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

by Chris Wickham

  The foregoing pages give a bare summary of the events of a hundred and fifty years; we must now consider what they mean. I shall concentrate more on the West, because it was there that the greatest changes took place, although the stability and prosperity of the East must act as a permanent reminder to us that the Roman empire was by no means bound to break up. In recent decades this view, already discussed in Chapter 2, has indeed become a dominant one among historians. This means that the invasions and occupations of the western provinces must be at the heart of our explanations of the period. But in recent decades we have also moved away from catastrophist views of the ‘barbarians’, encapsulated in André Piganiol’s famous lines at the close of his book on the late empire, written (significantly) just after the Second World War, ‘Roman civilization did not die a natural death. It was assassinated. ’ Recent work has in fact depicted the new ethnic groups in very Roman terms, a view which I fully accept and shall develop further shortly. This does not lessen the simple point that the Roman empire in the West was replaced by a set of independent kingdoms which did not make claims to imperial legitimacy; but it does force us to ask why each of these kingdoms could not have just reproduced the Roman state in miniature, maintaining structural continuities that could, in principle, have been reunited later, by Justinian, for example. For the fact is that most of them did not do so. One thing that archaeology makes very clear, as we shall see, is the dramatic economic simplification of most of the West: this is visible north of the Loire in the early fifth century, and in the northern Mediterranean lands during the sixth. Building became far less ambitious, artisanal production became less professionalized, exchange became more localized. The fiscal system, the judicial system, the density of Roman administrative activity in general, all began to simplify as well. These are real changes which cannot be talked away by arguments that show, however justifiably, that the ‘barbarians’ merely fitted Roman niches. They are matched by shifts in imagery, values, cultural style, which makes the seventh century in the West noticeably different in feel from the fourth or even the fifth: we are by now out of the late Roman world and into the early Middle Ages. How this could be, given the lack of innovation desired by most of the new ethnic groups, is the issue we need to confront.

  To start with, there is an evident continuum between the leadership of the fifth-century western (and indeed eastern) empire and the ‘barbarian’ kings. The fifth-century emperors were mostly ciphers, controlled by military strong-men, Stilicho, Constantius, Aetius, Ricimer, Aspar, Zeno, Gundobad, Orestes (Romulus Augustulus’ father). It is interesting that none of these tried to seize the throne by force, as military figures regularly had in the third century, and only two (Constantius and Zeno) became emperor even by more regular means. One commonly advanced reason for this is that, as ethnic ‘barbarians’, they were not entitled to imperial office; but, quite apart from the fact that not all of them were of non-Roman descent, there is no contemporary basis whatsoever for an exclusion of this kind. Basiliscus, briefly eastern emperor in 475-6, may indeed have been Odovacer’s uncle, and thus a Scirian, from a subject people of Attila’s Huns; Silvanus, a failed usurper in 355, was certainly a Frank. More likely they held off from seizing power because of a trend towards a view that imperial legitimacy was allied to genealogy, a view which can be traced back to Constantine’s family in the mid-fourth century; it would have seemed safer to control an emperor (or a series of emperors, as Ricimer did) than to usurp the throne. And it probably was; these strong-men had much longer periods of authority than most third-century emperors. An important element in late Roman genealogical legitimacy was marriage, so all the strong-men intermarried with the imperial families, hoping to put their sons on the throne; Constantius and Zeno both managed this. (Zeno became sole emperor himself, of course, but only as heir to his own short-lived son.) But this is equally true of the ‘barbarian’ royal families, most of whom had, or soon established, links of marriage to the Romans, often doubtless with the same intent. This genealogical network makes a nonsense of cultural difference, at least at the imperial or royal level. So does the fact that nearly every emperor of the East for more than a century after 450 (with only one exception, Zeno) came from the melting pot of the Balkans, where new identities were being refashioned all the time, as also did a high percentage of the imperial strong-men and the ‘barbarian’ leaders alike. And there were cross-overs in personal terms: both Gundobad the Burgundian and Theoderic the Ostrogoth had careers in and around the imperial court before becoming kings of independent ex-Roman provinces.

  The importance of intermarriage as a criterion for succession also put a good deal of stress on imperial women. We have seen that Galla Placidia and particularly Pulcheria were powerful in the early fifth century, and both legitimized their imperial husbands. So did Ariadne, daughter of Leo I and wife successively of Zeno and Anastasius. Verina, Leo’s wife, was Basiliscus’ sister. Theodora, herself a powerful political operator despite her husband Justinian’s dominance, seems to have promoted her kin as well, although she died too long before her husband for any of them still to be in place to succeed him. Sophia, widow of Justin II (565-78), certainly chose his successor, Tiberius II, and perhaps Maurice too. There was a space for female political action here, which was taken up many times. It is thus not surprising that Anicia Juliana (d. 527/8), a rich private citizen in Constantinople but a descendant of Valentinian III and of a whole host of empresses (and also wife of a descendant of Aspar), and bearing the title of patricia by 507, should have had an impact on Justinian: her church of Hagios Polyeuktos, in the centre of Constantinople, built around 525, was the largest church in the city until Justinian built Hagia Sophia a decade later, probably in part as a response. This space for female power, however ambivalent (for it was always that), was more of an eastern than a western feature; the military crises of the West favoured a more male military leadership. Women in the West who could dominate a militarized politics would appear later, with the Lombards after 590 and the Merovingian Franks after 575, but their prominence had different reasons.

  To return to the ‘barbarian’ leaders, and to their peoples: what exactly was non-Roman, ‘barbarian’, Germanic, about them at all? There is at present enormous debate about this, with an endless variety of positions even among those who accept that the new ethnic groups sought to accommodate themselves to Roman rules as much as they could: from the belief that there was a substantial kernel of non-Roman values and traditions, associated with the dominant element in any invading or settling group, which could survive for centuries, to the belief that Germanic ethnic markers were only a renaming of the military identity of Roman soldiers, and that there was nothing traditional about them at all. It does at least need to be recognized, with this second position, that most of the new ‘barbarian’ groups in the fifth-century empire had a history of employment in the Roman army; the most successful soldiers among them, such as the Visigoths, were effectively indistinguishable from a Roman military detachment. (‘Barbarian’ armies regularly travelled with their families and dependants, but, although it was theoretically illegal, it would be unwise to presume that Roman armies in practice did not.) We can, however, see a clear distinction in our sources between regular army forces, which, whether of Roman or ‘barbarian’ origin (as we saw in Chapter 2, there was on the frontiers, whence soldiers usually came, little difference between them), were part of a standard military hierarchy and career structure; and the followers of King X or leader Y, who identified with their leader, generally had a distinct ethnic name, and were accepted into the Roman army as a discrete group. This is the distinction between Odovacer and Theoderic, for example, successive rulers of Italy. Odovacer was the candidate of the Roman army of Italy, which merely happened to consist of ethnic Heruls, Sciri and Torcilingi; Odovacer was himself at least half-Scirian, but he had a Roman military background, and is never called leader of the Sciri, or of any other group in Italy. He became a king, formally autonomous, b
ut he recognized Zeno, and could fairly easily have been refigured as part of the Roman empire. Theoderic, by contrast, was a king of the Goths, whose people came with him from the start, no matter how many imperial titles he also had. That people was as mixed as Odovacer’s supporters; it certainly contained Rugi (who maintained an identity through intermarriage for fifty years after Theoderic’s conquest of Italy), Gepids, Huns and doubtless men of Roman descent as well, and, after Theoderic’s conquest, it will have absorbed all or most of Odovacer’s following. But it was attached to a leader, and had a name, ‘Gothic’, Ostrogothic in our terminology; this name characterized the people as a whole, no matter what their origin, and also Theoderic’s kingship. It was peoples like this, heterogeneous but - an essential feature - tied together by a single leader, which took over the western provinces, and indeed renamed them, the regnum Francorum instead of or alongside Gaul, the regnum Vandalorum instead of or alongside Africa. If they stayed in charge of their lands long enough, as the Franks and Visigoths did, though the Vandals and Ostrogoths did not, they tended to forget their disparate origins, and ‘become’ Frankish or Gothic - and also, crucially, not Roman.

  It is this process that has been called ‘ethnogenesis’ by Herwig Wolfram and his school: the recognition that ethnic identities were flexible, malleable, ‘situational constructs’; the same ‘barbarian’ in sixth-century Italy could be Rugian, and Ostrogothic, and (though only after the east Roman reconquest) even Roman. Such people would have picked up different identities successively (or contemporaneously), and these would have brought with them different modes of behaviour and loyalties, and even, eventually, different memories. As Walter Pohl has recently put it, the ‘kernel of traditions’ that made someone Ostrogoth or Visigoth was probably a network of contradictory and changeable beliefs; there does not have to have been a stable set of traditions in each group as it moved from beyond the frontier, to discontinuous service in the Roman army, then to settlement in a Roman province. By 650 every ‘barbarian’ kingdom had its own traditions, some of them claiming to go back centuries, and those doubtless were by then core elements in the founding myths of many of their inhabitants; all the same, founding myths not only do not have to be true, but also do not have to be old. Each of the ‘Romano-Germanic’ kingdoms had a bricolage of beliefs and identities with very varying roots, and these, to repeat, could change, and be reconfigured, in each generation to fit new needs. Historians tend to give more attention to the account that Clovis’s grandfather was the son of a sea-monster, a quinotaur, than to the account that the Franks were descended from the Trojans, which seems more ‘literary’, less ‘authentic’; but the first record of each of these traditions appears in the same seventh-century source, and it would be hard to say that one was more widely believed - or older - than the other.

  From all of this, one has to conclude that post-Roman identities were a complex mixture, and they had a variety of origins: Roman, ‘barbarian’, biblical; and also both oral and literary. What they had to do was less to locate an ethnic group in the past, than to distinguish it from its contemporary neighbours. This means that to ask what was non-Roman or ‘barbarian’ about the new ethnic groups is in part the wrong question; Arianism, for example, was a very Roman heresy, but by 500, for most people, it had become an ethnic marker, of Goths or Vandals. The Gothic language itself was by 500 in large part a liturgical tradition, associated precisely with that ex-Roman Arianism, rather than with ‘Gothic-ness’ in an ethnic sense; many Goths just spoke Latin, without their Gothic-ness being affected either positively or negatively. Indeed, unlike in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, language was not, as far as we can see, a strong ethnic marker anywhere in our period. Plenty of Franks in 600, say, still spoke Frankish (a version of what we now call Old High German), but very probably not all did, and many were certainly fully bilingual. Gregory of Tours, the most prolific writer of the sixth century in Gaul, who was a monoglot Latin-speaker, never gives the slightest indication that he had trouble communicating with anyone else in the Frankish kingdoms. Neither he nor anyone else in the Frankish world, until the ninth century in fact, makes anything of communication difficulties between primary speakers of Latin and Frankish; it must have happened, but it was not a problem for Frankishness.

  This does not mean that the ‘barbarian’ groups brought nothing of their earlier cultures into the empire, all the same. There is a whole historiography which discusses the German-ness of early medieval social practices, such as large kin-groups, or feud, or personal followings, or meat-eating, or certain concepts of property, or certain types of brooch or belt-buckle. Almost all of this is phoney if seen as a sign of innate identity, as if the Franks of 700 were exactly the same as the Franks of 350. Some of it is inaccurate, too: most early medieval property law had impeccable Roman antecedents, or at least close Roman parallels; similarly, ‘Germanic’ metalwork sometimes has Roman antecedents, and, even if it does not, does not provide us with any guide to the ethnic identities of the people who wore it. But it would be equally unhelpful to cancel all of this by sleight of hand, and to present the new ethnic groups simply as variants of Roman society itself. A stress on aristocratic meat-eating, for example, genuinely does seem to be an innovation of (among others) the Franks; it was not part of Roman cuisine, where status was conveyed by the complexity and the cost of ingredients, but first appears in a treatise about diet written for the Frankish king Theuderic I (511-33) by a doctor of Greek origin called Anthimus, and it continued throughout the Middle Ages.

  A particularly important innovation was the public assembly, the formal meeting of the adult male members of a political community, to deliberate and decide on political action and war, and, increasingly, to make law and judge disputes. The Romans had plenty of large-scale public ceremonials, as we saw in Chapter 3, but in the post-Roman kingdoms assemblies had a wider significance, in that they represented the principle that the king had a direct relationship with all free Franks, or Lombards, or Burgundians; these derived from the values of the tribal communities of the imperial period, but continued in the very different post-Roman world. We can thus trace a continuum of political practice which links the Franks and Lombards, not with Rome in this case, but with the less Romanized or un-Romanized peoples of the early medieval North; the Frankish or Lombard placitum assembly, or the Burgundian conventus, has parallels with the Anglo-Saxon gemot, the Scandinavian thing, the Irish óenach. These assemblies were not really of all free men, the traditional kingdom-at-arms of Romantic mythology, but they could be wide gatherings for all that, and they derived their power to legitimate political and judicial acts precisely from the fact that many people were there. From 500 to 1000, and sometimes later, public politics in the West was underpinned by the direct participation of wide sections of free, male, society. This went together with an assumption that wide sections of the free had military obligations, which was largely a product of post-Roman conditions, as we shall see in more detail later. But the link between military commitment and assembly politics must have made sense already to the ethnic armies of the fifth century; the generalization of assembly imagery in every Romano-Germanic kingdom (even the heavily Romanized Visigothic state) itself allows us to presume it.

  Notwithstanding these new features, ‘barbarian’ leaders fitted into a Roman world, more and more as the fifth century wore on, and as local Roman élites adjusted to new political situations. It is striking how Roman these élites could make their new rulers in their writings; nearly every new ruling ethnic group had its apologist who was prepared to describe ‘barbarian’ kings in resonantly Roman terms, as with Sidonius’ famous prose panegyric on the Visigothic king Theoderic II, stressing his seriousness, his accessibility to ambassadors and petitioners (and his board-games), and playing down his Arianism. There were not large numbers of ‘barbarian’ invaders in any province; all raw figures are guesswork, but historians generally propose up to 100,000 for major ruling groups like the Ostrogoths or t
he Vandals, and around 20,000- 25,000 for the adult males who made up their armies, in provinces whose indigenous populations numbered in the millions. Putting together the ethnic flexibility of so many of the actors of the period, the Romanizing images of so many of our texts, and the small demographic impact of the invaders - one in ten? one in twenty? one in fifty? - it is easy to imagine that they had no effect at all on the social practices of each province. But if we argue this line too schematically, we risk ending up with no explanations for change at all. And change, in the fifth century, certainly took place.

  This change did not derive mostly from cultural differences, all the same. Regions which experienced the miserable insecurities described earlier for Noricum would have seen substantial social breakdown even if no ‘barbarians’ ever settled. But in conquered provinces, the majority in the West, change derived most of all from the structural position of each ‘barbarian’ group. As noted earlier, the ‘barbarian’ armies that took over provinces had different aims from the Roman armies that seized power for their generals in previous centuries. They wanted to settle back on the land, as their ancestors had done, before the generation or so of intermittent movement and conquest. Their leaders, and probably a good proportion of the middling Goths or Vandals or Franks as well, also wanted to be a ruling class, like the rich Roman aristocrats in each of the provinces they occupied. To fulfil this aim, itself a very Roman one, they needed estates, and, as conquerors, they were in a good position to obtain it. Although the exact details of the land-settlement of each ‘barbarian’ group are obscure and hotly debated (indeed, they must have been very variable), by 500 or so it is clear that Gothic and other ‘barbarian’ aristocrats had extensive properties, and were keen to extend them further; Cassiodorus’ Variae include several instances of Ostrogoths abusing their political and military authority and expropriating the lands of others, for example. Beginning in the fifth century, there was a steady trend away from supporting armies by public taxation and towards supporting them by the rents deriving from private landowning, which was essentially the product of this desire for land of conquering élites. In 476, according to Prokopios, even the Roman army of Italy wanted to be given lands, and got it by supporting Odovacer. Prokopios may well have exaggerated; the Ostrogothic state in Italy certainly still used taxation to pay the army, at least in part, probably more than any other post-Roman polity did by the early sixth century. Overall, however, the shift to land was permanent. After the end of Ostrogothic Italy, there are no references in the West to army pay, except rations for garrisons, until the Arabs reintroduced it into Spain from the mid-eighth century onwards; in the other western kingdoms, only occasional mer cenary detachments were paid until well after the end of the period covered by this book. Some of this land may have been fiscal, that is, public property, and distributed by kings; some may have been part of a regular land-settlement, in which fixed proportions of the property of Roman landowners were ceded to the ‘barbarians’, probably in lieu of tax; some (as in Vandal Africa) may have simply been taken by force. Either way, a move to a landed army, and thus a landed politics, began here; so also did a move to a ‘barbarian’ ethnic identity on the part of landowners, whatever their origins.