Danubian provinces

• 1. Introduction

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  The Danubian provinces of the Roman Empire took their identity from a single river. Rome laid its frontier along the Danube, and the lands that grew up behind that line formed one of the empire's most distinctive regions. A mountain barrier closed off the far side, and a patchwork of provinces filled the space between. Several questions run through this region's story. Which provinces belonged to it, and how did Rome come to hold them? What kind of settlements did the Romans build there? How many people lived in them, and how sure can anyone be of that figure? Finally, why did the region matter so much to an empire whose heart lay far to the south?

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• 2. Provinces and Landscape

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  Noricum, Dacia, Moesia, Pannonia and Scythia Minor, together with the northern part of Dalmatia, make up the Danubian provinces. Several of these came in paired form. Dacia appears as Trajana and Aureliana, Moesia as Inferior and Superior, and Pannonia as Superior and Inferior. Geographically, the region covers the middle and lower Danube basins. It also takes in the Eastern Alps, the Dinarides and the Balkans, so the terrain runs from river plains to rugged mountain country. The river marked the region's northern limit. The Carpathian Mountains rose to the north and east of the provinces.

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• 3. Four Phases of Rule

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  Augustus began the story with military conquest, followed by further campaigns to secure what the army had won. Under Claudius, the emphasis shifted to building military bases along roads and at river crossings. Next came the Flavian dynasty and Trajan, who set up camps along the river itself. These camps housed legions and auxiliaries, the two kinds of Roman soldier. Trajan's era also saw expansion into Dacia, on the far side of the Danube. Hadrian then changed course. His approach was to defend and maintain what Rome already held, and that policy stayed more or less in force until the latter 4th century, when Roman control disintegrated. The settlements built under that cautious policy followed a pattern that would become standard.

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• 4. Fort, Camp Town, Town

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  After the time of Hadrian, a Roman settlement in this region usually grew in three parts. First stood the fort, called a castra. Beside it grew a military town known as the canabae, which was tied to the fort. A true town, called a municipium, then developed two or three miles away. The result was a layered landscape in which soldiers, their dependants and civilian townspeople lived in neighbouring but distinct communities. Counting the people who filled these places is a harder task than describing the buildings.

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• 5. Counting the People

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  Scholars have estimated that at least 2 million people lived in the Danubian provinces during the reign of Augustus. For the 2nd century, the estimate rises to 3 million. These numbers come with a warning, because they are not based on hard data. Later archaeological investigations have also suggested a greater degree of development than earlier writers had recognized. Even so, one more estimate exists for the time of the Antonines, when perhaps 3 to 6 million inhabitants lived in the region.

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• 6. Mines and Emperors

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  Mining regions gave the Danubian provinces a place in the imperial economy that went well beyond their role as a military frontier. The empire drew on the region's resources, and that made the provinces valuable as well as strategic. Their importance in the 3rd century shows up in another way too. Emperors of that century came from the Danubian lands, so a region once conquered by armies ended up supplying the men who ruled the empire.

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