“Regionalization and the Integration of the Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity” Heidelberg and Frankfurt, 3–6 June 2010

The disintegration of the Mediterranean world in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages was the topic of the second conference of the International Network for the Study of Late Antiquity, organized by Michael Kulikowski (Pennsylvania State University), Hartmut Leppin (Frankfurt), and Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner (Heidelberg). This fundamental process of European history has always been a matter of historical debate. Roman hegemony had assured political stability for over five hundred years and brought about an unprecedented level of economic and cultural exchange. The stability caused by long periods of peace, the state as distributive organ, and uniform judiciary and coinage systems all underpinned the exchange of goods from Britain to the Levant, while trade and the Roman army allowed for large-scale human mobility. All these factors contributed to the emergence of a shared cultural language in the Mediterranean and adjacent regions, with Latin and Greek as linguae francae, the city as the focus of cultural and political life, Graeco-Roman art and architecture, circus games, villas, and other common cultural expressions. From ca.400 CE onward, however, this unified world began to disintegrate, even if at regionally varying rates: Smaller political bodies took the place of the central Roman state; the Mediterranean system of exchange shrank into regional economic areas of very different levels of prosperity and often with weaker cross-regional ties; regionalisms appeared in the material culture from urban layout to tableware as well as in the formation of new identities. The result was a strongly diversified Mediterranean world.

While the fact of this disintegration can hardly be called into question, the extent of regionalization is still a matter of debate, as are its causes and time frame. This debate has recently come to the forefront once again through several major studies such as Michael McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy (2001) and, above all, Chris Wickham’s monumental Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005). Furthermore, in these and other recent contributions, an effort can be seen to overcome the traditional separation of the history of the Latin west from that of the Byzantine-Slavic east and the Islamic south that has long shaped historical thinking as well as academic disciplines and whose roots lie not least in the notion of regionalization in Late Antiquity. Instead, newer studies increasingly attempt to work out the interdependency of these worlds or at least to bring them into a comparative focus.¹ For a number of reasons, thus, the time seemed ripe to reflect once again upon the causes, course, and extent of these regionalization processes.

In the International Network for the Study of Late Antiquity, scholars of Late Antiquity from different disciplines came together in 2008 to found a network that can provide researchers in the field with an international forum for interdisciplinary exchange. The Network is intended to enable Late Antique scholars to keep abreast of current research and findings in neighboring disciplines and to conduct a dialogue between academic cultures and trends across national borders. For this purpose, the Network started a series of conferences dealing with the paradoxical interplay of strong centralization and regionalism, of integration and disintegration, of homogenization and particularization that is so typical for numerous political, religious, social, and cultural phenomena of Late Antiquity. The topic of the first conference, which took place in 2009 in Knoxville, Tennessee, was the question of the integration or disintegration of the late antique elites. A conference proceedings report, summaries of the talks, and further information regarding the Network in general, with announcements of future conferences, are available at www.LA-network.org.

The focus of the current discussion about the regionalization paradigm lies on its economic and cultural aspects. Although the extent to which political fragmentation served as a catalyst for economic and cultural disintegration remains an important question, the conference in Heidelberg and Frankfurt therefore focused on economic and cultural history rather than on the political. Rather than furthering specific aspects of the regionalization problem it aimed at determining the state of the question as well as issues and methodology...