Macro-economy, Micro-ecology, and the Fate of Urbanized Landscape in Late Antique and Early Byzantine Crete

In the case of the Cretan Late Antique/Early Byzantine landscape, the dichotomy between change and resilience could be easily defined in terms of changing relationships between long-term local micro-ecology and medium-term Mediterranean macro-economy. The former is to be understood as a long-lasting relationship between a single city and its surrounding territory (i.e., a factor of resilience); the latter as the sum of the changing relationships between the same city and the wide variety of economic, political, administrative, and military systems that connected cities, provinces, and regions across the Mediterranean. The specific case of Crete is of great interest in this respect, because a major event in local history—the huge earthquake of A.D. 365—chronologically coincides with the shifting of many macro-economies from a Rome-centered system to a Constantinople-centered system. The “rebirth” of Cretan cities after the devastating earthquake—mainly the provincial capital, Gortyn, but also in other case studies—appears to be directly related to the role that the Byzantine imperial administration assigned to Crete as a substantial component of the ‘island backbone’ of the Mediterranean. This new, and closer, macro-economic relationship between Crete and the Early Byzantine empire made the island and its cities very sensitive to the changes in the political and economic scenario. The vain economic effort made by the Empire to regain the West, and the shifting of the imperial center of gravity toward the East after the Arab conquests, created the conditions for a deep change in the local micro-ecology, determining the decline of cities and the creation of a new “city-less” Cretan landscape.