The Roman Empire Divided

400-700 AD

John Moorhead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317861430
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

In 400 the mighty Roman Empire was almost as large as it had ever been; within three centuries, advances by Germanic peoples in western Europe, Slavs in eastern Europe and Arabs around the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean had brought about the loss of most of its territory. Ranging from Britain to Mesopotamia, this book explores the changes that resulted from these movements. It shows the different paths away from the classical past that were taken, and how the relatively unified civilization of the ancient Mediterranean gave place to the very different civilizations that cluster around the sea today.

This comprehensive and authoritative second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated line-by-line, and contains several new sections dealing for instance with the new evidence provided by recent finds like the Staffordshire Treasure and the widespread effects of the plague. As well as a completely new bibliographical essay, The Roman Empire Divided now also includes six maps and an expanded selection of illustrations fully integrated in the text.

Chapter 1

The Empire

It was the achievement of the Romans to create the largest political unit ever to have existed in that part of the world where Europe, Asia and Africa approach each other around the Mediterranean. As early as the fourth century BC, Alexander the Great had knitted together areas around the eastern shores of what the Greeks tended to refer to simply as ‘the sea’, so that a cosmopolitan poet who died a few centuries later could greet the readers of his epitaph in the languages of three places where he had lived: ‘If you are Syrian, salaam! if Phoenician, naidus! if Greek, chaire!’ Over some centuries the Romans were able to unify the lands around much of its western portion, particularly after they defeated Carthage in a series of wars in the third and second centuries BC, and during the first century BC they succeeded in bringing the eastern Mediterranean under their sway as well. They called it ‘our sea’, a term that acknowledged its status as the sea specifically connected with humans and distinguished it from the Atlantic and the great all-encompassing Ocean. When a historian of the sixth century tried to conceptualise the extent of Roman power, it was natural for him to think of the Empire in terms of a block of territory lying around the sea. Its largest cities were all perched by its shores, and the advantages of speed and cost that transport by water had over that by land meant that, despite the excellence of the roads built by the Romans, through which they projected their power far inland, different coastal regions came to have a good deal in common.¹

The true measure of the distances between the cities dotted around the Mediterranean was the time it took to sail between them. Communications could be remarkably quick, particularly between the northern and southern shores. On one dramatic occasion, Cato produced before the senate in Rome a ripe fig that he claimed had been picked at Carthage two days previously.² Under favourable conditions, ships could travel between Narbonne on the coast of Gaul and Africa in five days, and between Constantinople and Alexandria in six. Communications across the length rather than the breadth of the sea were necessarily slower, but a letter written in Constantinople on 17 April 418 reached Arles in Gaul on 23 May, and, all going well, letters that popes wrote to emperors in Constantinople would take about a month to reach their destination.³ During winter, however, exchanges of letters could be hit and miss, for the level of ancient naval technology allowed few sailings then. A letter written by the emperor Anastasius on 28 December 514 only reached pope Hormisdas on 14 May 515, by which time the pope had already received a letter written subsequently, while a letter that the emperor Justin wrote to the same pope on 17 December 519 was only received in Rome on 22 May 520, a full six months later. Only in May 603 did pope Gregory the Great write a letter of congratulations to an emperor who had acceded in November 602. Indeed, of the several hundred letters that Gregory wrote to destinations beyond Italy, most were written in the three months of summer, while none is dated to December and January. Nevertheless, while dealings between the cities around the shores of the sea could be played out in what now looks like slow motion, the speed with which they were conducted during much of the year meant that major cities on different shores were in some ways more tightly bound to each other than they were to their own hinterlands. The people of Rome and then those of Constantinople came to eat bread baked from grain imported from regions hundreds of kilometres to their south, and those who governed them were sometimes the victims of blackmail when threats were made to cut off the supply. Ideas and techniques were easily shared around the edges of the sea. A codex produced in Egypt during the late fifth century contains a cycle of illustrations of the book of Genesis, a part of the Bible that fascinated people of the period; pictures that are similar in ways too close to be accidental occur in the frescos of two churches of the fifth century in Rome, the throne of a bishop of Ravenna in the sixth century and, less surprisingly, Egyptian textiles of the seventh century. Behind these similarities stand chains of transmission that we cannot now identify.⁴

Yet although the civilisations of the ancient world continued to be based on the inland sea, the Roman Empire came to have a vast hinterland. Some of this was inherited from Alexander the Great, whose successors had established the Hellenistic kingdoms in Syria and Egypt, which diffused Mediterranean influences far inland from their capitals at Antioch and Alexandria, while the military prowess of the Romans, especially from the time of Julius Caesar and Pompey in the first century BC, allowed them to gain control over a broad swathe of territory far from the sea. Within a few generations all of Gaul and Spain, and much of Britain, became subject to Rome, together with portions of Europe where Germanic and Slavonic languages and Romanian are now spoken. South of the Danube, the Balkans were entirely subject to Rome, as for a while was Dacia on its northern bank. Doubtless the Empire could have expanded still further. Towards the end of his life the emperor Trajan (98–117), himself from Spain, one of the Empire’s westernmost extremities, journeyed down the Tigris and gazed upon the Indian Ocean, where he lamented that he was no longer young enough to cross the sea to India, as Alexander had once done.⁵ But the inland acquisitions of the Empire were immense and, as the Romans were dimly aware, would have great consequences.

In varying degrees, the conquered peoples underwent cultural assimilation and economic exploitation. In the period that followed the occupation of Britain, for example, a policy of building temples, fora and large houses was followed, and young men of important families were trained in the liberal arts, it being said that those who had previously disdained Latin came to long for rhetoric. But Tacitus, the Roman author who described the adoption by the Britons of the toga, colonnades, baths and elegant banquets, saw these things as a form of slavery which, he claimed, they were foolish enough to call ‘civilisation’. Elsewhere, he represents the emperor Claudius as telling the senate that the people of Gaul, having been blended with the Romans by customs, culture and marriage, should bring their gold and wealth forward rather than keep them to themselves. Not surprisingly, the Romans encountered resistance. Tacitus credits a British leader trying to rally his people to fight for their freedom: ‘Making off with wealth, butchering, snatching away, they falsely call these things “empire”, and where they make a desert, they call it “peace!”⁶ Doubtless Tacitus was writing for effect, but if the physical remains of the Roman period in Britain still indicate the great impact that the Empire made there, the immense ruins of its capital show how successful the Romans were in making the wealth of others their own.

Yet the inhabitants of the inland areas of the Empire were also beneficiaries of Roman rule, for its thrusting away from the sea allowed Mediterranean ways to be widely diffused. The army in particular facilitated this process. Vines were planted by the river Mosel in the north of Gaul, in an area where legions were stationed; as early as the late first century an emperor had to act to preserve Italian production from competition. The founding of cities was one of the chief means by which the Romans imposed their rule. Identikit towns sprang up, each with its layout of streets based on two main roads intersecting at right angles, and buildings such as a forum, circus, amphitheatre and baths. Some of the works were paid for by the state, but largesse publicly displayed by the members of local elites eager to present themselves in a good light was responsible for the building of many, while in homes right across the Empire, from a wealthy suburb of Antioch to the villas of Britain, the upper class installed mosaics displaying similar themes. More and more, indigenes came to be regarded as Romans; from the early third century, virtually all the inhabitants of the Empire were Roman citizens. A poet of the early fifth century was able to pun: Rome had made a city (urbs) of what had formerly been a world (orbis; as we shall see, he was not the only one to associate the words; see below, p. 43).⁷

Another sign of increasing cultural homogenisation was the spread of the two imperial languages, Latin and Greek. As early as the time of Christ, the inscription on his cross had been written in these languages as well as Hebrew. Latin in particular benefited from its status, so that even in the east it gained currency as the language of imperial power and the army. Despite this a multiplicity of tongues continued to be spoken in the east, it being said that 72 languages could be heard in the streets of Constantinople. Some Armenians who came to a monastery near Jerusalem were told by the abbot to perform the liturgy in their own language, and only when some of them tried to add an heretical interpolation were they ordered to chant the Thrice-Holy hymn in Greek. In about 570 an Italian visitor found in an eastern monastery three abbots who knew Latin and Greek, Syriac and Coptic, and Bessic, a now extinct language then spoken in Thrace. In the west, on the other hand, the spread of Latin led to the extinction of Celtic speech over almost all the continental parts of the Empire. This process took longer than our sources, none of them written in Celtic, would suggest. The bishop of a town in the south of Gaul in the late second century found it necessary to use Celtic, which he thought of as ‘barbarous speech’, and the father of the first great writer of Latin in Gaul, Ausonius, a native of Bordeaux who flourished in the late fourth century, may have been a Celtic speaker.⁸ Yet outside Britain the fate of pre-Latin speech was sealed. In community after community, people who spoke only the indigenous language were succeeded by those who could speak both the indigenous language and the imperial one, who were themselves followed by people who spoke Latin alone.

Languages are a good example of the ways of the Mediterranean extending inland. But it was also true that the centre itself lay open to being influenced by people from the provinces. No less than the emperor Trajan, his successor Hadrian (117–38) was from Spain, while Septimius Severus (193–211), who was born in the African port city of Lepcis Magna, was said to have been moderately instructed in Latin, learned in Greek, but best at the Punic language that was indigenous to Africa. In the middle of the third century, celebrations were held to mark the thousandth birthday of the city of Rome. They took a standard form, wild animals being killed in the Circus Maximus and games being held in the Campus Martius, but despite his Greek name, Philip, the emperor who presided over them, had been born near the inland Syrian town of Bostra, and he also bore the Arab name Sergius.⁹ The Christian thinker Pelagius came to Rome early in the fifth century from Britain, at the other end of the Empire, to run afoul of Augustine, who had been born in an inland town in what is now Algeria. The gravitation of talented people from inland provinces to the centre is one of the most striking features of the Empire. And, as time passed, influences from further afield were increasingly felt. This was chiefly true of the western portion of the Empire, with which we shall be particularly concerned in the following pages; we shall consider the east in chapter 7.

Frontiers

Centred as it was on the sea, the Empire was ringed by inland frontiers. Some of these, like the borders between most modern states, were clearly defined. In the west, they followed the Rhine upstream approximately as far as its junction with the Mosel, where the modern town of Koblenz takes its name from the ‘confluence’ of these rivers; the Roman side of the Rhine was lined by the military settlements from which such cities as Cologne and Bonn originated. From Koblenz the frontier proceeded overland to Regensburg, whence it followed the Danube to the Black Sea. In Britain, the frontier came to be marked by Hadrian’s Wall, which ran across the island from the Solway Firth to the lower reaches of the Tyne. By contrast, the frontiers in the east and to the south were less sharply defined, and capable of being challenged. From the eastern edge of the Black Sea the frontier ran southwards through ancient Mesopotamia, a politically difficult area of tension with Persia, a powerful state fully capable of looking the Empire in the eye, and thence south-west from the Euphrates to Aqaba. On the African continent it incorporated Egypt as far south as the first cataract on the Nile, and the Mediterranean coast as far as the Atlantic. While at no point in Africa did the frontier extend as far from the sea as it did in Europe, in the modern Algeria and Tunisia in particular it ran some hundreds of kilometres inland.

The frontiers were an important part of the way in which the Romans thought of their Empire. They generally regarded them as precisely defined lines. Caesar looked on the Rhine as constituting a border between the Gauls, a branch of the Celts, and the Germans, although this was at best a gross simplification. Later Romans invested their borders with great significance. They could see themselves as being surrounded by howling nations which, in their tricky barbarism, were wont to attack the frontiers. One writer believed that the emperor Augustus had made the Empire strong ‘by hedging it about with major obstacles, rivers and trenches and mountains and deserted regions which were difficult to traverse’, while the author of a panegyric envisaged the Rhine as having been provided by nature as a dividing line that would protect the Roman provinces from barbarian savagery. Late in the fourth century, bishop Ambrose of Milan thought of this river as a ‘noteworthy wall’ that stood between the Roman Empire and fierce peoples, while his near contemporary, the historian Festus, whose life was memorably consummated as he died on the steps of a temple dedicated to Nemesis, considered that the Danube downstream from Augsburg formed a boundary between peoples whom he was happy to describe as Romans and barbarians.¹⁰

Those closer to the margins experienced a different reality. While Ovid, a Latin poet and man of the world at the time of Christ, was none too pleased at being exiled to a town on the Black Sea, in the midst of his sorrows he set himself to composing poetry in the language of the local people. Ill-defined borders running through semi-desert regions are porous, and even rivers can function as means of communication around which zones can form just as much as lines of demarcation. Downstream from Bonn the Rhine broadens, rich agricultural land lying on either side. The economy of this region was dominated by the need to provide for the legions stationed on its left bank, and farming patterns across the river seem to have changed to cater for the welcome market opened up by their arrival. Trade across borders was expedited by the markets that flourished along the frontiers. We are told that by the 360s people living to the north of the Danube were so dependent on trade with the Empire that they lacked the necessities of life when the Romans forbade them, and late in the fifth century Rugians and Romans were attending each other’s markets on either side of the river. In one area where the border with Persia was poorly delineated, the people on either side not only shared markets but happily intermarried, and elsewhere three towns were specified in Roman law as places where trade could take place on the Persian frontier. A peace treaty that the Empire and Persia concluded in the sixth century treated the conduct of trade between the two states at length: the locations at which trade could take place between Roman and Persian merchants were indicated, while trade undertaken by Saracens and other merchants was precisely regulated.¹¹

Trade was only one way in which ties extended across borders. Franks and others who dwelt to the east of the Rhine and Goths who lived to the north of the Danube in late antiquity were for the most part farmers; when some of the latter were allowed into imperial territory during the late fourth century, the authorities gave them food and land to cultivate.¹² On the Roman side were stationed the limitanei, the frontier troops whom a law issued in 443 reveals cultivating lands for their own profit in border regions, but also ‘barbarians’ who had been given land in return for seeing to the border and its fortifications. Some of them were laeti, groups of soldiers who had been settled with their families on imperial territory: a law issued at the end of the fourth century explained that ‘laetic land’ had to be provided for those people from many nations who had sought the felicity of the Romans and come to the Empire. Some Germanic people, as we may call them for convenience, were peacefully entering the Empire as migrants and settling as farmers in the north of Gaul, while others settled further to the south, with the permission of the authorities. In 370 some Alamanni captives were sent to Italy, where they farmed land around the Po.¹³ One way of looking at the coming to power in the western part of the Empire by Germanic peoples in the fifth century is to see it as the speeding-up of processes that had been going on peacefully for a considerable time.

In such ways, the image of their borders that presented itself to the Romans was false, turning as it did what can be seen as zones of inclusion and integration into lines of exclusion and division. It would be impossible to deduce where the northern border ran in Britain on the basis of finds of Roman pottery, and in some ways the area in which such pottery was used, which extended northwards of Hadrian’s Wall, is as valid a marker of the extent of Roman presence as the formal border. The ‘barbarians’ across the frontiers were people who enjoyed what the Empire offered and attempted to use it for their own ends. A treasure laid down in about 400 at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. The Empire
• 2. The western Mediterranean to the mid-sixth century
• 3. From Gaul to France
• 4. From Britain to England
• 5. The western Mediterranean from the time of Justinian
• 6. South of the Danube
• 7. The East to 661
• 8. The East from 661
• 9. Systems great and small
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index