The Governance of the Subordinated Countries

The present chapter aims at highlighting the strategies and mechanisms of governance that the Hittite empire employed at the acme of its territorial expansion and in the best-documented phase of its history, i.e., from the middle of the fourteenth until the end of the thirteenth century BCE, in order to successfully rule and maintain control over a vast and varied territory that encompassed most of Western, Central, and Southern Anatolia and extended eastward just beyond the course of the Euphrates, embracing the Northern Levant and parts of Upper Mesopotamia. The impact, nature, and extent of Hatti’s rule will be analyzed mainly on the basis of the textual evidence, in particular with regard to the empire’s influence on the political, military, and economic organization of the subordinated countries.