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

by Chris Wickham

  How do we assess this network of contradictions? It is not possible, with the evidence at our disposal, to tell what was typical in practice in each case, female constraint or female autonomy. Doubtless, as in many societies, we could expect autonomy for a few successful women, who nevertheless might find themselves more exposed to greater scrutiny than men, and also to some moral condemnation, particularly if their husbands were alive; the majority were maybe more subject and passive, whether voluntarily (as with Monica) or not. This general picture could well have been the case at every level of the social hierarchy, for the Egyptian material extends to peasants and artisans on occasion. And the space Christianity gave to ascesis allowed small, but visible, numbers of women to escape from family pressures altogether, as long as they maintained celibacy and disciplined behaviour, preferably indoors and in groups. The very quantity of these contradictory rights and constraints, all the same, was greater than in many societies: the early medieval West often assumed rather more uncompromising legal and social constraints on female action, as we shall see in Chapter 8. There was space inside the contradictions for late Roman women to construct their own social personae, if they wished to and if they were lucky. But they did so in a world full of gendered imagery that was negative about women, propagated by the public secular world and the church alike, with maleness and male virtues seen as the norm (virtus itself means ‘maleness’ as well as ‘virtue’) and femaleness seen as weakness and even danger, particularly to male ascetics, for whom female sexuality was, understandably, one of the greatest threats.

  Men, too, faced contradictory signals in the world they lived in. Late Roman society was very hierarchical and social mobility was in many cases constrained by law, as we have seen, although it was also fairly common; the mixture of caste-like assumptions of inequality and the presence of ‘new men’ always creates tensions. Roman men were very ready to take offence at breaches of etiquette by upstarts and outsiders; they got angry very easily, and could be violent if they did. Faustus, bishop of Riez (d. c. 490), remarked sourly in a sermon that a powerful man may do us an injury or angrily abuse us and we suffer in silence, to avoid greater injury, but if an inferior person abuses us we get angry and revenge ourselves. The violence of late Roman political and judicial practice meant that such threats could be dangerous. But educated élites were also trained to decorous and courteous formal behaviour; it was part of élite education, in fact, and it included never losing one’s temper and aiming to convince - or humiliate - by rhetorical skill rather than by threat. How could one do both? One could not, of course. Educated men of the late Roman period were appalled by monastic vigilantes, or the mob of Alexandria, or powerful men with a military background like Valentinian I, for their lack of self-control and their violence. On a small scale, Sidonius was delighted when, at his dinner with Majorian, his enemy Paeonius became visibly annoyed at a minor slight in front of the emperor, a damning breach of etiquette; the emperor’s decorous but amused laugh was enough for Sidonius, who referred to it as ‘revenge’. But decorum was all the more important because men were recognized as passionate. And anger could also be used politically, breaking through the barriers of decorum, to make a point, to show that one was serious, all the more effectively because of the formality of ‘normal’ political behaviour. In the post-Roman West, politics became less formalized, but the political force of anger remained a powerful weapon for kings and princes.

  This chapter, and the last, present a stable late Roman world, not unchanging by any means (this was above all a period of notable religious innovation), nor, of course, conflict-free, but all the same not in any sense doomed to dissolution. We shall see in the next chapter how it was that Roman political power did break down in the fifth-century West, despite this internal stability. But it is also worth asking at this stage what, in the political, social and cultural patterns described so far, would survive to form the Roman inheritance for future centuries. This is easiest to answer for the present chapter: most of the patterns described here survived. The structures of the church were the institution which changed least as the Roman West broke up, and they became politically marginal only in the south-eastern and southern Mediterranean, with the Muslim conquests of the seventh century. The importance of correct belief survived in Byzantium and in parts of the West, as we shall see in later chapters. Ascetic religious commitment and religion-based critiques of secular society never lost their force in the next centuries, and we shall see them constantly recur. These were a specific Christian Roman legacy for future ages. The public institutions of the Roman empire survived as a fundamental political template for both Byzantium and the Arab caliphate, too, still based on a continuing system of land tax. Taxation steadily broke down in the post-Roman West, however, and political institutions radically simplified. All the same, the political and institutional framework of the Roman empire was so complex that these new simpler versions could still provide a basic Roman-style governmental system for the ‘Romano-Germanic’ kingdoms, in particular the Franks in Gaul, the Visigoths in Spain and the Lombards in Italy, the leading polities of the two centuries after 550. And this went with a sense of public power, and of a public space for political practice, which was largely a Roman inheritance. This public politics lasted in the West until past the end of the Carolingian period, up to the tenth century at least, and often later; its breakdown, where it occurred (most notably in France), was momentous. That moment will indeed mark the end of this book, for in the West at least it represents the end of the early Middle Ages.

  Many things did change at the start of the early medieval period. Religious and cultural continuities cannot mask the importance of the breakdown of state structures; the exchange economy also became much more localized in both East and West, and less technically complex, too, at least in the West. Aristocratic society became more militarized, and a secular literary education became much less important, particularly in the West; our written sources become far more religious as a result, in both East and West. Aristocratic identity changed everywhere too, with the political changes of the fifth-century West and the seventh-century East; global aristocratic wealth contracted in most places, and the hyper-rich senatorial élite of Rome vanished. One must not overstate this contraction, for aristocrats with Roman ancestors continued to be major players, but, given the cultural changes just referred to, their Roman antecedence becomes much harder to see. Peasants also became more autonomous, as global aristocratic landowning decreased and as state power in the West lessened; by contrast, the constraints on women arguably increased. And, above all, each region of the Roman empire had a separate political, social, economic, cultural development henceforth. Before 550, the East and the West are treated together in this book, but thereafter they must be discussed separately; and the histories of the Frankish lands, Spain, Italy, Britain, Byzantium and the Arab world will all get individual treatment, as will the non-Roman lands of the North. This localization and overall simplification marks the early Middle Ages above all else. But underpinning every political system we look at in the rest of this book, outside the far North at least, was the weight of the Roman past, which, however fragmented, created the building-blocks for political, social and cultural practice in every post-Roman society, for centuries to come.

  4

  Crisis and Continuity, 400-550

  On 25 February 484, Huneric, king of the Vandals and Alans, and ruler of the former Roman provinces of North Africa, issued a decree against the ‘Homousian’ (we would say Catholic) heresy of the Roman population of his kingdom. The Vandals were Arian Christians, and they regarded the beliefs of the Roman majority as sufficiently incorrect that they needed to be expunged. Huneric, accordingly, adapted the emperor Honorius’ law of 412 against the Donatists of Africa, which had been a major Catholic weapon in the days of Augustine, and used it against the Catholics themselves. Huneric was explicit about this:

  It is well known that the casting back of evil counsels agai
nst those who give them is a feature of triumphant majesty and royal strength . . . It is necessary and very just to twist around against them what is shown to be contained in those very laws which happen to have been promulgated by the emperors of various times who, with them, had been led into error.

  Huneric’s mode in this decree, and in the persecution it began (which seems to have quietened down after his death in December of the same year), was consistently playful: you did this yourselves; it is therefore right that it should be done back to you. Indeed, his whole preparation for it was a deliberate echoing of the 410s. Honorius in 410 had called for a conlatio, a formal disputation, between Donatist and Catholic bishops, which took place in Carthage in June 411; its acts largely survive, and they show a striking mixture of ceremonial power-plays, insult and argument, followed by a judgement against the Donatists - and then repression a year later. The Donatists must have known that they were probably being set up; and when in May 483 Huneric called the Catholic bishops to a similar debate in Carthage for the February of the following year, the latter certainly knew what was coming. Both the Donatists in 411 and the Catholics in 484 tried to pre-empt discussion by presenting a manifesto ; but Huneric, if we believe the account of his fervent opponent Victor of Vita, had already prepared his decree, thus cutting short the debate. If this is true, it was Huneric’s only deviation from his replay of the Honorian drama. Huneric was enjoying being a Roman emperor in persecuting mode, act by act; and the Catholics knew well what he was doing.

  The Vandals in Africa represent a paradox, which is epitomized by this account. The modern use of their name shows the bad reputation they already had, expressed above all in Victor’s polemical account of their cruelty and oppression. Most contemporary accounts of the Vandals were indeed negative, from Possidius’ eyewitness account of their violent arrival in Africa in 429 to the eastern Roman historian Prokopios’ criticisms of their luxurious lifestyle at the moment of the Roman reconquest in 533-4. Under their most successful king, Huneric’s father Geiseric (428-77), who brought them from Spain to Numidia and then in 439 to Carthage and the African grain heartland, their ships (ex-grain ships, no doubt) raided Sicily, conquered Sardinia and sacked Rome in 455. Huneric was not the only king to persecute Catholics; Thrasamund (496-523) did the same in the 510s. Conversely, however, there is evidence to show that the Vandals thought they were being very Roman. Those we know about all spoke Latin. Huneric married Honorius’ great-niece, and had spent time in Italy. The Vandal administration seems to have been close to identical to the Roman provincial administration of Africa, and to have been staffed by Africans (at most they may have adopted a Vandal dress code); the currency was a creative adaptation of Roman models; the kings taxed as the Romans had; the Vandal élites accumulated great wealth as a result, which they spent in Roman ways, on luxurious town houses and churches, as both literary sources and archaeology tell us. Archaeology, indeed, implies little change in most aspects of African material culture across the Vandal century. And, of course, their religious persecution was entirely Roman. Other conquering Germanic peoples were also Arian, notably the Goths, as we have seen, but they saw their religion for the most part as marking out their own identity vis-à-vis their new Roman subjects, who could stay Catholic. Only the Vandals assumed that their version of Christianity should be the universal one, and that others should be uprooted, as the Romans themselves did: hence also the negative tone of contemporary accounts, which are all written by Catholics.

  It is thus possible to turn the Vandals into a version of the Romans themselves. They could be seen as in effect a rogue army that seized power in a Roman province and ran it in a Roman way; although the Vandals had themselves never been imperial federate troops, they were very like them, and one would be hard put to it to identify any element in their political or social practice that had non-Roman roots. But we would be mistaken if we thought nothing changed when Geiseric marched into Carthage. There were two major differences. First, the Vandals ruled Africa as a military landowning aristocracy, who continued to see themselves as ethnically distinct. Roman armies which seized power before the fifth century were content to create their own emperor and retire to barracks with rich gifts; but the Vandals became a political élite, replacing and expropriating the largely absentee senatorial aristocracy (and some Roman landowners who lived in Africa too, though most of these survived). Secondly, the Vandals broke the Mediterranean infrastructure of the late empire; they took over the major grain and oil export province of the West, the source of most of the city of Rome’s food. The food had largely been supplied free, in tax; the Vandals were autonomous, however, and kept African produce for themselves - although they were prepared to sell it. The Carthage-Rome tax spine ended. The population of the city of Rome began to lessen precipitously after the mid-fifth century; in the next century it probably dropped more than 80 per cent. And a gaping hole appeared in the carefully balanced fiscal system of the western empire; the Romans faced a fiscal crisis, just when they needed to spend as much on troops as they possibly could. Not to foresee that Geiseric would take Carthage, notwithstanding a treaty agreed in 435, is arguably the main strategic error of the imperial government in the fifth century: the moment when the political break-up of the western empire first became a serious possibility. Hence the belated but intense efforts made to recapture Africa in 441, 460 and especially the large mobilization of 468, which failed disastrously, even though Vandal military strength was not, as far as can be seen, unusually great. Reconquest in 533-4 was easy in the end, but the western empire was gone by then. However Romanized the Vandals were, they were agents of major changes.

  This is the key feature of the events of the fifth century, at least in the western empire. Over and over again, ‘barbarian’ armies occupied Roman provinces, which they ran in Roman ways; so nothing changed; but everything changed. In 400 the western and eastern Roman empires were twins, run by brothers (Honorius and Arcadius, the two sons of Theodosius I, ruling 395-423 and 395-408 respectively), with little structural difference between them, and, as we saw in Chapter 2, no fundamental internal weaknesses. In 500 the East was hardly changed (indeed, it was experiencing an economic boom), but the West was divided into half a dozen major sections, Vandal Africa, Visigothic Spain and south-west Gaul, Burgundian south-east Gaul, Frankish northern Gaul, Ostrogothic Italy (including the Alpine region), and a host of smaller autonomous units in Britain and in more marginal areas elsewhere. The larger western polities were all ruled in a Roman tradition, but they were more militarized, their fiscal structures were weaker, they had fewer economic interrelationships, and their internal economies were often simpler. A major change had taken place, without anyone particularly intending it. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate how - but not with hindsight. The events of the fifth century were not inevitable, and they were not perceived as such by the people who lived through them. No one saw the western empire as ‘falling’ in this period; the first writer specifically to date its end (to 476) was a Constantinople-based chronicler, Marcellinus comes, writing around 518. We shall look at those events in four chronological tranches, up to 425, up to 455, up to 500, and up to 550, so as to try to pin down what were the principal changes, but also stabilities, at each stage. We shall then deal with the issue of what these changes meant.

  Neither Honorius nor Arcadius was any sort of political protagonist, nor in fact were their successors as emperors, and it was not until the 470s that effective rulers occupied supreme political positions again. Others ruled through them. In the West, the strong-man at the start of the fifth century was Stilicho, military commander (magister militum praesentalis) of the western armies since 394: a powerful dealer, which he needed to be. For the whole of his ascendancy he faced Alaric, king of the Goths (c. 391-410), in the latter’s attempts to establish a stable location for his people. Gothic groups had first come into the empire in 376, as we saw in Chapter 2; after their victory at Adrianople in 378, they were left a
lone in the 380s in Illyricum and Thrace, the modern Balkans. Alaric was the first Gothic leader to serve with his own followers in a Roman army, for Theodosius in 394. This military arrangement came unstuck by 396, however, and Alaric’s Goths (we call them the Visigoths, to avoid confusion with other Gothic groups, though they did not call themselves this) spent two decades trying to regain, by force, a recognized position in the empire. They attacked Greece, then moved north, and entered northern Italy in 401. Stilicho defeated them and drove them back into Illyricum in 402, but they returned in 408. Nor were they the only ‘barbarians’ in the empire by now; other groups, probably persuaded to take their chances across the border by the development of Hunnic power, came in during the same decade. In 405 an army led by Radagaisus, again largely Gothic, crossed the Alps into Italy from the north; Stilicho defeated and destroyed them near Florence in 406. Stilicho needed a larger army for all this than Italy possessed, especially as he himself also wanted to make Illyricum part of the western, not the eastern empire, and he pulled troops from the Rhine frontier to meet this need. This was probably a mistake, for it was followed by an invasion of central European tribes led by the Vandals, over the Rhine on New Year’s Eve 406, an irruption into western Gaul and then (in 409) into Spain which was almost unresisted; and also in 407 another invasion of Gaul, this time by a usurper, Constantine III (406-11), at the head of the army of Roman Britain. Faced with these multiple crises, whispering campaigns against Stilicho began, and after a mutiny he was executed in 408.