From the Editor

This special issue of JLA opens with five ground-breaking articles on the theme of "Warfare and Food Supply in the Late Roman Empire." Jeroen W. P. Wijnendaele (Ghent University), the organizer of the colloquium from which these five studies emerged, provides the following description of this issue's timely theme:

In 1998, Paul Erdkamp published his pioneering study Hunger and the Sword: Warfare and Food Supply in Roman Republican Wars (264–30 B.C.), on the significance of logistics, landscapes, and the feeding of the Roman Republic's armies during wartime. The same period also saw a surge in renewed interest on the late Roman army, including such studies as Hugh Elton's Warfare in Roman Europe, ad 350–425 (1997) and Martijn Nicasie's Twilight of Empire: The Roman Empire from the Reign of Diocletian until the Battle of Adrianople (1998). While studies on various aspects pertaining to the Roman army in both eras have been prolific over the past two decades, there is still a noticeable lacuna. In his Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (2005), Chris Wickham already remarked that, "surprisingly, not much work has been done on the supply aspect of the Late Roman military logistics." The empire-wide organization of the annona militaris arguably was the single most important economic activity affecting the Mediterranean world and its European hinterlands. Successful supply to the army could make a significant difference in its performance during war in all its guises, from raids, to sieges and pitched battles. Yet, these very same logistics also formed a double-edged sword that could be turned against the Empire in times of adversity. Local communities, urban elites, and central governments could equally be affected by these ramifications.

These considerations motivated me to organize a workshop at Ghent University on 21 April 2017, to help advance our knowledge of the late Roman military food-supply and other crucially related issues regarding this long-neglected theme. This workshop was generously sponsored by the Roman Society Research Center and Ghent University's History department. Mark Humphries, Koen Verboven and Arjan Zuiderhoek's interventions provided great stimulus (and humor!) to the debates. I am grateful to Andy Cain for earnestly considering and accepting the proposal to turn our revised papers into the basis for this special issue of The Journal of Late Antiquity. We also would like to thank JLA's anonymous peer-reviewers for numerous valuable suggestions to sharpen our arguments and improve the quality of the papers.

Doug Lee opens the collection with his "Food Supply and Military Mutiny in Late Antiquity," which scrutinizes the extent to which food shortages played a part in military mutinies during Late Antiquity and contextualizes relevant episodes against comparable events from earlier periods of Roman history. His papers aims, firstly, to gain a clearer sense of similarities and differences between Late Antiquity and earlier periods of Roman history with regard to the role of food shortages in military mutinies, and secondly, to use the results of this investigation as a means of gauging the relative effectiveness of the mechanisms for army supply in Late Antiquity.

Jeroen Wijnendaele's "Late Roman Civil War and the African Grain Supply" re-examines the use of the African grain supply during Late Roman civil wars. The main point of contention is that while cutting off the African grain supply to Italy could make a sporadic difference during civil war, most of the time this tactic was, in fact, not considered. Nevertheless, during the transition from the fourth to the fifth century, there was a slight but conspicuous intensification of this method, which suggests a correlation between North Africa's growing importance at a time the Imperial West was at bay, and the changing nature of late Roman civil wars in the western Mediterranean.

Alexander Sarantis, in "Military Provisioning in the Sixth-Century Balkans," compares the textual and material evidence for military supply in this region during the fifth and sixth centuries. His paper argues that this discrepancy between textual and material evidence for centralized military supply casts light on fundamental changes to socio-economic life and military...