Romaness and its Transformations ca. 300–800 CE

The Roman World was not a homogeneous zone of Romanness, although it tended to present itself that way. It was a broad tapestry of differing identities, often in multiple layers, that was held together by a central claim to control and by administrative and military structures that allowed to incorporate pre-existing regional, ethnic and civic identities and to transform them over time.

When the Western Roman empire eroded in the 5th–7th centuries, new identities complemented the existing Roman and provincial identities in a dynamic process in which newly-defined peoples and polities began to emerge. I aim at selecting specific case studies to better understand these processes, their preconditions and the conflicts caused by them.