IMPERIUM ROMANUM

Provinces · The later eastern provinces

LE-40 Armenia Secunda

The later Balkan provincial landscape. Dacia south of the Danube, the two Epiri…
The later Balkan provincial landscape. Dacia south of the Danube, the two Epiri, Thessaly, Macedonia, Achaia, and the Thracian districts illustrate the replacement of large commands by smaller jurisdictions. The river network helps relate frontier districts to the Adriatic, Aegean, and imperial straits.

Melitene’s military history and position on eastern routes gave the province a distinctive focus. Agriculture, towns, roads, river crossings, and the demands of frontier supply linked its civil society to Roman eastern strategy. Its communities had cultural connections extending beyond the political boundary.

The province’s numbered name must be distinguished from Justinian’s later rearrangements of the Armenian system. Christian institutions and regional elites operated within changing civil and military relationships. Persian warfare and later seventh-century transformation altered the frontier, but did not make this jurisdiction identical with the highland kingdom annexed briefly under Trajan.