More than that, it is the fundamental thesis of this book that there is a coherence to the process of western imperial disintegration that unites this final collapse with the earlier losses of territory. This coherence stems from the intersection of three lines of argument.
First, the invasions of 376 and 405–8 were not random events, but two moments of crisis generated by the same strategic revolution: the rise of Hunnic power in central and eastern Europe. It is entirely uncontentious to state that the arrival of the Tervingi and Greuthungi on the banks of the Danube in the summer of 376 was caused by the Huns. That they were also responsible for a second cluster of invasions about a generation later – Radagaisus’ attack on Italy in 405/6, the Rhine crossing of the Vandals, Alans and Suevi at the end of 406, and the westward advance of the Burgundians shortly after – has sometimes been asserted, but never won consensus. The fuller picture of the intrusion into Europe of Hunnic power depicted in Chapter 5 makes a powerful case for it. In 376, the Huns did not, as has usually been assumed, sweep in vast numbers as far west as the Danube frontier. For the next decade, it was Goths – not Huns – who were still providing the Romans’ main opposition in this theatre; and as late as 395 most Huns was still located much closer to the Caucasus.3 By about 420 at the latest, however, and perhaps the best part of a decade earlier, they had established themselves en masse at the heart of central Europe on the Great Hungarian Plain. No written source explicitly says that the Huns were making this move in 405–8 and that it caused the second wave of invasions. The fact, however, that they were still near the Caucasus in 395 and that they would somehow have to shift 1,500 kilometres further west by 420 makes it overwhelmingly likely that the ‘blame’ for 405–8 should be placed upon a second stage of Hunnic displacement. The growth of Hunnic power thus provides a unifying explanation for thirty-five years of periodic invasion along Rome’s European frontiers.
Second, while some sixty-five years separate the deposition of Romulus Augustulus from the latest of these invasions, the two phenomena are causally connected. The various crises faced by the western Empire in the intervening years represented no more than the slow working-out of the political consequences of the earlier invasions. Damage inflicted upon west Roman provinces by protracted warfare with the invaders, combined with permanent losses of territory, generated massive losses of revenue for the central state, as we have seen. The Visigoths caused such damage to the areas around Rome between 408 and 410, for instance, that nearly a decade later these provinces were still contributing to state coffers only a seventh of their normal taxes. The Vandals, Alans and Suevi, likewise, cut a swathe of destruction through Gaul for five years after 406, before removing most of Spain from central imperial control for the best part of two decades. Worst of all, the Vandals and Alans then shifted their operations to North Africa, seizing the richest provinces of the Roman west in 439. Every temporary, as well as permanent, loss of territory brought a decline in imperial revenues, the lifeblood of the state, and reduced the western Empire’s capacity to maintain its armed forces. From the Notitia Dignitatum we see that, already by 420, Flavius Constantius was making up for the field army losses incurred during the heavy fighting of the previous fifteen years by upgrading garrison troops, not by new recruitment. The loss of North African revenues threw the regime of Aetius further into crisis, generating a series of panic measures to try to keep the western army and Empire afloat.4
As the Roman state lost power, and was perceived to be doing so, provincial Roman landowning elites, at different times in different places, faced an uncomfortable new reality. The sapping of the state’s vitality threatened everything that made them-what they were. Defined by the land they stood on, even the dimmest, or most loyal, could not help but realize eventually that their interests would be best served by making an accommodation with the new dominant force in their locality. Given that the Empire had existed for four hundred and fifty years, and that the east continued to prop up the west, it is not surprising that such processes of erosion took time to work themselves out. Many in the old imperial heartlands, such as the Gallic supporters of Athaulf in the 410s or Sidonius in the 450s, quickly came to terms with Goths or Burgundians as autonomous elements within a central Roman state that still enjoyed a military power and political influence. But it took two or three generations for all to accept that this was only an intermediate position, and that the trajectory of the Roman west was set inescapably towards fully independent Gothic and Burgundian kingdoms.
The third line of argument concerns the paradoxical role played by the Huns in these revolutionary events. In the 440s, the era of Attila, the Hunnic armies surged across Europe from the Iron Gates of the Danube towards Constantinople, Paris and Rome itself. These exploits earned Attila undying fame, but his decade of glory was no more than a sideshow in the drama of western imperial collapse. Of much greater significance had been the Huns’ indirect impact upon the Roman Empire in previous generations, when the insecurity they generated in central and eastern Europe forced various barbarian peoples across the Roman frontier. And while Attila inflicted huge individual defeats upon imperial armies, he never threatened the permanent alienation of a significant chunk of the western Empire’s taxpayers. The groups who had fled across the frontier in the crises of 376–8 and 405–8, on the other hand, did precisely that. In the generation before Attila, the Huns had even sustained the western Empire by restricting further immigration into its territories after 410 and helping Aetius, particularly, to constrain the worst expansionary excesses of the Germanic groups already forced over the frontier. The Huns’ second-greatest contribution to imperial collapse, in fact, was their sudden disappearing act after Attila’s death in 453. This was the straw that broke the western Empire’s back. Bereft of Hunnic military assistance, it had no choice but to build regimes that would include at least some of the immigrant powers. This started a bidding war in which the last of the west’s disposable assets were expended in a futile effort to bring enough powerful supporters together to generate stability. But by the late 460s, the more ambitious leaders of these outside groups, particularly Euric, king of the Visigoths, could see that what purported to be the central western authority now controlled too little to prevent him from establishing an independent kingdom. It was this realization that led to the rapid unravelling of the last strands of Empire between 468 and 476.
In all this, it was armed outsiders warring on Roman territory who played the starring role. In successive stages, the different groups first forced their way across the frontier, then extracted treaties; then, in the end, detached so much territory from the Empire’s control that its revenues dried up. Some of the first Goths of 376 were allowed across the Danube by agreement with the emperor Valens, but only because his army was already committed to battle on the Persian front. Otherwise, every stage of the process involved violence, even if it was followed by some kind of diplomatic agreement. But these agreements were no more than a recognition of the latest gains made by warfare, not the kind of diplomacy that moved events forward. I take an entirely different view, therefore, from one writer on fifth-century events who has commented: ‘What we call the fall of the Roman Empire was an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand.’5 You can only argue this, it seems to me, if you don’t let narrative history dirty your hands. Any attempt to reconstruct fifth-century events brings home just how violent the process was. In my view, it is impossible to escape the fact that the western Empire broke up because too many outside groups established themselves on its territories and expanded their holdings by warfare.
The process that brought down the western Empire was quite different, for instance, from the one that brought down the next major European empire, the Carolingian, in the late ninth century. Here the imperial centre, even after the great conquests of Charlemagne (768–813), controlled insufficient resources to maintain itself for more than two or three generations. In particular, it never developed the redistributive taxa
tion powers that had kept the Roman state afloat for five centuries. The need to buy local political support, something it shared with its Roman predecessor, thus quickly bankrupted the Carolingian state. Within about a century of its creation, its local elites moved pretty quickly towards autonomy, sometimes without even having to assert themselves with any vehemence. In this the Carolingian collapse does slightly resemble the final unravelling of the west after the defeat of the Vandal expedition of 468. But, overall, the process was very different: no massive intrusions by outsiders; and the new rulers of the Carolingian successor states were mostly its indigenous nobility, not the leaders of intrusive military powers. In essence, the Carolingian state dissolved into bankruptcy because it controlled few assets to begin with, not because, as with the western Empire, outsiders stripped it of a centuries-old tax base.6
Local Romanness
WHILE CENTRAL Romanness was being destroyed, provincial Romanness met a variety of fates. As we have seen, the worst-case scenario – from a Roman perspective – unfolded to the north, in the British Isles. Here, it is impossible to offer any kind of connected narrative, but when history begins again about AD 600,7 the Latin-speaking Christian Romanized landowning class, still dominant in central and southern Britain in about the year 400, had vanished. Along with it had gone the villas typical of its lifestyle, while economic production had both diminished in scale and regressed towards simplicity. Population had declined substantially, coins ceased to be used for exchange, towns no longer functioned as higher-order settlements, and most goods were produced at home rather than commercially. Late Roman pottery in Britain, for instance, was supplied by potters who distributed their wares over a radius of about forty kilometres from several centres of production such as Oxford and Ipswich. Soon after 400, pottery was being made for immediate consumption only. The old imperial provinces of Britain were likewise divided up into small kingdoms, at first maybe twenty or more, whose boundaries for the most part owed nothing to the political geography of Roman Britain. How this all came about is a matter of debate. The Victorians imagined Anglo- Saxon invaders chasing the entire Celtic sub-Romano-British population westwards into Wales and Cornwall, and across the sea into Brittany. More recent accounts have posited large numbers of indigenous British turning themselves into Anglo-Saxons in the same way that they had earlier become Romans. However you see it, characteristic Roman mores and lifestyles quickly disappeared from southern Britain after its ties with the rest of the Roman world were severed.8
British cataclysm was not typical, however. Parts of north-eastern Gaul aside, where the archaeological picture looks similar to that of southern Britain, the established forms of provincial life did not disappear so suddenly or so completely. South of the Loire in Gaul, whatever their initial misgivings, local Roman landowners reached a variety of accommodations with their new rulers. As we saw in Chapter 9, there was a price to be paid. Depending upon a variety of factors, not least the availability of assets within the new kingdoms, they had to give up more or less of their land. The smallish Burgundian kingdom seems to have enforced more large-scale confiscation than its better-endowed Visigothic peer, but sweetened the pill, perhaps, with tax reductions. But Roman landowners had much to offer the new barbarian rulers and, as a result, their regimes were willing broadly to uphold the unequal distribution of property that had brought the landowners into existence in the first place. We see remarkably little in terms of social upheaval, then, south of the Loire. Sidonius and his friends experienced difficult times, but emerged with enough of their property intact to retain their social positions. In Spain and Italy, too, the Roman landowning class generally survived the first shock of the end of Empire. Although in Vandal Africa Geiseric’s seizure of Carthage was followed by large-scale property confiscations in Proconsularis, Roman landowners in the other two provinces that had fallen to him in 439 – Byzacena and Numidia – were left alone, and as other territories were added to the Vandal Empire, confiscation was not repeated.
In many places, then, local Romanness survived pretty well. Catholic Christianity, a Latin-literate laity, villas, towns and more complex forms of economic production and exchange all endured to some extent – except in Britain – on the back of the landowning class. Consequently, across most of the old Roman west, the destruction of the forms and structures of the state coexisted with a survival of Roman provincial life.9
Even under the southern Gallic model, however, local life in the post-Roman west did not just stay ‘Roman’. The full story of what happened in these provinces after the fall of Rome is the subject of another book, but to bring the fall of the western Empire fully into perspective, it is important to make one major point. One of the many arguments surrounding the end of the Empire has focused on what significance to ascribe to the political changes that unfolded in the course of the fifth century. Was the end of the Roman state a major event in the history of western Eurasia, or merely a surface disturbance, much less important than deeper phenomena such as the rise of Christianity, which worked themselves out essentially unaffected by the processes of imperial collapse? Traditional historiography had no doubt that the year 476 marked, in western Europe at least, the divide between ancient and medieval history. More recently, the value-laden certainty that the end of the Roman Empire marked the start of a steep decline has given way to more nuanced views, which bear a closer relationship to historical reality. As we have seen, there was no sudden, total change, and this fact has laid a new emphasis on the notion of continuity, on the idea that the best way of understanding historical development in the late and post-Roman periods is to consider it in terms of organic evolution rather than cataclysm.10
I have no doubt that these new historiographical emphases are entirely necessary reactions to old historical orthodoxies, and I have no truck with the idea (originating with the Romans themselves of course) that the Roman Empire represented a higher order of society after whose demise the only possible way to go was downwards. But taking a minimalist view of the historical importance of the disappearance of the western Roman state is also, in my view, mistaken. It was certainly a ramshackle edifice. Running such a huge area on the basis of primitive communications and bureaucracy, it could hardly have been otherwise. Corruption was endemic, law enforcement sporadic, and much power retained in the localities. Nonetheless, because it was a long-established one-party state it managed to change the rules by which local life was conducted in some very profound ways. This manifests itself above all in the various processes that – slightly misleadingly – attract the label ‘Romanization’. To participate in the benefits of Empire, provincial elites needed to gain Roman citizenship. The easiest way to do this was to set up your own town with Latin rights, and hold high office within it. A rush towards this kind of urbanization, therefore, followed the establishment of Roman dominance. You also needed to be able to speak ‘proper’ Latin, so that Latin literary education spread too, and to show that you had bought into the values of classical civilization. Public buildings in which such a civilized life might be lived with one’s peers (meeting houses, baths and so on) and the villa style of domestic architecture were the concrete manifestations of that Roman vision. At the same time, the Pax Romana brought a massive peace dividend in its wake, creating regional interconnections that provided many new economic opportunities.
Most of what has been called Romanization was not a state-directed top-down activity. Rather, it was the outcome of the individual responses of conquered elites to the brute fact of Empire, as they adapted their society to the new conditions that Roman domination imposed upon them. An essential part of the deal, however, was that, while they transformed their lifestyles so as to participate in what the state had to offer, the Empire’s armies protected them. Local Romanness was thus inseparable from the existence of Empire.
The symbiotic nature of this relationship shows up clearly. As we have seen, much of the burden resulting from the need of the third-century Roman state to extra
ct a much higher level of tax from its provinces fell on the old town councils. It was largely in these councils that old forms of local Roman political life had been played out. You spent money to win office, making the friends and influencing the people whose support would in due course ensure that you rose to dominance and to the control of local funds. At a stroke, the confiscation of these revenues removed the whole point of the endeavour, and provincial elites weren’t slow to notice: hence the almost immediate disappearance in the mid-third century of inscriptions recording the expensive acts of generosity by which people had previously gained advancement. By the fourth century, careers on town councils had been abandoned in favour of the imperial bureaucracy, which became the new path to local dominance. When the centre made changes to its modus operandi, then local Romanness would change in response – often, especially in the long term, in ways not anticipated
Too much of life in the provinces was dependent upon the political and cultural order of the state for its passing to go unnoticed. Take education, for instance. The literary education characteristic of late Roman elites – Latin in the west, Greek in the east – was not cheaply bought. It required the best part of a decade’s intensive instruction with the grammarian, and only the landowning class could afford to invest so much in their children’s education. As we noted earlier, they did so because speaking classical Latin (or Greek) instantly marked one out as ‘civilized’. It was also necessary for most forms of advancement. The vast majority of the state’s new bureaucrats came from the old town-council, or curial, classes, for whom a classical education continued to be de rigueur.11
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