Debating medieval Europe

The early Middle Ages, c. 450– c. 1050

Stephen Mossman

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526117342
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Debating medieval Europe serves as an entry point for studying and teaching medieval history. Rather than simply presenting foundational knowledge or introducing sources, it provides the reader with frameworks for understanding the distinctive historiography of the period, digging beneath the historical accounts provided by other textbooks to expose the contested foundations of apparently settled narratives. It opens a space for discussion and debate, as well as providing essential context for the sometimes overwhelming abundance of specialist scholarship.Volume I addresses the early Middle Ages, covering the period c. 450– c. 1050. The chapters are organised chronologically, and cover such topics as the Carolingian Order, England and the 'Atlantic Archipelago', the Vikings and Ottonian Germany. It features a highly distinguished selection of medieval historians, including Paul Fouracre and Janet L. Nelson.

CHAPTER 1

The transformation of the Roman world, c. 450– c. 550

Craig H. Caldwell III

INTRODUCTION

To understand the early Middle Ages as a transformation of the ancient Roman world, we must begin with the legacy of the Roman Empire. For more than 500 years, from the reign of Emperor Augustus until the deposition of the last western emperor in the well-known year 476, the Romans united tens of millions of diverse peoples across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East within one political, economic and cultural framework. Roman rule was far from uniform and exerted different weights within its territory: it was strongest in the urban landscapes of the Mediterranean, while it overcame the mountains and dense forests of central Europe with difficulty. Above all, the Roman Empire was remarkable for its endurance. In addition to its unique social and military attributes, it persisted through its two technologies of concrete: the manmade stone that enabled the creation of complex structures, and the legal system that described and connected its people and property through a formal web of obligations and special procedures. In the second quarter of the fifth century, a special imperial commission collected important enactments into what we now call the Theodosian Code, which preserved the ‘wordy business’ of Roman government so that its legal tenets would be obeyed wherever they were relevant.¹ This effort to unite the empire through law, expressed in its original tongue of Latin, became an anchor for many medieval legal systems, and it provided a threefold division of the Roman heritage that informs this chapter. The compilers of the Code began with the foundations of the state, which we shall consider as governmentality; they then turned to matters of law that included the status of persons and, for our purposes, identity; and finally they considered the Christian religion, which will serve as our final analytical theme. In each of the categories that comprise this chapter, historians must contend with another problem modelled by the Theodosian Code: as A. H. M. Jones put it, laws are ‘records of the aspirations of the government and not its achievement’.² Every historical approach to the early Middle Ages must reconstruct the past by striking a balance between the aspirational aspects of our sources and the often thin and contradictory evidence for their impact in the real world.

GOVERNMENTALITY: What survived?

To what extent did state power in the fifth and sixth centuries still ‘wear a Roman face’?³ The phrase comes from Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, and the concept of ‘late antiquity’ has embraced post-Roman western Europe with difficulty.⁴ Some scholars such as Bryan Ward-Perkins have criticized that label for minimizing the real discontinuities and decline that we often call the ‘fall of Rome’. If our only concern lay with the fate of the Roman Empire as a political regime in the west, the fifth century was indeed its nadir. Following the lasting separation of the administration of the western provinces from the more stable and prosperous eastern Mediterranean in 395, the difficulties of maintaining central government mounted. Michael Rostovtzeff believed that the empire had gone rotten: widespread economic decline foreordained its political and military collapse.⁵ Other historians, especially A. H. M. Jones in The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey, a comprehensive study assembled on the model of Royal Commission reports, describe a state that was still viable until it suffered a few critical defeats in wars with barbarian outsiders.⁶ Historians often highlight the Roman loss of North Africa and its resources to the Vandalic invasion of 429–39 as the death blow to the Western Empire.⁷ These armed groups from outside the empire will occupy our full attention in the next section, but we must note that the ‘fall of Rome’ story has always required them as dancing partners for inept, often underage emperors who presided over imperial ruin. Honorius (r. 395–423) is emblematic of these trends. After becoming emperor in his own right at age ten, he became a portable figurehead in the removal of the imperial court from Rome to Ravenna (near modern Venice), his administration probably detached the province of Britannia from imperial support, and he failed to avert the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410. His government temporarily lost northern Gaul and Spain to usurping generals and permanently loosened its fiscal control over southern Gaul, and he died without an heir after twenty-eight years of rule. But while the biographies of Honorius and others like him, including Romulus, the final western emperor, who was deposed in 476, may tell tales of decline and fall, the structures of empire are where we may find the persistence of Rome.

Rather than listing the heroes and villains of late Roman political history, our answers to the question of ‘What survived?’ must consider the principal exercise of Roman power: taxation, which was the sustenance of states, and its evolution or devolution. Intrinsic to the study of taxation is the examination of which people constituted the taxpayers and tax collectors. Our discussion of governmentality surveys an array of approaches within the ‘Romanist’ tradition: these historians emphasize the continuity of the Middle Ages and the Roman Empire, albeit in strikingly different ways.⁸ The roots of this interpretation stretch back for centuries, but restricting our view to the scholarship of the last forty years yields three major strands of thought, represented here by the work of Jean Durliat, Chris Wickham and Walter Goffart.

We can begin by asking whether the Roman Empire, or more specifically its pattern of government, actually declined and disappeared from Europe at all. Jean Durliat’s administrative history smoothed over the break between the ancient state and its medieval successors by effacing political events in favour of fiscal structures.⁹ In Durliat’s view, the later Roman Empire subsisted for its income upon a decentralized system of ‘tax farmers’ (a type of tax collector) called possessores, who collected stable revenue, roughly 20 per cent of the harvest, from fiscal districts known as possessiones, villae and fundi. Local officials then divided the proceeds three ways to support local government, the army and the central government. Far from evading taxes, the aristocratic administrators maintained this arrangement because it benefited them financially along with supporting the empire. As this administrative terminology survives in documents across the early medieval period, Durliat asserted that no substantial changes occurred in the late Roman fiscal apparatus. Most historians accept that the Roman framework of land taxation persisted to some degree following the empire’s political collapse, but they add the caveat that early medieval states could not assemble the same level of resources and were thus diminished in comparison with their Roman precursors. In what has been called a ‘hyper-romanist’ perspective, Durliat instead favoured continuity of public expenditure to reject the weakening of post-Roman states. Since his later Roman Empire was already fiscally localized, its successors in western Europe did not privatize state revenues, but rather profited from their persistent, unatrophied collection. Central to this interpretation is the fixed fiscal meaning of technical vocabulary, such as defining possessores as collectors of taxes rather than conventional taxpaying landowners, or coloni as proprietors rather than tenant farmers. The rise of the Christian Church as a major landowner is unproblematic in this model because it was simply another part of the Roman administration, receiving state support in exchange for the role of ecclesiastical personnel in maintaining its government. Durliat used the apparent persistence of certain threads of the complex late Roman administrative apparatus to argue for the seamless survival of Roman fiscality, and thus for a Rome that, in one salient way, did not fall.¹⁰

Chris Wickham’s analysis joined the transformation of the Roman economy with its underlying society, and his use of social theory yielded a history with more texture than Durliat’s purely administrative and legal model.¹¹ He set out to provide a sweeping explanation that ‘framed’ the diverse elements within societies as well as showing how patterns of commerce and landownership affected social structures. To that end, Wickham assembled textual and archaeological evidence for a ‘pan-Mediterranean Roman fiscal system’ that taxed and redistributed revenues on an unprecedented scale. The state orchestrated flows of money and goods, which had capillary effects that propelled trade among and within its provinces. The geographically smaller successors to the Roman state represent a spectrum of greater or lesser continuity with their Roman parent, and Wickham’s task was to explain how and why different parts of the post-Roman world adapted its surviving elements in diverse ways. The argument favoured regional factors, such as the wealthier aristocracy in Gaul compared with other parts of Roman Europe, over sudden external influences due to wars and immigration, and it thus emphasized continuity, especially for the 90 per cent of the population who constituted the peasantry. Logically, those regions that the Roman Empire had integrated into the wider Mediterranean economy suffered the most when it collapsed, but the model must also be able to explain why relatively isolated Britain and the interior of Spain also suffered severe reductions in trade.

Wickham used the highly stratified society of the later Roman Empire as a starting point to assess relative levels of change. While the aristocratic landowning class remained prominent in the early Middle Ages, especially around the Mediterranean and in Gaul, it grew weaker everywhere due to the replacement of Roman government by unstable regimes. A single imperial state no longer existed to legitimize the elite, and they could no longer tap into its system of taxation to support themselves. Uncertainties about who was in charge meant that landowners’ purchases supported fewer trade networks across Europe, and they exercised less control over the peasants than Roman potentes, ‘the powerful’, had done in the fifth century. Wickham calls the situation ‘fluid’, with vague titles such as nobilis replacing precise Roman ranks like illustris, and with peasants able to ally themselves with different aristocrats. The decline in the quality of material culture such as pottery resulted from weakened aristocracies and more autonomous peasants, who used their own local products rather than imported ones. The end of literature that imitated the classics of the Roman world indicated not a ‘dark age’, but rather a newly militarized aristocracy, who consciously abandoned the educated leisure that produced the poems of Ausonius or the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris. The style of these aristocrats was more consequential than their identity, which Wickham downplayed by noting similar social changes in regions with evident immigration, such as England, and those without, including Wales. An early medieval domino effect is apparent here: the political and fiscal unity of the Roman Empire dissolved, and the ensuing simplified means of taxation reduced the power of aristocracies, who then purchased fewer goods through long-distance trade, which then affected the quality of the material culture revealed in archaeological excavations. Of course, some important dominoes are missing, since critics have noted that Wickham’s survey is uneven due...