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The Via Egnatia was a Roman road that stretched from the Albanian port of Durres on the Adriatic coast to Istanbul. It carried commercial and military traffic across the Balkans and through Greece and Turkey, sustaining the wealth of a great empire.

For nearly a thousand years, the Romans ruled an empire the like of which the world had never seen before, and has not seen since. Their rise to power began at the beginning of the fifth century BC when, as a republic, they elected their first ruling consuls. It ended with the sack of Rome, by then just another city in only half the empire, by the Goths in 410 AD. At its height, after the conquest of Britain in the first century AD, the empire covered all of North Africa, the Middle East, Asia Minor, the Balkans and most of Western Europe including Spain, France, the German lands and Italy. But its size, though vast, was not the most impressive thing about it. Its extraordinary achievement – one that has never been equalled in the history of the world – was the degree of organisation and control that it brought and then maintained to the disparate territories under its authority. When St Paul, a converted Jew from the town of Tarsus in Anatolia (in what is now eastern Turkey), fell foul of the law for his preaching about Christianity, he could claim that he was a Roman citizen – ‘civis Romanus sum’ – and therefore be sent to Rome for trial. Whether patrolling the bleak landscape on the border between occupied Britain and Pictish Scotland, or marching through the desert in the conquered provinces of North Africa, a Roman lived under the same laws and was entitled to the same treatment.

Legal and administrative systems were not the only things that bound together the peoples whom the Romans ruled. They were also connected by a great road network that ran throughout the empire. Aristides of Smyrna, an orator living in the second century AD, enjoyed flattering his Roman masters by proclaiming: ‘You have merged all nations into one family.’ He went on: ‘You have measured the earth, bridged the rivers and made roads through the mountains.’ For a man like Aristides, an educated Greek who travelled all over the empire, roads were one of the most obvious manifestations of Roman power and wealth. Journeys across huge territories were comparatively easy and helped to create a secure, prosperous environment.

The Roman Empire’s extraordinary achievement was the degree of control it brought to territories under its authority.

The Roman road system began with the Via Appia which was built in the fourth century BC, when Rome was still a republic. It was named, as were most roads, after the official who ordered its construction and, by the middle of the second century BC, had reached what is now the port of Brindisi on Italy’s Adriatic coast. At this point in time Roman expansion was confined to land within the Italian peninsula, although the republic subsequently grew into an international power following the defeat of the Greek king, Pyrrhus, whose armies invaded southern Italy in 280 BC. In the years that followed, the Romans pushed out beyond the boundaries of Italy itself, conquering all of Greece, the Balkans and North Africa. With these victories came the need for new roads.

The Via Egnatia picked up on the other side of the Adriatic from where the Via Appia ended. Starting on the Albanian coast it followed the line of the River Shkumbin and went over the mountains of Candava towards Lake Ohrid. It then dropped south, going through several mountain passes until it reached the Aegean Sea at Thessalonica in Greece. From there it went through the port of Kavala, today the second largest city in northern Greece, crossed into Turkey at Ipsala before travelling the last 160 miles into Istanbul, then called Byzantium and later Constantinople. It was a great Balkan highway 700 miles long, designed when it was built to help bring control to Rome’s new conquests across the sea from its eastern shore, but eventually becoming the essential link between its western and eastern capitals. It was about twenty feet wide and paved with big stone slabs or packed hard sand. From the time when the Romans first gained power over the peoples of the Balkans and Asia Minor, to the moment, 500 years later, when their empire began to collapse, the Via Egnatia was one of the principal methods by which control was maintained and wealth distributed throughout this huge region.

The Roman road network not only carried troops and supplies but imperial messengers as well. The centre of the empire kept in touch with its provinces through the cursus publicus, the postal system, which could travel at very high speeds thanks to the frequent resting places where riders could change horses or repair their vehicles. The poet Ovid, who lived in Rome for about sixty years just after the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, said he received a letter from Brindisi in nine days – presuming that the post did not travel at night, an impressive average speed of thirty-six and a half miles per day. At the end of the eighteenth century, before mail coaches were introduced into Britain, the post from London to Bath could take nearly forty hours or more to reach its destination. Even with an improved road system a coach and horses could only manage an average speed of ten miles an hour by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837.

The Roman world was immensely rich in resources. Tin from Britain, silver from Spain, wheat from North Africa, and fruit from the Middle East, all found their way into Roman homes. Craftsmen who made clothes out of silk imported from China or glass objects created from the high-quality sand of the eastern Mediterranean could find markets for their goods in places far away from where they worked. Trade moved easily between one place and the next – and sometimes the merchants went with it, moving their places of business from one city, or one region, to another. A Roman altar discovered in Bordeaux in 1921 was found to contain an inscription from a wealthy merchant with positions in the cities of both York and Lincoln who thanked the ‘protecting goddess of Bordeaux’ for allowing him to complete his journey to her city. He might have been a trader selling French wine to the Roman legions stationed in Britain: the Romans were as familiar as we are with the free movement of goods across provincial boundaries. Today in Britain, we have grown used to enjoying the fruits of the world, but the generation that lived during and immediately after the Second World War did not drink much wine and rarely ate exotic fruits or other food from Europe and beyond. Now these things are part of the nation’s everyday diet: we have become used to peace and plenty. In this we are not unlike the people who lived in the Roman Empire as it reached the height of its power. Its extraordinary cohesion was reinforced by language and law and oiled by the benefits of trade. The Roman road – straight, ruthless and capable of cutting through any obstacle in its path – was the physical embodiment of the empire’s wealth and success.

The Via Egnatia survived the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West to remain an important highway for centuries afterwards. Inevitably it fell into disrepair. It is remarkable how the great buildings of Rome were allowed to decay: succeeding generations preferred to destroy or ignore what had been built, rather than make use of their remarkable architectural inheritance. The Romans were enthusiastic builders. Great cities as far apart as York, Lyon or Carthage (today part of Tunis), became the provincial capitals of the empire, each demonstrating the Roman taste for fortification and domestic architecture. The same types of buildings were reproduced everywhere, a coherent manifestation of the imperial presence. We can still see ruined examples of them all over Europe, beautifully constructed aqueducts, gates, theatres and villas that remind us of the extent of Roman power. The modern world has been brought up to believe in the concept of the nation state. We tend to talk about architectural style in terms of its country of origin – French, German, English and so on. When the Romans were the rulers of Europe it was not like that at all. Whoever you were, Berber, Celt or Slav, you were the citizen of a Roman province and subject to the tastes and disciplines of your Roman masters. Perhaps it was this that ensured their eventual destruction. Their beauty and usefulness was not enough to assuage the brutal forces of revenge. The historian Procopius, writing during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the sixth century AD, reported that: ‘The barbarians … destroyed all the cities which they captured so completely that nothing has been left to my time to know them by – unless it might be one tower or one gate or some such thing that chanced to remain.’ The glories of Rome were extinguished with remarkable speed.

The Via Egnatia was the physical embodiment of the empire’s wealth and success.

It was Justinian who undertook repairs to the Via Egnatia. He had ambitions to restore the power of the old empire and, with his general Belisarius, succeeded in briefly recapturing Rome itself. His was a remarkable period of power. He was from peasant stock and his wife, Theodora, one of history’s more colourful consorts, was described famously in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon as: ‘The prostitute who, in the presence of innumerable spectators, had polluted the theatre of Constantinople was adored as a Queen in the same city, by grave magistrates, orthodox bishops, victorious generals, and captive monarchs.’ In the end, Justinian’s legacy was not a new Roman empire, but a codification of Roman law that set out the basis for civil law still in use in many places today. He also rebuilt Constantinople, which he hoped to restore to the glory it had enjoyed under its founder, the Emperor Constantine, 200 years earlier. Beyond this, however, the architecture of ancient Rome continued to decay.

Despite the collapse of its infrastructure, the route of the Via Egnatia maintained its importance. At the end of the eleventh century, in 1081, the Byzantine Empire nearly collapsed after Norman invaders, having conquered southern Italy and Sicily, landed at Durres intent on breaking into Byzantium through its western gateway. The Emperor gathered an army and came down the Via Egnatia to confront the Normans who appeared to be isolated and disheartened after their invasion fleet had been defeated by the Empire’s allies, the Venetians. But the Norman commander, Robert Guiscard, was a resourceful and brilliant soldier. Displaying the same sort military bravado that had seen the island of Britain fall to Norman control at Hastings less than twenty years earlier, he routed the imperial army. Its defeat did not bring about the fall of the Byzantine Empire, but the Via Egnatia had now become a much more open road than before. Overland trade between Constantinople and the rest of the Byzantine Empire had always travelled along it. Following the battle of Durres, or Durrazzo to give it its Italian name, it also became the chosen route for the armies of the Crusades as they made their way out of Europe into Asia Minor. The first Crusade was launched fifteen years after the battle, in 1095.

Timeline of Roman History

c.753 BC	Foundation of Rome according to the legend of Romulus and Remus: a series of hill-top settlements established near the Tiber become the city of Rome.
616–510 BC	REGAL PERIOD: Rome ruled by the Etruscans, who dominated northern city-states. Tarquinius Priscinus was the first King of Rome.
510 BC	Expulsion of the last Etruscan King, ‘Tarquin the Proud’, from Rome.
510–31 BC	REPUBLICAN PERIOD.
451 BC	Rome ruled by a council of ten citizens chosen from the Senate. Duodecim Tabulae, the Twelve Tables, is the earliest code of Roman law outlining patrician and plebeian rights.
340–338 BC	Final Latin War, fought by Latin league. Rome emerged victorious with control of the Latium region.
264–241 BC	First Punic War against the Carthaginians. Sicily became Rome’s first overseas province.
218–202 BC	Second Punic War; Scipio Africanus ‘the Roman Hannibal’ defeated Hannibal who had invaded Italy. He reintroduced ‘decimation’ – the killing of every tenth soldier – to enforce discipline.
214–148 BC	First, Second, Third and Fourth Macedonian Wars.
174 BC	Building of the Circus Maximus, the venue for lavish games.
149 BC	Publication of Marcus Porcius Cato’s Origines, the first prose history to be written in Latin.
149–146 BC	Third Punic War. Carthage was destroyed and Rome emerged as the dominant Mediterranean power.
73–71 BC	Revolt of Spartacus.
60 BC	First Triumvirate: Julius Caesar, Pompeius Magnus and Licinius Crassus.
55 BC	Julius Caesar’s first expeditions to Britain.
49–30 BC	Nineteen years of civil war and division lead to the destruction of the Republic.
44 BC	Caesar declared dictator for life and assassinated. ‘Kai su, o teknon?’ translated as ‘Even you lad?’) are the famous final words Caesar is supposed to have spoken to his assassin Brutus.
30 BC	Antony and Cleopatra committed suicide after their defeat by Octavian at the Battle of Actium.
27 BC	Beginning of the Roman Empire. Octavian was given the title of Augustus, First Emperor of Rome; a period of peace and stability followed. Literary figures such as Virgil, Horace, Ovid and the historian Livy, rose to prominence.
41–54 AD	Reign of Emperor Claudius; parts of Britain were conquered.
60–61 AD	Revolt of Boudicca, Queen of Iceni.
64 AD	Fire of Rome; first persecution of Christians.
98–117 AD	Reign of Emperor Trajan, marking the Empire’s high point of territorial expansion and Roman prosperity.
117–138 AD	Reign of Emperor Hadrian. Building of seventy-three-mile long defensive ‘Hadrian’s Wall’ in Britain.
212 AD	Citizenship granted to all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire.
235–284 AD	Empire weakened by a series of crises brought about by weak Emperors, religious conflict and barbarian invasion.
293 AD	Tetrarchy established. Empire divided into Eastern and Western halves. Milan replaced Rome as capital of the Western Empire.
313 AD	Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor, issued the Edict of Milan granting religious toleration throughout the Empire.
324 AD	Constantine became sole Emperor and Constantinople the Empire’s new capital city; St Sophia became its first church in 360 AD.
325 AD	First Council of Nicaea. The first assembly of the Christian Church to define Christian doctrine.
410 AD	Rome sacked by Alaric and the Visigoths.

The Roman road was straight, ruthless and capable of cutting through any obstacle in its path.

The Via Egnatia retains its allure as a symbol of prosperity and hope even today. The Via Egnatia Foundation was set up recently with the mission ‘to inspire this old road with new life’ and to stimulate cultural and economic interest in the region by bringing together the different communities through which the road passes. The road, that was once used by ‘by soldiers and later by crusaders, preachers, bandits, merchants and peasant caravans loaded with skins, wines, wood and sulphur’, served ‘economic and social functions for more than two millennia’.

So this great road is still with us. In the middle of the busy Greek city of Thessalonica the ruined Arch of Galerius, built at the end of the third century AD, stands across its route. Surrounded by cars, shops and the rest of the paraphernalia of modern city life it is a permanent reminder of an ancient empire and one of the great highways that carried its wealth.