Peregrinus (Roman)

Peregrinus was the term used during the early Roman empire, from 30 BC to 212 AD, to denote a free provincial subject of the Empire who was not a Roman citizen. Peregrini constituted the vast majority of the Empire's inhabitants in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD. In 212 AD, all free inhabitants of the Empire were granted citizenship by the constitutio Antoniniana, abolishing the status of peregrinus.

The Latin "foreigner, one from abroad" is a derivation from the adverb peregre "from abroad", composed of per- "abroad" and agri, the locative of ager "field, country". During the Roman Republic, the term peregrinus simply denoted any person who did not hold Roman citizenship, full or partial, whether that person was under Roman rule or not. Technically, this remained the case during the Imperial era. But in practice the term became limited to subjects of the Empire, with inhabitants of regions outside the Empire's borders denoted barbari (barbarians).

In the 1st and 2nd centuries, the vast majority (80-90%) of the empire's inhabitants were peregrini. By 49 BC, all Italians were Roman citizens. Outside Italy, those provinces with the most intensive Roman colonisation over the approximately two centuries of Roman rule probably had a Roman citizen majority by the end of Augustus' reign: Gallia Narbonensis (southern France), Hispania Baetica (Andalusia, Spain) and Africa proconsularis (Tunisia). This could explain the closer similarity of the lexicon of the Iberian, Italian and Occitan languages as compared to French and other 'oil languages'

In frontier provinces, the proportion of citizens would have been far smaller. For example, one estimate puts Roman citizens in Britain c. 100 AD at about 50,000, less than 3% of the total provincial population of c. 1.7 million. In the empire as a whole, we know there were just over 6 million Roman citizens in 47 AD, the last quinquennial Roman census return extant. This was just 9% of a total imperial population generally estimated at c. 70 million at that time.

Peregrini were accorded only the basic rights of the ius gentium ("law of peoples"), a sort of international law derived from the commercial law developed by Greek city-states, that was used by the Romans to regulate relations between citizens and non-citizens. But the ius gentium did not confer many of the rights and protections of the ius civile ("law of citizens" i.e. what we call Roman law).

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