From Urbs to Ecclesia Capta

This chapter demonstrates the enduring vitality and importance of the trope of the captive city ( urbs capta ) for late antique authors. Narratives of captured ancient cities follow a set pattern often modeled on the destruction of Troy but also, in Jewish and Christian contexts, on the sieges of Jerusalem. While these highly formulaic narratives are of little use to modern scholars interested in reconstructing specific acts of siege warfare, they provide historians with invaluable evidence for ways in which late Romans reckoned with the impact of war on civilian populations, which assumed a new urgency in the later empire when the sacked cities were increasingly Roman, and when both victim and aggressor were Christians. By tracing the use of the captive city trope from the late fourth to the sixth century, the chapter explains how Christian authors reframed the urbs capta motif by shifting the focus from the city to the church as the locus of suffering.