Roads and Commercial Networks in Thrace

Late Antique and Byzantine Thrace was crisscrossed by a dense road network, with numerous communication routes connecting the individual market centers between the River Danube in the north and the Aegean Sea or the Sea of Marmara in the south. These roads often consisted of several routes running parallel to each other at a certain distance to facilitate the supply of military units and larger travel groups. In this way, even smaller market towns on secondary roads gained a certain importance as regional communication centers. The paper will present several examples from the economically important Eastern Thrace, the immediate hinterland of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople.