Antioch was a Great City
On the late Roman map called the Peutinger Tables, three cities are represented by a man with a crown on a throne: Rome, Constantinople, and Antioch. To a cartographer in the fourth or fifth century CE, these were the three seats of imperial power.
Antioch on the Orontes was founded by Seleucus I Nicator, one of Alexander the Great’s generals turned warlord. As a wise king he never let his kingdom acquire a single overwhelmingly important city, but Antioch grew anyways. Isidore of Charax‘ Parthian Stations has the road to India and Central Asia begin at Antioch. Chinese chroniclers recorded that they received ambassadors from “An-Tun” who told them the way to Antioch. Roman emperors lived there when they campaigned in the east, and in the fourth century CE it became a patriarchal see in the Christian Church and the headquarters of the Count of the Orient, a Roman jurisdiction which ran from Syria and Cilicia through Palestine into Sinai and sometimes Egypt and Cyrene in North Africa. At that time, it was probably one of the three most important cities in the eastern Roman empire. The West had Carthage and Mediolanum (modern Milan) and the increasingly threadbare city of Rome, but the East had Alexandria, Constantinople, and Antioch.
Then after the Prophet Mohammed and the Arab conquests, Antioch found itself in the ‘debatable land’ between the Caliphates and the eastern Roman empire. Armies moved back and forth and whenever they took Antioch they drove out some people, executed others, and taxed the rest. When they could not take it they just robbed the caravans and burned the fields and orchards. That was how Antioch became the half-empty city which was conquered by the First Crusade in 1098.
There were a dozen other cities like this, Samosata and Edessa and Aleppo. Many of them were thousands of years old by the time the Romans came. They were centres of Greek and Syriac learning and of the secular and church authorities. But because they ended up first in the Eastern Roman Empire, and then in the Islamic world, they are not a big part of Europeans’ and settlers’ conceptions of the ancient world. We don’t get monthly news stories about the local archaeology. We don’t have the connections and associations which make us twinge when we hear an army is threatening Antioch like when we hear it is threatening Milan or York. And so Europeans and European settlers hear of the Parthians besieging Antioch or the Sasanids capturing Antioch and see that very differently than the Romans saw it.
The Byzantine empire became the empire of Constantinople because it lost Alexandria and Antioch. Without those other great cities as counterweights, the city which had the imperial palace had no rival any more. And without imperial patronage, Greek learning in Syria and Egypt declined step by step.
Today Antakya is a little provincial city in Turkish Cilicia. It has migrated a few kilometers from Antiochus’ city.
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Further Reading: I think it was Ancient Warfare IX.2 which had an article by Duncan Campbell on literary sources for travel between Rome and China
(scheduled 4 February 2024)
