If Rome Hadn't Fallen

by Timothy Venning

  The Roman Ambrosius, and his putative successor Arthur (if he existed), would have been bolstered by Roman support, and possibly mercenary troops, and a central kingship is quite likely to have evolved, held by the military warlords. Possibly other relics of Roman administration, not least the Church with its links with Italy, would have survived into the sixth and seventh centuries in a Britain that had driven out any invaders in the 440s and could look across the Channel for support and trade. The Romans’ fleets should have kept down piracy, and the larger Romano-British towns would have survived better provided that there was no widespread destruction by pirates or a catastrophic decline in trade due to insecurity.

  Accordingly, there would have been Roman assistance to an independent Romano-Celtic kingdom of Britain in the sixth and seventh centuries under a line of successors of the Count Ambrosius Aurelianus (maybe including the mysterious commander later known as Arthur, the Celtic for bear) This state would have evolved directly from the Roman provinces of romanised Southern Britain, and would be run by a mixture of civic officials and a landed nobility. Conceivably some of the more self-sufficient villas might have survived as functioning economic units, with a powerful local landed class as in post-Roman Gaul. The real-life collapse of the villa economy in Southern Britain is now put down to the end of their economic viability, as providers of large-scale agricultural produce for the Western Roman government and army, rather than systematic destruction by bands of Germanic marauders.14

  Thus, a continuing demand for British corn (e.g. from the drained Fenland or former great Imperial estates) for the Roman army on the Rhine, and a secure, brigand-free network of roads across Gaul should have enabled the majority of villa estates to continue functioning through the fifth century. The most probable scenario for a rural crisis and economic decline would have been the loss of agricultural manpower, and markets for produce, in the great plague of the 540s, which according to surviving British and Irish sources afflicted post-Roman Britain badly.15 It presumably spread via the trade routes, archaeology showing that there were Mediterranean imports to southwestern Britain via ports like Tintagel and Bantham, and would have been worse in a politically stable Western Roman state where trade was still at the levels of around 400. As in relatively peaceful late sixth century southern Gaul in real life, post-Roman towns and estates would have been badly affected by plague and at risk of decline.

  There might be independent but allied tribal kingdoms in the hillier zones of Northern and Western Britain that did not have Romanised towns or a villa economy, without loss of territory to Saxon and Irish settlers. From archaeological evidence, the latter seem to have been locally predominant in Cornwall, Pembrokeshire, and the Lleyn Peninsula in the early fifth century. The written evidence of later genealogies for the ruling dynasties of the emerging fifth century kingdoms has to be treated with caution, given that our extant information is as late as the tenth century and was compiled retrospectively for the descendants of those new kingdoms that had survived that long. Heroic saga may well have magnified, or outright invention falsified, the oral record remembered by bards at Royal courts. Later heroic mythology has been accused of inventing the whole saga of the founder of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Kent, the mercenary captain Hengest (whose name means Stallion), as well as magnifying or inventing the deeds of the British war-leader later identified as King Arthur who by the tenth century was supposed to have brought Ambrosius’ Saxon war to a victorious end at the battle of Mount Badon around 516.16 The same problem could apply to any dynastic founder or early ruler only known to us from written accounts centuries later.

  Our nearest source, the monk Gildas around 540, deals as much in inference or allusion as in fact in his polemic against the sinful British leadership of his time. But he names one of the five rulers he condemns, Constantine, as king of Dumnonia; the others are mostly identifiable from the genealogies, e.g. Mailcunus (Maelgwyn) of Gwynedd, Cynglas of Powys, and Vortipor of Dyfed.17 (The latter’s memorial-stone has survived, giving him the late Roman military rank of ‘Protector’). Other basic information vital to post-Roman history is uncertain; we have no clear idea of whether the Lothian prince Cunedda was called into Gwynedd to evict Irish settlers by the Roman government around 400 or by a later ruler (could it be Vortigern?) around 440. The claim that he arrived ‘146’ years before the time of Maelgwyn, who died in the plague of around 547/9, is at variance with the later Welsh genealogy which ascribes only two generations from Cunedda to Maelgwyn’s father Catwallaun.18 The terminology that Gildas uses for his tyrant kings implies that they were illegitimate rulers, i.e. not legally appointed magistrates or governors but self-appointed war-leaders.19 This is presumably the view of a legalist churchman of new men warlords flung up by military emergency.

  Kingdoms that had been absorbed into other polities may well have left no record, and there is minimal information in the tenth century genealogies on the rulers of those lands absorbed by the new Germanic kingdoms of lowland Britain in the sixth and seventh centuries. Many rulers of lowland states may have been left out of the record because they left no heirs to preserve their details. Gildas makes it clear that tyrants, i.e. rulers lacking legal and legitimate authority, had sprung up all over Britain by his time, and he refers to some kings, e.g Aurelius Caninus or Conan (of Gloucester?), and dynasties (such as that of Ambrosius) which are not referred to in extant Welsh genealogies. Our picture of post-Roman government in Britain is thus partial and probably inaccurate.

  Continental developments

  Likely offensives with Rome’s Germanic allies would have taken place to keep the Saxons in check by attacking them in the rear by land and along the North Sea coasts by sea with the continuing Classis Britannia operating from the Saxon Shore forts and Gesoriacum (Boulogne). If sufficiently Romanised, the Germanic tribes east of the Rhine could aid a Roman conquest and settlement of the Saxon territories; it would have been useful to utilise the energies of warlords such as the emerging Merovingian line of the Franks to fight for Rome so they did not gain their loot and prestige from attacking the Empire. The land hunger of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes trapped in the coastal areas along the North Sea coasts from Frisia to Jutland (which in reality led to a migration to Britain, though of disputed extent) would have been blocked from British ventures by a strong resistance in the island. Similarly, the stronger position of the Western Empire would have meant that peoples such as the Franks were still living in the romanised areas east of the lower Rhine and would have blocked expansion in that direction. As a result, warfare with Rome leading to their military defeat on land and sea could have meant that many of them would have been enlisted in the Roman army and acquired land across the Empire on their retirement rather than forming their own political authorities under their own leaders.

  The Empire could have Christianised them and used them as ‘federate’ Germanic allies in Roman expansion east of the Elbe. There had been Christianization of Germans beyond the Roman frontier in the earlier fourth century, by Ulfilas among the Goths, though it is unclear if his initiative was taken with backing from the civil or ecclesiastical leadership with a view to the strategic advantages of it. As he was an Arian, not a Catholic, in theology this resulted in major problems for fifth century Arian Gothic kings in dealing with the Catholic bishops of their new kingdoms. In real-life Gaul around 420–30, it appears that the local episcopate, maybe with Papal backing, saw the potential in firstly Palladius and then Patrick taking on missions to convert the heathen and hostile Irish.20

  Accordingly, some similar mission might have been mounted by zealous clerics within Gaul or the Rhineland to convert German tribes beyond the Roman borders. The existence of a single, charismatic leader in new kingdoms, such as the Salian Franks’ real-life rulers Childeric and Clovis, would have presented a tempting target for conversion, though there would have been less urgency if such men had not been ruling Roman Christians within the old Roman frontiers. Even if the Franks had been blocked
from expanding in Gaul after around 480 by the Roman military authorities, and thus driven to attack fellow-Germans in the lower Rhine valley, converting their leaders would have been politically useful in cementing an alliance. The see of Rheims took the lead in working with Clovis in real life, and in this scenario would still have been geographically close to the Frankish kingdom so with an interest in ensuring that Clovis was an ally who did not raid fellow-Christians in the province of Belgica

  Quite conceivably, the Western Empire would have gone on in the seventh century to annex Jutland to prevent any further raids across the North Sea. The peninsula appears to have been divided among small tribes, traditionally the enigmatic Jutes, Angles, and possibly some Saxons in Schleswig, without major kingdoms in the real-life fifth to seventh centuries, apart from possibly the realm of the original king Offa of the Angles whose descendants ruled Mercia in England. Without a major settlement in England from around 440 there might have been overcrowding in the peninsula, or else hardship in the coastlands arising from flooding due to rising sea levels, both matters of historians’ speculation.21 Without a safetyvalve for settlement overseas many more warriors might have enrolled in the Roman army for betterment, or aggressive war-leaders been as much of a menace to the Roman lands on the lower Rhine as they were to Frankish Austrasia ahead of Charlemagne’s conquest in the 770s. Any continuing raiding into Roman lands would have made retaliatory invasion logical, assuming that the traditional Roman option of paying and supporting friendly tribal leaders to preserve peace on the border had not worked in the long term.

  Jutland would logically be divided up among farmer-soldiers (some locals and some veterans) to form a Western equivalent of the Eastern ‘theme’ armies. The settlement of farmer-soldier ‘limitanei’ on the frontiers of Eastern and Western Empires after the late third century, providing a backbone of locally based men with military experience to support the field armies, would probably be continuing into the sixth or seventh centuries if the West had survived. It was ideally suited to utilising the social basis of society beyond the western frontiers, namely Germanic warriors used to both farming and fighting, for defence of new territories under Imperial politico-military leadership. Beyond the neutralised peoples of the Danish peninsula, loyal vassal-kings would be assisted by trade and military help against their rivals in Scania and Geatland (southern Sweden). The Danish and Geatish peoples had local kings by the sixth century if the later legends written down about their royal families are to be taken with any degree of accuracy. The later Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus wrote of the ‘Scylding’ dynasty, the people of Scyld, in Denmark,22 while the famous (possibly eighth century) heroic poem ‘Beowulf ’, its events dated to around 500 by the timing of a reference to a historical attack on Gaul, refers to king Hrothgar of the Danes and the eponymous hero, King Beowulf of the Geats.23The mythic events of the saga, with their lake-monsters and dragon, are clearly invented, as are the tidy back-construction of a long-ruling dynasty in Saxo’s work. But, as with the British myths of King Arthur, their usage of legend and contemporary references may well hide a kernel of truth about the antiquity of kingship, though not a full, national dynastic kingdom, in the area.

  As with the Roman promotion of trustable leaders beyond the frontier with Roman goods and backing to keep their turbulent peoples in order in first to fourth century Germany, the Empire would logically have served to promote kingship and stability among its Northern neighbours. Christianised kingdoms on the periphery of the Roman world would thus have evolved in Sweden and any unconquered part of Denmark at an earlier date than they did in reality, sponsored by the Empire and the Church to aid stability on the frontier. But a similar development in the divided jarldoms of pre-tenth century Norway is less likely, as the intensity of feuds among the warrior-nobility and lack of a clear dynastic authority seen in the sagas would militate against stability. Christianization or diplomatic relations with a powerful ruler may well have occurred but proved impermanent, as with the Frankish empire’s attempts to sponsor Christianity and stability in Denmark after around 800.

  The Roman fleet, if indeed there was one, based at the supposed Saxon Shore fortresses in Britain in the fourth century had failed to hold back Germanic or Pictish raids, possibly because the invaders’ long keels were superior to Roman shipping used to the Mediterranean (perhaps using sails more than oars) or because their small groups of fast-moving vessels could elude Roman patrols. The only late Roman admiral in the Channel with a successful anti-pirate record that we know of was Carausius in the 280s, and he was accused of keeping the arrested pirates’ loot for himself and revolted to escape punishment.24 But it can be assumed that the Romans would have had to master North Sea tides and storms to tackle the Danish coastline successfully during an invasion of Jutland, and to stave off further raiding on the British and Gallic coasts. An invasion of the mainland would leave searaiders with no refuge unless they escaped beyond Roman reach to Norway or the Baltic, and it would be logical for the empire to take on seaborne as well as land-based German-Danish mercenary ‘federates’ and reinforce its fleet with local experts. Roman naval bases around the sites of Bremen and Hamburg would police the North Sea’s eastern shores and the Skaggerak, aided by new military and naval bases around Aarhus and the Danish islands, and it is likely that the Church would seek to Christianise the area (as with hostile pagan Ireland) and set up monasteries as beacons of ‘Romanitas’.

  Ireland

  The Church in Rome had sponsored the civilising missions of Palladius and Patrick in the real-life mid-fifth century. If the Western Empire had continued, Rome’s interest in the project would have been greater (not least to discourage local raids on Britain and Gaul) given that the post-560s Papacy would not have been distracted by its local political role in Italy as it was in real life. The main centre of administrative expertise and organisation in the senate-less Rome of the restored Imperial Italy from the Gothic defeat in 553/4, it had an important local role backing up the civil government (which was based across the Appenines in Ravenna). The mixture of plague and devastating war had reduced the personnel available to man the administration of Italy, and from 568 the region was afflicted by a piecemeal penetration by bands of Lombards who were centred in the Po valley but by the 570s and 580s were spreading further south. The lack of a concerted invasion by a powerful Germanic army, as with the Goths in 402, 405, and 408, or of a permanent centralised Lombard war-leadership did not prevent the Lombards from serious disruption. Assorted local duchies were set up usually with autonomy from the emerging Lombard kingship based at Pavia by the Po; a major one was at Spoleto in Umbria, within striking-distance of Rome.

  The estates of the remaining Roman nobility and the Papacy were being raided, thus diminishing their resources, and Rome itself was threatened by the time of the reign of Pope Pelagius II (579–90). The Lombards were a major preoccupation for Gregory the Great and his successors. A stable and peaceful Imperial government in Italy would have avoided this distraction and enabled the better-resourced Papacy to concentrate on useful missions like converting the Irish to aid the Empire’s foreign relations. Conversely, however, the political and military weakness of the Eastern Empire’s viceroys in Italy, the ‘Exarchs’, and the absence of the Senate meant that the Papacy had to assume local civil leadership in central Italy. Lacking this stimulus to its administrative development and initiation of its own foreign policy, the post-550s Popes would have been less powerful than Gregory and his ilk, and under closer Imperial control even if the Western Emperor still ruled from Milan.

  The emerging Christian Church organisation across Ireland would have received more aid from Italy had the central Church authorities had more resources. Patrick is unlikely to have been the only (recorded) mainstay of the conversion-mission, and the Church in Britain or Gaul would have been directing his mission and supplying priests. It is also probable that local customs at variance with those of the Roman Church, the different form of the priestly t
onsure and the divergence in the date of celebrating Easter, would have been slower to develop, if they had done so at all. In real life the Church in Ireland and its offshoots, including Aedan’s mission in post-634 Northumbria, was allowed to develop without a stream of instructions delivered by zealously conformist officials sent from Rome.The result was a major divergence in practices which provided inconvenience, though not any theological split between a (supposedly more liberal) Celtic Church and Rome as some anti-Catholic historians have interpreted this problem. As Rome asserted its influence in Celtic-influenced Christian lands in the midlate seventh century, commencing with Britain, it made efforts to enforce its own agenda and practices.

  Thus the representatives of the two parties in the Church came to argue out their cases before the civil leadership of Northumbria at the synod of Whitby in 664, with Rome’s representatives led by St. Wilfred winning; the clinching argument was the role of Rome as heir to the senior apostle St. Peter, at least as Bede recorded it.25 The triumph of Roman practices in the morer remote Dalriada and the Pictish lands in Scotland, let alone in Ireland itself, had to wait until the eighth century. A surviving Western Empire would have provided the political weight, and probably the greater Roman missionary manpower, to bring about earlier submission to the Papal practices, though the 540s plague and local military preoccupations might logically have delayed efforts to bring Irish and Scottish missionary Churches into line with Rome.