Frontiers and Border Controls in Northern Syria after the Roman Conquest of Antioch, ad 969– c. 1070

Despite a millennium of maintaining boundaries with other polities, the borders erected by the Roman Empire after antiquity remain understudied. This article looks at new borders and frontier zones established in the late tenth century and maintained through most of the eleventh around Antioch (ad 969–1084). In the years after the Roman reconquest of the city boundaries were set in the east with Aleppo, and on the coast and in the Orontes valley with the other new power in the region, the Fāṭimid Caliphate. Past scholarship has highlighted much exchange across boundaries, especially by learned men who passed through Antioch on their journeys between Constantinople, Cairo, Baghdad, and Black Mountain. Although their works rarely mention it, they crossed guarded political borders. This paper lays out the groundwork for what those borders were, how they varied during the century of Roman rule in Antioch, and how people experienced them.