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

by Chris Wickham

  Underpinning the political systems and political changes just discussed was a network of structures common to all the societies of this book. They were not specific to the early Middle Ages - indeed, they arguably characterized most of the pre-capitalist world - but they need to be recognized if the period is to be understood. I shall here separate them into three: the accumulation of wealth, the institutionalization of politics, and the culture of the public, and each will be characterized briefly.

  Wealth and power in our period were overwhelmingly based on the land. The more one could take from the land, that is, from its peasant cultivators, either in rents or in taxes, the richer one was, the more resources one could manipulate, the more armed men one could support, the more power one had. Taxation was the surest means of exploiting the land and the peasantry, for in theory everyone had to pay it, not just the tenants of one’s own properties - hence the relative prominence of Byzantium and the caliphate, which were tax-raising states, unlike those of the post-Roman West. But, even in the West, Frankish kings in particular could get rich just by taking rents from extensive royal lands, even in times, like the late seventh century, when they were not taking wealth from their neighbours too. The same logic worked for the aristocracies of each political system. A rich aristocracy generally aided rulers, for in early medieval political conditions most aristocracies were closely involved with royal/imperial power. The stronger kings were, the more they could give to, and thus attract, their élite supporters; the accumulation of wealth thus doubly reinforced political cohesion. The only major exception to this was the caliphate, where local aristocracies had relatively little to do with political power. For a long time, caliphs were so rich that this did not matter, but it was in the end a contributing factor to the break-up of ‘Abbasid unity.

  The link between wealth and power meant that a strong state essentially depended on peasant exploitation. We cannot easily say which peasants would have preferred: the security most powerful rulers could give them (a security which was only relative: the reigns of Justinian, Charlemagne and Basil II have all left clear evidence of local violence and oppression); or the autonomy, and lower rents and tributes, which most peasants had in the small and weak polities of Britain or the Slav and Scandinavian worlds before the tenth century, an autonomy which was risky if stronger invaders came through on raiding and slaving expeditions. We simply do not have the information that would allow us to tell, and nor indeed did most early medieval peasants themselves; which seems preferable will thus largely depend on one’s own presuppositions (I think they would have preferred autonomy). But the wealth and power of the rich did go with the exploitation of the poor, and with restrictions on the fluidity of peasant life. As just implied, peasants were for a long time less restricted in the North. They were also, in parts of the post-Roman western provinces, and maybe also in parts of the Byzantine empire, more autonomous in the sixth to eighth centuries (in Byzantium, the seventh to ninth) than before or after; states and aristocracies were generally weaker in the earliest Middle Ages than under the Carolingians or the Macedonian emperors. With the arrival of stronger powers, local controls on the peasantry increased again, and in the West these controls continued to increase even when Carolingian power broke up, spreading northwards across the European continent too.

  With wealth also came exchange. Rich aristocracies (and churches, and kings) had more disposable wealth to buy artisanal goods, which could thus be produced in larger quantities, and sold more widely - even to peasants, in some cases. Poorer aristocracies and more autonomous peasantries generated less specialized productions. There was more complex production and exchange in the Roman empire than in the western successor states, or than in eighth-century Byzantium; later, at a lower level, there was more complex production and exchange (by far) in the Merovingian heartland of northern Francia than in its English or north German/Scandinavian neighbours; with the Carolingians exchange expanded in Francia again, although not matching Roman levels or those of the active economies of the Muslim world. This tight linkage between aristocratic wealth and peasant exploitation on the one hand and economic complexity on the other would last for a long time into the Middle Ages; it only began to weaken when large-scale production became so general and the sale of its products so capillary that it could begin to rely on peasant, not aristocratic, demand. With the possible exception of Egypt (where, however, the work has not yet been done which could tell us either way), this would not begin to be the case in Europe and the Mediterranean until after 1200 at the earliest, and often much later. In our period, the concentration of wealth, exploitation, exchange and political power went hand in hand, and (with due caution) one can be used as a guide to the others - which, given the scattered nature of our evidence, is often useful.

  The second element to be stressed here is the degree to which power was based on permanent political patterns. It was all very well for a king to have landed resources, but if his power was simply based on the personal loyalty of his armed men - a loyalty which never came free - then, unless he was permanently expanding the area he controlled, he would risk running out of land, having given too much of it away, and his power would go as well. This was seen by Marc Bloch as a permanent tendency of feudal society in the West after 900, and we have seen the problems of the ‘politics of land’ on a number of occasions in this book, most recently in the context of the collapse of royal authority in West Francia in the tenth century (Chapters 18 and 21), which is indeed the classic example of the pattern. How did rulers cope? For, outside the highly personalized and small-scale political systems of (for example) post-Roman Britain and Ireland, early medieval rulers did indeed often manage to maintain large and effective states for long periods of time, even though they were constantly granting their resources away.

  This was relatively easy for tax-raising states, the Roman and Byzantine empires and most of the Islamic polities. There, the state had a major resource-base which could pay for a salaried army, largely independent of aristocratic support, and also reward the loyal on a very large scale; only in extreme crisis circumstances (as with the fifth-century West, or the break-up of al-Andalus in the 1010s) could aristocrats contemplate going it alone, and normally they associated themselves as closely with rulers as the latter would let them. Tax-raising states also needed a complex bureaucratic hierarchy just to collect the taxes, which, together with the military hierarchy, created a career-structure for the ambitious based on a set of stable - even if often inchoate - institutions. This institutionalization of political practice was a direct inheritance from the Roman (and also Sassanian) empire, to Byzantium and the caliphate. It was in each sufficiently complex to sustain two separate élites, one civilian, the other military. Under Rome, the civilian elite had the highest status, and attracted the landed aristocracy most firmly into it; under all their successors the military hierarchy was dominant. But either way the state was, in its basic structures, pretty solid, as the survival of the Byzantine empire after the Arab conquests shows.

  In the post-Roman West, most of the bureaucratic hierarchy dissolved together with the tax system, and the army became a set of aristocratic military followings; the institutions of the Roman state were much reduced. They did not go away, however; there were counts and dukes and palace officials still in Francia, Italy, Visigothic Spain, and these positions were highly remunerative (they had lands attached) and competed for. The Carolingians extended this with their temporary concessions of honores, which could involve office, royal land, or control over monasteries. Almost every political player had to have an office of some kind, or else be very close to the king on a personal level, as Einhard was. Again, going it alone was for long inconceivable, except on political margins, such as the mountains of northern Spain in the sixth century or the eastern Alps around Chur in the sixth to eighth. The political community was also regularly united in public assemblies, in church councils, in the army-muster, and in the king’s court, as we shall see in a mome
nt; those who failed to attend risked losing their lands, at least those conferred by kings. These meetings were sufficiently regular for them to be in large and ramshackle polities like Francia and Spain, as important an institutional underpinning as office-holding was. As we saw in Chapters 5 and 16, political players in Francia, even those who lived a long way from court, needed to know where the king was; patronage, faction-fighting, sometimes even a sense of public responsibility, all depended on royal direction. This centrality for kings - or for their courts when kings were minors, or marginalized, as in Francia in the late seventh century - was reinforced by the knowledge that the disloyal would face a retribution which was fairly certain to come in the end, even if it did not come immediately. Fear reinforced self-interest in the political calculations of the aristocracy, and both helped the cohesion of the major post-Roman states. By the tenth century at the latest, and in some respects already in the eighth, this political logic also extended to England.

  Linked to this is the final element in early medieval political systems which I want to stress here, the culture of the public, the strongest inheritance of Rome. The Roman empire had a strong sense of the difference between the public, the arena of the state and the community, and the private sphere; the boundary was not drawn in exactly the same place as it is today, and there was no neat opposition between ‘public’ and ‘private’, but the uses of the word publicus were analogous to those we are used to. This difference was easy to maintain in a tax-raising state, for the taxes emanated from and supported the public sphere. The Byzantines continued the concept without change, and the Muslim polities, though using different terminology, invested such ‘public’ functions as law and collective worship with the same sort of importance. But the post-Roman western polities maintained the idea of the public arena too; it was a very important image in Visigothic, Lombard, Merovingian and Carolingian practice. Royal property, law courts, royal officials, and assemblies both great and small were regularly described as publicus in early medieval Latin texts.

  The clear sense that we get from our western sources that the world of royal power was also the public world of the collectivity (of free males) as a whole is the best justification I can offer for consistently using, in this book as elsewhere, the word ‘state’ to describe these western political systems. Although one essential resource for this public sphere, taxation, was already vestigial by the seventh century, the assembly, an import into political practice from the Germanic North, was a further reinforcement. In Scandinavia, and for a long time in England, the assembly was the only collective element in a political power-structure that otherwise relied entirely on the personal bonds between kings (or lords) and their closest retainers. In Francia and the other Romano-Germanic kingdoms, by contrast, it came to form a crucial part of the imagery of a public sphere which was otherwise Roman in its origin, and indeed it extended it further, in that the assembly, at least in theory, linked the king directly to all the free male population. That real politics was also based on a manipulation of constantly shifting factions and personal relationships does not take away from this conception of the public sphere; indeed, in the high Carolingian period the whole moral project of the king and his kingdom, the correctio of the faithful, could be described as a (or the) res publica. It is not, on this level, surprising that Roman law could be explicitly drawn on in the legislation of Charles the Bald; its presuppositions about the nature of the political system continued to be entirely apposite. This of course further strengthened the relevance of royal politics for the ambitious; privatus did not denote any sort of ‘private’ political activity, but, when used in this context, came simply to mean ‘powerless’. Public power was all there was, even if the resources of the Roman public world were no longer available.

  It is the public world in this sense that weakened in the tenth century and, in particular, the eleventh in the West, above all in the west Frankish lands. The parameters of politics changed, as we saw in the last chapters of the book. In a seigneurie banale, the old public rights now taken over by local lords were seen as part of their property, and could be divided between heirs or alienated away. Lordship could be claimed by people who had never met a king; the title of count could be assumed in some areas by anyone who was powerful enough, and passed on to his heirs. Kings in France or cities in Italy in the twelfth century used the terminology of publicus, but they had to construct it from the ground upwards, in a bricolage of links of personal dependence and collective reaffirma tion which by now had very little to do with the Roman past. This more ‘private’ world was not worse than that of the Carolingians and their predecessors; aristocrats behaved badly in both, to their peers and to their (and other people’s) peasantries. But it was different: the dialectic between the public sphere and (what we call) private interest had gone. The local powers that castle lords managed to enforce over the villages around were no longer illegal or quasi-legal, as opposed to the public law of kings, but instead became a new legality: in France, in particular, for a century in some regions, this is all there was.

  The years around 1000 are a better end-point for some regions of Europe than for others. They do not work for Byzantium at all; at the other end of Europe, they work very well for al-Andalus (and also for the ‘Abbasid caliphate, though 950 would there have been better). The late tenth century also denotes a break in much of Slav and Scandinavian history, as it marks the beginnings of durable state-formation there. In East Francia/Germany and in England, in both of which Carolingian political parameters easily survived past 1000 (in England, indeed, they never went away), the millennium is not such a good divide; it comes a little early for Italy (1080 would have been better as a date for the end of the public sphere there: the judicial assembly, in particular, survived until then without much difficulty), though it works well for West Francia/France. Which is to say: no date is perfect. I chose 1000 simply because I wanted to explore the divergencies of the Carolingian successor states and of post-Alfredian England, and the years of Byzantine success, in the tenth century, and did not want to add in the Seljuk Turks, or the problems of ‘Gregorian reform’ and the start of the grand narrative of moral progress which I lamented in Chapter 1, in the eleventh. But ending with a fundamental shift in the concepts of political power, even if only in a few parts of Europe, does not seem unreasonable. The inheritance of Rome, in those regions at least, lasted right up to around 1000; but after that its shadow faded away.

  Notes and Bibliographic Guides

  Abbreviations

  Chapter 1

  Authors of basic current approaches in English to the whole period are cited in the body of the text of this chapter. For initial introductions to documentary source material, and also basic syntheses, century by century, five large Cambridge collective histories are an essential point of reference, CAH, vols. 13 and 14, and NCMH, vols. 1 - 3. All were published after 1995. There is no equivalent for archaeology. These volumes also leave out the Arab world, although a revised Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1, is nearing publication. The major journal in English for the period is EME, which began in 1992. The largest set of source material in translation is the invaluable and steadily expanding web collection, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html; the translations there are generally old, but it is an excellent starting point.

  p. 4. National identities: an excellent comparative analysis of Britain and Ireland is by T. M. Charles-Edwards, in R. Evans (ed.), Lordship and Learning (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 11-37.

  p. 7. The Transformation of the Roman World series was published in 12 volumes by Brill of Leiden. They are, as a group, notably more innovative in their methodology than the Cambridge histories. They focus on the West up to 800.

  p. 9. Riposte to continuity: B. Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005); see further A. Giardina, ‘Esplosione di tardoantico’, Studi storici, 40 (1999), pp. 157-80, and cf. for an overview C. Wickham in South African Journal of Medieval and Renaissa
nce Studies, 14 (2004), pp. 1 - 22.

  p. 10. Overviews: R. Collins, Early Medieval Europe, 300-1000 (Basingstoke, 1991; revised edition 1999); J. M. H. Smith, Europe after Rome (Oxford, 2005), with a remarkable annotated bibliography; for archaeological approaches, R. Hodges and D. Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe (London, 1983), even though it was written so early, remains the only significant overview. Social history is dominated by surveys in French: P. Depreux, Les Sociétés occidentales du milieu du VIe à la fin du IXe siècle (Rennes, 2002); R. Le Jan, La Société du haut Moyen ge (Paris, 2003); J.-P. Devroey, Économie rurale et société dans l’Europe franque (VI-IX siècles) (Paris, 2003); idem, Puissants et misérables (Brussels, 2006).

  p. 13. Critical recent approaches to Gregory include W. Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History (A.D. 550-800) (Princeton, 1988); M. Heinzelmann, Gregory of Tours (Cambridge, 2001); I. Wood, Gregory of Tours (Oxford, 1994), and in Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire, 71 (1993), pp. 253-70; K. Mitchell and I. Wood (eds.), The World of Gregory of Tours (Leiden, 2002).

  Chapter 2

  The best brief introductions to the later Roman empire are by Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (London, 1971), and by Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire (London, 1993) and The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity AD 395-600 (London, 1993). The essential detailed surveys in English are A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284 - 602 (Oxford, 1964) and CAH, vols. 13 and 14. S. Mitchell, A History of the Later Roman Empire, AD 284-641 (Oxford, 2007) is another useful introductory account. The sixth century in the East is filled out further by M. Maas (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge, 2005). For further bibliographies on all the topics in this chapter, see these works. Some issues in this chapter are discussed in greater detail in my Framing the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005). Other important recent late Roman surveys include G. Bowersock et al. (eds.), Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass., 1999); A. Giardina (ed.), Società romana e impero tardoantico, 4 vols. (Bari, 1986); A. Carandini et al. (eds.), Storia di Roma, vol. 3 (2 vols.) (Turin, 1992); and A. Demandt, Die Spätantike (Munich, 1989).