City-Making in Crisis: Environmental Disasters and People's Agency in the Eastern Roman Empire (6th to 9th c. CE) 3 views

The dissertation offers a new lens for understanding urban change and environmental decision-making in the premodern Mediterranean. It examines urban life in the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire between the 6th and 9th centuries CE, a period marked by political and fiscal contraction that limited sustained imperial investment in cities. It argues that non-elite communities shaped cities through responses to environmental disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, and harbor siltation. Through decisions about how to maintain, repurpose, or abandon urban space, the people allocated resources, structured authority and access, and reconfigured cities from the ground up. Drawing on archaeological, environmental, and textual evidence, the dissertation challenges narratives of environmental determinism and political decline, instead presenting a model of bottom-up adaptation and collective action. The dissertation is organized around three key aspects of urban life — architecture, infrastructure, and civic ritual. Chapter One shows how people reworked post-earthquake Corinthian basilicas into smaller sacred, domestic, and economic spaces, producing locally sustainable architectural forms. Chapter Two demonstrates that people reconfigured the harbors of Ephesus, Miletus, and Heraclea/Mount Latmos into flexible, low-energy, multi-nodal systems in response to deltaic change. Chapter Three argues that people positioned the Virgin Mary in Constantinople and St Demetrios in Thessaloniki as managers of seismic risk and used their cults to coordinate disaster response and enact forms of popular governance. By foregrounding the environmental decision-making of non-elite communities, the dissertation offers a model for how cities work under constraint without sustained central coordination

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

Byzantine Empire; Late Antiquity; Early Middle Ages; Eastern Mediterranean; Archaeology; Urbanism; Political Ecology; Environmental Change; Natural Disasters; Disaster Response; Non-Elite Agency; Earthquakes; Floods; Harbor Siltation; Corinthia; Ephesus; Miletus; Mount Latmos; Constantinople; Thessaloniki

English

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2026-04-27