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Propos introductifs

Urbs ipse moenia (non) sunt
Decentering and deconstructing the city of Late Antiquity in Gaul

Urbs ipse moenia (non) sunt
Décentrer et déconstruire la ville de l'Antiquité tardive en Gaule
Simon Esmonde Cleary, Vanessa Elizagoyen, Michel Kasprzyk et Martial Monteil
Traduction(s) :
« Urbs ipse moenia (non) sunt »
Décentrer et déconstruire la ville de l’Antiquité tardive en Gaule
 [fr]

Résumés

Cette introduction générale s’apparente par certains aspects à une conclusion et à une mise en perspective, comme il est d’usage de le faire dans les dossiers de Gallia. Un préambule y rappelle les attendus du colloque à l’origine de cet ouvrage, qui s’est déroulé du 7 au 9 décembre 2023 à Bordeaux. Placé sous l’égide de l’association Antiquité tardive en Gaule (ATEG), il avait pour titre, en centrant le sujet sur les chefs-lieux de cité, « Les villes de l’Antiquité tardive en Gaule et dans les régions mitoyennes : des sites multipolaires ? ».
La première partie est consacrée à l’apport des sources textuelles, peu nombreuses mais utiles, puis à la problématique des espaces périurbains, qui est au cœur du sujet, en y dissertant sur des questions de vocabulaire et en dressant un portrait de ces composantes au Haut-Empire, servant de référence pour la suite.
La deuxième partie débute par la présentation des quelques difficultés rencontrées dès lors que l’on s’intéresse aux villes-capitales de l’Antiquité tardive et du début Moyen Âge, en évoquant notamment le cas singulier des « terres noires » caractéristiques de ces périodes. L’accent est ensuite mis sur les importants bouleversements que connaît la topographie urbaine entre les années 200-250 et 500-550 apr. J.-C., tant dans le Dioecesis Galliarum que dans le Dioecesis Viennensis : rétraction du tissu urbain, nouvelles enceintes, nouveaux intra et extra muros, formes de l’occupation, modifications sociales, etc.
La troisième partie sert à énumérer les facteurs potentiels – exogènes et endogènes – de ces profonds changements, en abordant successivement les effets éventuels des épidémies, des famines, des guerres ou encore de l’hypertrophie monumentale qui a caractérisé le temps prospère du Haut-Empire.
La quatrième partie permet d’élargir le propos en insérant les villes de la Gaule antique tardive dans le contexte des « régions mitoyennes », notamment l’Italie, le nord de l’Afrique et la péninsule Ibérique, en particulier dans l’optique des « città ad isole » et de la « ville multipolaire ».
La cinquième partie, qui précède une conclusion en forme d’ouverture, présente certaines des perspectives émergeant de l’ensemble des réflexions. On y revient sur la chronologie des événements, les enceintes et le nouveau tissu urbain, l’impact de la christianisation des sociétés, le monde des morts, pour développer ensuite de nouvelles approches et la manière dont elles pourraient modifier nos points de vue et nos analyses.

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Texte intégral

  • 1 To illustrate the cover of this volume we have chosen an engraving of the city of Bordeaux itself, (...)
  • 2 This text has benefited from corrections and pertinent suggestions from our colleagues Didier Bayar (...)

1This volume constitutes the proceedings of the eighth conference of ATEG (Antiquité tardive en Gaule) held at Bordeaux1 from December 7 to 9, 2023 on the theme of “Les villes de l’Antiquité tardive en Gaule et dans les regions mitoyennes : des sites multipolaires ?”. As such it can be seen as a prolongation of the recent work on late urban defensive circuits in Gaul recently published under the titles of Villes et fortifications de l’Antiquité tardive dans le nord de la Gaule (Bayard, Fourdrin ed. 2019) and Les enceintes urbaines de Novempopulanie entre Aquitaine et Hispanies (Fourdrin ed. 2020). With understanding of the wall circuits themselves brought up to date, attention could turn to the areas outside them as a field of study. The agenda of the Bordeaux conference responded to the two volumes in three ways. The first was the desire to move on from the traditional picture of towns in this period consisting simply of a late Roman fortified strongpoint surrounded by cemeteries and over time by Christian funerary basilicas and monasteries. The second, well evidenced by the papers in this volume, was the increasing quantity and quality of evidence being generated, especially by excavations in advance of development, for occupation and activities in the areas outside the walls in addition to churches and burials. The third was the perceived need to come up with a new exegetic framework for the analysis and interpretation of these sites which took account of the full range and complexity of the types of evidence becoming available, thus allowing more nuanced visions of the transition/s from the late Roman into the early medieval period. Linked with this was the awareness of how colleagues in neighbouring regions such as Germany, Iberia and Italy were confronting similar evidence and similar interpretative problems. The title of the conference therefore drew upon a concept increasingly used to characterise these late-antique towns, that they were “polynucléaires” (Eng. “polyfocal”), such terms situating the approaches alongside the Italian intellectual tradition of the “città ad isole” (Fr. “ville archipel”). This approach was intended not to be simply descriptive of the layout of these places (especially in archaeological cartography) but also to emphasise that this multipolar plan was the defining urbanism of the period in certain regions, distinguishing it from the earlier urban form of Roman cities under the Early Empire. The aim of the conference was therefore to interrogate and analyse these towns in their own terms rather than simply by comparison with and as a deviation from classical urban forms.2

2So what is meant by the “polynuclear” town and how does this impose approaches specific to such places? The most obvious feature of a polynuclear town, as the term expresses, was that the various areas and functional nuclei that made it up were discontinuous, separated from each other by zones that can seem to be uninhabited. This makes it very different from the sorts of towns with which we are more familiar, both now and in the past, where the urban fabric is by and large continuous and contiguous. The major towns of Roman Gaul under the Principate, the colonies and civitas-capitals, were excellent examples of this with their built-up areas most often articulated around rectilinear street-grids, with a range of functional areas incorporated within this built-up area. Beyond the street-grid seemingly lay only the cemeteries with the occasional monuments, inhabited areas and a few fields and gardens. To continue the image of urban fabric, at one level the polynuclear/polyfocal town could be seen as a form of patchwork, an assemblage of disparate pieces each with its individual character, as opposed to the continuous weave of the gridded town. But at another level just as a patchwork links the individual pieces into a new ensemble, so the polynuclear plan holds all the individual elements together as part of a greater ensemble which is the late-antique town.

3It will be clear from these opening paragraphs that, following the conference and based on the contributions brought together in this volume, the concept of a polycentric city now seems applicable to the vast majority of Gaul’s cities during late antiquity, albeit with some differences between the south and north of the Loire in terms of impact on urban topography and chronology, as will be seen below. Where this redrawn image of the late city cannot be observed, it is most often due to insufficient archaeological documentation, without of course excluding a few special cases. It is with this premise in mind that the rest of this text has been written (fig. 1).

Fig. 1 – Map of the dioceses and provinces of Gaul at the end of the fourth century AD, showing the main cities

Fig. 1 – Map of the dioceses and provinces of Gaul at the end of the fourth century AD, showing the main cities

Those marked in red are the subject of a case study in this issue of Gallia.

DAO : M. Monteil (Nantes Université).

4The transformation from the city of the Principate defined by walls and/or the streets of its regular grid plan to the late-antique city consisting of a defended nucleus surrounded by a number of other poles of activity was a radical one, implying first an implosion and after an explosion of urban form. How and when did this take place? This contribution will seek to outline not only the processes involved at the time but also to assess how modern perceptions have shaped the study of the phenomenon. In particular, it will focus on an area or series of areas often neglected in studies of ancient urban forms, the “suburbium” or the “peripheral areas”, seeking to rescue them from being zones which do not fit neatly into simple binary categories of “inside” and “outside” and to recognise them instead as a series of zones, integrated both with the cities as they were in the past and to studies of their urbanism as they are in the present. A consistent frame of analysis will be chronological, the extended period over which these changes can now be understood to have been taking place. Another will be that of “cognitive geography”, the study of how human beings perceive and interact with spaces and how spaces shape behaviour; here in particular how they perceive, structure and utilise urban spaces and what changes over time may therefore mean.

  • 3 All dates indicated below are expressed in AD, unless specifically mentioned

5As expressed in the title of the conference and this publication, the geographical focus will be on the cities of Gaul—including the Rhineland from Switzerland to the North Sea—and the chronological focus on the earlier part of late antiquity, ca. 200/250-500/550 (Inglebert 2006, pp. 364–366).3 But bearing in mind the full conference title, this contribution will also consider some of the results of research on cities of this period in “régions mitoyennes”, most notably Italy but also to an extent the Iberian peninsula and North Africa where similar trends may be observed (trends not observable in Britain, which will therefore be left to one side). But it will not only be the evidence from these regions which will be taken into account but also the development of debates about them, such as the Italian model of the “città ad isole”.

Walls and what lay outside them

Town walls in late-antique Gaul, the textual evidence

6The (modified) quotation at the head of this article comes from the seventh-century Spanish bishop Isidore of Seville (Etymologiarim libri, 12.5.1 – de aedificiis publicis) expressing the contemporary view of city walls as the defining urban monument, not only in a physical and military sense but also and importantly in an ideological sense. This attitude to city walls was prefigured by the Italian Cassiodorus in the sixth century with his terse remark on city walls “et ornatus pacis… et bellorum necessitas” (an ornament in peace… and a necessity in war) (Variae, 1.21.8) emphasising their ideological as well as their military function. For Gaul there is the celebrated puzzlement of bishop Gregory of Tours that the castrum of Dijon despite a formidable circuit of walls along with other features was nonetheless not ranked as a city (Libri Historiarum, 3.19). This makes the important point that cities were distinguished not only by their physical attributes but also by their institutional character and centrality, a point to which we shall return. Indeed already by the late fourth century the walls could serve as a metonym for a Gallic city, as in the muros Elusae (Claudian, In Rufinum, 1.5.37 – though ironically Éauze has yet to yield any archaeological evidence for such a wall circuit).

  • 4 A toponym in bold signifies one of the towns specifically discussed in the papers in this volume, e (...)
  • 5 The word castrum, which has entered the everyday language of archaeologists, was not commonly used (...)

7At the same period, Ammianus Marcellinus mentions numerous towns in the Gauls and when he cites elements of the monumental topography at the start of the second half of the fourth century, this almost always relates to the wall circuit and/or the gates. Tongres/Tongeren and Cologne/Köln are called munita (fortified) (Res gestae, XV, 11, 7); he refers to the vast circuit at Autun4 (that of the High Empire?) (XV, 11, 12; XVI, 2, 1); along with that at Sens and its gates (XVI, 4, 2); the gates of Troyes (XVI, 11, 7); perhaps those of Lyon (XVI, 10). In his writings the emperor Julian described Lutetia (Paris) as an island of limited extent surrounded by walls (Misopogon, 7) and mentions the ramparts of Besançon (Epistulae, 26). Allusions to urban monuments are rare—Ammianus evokes performances in the theatre and the circus at Arles during a stay by the emperor Constantius II in 353-354 (Res gestae, XIV, 5, 1)—almost as numerous as mentions of ruined monuments: the aedificia semiruta of Avenches deserta in Ammianus (XV, 11, 12) or the former magnificent temples of Besançon (Julian, Epistulae, 26). In his poem Ordo urbium nobilium lists twenty towns, of which five were in Gaul (Trèves/Trier, Arles, Toulouse, Narbonne, Bordeaux). Even if he accords an important place amongst others to commerce with mention of ports (Trèves/Trier, Arles, Narbonne, Bordeaux), it is the walls that are most frequently evoked (Trèves/Trier, Toulouse with its brick walls, Bordeaux with its rectangular walls and high towers). The only noteworthy monuments in the five towns are the templum of Narbonne in Parian marble and the bridge of boats at Arles, two towns where Ausonius does not mention a wall-circuit (Ausone, Œuvres complètes). Ultimately one has to go back to the years around 300 to find evocations of towns where the wall does not seem to constitute the major element in their description, at Trèves /Trier and Autun in the collection of the Panegyrici latini. At Trèves/Trier the orator of 310 mentions a huge circus, basilicas and a forum (Panegyrici latini, VII, 22); at Autun the orators in 298 and 311 make mention of a Capitolium, and of a temple of Apollo, of a schola, of baths and probably of an aqueduct (Panegyrici latini, V and VIII).5

8These literary references, and one could parallel them with the many depictions of cities represented by their walls in the art of late antiquity, have understandably led in studies of late-antique urbanism to an emphasis on the fortified area of the city as the dominant element at such cities. This is buttressed by the massive physical form of these walls at many cities, Rome and Constantinople pre-eminent amongst them. Moreover they were the most recent monumental embellishment of towns in Gaul. In Gaul one has but to look at the surviving sections of some wall circuits, perhaps above all Le Mans, but also at towns such as Carcassonne or Senlis to get some idea of the sheer physical mass and dominant presence of these constructions. Moreover, the great majority of these late Roman walled nuclei in time developed into medieval cities where the most important ecclesiastical and secular buildings were constructed within the late Roman walls, the cathedral, the castles or palaces of the kings and the nobility. This gave them a privileged position in the textual histories of these towns and in due course a privileged position also in the development of urban archaeology. The correlative of this attitude was the relegation of the “suburbs” to zones that were of relatively little interest and thus little study, mirroring the relative neglect of these areas in study of the towns of the Principate. Yet the urban peripheries and how they developed over time are absolutely central to this volume as a whole and to the individual papers in it, so some consideration of why they have been seen as subordinate and the impact that has had on studies of late-antique urbanism is needed.

“Suburbs” and questions of vocabulary

9The long-used if imprecise term “suburb” derives from the Latin word suburbium, which along with cognate words such as the adjective suburbanus demonstrates that there was a concept which needed a verbal descriptor. Suburbium is found in texts (only ever in the singular) from the second century BC (Champlin 1982; Agusta-Boularot 1998; Witcher 2013) referring exclusively to the areas outside the city of Rome itself, a city which possessed both a ritual boundary in the form of the pomerium and from the fourth century BC a physical one in the form of the Servian Wall. At that time the word and its adjectival form seem to have had simply a locative significance, describing where the place or the person was to be found in relation to the city itself: it does not seem to have any further connotation. From about the turn of the eras the word starts to be used of areas associated with other cities in the Roman empire, in Italy and then further afield, but it always retained its primary link with the city of Rome itself. Nevertheless, the municipal charters of a number of Roman colonies, especially in Iberia, show clearly that it was recognised as a concept in provincial cities also. For instance, the surviving portion of the lex coloniae of Urso (Osuña, Spain) forbade certain activities being carried out within the boundary of the town (as defined by the sulcus primigenius, the furrow that ritually defined the boundary), such as funerary activities treatment of bodies, construction of graves and memorials (Lex Ursonensis, 73, 74) or pottery kilns above a certain capacity (Lex Ursonensis, 76), perhaps because of the risk of fire. On the other hand specific provisions were made for establishing the course of an aqueduct through external areas and structures into the city (Lex Ursonensis, 99). This zone was therefore seen as innately linked to the city and its activities and under its jurisdiction. It does not seem to have been seen in any way as inferior functionally or morally to the rest of the city. It should also be noted that, like many Latin terms, the meaning of the word suburbium evolved in the early Middle Ages, at least in the former Narbonnensis Prima. From the eigth to ninth centuries onwards, it could refer to the legal or administrative jurisdiction of a town or castrum, with references to places that may have been located at a considerable distance from the main centre, as can be seen in the example of Béziers and others (Schneider 2008, par. 45–46).

10The conceptual and moral subordination of “suburbs” seems rather to be a product of the cultural attitudes of modern European languages arising out of specific views of the people in them and by transference to the areas themselves. To start with, the Latin prefix sub- (under) has in this context acquired a hierarchical significance, which can set the suburban areas at a disadvantage when compared to the city proper, particularly when considering modern, post-industrial cities. This inferiority can be neutral, simply indicating that these areas are of lesser significance than the main area of the city. But often, especially perhaps in English (American and British) there can be a degree of moral judgement being passed, particularly on the inhabitants of these areas and their social and cultural outlooks, seen as more limited and censorious than those of the more cosmopolitan inhabitants of the cores of these cities, especially major modern conurbations. French, exceptionally, has no noun derived from suburbium, instead the mediaeval terms “banlieue” and “faubourg” have been adopted, the former referring to an area of jurisdiction extending for one league round the city, the latter to an area foris burgus (outside the city), similar to the German term “Vorstadt”. French does, of course have the adjective “suburbain/e”, which has primary meanings to do with location, but can also take on some of the colour of the pejorative Anglo-Saxon usage. The same may be said of Italian and Spanish “suburbio” and “suburbano”. The problem of the modern connotations of “suburban” have been recognised by those working on such areas in both the ancient and the modern periods and alternatives have been proposed which are felt to be more neutral such as “periphery/peripheral”, “marges”, “franges”, or pairings such as “intra/extra muros”, or simply “extra-mural”. The latter two technically require the presence of city walls whereas “periphery” still implies a hierarchisation of importance between the “core” and the “periphery”. In urban geography the suburban areas of Roman cities thus suffer from a double disadvantage. On the one hand they are seen as neither one thing nor the other, neither properly urban nor properly rural, as neatly encapsulated by the description by Gregory of Tours of the outskirts of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges as a “suburbana urbis campaniaî” (Libri historiarum, 7.35; Guyon et al. 1996). They tend to be seen instead as an “interface” or a “buffer zone” or a “zone of transition” (Corsi 2023, p. 9), all of which carry the implication that such areas are intrinsically of less interest than the town or the country and risk being a sort of terra nullius. In this contribution use will be made of the variety of terms, sometimes in a technical sense (e.g., extra muros) but more often for reasons of literary varietas. They should at all times be read as having no significance other than the locative.

“Suburban areas” in the academic literature for Gaul

11The baleful influence of such negative perceptions of suburban areas must in large part explain the neglect of them in the academic literature until a relatively late date compared with the extensive general literature on the urban archaeology of Roman Gaul. Nevertheless, as early as the middle of the twentieth century Michel Roblin in his Cités ou citadelles ? Les enceintes romaines du Bas-Empire d’après l’exemple de Paris (Roblin 1951) was posing the question of the existence of late occupation outside the walls of Paris, drawing on the mention of a suburbium in Ammianus (Res gestae, XX, 4, 12), even if no details about its exact nature were vouchsafed. Similar questions were raised by Arlette and Charles Higounet in their Origines et formation de la ville du Puy-Saint-Front de Périgueux (Higounet, Higounet-Nadal 1978). In the magisterial opening volumes of the series Histoire de la France urbaine (Février et al. 1980), when discussing the late-antique cities Paul-Albert Février recognised the importance of the areas outside the walls (Février 1980, pp. 411–421), though lack of evidence for these areas meant that perforce much of his contribution, as with Roblin, concerned walls and churches. The problem has a good pedigree.

12But it was only in 1998 that the first collective work dedicated to such areas Les faubourgs en Gaule romaine was published as Caesarodunum tome XXXII (Bedon ed. 1998), consisting mainly of studies of individual cities in Gaul and elsewhere, prefaced by some general introductory papers. 2016 saw the publication of the substantial volume on Franges urbaines et confins territoriaux : la Gaule dans l’Empire (Besson et al. ed. 2016). The first part “Limites de la ville, franges urbaines” and many of the papers in the third part “Des sanctuaires aux marges et confins” again consisted of studies of particular cities. In his concluding paper in this volume Michel Reddé specifically noted the problem of the “franges” for the towns of late antiquity and opined that it would justify a specific study (Reddé 2016, p. 651, n. 15). One might also note the work of the British researcher Penelope Goodman, half of whose The Roman City and its Periphery: From Rome to Gaul (Goodman 2007) is devoted to Gaul. Recently the “Mémoire de master” by Antoine Vazeille Le suburbium dans les cités de la Gaule romaine (Vazeille 2021; 2024) offers a general reflection rather than that of specific cities, examining aspects such as the historiography of the subject. It should be noted that all these volumes largely concern themselves with the period of the Principate, a few contributions on specific cities in late antiquity apart. Comparable synthetic volumes for late antiquity are even rarer with the exception of the magnificent series of the Topographie chrétienne des cités de la Gaule des origines au milieu du viiie siècle (Gauthier 2016), comprehensive in its coverage of the geographical area of Gaul, the Rhineland and Switzerland and in its treatment of the textual and archaeological evidence, city by city. As its title shows, it is nonetheless limited to Christian topography as normally manifested by churches, monasteries and basilicas, many of which, it is true, lay outside the walls of the late Roman cities. This has meant that the areas extra muros are considered from a particular perspective, with the evidence for churches and cemeteries very much in the foreground and other activities relegated very much to the background. This remarkable resource and its perspectives have continued to inform discussion of the late-antique cities of Gaul (e.g., Guyon 2006; Loseby 2006). It should also be remarked that the schematic cartography associated with these volumes can give rise to misleading impressions. One such impression is that cities simply consisted of a fortified kernel surrounded by a greater or lesser number of funerary basilicas at a distance from the fortifications (e.g., the well-known map of Clermont-Ferrand). Another impression can be that all features depicted were contemporaneous, when in fact these maps are palimpsests depicting in one single illustration buildings whose dates can range from the late third or fourth centuries (principally the walls) to the sixth or seventh centuries (funerary basilicas). Similar maps, with similar reservations, may be generated for cities in neighbouring regions such as Iberia, North of Africa and perhaps especially northern Italy, home of the notion of città ad isole.

“Suburban areas” under the Principate

13Given the problems with research on the extra muros areas, a brief consideration of the suburban areas of Gallic cities under the High Empire to set the scene. On a map or plan they seem to have clearly defined boundaries. In a minority of cases this is because they were provided with defensive circuits. This provision was clearly related to status, with the majority of fortified cities being coloniae, for the most part in Narbonensis, with a few such as Autun, Lyon, Tongres/Tongeren, Trèves/Trier in Lugdunensis and Belgica, along with cities such as Augst, Avenches, Cologne/Köln and Xanten in Germaniae. Even so, as boundaries these city walls were not always clear-cut. Whilst at some, such as Arles or Orange, the walls tightly circumscribed the area laid out in a street grid, at others, such as Avenches, Nîmes or Trèves/Trier the walls enclosed a much larger area than the street-grid which they also had, and with the area between the streets and the walls sometimes containing major monuments, as with the amphitheatre and theatre at Autun or the Altbachtal Tempelbezirk at Trèves/Trier. This “double boundary” of street grid and of walls suggests that the concept of urban boundary may have been fluid. The great majority of cities lacked defensive circuits, and there it is the extent of the street grids that serves as a visual delimitation, to the modern observer at least. On a modern map it is easy to draw a line at the edge of the street grid of Amiens, Bordeaux, Jublains, Le Mans, Paris or Tours and give the impression that this was the boundary of the “urban”. It should be noted nonetheless that at some of these towns, for instance Amiens, there were insulae towards the edges of the street-grid that seem never to have been built over, so the street-grid may be an unreliable guide to the actual extent of the urban fabric. Equally, was everything outside that line ipso facto “rural”? Terms such as the ancient “suburbium” or the modern “zone of transition” clearly show that this was in no way the case. So what areas and activities may we discern outside the apparent boundary of walls or streets? Briefly, we may propose the following: habitation, artisanal activity, agriculture, quarries, public monuments and temples, burial and funerary monuments.

14Habitation could take the form of buildings along the main roads serving the city, often linked to craft or agricultural activities. At towns sited on rivers there may have been harbour areas. The areas outside cities sometimes also contained high-status residences of elaborate plan and decoration, which in the countryside would be termed a “villa” and therefore are sometimes referred to as a “villa suburbana”, a phenomenon well known at Rome (Champlin 1982), lavishly exemplified around the Vesuvian cities (Zarmakoupi 2014) and even envisaged in the lex Ursonensis (Lex Ursonensis, 91), allowing that a public official may live up to a mile from the city itself. In addition to villas there might also be other settlements engaged in agricultural exploitation, what might be termed farms.

  • 6 For the wider hydrological impacts of Nîmes, see Veyrac 2006, chap. IX, fig. 224.

15As well as raising the staple crops—wheat, barley— and herds—cattle, sheep—, the suburban areas of a city might encourage specialisation in animals such as poultry or in more perishable crops such as fruits and vegetables, where proximity to the market afforded by the inhabitants of the city and effectively constituting a profitable business. Enclosures defined by ditches or palisades are frequently encountered in excavations in peripheral areas of cities; further carpological and palynological analyses will make it clearer whether these were dedicated to horticulture or arboriculture (orchards) or viticulture. Whether these areas also contained pleasure gardens, horti, as at Rome must remain a matter for speculation. The needs of the bulk supply of comestibles to a city could have other impacts on the suburban areas, such as the storage of goods, such as grain, or the housing of livestock at the time of periodic markets, nundinae, as attested for the of Aix-les-Bains (admittedly an agglomeration secondaire) with its campus pecuarius (CIL XII, 2462). One can also envisage the supply of the city with construction materials such as timber or of stone from suitable locations and quarries in their immediate hinterland. The supply of water by aqueducts would have seen the city reaching further out into its periphery, a situation envisaged in the provisions of the lex Ursonensis, and likewise rainwater and foul water from the city might also be discharged into its immediate surroundings.6 The immediate surroundings could also be where much of the rubbish produced by the city and its inhabitants was disposed of (Dupré Raventos, Remola Valverdu ed. 2000). A particularly well studied case is that of the peri-urban area of Nîmes and how the city and its needs impacted not only on its immediate surrounds but also up to 8 km from the walls (Pomarèdes et al. 2012).

  • 7 For Lugdunensis, see Bossard 2024.

16Apart from areas devoted to settlement and production, there were areas with a more religious and ritual significance, particularly extra-mural temples and sanctuaries, along with the functional area for which the suburbium is best known, the necropolis. A comprehensive census of temples and sanctuaries in the urban periphery was undertaken by Ludivine Péchoux (2010), who identified 42 towns: 8 in Narbonensis, 9 in Aquitania, 16 in Lugdunensis, 9 in Belgica (including parts of the later Germania Superior7). This has recently been amplified by A. Vazeille (2024, part IIID). Their degree of proximity to the city varies widely, some such as La Genetoye lay within a kilometre of the city walls of Autun, others such as Allonnes or Vieil-Évreux were more distant, the former 5 km. from Le Mans, the latter 6 km. from Évreux itself. Clearly these last two were in a very different relationship to the town compared with a sanctuary that could be seen from within the town. For the truly “peri-urban” sanctuaries that are most relevant here. This very visibility would make such sanctuaries, often with tall structures, part of the suite of major monuments of the city and a significant element of its cognitive geography. This significance would be emphasised by integration of such sanctuaries into the religious and civic calendar of a city. It is highly likely that “peri-urban” sanctuaries could have been the destination of processions out from the city itself, processions which might have had a civic element as members of municipal priesthoods and perhaps municipal councils participated in such ceremonies. The ordering of different classes and groups in the processions could have served as a representation of the (idealised) social order of the urban population. One may also propose that the presence of such religious complexes in the suburbium would mean that the landscape around the city could take on a sacral character, overseen by the presiding deity or deities of the sanctuaries (Esmonde Cleary 2016).

17The use for which the suburbium of a city is best known is, of course, burial. By Roman law, stretching as far back as the Twelve Tables of 449 BC., the living and the dead were to be kept separate. We have seen that the lex Ursonensis (Lex Ursonensis, 73) specifically forbade the introduction of the dead or their monuments within the area of the city, demonstrating the imposition of Roman norms in the provinces. The geography of the dead in the towns of Roman Gaul under the High Empire conformed rigorously to these prescriptions, hence the extra-mural, or at least extra-street-grid location of necropoleis, often along the main approach roads, where amongst other things monuments to individuals and to families might be constructed. The presence of necropoleis is thus an indicator of the passage from urban core to urban periphery.

18The treatment of the suburban areas of the cities of Gaul under the High Empire presented above has of necessity been superficial, but it is to be hoped that is has been made clear that these zones comprised an integral adjunct to the city itself and performed economic, funerary, habitational and religious functions that were indispensable to the proper functioning of the city as a whole. Some of these, as we shall see, have persisted in the cities of late antiquity.

Radical transformations of the cityscape

Methodological issues and questions

Confrontations between North and South, excavations in city centres, dating and stratigraphy

19The progress made in recent years in reconstructing urban development in antiquity and the Middle Ages is clearly spectacular, as evidenced by the Bordeaux symposium that gave rise to this volume of Gallia and others before it, particularly those organised by the association Antiquité tardive en Gaule and the Association française d’archéologie mérovingienne. However, it is necessary to reiterate some important points in order to highlight certain difficulties that regularly undermine the quality of archaeological data obtained in cities for late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. These are, in fact, long-established observations, set out in several articles collected in this volume, which should encourage caution and a measured approach to certain interpretations or hypotheses developed below.

20A first difficulty, which may render any attempt at synthesis futile a priori, relates to the chronological, cultural and economic differences that can be observed in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages between northern Gaul—the Dioecesis Galliarum—and southern Gaul—the Dioecesis Viennensis/Septem Provinciarum—with, in the latter case, stark contrasts between Novempopulana, Aquitania, Viennensis and Narbonensis, some aspects of which are discussed in the following articles.

21A second difficulty stems from the extreme rarity of operations carried out within late city walls, where these exist. The late antique urban fabric has almost systematically served as the foundation for the development of the medieval and modern city, to the point of constituting the protected areas of our current urban centres. These city centres are obviously not very susceptible to development projects that might give rise to development-related archaeological operations, while research excavations are singularly rare there. Most of the available documentation therefore relates, with a few exceptions, to chance discoveries or occasional observations made in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In other words, the intra muros area is often identified mainly by its walls and a few places of worship that have been more or less precisely identified.

22A third difficulty is the accuracy of dating, which is mainly based on ceramics and coins. Despite undeniable progress, variations due to the supply of imported and well-dated artefacts, which are more numerous in some areas than in others, the lack of chrono-typological sequences in certain regions, or even fluctuations in the economy and coinage, and the great scarcity of coins after the fourth century. Added to this are uncertainties regarding the implementation of certain major construction projects, primarily those related to the building of late wall circuits, which are still characterised by multiple uncertainties in terms of chronology: very few of them actually have a solid date. In fact, to give just one example, it is almost never possible to say with certainty, for towns with small walled areas, between the end of the third and the middle of the fourth century, whether a settlement identified outside the walls predates or postdates the fortification, not to mention the difficulty of estimating how long it took to complete the construction.

23A fourth and final major difficulty is the materiality of the remains, which is complicated for the analysis of buildings, alongside the occasional maintenance of a tradition of masonry, by the development of constructions using earth and wood, which are often more difficult to understand. Added to this is the stratigraphy specific to these periods, which is very uneven and regularly characterised by problems of preservation linked to subsequent occupation—recovery of materials, levelling, destructive excavations, etc.—or by dark and monotonous sedimentary strata, known as “dark earth”, which are often difficult to interpret. They are almost a sedimentary symbol of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, so much so that they led Henry Galinié to coin the lovely expression “la ville de l’entre deux” (Galinié 2002; 2010) for this period; they therefore deserve a few specific paragraphs.

The “dark earth”

24Where it has proved possible to open windows into the stratigraphy of the areas within but also outside late Roman urban defences in Gaul, a recurring feature has been the presence of the “dark earth”. This phenomenon was first recognised on urban excavations in the 1960s and 1970s across areas of western and northern Europe (Macphail 1981). For Gaul, a project of urban archaeology which was early to recognise and study such deposits was Tours, because of Henri Galinié who had encountered the phenomenon on the excavations in Winchester, G-B, in the late 1960s (Galinié 2004). Typically “dark earths” consisted of thick (up to 1 m.) deposits overlying the late Roman deposits and underlying the reappearance of coherent urban archaeological deposits somewhere in the second half of the first millennium. It was often difficult to date since though it regularly contained copious late Roman pottery and other material this could well be residual and finds of early medieval pottery and other material were rare; dating by physical and chemical methods were only sporadically undertaken. Analyses of these deposits by pedological methods have enabled researchers the better to characterise their components and how they came to be deposited (for an introduction to these techniques see Nicosia et al. 2013) The early debates about the “dark earths” were essentially polarised between those who wished to see them as expressions of discontinuity or continuity in urban activity, views heavily influenced by a priori viewpoints, for instance the British tended to favour discontinuity, whereas the Italians favoured continuity, archaeologists took a more negative view than historians of urban survival (see Ward-Perkins 1997). Those who favoured discontinuity saw dark earths as deposits formed essentially by natural processes, the degradation of late Roman structures and the products of the annual growth and death cycles of vegetation colonising the ruins, acted upon by earthworms, microorganisms and other animals to form over time a deep soil, the dark colour deriving from the quantity of organic material and of charcoal in the soil. Those who favoured urban continuity argued that occasional traces of occupation such as timber structures, hearths, surfaces suggested that there was continued urban occupation and that the dark earths were in part the products of cultivation associated with the occupation. As individual studies grew in number it became clear that despite the unitary title of “dark earth” it was in fact a very heterogeneous phenomenon, varying in their formation processes and significances from site to site within a city, from city to city and from geographical region to geographical region (for France see Fondrillon 2009; Borderie et al. 2013; Macphail 2013; Borderie et al. 2021, with bibliographies). But in general it is clear that these deposits betoken some sort of human activity. To quote Richard Macphail (2013, p. 259): “Total abandonment of urban space has not yet been demonstrated, although breaks in occupation, low level occupation and renewed occupation of a more rural character, have been recorded”.

25An important recent publication Cultivating the City in Early Medieval Italy (Goodson 2021) may allow us to reformulate the discussions about urban “dark earths” and what they could represent. Even though this study is based in the Italian evidence the methods it lays out and the insights it enables are of wider application, with clear relevance to the towns of early medieval France. Archaeologically, the processes contributing to the formation of “dark earths” are laid out: decay of buildings made of perishable materials; dumping waste; manuring; cultivation; bioturbation and soil weathering (Goodson 2021, pp. 64–69). The decay of buildings made of perishable material seems to be a major source of material composing “dark earth”. These would naturally decompose in place, hosting annual and perennial plants and a range of animal life, to form a soil. At a number of sites the stratigraphy shows material has been dumped, raising the question of where this is from, and does it betoken occupation in the vicinity? Is the dumping simply disposal, or could it be intended to help form soils for cultivation for instance by manuring, pointing strongly towards purposeful cultivation rather than ground left as waste? Caroline Goodson (2021, pp. 15–22) has furthermore enumerated documentary evidence for a number of terms such as hortus, curtis, terra all of which refer to defined plots of land used for cultivation of fruits, vegetables and other comestibles, or vinea for vineyards. It was probably also the case that these plots could be raised for the raising of animals, cattle, goats and pigs, also perhaps chickens and other fowl, so consideration needs to be given to how these various plant and animals species influenced each other in the formulation of agrarian and horticultural regimes. So rather than expressing a process of “ruralizzazione” between the occupied poles, these areas now linked the poles together in a new urban fabric Yet again this is an index of the profound transformations in urban form and practice in late antiquity.

The nature of the transformations

26These transformations, as is well known, can be expressed simply and clearly by comparing the start-point and the end-point, for present purposes the urban forms in ca. 200-250 and ca. 500-550 CE. In ca. 200-250 the cities of Gaul covered large areas, sometimes hundreds of hectares. Normally undefended, laid out on street-grids and endowed with the public buildings and monuments expressive of civic autonomy and legal and fiscal centrality (forum, basilica), entertainment and communal activity and identity financed through public euergetism (amphitheatres, arches, baths, theatres, etc.) commemorated through epigraphy and statuary, religious observance (temples, sanctuaries), the residences of the well-to-do and the artisanal and commercial premises, surrounded by the “suburban” spaces, both for the living and for the dead. This urban topography materialised a particular urban ideology concerned institutionally with civic self-government, placed under the protection of guardian deities, societally with the dominance of an aristocratic class and physically with the provision of urban infrastructure and the obligations of euergetism expressed through public distributions and monumental buildings for public use. All these derived ultimately from Mediterranean, Greco-Roman models of urbanism and urban self-government, the polis-model, and expressed a particular mode of citizenship concerned with membership of and identification with the res publica civitatis, above all for men who had some political agency, and formed by the political institutions, physical fabric and religious and civic observances located at the principal town of a civitas.

27In ca. 500-550 the great majority of the footprint of the earlier city had been abandoned: its street-grid largely disused and its public monuments abandoned. In its place was a small, heavily-fortified kernel, often sometimes covering less that 10 ha., normally in time containing a bishop and later a count representing the king. The construction of the walls means that at nearly all the towns of late Roman Gaul, which until then had been mostly open, one may now use the term extra muros in its technical sense. Within and outside these walls were constructed over time a varying number of religious loci of the new religious dispensation, Christianity Sometimes there is also evidence for secular occupation and activities (see the papers in this volume) extra muros. The dead still claimed large areas, with cemeteries often on new sites some of which colonised areas formerly within delimited by the street-grid. These cemeteries often preceded the extra-mural basilicas commemorating the holy persons buried in them.

28In the terms used at the start of this contribution we see an implosion followed by an explosion of urban form: an implosion in the sense that the main area of the earlier city contracts enormously, sometimes by more than 90% and an explosion in the sense that in place of the coherent and contiguous spaces of the earlier city this new city consists of a number of foci of activity orbiting around the fortified core. In terms of cognitive geography there is an almost complete dissonance between the two urban forms. At first sight, what it meant to be a citizen of such a town must have changed radically too. Instead of membership of a self-governing political and cultural entity with its roots in the Mediterranean-style polis or civitas, the roots of this new urbanism now suggests parallel institutional and political changes. Apparently such a town was now strictly subordinated to external powers other than those formerly represented by the ordo decurionum, which were initially imperial and after royal, represented by the bishop and, later, the count, its inhabitants rarely had political agency. This was made starkly evident by the dominance in the urban landscape of the fortified kernel and the churches and basilicas and the utterly changed cycles of religious observance, civic rituals and military or even military concerns. Nevertheless, recent research allows us to nuance this vision considerably. Scholars have been able to show the persistence of assemblies of notables at several towns of the Frankish kingdom up till the eighth century (Brown 2012; Barbier 2014). The vocabulary of maiores, seniores, priores and other such terms clearly shows a recognition that such notables were a regular feature of urban society. Certainly they were the political inferiors of the counts and the bishops, but the powers of these two worthies were not as absolute as they might have wished, and we are able to see notables acting in their own interests when counts and bishops were at odds or royal power was disputed (Loseby 2020a; Barbier 2021). Occasionally one may glimpse the citizens as a body with some agency. Since the council of Nicaea in 325, and as shown later by the example of Martin of Tours, bishops could be elected by popular acclamation (Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini, 9) and the activities and liturgies of bishops such as Caesarius of Arles are portrayed as involving large numbers of citizens. Even though the polis-model may have irretrievable broken down, the town, its nobles and its people retained an identity and importance through till at least the eighth century.

Archaeology and the chronology of urban transformations

The contraction of urban space

29Blanchet’s (1907) influential and long-lasting model proposed a very short chronology for the changes in urban form, three or four decades in the later third century, and explained the new, small urban defensive circuits as immediate and hastily-executed responses to military shock. Both chronology and fortification need re-examining in the light of recent excavation and research. For some years, even decades, now it has been becoming increasingly clear that at most of the cities of Gaul for which we have sufficient excavated evidence the long processes of urban transformation that were to lead to the late Antique city were beginning around the turn of the second and third centuries, that is well before any serious irruption by “barbarians”.

30This question, which deserves to be the subject of a new conference, was initiated with a publication entitled Le iiie siècle en Gaule narbonnaise (Fiches ed. 1996) contained papers showing that three of the most important cities of southern Gaul, Aix-en-Provence, Arles, Nîmes were also contracting during the third century (Nin 1996; 2014; Heijmans 1996; Monteil 1996; Heijmans in this volume). Moe recent publication has suggested that at Nîmes the contraction may have got going as early as the beginning of the second century, if not the end of the first (Monteil 1999), while in Narbonne the process began during the second half of the second century. Indeed the shrinkage of the occupied areas of the cities of Provence is now something of a commonplace in studies of the region (Heijmans 2011; 2024). Increasingly the same seems to be largely true of the cities of Aquitania (Maurin 2019). At Saintes the northern district of the city was abandoned as early as the mid second century, and the desertion of this domestic and artisan quarter had been linked to the loss of the town’s status as provincial capital of Aquitania in favour of Poitiers or Bordeaux. At Périgueux the domus of the rue des Bouquets shows a final phase of restoration in the later Antonine or Severan period, but not later (Gaillard et al. 2016). At Clermont-Ferrand, the quarters lying to the north of the city begin to be abandoned in the course of the second half of the second century, with the phenomenon accelerating at the end of the second and beginning of the third century (Dartevelle 2021, p. 486). For Bordeaux, most of the peripheral sites whose occupation did not continue into late antiquity and for which chronological data are available were abandoned at the end of the third century. Some, however, show evidence of an earlier desertion. This is particularly the case for the group of small craft-related sites along the banks of the Peugue where activity gradually ceased and moved downstream between the mid second century and the third.

31North of the Loire in Lugdunensis, Belgica and Germaniae there is now a litany of cities where excavation over the last forty years has shown a major contraction in the occupied area through the third century, with the late defensive circuits relating to these now very much smaller centres with their necropoleis (Boudeau 2009; 2019). At Lyon the abandonment of the upper town seems to have taken place gradually through the third century (Desbat, Lenoble 2018), with impoverishment of the inhabitants suggested by deterioration in architectural appointments in the houses of the plateau de Fourvière. Whether this is still to be linked to the after-effects of the battle of Lyon in 197 remains controversial (Faure, Poux ed. 2025). In cities of north Gaul and the Rhineland such as Augst, Autun, Besançon, Metz, Reims, Soissons the phenomenon seems somewhat later than in Narbonensis, mainly dating to the second half of the third century. At Augst the signs of urban crisis are clearly visible in the 250s with the dismantling of the forum. Many blocks from this monument were recovered in 270-75 at the same time as the construction of a short-lived fortification in the upper town (“Kastelen”) before the definitive move to the castrum of Kaiseraugst on the banks of the Rhine ca. 300 (Schatzmann 2011), with the earlier city largely deserted.

32It should be noted that there is a small number of towns where defensive circuits are not currently attested and therefore remained open, for instance Carhaix, Corseul, Vieux in the northwest, Apt, Sisteron, Vaison-la-Romaine in the southeast, Agen, Éauze and Javols in the southwest. They remain poorly documented, but it is likely that their polynuclear character is also attested (Ferdière ed. 2004).

The imposition of defences and the new urban topography

33In general terms, the forms of the late-antique urban defences of Gaul divide along the line of the Loire, which is also approximately the administrative divide between the diocesis of Galliae to the north and Septem Provinciae/Viennensis to the south. In both regions a recurrent feature of these circuits was their very restricted area, especially in relationship to the areas delimited by earlier street-grids; few circuits enclose more than 10 ha. To the north of the Loire as far as the Rhine lay the broadly similar, massive, heavily-fortified enceintes which reused monumental architectural elements and tombstone in their lower parts, with tall, thick walls faced in petit appareil and courses of bricks, the circuits studded with projecting towers and provided with heavily defended gates (cf. Dey 2010). These are often seen as the classic type of late Gallic defences. South of the Loire lay only a handful of this type of fortification, principally in the northwest of Aquitania. The other defences tended to be much less massive and imposing in their construction, sometimes sited on hilltops, and much less similar to each other than those in the north. This seems to reflect two different histories of development and function, with the northern circuits seeming to form part of a coherent initiative, or regional initiatives, reflected in the similarities of their morphology and construction, though taking place over a number of decades, principally in the first half of the fourth century (Bayard 2019). By contrast the defences in southern Gaul seem broadly to date to a century or so later and their differences suggest that they were more probably initiatives at the level of the individual city (Heijmans 2019; Maurin 2019). Thanks to the two recent publications focusing on these defences to the north (Bayard, Fourdrin ed. 2019) and to the southwest (Fourdrin ed. 2020) and southeast (Heijmans 2020) of the Loire, it is not necessary here to go into detail about the physical forms of these monuments, but there are other aspects of their imposition that are germane to the themes examined in this contribution.

34An important feature of these new defended circuits both north and south of the Loire (Fourdrin 2019) is their relationship to the monumental centres of the early empire (cf. Pichon 2015). At a small number (Metz, Reims, Sens, Tongres/Tongeren) the defences enclose the forum and other monuments as though these were still the urban focus, though the condition of these monuments at the time remains uncertain (for Reims see also Balmelle et al. 2019), did they still fulfil their second-century functions? At some cities the earlier monuments were preserved but as effectively massive buttresses or bastions to the new wall circuit, for instance at Amiens the massive, double forum/temple/amphitheatre complex became a huge masonry massif strengthening the southern walls (Bayard, Gemehl 2019). The case of Bavai was even more extreme with the massive forum complex now effectively a podium with the fortifications clamped to its outer face (Louvion 2019). At Périgueux and Tours the second-century amphitheatres were incorporated into the wall circuits as a sort of massive bastion. Were they still used for ludi? But at the majority of these cities the fortified kernel lay at one side or on the edge of what had been the built-up areas (Angers, Beauvais, Évreux, Jublains, Le Mans, Paris, etc.) and it seems that by and large the civic complexes and monuments of the cities of the High Empire had ceased to serve their original purposes, an impression reinforced by the spoliation of their architectural stonework for reuse in the new wall circuits (in general Loseby 2020b; for southern Gaul, Guyon, Heijmans 2006; Heijmans 2019; 2020). Another major urban undertaking that was modified through the third century north of the Loire was the street-grid. Inside the walls some medieval and modern street-lines fossilised Roman-period alignments. Outside the walls some street-lines perpetuated earlier alignments, for instance at Saintes; very often these were streets that now served the gates of the town. Elsewhere, excavated evidence at towns such as Amiens, Bavai, Le Mans, Paris, Reims, Sens is that some streets were no longer maintained, that they could be encroached upon and that burial started to impinge on the area of the grid. This must presumably be telling us something about the weakening of the powers of the authorities which had previously laid out and maintained the armature of urban space. This tendency to abandonment or an early drop-out of the central public areas and monuments of the earlier town also raises the question of why the circuits were placed where they were. Was this where the main population nucleus had already established itself? Or were these abandoned areas and therefore less restrictive as to where the defences could be constructed ex novo? Or did this development simply fail to take into account the immediately preceding urban form?

35And it was not just the streets and public buildings and monuments that seem to be disused, large areas of the domestic and artisan occupation that had made up the city of the High Empire had been abandoned (Boudeau 2009; 2019). Thanks to the recent projet collectif on the walls of Le Mans we now have a much clearer impression of how the massive, polychrome walls of the fourth-century circuit on their hilltop, further marked off from the area around them by a broad glacis, overlooked large areas of the second-century city that had been abandoned, with some areas now given over to burials (Bouillet et al. ed. 2022, p. 91, fig. 1). Another striking recent image of the disconnection between the occupied areas under the High Empire compared with their abandonment and spoliation is now given by Reims, the Constantinian fortified area seems to have been surrounded by a disused street-grid and houses and shops demolished and with foundations systematically recovered, sometimes colonised by isolated burials (Balmelle et al. 2019). At all these sites there three had been a major topographical shift in the organisation of the urban fabric, resulting in what might with justice be termed a new urban form.

36South of the Loire the processes leading to the construction of defences and their relationships to existing urban monuments and topography seem to have been longer-drawn-out and so perhaps less traumatic, but the end results were similar (Heijmans 2011; 2025). In Aquitania, there were a few wall-circuits similar to those of dioecesis Galliarum (Bordeaux, Bourges, Dax, Périgueux, Poitiers, Saintes, along with Bayonne). Bordeaux and Périgueux are classic examples of where the new fortified area lay to one side of the former core of the city. In Narbonensis, some of those cities that had received fortifications under the High Empire retained their existing circuits (e.g., Arles, Fréjus, Orange, Toulouse), whereas others had, in the fifth or sixth century, new, smaller enceintes carved out of them (e.g., Aix-en-Provence, Béziers, Narbonne, Nîmes) and others in the end of third or fourth century walls comparable to those north of the Loire (Carcassonne, Die, Grenoble, Genève and perhaps Vienne) (Heijmans 2020, pp. 55–60). Several cities acquired defences from the third to the fifth century, restricted circuits which sometimes disregarded existing civic monuments (Heijmans 2015). Since these circuits seem to have been provided piecemeal rather than according to some overall plan, it is argued that they reflect the responses of individual cities to insecure times or, for the most precocious, decisions of an imperial nature. In the southwest, particularly the province of Novempopulana, there is a group of small, hilltop fortifications with relatively slight walls, probably dating to the early fifth century (Auch, Bazas, ?Lectoure, Lescar, ?Oloron, Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, Saint-Lézer, Saint-Lizier-en-Couserans), and which have sufficient similarities to suggest they may be a regional group (Maurin 2019; 2020). These all lie to one side of (Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges – Quéré, Van Andringa ed. 2022), or even at a short distance (Saint-Lézer, Saint-Lizier) from the agglomerations of the High Empire. Though the chronology and processes south of the Loire differ somewhat from those to the north, the end-point is similar in both cases, small, defended enceintes representing a major topographical shift in the organisation of the urban fabric.

37Generally speaking, intra muros, major projects on civic monuments seem rare and euergetism in this area seems to have come to an end in the middle of the third century. However, we can mention the case of Autun, with the restoration of, among other things, the thermal baths, aqueducts, and the scholae Maeniaenae, but also Arles, Reims and Trèves/Trier, all cities with strong links to the fourth-century emperors.

38In contrast, it should be noted that several large civic sanctuaries in both rural and urban contexts were abandoned and dismantled, often as early as the second half of the third century (Van Andringa ed. 2014). With the subsequent abandonment of other types of major civic monuments in the fourth century or around that date, such as fora, as in Vaison-la-Romaine, or a civic complex that appears to have been in ruins by the end of the third or beginning of the fourth century and used for the storage of salvaged materials. If we add to this the baths, theatres and amphitheatres, this raises crucial questions about what happened to the aristocratic classes in the various civitates who, for more than two centuries, had commissioned and financed the construction and architectural embellishment, statues and inscriptions of these places. It should also be noted that euergetic inscriptions became rare from the third century onwards, marking a kind of “crisis of the aristocracies” and a turning point in their loss of power or their way of expressing themselves.

Occupation and functions of the intra muros

39What the nature of the occupation and functions of the intra-mural areas were remains a vexed question, largely due to the major difficulties of excavating within the walls, located beneath the present-day city centres. For some time the implicit model has been that these areas housed the remaining urban population, effectively the successors of those who had lived in the sprawling towns of the Principate. The remaining administrative and fiscal functions which remained attached to the capitals under the late Roman state should in all likelihood be discharged from within the walls and commercial and economic activities might be carried on within their shelter, quite possibly favouring the elites who would seek the safety afforded by the defended area. Thus these places would still be “urban” in a traditional sense of the word, with an emphasis on their largely civilian and civic nature and population, the end-point of the contraction of the towns which bean around the end of the second century or during the third century. A recent expression of this tradition has been eloquently set forth by William Van Andringa (2020), basing himself on examples with relatively good archaeological documentation such as Paris or Reims. He notes that in the fourth century there was indeed an urban restoration programme led by a governing authority, with undeniable evidence of abandonment and urban contraction similar to that described above, and that this led to the emergence of a “new urban ideal, of which the city wall was now the main representation” (Van Andringa 2020, p. 254).

40Though the evidence for the urban contraction is convincing, less obvious is the supporting evidence for what was going on within the walls. As might be expected, some of the best evidence for continuing civilian occupation, especially elite housing, comes from towns south of the Loire. At Bordeaux the large defended area (35 ha.) was clearly designed to safeguard the port and its warehouses along the Dévèze, an affluent of the Garonne, nevertheless excavation has shown that in the fourth and fifth centuries there were elite residences and artisan areas to either side of the river. The commercial life of the town was clearly very vigorous, best attested by ceramics, especially the locally produced dérivées de sigillées paléochrétiennes du groupe Atlantique (DSPA) with their wide distribution in southern Gaul and northern Spain, along with fabrics produced inland in the Saintonge. The eponymous town of that region, Saintes, has yielded some evidence for occupation within the walls. For the fourth century the textual evidence of Ausonius gives some impressions of his home city, Bordeaux, and its university in the Ordo urbium nobilium (the walls and port figuring prominently) and the Parentalia and Professores (Ausonius, Collected Works). Further south in Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges with occupation on the plain continuing through the fourth and into the fifth century, a gradual move up the hill occurs apparently set in train by the construction of the wall circuit early in the fifth century (Quéré, Van Andringa ed. 2022). Something similar may be observable at Auch, capital of Novempopulana in the late Roman period. In southeastern Gaul it is Arles that unsurprisingly provides the best evidence for a continuing urban population, despite the abandonment of some important peripheral areas such as Trinquetaille (Heijmans 2004, Ch. 2). Occupation continued both within and outside the wall (Heijmans 2004, Chs. 4,6) and signs of still considerable wealth through the fourth and fifth centuries include the major episcopal basilica within the southeastern part of the wall circuit, to say nothing of the series of elaborately carved marble sarcophagi. Clearly Arles’ important administrative role and commercial position favoured its continuing prosperity as so pithily expressed in a poem written ca. 360: “quae est super mare, quae dicunt Arclatum [sic] quae ab omni mundo negotia accipiens praedictae civitati emittit” (Expositio totius mundi et gentium LVIII). Other major commercial entrepots may have also weathered the storms of the third century better than other towns, for instance the evidence from Vienne and Lyon presented in this volume or the continuing importance of the entrepot of Marseille (Bonifay et al. ed. 1998; Mellinand et al. 2024). The evidence for other towns in the southeast is less striking, nevertheless a recent review accumulates the developing evidence for urban habitation and activity at a number of towns, defended or undefended (Heijmans 2024).

41North of the Loire such evidence for continued civilian occupation and activity at towns is much harder to come by. An alternative view that has been promulgated more recently is that the classic late Roman fortifications north of the Loire—and a few other southern examples that can be linked to them—, the massive “mastodontes de pierre” had more to do with the needs of the state than of the civic community. This view was proposed in 2019 for the fortifications between Lyon and Metz (Kasprzyk 2019) and in the following year for much of Gaul, especially the north (Esmonde Cleary 2020). One might summarise four principal strands of evidence for this view as follows. The first strand, the evidence of the Notitia Dignitatum, the great register of the civil and military officials and officers of the late empire compiled in the early fifth century. Gaul north of the Loire, the diocesis Galliarum, shows a strong correlation between fortified towns and military units or other imperial installations (fabricae) in the Notitia (Esmonde Cleary 2020, p. 32, tabl. 4.1). South of the Loire in the diocesis Viennensis there were fewer military units but on the other hand a greater presence of fabricae (Esmonde Cleary 2020, tabl. 4.2). The second strand is another written source is that of epigraphy, with the discovery of epitaphs of soldiers at a number of towns such as Amiens (CIL XIII, 3492–3496), Paris (Busson 1998, 531*, 553*, 623*, 633*), Metz (CIL XIII, 4328), Lyon (CIL XIII, 1848, 1855). In Viennensis one might point to the evidence from Bordeaux (CIL XIII, 11032). The third strand is the evidence for major store-buildings within the walls at some towns, notably Amiens (chantier les Halles, chantier Saint-Germain) (Bayard, Gemehl 2019, fig. 2), Bâle (Fellmann 1960, pp. 24–30), Paris (the Marché aux Fleurs “basilica”) (Busson 1998, 722*, fig. 292) as well as the massive Saint-Irminen horrea at Trèves/Trier (Cüppers ed. 1984, pp. 200–202). One may also point to the apparent late fourth century barracks at Arras (Jacques 1993). On the other hand, the fortified towns of Novempopulana do not appear to have housed garrisons (Maurin 2020, pp. 22–23). The fourth strand is a more diffuse one, the presence at many towns of items relating to military or civilian servants of the state such as weapons, belt-fittings, fibulae (e.g., Fort et al. 2021; Ferdière 2019; 2022a; 2022b; Quemener 2022), though it should be noted that this is not the case at all towns. Nevertheless, such items are regularly found either intra muros or extra muros in the late cemeteries or in other types of sites. As yet, these strands of evidence should be taken as pointers towards a possible scenario rather than a proven and universal argument. They work better at some towns, for instance Amiens, than at others, where there is little or no evidence, so it would be a grave error to be too dogmatic or decided. Towns will have to be evaluated on their own evidence over time. But the idea that these imposing and expensive circuits of walls in the northern half of Gaul (and a few in the southern half) were a materialisation of imperial interest in and demands on these places which had earlier been urban can be argued. In the fourth century, such towns were principally militarised (Amiens, Paris, Vermand), while others had they ceased to be urban (Bavai, Jublains) or were they associated with coastal fortresses in pairs (Carhaix and Brest, Corseul and Alet) (Maligorne 2004)?

Occupation and functions of the extra muros

42The contributions gathered in this dossier present a range of cases where the extra-mural areas have yielded the majority of the evidence now at our disposal. Given that this evidence is presented in extenso in the individual contributions it seems otiose to present it here in summary form. Nevertheless, overall it reveals some common trends that can be observed outside the fortified centres of many Gallic towns. Here we confine ourselves here to a very brief outline of the nature of these trends to point up the principal common features. Outside the late fortifications, often along the main access routes, but also within the walls of the High Empire that were maintained, the centres of occupation mainly combined craft activities and places of residence, sometimes belonging to the elite, judging by the associated furnishings or building styles. These inhabited areas alternate with more complex areas, sites of “dark earth”, isolated or small groups of burials and, more rarely, very specific religious or military buildings, such as the mithraea of Angers and Bordeaux or the probable bakery in Reims. In due course further religious structures, funerary basilicas, came to form an important and imposing element of the extra-mural landscapes.

What were the causes of the transformations?

43The principle of comparing towns in 200-250 and 500-550 works well enough as a description, and as an analysis of some of the significance of the transformations, but it works less well as an explanation. So can we identify the causative agents which led to such a profound reworking of urban form and civic ideologies? Evidently there are three major processes at work, diminution, fortification and Christianisation, yet they are only necessary but not sufficient factors to explain the massive changes, which also involved population, economy, social structures. It is necessary to examine two linked themes, causation and chronology, to understand these changes. This is not the place to undertake a detailed discussion, often of well-known evidence and arguments, but a general outline of developing perspectives can be given. For causation one may perhaps be allowed to use the device of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Pestilence, Famine, Death, or at least the first three since they all tended to lead to the fourth. All of these of course were exogenous and thus provided a deus ex machina solution to the problem.

War

44War was for a long time the favoured explanation for the observed changes, specifically war in the form or the “barbarian/Germanic invasions” reputed to have caused widespread destruction within Gaul, particularly in the second half of the third century. This was espoused by Adrien Blanchet in his Les enceintes romaines de la Gaule (Blanchet 1907). He was able to link textual with epigraphic evidence to suggest that the fortifications were built on the initiative of the emperor Probus (276-282), The vita of Probus in the Scriptores Historiae Augustae (Probus, XV) recounts a letter from the emperor to the senate claiming that “seventy most noble cities have been freed from the captivity of enemies and all the interior of the Gauls liberated”. Blanchet argued that this number of seventy meant great destruction had been wrought on most of the cities of Gaul (Blanchet 1907, pp. 335–338). The new urban fortifications, incorporating much stonework reused from public buildings and monuments and private tombstones and monuments, he interpreted as a hasty response to this destruction; these walls also contained inscriptions and coins dating down to the 260s. The “barbarian invasions” thus conveniently elided, causation, chronology and explanation for the massive changes, giving a very compressed chronology at the end of the third century. We have seen that further evidence on the chronology and form of these defences and their place within the wider processes of urban transformation—retraction in particular—make this explanation difficult to sustain in a simple form.

45However, we cannot completely ignore the effects that the invasions and raids mentioned in the texts may have had, even though they are often difficult to prove archaeologically. Their impact must have been significant in some places, particularly in the Rhineland, as evidenced by the example of Augst.

Plague

  • 8 We are grateful to Sasha Kacki to have drawn our attention to this case.

46Plague and its possible impacts on the population of the Roman empire between the second and the sixth centuries has recently been the subject of a major academic debate, largely provoked by the important work by Kyle Harper The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of Empire (2017), French translation Comment l’Empire romain s’est effondré: le climat, les maladies et la chute de Rome (2019) (Petit 2023 for a French-language summary), though it should be noted that his approaches on both disease and climate have attracted significant criticism (e.g., Haldon et al. 2018; Leveau 2022). Harper concentrates mainly on the Plague of Justinian of the sixth century but also discusses the Antonine Plague of the second century and the Plague of Cyprian in the third (Harper 2019, pp. 98–118, pp. 136–155). The Roman empire with its developed connective networks by land and sea and its multitude of cities which provided both significant numbers of humans in close proximity and habitats for the vectors of plague, above all rats, was favourable territory of the spread of the diseases. The Plague of Cyprian struck in the 250s but the evidence for it is of variable quality and its origins, aetiology and identification are all much debated. Geographically, its incidence was in the East Mediterranean, and it is not attested in the literary sources further west than Rome, except for Africa, so its relevance to this contribution is debatable, though archaeology may yet contribute. The Antonine Plague of the 160s and 170s seems to have been more widespread, with some attestations west of Italy (Duncan-Jones 1996; Lo Cascio ed. 2012). Ammianus Marcellinus states that Gaul and Germany were struck by the disease (Res Gestae, 23.6.24). A passing remark from two centuries later should however be treated with caution, though Ammianus must have had a source. The Antonine Plague would at present seem to be too early to act as a causative agent for urban change in Gaul, and the Plague of Cyprian occurred when those changes were already well under way. It may be that archaeological evidence, particularly mass burials or other funerary evidence may yet be linked to pestilence in Gaul, for instance the exceptional evidence for multiple burials in the cemetery of Saint-Seurin, Bordeaux, or at Chartres (Bazin et al. 2013) or Poitiers (Sasha Kacki pers. comm.).8 At present plague seems unlikely to be a general factor in provoking urban change between Rhine and Pyrenees, but at least Harper’s book has made us aware of the subject and to be sensitive to the need to interrogate any possible evidence that may emerge from future excavations as a contributory factor and undoubtedly to re-examine cases that are still awaiting explanation, such as that of the sanctuary of Saint-Martin-au-Val in Chartres.

Famine

47Famine in the ancient world, except during periods of war, was usually the product in the short term of adverse weather and over longer time-scales of deteriorating climatic conditions. The possible effects of climate change across antiquity, particularly from the third century onwards, have recently been a major concern of a number of scholars, reflecting present-day anxieties about variability in climate. Kyle Harper’s book (2017; 2019) is again in the vanguard (see also Izdebski, Mulryan ed. 2019; Leveau 2022) and has given rise to a huge literature. Harper argues that the Principate was made possible by and benefited from the Roman Climatic Optimum/optimum climatique romain (RCO/OCR), a period of stable and favourable climatic conditions, which began to break down in the third century with a turn to cooler, wetter conditions impacting on agricultural productivity and thus the economic base of the empire. Unlike the short-term plagues, this was a phenomenon of the medium term, which amongst other things means that human populations had time to adapt their agrarian strategies to the changing conditions. As yet, the evidence for climate change in Gaul awaits detailed and extended treatment, but again the chronology of the climatic deterioration of late antiquity fits badly with our subject here. Both for plague and for climate change there is currently a severe problem of chronology, coincidence and correlation. War, pestilence, famine, these three horsemen of the Apocalypse fail to explain adequately the nature or the chronology of the changes that we are considering. Nevertheless, it is important to recognise the ways in which Harper and others may have opened up debates about the nature and reasons for change in late antiquity. If exogenous change does not currently provide satisfactory answers then we must turn to endogenous factors which may have provoked the changes.

Civic hypertrophy

48One argument that may be advanced to explain the causes of the major changes in urban form is that cities had become victims of a form of civic hypertrophy. The form and architecture of the “classic” Roman city of the second century has had a long afterlife down to the modern day in Europe and beyond. The armature of street-grids, the architectural vocabulary of public buildings and monuments, the sculpture and epigraphy, all recall what is generally seen as the high point of classical Mediterranean urbanism (Greaves, Wallace-Hadrill ed. 2022). This form of urbanism has therefore been accorded a privileged position in many modern attitudes to cities, especially in Europe and areas once under recent European domination. For those studying ancient urbanism there tends to be a teleology to urban form, above all to Mediterranean urban form, moving from the relatively small-scale and little monumentalised cities of Archaic Greece through to the glories of the Classical period, then on to the great cities of the Hellenistic period, ultimately to Rome itself and the cities nurtured by the Roman economic and cultural formations. Roman provincial cities in the West were at their largest and most populous and endowed with their greatest and most splendid buildings and monuments in Gibbon’s “fortunate age of the Antonines”. The implicitly teleological view of Greco-Roman urbanism therefore sees these cities as the acme of classical urbanism (Woolf 2020, part III). This of course then implies that any departure from or diminution of these cities, individually or collectively, should attract the vocabulary of “decline”, or “degradation”. But is it legitimate to ask whether these cities really were the acme of classical urban form, or rather a contingent and transitory phase of urban form, one that had become unsustainable? How many of the great buildings whose plans we know in two dimensions were actually carried through to completion in three dimensions? Thus, for example, the large sanctuary of Saint-Martin-au-Val in Chartres was never completed (Bazin et al. 2013).

49Was the accelerating decline in the extent and monumentality the result of an endogenous weakness, that the forms of display materialised in stone simply became too costly and that from the second half of the second century (if not earlier at some towns) the elites gradually turned to other forms of auto-representation? What may look to us as an unstoppable urbanising process was in fact fragile. Other influences, including exogenous ones such as warfare, (invasions, civil wars) or perhaps plague could then have acted on a trajectory of change already established. This perspective raises questions for the wider field of Roman urban studies into which we should now place the evidence and debates from Gaul.

The wider context

The study of late-antique urbanism in the West

50The cities of late-antique Gaul with all the problems and problematics of their archaeological and textual evidence and of the analyses built upon that evidence are of course only a part of the immense debates about the transition from the Mediterranean-style “classical” city of the High Empire to the radically different city of late antiquity, diminished topographically and institutionally and in terms of population. What sorts of urban crisis, or rather crises, had precipitated these radical changes, when and why, and how are we to characterise and interrogate them? Some treatments of these questions operate at the level of the entire empire, for instance Wolf Liebeschuetz’s magisterial The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Liebeschuetz 2001), with its explicitly Gibbonian title and viewpoint, though it says a lot less about the West than about the East. Cities and their vicissitudes are central to Chris Wickham’s equally magisterial Framing the Early Middle Ages (Wickham 2005, chap. 10 and passim). Two volumes of the international project “The Transformation of the Roman World” focused on cities: The Idea and Ideal of the Town between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Brogiolo, Ward-Perkins ed. 1999) and Towns and their Territories between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Brogiolo et al. ed. 2000), both much concerned with the West. For the West more specifically, the last few decades have seen a series of publications addressing the evidence for and problems of the fundamental changes in the cities of this vast area and of various regions within it, for instance: Le città italiane tra la tarda Antichità e l’alto medioevo (Augenti ed. 2006): Urbanisme civique en temps de crise (Brassous, Quevedo ed. 2015); Le origini della città medievale (Brogiolo 2011); Urban Transformations in the Late Antique West (Carneiro et al. ed. 2020); La configuración urbana de la Hispania tardoantigua (Diarte Blasco 2012); Die Stadt in der Spätantike – Niedergang oder Wandel? (Witschel 1999; Krause, Witschel ed. 2006); Late Roman Spain and its Cities (Kulikowski 2004); La fin de la cité antique et le début de la cité médiévale (Lepelley 1996); L’Empire romain en mutation : répercussions sur les villes dans la deuxième moitié du iiie siècle/Das römische Reich im Umbruch: Auswirkungen auf die Städte in der zweiten Hälfte des 3. Jahrhunderts (Schatzmann, Martin-Kilcher ed. 2011), and most recently ¿Ciudades invisibles? Paisajes urbanos de la Antigüedad tardía (siglos III-VIII) (Panzram, Brassous ed. 2025)—to name but a few. This list emphasises what a truly international undertaking this has been. Yet as the contributions to the conference published here showed, there is still important evidence coming out of the ground and innovatory analyses being proposed. How then do the evidence and analyses from traditions outside Gaul help to shed light on Gaul?

Italy and the “città ad isole

51For Italy the notion of the città ad isole is a form of analysis which has proved very influential in discussions of cities at the end of antiquity and in the early Middle Ages (for introduction and bibliography see Brogiolo, Gelichi 1998; Brogiolo 2011, chap. III, esp. pp. 131–146; Gelichi 2020; also Ghilardi et al. ed. 2006) see also the paper on Northern Italy. The abandonment in Italian cities of public buildings and monuments inherited from the High Empire meant the cities were deprived of that centre for coherence, setting in train a process of dis-integration and abandonment, with the diminished population and the civil and ecclesiastical powers now concentrated in small nuclei. In larger cities, above all Rome (Dey 2021, esp. chap. 2,3), where there was a large area intra muros, this pattern of nuclei and voids could develop within the walls. In addition there was of course the development of nuclei cohering around extra-mural funerary churches in the established urban cemeteries at a distance from the walls. So a large city such as Milan, Naples, or Verona let alone Rome, could come to consist of a whole series of intra- and extra-mural nuclei dotted in and around the fabric of the former city, what in French is sometimes referred to as “en peau de léopard” (Guyon et al. 1996). In this reading the spaces in between the nuclei were by-and-large devoid of urban activity, consisting at beast of areas of cultivation at worst as abandoned lands. Such areas were seen as essentially non-urban, indeed rural, hence the epithet sometimes applied to them of “ruralizzazzione”. This has sometimes led to commentators writing off these areas as “derelict wasteland” (Loseby 2006, p. 72), giving an impression of profound de-urbanisation with accompanying incoherence of the urban fabric. This was linked with the developing evidence for “dark earths”, apparent interruptions in the urban fabric, though as we have seen above they were in fact very probably an integral part of a new form of urban fabric, weaving together the apparently isolated patches of occupations and activity.

52The attractiveness of the model of città ad isole for the analysis of late-antique cities in Gaul is evident. At one level it is a matter of cartography. The Topographie chrétienne des cités de la Gaule provides a comprehensive series of maps of the cities of Gaul as they were by about 800. Wherever there is more than basic evidence for a city it is shown essentially as a città ad isole, a fortified nucleus surrounded by a series of extra-mural churches at a greater or lesser remove from the walls: the map of Clermont-Ferrand is a well-known example. So the Italian model provides a useful descriptor of the forms of urban topography to be found in late-antique and early-medieval Gaul. But is it more than a descriptor? We have already seen important evidence that the blank areas in modern cartography were often filled with areas that may have been devoted to horticulture, arboriculture or agriculture being carried out by the townspeople living outside and around the wall, thus forming part of a connected urban fabric and comprising part of the cognitive geography of the town. There is one type of Christian evidence that also suggests that these isole were in fact linked into a more structured and coherent whole. This is the question of liturgical observances at the various churches of a city and of the processions that linked them, as attested for instance at Tours (Pietri 1983) or at Arles under bishop Caesarius. These festivals were normally led by the bishop of the city attended by his clergy and lay members of the community of the faithful. As they processed from church to church, from intra-mural episcopal church to extra-mural funerary and martyrial churches they would be weaving a new cognitive geography of the altered city, just as their predecessors in the second century had done. So the islands would not necessarily be seen as isolated from each other, but rather only to be understood in relation to each other. Each of the poles of a “multipolar” city had its own place in the spatially and functionally disparate complex that made up what its citizens over time came to understand as the city.

The Iberian peninsula North Africa and Britain

53Since this volume is concerned not just with Gaul but with “régions mitoyennes” one should say a few words about Gaul’s southern neighbour the Iberian Peninsula to complement what has already been said concerning Italy. A series of monographic publications in Spanish, also in English, has made more readily available the increasing evidence for the origins of the “urban crisis” in the third century (Andreu, Blanco-Pérez ed. 2019) then the major changes in the late antique cities of the peninsula (Kulikowski 2004; Diarte Blasco 2012; Chavarría Arnau 2018 ; Martínez Jiménez et al. ed. 2018, esp. chap. 2,5; Ruiz Bueno 2018; Andreu, Blanco-Pérez ed. 2019) with a conference volume specifically on suburban areas in prehistory and antiquity (Carme Belarte, Plana Mallart ed. 2012). More recently, the research project “Atlas”, studies the late-antique cities of South Iberian Peninsula and of North Africa and provides new scopes for thoughts (Panzram, Brassous ed. 2025). To generalise massively: as might be expected, the development of the cities of Iberia resembles more that of their southern Gaulish neighbours and Italy than northern Gaul. The same processes can be seen of the abandonment and spoliation of the public buildings and monuments of the early-imperial city can be discerned (Diarte Blasco 2012; Ruiz Bueno 2018, Ch. 6), likewise contraction in urban population and of course the addition of Christian topographies, both intra- and extra-mural and the consequent changes in funerary topography inside and outside the walls (Chavarría Arnau 2018, chap. 3; Ruiz Bueno 2018, chap. 7,10). The abandonment rate of the public buildings varies, often occurring earlier in Hispania than in Africa. The transformations accelerated in the fifth century, with the appearance of new buildings that defined new loci. Since many Iberian cities had inherited extensive wall circuits from the High Empire (like Córdoba) and some had had them constructed under the Tetrarchy and later the situation resembled Italy, with nuclei of occupation, places of worship and burial within and outside the walls which could be classified as città ad isole, though in fact this is not a term much used in the peninsula. Some cities which have been more fully excavated such as Mérida (Eger, Nogales Basarrate ed. 2024, pp. 353–425), Tarragona (Pérez Martínez 2012, chap. 2,3) and Valencia (Ribera i Lacomba 2000) give clear evidence for the breakdown of a formerly extensive and coherent urban plan into a series of functional areas inside and outside the defences. In Cartagena, many public buildings were destroyed or abandoned between the second and third centuries. The contraction of the urban area towards the western quarter of the city continued into the fourth century, before a very limited urban revival in the fifth century and the construction of the enclosure, which did not take place until the sixth century. In North Africa, the construction of the walls came later, with a few exceptions, and most often is attributed to the Byzantine reconquest (for example Aïdra), even though there are rare examples dating back to the fourth century, such as in Thyna (Belmabrouk et al. 2023). In the terms of this article they had become decentred and reorganised according to new foci in a manner familiar from south of Gaul and Italy. Another factor to be borne in mind is also the creation of royal centres under the Visigothic kings, particularly at Toledo with the bipolar city split between the hilltop fortified core and the riverside area of the Vega Baja. A somewhat different and earlier Visigothic royal focus is now recognised inside and outside the north-western walls of Toulouse. The newly-created Visigothic royal citadel of Reccopolis clearly builds on the late-antique urban tradition in Iberia.

54One last “région mitoyenne” of course lay across the Channel, Britain. The history of urban form in the diocesis Britanniarum during the fourth century was rather different to that of neighbouring northern Gaul, perhaps more like southern Gaul or Iberia (Esmonde Cleary 2019), but the available evidence points to a total collapse of urban life and activity in the first half of the fifth century (e.g., Gerrard 2013). So there was a lacuna of two almost centuries before the revival of urban life, which followed on from the second Roman conquest of the island, led by Augustine of Canterbury in 597. Augustine of course was a product of the late-antique Mediterranean, so when he established his metropolitan seat at Canterbury he founded not only an intra-mural episcopal church but also an extra-mural church as royal and archiepiscopal funerary basilica.

Perspectives

55Having reviewed at length evidence from and approaches to the towns of late Roman Gaul, on may seek to conclude with some more general remarks which draw out current issues.

Questions of evidence and chronology: the third to the fifth century

56The discussion above allied to the contributions in this volume and work at many towns of late Roman Gaul confirm what has become apparent over the last decades, namely that enormous transformations to Gallo-Roman urban forms and functions took place, something of a commonplace, but took place over an extended period rather than the short chronology favoured over a century ago by Blanchet (1907). Two crucial phases of change concerned the third and the fifth centuries, periods where our evidence remains lacunose and out perceptions of these evolutions and the causes behind them remains tentative can only be temporary.

57A favoured chronological device of recent historiography has been to speak of “the long X century”, to avoid the tyranny of arbitrary date brackets and of round numbers. Here we may with justice speak of “the long third century”, starting at the close of the second century and extending into the first half of the fourth century: Commodus to Constantine if one must. The physical materialisations of this are clear enough: progressive retraction of urban occupation; progressive abandonment of the street grid; progressive disuse of public buildings and monuments; progressive cessation of the occupation of domestic and artisanal structures. The word “progressive” is used here not in its commendatory sense but to emphasise that these were drawn-out processes, often lasting decades. Clearly the construction of city walls could not have been the catalyst for such pronounced changes as once imagined, with a few exceptions. Indeed it increasingly seems that these defences were inserted into an urban landscape where much of the town of the Principate was no longer what it had been. At present we know that these processes are taking place but have great difficulty in apprehending or comprehending them. This is true both at the level of the individual town as much as of regional or wider levels. At individual towns the stratigraphy and finds yielded by excavations have allowed us to glimpse what was going on in restricted areas. It is only at a few such as Amiens, Autun, Bordeaux, Reims, Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges that thanks to the number of excavations and the analyses of finds we can propose a more synthetic view with a more reliable chronology. The abandonment of so much of the majority of the towns of Roman Gaul must indicate major changes, including progressive depopulation, loss of a range of economic and commercial activities, apparent impoverishment of what remained of the urban populations. It was noted above that this must raise important questions about what had become of the municipal aristocracies which had so long been controlling bodies of the towns and their territories, provided the magistrates and councils, and through their euergetism funded the great projects of public construction.

Walls and the urban fabric

58For most of the towns to the north of the Loire the “long third century” came to an end by and large in the end of that century or in the first half of the fourth century with the construction of the new urban defences. These marked the change to a different physical and ideological form of urbanism from that of a century or more earlier, as has been discussed above. The town now revolved around a small, heavily fortified kernel, whose walls and ditches and the glacis beyond them distanced them from the former urban area which lay around them. The reuse at most of them of stonework from earlier public buildings and of the tombstones and of the monumental tombs of the former leading families of the town again signified the break with the earlier towns. As noted above, what went on inside these fortifications remains very poorly understood; were they still essentially civilian centres, if much diminished, or does the occasional use of the word castrum suggest something more militarised? The archaeological research to be carried out in these areas will be as crucial as it will be difficult to find opportunities for. Equally, opportunities to open windows into what had once been areas within the street grid of the town of the Principate but had now become extra muros will be as precious to augment our knowledge and understanding of who, if anyone, was living in these zones and what they were doing in them.

59To the south of the Loire, with some exceptions (Bordeaux, Bourges, Périgueux, Saintes), the “long third century” rolled on through the “long fourth century” and thus to the early fifth, when in both southeastern and southwestern Gaul urban defences became increasingly widespread. But this leaves a period of some two hundred years of development at these places: what form/s did this development take? It has been clear since at least the publication of the 1996 volume on Le iiie siècle en Gaule narbonnaise (Fiches ed. 1996) that a process of abandonment of peripheral areas at many towns started from the end of the second century and developed into the third. How far this process continued and whether it achieved an equilibrium at some point is yet to be determined. It is also clear that by the first half of the fifth century when defences start to be built there was a range of responses to the previous two centuries of urban change.

60The construction of urban fortifications marks a milestone in our perception of urban development in late-antique Gaul. The conventional view for a long time was that the next significant horizon was the Christianisation of urban space by the creation within the walls of the episcopal church followed by the erection outside the walls of the funerary basilicas and the foci of activity that they represented. But again the contributions to this volume and work at other towns has shown that this is to risk over-compressing what was in fact a long-drawn-out and complex process of the installation of funerary basilicas from the fifth, but more especially through the sixth and seventh centuries.

Christianisation and chronology

61The widespread construction of episcopal basilicas and their ancillary structures such as baptisteries and residences seems on the available archaeological and textual evidence to be a phenomenon getting under way from the late fourth century, with a few exceptional earlier instances such as the imperial double basilica at Trèves/Trier (Guyon 2006). By and large this appears to be true both to north and south of the Loire (Guyon, Heijmans ed. 2006; Gaillard 2019). The known examples of such churches lay within the defences (if these existed), such as the case study of Geneva (Bonnet 1993). The example of Auxerre is worth mentioning. Here, at the end of the fourth or beginning of the fifth century, Bishop Amator was only able to build a basilica of an appropriate size intra urbis moenia (within the walls), as indicated in the Vita Sancti Amatoris, thanks to the donation of a house by a local notable, Rupilius (Stephanus Africanus, Vita s. Amatoris): does this imply that the preceding ecclesiam… angustiorem lay outside the walls? It also shows that the local aristocrat Rupilius owned property intra muros. By contrast the textual and archaeological evidence for the construction of extra-mural church buildings shows this to have been extended over a long time-span, with a few martyria and memoria churches apparently dating to the later fourth or fifth centuries, but with many others being newly built down into the sixth or seventh centuries, and indeed later. The evidence for this was authoritatively collected and laid out by the team responsible for the Topographie chrétienne des cités de la Gaule (Gauthier 2016). This leaves the question of what else, other than churches, was going on at the towns of Gaul in the fifth century, the time of the military and political collapse of the imperial authorities and the gradual creation of the successor kingdoms?

62The questions of the changes in urban form and function over a period of two hundred years and more must be a major focus of archaeological and historical research in the decades to come in order to try to fill the voids in our knowledge and understanding and thus to rewrite the urban history of Gaul/France at this period.

Burials

63One of the major evidence types in the archaeology of the towns of late-antique Gaul has always been burials, and the time is now ripe to exploit this very considerable resource in new ways. Both the textual and the archaeological evidence have laid great stress on the cemeteries whose development preceded the construction of the extra-mural funerary basilicas, the basilicas themselves and the relics they housed then becoming the focus for further burials down into the middle ages and into the modern period. There are though some approaches which derive from more general approaches to funerary archaeology that might profitably be applied in the future such as ancient DNA or stable isotopes to help understand the origins of those buried in urban burial grounds. Here we shall stay with questions of urban topography and how burial location was de- and re-constructed.

64The first is the question of burial location, especially of organised burial grounds. In most Gallo-Roman towns, necropolises and isolated burial sites were located outside the town walls or on the outskirts of the urban area during the High Empire, as they were during late antiquity, with a few rare exceptions, such as Fréjus, where a few tombs were reported inside the walls in the fourth century. Sometimes the locations in the Principate and late antiquity coincide because the burial of a martyr or other leader of a Christian community took place in an established necropolis of the High Empire. But other burial sites of the Late Empire were on new sites, sometimes overlying what had been part of the urban area defined by the street grid of the earlier town, thus apparently overturning the prohibition on mixing the zones of the living and the dead. But these areas of the earlier town had been abandoned, so presumably the prohibited zones had somehow been redefined. How did this come about? For Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges William Van Andringa proposes that the new cemetery adjoining the future Saint-Just was a formal foundation, which he convincingly attributes to ecclesiastical authority. Was there still a functioning civic authority at the towns which could also have enabled a formal and legal redefinition of the relationship between the spaces of the living and of the dead? Could such areas of burial arise “bottom up”, that is to say on the initiative of particular social groupings? Could they represent family burial plots in the vicinity of the dwellings of such a group? We are familiar with the idea of Christians creating cemeteries, though we might inquire whether specific Christian communities such as Arians as opposed to Nicaeans created rival Christian cemeteries, as they created rival church buildings (cf. the contribution on northern Italy) this perhaps especially in the areas controlled by the Arian Visigoths? But what of other groups such as continuing “pagan” devotees. Did they organise cemeteries according to traditional rites? One group that would very probably have organised their own necropoleis was Jews in towns where they were sufficiently numerous.

65Alongside these burial grounds, in most major towns there are also isolated graves or small groups of graves dating from between the third and seventh-eigth centuries, where available, located at varying distances from the town centres. The best-documented examples show a variety of scenarios, with a mixed population of indigenous and non-indigenous origin in Reims, and some individuals who died from wounds caused by sharp weapons in Le Mans and possibly in Metz. The same is true in Clermont-Ferrand (Wittmann 2021) and in many other cities. In Nîmes, another later example is provided by three isolated Muslim burials dating from between the end of the seventh and the end of the eigth centuries which have been uncovered (Gleize et al. 2016). A broader investigation into this topic is needed, but at this stage it should be noted that these graves are located away from religious buildings and large community burial grounds established during the High Empire or newly created during late antiquity. Should we see this as evidence of individuals being excluded because of their origins or beliefs, a sign of a rapprochement between the spaces occupied by the living and their burial sites, or an expression of freedom in the management of the dead before the establishment of parish cemeteries?

Developing new approaches

66It is clear that one emerging theme of the conference was the importance of developing scientific analyses in altering our perspectives on late-antique towns in Gaul and elsewhere. The conventional approach to such towns, clearly reflected in the bulk of this introduction, has focused on the built elements of these places, since these are what archaeologists have mostly encountered and which their excavation techniques are adapted to recognise. But there is a range of evidence types also yielded by such excavations many of which have long been exploited and others which are relatively new. These evidence types may be broadly characterised as the evidence of artefacts and paleo-environmental evidence.

67The deployment of material culture for the understanding of human activity is a central concern of archaeology. Many of the contributions to this volume make use particularly of ceramic evidence both for dating and especially for insights into local and long-distance commercial contacts. Several also record information on artisan activities at the towns, particularly the working of metals, evidence for which is relatively easily detected in excavations. But it should be remembered that other industries such as leather working and above all the production and processing of textiles may have been hugely important, though much less visible to the archaeologist.

68It is perhaps in the fields of paleo-environmental evidence types that studies to date have not only contributed much but are also showing how great the potential is for future exploitation. Perhaps even more numerous than artefactual material can be animal bone. Clearly such topics as species, age at death, butchery patterns have already yielded a great deal about subjects such as the uses of animals for raw materials and nutrition. But again it will be the comparison of urban with rural assemblages that will be able to tell us much about the distinctiveness of the urban bone spectrum and thus of the reasons for patterns of the urban consumption of animals. The contribution here about Metz shows these techniques to have continuing value with the identification near the amphitheatre of a mid-fifth-century bone group with a preponderance of hunted rather than domestic species, suggesting high-status occupation in the vicinity. To the conventional osteological techniques can now be added those such as ancient DNA and stable isotopes. Stable isotopes in particular may have much to teach us about the provenance of the animals consumed at urban sites and how this compares with non-urban sties. Were animals bred and consumed locally or could they be moved over long distances to supply urban consumers and markets, perhaps especially at the more important towns such as Arles or Bordeaux, Lyon or Trèves/Trier?

69Carpological studies have yet to be deployed to their full potential. The identification of cereal grains can inform us about changing preferences over time in the staple diet. Again, does this diet match that observable on non-urban sites or is the urban population distinctive in its consumption patterns? And not just cereals but vegetables, and pulses together with fruits and nuts. Given the suggestions outlined above of how areas around the fortifications, often characterised by “dark earths” may in fact represent the locations of gardens, potagers, orchards, fields, meadows or pastures, can these products be tied back to production in the immediate environs of the kernel of the city, or were they brought in from further afield?

70The possibilities and questions very briefly in this final section can only be a series of tasks for research on the time-scale of decades. They also seek to emancipate the study of late-antique towns in Gaul from the dead hand of fortification and Christianisation.

*

* *

71The study of the late-antique towns of Gaul through the twentieth century was largely focused on questions about walls and churches. When and why were towns fortified? Why did these wall circuits enclose such a tiny fraction of the former inhabited area? Who lived in these places and what did they do? Were these places the urban bridge between the towns earlier in the Roman period and the developing towns of the early Middle Ages, glimpsed in the pages of Gregory of Tours and other writers? Gregory’s towns were Christian. When and how did this Christianisation come about and what were the roles played in this by the construction of episcopal churches and complexes within the walls and the funerary basilicas and monasteries outside the walls? All these remain valid questions, and not only because they have yet to be resolved; walls and churches were always the most labour-intensive and imposing monuments of the late-antique townscape.

72But one of the major themes to emerge from the contributions to this volume is a focus on the processes of fortification. It is clear that there was a range of changes in the half-millennium between 200 and 700, which were not all part of a single process. Broadly, one may identify a series of factors contributing to the decentring and re-centring of the town, physically and ideologically: the slowing then the reversal of the phase of urban expansion; the disuse of many of the monuments expressive of the Greco-Roman polis-model; the contraction of occupation; the construction of fortifications, in the north then the south of Gaul; the rise of Christianity both as a religion and as the dominant urban institution; the reconfiguration of religious space and observance by the construction of episcopal churches intra muros and of funerary basilicas extra muros. Each of these needs to be studied in its own terms, not as part of some preconceived and thus teleological narrative of urban change.

73On a territorial level, broadening the perspective, we can also see that from the fifth century onwards, and especially from the sixth century onwards, new episcopal cities emerged at the expense of certain older cities and also built walls around themselves, or were even established according to a multipolar pattern, as in the case of Viviers (Ardèche) with its two fortified centres on either side of the Rhône. At the same time, on the initiative of local elites—from the former major towns?—new, equally fortified towns and elite residences developed on high ground, on former pre-Roman sites or new locations. These castra, castella and oppida, as well as these new episcopal towns, can be observed particularly—but this is the current state of research—in Mediterranean Gaul, Aquitaine, Auvergne, Burgundy and the Jura Arc. They form an intermediate network that complements the largely unchanged network of Roman-era city centres, further highlighting the urban changes that characterised the end of antiquity (Kasprzyk, Monteil ed. 2017; Schneider 2024).

74Much of this re-evaluation of processes and chronologies has been driven by archaeology. This discipline will continue to be the main driver of new perspectives on the towns of late-antique Gaul. At one level this will be simply because archaeology is continuing and will continue to yield substantial amounts of new evidence, in a way texts are much less likely to do. At another level it is because the range of techniques available to the archaeologist and thus the questions that can be posed and responded to continues to expand.

75The study of the late-antique towns in Gaul (and elsewhere) stands on a threshold. Like all thresholds this is a point of transition from one state of being to another. In this case we might say that the threshold lies at the level that divides the foundations and substructures of the subject from the superstructure, mostly yet to be built. It is only thanks to the devoted labours of generations of historians and archaeologists that the subject has firm and dependable foundations; if we and our successors in the venture can make our modest contribution it is only because of them. The seventeenth-century English natural scientist Isaac Newton wrote in a letter “If I can see further, it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants” (Letter to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1675).

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Bibliographie

Pour consulter la liste des sigles et acronymes, cliquer ici.

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Notes

1 To illustrate the cover of this volume we have chosen an engraving of the city of Bordeaux itself, dating from 1575, which mixes, as was the case with cities of late Antiquity, remains of structures inherited from the Early Empire and newly-constructed buildings both outside and inside an urban wall circuit.

2 This text has benefited from corrections and pertinent suggestions from our colleagues Didier Bayard and Laurent Schneider, whom we warmly thank.

3 All dates indicated below are expressed in AD, unless specifically mentioned

4 A toponym in bold signifies one of the towns specifically discussed in the papers in this volume, either on an individual town or on the towns of a region.

5 The word castrum, which has entered the everyday language of archaeologists, was not commonly used in the sense of a fortified town until the writings of Gregory of Tours in the second half of the sixth century. It was then synonymous with castellum and referred only to settlements that were not administrative centres (Hervé 2012). These parameters led us to use it in the articles in this book only in quotation marks and in normal type.

6 For the wider hydrological impacts of Nîmes, see Veyrac 2006, chap. IX, fig. 224.

7 For Lugdunensis, see Bossard 2024.

8 We are grateful to Sasha Kacki to have drawn our attention to this case.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Fig. 1 – Map of the dioceses and provinces of Gaul at the end of the fourth century AD, showing the main cities
Légende Those marked in red are the subject of a case study in this issue of Gallia.
Crédits DAO : M. Monteil (Nantes Université).
URL http://journals.openedition.org/gallia/docannexe/image/9824/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 847k
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Simon Esmonde Cleary, Vanessa Elizagoyen, Michel Kasprzyk et Martial Monteil, « Urbs ipse moenia (non) sunt
Decentering and deconstructing the city of Late Antiquity in Gaul »
Gallia [En ligne], 82 | 2025, mis en ligne le 08 janvier 2026, consulté le 16 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/gallia/9824 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15h4q

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Auteurs

Simon Esmonde Cleary

Department of Classics, Ancien History and Archaeology, University of Birmingham; Birmingham B 15 2TT

Vanessa Elizagoyen

Inrap; UMR 5607 – Institut de recherche sur l’Antiquité et le Moyen Âge (Ausonius); 140 avenue du Maréchal-Leclerc, F-33323 Bègles Cedex

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Michel Kasprzyk

Inrap; UMR 6298 – Archéologie, Terre, Histoire et Sociétés (Artehis); Centre archéologique Inrap, 5 rue Ferdinand-Holweck, CS 16521, F-21065 Dijon Cedex

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Martial Monteil

Nantes Université; UMR 6566 – CReAAH-LARA ; UFR Histoire, Histoire de l’art et Archéologie, Bâtiment Tertre, Chemin de la Censive du Tertre, BP 81227, F-44312 Nantes Cedex 3

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