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

by Chris Wickham

  Stilicho was brought down by problems that were not entirely of his own making; the western leadership immediately after his death only made errors. Stilicho was half-Vandal in origin, and was regarded by some as too favourably disposed to ‘barbarians’; those who were in his Italian army were either massacred or fled to Alaric. Alaric was dominant in Italy in 408-10, but the Romans would not consistently make peace with him, even though he blockaded Rome three times. In the end he sacked Rome in 410, an event which shocked the Roman world much as 11 September 2001 shocked the United States, a huge, upsetting, symbolic blow to its self-confidence; but it was without other repercussions, and was only one step in the long Visigothic road to settlement. The Goths tried to go south to Africa, then went north into Gaul instead, under their new leader Athaulf (410-15); there they found, and contributed to, a still greater confusion, with as many as four rival emperors in 411, most of them the protégés of different ‘barbarian’ groups. Slowly, the legitimist Roman armies regrouped under a new magister militum, Constantius (411-21), who picked off the usurpers one by one and forced the ‘barbarian’ groups to come to terms. Athaulf’s Visigoths were, as Roman armies were, dependent on Mediterranean grain, and the Romans blockaded them into submission in 414-17; they ended up fighting on behalf of the Romans against the Vandals in Spain, who were partially destroyed in 417-18, until, in 418, they were finally settled around Toulouse. Constantius married Honorius’ sister Galla Placidia, who had previously been married to Athaulf, and he became co-emperor shortly before his death in 421. Military rivalries continued, but the crisis was quietening down. By 425, after a disputed succession, Honorius’ nephew, Constantius and Placidia’s young son Valentinian III, was western emperor (425-55), with his mother as regent.

  The East faced less trauma in this period. The Balkans was a military district, and was always the most invaded part of the eastern empire; there were also Hunnic attacks on it, both before and after the Goths left. But Constantinople, on the edge of the Balkans, was well defended, and the wealth of the East was in the Levant and Egypt, a long way from the northern frontier. Above all, Sassanian Persia, Rome’s traditional enemy to the east, was at peace with the empire for almost the entire fifth century, probably because it faced its own threats elsewhere, which allowed the eastern empire a greater strategic security. Eastern politics were often fraught, sometimes violently so, as with the anti ‘barbarian’ hysteria in the capital which in 400 destroyed the magister militum Gainas, and, soon, his rival Fravitta as well, a foretaste of Stilicho’s fate later in the decade. But from then onwards most of the political leaders of the East were not soldiers but civilians, ruling for Arcadius and his equally inactive son Theodosius II (408-50), and indeed empresses were particularly prominent in Constantinople, in this period Arcadius’ wife Eudoxia in 400-404 and Theodosius’ sister Pulcheria in the 410s-420s. Each of these, among other acts, brought down ambitious and uncompromising patriarchs of Constantinople, respectively John Chrysostom in 404 and Nestorios in 431. This in itself shows that the eastern empire was developing a different political style from the West: the patriarch of Constantinople, only established in 381, was already a protagonist in secular politics in a way that the pope in Rome would not be for another century. The fact that the western empire was run from Ravenna, not Rome, meant that Roman city politics were less central to it; the importance of church councils and doctrinal debate as a focus for unity and dissension was also greater in the East, giving bishops in general more of a political voice than they as yet had in the West. The church-state relationship would remain much more intimate in the East in the future, too, except, much later, during the Carolingian period in the West, as we shall see in Chapter 17.

  In 425 the East was stable and had begun the long economic revival that would continue into the late sixth century or early seventh. But the West had achieved, after a decade of turmoil, a substantial stability as well. Most of the frontier was still manned by Roman troops. There were ‘barbarian’ groups settled in the empire, it is true, separate from the Roman military hierarchy, the Visigoths between Bordeaux and Toulouse and the remnants of the Vandal confederacy in western Spain, Suevi in the north and Hasding Vandals in the south; but all these had been defeated, and the Visigoths at least were in formal federate alliance with Rome. Only in the northern provinces of the West, north of the Loire, was the situation still unstable. The far northern border of Gaul was increasingly settled by Franks from just over the Rhine; in the north-west there were intermittent peasant revolts, of groups called Bagaudae, which began in the confusion of the 410s and continued into the 440s, presumably an exasperated reaction against continued taxation at times of military failure; and Britain had been abandoned by the Roman administration after 410. These areas were even more marginal for the West than the Balkans were for the East, however. Orosius, a Christian apologist writing in Spain in 417, could already use the cliché that ‘the barbarians, detesting their swords, turned to their ploughs and now cherish the Romans as comrades and friends’, and this did not seem a false vision in the next decade. In that same period, 413-25 to be exact, Augustine wrote his monumental City of God, initially in reaction to the Sack of Rome; it was neither a triumphant tract about Christian Roman victory (as was Orosius’ text) nor a polemic about the dangers facing Roman ill-doing. Augustine was, indeed, careful not to ascribe too much importance or longevity to the great Roman imperial experiment, for the heavenly city is separate from earthly political forms. But his book nonetheless presumes a considerable confidence in the imperial future. The world itself might end, of course, and, Augustine assumed, would indeed do so soon enough; but there is no hint here that an end to the empire was expected or feared by anybody.

  Things shifted in the next generation, up to 455. In the East, politics stayed quiet, except for regular Hunnic attacks in the Balkans. This period was marked by the ambitious compilation of the current laws of the empire, the Theodosian Code, completed in 438; these were both western and eastern laws (many of them seem to have been collected in Africa), but they were compiled in Constantinople, and bore the eastern emperor’s name. It was also marked by two defining church councils, at Ephesos in 431 and at Chalcedon in 451, as we saw in Chapter 3, although their definitions were achieved at the expense of alienating large sectors of the Christian community of the Levant and Egypt, who found themselves stigmatized as Monophysite heretics. Pulcheria was a prominent operator behind the scenes in each of these councils. She had a relatively small role at court between them, especially in the 440s, but at Theodosius II’s death she created his successor Marcian (450-57), by marrying him, and she was again influential until her death in 453. Chalcedon, in particular, was a divisive moment; but the fact that the politics of the East hinged on these great ecclesiastical aggregations, rather than on war, is telling in itself.

  The West saw more trouble. Military leaders fought over the young Valentinian, with Aetius, based in Gaul, winning out by 433. Aetius ruled the West as magister militum until 454, but his interests remained in Gaul. The responsibility for letting the Vandals move into Carthage essentially lies with him; he reacted, but ineffectively and too late. Aetius’ main concern was the Visigoths, whom he at least temporarily pacified in 439. Other ‘barbarian’ groups in Gaul were also persuaded to accept Roman military hegemony, including the Alans and the Burgundians, whom Aetius himself settled in, respectively, the lower Loire valley and the upper Rhone in 442-3. Gaul remained stable under Roman hegemony as a result of Aetius’ attentions, although it is undeniable that there were more autonomous groups settled there by Aetius’ death than earlier. Italy, too, the core of the West, was actually less menaced by invasion than in the early years of the century. But Africa had been lost, and Spain, too, after the Vandals left in 429, came largely under Suevic control in the 440s; Spain, though, as we have seen, was much less essential to the imperial infrastructure. It is in the 440s that we get our first indications in western legislation that standard taxation
was insufficient to pay imperial troops, which heralded tax rises. The Bagaudae reappeared in northern Gaul, and now in north-east Spain as well, the part of the Iberian peninsula still under Roman control. Salvian of Marseille wrote a long hell-fire sermon called On the Governance of God in the 440s which ascribed Roman failures against the (obviously inferior) ‘barbarians’ to their own sins: notably, unjust and excessive taxation, public entertainment and sexual licence. This is the sort of thing extreme Christian preachers always said (and still say), and its detail cannot be taken too seriously; we could not conclude from this, for example, that the western provinces really were being destroyed by overtaxation, and it would be best to see Salvian’s writing as a proof of the continuing effectiveness of the fiscal system. But it is undoubtedly true that Salvian’s vision of the West now included the ‘barbarians’ as stable political players, alternatives to Roman rule, and the same was true of the Bagaudae (though the latter were in reality less stable, and disappear from our sources by 450; Aetius and his ‘barbarian’ allies had defeated them). Salvian thought that Romans often chose to be ruled by ‘barbarians’ in order to escape Roman state injustice. This was probably not common in the 440s, but the concept was possible to invoke; the historian Priskos in the East, when discussing the Huns, did so in the same period as well.

  Aetius, in his campaigns against the Visigoths and others, relied quite substantially on the military support of the Huns. The latter had, by the 420s at the latest, largely settled just outside the empire in the middle Danube plain, what is now eastern Hungary, a good strategic point for attack both into the Balkans and the West. But they were not a full-scale danger until Attila (c. 435-53) and his brother Bleda both unified them and reinforced their military hegemony over other ‘barbarian’ groups, notably the Gepids and that section of the Goths we call Ostrogoths, around 440. The 440s marked serious Hunnic attacks in all directions, culminating in major invasions of Gaul in 451 and Italy in 452. The Huns were defeated in Gaul, however (Aetius used the Visigoths against them, as he had previously used the Huns against the Goths), and retreated from Italy, for less clear reasons; in 453 Attila died unexpectedly, and in 454/5 conflict among his sons and his subject peoples led to the rapid break-up of the Hunnic hegemony. The Huns were a terrifying because unfamiliar people, but as a direct military threat to the Romans they were a flash in the pan. The same is true for Attila’s construction of an alternative political focus to the capitals of the empire, which looked impressive at the time, but did not last much more than fifteen years. It could equally be argued that the Huns helped the Romans, not only by fighting for Aetius but also as a force for stability (and thus fewer population movements) beyond the frontier. But this did not outlast 454 either.

  The Hunnic empire collapsed, but Aetius was already dead, assassinated by Valentinian III personally in 454, the latter himself killed as a direct result a year later. Aetius was seen by many later as (to quote Marcellinus comes) ‘the main salvation of the western empire’, largely because he was its last commander to convey an impression of military energy over a long period. His errors, especially in Africa, could be regarded as equally fatal. But the 450s still saw a certain level of stability in the West. It now contained half a dozen ‘barbarian’ polities, with all of which any Roman leader would have to deal, though still from a position of strength: all those polities operated by Roman rules, and cared enough about the empire to seek to influence its choice of rulers. This was shown in the crisis after Valentinian’s death, when Geiseric sacked Rome; Theoderic II of the Visigoths (453-66) persuaded Eparchius Avitus, a senator from the Auvergne in central Gaul and one of Aetius’ former generals, at that moment on an embassy to him, to claim the imperial office in 455. Avitus was no cipher, all the same. He did not last long, but there would still have been space for an energetic ruler in the West to maintain at least Aetius’ hegemony, and maybe even to regain that of Constantius, if he could get eastern logistical support (sometimes available), and if he was very lucky.

  Imperial luck did not hold, however. The next two decades, into the next generation, are the period when the West finally broke into pieces. Avitus, clearly a Gaulish imperial candidate, had been defeated by the Italian army under Majorian and Ricimer, and the former became emperor (457-61). Majorian took the trouble to get both eastern recognition and the support of Avitus’ Gaulish clientele; he issued legislation which shows reforming aspirations, too. But, if he was energetic, he was certainly not lucky either, for Ricimer, his magister militum, organized a coup against him and had him killed. Ricimer then ruled until his death in 472, through a succession of mostly puppet emperors, although Anthemius (467-72), a military figure from the East, had a certain presence and autonomy until Ricimer fell out with him. It was Anthemius who organized, together with the eastern general Basiliscus (the eastern emperor Leo I’s brother-in-law), the great attack on the Vandals of 468, which was not only a failure but an extremely expensive one. After that, Ricimer concentrated on Italy, which he defended effectively, and left the rest of the empire largely to its own devices, although he maintained links with south-eastern Gaul through his son-in-law the Burgundian prince Gundobad, who succeeded Ricimer briefly as the imperial strong- man before leaving Italy to become Burgundian king (474-516). Ricimer is hard to assess through sources that are both hostile and sketchy, but there is no sign that he had political interests or ambitions which extended beyond Italy; he is a clear sign that imperial horizons were shrinking. After two more short-lived coups, Odovacer, the next effective military supremo in Italy (476-93), did not bother to appoint any emperor of the West, but instead got the Roman senate to petition the eastern emperor Zeno that only one emperor was by now needed; Odovacer then governed Italy in Zeno’s name, as patricius, patrician, a title used by both Aetius and Ricimer, although inside Italy Odovacer called himself rex, king.

  The year 476 is the traditional date for the end of the western empire, at the overthrow in Italy of the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, although 480 is an alternative, for Romulus’ predecessor Julius Nepos held out in Dalmatia until then. But Italy is actually the region of the western empire which lived through least change in the 470s, for Odovacer ruled much as Ricimer had, at the head of a regular army. Italy did not experience an invasion and conquest until 489-93, with the arrival of Theoderic the Amal and his Ostrogoths, and Theoderic (489-526) ruled in as Roman a way as possible, too. The end of the empire was experienced most directly in Gaul. The Visigothic king Euric (466-84) was the first major ruler of a ‘barbarian’ polity in Gaul - the second in the empire after Geiseric - to have a fully autonomous political practice, uninfluenced by any residual Roman loyalties. Between 471 and 476 he expanded his power east to the Rhone (and beyond, into Provence), north to the Loire, and south into Spain. The Goths had already been fighting in Spain since the late 450s (initially on behalf of the emperor Avitus), but Euric organized a fully fledged conquest there, which is ill-documented, but seems to have been complete (except for a Suevic enclave in the north-west) by the time of his death. By far the best documented of Euric’s conquests, though not the most important, was the Auvergne in 471-5, because the bishop of its central city, Clermont, was the Roman senator Sidonius Apollinaris. Sidonius, who was Avitus’ son-in-law, and had been a leading lay official for both Majorian and Anthemius, ended his political career besieged inside his home city, and we can see all the political changes of the 450s-470s through his eyes. A supporter of alliance with the Visigoths in the 450s, by the late 460s Sidonius had become increasingly aware of the dangers involved, and hostile to Roman officials who still dealt with them; then in the 470s we see him despairing of any further help for Clermont, and contemptuous of the Italian envoys who sacrificed the Auvergne so as to keep Provence under Roman control. By around 480, as he put it, ‘now that the old degrees of official rank are swept away . . . the only token of nobility will henceforth be a knowledge of letters’; the official hierarchy had gone, only traditional Roman culture
survived.