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

by Chris Wickham

  Liutprand’s successors were the brothers Ratchis (744-9) and Aistulf (749-56), dukes of Friuli in north-east Italy. Both kings legislated, and Aistulf in particular followed Liutprand’s territorial policies. It was Aistulf who finally occupied Ravenna in 751, and in 752 he sought tribute from Rome. But the geopolitical situation had changed by now. It was in 751 that the Carolingian Pippin III claimed the kingship in Francia, and sought ratification by two popes (below, Chapter 16); the debt to the papacy that this represented was quickly called in, as Pope Stephen II appealed for help against Aistulf. Pippin invaded Italy twice in 754-6; he forced Aistulf to leave Rome alone and to hand Ravenna to the pope as well. The next king, Desiderius (757-74), inherited both Aistulf’s aspirations and his constraints; he interfered in Roman politics, and also in Benevento, whose duke, Arichis II (758-87), he chose, but the Frankish threat remained. In the end, Desiderius attacked Rome again in 772, and Pippin’s son Charlemagne invaded Italy in 773-4; this time he overthrew the Lombard king and took all of Lombard Italy for himself, except Benevento, where Arichis in 774 named himself an independent prince.

  The mid-eighth-century kings were trapped between their felt need to absorb Rome, as the key to the south, and the certainty of Frankish retribution, even if it has to be added that Italy’s accessibility across the Alpine passes probably means that Charlemagne would have eventually attacked anyway. The Franks were never safe neighbours, and had a history of Italian involvement going back to Theudebert; from the time of Ratchis onward, in particular, the Franks were also keen to welcome Italian exiles, as were the Bavarians. Lombard military activity was probably always on a smaller scale than in Francia, and we have several wills from landowners about to go to war. These hint that actually taking part in fighting was by now not routine, even for large owners, despite all the military imagery that the Lombard aristocracy, just like all their neighbours, now regarded as de rigueur - let alone for the lesser free, who were nonetheless referred to as ‘army men’ in legislation. But there is no sign of political or structural weakness in the Lombard political system in any other respect. Like the Visigoths in 711, they just lost to superior arms, in this case to the strongest army in western Europe. Lombard political practice, indeed, influenced that of the Franks in the next generations, as we shall see later.

  The documentation we have for the eighth century shows a Lombard state that intervened in local society in capillary ways. The kings and the dukes or gastalds of the cities remained regular judges for primary court cases and for appeals, and kings made sure their judgements were followed by sending written instructions; we have a case from Lucca in 771 in which the local bishop re-heard a church dispute because the king had instructed him that his first judgement was improperly made. In difficult cases the king sent missi, emissaries of the royal court, to make enquiry on the spot, as in the disputes between Parma and Piacenza over the boundary of their city territories, resolved after an inquest by Perctarit in 674, and the parallel dispute over diocesan boundaries between Siena and Arezzo in 714-15, resolved after two inquests by Liutprand. It was normal for quite ordinary people to go to Pavia to seek justice, or to Spoleto or Benevento, for which we have similar inquests and judgements. The inhabitants of the Lombard lands were also well informed about royal legislation, which gets cited in documents, even in the duchy of Benevento, unlike in Francia. Writing was an important basis for government. There is relatively little evidence in Lombard Italy for the large-scale ceremonial in the capital that is so visible for Spain, however. It seems that the centrality of Pavia was made easier because of two main features of Lombard society. First, the élites of the kingdom were very largely city-dwelling. They lived in one place, they competed over who was to be duke/gastald or bishop, they regularly attended the courts of both; they were loyal to their cities, indeed, as the boundary disputes mentioned above demonstrate. Even monastic foundations, which begin in the eighth century, were with some prominent exceptions urban. Whereas Frankish historians followed the factional politics of major dealers like Leudegar of Autun, Paul the Deacon, when he described the civil war following the coup of Alahis duke of Trento against Cunipert (c. 688-90), saw it in terms of the political choices of the citizens of Brescia, Pavia, Vicenza, Treviso. All of this meant that local élites were easily accessible, for all political practice took place inside cities, or nearly all.

  The second major feature is that most Lombard aristocrats were fairly restricted in their wealth. Almost none of our documents show any of them with more than between five and ten estates, which is close to a minimum for aristocrats in Francia. The king and the ruling dukes of the south had immense lands, of course, and a small number of powerful ducal families, particularly in the north-east, were rich, but the bulk of the élite owned only a handful of properties, usually only in the city territory they lived in, plus perhaps its immediate neighbours, with, quite often, a house in Pavia. This meant that they could not afford the private armed entourages that were the support for factional politics in Francia; it is not chance that nearly all the usurpers in Italy, successful or unsuccessful, were dukes, who had a right to control local armies. It also meant that they would be satisfied by relatively modest gifts by kings, and indeed as far as we can tell royal generosity was not huge in the Lombard period, although the royal treasury was imposing, in Italy as in Francia. Aristocratic identity was also bound up with office-holding, which was in the king’s gift; duchies did not become family patrimonies, except for Spoleto (sometimes) and Benevento. The Lombard kings did not tax, after the first couple of generations of their rule at least. They operated entirely in the framework of a political practice based on land. But inside that framework, their hegemony was very great, and unusually detailed: their capillary power arguably extended to much more modest levels of society than the Frankish or Visigothic kings achieved.

  The cities of the Lombard kingdom, despite their social and political importance, were in material terms not particularly striking. They were full of churches by 774, most of them recent foundations by urban notables - Lucca, the best-documented city in Italy, had at least twenty-five - but urban housing was materially nondescript, and commercial exchange for anything except luxuries was local at best. We know less about the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento; the high-mountain core of Spoleto meant that its cities were rather weaker, and its aristocracies more often rural, but Benevento had some rich lowland areas, and the capital there seems to have been a focus for an aristocracy that owned more widely than anywhere else in Italy; Benevento may well have been quite rich and politically coherent. But it was Byzantine cities in Italy, at least major ones like Rome, Ravenna or Naples, that were probably the most economically active. The archaeology for cities like Naples is certainly more impressive - or less unimpressive - than that for Lombard cities, Brescia or Verona or Milan. It was only in the last decades of the Lombard kingdom that even churches, usually the only surviving buildings of the early Middle Ages to show a real monumental aspiration, begin to be architecturally ambitious, as with Desiderius’ prestige monastery of S. Salvatore (later S. Giulia) at Brescia. By contrast, Naples and Ravenna, and above all Rome, could sustain that ambition throughout, and in the Byzantine lands it extended even to private housing, as documents show for eighth-century Rimini, and as recent excavations show for Rome.

  Byzantine society in Italy had developed parallel to Lombard society, but it did have some particular features. It was broadly richer and more complex, as just implied. In Byzantine Italy the church was also more of a political protagonist: most obviously in the case of the pope in Rome, but also in Ravenna and Naples, where bishops were major figures. Another difference is that the separate Byzantine provinces of Italy moved towards effective independence in the eighth century, just at the moment when the Lombard lands gained some political coherence. The duke of Naples, Stephen II (755-800), became entirely autonomous from Constantinople (interestingly, he ruled Naples first as duke, and then, after 767, as bishop). By the
740s the dukes of the small lagoon islands crystallizing as Venice were effectively autonomous too; and that decade was probably the key moment in the century-long shift towards independence in the Rome of the popes, which was complete by the 770s. Nostalgia for Byzantine rule could remain; it was very much felt in Istria, taken by the Franks from Byzantine/Venetian control in the late eighth century, as a court case from 804 against the Frankish governor shows (see below, Chapter 16). But Italy was spinning away from Byzantine domination. The only major exception to this was Sicily, stably in imperial hands until the 820s.

  Rome remained the least typical city in Italy. Although far smaller than it had been under the empire, it remained by a long way the largest city in the West, maybe twice the size of Ravenna or Naples, and five times the size of Brescia or Lucca (these figures are bald guesses, however). Rome’s territory, roughly the modern region of Lazio, was also much bigger than that of other city-states like Naples or Venice. The popes had always been major players in religious matters, and remained so - although their political-religious interests for a long time remained focused on the East, and they had almost no influence in Merovingian Francia and Visigothic Spain. But when the senate of the city faded out in the late sixth century, the popes emerged as the authority best equipped to rule Rome, as is already visible in the extensive letter collection of Pope Gregory the Great in the 590s. The eastern emperor could still remove a religiously rebellious Martin I in 653 (see Chapter 11), but could not remove Sergius I in 687 (the imperial envoy supposedly had to hide under the pope’s bed to escape the Roman crowd), and in the eighth century the entire imperial infrastructure in Rome steadily became papal. But the wealth of Rome, and of the popes themselves, meant that this infrastructure (and associated ceremonial) remained remarkably elaborate, with dozens of officials in separate hierarchies: far more elaborate than the government in any of the Romano-Germanic kingdoms, and indeed imitating that of Constantinople itself. In the eighth century popes like Gregory II (715-31) and Zacharias (741-52) consolidated papal power inside Lazio; Stephen II (752-7) and Hadrian I (771-95) acted as political protagonists, calling in the Franks against the Lombards, and in Hadrian’s case acting as a regional player, whom Charlemagne treated as a (near) equal. The papacy remained fairly marginal to western European politics for some centuries more, but its more strong-minded occupants could achieve quite an effect, as Nicholas I (858-67) would in Frankish and also Bulgarian affairs. In Italian politics, Rome’s size ensured that the popes would continue to punch above their weight, too; and popes acted as a legitimating element for Carolingian and post-Carolingian rulers, as we shall see later.

  Visigothic Spain and Lombard Italy show two coherent alternatives to the Frankish path away from the Roman empire and into the early Middle Ages. Around 700, indeed, Spain looked more successful than Francia, though Spain’s conquest by the Arabs and Charles Martel’s reunification of the Frankish lands in the 710s and later have often led modern historians to conclude otherwise. Italy’s government, too, was effective enough to be a model for the Franks after 774. These three states show sharp divergencies in their political style, in the force of royal ceremonial (strongest in Spain), in the importance of dynastic legitimacy and in the wealth of local aristocracies (strongest in Francia), in the complexity of the links between central government and provincial society (arguably strongest in Italy). Royal aspirations were different, too: only the Frankish kings sought political hegemony over other peoples; only the Visigothic kings sought to rule like Roman emperors. But there are other aspects in which their developments were similar. They all moved towards social and political hierarchies dominated by military identity; civilian aristocracies vanished. (This happened in the Byzantine empire as well, first in Italy, but eventually even in the Byzantine heartland.) Steadily, at different speeds, they lost control of tax-raising, and became essentially land-based political systems, although all three managed to keep aristocratic political practice and even identity firmly concentrated on royal courts. Indeed, even though all three experienced periods of royal weakness and political fragmentation, successful rulers could in each case re-focus the aristocracy on them, Leovigild after 569, Agilulf after 590, Charles Martel after 719. All three also saw their political identity in ethnic terms, as Franks, Goths and Lombards, but ethnicity rapidly became unimportant in practice: by 700 most ‘Franks’ had ancestors who had been Roman, and the same is true for Spain and Italy. Indeed, apart from the continuing importance of assemblies (above, Chapter 4), and the assumption that military service was due from all free males, at least in theory (never in practice), there was not so much that was specifically Germanic in the ‘Romano-Germanic’ kingdoms. Politics, society and culture had moved on from the Roman world, but they can most usefully be understood as products of development from Roman antecedents.

  7

  Kings without States: Britain and Ireland, 400-800

  The seventh-century Breton Life of Samson of Dol discusses the saint’s early career in Britain in the early sixth century in some detail. Samson was supposedly from an aristocratic family of hereditary royal tutors in Dyfed (modern south-west Wales), but was dedicated to the priesthood and sent to be taught by the learned Illtud, probably at Llantwit in Glamorgan. From there he travelled around south Wales, the Severn valley and Cornwall, looking for monasteries with greater rigour, and ending up as a hermit in a fortification above the Severn. Here, he was recognized and promoted by the local bishop; later, he became an abbot in a monastery founded by his mother, and eventually a bishop himself, before he left for Brittany and Francia. This sort of storyline is a familiar one in hagiographies. Less familiar are his opponents, for he regularly combated and destroyed (or tamed) poisonous serpents, and once he had to face a sorceress with a trident. A particularly significant feature of the text is that, between his high-status origin and his later encounters in Francia (called by the author Romania) with King Childebert I (511-58), no kings are mentioned, and hardly any other secular people except his immediate family. In Britain, Samson seems to operate in an almost entirely ecclesiastical world, even though he moves about such a lot and gains preferment so systematically; wider political systems barely impinge there at all, although in his Breton and Frankish travels they are mentioned at once. This is a Breton, not a British, text, but the two culture areas were closely linked, and Breton and Welsh were effectively the same language in this period, thanks to migration from Britain to Brittany. It was at the least unnecessary for a Breton author to imagine that his subject had dealt with kings in Britain, even in order to get land and patronage for his monasteries. This makes Samson close to unique in the world of early medieval hagiography, but it may tell us something about the evanescence of British kingship, whether in the seventh century or the sixth.

  Britain faced economic meltdown in the early fifth century, after the withdrawal of Roman armies and the end of the Roman provincial administration around 410. We cannot say if the Romans intended to return after they coped with the civil wars in Gaul in the same period, but anyway they did not do so. Britain effectively fell off the Roman map. In archaeological terms, the consequences were extreme: by 450 at the latest, villas were abandoned, urbanism had virtually ended, the countryside was partly abandoned around the old military focus of Hadrian’s Wall (although not elsewhere, probably), and all large-scale artisan production had ceased. In no other part of the empire was this economic simplification so abrupt and total, and it must reflect a sharp social crisis as well. Our early written sources are fragmentary (a few inscriptions, some writing by Patrick, the fifth-century British missionary to Ireland, and a mid-sixth-century hellfire sermon by Gildas), but they seem to show that by 500 western Britain, at least, was divided among a set of small-scale rulers, sometimes called kings (reges), sometimes tyrants (tyranni: a negative term in Gildas, but maybe related to tigernos, ‘ruler’ in Brittonic). A patchwork of tiny polities had replaced the Roman state. In eastern Britain there was by now a similar se
t of micro-kingdoms ruled by immigrant Anglo-Saxons; in the late fifth century these had been expanding westwards, but British counterattacks, obscurely led by a warlord called Ambrosius Aurelianus, had held them back at the edge of the Severn river basin. We shall come on to the Anglo-Saxons in a moment, but for now it can be noted that the evidence we have for the small scale of the British kingdoms and of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms each backs the other up, for otherwise one set would have prevailed more easily against the other.