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

by Chris Wickham

  The major post-Roman kingdoms still taxed, into the seventh century. But if the army was landed, the major item of expense in the Roman budget had gone. The city of Rome, another important item, was only supplied from Italy after 439, and lost population fast, as we have seen. The central and local administration of the post-Roman states was perhaps paid for longer, but in most of them the administration quickly became smaller and cheaper. Tax still made kings rich, and their generosity increased the attractive power of royal courts. But this was all it was for, by 550 or so. Tax is always unpopular, and takes work to exact; if it is not essential, this work tends to be neglected. It is thus not surprising that there are increasing signs that it was not assiduously collected. In ex-Vandal Africa after 534, the Roman re-conquerors had to reorganize the tax administration to make it effective again, to great local unpopularity; in Frankish Gaul in the 580s, assessment registers were no longer being systematically updated, and tax rates may only have been around a third of those normal under the empire. Tax was, that is to say, no longer the basis of the state. For kings as well as armies, landowning was the major source of wealth from now on.

  This was a crucial change. Tax-raising states are much richer than most land-based ones, for property taxes are generally collected from very many more people than pay rent to a ruler from his public land. Probably only the Frankish kings at the high points of their power, the century after 540 and the century after 770, could match in wealth the states of the eastern Mediterranean, the Byzantine empire and the Arab caliphate, which still maintained Roman traditions of taxation. And tax-raising states have a far greater overall control over their territories, partly because of the constant presence of tax-assessors and collectors, partly because state dependants (both officials and soldiers) are salaried. Rulers can stop paying salaries, and have greater control over their personnel as a result. But if armies are based on landowning, they are harder to control. Generals may be disloyal unless they are given more land, which reduces the amount of land the ruler has; and, if they are disloyal, they keep control of their land unless they are expelled by force, often a difficult task. Land-based states risk breaking up, in fact, for their outlying territories are hard to dominate in depth, and may secede altogether. This would not be common until the late ninth century or later in the West. Many things would have to change before then, as we shall see in later chapters. But it did happen in the end, above all in the wide lands ruled by the Franks.

  The shift from taxation to landowning as the basis of the state in the West was the clearest sign that the post-Roman kingdoms would not be able to re-create the Roman empire in miniature, however much their rulers would have liked to. Overall, too, these kingdoms did not match the empire in their economic complexity, either. Archaeology shows a steady simplification of economic structure in most of the West by 550 or so. By then, rich urban and rural dwellings (villas) had often been abandoned, or subdivided into smaller houses; artisan production was generally smaller-scale, and sometimes less skilled (this is particularly clear in the case of pottery production, always our best archaeological indicator of artisanal professionalization); goods were exchanged much less between the provinces of the former empire, and inside those provinces, the new kingdoms, the distribution range of artisanal goods was generally much reduced. The pacing of these changes varied greatly from place to place, and not all of them took place everywhere. In northern Gaul, towns decreased in size and villas were abandoned by 450, but production and distribution patterns dipped much less (northern Gaul’s economy had long been separate from that of the Mediterranean), and had stabilized by the sixth century. In Spain, the interior saw a simplification of distribution patterns and a partial abandonment of villas from the later fifth century, whereas the Mediterranean coast saw less change until after 550. In Italy and southern Gaul, the mid-sixth century was the major period of change, but small-scale skilled artisanal production survived, and so did towns. In Africa, the great export region in the late Roman West, little internal change is visible at all until 500 or so, and one can track a survival of the main elements of the Roman economic structure until after 600, even though there is a steady decrease in African exports found in most of the rest of the Mediterranean which begins as early as 450.

  These regional differences - which could be multiplied, for our information is getting more detailed all the time, as scientific archaeological excavation becomes commoner in each country - are markers of the different impact the invasions and dislocations of the period 400-550 had on each part of the empire. It was more than one might expect in inland Spain; less than one might expect in Frankish northern Gaul and Vandal Africa. These differences also show that the aristocracies of the newly created kingdoms did not match the wealth of their predecessors or ancestors, partly precisely because it was harder to own far-flung estates now that the empire was divided up (the hyper-rich senatorial élite of Rome ceased to exist, in particular), but this impoverishment was also very variable indeed in regional terms. Seen globally, however, these changes show that the post-Roman kingdoms in the West were unable to match the intensity of circulation and the scale of production of the later Roman empire. The East was very different in this respect; in the early sixth century, towns, industries and the exchange of goods were reaching their height, and continued at that level until the early seventh century. But the empire survived in the East. This correlation is exact: economic complexity depended on imperial unity, in both the eastern and the western empire. The implications that these changes had for local societies in the West will be discussed in Chapter 9.

  The existence of ‘barbarian’ élites in each of the post-Roman kingdoms had an impact on Roman élite culture as well: not because the incomers were culturally distinct - as we have just seen, in most respects they were not - but because they were military. The aristocratic strata of the Roman empire had been mostly civilian, as we saw in Chapter 2. This was already less the case in the world of Aetius; Eparchius Avitus, for example, from a major Gaulish senatorial family, had been one of Aetius’ generals before he became emperor, and could be described in very martial terms by his son-in-law Sidonius. But in the post-Roman kingdoms, the secular career structure became steadily more militarized, and more and more ambitious Romans found places in royal armies and entourages alongside the ‘barbarian’ élites themselves, rather than in the steadily simplifying civilian administration. Sidonius himself never did this, but his son Apollinaris fought for the Visigoths at Vouillé, and Apollinaris’ son Arcadius was a supporter of Childebert I of the Franks. The place where civilian aristocratic values survived longest was Rome itself, because the senatorial hierarchy there was partially separate from state service, but even in Italy senators could make the military choice: Boethius’ enemy Cyprian, who had a partly military career, brought up his sons to be soldiers and even to speak Gothic.

  These trends persisted; all secular aristocratic hierarchies became military. The only alternative was the church. As we have already noted, aristocrats became bishops in Gaul first, by the mid-fifth century; in Italy this was less common until the Gothic war, but was normal thereafter. This ecclesiastical choice shows the growing wealth of the church, such that it was worthwhile for an élite family to seek to dominate the episcopal office, and thus church land, in a given diocese. It also shows the growing localization of political action, for episcopal power was focused above all inside the diocese, except for the richest and most influential bishops; the church became even more decentralized in the post-imperial West. Being a bishop was sometimes a retirement option (as with both Sidonius and his son Apollinaris in Clermont), but increasingly it became a career choice, with a specifically clerical training: sometimes for younger sons, but sometimes for whole families. The extended family of Gregory of Tours in sixth-century central Gaul included seven bishops in four generations, and only one military figure, the dux Gundulf.

  The major result of these trends was that the secular élite culture of the Ro
man empire lost its role as a marker of status. This is probably why rural villas were abandoned: as a sign of ease and luxury, they were out of date in a more militarized society. Meat-eating came in in this context, too. Élite clothing changed as well; early medieval kings and aristocrats dressed like late Roman generals, not like the older toga-clad senatorial tradition. But above all, to know Virgil and the other secular classics by heart, to be able to write poetry and complex prose, which Sidonius still regarded as essential, ceased to be important; swordsman ship, or the Bible, were far more relevant sources of cultural capital. Our written sources change dramatically as a result, becoming much more focused on Christian themes, hagiography, sermons, liturgy (as they would in Byzantium too). It is not that all forms of literary training ended; even in the West, aristocracies were generally able to read until the end of the ninth century. But we should anyway remain neutral about such changes. As stressed in Chapter 2, it is more important to recognize that a complex education had above all existed in order to mark the Roman elites as special, and, now that that elite identity was changing, it was no longer needed.

  These changes usually took place slowly: a hundred and fifty years is a long time, after all. (Only in Italy were the changes really rapid, the result of the catastrophe of the Gothic war, in the 540s above all.) People were not usually aware of them; they adjusted easily to each small shift. It is not at all clear how far the majority of western writers saw the Roman world as having ended in the period up to 550, or indeed later. Writers rarely showed much nostalgia for the past, and, although they were certainly capable of complaining about how dreadful present-day morals were, this is a feature of conservatives of every generation. In any case, as writing became more ecclesiastical, it also became more socially critical, more moralizing; but that was a product of genre, not necessarily of social change, whether perceived or real. Traditional Roman aristocracies, the writers of most of our sources, were after all still in place in most parts of the West; they existed alongside newer families, rising in the church or the army, and of course the new ‘bar barian’ élites, but these latter groups were still copying Roman aristocratic culture. Still, that culture was itself changing. And aristocracies were becoming steadily more localized, drifting apart from each other. In the end - by 650, in every one of the post-Roman kingdoms - they would cease to think of themselves as Roman, but, rather, as Frankish or Visigothic or Lombard. ‘Romans’ were, by then, restricted to the eastern empire, to the non-Lombard portions of Italy (above all Rome itself), and to Aquitaine, the ex-Visigothic part of Gaul, where the Franks settled least. By then Romans were seen as belonging in the past, too; but it took that long for people to recognize that the empire had really gone in the West.

  Why the Roman empire vanished in the West and not in the East is a problem that has perplexed centuries of scholars, and will continue to do so. It does not seem to me to reflect social differences between West and East, or the division of the empire. It probably did derive in part from the greater exposure of heartland areas in the West, Italy and especially central and southern Gaul, to frontier invasion; attacks on the Balkans in the East rarely got past Constantinople into the rest of the empire, but attacks on the western military regions, northern Gaul and the Danube provinces, could get further much more easily. Accepting invading groups into the western empire and settling them as federates was a perfectly sensible response to this, as long as those federate areas did not become so unruly that Roman armies had to be held back to fight them, or so large that they threatened the tax base of the empire, and thus the resources for the regular armies themselves. Unfortunately for the West, however, this did happen. The Visigoths in 418 could be a support for the empire, but fifty years later they were inimical to it. As argued earlier, the conquest of the grain heartland of Africa by the Vandals in 439, which the Romans mistakenly did not anticipate and resist, seems to me the turning point, the moment after which these potential supports might turn into dangers. Army resources lessened too much after that; the balance of power changed. By 476 even the Roman army in Italy may have started to think that landowning was desirable. And, not less important, local élites began to deal with the ‘barbarian’ powers rather than with the imperial government, which was by now too distant and decreasingly relevant; the provincialization of politics marked the death knell for the western empire. In the East, the control by the empire of that other huge grain resource, the Nile valley in Egypt, was never under threat in this period, and the logistical structure of the empire remained untouched as a result. When the Persians and then the Arabs took Egypt, and also the Levant, from Roman control after 618, the East would however face a huge and rapid crisis as well. The eastern Roman empire (we shall from that point on call it the Byzantine empire) survived, but it was a close-run thing, and the eastern empire changed considerably as a result.

  PART II

  The Post-Roman West, 550-750

  5

  Merovingian Gaul and Germany, 500-751

  In 589 a group of the leading aristocrats of the kingdom of the Frankish king Childebert II (575-96), led by Duke Rauching, plotted Childebert’s assassination. They had long been opposed to Childebert’s mother Queen Brunhild (d. 613) and her supporters, and, even though Childebert was now an adult (he was probably nineteen), Brunhild was gaining in authority. But they were found out. Rauching, who may have had royal ambitions, was killed at once on Childebert’s orders at the king’s palace (probably at Reims), and his huge wealth was confiscated. His closest supporters, Ursio and Berthefried, had already mobilized an army, and they fled to a hill-top church in the wooded Woëvre region above Verdun, which overlooked Ursio’s estate-centre, and which had been a fortification in pre-Roman times. The king’s army besieged the church and Ursio was killed; Berthefried fled to Verdun cathedral, where he sought sanctuary, but he was killed there anyway, to the great distress of the local bishop.

  This narrative, like almost all our evidence from sixth-century Gaul, is known to us because of the extensive writings of Gregory, bishop of Tours. Gregory, an active political bishop of Roman senatorial background, had been appointed in 573 by Brunhild and her husband Sigibert I (561-75), and there is no doubt of his support for the queen’s party. He detested Rauching for his sadism, and he retells the deaths of the conspirators with verve: Rauching tripped at the door of the king’s private room and cut about the head with swords, his naked body then thrown out of the window, Ursio overwhelmed by his enemies outside the church, Berthefried hit by tiles from the partly dismantled cathedral roof. Gregory’s partisanship goes with his narrative gifts to make him one of the most interesting and illuminating authors in this book, but we cannot avoid seeing sixth-century Gaul pretty much exclusively through his eyes. It is over-optimistic to take him on trust, and, in the last decade or so, the careful literary structuring of Gregory’s work has become widely accepted. But as we saw in Chapter 1, even if we do not believe everything he says, the density of his descriptions allows us to learn from the assumptions he makes. Whatever the accuracy of his account of this conspiracy, we can at least conclude that it was plausible to picture certain things: that a royal court could be riven by factions; that queen-mothers could have considerable political power (note that Gregory ascribes no political protagonism to Childebert’s wife Faileuba); that major aristocrats could be very rich, and could have what amounted to private armies, but that their political ambition was concentrated on royal courts; that such men did not base themselves on private fortifications, unlike in the world of castles of the central Middle Ages - for Ursio’s last stand was notably makeshift in Gregory’s account; and that people might expect sanctuary to be respected, even if this did not always happen. All these conclusions are amply borne out slightly later, by sources from seventh-century Francia; they made up some of the basic parameters of Merovingian political practice. This conspiracy was traditionally read by historians as a deliberate attempt to limit royal power; there is no evidence for that. But the im
age of the Merovingian political world as one in which kings consistently faced over-mighty subjects who had both character and resources would not be a false one. These points will be developed in this chapter. I shall give a political narrative first, and then set out some of the basic structures and patterns of political action of the Merovingian period as a whole.