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

by Chris Wickham

  We have already seen that some parts of the empire sent much of their surplus in tax to other areas: Africa, Egypt and to a lesser extent Syria, Palestine and the Aegean. These provinces were probably in agricultural terms the richest in the empire (the climate was then much as it is today, global warming apart); and they are mostly prominent in these commercial networks as well. It would certainly be wrong to see the archaeological distributions as signs of the tax network only; they extend to too many insignificant places for that to be the case, such as tiny settlements in central Italy or eastern Palestine. But it is likely, all the same, that commercial exchange was underwritten by the tax network. Ships left Africa for Italy every autumn, bringing state grain and oil to Rome as annona; doubtless they took commercial goods as well, ceramics and once again oil, the transport costs of which were thus covered by the state, and which could be sold on the other side of the Mediterranean more competitively, whether in Rome or in other ports. Egypt’s commercial exports are less well known, but they probably consisted above all of cloth and papyrus, which archaeology does not pick up (Egyptian wine production was enormous in the late empire, but was of low quality, and was for consumption within Egypt only). The tax network made commerce easier, and also contributed to the commercial prominence of certain regions. When the empire began to lose its fiscal homogeneity in the West, which was when the Vandals seized the heartland of North Africa in 439, breaking the Carthage-Rome tax spine, western Mediterranean commerce began two centuries of steady involution; but the East remained politically and fiscally strong, and eastern Mediterranean commerce was as active in 600 as in 400.

  The late Roman world always maintained a double face, local and imperial. Latin and Greek were far from its only languages. Proto-Welsh was spoken in Britain, Basque in parts of Spain, Berber in Africa, Coptic in Egypt, Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic/Syriac in the Levant, Isaurian and Armenian in Anatolia, and there were doubtless other languages too. Coptic, Hebrew, Syriac and Armenian had their own literatures. Local societies were at least as different then as they are now, in the range of realities that stretch from the Welsh mountains to the Egyptian desert, both as a result of their necessary adaptations to the huge differences in local ecology, and as a result of the more human-made contrasts discussed in the last few pages. On the other hand, the Roman world not only held together but increased many aspects of its cohesiveness with time. Christianization swept away many local religious traditions, as we shall see in the next chapter. Cities looked remarkably similar, in their public buildings and their layout, in different parts of the empire. The administration and the army had the same overarching structure everywhere, and the tax system affected everybody. Some cultural differences were lessening: Gaul, for example, lost its local language, Gaulish, perhaps in the fifth century. Egypt, in particular, was much less atypical in its society and culture in the fourth and fifth centuries than it had been in the first and second; it had ceased to use its huge temple complexes and had abandoned their Pharaonic architectural style, and had even deserted its traditional beer-drinking in favour of wine. People felt themselves to be part of a single Roman world, an awareness which extended not only to city élites but even into villages, for Antoninus of Fussala had appealed to the pope in Rome for support against Augustine, and the villagers of Aphrodito appealed to the empress Theodora herself for support against the governor of Antaiopolis.

  This awareness of a wider community is linked in our sources, over and over again, with patronage. The patron-client relationship has existed in most societies (the lord-vassal bond of the central Middle Ages is an example), but Roman culture laid immense stress on it. Seeking help from a patron, alongside official channels, was normal. It could be stigmatized as corrupt, but often only by extreme moralists, or else by victims; most people, however, accepted its day-to-day logic. Actually, even the official channels were often expressed in patron- client terms, as with personal or collective appeals to the emperor, which were commonplace, or as with the endless, and legal, personal payments (sportulae) which were expected by low- and medium-level bureaucrats who might either facilitate or obstruct tax registration or a court case. The point about a patronage system of this kind is that in the end it involves everybody, and everybody can feel they somehow have a stake in the social system. They will often not get anything out of it, as with the average peasant, but they feel that they can get an element of protection from patrons, if not this time then the next. Everyone except the emperor and his most powerful subordinates needed a patron, and sometimes many. They boasted about it, too, as when John Lydos was fast-tracked as a trainee administrator by the praetorian prefect Zotikos, who was from the same province as him, and did not even have to buy his appointment. Similarly, everyone with even a modicum of local power, from Dioskoros upwards, had clients. Abinnaios, a medium-level soldier stationed in southern Egypt in the 340s, whose archive also survives, preserved requests for special favours from his subordinates, but also from friends and clients who were city councillors, priests, artisans or peasants; he was asked to arbitrate disputes, and to apprehend robbers. Little of this was in his official remit, but it was totally normal. The Antiochene intellectual Libanios was outraged in the 390s when his tenants sought a military patron to protect them against paying him rent; he claimed that their main patron should be their landlord, but anyone in his audience would have known that was specious. A great part of the elegant letters that the educated élite wrote to each other consisted of or included recommendations for clients or requests for help. So did Dioskoros’ poetry, as we have seen. Far from ‘corrup tion’ being an element of Roman weakness, this vast network of favours was one of the main elements that made the empire work. It was when patronage failed that there was trouble. Peasants in Africa who felt that the Catholic church’s patronage was unavailable to them could turn to Donatism. When peasants in Egypt who had used patrons to lift some of their tax burdens in difficult years felt that this did not work, they would flee; and when the new Arab government after 640 excluded traditional rural patrons from political influence, as we shall see later, in Chapter 12, they could revolt. Above all, perhaps, when local élites in the fifth-century West ceased to believe that their traditional patrons in central and provincial government were capable of helping them, they could turn to the new military leaders of ‘barbarian’ tribes in their localities instead, and a major political shift resulted. We shall look at the causes and consequences of that shift in Chapter 4.

  The Roman world was surrounded by ‘others’, whom Romans regarded with varying degrees of contempt and incomprehension, but who interacted with them in complex ways. To the east, there was always Persia, the great sister empire of west-central Eurasia, ruled between the 220s and the 640s by the Sassanian dynasty. This was a permanent threat, but a stable one: it involved only border wars, at most extending into Syria, for the two hundred and fifty years between Julian’s disastrous invasion of what is now Iraq (then Persia’s economic and political heartland) in 363 and the temporary Persian conquest of the Roman East in 614-28, which culminated in the siege of Constantinople in 626. The Persian state was almost as large as the Roman empire, extending eastwards into central Asia and what is now Afghanistan; it is much less well documented than the Roman empire, but it, too, was held together by a complex tax system, although it had a powerful military aristocracy as well, unlike Rome. The militarization of Persian culture extended west into Armenia, which Romans and Persians fought over but which remained partly independent and culturally separate. The Armenians converted to Christianity in the fourth century, which separated them further from the Persians, who were Zoroastrian for the most part (although with sizeable Jewish and Christian minorities, and also local traditional religions). Zoroastrianism certainly contributed to Persian ‘strangeness’ in the eyes of the Romans; for example, its priests, called magoi in Greek or magi in Latin, gave their name to ‘magic’ in both languages, even though Zoroastrian religion favoured an abstract theolog
y and public rituals, just as Christianity did. But it was arguably Persia’s military culture and enormous respect for ancient dynastic tradition that marked it out as most culturally different from Rome, for the Roman sense of kinship could link far-flung cousins and cousins-in-law in patronage networks, but even ‘old’ families rarely had more than a century or two of prominence. The dynastic element helped Persian traditions survive better than Roman traditions when both were swept away, from Carthage to Samarkand, by the Arabs in the seventh century.

  Rome’s other borders were shared with far less organized political groups, all of which the Romans called barbari, ‘barbarians’, a conveniently vague term which I shall adopt (keeping the inverted commas) as well. To the south they faced nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes in the Sahara and its fringes, mostly speaking Berber languages; for a long time these were not taken very seriously as military threats, but such groups were gaining in social and military coherence, largely as a result of Roman influence, and one tribal alliance, the Laguatan, was very aggressive at the start of the fifth century, as Synesios in Cyrenaica, among others, complains; the Vandals in Africa had trouble with Berbers later, too. The Picts and the Irish to the north and west of Britain were also a potential threat, although only to the already militarized British borderlands, especially around Hadrian’s Wall (they staged a substantial invasion in 367-8). The long Rhine and Danube frontier faced tribal communities, mostly speaking Germanic languages, which historians since Tacitus in the first century had seen as a whole as Germani, although there is no evidence whatsoever that these peoples recognized any common bonds. The main groups along the frontier were by the fourth century the Franks on the lower Rhine, the Alemans on the middle and upper Rhine, and the Goths on the lower Danube and north-eastwards into the steppes of what is now Ukraine. Further back were Frisians in the modern Netherlands, Saxons in modern north Germany, and Vandals and Longobards or Lombards to their east. These were the main groups, but there were dozens of others. The Quadi in what is now Slovakia and Hungary are perhaps worth mentioning, if only because, after they fought a small war against Valentinian I in 374-5, they met the emperor and argued (correctly, in fact) that their own attacks were a justified and largely defensive response to Roman aggression: this was seen by Valentinian as so insolent that he had an apoplectic fit and died. One might have a soft spot for the Quadi as a result, but they vanish from history soon afterwards: they must have been absorbed into the Hunnic empire in the early fifth century, which was based in the same area, and their probable descendants in the fifth century were called Suevi and perhaps also Rugi.

  The transformation of the Quadi is only one example out of many of one crucial feature of all these tribal communities: they were very changeable. For a start, none of them were united ethnic groups; they all consisted of smaller tribes, each with a separate leader (as with the half a dozen Gothic groups, even though the Goths were among the most coherently organized of the Germanic peoples). Historians have indeed sometimes argued that some Germanic tribes had no permanent leadership at all, only generals in times of war. This latter pattern seems less likely (if only because war was pretty common); more plausible is that war encouraged the temporary development of alliances or confederations of separate tiny tribes, each with its own permanent leader, but choosing a temporary leader for that confederation. This at least fits the Alemans of the 350s-370s described by Ammianus, whose seven kings (reges) united under Chnodomar and his nephew Serapio to fight Julian in 357, but the latter were also flanked by ten lesser leaders, regales, and aristocrats as well, ‘from various nationes’. Did all of these nationes even think of themselves as ‘Aleman’, or is this, like ‘German’, just a Roman term for a much more inchoate reality? We cannot be sure, but, if the latter was so, this would at least explain the frequent name changes of the major peoples the Romans described. The problem is, of course, that the Romans wrote our only written sources (the only certainly Gothic source is Ulfilas’ Gothic translation of the New Testament, although the Passion of Saba, about an early Christian martyr in the Gothic lands who died in 372, may have been written by a Goth too). Roman ethnography was never reliable, and was usually highly moralized, with ‘barbarians’, naturally inferior but often noble in their savagery, acting as a mirror for the faults of the Romans themselves. It is highly unlikely that even Ammianus, although present on the Rhine in 357, had more than second-hand information about Aleman society and practices, and other observers were further removed still.

  Certain things can nevertheless be said about the ‘barbarian’ groups, partly thanks to written sources, partly thanks to archaeology. The northern and southern neighbours of Rome were all mixed-farming peasant societies (except for the Sahara nomads), living for the most part in villages, with élites generally living side by side with cultivators. They were settled and stable societies; they did not normally move about. They seem, however, in all cases to be better organized by the fourth century than they had been in the early empire. The archaeology shows the slow development of material cultural differences between regions (unfortunately, we have no way of knowing if these mapped onto the ethnic distinctions between Franks, Alemans, Goths, etc., and this is in my view unlikely), and, most important, increasing concentrations of wealth: the rich in the Germanic world, and we can add the Berber world as well, were becoming richer, thus presumably showing that power was slowly becoming more stable too. This was largely the simple result of contact with the Roman empire, which was vastly more wealthy and powerful than any ‘barbarian’ group. A substantial proportion of the artefacts in rich graves beyond the frontier in the fourth century are of Roman manufacture, as far north as Denmark. The Romans traded beyond the frontiers; they also employed ‘barbarians’ as paid soldiers, in every century. As the ‘barbarians’ became better organized, they also became more dangerous, and the Romans had to defend themselves more carefully against them. A long frontier region developed on the northern boundaries of the empire, in which militarization was capillary, affecting much wider strata of society than was the case elsewhere: northern Gaul and the Balkans were the largest such frontier regions, but there were smaller ones elsewhere too. As ‘bar barians’ were used in the army and often settled in the empire, at the same time as hierarchies developed under Roman influence beyond the frontiers, society on each side of the frontier slowly became more similar: there may not have been so very much difference on one level between Valentinian, himself from the Pannonian frontier in modern Hungary, and the leaders of the neighbouring Quadi whose bold reply killed him.

  This type of observation has been used by some recent historians as the basis for an argument that nothing really changed when the ‘barbarians’ entered the Roman empire in the fifth century and replaced its western half with their own kingdoms. Emperors had long been drawn largely from military families on the frontier; the successor states had kings of a similar type, only from just beyond the frontier. This is a better argument than the traditional one that waves of migrating Germans overbore the weakened (because barbarized) Roman army and state; but it does go too far, all the same. There was a major political difference between each side of the frontier: on one side Romans ruled, on the other they did not. Julian and Valentinian could attack Alemans and Quadi precisely because they were not under Roman rule, and the latter saw themselves as structurally different from Romans, something that did not change when they invaded. Conversely, the soldiers of ‘bar barian’ origin largely deracinated themselves when they joined the army. Take Silvanus, a Frank by origin according to Ammianus, who was a Roman general in the 350s, as his father had been. Silvanus was falsely accused of treason in a piece of palace intrigue in 355, when based at Cologne on the Rhine frontier. He wondered what to do. Should he flee to the neighbouring Franks, his kin? He was dissuaded from this, on the grounds that the Franks would kill or betray him; he claimed the empire instead, as army leaders had often done in the past. This failed, and Ammianus was himself instrumental in havin
g him killed. It would have been easy for Ammianus to depict Silvanus as an untrustworthy and perhaps savage outsider (he does so on other occasions, as with the Romanized Berber aristocrat Firmus, who becomes ‘barbaric’ when he revolts in 373). But Ammianus was instead sympathetic to Silvanus’ plight, and paints him simply as a Roman soldier, and as both politically and culturally separate from the Franks beyond the Rhine; Silvanus’ army training had seen to that. The major military politicians of ‘barbarian’ extraction who were important in late fourth-century politics, such as the Frank Arbogast (d. 394) and the half-Vandal Stilicho (d. 408), both of whom were de-facto heads of state, were similar: they were career soldiers, and operated in an entirely Roman political arena. This was normal in fourth-century politics. It was the politics of the fifth century, when some ‘barbarian’ military leaders fought for Rome at the head of substantial bodies of troops from their own communities, and who called themselves Goths or Franks rather than Romans, that was often different.

  In the 370s the Huns appeared in the East, a nomadic people from central Asia. Ammianus depicts them in very hostile and impossibly schematic terms, as hardly human, eating raw flesh, never entering houses, living on horseback, and without rulers: the classic uncivilized ‘others’. They were good fighters, all the same. They may not have been a single political group in the 370s (although they became one, for a generation under Attila, between the 430s and 454). But they destroyed the rule of at least one of the Gothic tribes, Ermenric’s Greuthungi, in or before 375, and menaced others. As nomads, they were as alien to the Goths as to the Romans. As a result, the majority of another Gothic tribe, the Tervingi, sought entry to the Roman empire in 376, and so did other sections of the Goths, although others stayed north of the Danube and slowly accepted Hunnic hegemony. ‘Barbarian’ tribes had invaded the empire often enough in the preceding two centuries; usually they ravaged sections of one of the military zones, the Balkans and northern Gaul, and were then defeated and enslaved, absorbed or driven back. Submissive requests for entry were rarer, and the Romans, including the eastern emperor Valens (364-78), Valentinian’s brother, were not sure how to handle this. They accepted the request, and the Goths, immigrating into the eastern Balkans, became in the following decades ‘Arian’ Christians, the variant Christianity of both their early missionary Ulfilas and, to a lesser extent, Valens himself. But Roman suspicion remained. The Goths were deprived of supplies, and soon revolted under their leader Fritigern; and Valens, underestimating them, was defeated and killed at Adrianople (modern Edirne in European Turkey) in 378. The Goths did not manage to build on this, for they were too few and in a strategically weak position, and they accepted peace in 382. By 394 they were fighting in the east Roman army, against a western usurper put up by Arbogast. But they did not become ‘Roman’, and remained as a separate ethnic grouping, the first group inside the empire to do so.