Bithynia and Pontus

Bithynia and Pontus (Latin: Provincia Bithynia et Pontus; Ancient Greek: Ἐπαρχία Βιθυνίας καὶ Πόντου, romanized: Eparkhía Bithynías kaì Póntou) was the name of a province of the Roman Empire on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). It was formed during the late Roman Republic by the amalgamation of the former kingdoms of Bithynia (made a province by Rome 74 BC) and Pontus (annexed to Bithynia 74 BC). The amalgamation was part of a wider conquest of Anatolia and its reduction to Roman provinces.

In 74 BC, Nicomedes IV of Bithynia willed his kingdom to the Romans, whom he hoped would defend it against its old enemy, Pontus. Due to the influence of Julius Caesar, then a young man and a guest-friend of Nicomedes, and an impassioned speech by the deceased king's sister Nysa before the Senate, the gift was accepted. Contemporary Rome was divided into two parties, the Populares, party of the "people," and the Optimates, party of the "best." The guest-friendship had been offered to Caesar, a popular, to save his life by keeping him from Rome during a proscription (a kind of witch-hunt) by Sulla, an optimate in power. Forever after Caesar had to endure scurrilous optimate slander about his relationship to Nicomedes, but Bithynia became a favored project of the populares.

The Populares held both consulships at Rome. Marcus Aurelius Cotta, a maternal uncle of Julius Caesar, was sent to secure the province as governor. Mithridates VI of Pontus, seeing a prospective addition to his kingdom about to escape, attacked Bithynia even before the consul arrived. Cotta sent for his co-consul, Lucius Licinius Lucullus. The Third Mithridatic War ensued and dragged on. At the end of their consulships the two commanders stayed on as proconsuls. Mithridates was able to mobilize almost all the rest of Anatolia against them. The two populares were insufficiently skilled to take on Mithridates. Cotta was removed finally by the Senate on a charge of corruption. Lucullus' men mutinied. In the confusion he lost nearly all Anatolia and was out of it. Their patience at an end, the Senate chose the best commander they had. In 66 BC Rome passed the Lex Manilia appointing Pompey, a popular, as Summus Imperator, a term that would find more use after the Civil War. He had the full support of Caesar, then coming into his own. He was to have a totally free hand in Asia. By 64 BC all of Mithridates' allies had been defeated or forced to change sides. Driven from Pontus, hunted through Anatolia, he was assassinated at last by former friends hoping to win Roman favor.

The wealth of Anatolia was now at Rome's command. It was Pompey's task to divide it into provinces. He kept the larger regions and combined the smaller city states. Pontus never became a province of its own. It was simply added to its former competitor, Bithynia, while its name was tacked on at the end of Bithynia. This was not a marriage of different cultures. The coast of the Black Sea had long been Hellenized, despite differences of ancestral populations. The new province began in 74 BC. It was of storied wealth and importance to the Republic. Pompey went on to be in the First Triumvirate with his fellow Populares. It was the peak of his career. They had a falling-out and fought the Roman Civil War. The last popular standing, Octavian Caesar, assumed the title imperator on a permanent basis and was granted another by the Senate, Augustus. Bithynia and Pontus went on from that date, 27 BC, as an imperial province, a name which it kept.

The Roman province of Bithynia et Pontus (et is Latin "and") comprised a coastal strip of hilly country containing tracts of intensely fertile, arable land, in a mild and moist climate, on the southern shore of the Black Sea from the Bosphorus to approximately the city of Trabzon. Just to the south of the coastal strip was an east-west striking range, the Pontic Mountains, isolating the coast from the Central Anatolia Region, a temperate plateau of grasslands and low forests. The province extended up the slopes to the ridge. On its reverse side were valleys and plateaus in which were situated cities that were on the edge of the coastal province but were not part of it.

The Kingdom of Bithynia became a Roman ally around 149 BC. In 74 BC, during the Third Mithridatic War, King Nicomedes IV of Bithynia died and, hoping to secure his kingdom from further Pontic aggression, bequeathed his kingdom to Rome. The Senate immediately voted to annex the kingdom as a province directly governed by the Republic. The province of Pontus, which was conquered and created by the Roman Empire's from the Pontus in 65 BC, was combined with the province of Bithynia, which was created in 74 BC when the last Bithynian king Nicomedes IV, left the Kingdom of Bithynia to the Roman Empire with a will, and was attached to the province of Bithynia and Pontus.

Bithynia and Pontus became an important player during the Roman Republican civil wars. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River in 49 BC and started his civil war, many of members of the Roman Senate under the leadership of Pompey fled to the East. The Galatian client king Deiotarus, ruler of the rump state of eastern Pontus (Lesser Armenia), sided with his old patron Pompey against Caesar. However, following Pompey's defeated at the Battle of Pharsulus and subsequent death in 48 BC, Deiotarus faced execution by Caesar's forces until the Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero pleaded his case and secured his pardon from Caesar. Caesar subsequently named Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus as his chief lieutenant in Asia Minor while Caesar traveled to Ptolemaic Egypt.

With the Caesar in Egypt, Pharnaces II, the Roman client king of the Bosporan Kingdom and the youngest son of Mithridates VI, seized the opportunity and conquered Colchis and Lesser Armenia. The rulers of Cappadocia and Galatia, Ariobarzanes III and Deiotarus respectively, appealed to Calvinus for protection and soon the Roman forces sought battle with Pharnaces II. They met at the Battle of Nicopolis in eastern Anatolia in 48 BC, where Pharnaces II soundly defeated the Roman army and overran much of Cappadocia, Pontus, and Bithynia.