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

by Chris Wickham

  The last half of the seventh century marks the peak of public activity for the Visigothic kingdom. Reccesuinth and Ervig both revised Leovigild’s law code, and legislated substantially themselves; laws survive for all the other kings except Roderic. The church councils were key moments in royal policy-making as well. And the laws that were made were more and more complex, as well as more and more high-flown. They were posed in all the codes as Gothic law, valid for all people in the kingdom, as law had probably in fact been from the fifth century onwards, even when a distinction between the Gothic and Roman population could be drawn, something which had gone by the mid-seventh century. But the antecedents of much of this ‘Gothic’ law lay in the imperial code of Theodosius II, far more than in other post-Roman kingdoms, and the rising rhetoric of the law looked to Roman models too. It is fairly clear that the late seventh-century Visigoths had the contemporary Byzantine empire as a point of reference as well, at least as a model for ceremonial, and for a close identification between the episcopacy and the king. The importance of religious conformity, implicit since the third council in 589, also became increasingly visible. The major law-givers of the period, Reccesuinth, Ervig and Egica, were fiercely hostile to the main non-Catholic group in Spain, the Jews; they picked up Sisebut’s laws and greatly extended them, banning all Jewish religious practices, restricting Jewish civil rights, and in 694 reducing all Jews to slavery. The seventh century in Byzantium, Italy, even the normally tolerant Francia, saw some sporadic Jewish persecution, but these Visigothic laws have no real equivalent in their violence - and violence of expression - against Jews until the late Middle Ages. It is hard to read them today without hostility and alarm. All the same, they are quite parallel with Roman heresy laws, and they are in a line of legislation which in that respect stresses the Romanizing ambition of the kings only too clearly.

  It is at this point, however, that questions arise. The complexity of the ceremonial at Toledo is very evident by 650 or so, and the regularity with which bishops and aristocrats went there is equally clear. The elaborate public humiliations which political losers faced in the capital - Argimund in 590 taken through the streets on a donkey with his hand cut off, Paul in 673 brought in barefoot on a camel - look straight back to the victory ceremonies of the Roman empire. Kings were, as in Francia, rich, not least because of Chindasuinth’s confiscations (they maintained elements of the land tax, too, into the late seventh century at least), and therefore such a focus on the capital was presumably considered profitable by political players. The administration, the officium palatinum, was at least as elaborate as in Francia - although far less than in the Roman world - and hedged about with legal privileges; it included central officials and regional representatives such as dukes, and seems to have had some corporate identity, presumably centred on the king, much as the episcopate did. Indeed, it has been plausibly argued by Dietrich Claude that the aristocracy were, as a whole, more and more involved in palace politics; and the kings could certainly ruin individual aristocrats if they chose. But our sources are so overwhelmingly interested in royal and episcopal aspirations, and tell us so little about what really went on outside Toledo, that it is legitimate - and common - to wonder how much of this legislation was shadow-play. The Jews were so often extirpated, then return to be extirpated again. Wamba’s 673 law on army-service was so severe, Ervig claimed when revising it a decade later, that ‘almost half the population’ had lost their civil rights: do we believe this? Egica in 702 in a law against fugitives said that ‘there is barely a city, fortification, village, estate or dwelling-place’ in which they were not hiding. This is a law which has been taken literally distressingly often, but it at least shows both the tendency of the kings to get carried away rhetorically and their awareness that it might be very different on the ground.

  When we get a sight of local realities, they often seem very variegated as well, just as they had been before Leovigild. The archaeological trends of the fifth and early sixth centuries were not reversed later; if anything, they were accentuated, with the Meseta showing an increasingly localized set of economies, imports dropping in the Guadalquivir valley, and much of the Mediterranean coast showing a sharp economic simplification in the seventh century; the Roman south-east coast was no longer supplied from North Africa after Suinthila’s conquest, and it seems to have gone into crisis. Urbanism survived best in some of the southern cities, Mérida, Córdoba, doubtless Seville, and also Toledo in the centre (the latter two have not been excavated, however); much less in most of the north, and only occasionally on the Mediterranean coast (Barcelona and Valencia are candidates). In economic terms, the seventh-century kings thus presided over a set of separate economic realities, with divergent histories and decreasing interconnection. The seventh-century slate documents that have been found in the central mountains south of Salamanca (it is an area with slate rocks, easily usable for writing; the texts are often quite ephemeral estate texts, lists of cheese-rents and animals) seem to reflect a very localized economy as well: they cite very few place names, except, once, Toledo.

  This growing local divergence may also explain some of the inconsistencies we can see in social trends. The aristocracy was clearly as militarized as in Francia, and a pattern of private relationships was developing; the late seventh-century army laws show that the army was largely made up of the personal dependants of lords, and church council legislation shows that the image of personal dependence was coming to structure ecclesiastical hierarchies too. The king, indeed, was seen as everyone’s lord; every free man swore a personal oath of fidelity to him, a practice borrowed later by the Franks and Anglo-Saxons. Conversely, we also find institutions and cultural attitudes that were hardly changed from the Roman empire. The obsession with law and with legal delimitation (between aristocrats, honestiores, and non-aristocrats, for example) seems likely to be a Roman survival, even if some of the rhetoric of kings like Ervig and Egica could be seen more as revival. And, above all, the dense Roman culture of major political intellectuals like Isidore, bishop of Seville (599-636), author of theology, history, and the Etymologies, an influential if very strange encyclopedia, as well as animator of the fourth council of Toledo, must show that a traditional educational structure had survived intact in some of Spain’s major cities. The letters of Isidore’s disciple Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza (631-51), which are unusually attractive and human, show that this Roman cultural style existed in other parts of Spain as well, and the letters of Count Bulgar, surviving from the 610s, show that it sometimes extended to the secular aristocracy too, as King Sisebut’s writings further demonstrate. Isidore and Braulio were in any case heavily involved in secular politics; they were both from aristocratic episcopal families, and were very close to kings. Their ‘late late Roman’ political practice, which survived in their successors up to 700 at least, must have been recognizable to a substantial part of the political establishment, and was certainly drawn on by legislators; Braulio indeed seems to have personally contributed to Reccesuinth’s revised law code.

  The seventh-century Visigothic kings thus presided over places and social groups where not very much had changed since the days of Augustine, places and social groups characterized by the same sort of militarized - and ruralized - society as in contemporary northern Francia, as well as some much simpler, more collective, societies, surviving in particular in parts of the north, and some areas of economic disintegration on the Mediterranean coast. They handled this diversity with the ambition of Roman emperors, but with a rather less elaborate administrative structure, which would have made detailed intervention rather more difficult. Small wonder their laws were sometimes rather shrill. It was impossible to encompass this diversity with early medieval western means; the kings knew it, and, unlike in Francia, resented it. But we would be wrong to follow the view of some modern historians and conclude that the late seventh century was a period of general crisis for the kingdom. Far from it; in that period the Visigothic state was the strongest in the
West.

  One of the reasons why the imagery of crisis has been used is that in 711 the Visigothic kingdom was overthrown by an Arab and Berber army invading from North Africa, and most of Spain remained part of a Muslim political community looking to Damascus, Baghdad and Cairo as a result, for the next five centuries and more (see Chapter 14). When kingdoms collapse quickly, historians have often sought to blame them for their defeat; but the answers can just as easily lie in the chance of a single battle, as with the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England that ended at Hastings in 1066. It is certainly true that Spain fell to pieces in 711. The Arabs were for long only powerful in the far south. The north-east kept a Visigothic king for a decade; the south-east saw its Visigothic governor, Theodemir (d. 744), cut a separate deal with the Arabs in return for autonomy; the far north returned to communitarian and sometimes tribal traditions, as well as choosing an independent Christian king in the Asturias, Pelagius, around 720, the first of a long series of independent kings in the north (see Chapter 20). These different choices certainly reflect the socio-economic divergences already cited. But it took violent conquest to turn them into political realities; before 711 there is no sign of the sliding away of outlying regions, as in late seventh-century Francia. Until then, as far as can be seen, the Visigothic kings kept a firm hegemony over all of them.

  Italy had even more Roman traditions than Spain to draw on in the sixth century, but handled them differently. The Gothic war of 536-54 did enormous damage to the infrastructure of the peninsula, and Italy had by no means settled down when a federation headed by the Lombards invaded from Pannonia under Alboin (560-72) in 568-9. The Lombard invasion was one of the more disorganized we know of, however. In 574, after the assassination of two kings, the Lombards abandoned kingship altogether for a decade, and operated as a loose federation of dukes. It is likely that they did this as a result of bribes by the east Roman ruler Tiberius II, and Tiberius and his successors were indeed successful in getting many dukes to fight on the Roman side in the wars of the rest of the century. Tiberius also invited the Franks back to Italy to attack the Lombards. The Lombards, facing this, elected kings again, Authari (584-90), and then, in the teeth of the most substantial Frankish invasion, Agilulf (590-616), formerly duke of Turin. Agilulf withstood the major attacks of 590 and counterattacked himself; he established peace with the emperor Phocas in 605, gave tribute to the Franks, and some stability could return. But that peace revealed an alarmingly divided Italy. The Lombards had not managed to conquer more than separate sections of the peninsula: the inland Po valley in northern Italy; Tuscany, connected to the north only by a single mountain pass; and the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento in the central and southern Appennines. The last two were effectively autonomous duchies, with little link to the kingdom of the north until the eighth century. The Romans clung on to the area around Ravenna in the north, extending along the Adriatic coast in both directions, the west coast around Genoa and Pisa, the area round Rome, the area around Naples, and Puglia and the far south, with Sicily and Sardinia. Italy would not be controlled by a single ruler again until 1871. In this patchwork, the old centres of Roman political power, Rome and Ravenna, and all the major ports, stayed out of Lombard hands, and the Lombards were essentially restricted to inland areas, which had already become structurally separate from the Mediterranean world since the Gothic war.

  This division could have allowed the Roman parts of Italy - Byzantine Italy as we can now call it - to maintain imperial traditions without further problem, while leaving the Lombard lands in relative isolation. This did not happen, however. The Lombards tended to remain on the offensive, taking Genoa in the 640s and Puglia in the 670s; another peace in 680 stabilized matters a little, but between 726 and 751 the Ravenna area was taken in a series of wars. Lombard isolation from the coast was steadily eroded, and after 751 Byzantine power on the mainland was restricted to Venice, Rome, Naples and the tips of the heel and toe of Italy. This meant that the Byzantines had to remain heavily militarized to defend themselves, and they did so. The ruler of Byzantine Italy, the exarch based in Ravenna, held a military office, and the aristocracy rapidly reshaped itself into a military hierarchy looking to him; even the citizens of the Byzantine cities could be referred to as milites, soldiers, or as a numerus, an army. They looked more and more like a ‘Romano-Germanic’ society, in fact, whether Lombard or Frankish. Unlike in the rest of the Byzantine empire, even the tax system eroded in much of the peninsula, much as it did in Francia or Spain. And links with Lombard areas, wars or no wars, slowly developed. The northern Lombards had to cross Byzantine territory if they wanted to reach Spoleto or Benevento, and are sometimes mentioned in sources as visiting Ravenna; the Beneventans and the Neapoli tans even shared ownership of public lands in the rich Capua plain on their boundary. In social terms, the various sections of the peninsula developed largely in parallel, and we do not see the divergencies in Italy that are visible in Spain. We shall look shortly at some of the differences that did exist.

  The Lombard kings, like the Visigoths, never established a dynasty; even the Agilolfings who ruled from 653 to 712 faced internal coups, and two kings from a rival family in 662-72. But throughout the seventh century they recognized some rough genealogical criteria for succession, if not in the Agilolfing line, then through queens. Authari’s widow Theodelinda (d. c. 620) married Agilulf in 590, and later tradition said she chose him; she was certainly influential in Agilulf’s reign, negotiating with Pope Gregory the Great (590-604) in Rome. Her daughter Gundiperga similarly married two successive kings, Arioald (626-36) and Rothari (636-52); Aripert I (653-61) was her cousin; and Grimoald (662-71), when he overthrew Aripert’s son Perctarit (661-2, 672-88), married the latter’s sister. This did not, all the same, lead to much female political protagonism; Theodelinda remains an exception here, perhaps because she was a Frank, daughter of the Agilolfing duke of Bavaria, at a time of considerable Frankish influence.

  The seventh century is poorly documented in Lombard Italy, in the absence of both documents and detailed narratives, for Paul the Deacon’s Lombard history, written in the 790s, is both brief and late; but Agilulf and Rothari stand out. Agilulf stabilized the frontiers, and also established an effective hegemony over the dukes of the cities of the north. The political incoherences of the first thirty years of Lombard Italy ended with him. He used Roman ceremonial imagery, as when he presented his son Adaloald (616-26) as king in 604 in the circus at Milan, and he had Roman administrators and advisers. His wife and son were Catholic, but he was not. All the same, it is significant that we cannot tell from our sources whether he was pagan or Arian; the Lombards included followers of all three religions, and there is no sign from Agilulf onwards that personal religious affiliation had a major political content, unlike in Spain. Rothari, duke of Brescia before his accession, was certainly Arian, but more important than that is that he saw himself as a Lombard legitimist, fighting wars against the Byzantines, and he issued the first Lombard law code, the Edict, in 643. This text lists his seventeen predecessors as Lombard kings, well back into myth, and also Rothari’s own eleven male-line ancestors, and manuscripts of the law include a brief Lombard history, which may have been there in some form from the start. The Edict of Rothari is the longest early medieval code after those of the Visigoths, but much less influenced by Roman law, although the picture of royal authority contained in it is Roman enough. It was really Rothari who created a specifically Lombard imagery for kingship and society in Italy, and there is little in later Lombard ‘ethnic’ identity that can be traced back further than 643. Conversely, it is important to recognize that, as in Spain, this identity was erected on the back of a Roman-influenced administration, based from Rothari’s time at the latest on a stable capital at Pavia, in imitation of Roman/Byzantine centres such as Ravenna (and maybe also of Toledo), as well as on a network of dukes and gastalds (the equivalent of Frankish counts) ruling over each of the traditional Roman city territories of the north of Italy.
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  Rothari’s successors drew on Lombard imagery, and on Lombard law, but also on the Roman infrastructure that it assumed. They also used the church relatively little; bishops were important in city politics, and are sometimes referred to as royal advisers (under Agilulf in particular), but none of them were major political dealers, unlike in Francia, and councils of bishops had no political or ceremonial role, unlike in Spain, or in the Byzantine empire. After 653 no king was certainly Arian, but the abandonment of Arianism is given little stress in our sources. Slightly more important, perhaps, was the formal abandonment at the synod of Pavia in 698 of the schism of the Three Chapters, which had separated the Catholics of the north of Italy from Rome since the 550s, under the patronage of King Cunipert (679-700), but this did not lead to any increase in the imagery of religious unity in the Lombard kingdom, either.

  Liutprand (712-44) was the most powerful Lombard king. Son of the tutor to Cunipert’s son, he could claim a link to the family politics of the seventh century, but he was not genealogically associated with his predecessors, and his reign feels like a new beginning. He legislated extensively to fill out and update Rothari’s Edict, in annual sessions (taking place on 1 March, as in sixth-century Francia); it is clear that he was also regularly acting as a judge, for many of his enactments are the generalizations of specific judgements on quite arcane points of law, such as who is liable if a man is killed when the counterweight from a well falls on his head while water is being drawn, or how much penalty should be paid if a man steals a woman’s clothes while she is bathing. One of his first enactments, in 713, made pious gifts to the church legal, and documents for such gifts and for other matters more or less begin then, making the eighth century as a whole much more visible than the seventh in Lombard Italy. And he made war, almost as regularly as his contemporary and ally Charles Martel, against the Byzantines and also against the southern Lombard dukes. By the 740s Spoleto was permanently brought into the political power-structure of the kingdom. Benevento, further away and richer, had always been the more autonomous of the two (except in the 660s, when its duke, Grimoald, had gained the kingdom), and remained so, but at least Liutprand and his successors chose its dukes several times. By Liutprand’s death the Lombard king was hegemonic in the entire peninsula, and it became for the first time since 568 conceivable that Italy might become a single political unit again.