The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000
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I would cautiously accept this rare island of certainty. The question is what one does with it. Isolated documents tell us little. We need collections of texts, which, put together, can constitute a guide, to how many people held land in A, to the financial difficulties of C (or of the category of people which C belonged to), to the size and geographical range of the properties of D, and to the differences in social structure or land price between village A and villages F, G and H. These are valuable things to study, if we have enough material to do so (and occasionally, even in the early Middle Ages, we do). All the same, they are only partial shafts of light. We have to engage in careful argument before we can assume that A, or D, are typical of the region and period we are studying. Also, documents in this period (the situation only changes in the thirteenth century) overwhelmingly tell us about land. Except in Egypt, where desert conditions help the survival of all kinds of text, only land documents were regarded as having a sufficiently long-term future importance to be worth keeping, except by accident; social action outside the field of land transactions remains obscure. Furthermore, again except in Egypt, only churches and monasteries have had sufficiently stable histories to keep some of their archives from the early Middle Ages into the modern period (from roughly 1650 onwards), when historians became interested in publishing them. We only know, that is to say, about land which came into church hands, whether at the time of the charters we have, or as a result of later gifts to the church of properties which came together with their deeds, in order to prove title. These are different sorts of limitation from those involving the narrative strategies of writers, but they are limitations all the same, and we have to be aware of them too. What we can do within these particular constraints will be further explored in Chapter 9.
Archaeological and material evidence is at least free from the constraints of narrative. Archaeologists have indeed sometimes been dis missive of written sources (this was a trend of the 1980s in particular), which only preserve attitudes of literate and thus restricted élites, whereas archaeological excavations and surveys uncover real life, often of the peasantry, who are badly served by texts. Excavations are, however, in some respects like land documents: you can say reliable things about how individual people lived, but you need many sites to be sure of typicality, of patterns and generalities. Archaeology also has its own blind spots: you can tell what sorts of houses people lived in, what food they ate, what technologies they had access to, how spatial layouts worked, how far away the goods they possessed came from, but you cannot tell who owned their land, or what rents were paid from it. This at least creates a balance with documentary history, however. Overall, archaeology tells us more about functional relationships, whereas history tells us more about causation; ideally, we need both. And when we use them both we must bear in mind that material culture projects meaning, too. A burial ritual is a public act, and what one buries in the ground makes a point to others; similarly, urban planning, architecture and wall-painting, and the designs on metalwork and ceramics, all convey meaning, often intentionally, which needs to be decoded and appraised with the same care we use for Gregory of Tours. Archaeology (like art history) is free of the constraints of narrative, but not the constraints of communication. We shall look at this issue in Chapter 10.
The kinds of evidence we have for different regions of Europe in different periods act as further constraints on what we can say about each. Seventh-century England is documented above all through church narratives, with a handful of laws and land documents, set against an extensive cemetery archaeology and a more restricted settlement archaeology; we can say a fair amount about ecclesiastical values and the political dynamic, and also about technology and social stratification, but much less about aristocratic values and political structures. After the 730s in England, the narratives and laws virtually cease for over a century, as do the cemeteries, but we have far more documents, and also urban excavations; we can say much more about the state, and about wider economic relationships, but much less about how kings manipulated their political environment to increase their power, or else failed to do so; important historical questions, like the failure of Mercia to maintain its century-long dominance over central and southern England in and after the 820s (see Chapter 19), remain a mystery as a result. Overall, clerics maintained a constant output of texts of locally varying kinds throughout the early Middle Ages, so that we can tell what ecclesiastics (particularly ecclesiastical rigorists) thought; but only in some periods and places did lay aristocrats commit themselves to writing - the late Roman empire, Carolingian Francia, tenth-century Byzantium, ninth- and tenth-century Iraq - so it is only then that we can get direct insights into the mind-set of secular political élites. And even in single political units we can run up against different concentrations of material. The late tenth-century Ottonian emperors had two power-bases, Saxony and northern Italy; the first is documented almost exclusively in narratives, the second almost exclusively in land charters. So we can talk about the nuance of aristocratic intrigue and political ritual in the first, and about the range of aristocratic wealth and its relationship to royal patronage in the second. The Ottonians must have dealt in both ritual and landed patronage in each, but we are blocked from seeing how.
These constraints are permanent in our period, as they also were in the ancient world. New texts are rare; only archaeology will expand in the next decades, moving the balance steadily towards what can be said from the material record. We are always limited as to what we can say, even about élites, who are at least relatively well documented in our crafted sources, never mind the huge peasant majority, whose viewpoint is so seldom visible (for some of what can be said, see Chapters 9 and 22). Hence the fact that a book of this kind covers six centuries, not one or two, as later in the series. But there is enough known, all the same, to have to select, sometimes quite ruthlessly. What follows is only a small part of what we know about the early Middle Ages. It does at least consist, however, of what seems to me essential to know.
PART I
The Roman Empire and its Break-up, 400-550
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The Weight of Empire
The guilty thief is produced, is interrogated as he deserves; he is tortured, the torturer strikes, his breast is injured, he is hung up . . . he is beaten with sticks, he is flogged, he runs through the sequence of tortures, and he denies. He is to be punished; he is led to the sword. Then another is produced, innocent, who has a large patronage network with him; well-spoken men are present with him. This one has good fortune: he is absolved.
This is an extract from a Greek-Latin primer for children, probably of the early fourth century. It expresses, through its very simplicity, some of the unquestioned assumptions of the late Roman empire. Judicial violence was normal, indeed deserved (in fact, even witnesses were routinely tortured unless they were from the élite); and the rich got off. The Roman world was habituated to violence and injustice. The gladiatorial shows of the early empire continued in the fourth-century western empire, despite being banned by Constantine in 326 under Christian influence. In the 380s Alypius, a future ascetic bishop in Africa, went to the games in Rome, brought by friends against his will; he kept his eyes shut, but the roar of the crowd as a gladiator was wounded made him open his eyes and then he was gripped by the blood, ‘just one of the crowd’, as his friend the great theologian Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) sympathetically put it. Augustine, an uncompromising but also not a naive man, took it for granted that such a blood lust was, however sinful in Christian eyes, normal. Actually, all the post-Roman societies, pagan, Christian or Muslim, were equally used to violence, particularly by the powerful; but under the Roman empire it had a public legitimacy, an element of weekly spectacle, which surpassed even the culture of public execution in eighteenth-century Europe. There was a visceral element to Roman power; even after gladiatorial shows ended in the early fifth century, the killing of wild beasts in public continued for another hundred years and more.
> As for the rich getting off: this was not automatic by any means, as the senatorial victims of show trials for magic in Rome in 368-71 knew. But the powerful did indeed have strong patronage networks, and could very readily misuse them. Synesios, bishop of Ptolemais in Cyrenaica (modern eastern Libya) in 411-13, faced a brutal governor, Andronikos, at his arrival as bishop. Andronikos, Synesios complains in his letters, was particularly violent to local city councillors, causing the death of one of them for alleged tax offences. Synesios got him sacked, which shows that only a determined bishop with good connections in Constantinople could properly confront abuse of power - or else that a local official, whether good or bad, could fail to survive a frontal attack by a determined political opponent with his own ecclesiastical and central-government patronage network. But the patronage was crucial, and most of our late Roman sources (as, indeed, early Roman sources) lay great emphasis on it. One could not be a success without it. The Roman world was seriously corrupt, as well as violent. What looks like corruption to us did not always seem so to the Romans, at least to those who formed the élite: it had its own rules, justifications and etiquette. But corruption and its analogues did privilege the privileged, and it was, at the very least, ambiguous; an entire rhetoric of illegal abuse of power was available to every writer.
I begin with these comments simply to distance us a little from Roman political power. The Roman state was not particularly ‘enlightened’. Nevertheless, nor was it, around 400, obviously doomed to collapse. Its violence (whether public or private), corruption and injustice were part of a very stable structure, one which had lasted for centuries, and which had few obvious internal flaws. Half the empire, the West, did collapse in the fifth century, as a result of unforeseen events, handled badly; the empire survived with no difficulty in the East, however, and arguably reached its peak there in the early sixth century. We shall follow how this occurred in Chapter 4, which includes a political narrative of the period 400-550. In this chapter, we shall see how that stable structure worked before the western empire broke up, and, in the next, we shall look at religious and other cultural attitudes in the late Roman world. Fourth-century evidence will be used in both chapters, extending into the early fifth in the West, a period of relative stability still, and into the sixth in the East, for the state did not change radically there until after 600.
The Roman empire was centred on the Mediterranean - ‘our sea’ as the Romans called it; they are the only power in history ever to rule all its shores. The structure of the empire was indeed dependent on the inland sea, for easy and relatively cheap sea transport tied the provinces together, making it fairly straightforward for Synesios to move from Cyrenaica to Constantinople and back again, or for Alypius to move from Thagaste (modern Souk Ahras in eastern Algeria) to Rome and back. By 300 it was recognized that the empire could not easily be ruled from a single centre, and after 324 there were two permanent capitals, Rome and Constantine’s newly founded Constantinople. The empire thereafter had, most of the time, an eastern (mostly Greek-speaking) and a western (mostly Latin-speaking) half, each with its own emperor and administration. But the two halves remained closely connected, and Latin remained the official legal and military language of the East until well into the sixth century.
Rome was a huge city, with a million people at its height in the early empire, and still half a million in 400, when it was no longer the administrative capital of the western empire (which was, in the fourth century, Trier in northern Gaul, and after 402 Ravenna in northern Italy). Constantinople started much smaller, but increased in size rapidly, and may have reached half a million, by now more than Rome, by the late fifth century. Cities of this size in the ancient or medieval world were kept so large by governments, who wanted a great city at their political or symbolic heart for ideological reasons. Rome and Constantinople both had an urban poor who were maintained by regular state handouts of grain and olive oil, from North Africa (modern Tunisia) in the case of Rome, from Egypt and probably Syria in the case of Constantinople, Africa and Egypt being the major export regions of the whole empire. These free food-supplies (annona in Latin) were a substantial expense for the imperial tax system, making up a quarter or more of the whole budget. It must have mattered very much to the state that its great cities were kept artificially large, and their populations happy, with ‘bread and circuses’ as the tag went - though the circuses (including games in the amphitheatres of Rome) were paid for in most cases by the privately wealthy. The symbolic importance of these cities was such that when the Visigoths sacked Rome in 410 the shock waves went all around the empire, as we shall see in Chapter 4.
This concern for the capitals was only the most obvious aspect of the lasting Roman commitment to city life. The whole of the world of culture was bound up in city-ness, civilitas in Latin, from which come our words ‘civilized’ and ‘civilization’, and which precisely implied city-dwelling to the Romans. The empire was in one sense a union of all its cities (some thousand in number), each of which had its own city council (curia in Latin, boul in Greek) that was traditionally autonomous. Each city also had its own kit of impressive urban buildings, remarkably standard from place to place: a forum, civic buildings and temples around it, a theatre, an amphitheatre (only in the West), monumental baths, and from the fourth century a cathedral and other churches replacing the temples; in some parts of the empire, walls. These marked city-ness; one could not claim to be a city without them. And the imagery of the city and its buildings ran through the whole of Roman culture like a silver thread. The Gaulish poet Ausonius (d. c. 395) wrote a set of poems in the 350s called the Order of Noble Cities, nineteen in number, from Rome at the top to his own home town of Bordeaux at the bottom (he uses the word patria, ‘fatherland’, of both Rome and Bordeaux); he enumerated his cities by their buildings, and, in so doing, he was in effect delineating the empire itself.
Political society focused on the cities. Their traditional autonomy had meant in the early empire that being a city councillor (curialis in Latin, bouleuts in Greek) was the height of local ambition. This was less so by the fourth century, however, as the centralization of imperial government meant cities finding that more decisions were taken over their heads; the expansion of the senate and the central administration also meant that the richest and most successful citizens could move beyond their local hierarchies, and the curia thus became second best. City councillors became, above all, responsible for raising and also underwriting taxes, a remunerative but risky matter. Slowly, the formal structures of such councils weakened, above all in the fifth century, and by the sixth even tax-raising had been taken over by central government officials. These processes have often been seen in apocalyptic terms, for it is clear from the imperial law codes that curiales often complained of their tax burdens, and that some (the poorer ones, doubtless) sought to avoid office; emperors responded by making such avoidance illegal. Put that together with the trickle of literary evidence for local élites in the West preferring rural living to city life, and an archaeology which increasingly shows radical material simplifications after 400 or so on western urban sites, and the tax burden on city councillors starts to look like a cause of urban abandonment, maybe in the context of the fall of the empire itself.
Such an interpretation is over-negative, however. First of all, it does not fit the East. Here, city councillors were indeed marginalized, and are documented less and less after around 450 (except in ever more hectoring imperial laws), but political élites remained firmly based in cities. What happened was that city government became more informal, based on the local rich as a collective group, but without specific institutions. Senators who lived locally, the local bishop, the richest councillors, increasingly made up an ad-hoc élite group, often called prteuontes, ‘leading men’. These men patronized city churches, made decisions about building repairs and festivals, and, if necessary, organized local defence, without needing a formal role. Nor did cities lose by this; the fifth and sixth centuries s
aw the grandest buildings being built in many eastern cities. Once we see this post-curial stability in the East, it is easier to see it in the West too. Sidonius Apollinaris (lived c. 430-85), whose collection of poetry and letters survives, was from the richest family of Clermont in Gaul, son and grandson of praetorian prefects, and son-in-law of the emperor Eparchius Avitus (455-6). He did not have to be a curialis, and largely pursued a central government career. But he ended up as bishop of Clermont, enthusiastically supporting local loyalties in his letters, including city-dwelling; and his brother-in-law Ecdicius, Avitus’ son, defended the city with a private army. So this sort of commitment to urban politics did not depend on the traditional structure of city councils. Essentially, it went on as long as Roman values survived; this varied, but in many parts of the empire it continued a long time after the empire itself fell. The presuppositions of civilitas achieved that on their own. In the West, urban élites also had rural villas, lavish country houses where they spent the summer months (in the East, these were rare, or else concentrated in suburbs, like Daphne in the cooler hills above Antioch); but cities remained the foci for business, politics, patronage and culture. Few influential people could risk staying away from them. And where the rich went, others followed: their servants and entourages, but also merchants and artisans who wanted to sell them things, and the poor who hoped for their charity; the basic personnel of urban life.