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

by Chris Wickham

  The Damascus mosque also had a specific political and spatial symbolism, by no means only directed to Muslims. For a start, al-Walid built it on top of the demolished cathedral of the city, which still had a Christian majority, in a particularly overt assertion of Muslim supremacy. This formed part of the monumental rhetoric he inherited from his father ‘Abd al-Malik (685-705), who was, as we shall see in Chapter 12, the first caliph to publicize Islam on a large scale in material form, in coins and monumental buildings; al-Walid simply developed it further, including by bringing it to the capital itself, right at the start of his reign. Like Hagia Sophia, the Great Mosque is very large, with a courtyard 157 by 100 metres in size, and was hugely and visibly expensive. The courtyard used the walls of the precinct of the pagan Roman temple of Jupiter, which the Christians had already left around their cathedral, but that enclosure was now turned into a specific walled-off Muslim religious and political space, reserved for the new Arab ruling class of Damascus. The walled courtyard constituted a typical element of the mosque for ever after. Al-Walid put four minarets at its corners, perhaps to show to all that the old Roman space had a new function; but this was the only important feature of the mosque not to have a later history, for a single tall minaret is characteristic of most later major mosques.

  The effect of the Great Mosque was not, however, restricted to its scale and to its appropriation of a former sacred site. Al-Walid had the monumental upper parts of his roofed space, looking out onto the open courtyard, covered in mosaics, probably the work of Byzantine mosaicists; mosaics also covered much of the walls of the roofed space, and the other walls of the courtyard. Sections of these survive; they consist of trees and foliage, interspersed on the courtyard walls with buildings and a river - paradise imagery in all likelihood - of remarkably high quality, but with no representations of humans or animals. This marks out a new style of visual programme. Mosaic decoration was normally figurative in the Roman world, in public buildings and churches alike (Hagia Sophia was atypical in this respect), and vegetation was at best used as a background, or as a divider between scenes. Here, the caliph was making very obvious indeed the fact that the new Islamic religion was beginning to avoid human representation in public spaces (it matched the new coinage developed under ‘Abd al-Malik, too, which abruptly abandoned pictures of caliphs in 696). The importance which representation came to have in both the caliphate and the Byzantine empire will be looked at again in the next two chapters; but the Great Mosque is one of its earliest signs.

  The other important feature of the Great Mosque was that, as a space, it was closed off to the outside. Roman cities were structured by wide streets leading to central forum areas, to which processions led and where public participation could be considerable, as continued to be the case in Constantinople for centuries. Amphitheatres (in the West), theatres and racetracks were other major venues for public activity, and the Hippodrome of Constantinople carried on this tradition for a long time. In the Islamic world, the mosque courtyard took over from all of these; major political events, like collective oaths of loyalty, took place there, not in any secular location. And the Arab states did not use processions as a major part of their political legitimization; the assembly in the mosque courtyard was sufficient for that. The need for wide boulevards ended; pre-Islamic Syrian and Palestinian colonnades were quite quickly filled in with shops in the eighth century, some of them commissioned as public amenities by caliphs. The narrow streets of Islamic cities resulted directly from this, for there was no public interest involved in keeping them clear from obstructions like vendors’ stalls, beyond a certain minimum (enough for two loaded pack animals to pass each other, later jurists said). Public display came to be focused on the mosque, and, secondarily, rulers’ palaces and city gates, rather than on the cityscape as a whole. The impact of al-Walid’s mosaics would have been all the greater as a result, although that would be a future development, only set in motion in the eighth century. The caliph and his advisers were nonetheless making a set of conscious symbolic and political points by organizing the Great Mosque as they did; and the way the public space in Islamic cities changed, to focus so exclusively on mosques, although less conscious as a process, would have seemed to them auspicious and fitting. In a time when the population of Syria was still mostly Christian, and Greek- or Syriac-speaking, these changes were also probably the most immediate signs they had of the content of the Muslim religion of their new rulers.

  At the other end of the former Roman world, in the Cheviot hills of Bernicia (now Northumberland) just south of the modern Scottish border, King Edwin (616-33) of Northumbria had a court (villa) called, according to Bede, Ad Gefrin. There is no serious doubt that this villa was at Yeavering, where in 1949 air photography allowed the localization of a complex Anglo-Saxon site, which was excavated in the 1950s and published in 1977. This site had lost its topsoil and floor levels, and with them most of the small finds one would normally expect, though it has to be said that the site was, even then, unusually poor in finds for such an important centre, which underlines how limited the resources of early Anglo-Saxon kings were. But in compensation the post-hole foundations of a variety of wooden buildings were identified, which show us a much more elaborate picture of an early Anglo-Saxon palace complex than researchers had previously expected.

  Literary images of royal palaces in Old English texts concentrate on a single wooden hall, like Heorot in Beowulf, where kings and their retainers met, feasted and slept. Yeavering was both less and more than that. In the late sixth century the Anglo-Saxons had found an earlier stone circle, a Bronze Age barrow, and a large fortified enclosure, some of which seems to have made up a British cult-site. This was further developed by pagan Anglo-Saxons, with small buildings which may have been temples. In the middle of the site, around 600 or so, a building unparalleled in Anglo-Saxon England was set up, consisting of a dais and banked seats looking down on it, 20 metres from front to back, the whole looking in plan (all that survives of it) like the cross-section of an orange segment. This construction most resembles a section of a Roman theatre, imitated in wood, and its parallels are firmly Roman. It is generally and convincingly interpreted as an assembly point for the Bernician, and later Northumbrian, aristocracy when they and the king came to the Yeavering cult-site. A few years later, the site turned into a more typical palace complex as well, with the construction of a line of large halls, some 70 metres long in total, pointing straight at the apex of the ‘theatre’. This was the setting for a set piece of Christian conversion and baptism in the 620s by Paulinus, an early missionary to Northumbria, which explains Bede’s references to Ad Gefrin. In these halls, which were occupied until around 650, Edwin could easily have lived the sort of life described in Beowulf and similar literature; but they were surrounded by a network of earlier architectural representations looking in other directions too.

  The pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons settled in a British landscape, but took relatively little from their predecessors and neighbours by way of material culture, even though the British were overwhelmingly dominant numerically. Yeavering was right at the edge of a relatively narrow Anglo-Saxon coastal settlement around the Bernician royal centre of Bamburgh; it may not be so surprising that we find here one of the few documented examples of a British site (and British religious practices, maybe also pagan in this area, north of Hadrian’s Wall as it was) having a cultural influence on an Anglo-Saxon one. But, given that, the ‘theatre’ is all the more striking. We are not so far from the wall here, and Roman material culture was thus at least physically available to the Bernicians; but for Anglo-Saxons living north of the Roman province of Britannia deliberately to adopt a Roman-influenced construction for something as emblematically Anglo-Saxon as a public assembly point sheds considerable light on royal aspirations, particularly because it seems to predate Christianization, which would make Roman influences more obviously culturally attractive. Indeed, this may go some way to explaining the readiness of Anglo-Saxon
rulers to be converted relatively quickly. And that Roman imagery presumably made sense to an aristocratic and possibly also popular audience too. The early Anglo-Saxons are sometimes depicted as finding the Roman past incomprehensibly grandiose, as in the Old English poem The Ruin, plausibly about Bath, which refers to the Roman buildings of a city as ‘the work of giants’. However that may be, they could deal with elements of that past with the same sort of creative and expressive bricolage that we find in Arab Syria. Cosy primitivist readings of Anglo-Saxon ‘barbarism’ are out of place here. The early Anglo-Saxons did not have access to a technologically complex material culture, but despite this the culture they did have could be manipulated in complex ways, with images of legitimacy taken from Anglo-Saxon, Roman and non-Roman British culture all at once.

  For our next example, let us move to the Rome of the Carolingian period, by which time the Franks ruled most of western Europe, including a protectorate over the papal city. We shall look here at the building programme of Pope Paschal I (817-24), which was very extensive for what was not a very long reign. Paschal was a controversial pope, who built up an influential set of aristocratic enemies. Although his enemies could draw on Carolingian support, in 823 Paschal had several of them executed, and fiercely defended the executions to Carolingian emissaries. He was not afraid of much, it seems, and his church-building, which includes two of the three largest churches in Rome built between the sixth century and the twelfth, testifies to his confidence. I shall focus here on the earliest and best-surviving of them, S. Prassede, built around 820.

  Paschal was not the first builder-pope of the late eighth and ninth centuries. There was probably no break in papal building in the early Middle Ages (and there was certainly no break in reconstruction and repair), but our sources, both written and material, concur that there was more new church construction than before, from S. Silvestro of Paul I (757-67) and SS. Nereo e Achilleo of Hadrian I (772-95) onwards, up to the 850s at least. These churches were all built on a standard basilica plan, looking directly to the great church of St Peter’s in the Vatican, originally founded by Constantine; they constituted a self-representation of the unbroken continuity of papal legitimacy and centrality. In three churches, S. Prassede, S. Cecilia and S. Maria in Domnica, Paschal simply did this on a rather larger scale. S. Prassede, some 50 metres long excluding its courtyard, has expensive internal finishings, such as good-quality reused columns and a good deal of marble, some of which is still in situ; it also had a remarkable quantity of gold and silver furnishings, as the near-contemporary biography of Paschal in the Liber Pontificalis informs us, including a silver canopy weighing 910 pounds, and a silver image of St Praxedis herself on her coffin in the crypt, weighing 99 pounds. The eye is caught today by the dramatic quality of the mosaics in the apse and triumphal arch, and in the side chapel of S. Zenone, a burial chapel for Paschal’s mother, Theodora. The apse mosaics, of the risen Christ and associated saints (including Praxedis), with a portrait representation of the pope, copy those of the sixth-century church of SS. Cosma e Damiano in the forum, built by Felix IV (526-30), and are a further sign of Paschal’s concern to show himself as part of an unbroken papal tradition. It is worth remembering, however, that the Liber Pontificalis, while mentioning the mosaics, puts rather more stress on Paschal’s gold and silver gifts, and also on the pope’s clearest innovation in S. Prassede, the moving of a large quantity of saints’ bodies from Rome’s catacombs to the church, which a contemporary inscription claims to have numbered 2,300 in total.

  Paschal had a variety of audiences - one could well say targets - for his activities in S. Prassede. One was the Byzantine emperors, who in 815 had readopted Iconoclasm, a hostility to holy images of God and the saints (on which more in the next chapter) which the pope was in the front line of opposition to. Paschal wrote critical letters to Constantinople about it, and sheltered Iconophile monks in Rome; S. Prassede indeed was endowed with a community of Greek monks, who must have been part of the Iconophile observance. In the context of the material culture of the church, the numerous mosaic figures in S. Prassede’s apse were too traditional a set of motifs for their detail to be a specific response to Iconoclasm, but the expense of Praxedis’s silver image is quite likely to have been. It must be added that Paschal here could well have had an eye on Frankish Iconoclasts too (see Chapter 17). Only fifteen years before, Theodulf of Orléans (d. c. 826) had constructed his intriguing and unique monument to his Iconoclast beliefs, the private chapel at Germigny-des-Prés on the Loire, whose apse mosaics show two angels (not human, so acceptable to represent) and the ark of the covenant. These representations were a polemical response to some of the arguments of Byzantine Iconophiles, and had a complex relationship to Old Testament interpretation, as much of Theodulf’s own writings had; they thus show how theological positions could have quite a detailed effect on western visual imagery in this period. Paschal is unlikely to have known about Theodulf’s chapel (and his Roman audience is unlikely to have heard of Theodulf at all), but he knew of Frankish Iconoclast sympathizers such as Claudius of Turin, and he opposed them explicitly; S. Prassede could at least serve as a visual reassertion of the centrality of Roman and papal traditions and the superiority of papal positions on the matter of religious belief. Paschal’s buildings responded to a network of contestations of papal positions simply by, so to speak, repeating themselves, but louder.

  Paschal had two other audiences for his building campaigns. One was the Frankish court itself, to whose power in Rome he was perhaps the firmest opponent in the Carolingian period. There were always Franks in Rome by now, as pilgrims (as we saw in Chapter 8), but also, at the political level, as emissaries and dealers; they were expected to see what the pope was doing, and to report it back northwards. They would have reported that Paschal’s churches were not just larger and pricier than those of his predecessors, but were as large as those of the Carolingians themselves; and they challenged monuments like the octagonal royal chapel in the palace at Aachen by, once again, their traditionalism - Rome had no need of Carolingian protagonism, including its moral reform programme; it was simply itself, and could carry on as before.

  The other audience was the Romans themselves. Paschal was like Justinian and al-Walid in building big to impress a local audience, the people who would be inside or near S. Prassede most often; the church was indeed on one of the major processional routes of the city, leading out over the Esquiline hill to the basilica of S. Lorenzo fuori le mura. All the major popes of the century after Paul I were builders, indeed, and it is arguable that it was their collective intervention, above all in church-building, that did most to make Rome into the ‘papal city’ that it remained for the next millennium. But it is Paschal’s appropriation of so many relics which marks his position most clearly here. Rome had a highly dispersed array of cult-sites, scattered across the huge field of ruins that the city had become, and based on the burial places of numerous martyrs and other prominent Christians of the pre-Constantinian period; they extended, in particular, way out into the countryside in Rome’s extramural cemeteries. These were hard for popes to protect, as Paul I already recognized (he imported several saints into papal churches inside the walls after Lombard attacks); this became all the more pressing in the early ninth century, given a growing Frankish obsession with Roman relics, which by the 820s extended to outright theft (below, Chapter 17). The sites were also hard for popes to control politically; the churches associated with these scattered cults had local communities and aristocratic families as patrons, quite as much as they were under papal patronage. To empty them of 2,300 saints, who were to be transported to a new papal prestige foundation, was thus a notably authoritarian move. It cannot have contributed to Paschal’s popularity, which as we have seen led to contestation in 823 by some of the aristocratic officials of the papal hierarchy; but it was certainly an assertion of his power - and anyway he had defeated his opponents before he unexpectedly died in 824.

  Aachen was only the
biggest of a long sequence of Merovingian, Carolingian, Ottonian palaces across the centuries in the Frankish world. Most of the others do not survive, and have not even been excavated (exceptions include the Merovingian Malay and the Ottonian Tilleda, both fairly small, and some rather grander complexes, such as Carolingian Ingelheim and Compiègne, and Ottonian Paderborn); but they are described occasionally in detail, in written texts.

  Palaces were long-standing sites of royal or imperial rhetoric, aimed to impress both royal subjects and ambassadors or other visitors from outside. Even in societies where kings lived in single wooden halls, these were seen as remarkable, ‘greater than the children of men had ever heard tell of’, as the Beowulf poet said of Heorot, and acting as metonyms for the fate of the kingdom itself, as with Cynddylan’s hall, ‘dark tonight, without a fire, without a bed’, as a ninth-century poet wrote of an eastern Welsh king after his death in battle. They were barred by élite guards who would only let in appropriate people, as with Hrothgar’s court-officer Wulfgar in Beowulf, or Arthur’s door-keeper Glewlwyd in Culhwch ac Olwen, a Welsh text of the eleventh century; this added to the honour involved in entering them and participating in the Königsnähe (‘closeness to the king’) inside. These are heroic texts, in which everything and everyone is larger than life; the east Roman ambassador Priskos was less amazed at Attila’s very similar palace complex in 449. But he describes it neutrally and with respect, as a splendid hall made of planed wood, surrounded by other buildings, including dining halls and colonnades, some carved and well constructed, the whole in a wooden enclosure with towers, ‘with an eye not to security but to elegance’. The furnishings inside, in Attila’s case in linen and wool, and multi-coloured hangings ‘like those which the Greeks and Romans prepare for weddings’, were also designed for effect. Yeavering probably had this sort of impact, too, on a smaller scale, which would have been all the greater for visitors from smaller centres than Constantinople.