Geography and economy of the imperial properties in the Roman World (from Augustus to Diocletian).

Project Information

PATRIMONIVM

Grant agreement ID: 716375

DOI

10.3030/716375

Project closed

EC signature date 14 December 2016

Start date 1 March 2017

End date 30 June 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 493 478,75

EU contribution

€ 1 493 478,75

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE BORDEAUX MONTAIGNE
France

Periodic Reporting for period 5 - PATRIMONIVM (Geography and economy of the imperial properties in the Roman World (from Augustus to Diocletian).)

Reporting period: 2023-03-01 to 2024-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The properties of the Roman emperors were extended throughout Italy and the provinces and included residences, cultivated land, pastureland, woods, mines, quarries, luxury items and slaves. All this constituted the imperial patrimony (patrimonium Caesaris), which originated from the private fortune of Augustus and gradually grew through inheritances from relatives, friends and freedmen, acquisitions of invalid testamentary dispositions of Roman citizens (bona caduca) and confiscations from people convicted to capital punishment. This immense richness played a central role in Augustus’ raise to power during the civil wars (43–30 BC) and remained a key element for the maintenance of the position of supreme power, since the emperor could use it to raise armies and retain their loyalty, to confer social status to individuals or to perform benefactions in favour of communities or veterans.
The patrimonium Caesaris was technically a private property since it belonged to a natural person, but it was used for public purposes. It could receive public revenues (like the estates of people condemned to the capital punishment) and was not transmitted according to the usual principles of Roman civil law, since it did not go to the natural heir, but to the successor on the throne.
In addition to their significance for the foundation of the emperor’s social and political pre-eminence, the imperial properties, because of their size, had an undeniable economic weight. At local level, they could have a powerful impact on the regions where they were particularly extended. Vast agglomerations of estates, mining and quarrying areas can be seen as productive districts, attracting large numbers of seasonal workers and tradesmen and around which a variety of economic transactions took place. Imperial estates contributed to the grain supply of the city of Rome and of the army, while various provincial mines in the imperial ownership largely provided for the needs in iron, lead and precious metals.
The patrimonium Caesaris has rarely been studied in all its complexity, and the ERC project PATRIMONIVM intend to propose the first comprehensive overview of the geography and the economy of the imperial properties in the Roman world in more than a century. A detailed work on the sources is necessary to finally have a clearer picture of the geography of the imperial properties throughout the empire.
The project aims to reconstruct the geographical distribution of the properties after reviewing all available documentation. The distribution needs to studied taking into consideration the representativity of our data in order to understand where the presence of imperial estates is over- or under-estimated. The question of how estates were acquired is central for our understanding of the reason behind the permanent inclusion of a property into the patrimonium. The project wants therefore to understand what kind of landowner the emperor was and to see how political and economic considerations influence the patrimonial strategies of the Roman emperors.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During their regular meetings, the PI and the research team worked together to review the documentation concerning the geographic distribution, the administration and the exploitation of imperial properties in all provinces of the Roman empire. A wide-ranging set of documents has been considered and many issues tackled, form the definition of the correct methods for the identification of imperial domains, to the modalities of acquisition and alienation, to the economic value of each property in relation to the main consumption centres. The reinterpretation of a number of documents has also allowed the research team to revise certain commonly held ideas on the early administrative structures of the properties. A tendency toward a redistribution instead of the systematic acquisition of confiscated properties has also been clearly highlighted, contrary to what is generally believed.
This work on the sources has also enriched the digital database of the project, which contains a digital edition of all written testimonies and an historical atlas of the properties. The database has for now remained an internal working tool, but it will be soon open to the general public.
Five thematic workshop have explored a series of fundamental issues and documentary dossiers concerning the imperial properties. A conference has been dedicated to digital humanities and how the work conducted by the research team in this scientific domain can connect to other similar digital initiatives around the world. An international conference was dedicated to the important figure of imperial procurators, the main administrators of imperial domains. A second international conference was dedicated to the patrimonium under Augustus and on how its formation has to be connected with the rest of his political actions in the later part of his reign.
The output of the project consists in 36 publications of different type (books, chapters in books, journal articles, habilitation theses) and almost 50 dissemination activities (conferences, workshops, videos, radio interviews etc) that helped to establish the project’s reputation at international level.
The Atlas patrimonii Caesaris, the digital atlas of the Roman imperial properties, gives access to almost 5000 documents records, 4400 person records and 4700 location records. It is an extremely rich working tool and the exploitation of all the data is far from over. The database has been built with PATRIMONIVM_Editor, a digital research environment for historians that has been conceived in a modular and reusable way. The software is currently used by several other research projects in France.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The biggest achievement of the project is that it shows for the first time that, contrary to what was generally believed, we can identify a clear pattern in how imperial properties spread throughout the empire. We can finally point out to regions where successive emperors constantly preferred to sell all properties that they might have inherited or confiscated. In other regions, acquisitions were steady and continuous. Differences in behaviour can be explained by political reason (importance for the supply of Rome, desire to monopolize some prestigious assets) or by the fact that the imperial administration could extract surplus from those regions by other means (taxation of cities). This results have been possible because the project did not focus only on explaining what we find, but also on how to interpret the lack of evidence.
The correlation between the spread of imperial properties and the degree of urbanization of a certain region has been verified for Asia Minor, Africa and parts of Italy. This result came somewhat unexpected, since this relation did not figure among the working hypotheses presented in the project proposal.
As planned in the proposal, the project has also allowed to reconsider some fondamental questions about the juridical nature of the patrimonium Caesaris and it relation to the other branches of the imperial financial administration. The private nature of the patrimonium is clear for the whole period under consideration (it was never transformed in a "crown estate"). This fact is linked to the fact that the emperor had to publicly show that he used his own money for the benefit of the people of Rome.

Logo of the project