The Cost of Peace
The new arrivals demanded and obtained a share of the empire’s capital wealth, which at this date meant primarily land. We know for certain that many of the great landowners of post-Roman times were of Germanic descent, even though we have very little information as to how exactly they had obtained their wealth at the expense of its previous owners. However, just occasionally we know a little more. We have already met some landowners in northern Gaul, who in about 442 attempted to resist a settlement of Alans by treaty, and lost everything for their pains. In Africa, with the Vandal conquest, we hear of aristocrats who lost all their property and fled abroad: in 451 the western emperor Valentinian III issued a law granting to ‘the dignitaries and landowners of Africa, who have been stripped bare by the devastation of the enemy’, lands in neighbouring provinces that were still under imperial control. Elsewhere the information, although grim, is very much vaguer. Gildas, in sixth-century Britain, for instance tells us how
a number of the wretched survivors were caught in the mountains and butchered wholesale. Others, their spirits broken by hunger, went to surrender to the enemy; they were fated to be slaves for ever … Others made for lands beyond the sea; beneath the swelling sails they loudly wailed, singing a psalm … ‘You have given us like sheep for eating and scattered us among the heathen.’
Gildas’s story, although undoubtedly greatly exaggerated, does find partial support in evidence of emigration by Britons, who left their homeland in this period to settle in Brittany across the Channel.2
In a few areas of the empire, of which Italy is the only sizeable one, there was an organized and formal division of resources between the incomers and the native population. In 476 a coup in Italy, led by the general Odoacer, deposed the last emperor in the West, and distributed ‘a third of the land’ of the peninsula amongst Odoacer’s Germanic soldiery. As so often in this period, the evidence we have for this allocation is not quite full enough to show beyond doubt what the rebellious soldiery received; and there has recently been a major scholarly debate, between those who believe that only tax revenue was granted into barbarian hands, and those who stick to the idea that land itself was distributed.3 If one thinks that tax alone was granted, the initial allocation of resources in Italy will have been painless to Italian landowners. Only the state will have suffered, through the loss of tax revenue; but even this loss will have been balanced by the ending of the need to salary the army.
Personally I am convinced that some land was taken away from Italian landowners in 476, and that the settlement therefore hurt. I believe this, because a number of different texts talk of the division of ‘land’, ‘the soil’, and ‘estates’, not of tax; and because there is also explicit mention of ‘losses’ suffered by the Roman population. For instance, when describing the allocation of resources to the Ostrogoths in Italy, an official letter, which is undoubtedly seeking to minimize the impact of the settlement on the Romans of Italy, still speaks of how ‘losses have increased the friendship of the two peoples, and a share of the land purchased a defender’.4 With a very great deal of ingenuity, references to the Germanic troops receiving land can be interpreted as a figurative way of describing grants of taxation. But, if the settlement had really involved only the transfer of taxation revenue from the state to the settlers, why is this not lauded explicitly, and why are ‘losses’ mentioned?
Whatever the original allocation of resources to the new Germanic masters, no one disputes that throughout the empire they very rapidly added to their landed wealth through the astute use or abuse of power. Ultimate power was, of course, now in Germanic hands, even though the new rulers were often happy to share much of their authority with Roman ministers. At a local level, the degree of power-sharing with the Roman aristocracy probably varied. For instance, in early sixth-century Italy there were large numbers of Ostrogoths settled in the North, to defend against any further invasion, and here their power and authority must have been keenly felt. But the new rulers were only very lightly scattered across southern Italy and Sicily; when Justinian’s general Belisarius invaded Italy from the South in 535–6, it was only when he reached Naples, a third of the way up the peninsula, that he encountered resistance from a town with a substantial Gothic garrison. But under the Ostrogoths all cities, at least in theory, had Gothic ‘counts of the city’ in charge of a military garrison, and ‘counts of the Goths’ with authority over any Gothic inhabitants. These ‘counts of the Goths’ also wielded one very significant power over the natives of Italy—the final say in any dispute that might arise between a Roman and a Goth.5 As in recent colonial states, like British India, native magistrates in Ostrogothic Italy were not allowed to judge a member of the ruling race.
Unsurprisingly, and with good Roman precedent behind them, the Germanic settlers rapidly used their power to acquire more wealth. We are told, for instance, that Theodahad, nephew of Theoderic the Ostrogothic king of Italy, was a man who ‘had gained possession of most of the lands of Tuscany, and was eager by violent methods to wrest the remainder from its owners’, and that for him ‘to have a neighbour seemed a kind of misfortune’. Theodahad, as a close relative of the king, was exceptionally well placed to abuse power and build up massive estates; but at a local level there must have been many other Goths quietly lining their pockets through their monopoly of military power, and the political immunity that this gave them. We learn, for instance, of two unfortunate Italian smallholders dispossessed and enslaved by a powerful Goth, Tanca. In theory this particular story had a happy ending; an official was ordered to investigate Tanca’s activities: ‘the whole truth of the case between the parties is to be examined, and you are to dispense a justice that accords with law, and corresponds to your character.’ However, the man receiving these high-minded instructions was another Goth, Cunigast, who, we happen to know, himself acquired a reputation for abusing power. The Roman aristocrat Boethius wrote of him: ‘how many times have I stood in the way of Cunigast when he made an assault on the wealth of some helpless person.’6 History does not record the fate of our two Italian smallholders, but, in the hands of Tanca and Cunigast, the cards were stacked firmly against them.
Working with the New Masters
Germanic rule, once peace was established, was not an unmitigated disaster for all the native population. Above all, as we have seen at the start of this chapter, the foundation of the new kingdoms certainly restored a degree of stability to the West, allowing normal life to resume its course, though under new masters. The Ostrogoths in Italy very explicitly presented their rule in this light: ‘While the army of Goths wages war, let the Roman live in peace.’7 However, it is worth remembering that this was ‘peace’ in the context of the dying or dead empire, and relative to the dreadful conditions of much of the fifth century. In the fourth century, before the invasions of the West began, there had never been any question of needing large numbers of troops under arms far from the frontiers in areas like Italy, let alone of allowing them to rule the peninsula. If the settlement of the Germanic armies was a satisfactory way to re-establish stability, it was satisfactory faute de mieux.
Fortunately, the invaders entered the empire in groups that were small enough to leave plenty to share with the locals. Furthermore, in order for their regimes to operate smoothly, the new rulers needed and wanted Roman aristocratic administrators and supporters. The author of a sermon delivered in the southern Gallic town of Riez, shortly after its surrender to the Visigoths in about 477, was putting a brave face on things, but not being entirely untruthful, when he said of the conquerors: ‘Behold, the whole world trembles before the clamour of this most powerful race, and yet, he who was considered a barbarian, comes to you with a Roman spirit …’.8 The Germanic peoples entered the empire with no ideology that they wished to impose, and found it most advantageous and profitable to work closely within the well-established and sophisticated structures of Roman life. The Romans as a group unquestionably lost both wealth and power in ord
er to meet the needs of a new, and dominant, Germanic aristocracy. But they did not lose everything, and many individual Romans were able to prosper under the new dispensation.
In many regions, despite some expropriation and loss, Roman aristocratic families continued wealthy and influential under Germanic rule. In southern and central Italy, for instance, the overwhelming impression is of aristocratic continuity, at least into the sixth century; in Gaul too many important families are known to have kept at least part of their wealth and status, particularly in the south. Even in areas where brutal expropriation occurred, such as Vandal Africa and Anglo-Saxon Britain, it is either demonstrably untrue, or very unlikely, that all native landowners were dispossessed. A certain Victorianus of Hadrumentum, who was certainly not of Vandal descent, was, we are told, ‘as wealthy as any man in Africa’ in 484, and had risen in Vandal service to the office of ‘proconsul of Carthage’. In the late seventh century King Ine of Wessex set down laws for his own Saxon people and for Britons under his rule. These laws include a reference to Britons (called by their English name ‘Welshmen’) with substantial estates and considerable legal status: ‘A Welshman, if he has five hides, is a man of a six-hundred [shilling] wergild.’ Even in Britain the incomers had not dispossessed everyone.9
Smallholders, and in particular dependent tenants, perhaps managed to hold onto their land even more effectively than the aristocracy, because the numbers involved in the invasions and migrations were substantial, but not overwhelming. A large Germanic group probably numbered a few tens of thousands, while regions like Italy and Roman Africa had populations of several millions. In the case of the Vandals, we are told that their leader Geiseric had them counted at the moment of their crossing into Africa in 429, and that they numbered 80,000, including children, the old, and slaves. This figure is almost certainly a considerable exaggeration, since Geiseric is said to have ordered the census for a specific purpose of making ‘the reputation of his people a source of dread’.10
In the case of the Anglo-Saxons and others who bordered Roman territory by land or sea, the number of immigrants was probably substantially larger, since here the initial conquests could readily be followed up by secondary migration. However, except perhaps in regions that were right on the frontiers, it is unlikely that the numbers involved were so large as to dispossess many at the level of the peasantry. Many smallholders in the new kingdoms probably continued to hold their land much as before, except that much of the tax and rent that they paid will now have gone to enrich Germanic masters. In the south of the Vandals’ African kingdom, forty-five written tablets from the end of the fifth century were discovered in the 1920s. These revealed Roman smallholders, with leases held by right of a centuries-old Roman law—in this area, except that the leases were now dated by the regnal year of a Vandal king, nothing obvious had changed for the local farmers.11
Most of the new rulers ran their kingdoms in a style that closely imitated that of the empire, and that required Roman administrators to make it function. Except in Britain and parts of the Balkans, most of the basic structures of society, which needed experienced Romans to maintain them (the Christian Church, the cities, secular administration, Roman law, and so on), persisted under Germanic rule, at least in the early days. Indeed, in some parts of the former empire, the new rulers took explicit pride in maintaining Roman ways—as Ostrogothic propaganda in early sixth-century Italy expressed it, ‘The glory of the Goths is to protect the civil life.’12 Under the Ostrogoths, the entire administrative and the legal structure of the Roman state—which was, of course, both efficient and profitable—was maintained, and the traditional civilian offices continued in aristocratic Roman hands. The early Germanic Kings of Italy, and elsewhere, even minted their gold coins in the name of the reigning emperor in the East, as though the Roman empire was still in existence (Fig. 4.1).
When they did brutal things to their subjects, as they sometimes did, Germanic kings often chose to do them in a very Roman way and for very Roman reasons. The Vandal king Huneric (477–84)—an Arian Christian, like the rest of his people—was, according to one’s point of view, either a heretic and a savage persecutor of the native Catholic majority of Africa, or a caring and orthodox ruler who wished to lift his subjects from the appalling doctrinal errors in which they wallowed. He instituted his attacks on Catholicism in a purely Roman style, issuing edicts in Latin, which spelled out his own titles to rule, the errors of the ‘homo-ousian’ heretics (as he termed the Catholics), and the divine justice of his own position: ‘In this matter our Clemency has followed the will of divine judgement …’.
4.1 The empire lives on in the West, if only in name. Gold coin issued by the Ostrogothic king of Italy, Theoderic. It bears the bust and name of the eastern emperor, Anastasius, and is identical to those issued by Anastasius himself. The only indication that this is a coin produced in an independent Germanic kingdom is the tiny mint mark of Ravenna on the reverse of the coin (next to the cross held by the Victory).
Such ‘Roman’ rule required Roman servants, both at the level of humble clerks and functionaries, and at the level of aristocratic administrators. Of the humbler servants, admittedly, we know very little, though a story, again from Vandal Africa under Huneric, does shed some light on them. The king was apparently particularly concerned to stamp out any possibility of Vandal conversions to Catholicism; to this end he ordered that no one in Vandal dress should be allowed to enter a Catholic church, and posted armed men to enforce the rule with considerable brutality. This order was vehemently opposed by the Catholic bishop of Carthage, Eugenius, ‘because a large number of our Catholics came to church dressed in their [Vandal] clothes, since they worked in the royal household’.13
It was important for Germanic kings to work closely with aristocratic Roman ministers and advisers, both to ensure the smooth and profitable running of their administrations, and to be confident of local political support. All the new kingdoms from which evidence survives provide examples of a mutually advantageous arrangement between Germanic kings and members of the local aristocracy: the king gave native aristocrats access to power, security of tenure for their lands and status, and grants of privileges and wealth; the aristocrats, in return, gave service and support, both at court and in the localities. Even from Anglo-Saxon Britain we have evidence of this kind of arrangement. The laws of Ine tell us of the king’s ‘horse-Welshmen’, Britons who had entered the West-Saxon king’s service as mounted warriors, and had thereby gained a privileged legal status.14
On the Continent, the examples of cooperation between local Roman aristocrats and Germanic kings are myriad. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of our sources that we have very little detailed evidence of what precisely these Roman servants of the new rulers gained from their service. But it is very obvious that a Roman like Cassiodorus, one of the principal ministers of Theoderic and his successors as kings of Italy, must have been richly rewarded by his masters. The disintegration of the unified empire, and its replacement by a scatter of Germanic courts, indeed gave provincial Romans readier access to influence and power than they had held in the fourth century, when there was only one imperial court, often at a great distance. Paulinus of Pella, for instance, a landowner of south-western Gaul, was awarded the important office of ‘Count of the Private Largesse’ by a puppet-emperor created by the Visigoths during their stay in southern Gaul in 412–16. This was a marked step up in the world for a provincial Gallic aristocrat; though, sadly for Paulinus, his ambition came badly unstuck when the Goths withdrew from southern Gaul and the emperor in Italy, Honorius, reasserted his power. However, the settlement of the Visigoths around Toulouse and Bordeaux in 419 again gave Paulinus hope: two of his sons went to live amongst the Goths in Bordeaux, in the hope of furthering the family’s interests. Again, sadly, these hopes of power and influence proved transitory: both sons died young, one of them having gained ‘both the friendship and the anger of the king’. Others, however, were luckier—Paulinus tells us
that at the time he was writing, in around 458, ‘we see many flourishing under Gothic favour’.15
Most of the aristocrats who are known to have entered Germanic service in the fifth and early sixth centuries still did so in the traditional Roman way, as civilians. In the later fifth century Sidonius Apollinaris, the doyen of learned aristocratic standards in Gaul, wrote to Syagrius, the great-grandson of a Roman consul of the same name. Syagrius junior had very sensibly entered Burgundian service, and was in demand as a translator and legal expert. His role as a ‘new Solon to the Burgundians’ had given him considerable influence amongst his new masters: ‘you are loved, frequented, and sought after; you delight, and you are chosen; you are consulted, you make decisions, and you are listened to.’ However, there were also Romans who, from quite an early date, entered the service of the new kings as warriors. Italy enjoyed peace for most of the fifth and early sixth centuries; it was therefore also one of the very last regions where the late-Roman tradition of a demilitarized aristocracy persisted. But even here there were Romans, like a certain Cyprianus, who served their new Gothic masters loyally and fully in a military as well as a civilian capacity.16
In imagining a regime such as that of the Ostrogoths in early sixth-century Italy, we should certainly not imagine a hard-and-fast horizontal division of power and resources, with everyone above the line a Goth, and everyone below a Roman. Romans like Cyprianus and Cassiodorus were very wealthy, and were major powers in the land, able to lord it over many a humble Goth. On the other hand, we should also never forget that both royal power and almost all military might lay in the hands of Goths, and that in cases of legal dispute between a Goth and a Roman it was always a Gothic judge who presided over the court. Elsewhere in the West, the formal advantaging of the newcomers was sometimes even starker. In the Frankish Salic Law of around 500, Romans were offered the protection of a wergild (blood-price), alongside their Frankish neighbours. One group of Romans, members of the king’s retinue, had higher wergilds than those of ordinary free Franks. But, and this is very telling, Franks in the royal retinue were judged to be worth exactly double the amount of an equivalent Roman; while ‘ordinary’ Roman landowners (not in royal service) were similarly valued at exactly half the price of a normal free Frank.
The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization Page 8