The Middle East was built on two complementary economies: agriculture and pastoralism. Given the dry climate and difficult terrain, the region could probably not have developed a rich urban civilization without pastoral nomadism. Nomads made it possible to cross deserts; provided animal produce for cities and trade; guidance, protection and livestock for caravans; and both horses and soldiers for war. They also contributed to state-building. States founded by the Bedouin were usually small regional polities, often in regions bordered by states competing for power, such as the Roman and Sassanian Empires or the Abbasid and Fatimid Caliphates. The steppe nomads had a more stratified social structure and their own imperial ideology; the Seljuqs, Mongol, and Timurids founded larger states with imperial pretentions. From the fifteenth century on conquests came from within, largely from the nomadic tribes of Anatolia and Transoxiana. The decline of nomads after the early 19th century was due partly to new weaponry and growing state power, but also to the transport revolution and the decline of the market for livestock. Nomads ceased to be necessary for war, trade and border protection but survive as providers of livestock products.

This chapter investigates the dynamics of material and symbolic exchange between Roman emperors and Greek cities, and the role of the emperor in the ideology and practice of civic euergetism in the Greek East, in the middle Roman empire (c. 98–180 CE). It begins by documenting the absence of demonstrable correlations between (1) an imperial visit and an imperial benefaction to a city and (2) an imperial visit and the erection of an honorific statue for the reigning emperor. On this basis it is argued that an imperial visit was not the critical moment for generating reciprocal exchanges between emperor and city, as is normally thought, and that local honours for the emperor were not usually triggered by the provision or even the prospect of specific imperial benefactions to the city. The bulk of the chapter then draws out the implications – both ideological and practical – of this peculiar form of ‘abstract reciprocity’ between Roman emperors and Greek cities, arguing that this type of idealized benefaction and local honorific practice defines this phase in the long history of civic euergetism in the Greek polis.

The aristocratic milieu: Hagiography and aristocracy in the early ninth century: Philaretos and Eudokimos. Aristocratic models of feminine holiness (ninth-tenth centuries). The political meaning of the new aristocratic saint: imperial ideology. The military milieu. The court milieu: the family and collaborators of Theophilos in post-iconoclast hagiography. The court of Theophilos and its post-iconoclast reinvention. The family of Theophilos and Theodora. The imperial couple in post-iconoclast hagiography: Theophilos and Theodora

This chapter discusses some general principles of spatial organisation and perception in the Medieval Roman (“Byzantine”) Empire as can be reconstructed from written sources, furthermore the definition and dynamics of frontiers and the significance of the centre (Constantinople) and its demands for the spatial framework of imperial politics. The chronological focus is on the centuries from the inauguration of Constantinople as new capital (330 CE) up to the Fourth Crusade in 1204 CE. Furthermore, the papers deal more with the frontiers and relations of Byzantium to the East, where also Byzantine authors identified (competing) polities of a similar imperial quality, than with the connections to and conflicts with medieval Western Europe. It aims to demonstrate how specific aspects of Byzantium´s spatial dynamics can be integrated in a more general comparative discussion of empires as spatial phenomena.