It is noticeable that the records we have of the most senior Palace-based ministers, and great provincial bureaucrats headed by the Praetorian Praefects, suggest a quick ‘turnover’ rather than a system of long-serving men who could grow in experience and competence. Late Roman bureaucratic office had to be bought, and applications for favours from these high officials had to be paid for. Official salaries were small – hence the predominance of officials from the landed ‘gentry’ class, like the mid-fourth centuryAntiochene orator Libanius, who could ‘pay their way’. A case-study of the East’s senior bureaucracy in the career (and complaints) of the sixth century John Lydus suggests that raising money was a major concern of officials, to pay off the debts from one’s previous promotion and to afford the next one.
Did all this lead to what we would nowadays categorise as a lack of concern for competence or (in senior ranks at the Palace) policy-making? It may not have been vital to the Empire’s survival, as were military mistakes, but it arguably led to such venal incompetents in high office as Rufinus. Rufinus did considerable damage to the Eastern leadership in the early 390s. His most eminent victims, ex-finance minister and current Praetorian Praefect Tatianus (exiled) and his son Proculus (executed), were the sort of capable and honest ministers who the Empire needed in the crises after 395. Zosimus’ attack on Rufinus’ intrigues, cruelty, and corruption, which Theodosius did nothing to halt, is hardly just political partisanship, and is an indictment of Theodosius’ abilities in civilian rule20. Would East and West have co-operated better against Alaric at the crucial moment of military crisis in 395 but for Rufinus, or would Stilicho have undermined any independent-minded Eastern chief minister?
There is also a highly significant trail of evidence pointing to the unwise political advice offered to impressionable Emperors by their (eunuch) chief chamberlains, from Eutropius under Arcadius to Chrysaphius under Theododius II and Heraclius in the West in 454, who advised Valentinian III to murder Aetius. Such household intrigue was not new, but it was more dangerous at a time of severe crisis, particularly if it concerned foreign policy (murdering Attila) or the army (murdering Aetius). Court favourites destroyed both Stilicho and Aetius.
After 395 no Eastern Emperor commanded his troops in person and the only Western Emperor to do so in 395–457 was the short-lived Constantius III. This probably gave him a reduced insight into the problems facing his government, let alone the lives of its ordinary citizens, as bad news could be filtered by his courtiers and he had a slower reaction to crisis. The sons of Theodosius the Great, Arcadius and Honorius, and the latter’s nephew Valentinian III seem to have been particularly politically inert and vulnerable to court factions. But this was a personal, not institutional failing; all three were weak characters. The charge that a remote and suspicious Emperor living in the closed world of the court was listening to bad advice, following the dictates of flatterers, punishing loyal and competent ministers at the behest of intriguers, and neglecting honesty for servility was made strongly against Constantius II in the 350s, and played up by his overthrower, Julian.21 It was not a new phenomenon, but the nature of court life made this threat to capable leadership from the centre greater than before, though it did not weaken the Eastern Empire, perhaps more used to autocratic rule by pre- Roman dynasts, as it did the Western.
Division of the Empire – militarily necessary, or extra problems?
Diocletian divided the Empire into East and West, with two senior ‘Augusti’ and two junior colleagues, ‘Caesars’ who would in due course succeed them. This was meant to avoid struggles over the succession by pre-nominating competent adult heirs but predictably collapsed into chaos. He and his partner Maximian abdicated in 305 and their deputies Galerius and Constantius I took over as the senior Emperors (‘Augusti’); however the new deputy Emperors never secured recognition and Maximian’s and Constantius’ sons joined in the struggle. The succession reverted to the ruler’s immediate family, brothers or sons, if available, with each ruler having his own court and mobile ‘comitatus’ field army. Constantine the Great, who had first challenged Diocletian’s system in 306 by claiming the succession to his father Constantius I, defeated Maximian’s son Maxentius (usurping ruler of Italy and Africa) in 312; Maximian, who had staged a come-back and then deserted his son for Constantine to betray him too, was also eliminated. Constantine reunited the Empire in 324 but left it in 337 to his three sons by Maximian’s daughter Fausta: Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constans. He intended to leave two sub-states to his nephews Dalmatius and Hannibalianus, but they were murdered.
The eventual reunion of the Empire under Constantius II (353–61) and his nephew Julian (361–3) was followed by the extinction of the dynasty in 363.This was avoidable: Julian was only thirty-two, had had two marriages without children, and was killed by an arrow in a skirmish on the River Tigris while invading Persia. Arguably, if the militarily competent Julian, who had defeated the massive Alemannic attack on Gaul in 355 despite minimal military experience and so was a natural general, had been able to complete his Persian campaign in 363, withdrawing in good order, the Empire would not have been weakened by the surrender of vital fortresses West of the upper Tigris which his successor Jovian agreed to.
Evidently panicking with the Persian cavalry pursuing his demoralised army, the Emperor Jovian abandoned this frontier region (the modern south-east Turkey) in return for peace, and so opened the way for extra Persian pressure on the Roman frontier, and Armenia, from a much more secure position than formerly. Major fortresses that had protected Syria and Armenia, such as Nisibis, were lost and the Empire forced to divert troops and Imperial policy-making to planning a military recovery. Was it thus that Valens was fatally distracted from the Danube in the 370s and the Empire put at greater risk of a disaster like Adrianople? Would Persia’s threat have been more containable but for the long-term disaster of Jovian’s treaty, or would an over-confident Emperor have neglected the Danube for the chance of glory in Mesopotamia anyway?
Jovian accidentally suffocated from paint fumes. His elected successor Valentinian, a capable Danubian general, took the West and handed the East to his brother Valens, against advice to empower an experienced minister or general. Valentinian died of an apparent fit of rage while shouting at some insolent German envoys during a Danube campaign in 375, aged fifty-four. If he had been alive in 378 he was experienced enough to have done better than his son in dealing with the Goths in Thrace, if not to destroy them.22 Would Valens have waited for his more experienced brother to arrive to join him before he tackled the Goths in autumn 378, unlike he did for teenage Gratian?
Valentinian I was succeeded in the West by his sons Gratian (sixteen) and Valentinian II (four), and after the violent deaths of both (and their usurping successors) his empire fell to Valens’ successor in the East, Theodosius the Great. The latter had been appointed by Gratian to clear up the Gothic war in 379, but Valentinian I, who executed Theodosius’ father, would not have given him this chance. Theodosius died within months (January 395) and left the two halves of the Empire to his two sons; this time the division was permanent. But the division could have been as ephemeral as the previous multiple divisions of 337 and 375, or Theodosius never gained the West at all had Gratian or Valentinian II survived and left their thrones to sons. For that matter, the triple division of 337 could have lasted and three Empires, not two, emerged with their capitals at Trier (to face the Germanic threat on the Rhine), Milan (to guard the Danube), and Constantinople (the East). The notion of a careful, planned permanent division of the Empire in 395 owes much to hindsight.
The State and army: too heavy a burden? Or irrelevant to the question of survival?
The multiple courts of a number of Emperors, ruling as colleagues, and their ministers were followed down the administrative hierarchy by a large number of provinces, many more than in the early Empire, plus over-governors, ‘vicars’, ruling groups of provinces. All these men needed officials, and the armies of over 300,
000 men now included both the field armies and local frontier garrison ‘limitanei’. The precise size of the army is unclear, as it can only be estimated from the early fifth century administrative summary in the ‘Notitia Dignitatum’, which may have been out-of-date or reflecting an idealised picture. But it was clearly much larger than the twenty-nine legions (120–150,000 men?) of the early Empire. Now each province had its own military commander (‘dux’, leader or general, hence our ‘duke’); the civilian governors (‘praeses’) had been stripped of troops to discourage revolt. The army apparently took up two-thirds of the Imperial budget.23
Service in many professions such as the army and farming was meant to be hereditary to ensure continuity of manpower in an Empire denuded of manpower by war and plague. The costs of the Imperial courts (there was usually more than one Emperor after 286), officialdom, and armies made the tax base shoulder more costs than it had in the second century, coinciding with difficulties in payment. The always fragile monetary economy was weak, as seen in the hyper-inflation of the later third century and the drastic regulatory measures taken to counter-act it. It is noticeable that there was both a reluctance to serve in urban civic offices, the middle-class social and economic basis of city life who could not escape the burden of tax, and a flight from the land by agricultural workers, defying the legal requirement for hereditary service in both cases. The dramatic decline in the commissioning of inscriptions commemorating public works by the provincial ‘curial’ middle class has been taken as a definitive sign of their impoverishment, flight from their responsibilities, and probably a lack of concern for the early Empire’s pattern of civic improvement. There was certainly greater fourth-century spending on private than public life.
Indeed, the declining ability of the over-taxed urban middle classes to fund urban building projects and civic public life seems to have added to the shrinkage of towns and lack of new public works compared to the early Empire; the most impressive new building was carried out by the wellfunded and staffed Church. All this testified to a much different state of society from the relatively under-governed and prosperous first and second centuries AD. The new government interference in private life, prescribing belief and hunting down dissidents, first Christians, then heretic Christian sects and pagans, added to the sense of permanent crisis. But case-studies of places such as fifth century Syria and fourth to fifth century North Africa have shown that these areas were certainly still prosperous, with flourishing agriculture and farms, and even in raid-hit Britain there were grander villas than ever before in the fourth century. Recent estimates of the late Roman population and prosperity have painted a far less gloomy picture than was once assumed. On this basis the populace and the tax-hit ‘curial’ classes were better able to sustain the burden of taxation. Possibly earlier reckonings relied too heavily on Gaul and the Rhine valley, badly hit by the third century invasions.
Germans and Romans
The Empire was restored as a viable structure by Diocletian and his successors, but was still vulnerable to insecure successions and civil wars. Then from the 370s a series of massive incursions by ‘barbarian’ Germanic tribes seeking new homes, commencing with the Goths, added to the constant pressure of frontier wars against smaller, usually disorganised Germanic attacks from the north and a ‘cold war’ that erupted into sporadic conflict with Rome’s only major rival state, Sassanid Persia, to the east. The defeat and death of Eastern Emperor Valens at the hands of the Goths at Adrianople in 378 broke the myth of Roman military supremacy and encouraged further tribal attacks, besides leaving a permanent autonomous Gothic presence within the Roman borders that the Empire had to accept.
When the next chance for Germanic attack arose on the death of the strong Eastern Emperor Theodosius in January 395, revolt by the Goths followed; and incursions from north of the Rhine and Danube resumed. The Empire was permanently divided into the East, with its capital at Constantinople, and the West, with its official capital at Rome but the Emperor’s court now at Milan or Ravenna, and help from one half of the Empire to the other was not guaranteed. In 406 a coalition of tribes crossed the Rhine into Gaul; they had done so before, most notably in the 270s and 350s, but this time they could not be driven back.24
But was this permanent irruption of Germans into Roman lands the inevitable precursor of the fall of the Western Empire? The apocalyptic notion of a ‘Fall of Rome’ has been debated, as Roman civilization, its social and economic structures, its Church, and use of its Latin language survived across much of the post-Roman West; the main break in social and economic continuity occurred in the seventh century with the Arab invasions and collapse of Mediterranean trade. But the end of formal Imperial authority and the administrative structure of the Late Empire is undeniable, commencing with the outer provinces like Britain and the Rhineland.
The notion of a massive ‘volkwanderung’ of hordes of hundreds (or at least scores) of thousands of Germans across the Empire from 376 was played up by romantic nationalists in the nineteenth century, but is now largely discredited.25 For one thing, there had been substantial Germanic settlement within the Empire and recruitment to its army already in the fourth century, an era characterised by shortages of manpower in the Empire after the plagues and wars of the third century. As we have seen, there had been assimilation of bodies of thousands of Germanic warriors (and/or farmers) from across the Danube into the East after 331 and 358/9. There were Germans at Court and in high military command by the 360s, as shown by their names. Valentinian II as well as Honorius had a German commander-in-chief (Argobast).
Nor were the German peoples who invaded the Empire necessarily neatly divided into permanent and recognisable tribes, all strictly delineated by descent and recognising unchallenged war-leaders. What is attested by archaeology is that certain widespread Germanic agricultural settlements North of the Danube disappeared after the fourth century, e.g. the ‘Cernjachov’ culture in Wallachia and the Moldova-Ukraine region (largely peopled by Goths) and the ‘Przeworsk’ culture of Bohemia, Slovakia and southern Poland (the Vandal area). The abandonment of these settlements is obviously linked to large-scale immigration into the Empire, whether in the specific invasions testified to by the literary sources or more gradually. The culprits for the mass-movement were presumably the nomadic, horse based Huns.
Names that were later adopted by separate tribal kingdoms are used to define particular military groups who fought the Empire in the later fourth century and the fifth century, e.g. the Goths (East and West), Franks, and Vandals; but this is not to say that their armies consisted solely of men from that tribe. It is more likely that there was a fluid situation of assorted warriors (plus their families) from mixed Germanic backgrounds supporting the most promising leader available, with a successful leader attracting a growing coalition of warriors who might become a permanent, coherent grouping if they secured a geographical ‘state’ to settle in. Identity was as much ‘cultural’ as ethnic – by choice as well as descent successful warbands became the allied kingdoms that fought the Empire and were then sometimes recognised by treaty as occupying particular Roman territory. As described by the Roman historian Tacitus in the first century AD, Germanic kingship was divided between ephemeral military commands, created for particular wars by the election of the best or most forceful war-leader, and permanent judges and religious leaders. All came from hereditary noble or royal lineages; the former only emerged when needed.26
There is no continuous record of any dynasty ruling a stable kingdom of one particular Germanic people for centuries before the invasions of the Empire from 378, even when the name of a people is continuous. The ancient lineage of the Goths’ leaders was probably exaggerated by their sixth century propagandist Jordanes, back-dating its length to add to their descendants’ prestige. But Rome preferred to deal with individual kings, who it could control with gifts or military pressure, than with anarchic bands of warriors, and so built up its allies beyond the Rhine and Danube as rulers from the f
irst century. All the evidence suggests that these kingships, e.g. of Maroboduus in Bohemia in the early first century, were personal and temporary. Arguably, indeed, it was the need for permanent military leadership as the Germanic peoples invaded and settled in the Empire that led to permanent kingships; Alaric’s relatives ruled the ‘Visi[West]goths’ from the 400s. But there were undeniably Germanic hereditary elites by the fourth century, with Athanaric the Goth (fl. 376) being the son of a former noble hostage in the Empire and 350s Alemmanic leader Serapio called after the god Serapis by his royal hostage father. The Alemannic-led invaders of the Rhine frontier in 355–6 had seven kings, and the Tervingi and Geuthungi Goths of 376–8 had multiple leadership too. Athanaric and others were linked to previous kings (i.e. war-leaders) or judges, but not to any long-lasting, permanent patrilineal rulership.
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