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Abstract

This study interrogates how the Byzantine Empire understood and spatially organized its territorial holdings within Asia Minor between the seventh and eleventh centuries. The objective is to reveal the extent to which administrators understood and utilized geographical principles when addressing large-scale governance challenges.

Through the use of geographic information systems (GIS) and quantitative analysis, the study address questions regarding how Byzantine administrators conceptualized the territorial extent of the empire and used factors such as land usage, demographics, and communication constraints to make administrative decisions.

Methodologically, this objective is pursued by investigating the spatial composition of the administrative divisions that defined the Byzantine Empire’s territories during this period: the strategides, the themes, and the ducates/katepanates that organized the minor themes. With the support of the extant historical record, there is enough information about the spatial composition of the boundaries, cities, and road networks of these administrative bodies to apply GIS principles and other analytical means to elucidate how these entities functioned. For a period marked by a paucity of extant documentation from the imperial bureaucracy in regards to census figures, land surveys, and itineraria, as well as little stated rationale behind territorial organization, such a study helps to fill an important lacuna in Byzantine administrative history.

Within this study is an expansive dataset that provides a resource for future research concerned with the administrative composition of the strategides, themes, and ducates/katepanates. The dataset entails the most detailed and accurate series of maps and tables of the following geographical features related to the strategides, themes, and ducates/katepanates:

  • The territorial boundaries of the strategides, themes, and ducates/katepanates
  • The locations of their capitals and the 386 principal Anatolian cities under their jurisdictions
  • The reconstruction of the more than 34,000 km Byzantine road system within the empire's eastern holdings
  • A network model grounded in geographical determinism that articulates how the themes and Constantinople connected
  • A list of seventy minor themes that allows the themes to be assessed collectively for the first time
  • A heuristic representation of the territorial extents of the minor themes

In addition, this study also shows the feasibility of implementing a series of quantitative tests that include: Alpha Indices, area comparisons, betweenness centralities, bivariate and multivariate correlations, Central Place Theory, centroids, clustering coefficients, degree distributions, demographic distributions, heatmaps, isochrone surveys, network connectivity, node-to-node distances, path lengths, satellite overlays, scale-free networks, spatial buffers, and Voronoi diagrams. None of these tests have been implemented previously into a study of the strategides and themes.

All of this information is accessible through a robust dataset that can be easily implemented into any future GIS based studies on the strategides, themes, and ducates/katepanates. Data collection is time consuming, so any subsequent GIS studies of the strategides, themes, and ducates/katepanates can use this information as a foundation to quickly implement tests on a variety of quantitative propositions.

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