The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  As an epitaph for the western empire, this is somewhat muted. It is far from clear that Sidonius saw Rome as having definitively ended; and his claim that the traditional hierarchies had gone was certainly exaggerated. But much was changing in Gaul, for all that. Euric’s conquests were soon matched by the Burgundians under Gundobad in the Rhône valley, with Provence a battleground between these two peoples and the Ostrogoths in the decades after 490. In the North, there were still armies which looked to Rome, under Aegidius around Soissons, Arbogast around Trier, and Riothamus, a British warlord, on the Loire; but Aegidius had recognized no emperor since Majorian, and these can be regarded as effectively independent polities, probably using rather fewer Roman traditions than the Goths and Burgundians did. The Frankish kings in the North allied and competed with them, and the most successful of these, Clovis of Tournai (481-511), began to take over rival Frankish kingdoms and the lands of Roman warlords alike.

  The north of Gaul had long been the most militarized part of the region, where the army structured exchange, social display and landowning patterns, and this accentuated across the fifth century. Villa culture had ended here by 450, for example, as also in rapidly de-Romanizing Britain, but unlike anywhere else in the West, where the richest rural residences continued until well into the sixth century; this marks the early end of one of the classic markers of civilian élite culture. Sidonius, who knew all the great civilian aristocrats of Gaul, hardly ever wrote to people north of the Loire (one was Arbogast of Trier, whom he praises for maintaining Roman cultural traditions - Sidonius clearly thought that this was hard in the north). The rest of what we know of the north points at very ad-hoc political procedures, as with the saintly Genovefa’s travels to find food for Paris in, perhaps, the 470s, or the bishops who dealt directly with Clovis in the 480s. The south of Gaul was much better organized; Visigothic and Burgundian kings legislated, taxed, shipped grain around, used Roman civilian officials, and created integrated Roman and ‘barbarian’ armies, including Roman generals. But, everywhere in Gaul, the last two decades of the fifth century were definitively post-imperial, in the sense that half a dozen rulers faced each other with no mediation, no distant Rome/Ravenna-based hegemony to look to. Gaul is the best-documented part of the West in the late fifth century, so we can see this most clearly there, even if it was also arguably the region where change was greatest: more than in Italy, certainly, but more even than in Africa, where Vandal rule, popular or not, was solid and relatively traditional. All of these regions were nonetheless post-Roman too; imperial unity and identity was by 500 the property of the East alone.

  It must also be recognized when discussing these post-Roman kingdoms that the shift away from Roman government was often rather less organized, or quick, than narratives of conquest imply. Eugippius’ Life of Severinus gives us an instance of this. Severinus (d. 482) was a holy man in Noricum (modern Austria) in the 470s, at a time when the Danube frontier was breaking down, but the main ‘barbarian’ group nearby, the Rugi, had remained firmly beyond the river and restricted themselves to raiding and taking tribute - and also to trading with the Romans. Severinus won the respect of King Feletheus and was able to mediate between Romans and Rugi on several occasions. Life in Noricum was clearly miserable, as well as cold (the imagery of winter is stressed constantly by Eugippius, who was a younger contemporary of Severinus but had left for Italy, and who was writing thirty years later much further south, in Naples). It was a province in which the Romans were concentrated in towns and fortifications, and various ‘barbarians’ roamed the countryside. The Roman army was still in existence, but there was no political leadership, at least in Eugippius’ vision of the province, except for Severinus’ mediating role. This sort of no man’s land may have characterized other areas, too: parts of northern Gaul, parts of central Spain, much of Britain. The social breakdown involved in these regions would have been much greater than that in any area of quick conquest, no matter how violent. But most of the West was nonetheless under the control of more stable (and more Roman) polities, whether Gothic, Burgundian or Vandal.

  The East in the late fifth century was a less tranquil place than under Theodosius and Pulcheria. For a start, it had by now rulers who were much more militarized: Aspar, magister militum in 457-71, strong-man for his protégé, Emperor Leo I (457-74), until Leo had him killed, and his successor Zeno, who became emperor in his own right (474-91). Secondly, Zeno had constant trouble with rivals. The main eastern army base had remained the Balkans, but this military region was itself more unstable after the end of Hunnic power, and ‘barbarian’ groups, mostly Goths, were beginning to enter the empire again: two of their leaders, Theoderic Strabo and Theoderic the Amal, each of them with Roman military experience, tried under Leo and Zeno both to gain power in Constantinople and to settle their respective peoples in a favoured part of the Balkans. Zeno was himself from Isauria, a remote mountain region in what is now southern Turkey, and a traditional source of soldiers (and also bandits) which could be seen to an extent as in competition with the Balkans; Zeno had rivals in Isauria, too; tensions with the army thus increased when he succeeded to the throne. Indeed, for a year (475-6) he was out of office, expelled by the general Basiliscus, and he faced several revolts even after that. It was only in the late 480s, shortly before his death, that he managed to quell rivals, and to persuade the main warlord who survived, Theoderic the Amal, to leave with his Gothic army and occupy Italy in 489. These problems meant that Zeno had no hope of intervening in the West himself, even had the fingers of the East not been burnt by the costly failure of the Vandal war in 468. A substantial stability was, however, restored by Anastasius I (491- 518), an elderly but able career bureaucrat who lived to the age of eighty-eight and had time both to quell Isaurian revolts and to put imperial finances firmly in the black. The fact that Anastasius could do this, and without a military base either, must indicate that the eastern political system was essentially solid.

  We are now in 500, and the East, despite some trouble under Zeno, was still in a stable state. The West had greatly changed, as we have seen, but there were elements of stability there too. Theoderic ruled Italy from Ravenna, the western Roman capital, with a traditional Roman administration, a mixture of senatorial leaders from the city of Rome and career bureaucrats; he was (as Odovacer had also been) respectful of the Roman senate, and he made a ceremonial visit to the city in 500, with formal visits to St Peter’s, to the senate building, and then to the imperial palace on the Palatine, where he presided over games, like any emperor. Theoderic’s whole modus operandi was largely imperial, and many commentators saw him as a restorer of imperial traditions. This was certainly the view of Cassiodorus Senator (lived c. 485-580), who was an administrator for him after 507 and who wrote an extensive collection of official letters for Theoderic and his immediate successors, which he called the Variae; Cassiodorus deliberately wrote up Theoderic as an upholder of Roman values, but it was easy for him to do so. The administrative and fiscal system had changed little; the same traditional landowners dominated politics, beside a new (but partly Romanizing) Gothic or Ostrogothic military élite.

  Theoderic looked beyond Italy, too. He ruled Dalmatia and the Danube frontier; and he was well aware of his cultural connections to the second Romano-Germanic power in the West, the Visigothic kingdom of Alaric II (484-507) in southern Gaul and Spain. Orosius had claimed that Athaulf the Visigoth said in 414 that he had considered replacing Romania with Gothia, but had decided against it, because the Goths were too barbaric, and could not obey laws. Were this story true (which is unlikely), it was reversed by the end of the century. Theoderic in Italy, Euric and Alaric in Gaul all legislated for their subjects, Goth and Roman. The Goths were military figures, it is true, unlike the senatorial stratum (or most of them), and were Arian, not Catholic, Christians, but in other respects they were picking up Roman values fast. In this they were followed by the Vandals and Burgundians, who were both very influenced by the larger Gothic kin
gdoms by 500 or so. In a sense, Gothia really had replaced Romania, but had done so in large part by imitating the Romans. In the western Mediterranean, in effect everywhere in the West south of the Loire and the Alps, a common political culture survived.

  But the world was changing. The end of political unity was not a trivial shift; the whole structure of politics had to change as a result. The ruling classes of the provinces were all still (mostly) Roman, but they were diverging fast. The East was moving away from the West, too. It was becoming much more Greek in its official culture, for a start. Leo I was the first emperor to legislate in Greek; under a century later, Justinian (527-65) may have been the last emperor to speak Latin as a first language. But it is above all in the West that we find a growing provincialization in the late fifth century, both a consequence and a cause of the breakdown of central government. Augustine thought in terms of the whole empire; Salvian took his moral images at least from the whole of the West (though he only really knew Gaul). But Sidonius was definitely a Gaul. Gaulish élites rarely travelled to Italy by now; although Sidonius was urban prefect in Rome in 468, he was the first Gaul to hold the office since perhaps 414, and also the last. His colleagues were even more clearly focused on Gaulish politics, like his friend Arvandus, praetorian prefect of Gaul in 464-8, and his enemy Seronatus, an administrator in central Gaul in and after 469, both of whom threw in their lot with Euric’s political ambitions and were cashiered for it; Euric’s Roman generals Victorius and Vincentius were presumably more successful variants of the same type, provincials who saw advancement in the Visigothic court as simply more relevant than the traditional career hierarchy centred on distant Ravenna. These were political shifts which made a lot of sense to local actors, but they were fatal to what remained of the empire. Sidonius himself left the imperial hierarchy when he became a bishop in 469/70, and the growing tendency for aristocrats in Gaul to look to the episcopate for a career (above, Chapter 3) expresses this local focus very clearly. In the next generation, horizons narrowed again; Ruricius of Limoges (d. 510) and Avitus of Vienne (d. 518), bishops in the Visigothic and Burgundian kingdoms respectively, both left collections of letters, written very largely to recipients inside their respective kingdoms (with the main exception of Sidonius’ son Apollinaris in Clermont, to whom they were both related).

  This provincialization was not restricted to Gaul, either. Hydatius of Chaves (d. c. 470) wrote a chronicle which tells almost entirely of Spain, especially the north-west, where he was based. Victor of Vita in Huneric’s Africa saw the Vandals exclusively from the perspective of the Africani; the Roman empire never appears in his text, and even Romani are only referred to when he is being very generic. A common political culture may have survived, but in each former Roman region or province its points of reference were becoming more localized, and its lineaments would soon start to diverge. The easy unity which had taken the biblical scholar Jerome in the late fourth century from Dalmatia to Trier, then Antioch, Constantinople, Rome and finally Palestine, from where he wrote letters to his Mediterranean-wide ascetic clientele for thirty years, had gone. I shall come back to this issue in more general terms later in this chapter.

  The high point of the Gothic western Mediterranean was around 500. It was destroyed by two men, Clovis the Frankish king and the eastern emperor Justinian; let us look at them in turn. Clovis reunited northern Gaul, including some non-Roman territories, during his reign; in 507 he attacked the Visigoths, defeating and killing Alaric II at the battle of Vouillé, and virtually drove them out of Gaul (they only kept Languedoc, on the Mediterranean coast). The Burgundians held on for a time, but in the 520s Clovis’s sons attacked them too, and took over their kingdom in 534. Theoderic reacted by occupying Visigothic Spain, nominally ruling for Alaric’s son Amalaric (511-31), but Spain’s political system went into crisis for two generations. It is hard to see that Theoderic’s Spanish extension was more than the temporary reinforcement of the Mediterranean coast against the Frankish threat; already by 511 the hegemony of the Goths in the West had largely gone, except in Italy. Clovis’s Merovingian dynasty would dominate post-Roman politics in the West for the next two centuries. We shall look at its history in the next chapter. For now, it is enough to stress one important geopolitical consequence of Clovis’s success: northern Gaul, long a military borderland, rather marginal to the Roman world except in the mid-fourth century when Trier was the western capital, became a political heartland territory, a focus for great landed wealth and political power. It was initially a focus for Gaul alone, but across later centuries it was one for the whole of western Europe.

  Justinian, Anastasius’ second successor, took Anastasius’ large budgetary surplus and devoted most of his forty-year reign to imperial renewal. There is a bounce about his accession in 527 that had not been visible for any emperor since Julian. As we saw in Chapter 2, starting in 528 he had Theodosius II’s law code revised in a year, and by 533 the writings of the Roman jurists were codified as the Digest, still today the master text of Roman law. Furthermore, a string of new laws (Novels) surveyed and revised the administration of the empire in the 530s, and also tightened laws on sexual deviance and heresy, even Jewish heresy, provoking Samaritan revolts and severe repression in northern Palestine in 529 and 555. Justinian was no liberal, and a growing humourlessness and intolerance of religious difference is visible in the East from this time onwards; he was nonetheless an innovator, and the complaints of traditionalists during his reign about the uncultured radicals in his administration indicate that his organizational changes had some effect. Justinian was also a builder, always an important part of political display in the Roman tradition. He is not the only one in this chapter; Zeno, Anastasius and perhaps also Theoderic the Ostrogoth were particularly active; but the scale of Justinian’s building outmatched them all, as with the huge churches he built in Constantinople (such as Hagia Sophia, see below, Chapter 10), Ephesos and Jerusalem. These building campaigns are well documented in a panegyric work, Prokopios’ On Buildings; as a result, archaeologists have been prone to date almost every major late Roman building in the East to the second quarter of the sixth century, and careful redatings have been necessary to uncover other patrons both before and after him. All the same, the money and the commitment were there to do a lot.

  Given the self-confidence of these acts, it is not surprising that Justinian was also interested in war. He faced Persian wars, the first serious conflicts for well over a century, in 527-32 and 540-45, and intermittently thereafter up to 562. Persia was always the major front for the eastern empire (the Balkans were also attacked in his reign, but this was hardly new, and was regarded as less crucial). It was expensive both in resources and in post-war reconstruction, and many emperors would have restricted their attention to Persian defence. But Justinian used the period of eastern peace in 532-40 to attack the West as well. His general Belisarios took Vandal Africa quickly, in 533-4, and moved straight into Ostrogothic Italy; he had almost completely conquered it by 540. Theoderic’s last years had shown up tensions with traditionalist figures too, and the aristocratic philosopher Boethius, among others, was executed for treasonous communication with the East in 526; infighting between Theoderic’s heirs in 526-36 led to a more serious alienation of some of the aristocratic élite from the Ostrogothic regime, many of whom ended up in Constantinople. But whereas the conquest of Africa was largely a success, Italy was not. Most of the non-Gothic Italians were at best neutral about Justinian’s armies, and the Goths regrouped after 540 under Totila (541-52), when the renewal of the Persian war pulled Roman troops away from the peninsula. The 540s saw Italy devastated, as Roman and Gothic armies in turn conquered and reconquered sections of the peninsula, and when war largely stopped in 554 Italy, now Roman again, had a fiscal system in ruins, a fragmented economy and a largely scattered aristocracy. This was not handled well, then. But Justinian had nonetheless absorbed the central Mediterranean back into the empire, and when his armies also occupied part of th
e Spanish coast in 552, almost the whole of the Mediterranean returned to being a Roman lake.

  Justinian was and is a controversial figure. He was hated by many, notably those whom he disagreed with on religious matters and persecuted, who became more numerous as his reign went on. This followed his growing hostility to Monophysites, especially after the death of his influential wife Theodora (herself a Monophysite) in 548, and then his equally controversial attempt to take a doctrinal step in the Monophysite direction at the fifth ecumenical council of Constantinople in 553, which alienated much of the West. Less serious (and far too influential on modern scholars) was Prokopios’ set-piece anti-panegyric, the Secret History, which depicts Justinian and Theodora as wicked geniuses, in highly coloured and sexualized terms, with Justinian characterized as a demon. Today, Justinian is above all accused of ruining the empire financially, thanks to his anachronistic wars in the West; the eastern empire after his death in 565 is often seen as weakened, both militarily and economically, a state of affairs that would result in the political disasters of the years after 610. We shall look at the seventh-century crisis in Chapter 11, but it does not seem to me to have much to do with Justinian. The western wars were not anachronistic, for the Roman empire was still a meaningful concept even in the West, nor were they particularly expensive; Africa was won on a shoestring, and remained Roman for more than a century longer, and the Italian war would have been less of a mess if Justinian had put more, not less, money into it. Justinian’s successors, notably Tiberius II (578-82) and Maurice (582- 602), held off the Persians, their main opponents, as effectively as Justinian had done. They also kept out the Avars, the new holders of ‘barbarian’ hegemony in the middle Danube, who from the 560s turned the most recent invaders of the Balkans, mostly Slavic-speaking (but also Turkic- and Germanic-speaking), into the greatest military threat in the area since the Huns. They abandoned most of Italy to a new people, the Lombards, but given Italy’s state this was not necessarily a strategic failure. Furthermore, money was sufficiently loose into the 570s for Tiberius (though not Maurice) to be noted as an extravagant spender. Justinian’s reign does not seem to have been a negative turning point for the empire. But the controversy over it does at least mark respect: Justinian put his stamp on a generation, all over the Mediterranean, and, unlike most rulers, the events of his reign seem to have been the result of his own choices. His protagonism gives the lie to the view that the break-up of the fifth-century West in itself marks the failure of the Roman imperial project.