Escape From Rome

by Walter Scheidel

  Tellingly, none of medieval Europe’s more influential innovations, from chartered communes, universities, and guilds to parliaments and public debt, were meaningfully associated with Byzantium. The asymmetries between the economically most vibrant parts of Latin Europe and Byzantium are also reflected in the fact that it was Italian city-states that pioneered institutional innovations later adopted in Byzantine commerce, and more brutally in the wide-ranging trade concessions the Byzantine state granted to leading Italian city-states—first Venice and later Genoa—from the late eleventh century onward, which were followed by an Italian takeover of trade in the thirteenth century. Small-state Italians were responsible for Byzantium’s integration into wider commercial networks.16

  Quasi-Byzantine iterations of hegemonic empire in Europe would likely have shared at least some of these traits. To be sure, the Roman-Byzantine template was not the only option, and great imperial powers founded on different principles might perhaps have emerged over time. Yet the larger and more durable those powers might have become, the more their success would have suppressed the peculiarly European trajectory of polycentric development that underpinned the continent’s long march toward modernity. From a global comparative perspective, there is no compelling reason to assume that any such formation would have broken the mold that was common to all real-life Old World empires by managing to marry imperial unity with transformative innovation. Some variant of the Roman or Asian imperial tradition and its attendant economic conservatism is thus by far the most economical counterfactual.17

  The answer to the question of what the Romans ever did for them is therefore more or less the same as for other traditional empires. This is also true for the answer to the question of what the Romans would not have done for later generations had their empire persisted or returned in a similar guise: business as usual would have been the order of the day, with far poorer odds of transformative change. But what did they do for us?

  ROMAN LEGACIES

  This is a valid question: even if the Roman empire’s failure to persist or return was its most consequential contribution to much later breakthroughs, it need not have been the only one that mattered in bringing about these unexpected outcomes. The absence of Roman-scale empire from post-Roman Europe is not the same as the absence of any such empire from all of Europe’s history. Did the Roman empire’s existence help us along on our “Great Escape”?

  The Roman cultural legacy is famously rich and varied—from Romance languages, the Roman writing system, and many proper names to the Julian calendar, Roman law, the urban grid and architectural styles (widely disseminated by Rome even if Greek in origin), and the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Even so, in the present context, only those influences that can be shown to have been foundational to European polycentrism and its attendant windfalls merit consideration. In principle, such influences could have made themselves felt in two different ways: by reinforcing polycentrism and by counterbalancing it by adding to a measure of cohesion that created a more productively competitive environment.

  Division

  Christianity was the paramount divisive trait passed down from the Roman period. As I noted in chapter 9, its foundational autonomy endowed it with considerable potential for divisiveness. Thus, it had not only evolved outside state control or cooperation for three centuries, it had also from very early on envisioned both clear boundaries between its community and the secular authorities—the synoptic gospels’ “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Intimations of supremacy followed in due course, such as Gelasius’s famous distinction four centuries later (proffered at safe remove from the seat of imperial power) between the clergy’s “sacred authority” and “royal power,” of which the former is “the more weighty.” Its standing was enhanced by the divine nature of the founder, a notion late Roman rulers readily (if somewhat perversely, given that founder’s terrestrial fate) embraced.

  In practice, these normative principles were backed up by an autonomous administrative apparatus and growing wealth. From this powerful position, church leaders, however closely their affairs were enmeshed with those of secular rulers, generally managed to keep the latter at arm’s length. It was these capabilities, alongside the weakness of the medieval polity, that later encouraged the politicization of the Gelasian premise of the “two powers”—that “spiritual activities have been separated from earthly affairs” by Christianity and “none is so proud as to take on both at the same time”—in conjunction with Augustine’s “two cities” template.18

  Much of this was contingent: as Byzantine and then Russian history show, there was nothing to keep imperial regimes from taming the church. Post-Roman state (de)formation made it possible for Latin Christianity to preserve and expand its autonomy. Yet as we have seen in chapter 7, this process of (de)formation, even if Christianity contributed to it, was in the first instance driven by factors other than the church, most notably specific characteristics of the successor regimes: it cannot in any meaningful way be considered primarily the result of Christian influences. Thus, for Christianity’s divisive traits to come to the fore, the political landscape already had to be changing in a certain direction that undermined state power. Universal empire had to fade for good before the papacy could flex its muscles or the Reformation could take off. Roman-style Christianity reinforced this fading but was not its root cause.

  It might be more productive to ask at which junctures when European empire-building on a larger scale might conceivably have been an option can Christianity be credited with a significant role in preventing this outcome. The yield is modest at best. It would seem a stretch to assign Christianity much weight in the Frankish repulsion of the Arabs and Berbers: as I argued in chapter 5, these incursions held little promise to begin with. More importantly, as its reach across the Levant and the Maghreb into the Iberian peninsula makes clear, Islamic rule over Christian populations did not encounter serious obstacles at that time. It is hard to see why the Christian communities of France or Italy should have proven less accommodating.19

  The Catholic Church was somewhat more effective in undermining the position of German emperors, culminating in Henry IV’s and Frederick II’s unsuccessful power struggles with the ascendant papacy. Even so, this effectiveness critically depended on the configuration of power both within the German “empire” and more specifically in the Italian peninsula: it was the dispersion of powers and the capacity of city-states to marshal and pool resources that made resistance against feeble imperial centers viable in the first place. Once again, while the church had helped shape the evolution of these power relations, it could not claim a leading or crucial role in this process.20

  The most promising scenario of Christianity’s divisiveness having a powerful effect on imperial ambitions dates from the early modern period. Imagine a counterfactual world in which the sixteenth-century Habsburgs had managed to gather diverse realms and to gain access to New World bullion but did not face Protestantism. What difference would that have made? There can be no doubt that this schism contributed to the failure of imperial hegemony at the time. However, two questions complicate the issue, for there are two ways in which schism could have been avoided: through unity, or by removing Christianity altogether.

  The first question is whether Catholic unity by itself would have been enough to enable the Habsburgs to overcome other sources of resistance, from German nobles and Dutch councils to international competition and balancing strategies. As I pointed out in chapter 6, a lot hinges on how much autonomous force we are prepared to assign to religious beliefs as such—on whether we view them more as a genuine driver of collective action or more as a reflection of underlying divisions that would have played out regardless. Only in the former case might the absence of religious conflict have presented the Habsburgs with a more compliant England and Netherlands, and with less intractable German princes. But even then, France would still have been a separate large kingdom,
unencumbered by religious strife of its own: thus, the Habsburgs would not have been the only ones to benefit from religious concord.

  The second question is more fundamental, if intrinsically unanswerable: if Christianity had not been unified but instead had not existed at all, would it be legitimate to envision a sixteenth-century Europe more or less the way it was, just without religiously motivated conflict? This would surely be an overly simplistic counterfactual that, at the very least, neglects the positive role of the church in holding the Habsburg domain together. In a non-Christian Europe, would it have been as easy for princes to inherit diverse lands? And would the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula have unfolded in a comparable way? Ultimately, just how different would early modern Europe have turned out had Christianity never existed at all?

  It is thus only by suspending disbelief and accepting the dubious premise that such crude counterfactuals free of second-order effects have any merit at all that it becomes possible to contemplate the consequences of a schism-free Europe for Habsburg imperial designs. And even if we were prepared to go down that road, it would by no means be a given that this alone would have sufficed to dislodge polycentrism in favor of sustainable hegemonic empire.

  Overall, the case for attributing any critical importance to Christianity in accounting for the failure of empire-building in Latin Europe is therefore extremely weak. It is telling that we need to wait for an entire millennium after the collapse of the sixth-century imperial restoration attempt for an even halfway plausible critical juncture to appear where Christianity might have played a major role in preventing imperiogenesis. This alone casts serious doubt on the notion that Christianity had somehow been necessary for the preservation of European polycentrism, rather than merely reinforcing existing trends in that vein.

  Much the same is true of canon law. Developed during the papal revolution of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it enshrined the plurality of legal traditions by demarcating church law from fragmented secular—urban, feudal, manorial—laws. But once again, this demarcation reflected the existing diffusion of power at least as much as it strengthened it.21

  Roman law, by contrast, could be used to reassert royal power. It did not effectively constrain it: this was, after all, why from the 290s CE onward, late Roman emperors desirous of shoring up central authority had found it expedient to sponsor successive codifications. In and of itself, there was nothing in Roman law that would have turned it into a driver of European polycentrism: it contributed to it only in contradistinction to canon law. In Joseph Strayer’s judgment, “While the revival of Roman law facilitated and perhaps accelerated the process of state-building, it was certainly not the primary cause and probably not even a necessary condition.”22

  Unity

  The search for powerfully divisive legacies of the Roman empire thus comes up short. By contrast, the second option raised above appears more promising: the idea that Roman traditions softened post-Roman fragmentation in ways that rendered it more productive in regard to long-term developmental outcomes. This notion is worth considering since competition as such need not have been enough to ensure these outcomes.

  Existing scholarship tends to endorse this idea in somewhat apodictic fashion, usually in the form of what we might call the “goldilocks scenario” of a Europe that was not united but not too splintered either. “Unity in diversity gave Europe some of the best of both worlds,” in Eric Jones’s pithy phrasing, allowing it, according to Joel Mokyr, to “combine the best of fragmentation and consolidation”: “the key to Europe’s success was its fortunate condition that combined political fragmentation with cultural unity.”23

  Impressionistic judgments of this sort are complemented by more strident observations ex cathedra, such as Jean Baechler’s claim that commercial development toward capitalism requires an environment “where sovereign political units coexist within a culturally homogeneous area,” echoed in John Hall’s view that “competition between strong states inside a larger culture encouraged the triumph of capitalism” and Jan Luiten van Zanden’s slightly more refined assertion that “the combination of political competition and economic cooperation (through trade)” was “crucial” for long-term development.24

  There is no shortage of evidence for transregional integration: the movement of labor and capital across Europe’s many borders, or more specifically the rapid dissemination of book printing. Even so, indeterminate claims of causal significance can come dangerously close to just-so stories.25

  As before, we need to concentrate on Roman-era legacies that not only fostered cohesion but meaningfully contributed to the developmental dynamics identified in chapters 10 through 12. Two candidates stand out: Latin as a shared elite language that transcended political divisions, and—once again—Christianity, as the one commonly shared belief system, backed by a single transnational organization. Latin, followed later by exchange in the influential Romance languages of Italian and then French, facilitated communication among the educated. Christian norms are thought to have helped pacify the medieval lords and to have lowered transactions costs, most notably in interregional trade.26

  The “idealist” school of thought regarding the underpinnings of modernity puts the greatest emphasis on the importance of cultural cohesion. If we follow those who ascribe a central role to the emergence of a European culture of knowledge and science and view it as being rooted in transnational exchange and competition, anything that assisted in this process would have been beneficial to transformative development. Thus, for Mokyr, Western Europe profited from “a disconnect between the size of the political unit and the intellectual community” because it created space for a Republic of Letters. The lack of such networks would have raised the cost of access to a transnational market of ideas and helped incumbents—defenders of entrenched tradition—fend off challengers.27

  This relatively narrow perspective is bound to disappoint champions of the long-term legacy of Roman law or ancient political discourse. Yet inasmuch as Roman law exerted influence, it did so because the medieval church had kept it alive, not just by ensuring the survival of Latin but also by applying elements of this tradition for its own purposes and drawing on it in the training of clergy. Moreover, even though the revival of Roman law in the High Middle Ages boosted its standing in learned discourse and in debates of current affairs, and later left its mark on law and court procedure both in the Protestant North and the Catholic South, it did not act as some form of transnational glue.28

  Most tellingly, medieval and early modern merchants—groups that straddled regional customs and were perhaps most in need of a unifying set of rules—preferred to rely on peer panels to arbitrate disputes rather than on local courts, and came to develop their own body of customary law. England, the eventual spearhead of modernization, privileged common law, and its political system, inasmuch as it had not been influenced by Carolingian traditions (at the time or later via the Normans), was grounded in local practice and bereft of any substantive Roman legacy. And even where the Roman legal tradition was adopted and adapted, this process was governed by contemporary concerns: practitioners approached it, in Peter Stein’s words, as “a kind of legal supermarket, in which lawyers of different periods have found what they needed at the time.”29

  What we are looking for in the present context is solid evidence of a Roman tradition’s critical impact on the later European path to modern development: mere residual presence or influence will not do. Christianity and Latin may well be the only factors to clear this threshold.

  Without Christianity

  How can we tell? Any claim that such unifying traditions were instrumental in making competitive fragmentation yield developmental benefits over the long run implicitly entertains a counterfactual: a world from which these features were missing. What would it have taken to remove them, and what difference would that have made?

  West of the Balkans, post-Roman Christianity and Latin were joined at the hip. It is doubtful whether the
latter could have survived as a single elite lingua franca without the Catholic Church. The timing of the onset of linguistic diversity within Latin remains contested but was certainly under way by the sixth century and perhaps already several centuries earlier. During the sixth and seventh centuries, the negative effect of the Roman empire’s fall on Latin usage and literacy was partly offset by the growing influence of the church and its efforts to maintain a recognizably “Latin” language in the face of growing differences between a standard high-register version and popular (or “vulgar”) Latin.

  In the eighth century, the shift of political power to the Carolingian realm and the challenge of Islamic expansion prepared the ground for more significant change in the following two centuries. The renewal of formal Latin in ecclesiastical contexts that focused on spelling, pronunciation, and antiquated grammar based on late Roman primers meant that popular styles of Latin were no longer recognized as such but increasingly treated as separate languages.30

  This in turn encouraged experimentation with written vernacular versions: in the ninth century in France, from the late tenth century in Italy, and in the late eleventh century in the Iberian peninsula. Regional clusters began to diverge: the difference between Italian and French versions of “post-Latin” was already recognized in the tenth century. In the twelfth century, competitive state formation favored the concept of separate Romance languages, complemented in the thirteenth century by distinct writing systems. By then, most writing was no longer done in Latin, even as it had survived long enough to witness a revival in elite circles during the High Middle Ages.31