Land and Power in the Later Roman World

The conference aims to re-examine the links between land and power in the late Roman world in their legal, socio-economic and material dimensions. By bringing together scholars from different disciplines and academic traditions, the event will survey recent academic developments and hope to establish a comprehensive, interdisciplinary framework for understanding land ownership in the period between 300 and 600 CE.

Conference Programme

Monday, 29 June 2026 – Schloss Hohentübingen, Fürstenzimmer

• 9:00-9:30 Welcome
• 9:30-9:45 Opening Remarks

Session I: Political economies of landownership

• 9:45-10:30 Alberto Dalla Rosa — Land, status and loyalty: the politics of land grants to individuals from Augustus to the Severans.
• 10:30–11:15 John Weisweiler — Imperial fiscality and senatorial property in the fourth century.
• 11:15-11:45 Coffee Break
• 11:45–12:30 Sophie Kovarik — Arsinocrats: aristocratic landownership in late antique Fayyum.
• 12:30–13:15 Damián Fernandez — Land and power in post–imperial Hispania: royal gifts and the politics of ownership.
• 13:15–14:45 Lunch

Session II: Ecclesiastical economies

• 14:45–15:30 Simona Tarozzi — Imperial law and ecclesiastical administration in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages: land management in Ravenna and the prefecture of Gallia (4th – 8th centuries).
• 15:30–16:15 Francesco Verrico — Emphyteusis on Church lands: how ecclesiastical practice (re)shaped a legal institution.
• 16:15–16:45 Coffee Break
• 16:45–17:30 Roy Flechner — Distributive justice on the sixth–century Sicilian papal patrimony.
• 17:30–18:15 Paulo Pachá — Land, power and labor: property and asymmetrical dependence in Visigothic Iberia.
• 19:30 Conference dinner

Tuesday, 30 June 2026 – Schloss Hohentübingen, Fürstenzimmer

Session III: The dynamics of conflict

• 09:00–09:45 Pierfrancesco Porena — Land and power: the rise and fall of the Ostrogoths in Italy.
• 09:45–10:30 Ian Bonze — The economy of power: debt and land disputes in Late Antiquity.
• 10:30–11:00 Coffee Break
• 11:00–11:45 Giordana Franceschini — Governing land through conflict: invasio and élite competition in the later Roman World (4th–6th c.).
• 11:45–12:30 Konstantin Schönleber — In fraudem legum adversariorumque terrorem. The (ab)use of social status in late Roman land litigation.
• 12:30–14:00 Lunch

Session IV: Small-world economies

• 14:00–14:45 Paolo Tedesco — Living at the margins: afterthoughts on African peasants in an age of extremes, 300–900 CE.
• 14:45–15:30 Eugenia Vitello — Fields for shepherds? Socioeconomic leverage of herdsmen in land disputes within late antique Anatolia.
• 15:30–16:00 Coffee Break
• 16:00–16:45 James Burns — Small fields and status in late antique Gaul: towards the slaves’ economy.
• 16:45–17:30 Kevin Hoogeveen — The fragile power of Byzantine landowners: foregrounding the influence of rural Egyptians in the fifth to seventh centuries AD.

Keynote in combination with the Kolloquium des Seminars für Alte Geschichte

• 18:00-19:30 Paul du Plessis – Land and imperial rhetoric in the Theodosian Code.
• 20:00 Conference dinner

Wednesday, 1 July 2026 – Schloss Hohentübingen, Fürstenzimmer

Session V: Notions of property and their social context

• 09:00–09:45 Becca Grose — Co–owning land in the late Roman West: a social and political perspective, 300–600 AD.
• 09:45–10:30 Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner — Notions of property and the political economy of the later empire.
• 10:30–11:00 Coffee Break
• 11:00–11:45 Carlos Machado — Defining property from the ground up: Italy, 300–600.
• 11:45–12:30 Ralph Mathisen — Landholding and power on the ground: social network analysis and the Tablettes Albertini.
• 12:30–13:00 Concluding Remarks

The papers presented at the conference will be considered for inclusion in an edited volume that aims to map the state of the art in this field.

The conference language will be English.

Enquiries

For all enquiries and further information, please contact Dr Giordana Franceschini, giordana.franceschini@histsem.uni-tuebingen.de.