Land and Loyalty: The Politics of Land in the Later Roman World (4th-6th c.)

01/01/2024 to 31/12/2026

The project analyses the role played by land grants in the re-configuration of Mediterranean societies between AD 300 and 600. It will examine the politics of land grants, the agents involved, the legal forms assumed, and the political contexts in which this practice took place; at the same time, it will chart the impact of land grants on local societies, investigating how these initiatives redefined social hierarchies and landscapes of property. To this end, the project will produce an online database collecting all the evidence and instances of land grants, which will serve as the base for a comprehensive reassessment of the wider implications of land for late antique society in a collective volume exploring fiscal regimes, legal frameworks, and processses of state building and a monograph that will for the first time systematically explore the phenomenon and its role in the making of the late antique world.