Debating the decline of the Roman Empire Taxation and diminishing state revenues The loss of military capacity
Demographic regression and plague in late antiquity The afterlife of ancient Rome
The spine of this book has been a narrative tracing the history of the Roman state, the Roman Empire, from 284, the accession of the emperor Diocletian, to the fall of Alexandria to the Arabs and the death of the emperor Heraclius in 641. At the beginning of this period Diocletian, during a twenty-year reign, much of it shared with his colleagues in the tetrarchy, introduced major changes to administrative structures and transformed state ideology to the extent that it is justifiable to think of the emperors from the beginning of the fourth century as being masters of a “new empire.”1 The end of the period is marked by an even more significant break, the moment when Constantinople, the new Rome, lost control of Egypt, its most important overseas territory and the main source of its food supply and of its tax revenue. By this date the Roman state had also relinquished control of the Near East to the Arabs, and the Asia Minor provinces had been rendered a virtual wilderness by the protracted wars with the
A History of the Later Roman Empire, AD 284-641, Second Edition. Stephen Mitchell. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Sassanians. The empire did not collapse entirely, but now consisted only of an impoverished Asia Minor, north of the Taurus mountains, the Aegean basin, and the eastern extremity of the Balkan peninsula.
Much of later Roman history has been a story not of one but of two empires. The Diocletianic tetrarchy created a geographically decentralized state ruled by two Augusti, with subordinate Caesars, based in strategically important capital cities. Soon after Diocletian’s abdication in 305 the system broke down, and over the next sixty years the empire was dominated variously by one (Constantine, Julian), two (Constantine and Licinius) or three (Constantius, Constans, Constantine II) rulers, according to events and circumstances. From the accession of Valentinian and Valens in 364, the empire was again divided between east and west, and each half was ruled as a separate and independent entity.2 The eastern and western empires were morphological clones of one another, with identical military and administrative structures, similar taxation procedures, and a shared legal framework, whose notional unity is exemplified in the Theodosian Code, which was an amalgam of imperial decisions drawn from case law in both eastern and western provinces. The contradiction between empires which were unified in theory but quite distinct in practice is well illustrated by Priscus’ account of the episode in AD 449 when the embassy from Constantinople to Attila, representing Theodosius II, encountered by chance a corresponding embassy to the Hunnic leader from the court of Valentinian III:
Here we met with some of the western Romans, who had also come on an embassy to Attila - the count Romulus, Promotus governor of Noricum, and Romanus a military captain. (Priscus Fr. 11.2; Blockley p. 262)
Each imperial embassy was fully independent of the other and had quite separate political objectives. Nevertheless all Roman legislation of this period was issued on the explicit authority of the two rulers, whose names duly appeared as the authors of every legal decision, thus creating an appearance of imperial unity. Through the fifth century it was always a major objective of the court at Constantinople to maintain and support the security and integrity of the western empire. Troops were sent from the East to support Honorius after the fall of Rome to Alaric in 410, to install Valentinian III as emperor in 425 in the face of the usurpation of John, to support the western empire’s unsuccessful attempts to prevent the African provinces from falling under Vandal control in 435 and 441, and to help in the defense of Italy against Attila in 452. Above all, the emperor Leo dispatched the largest naval expedition of late Roman history to Carthage in 468 in a doomed attempt to destroy the Vandal kingdom and thus secure the western empire from ultimate collapse.3
This summary description envisages the Roman Empire as a huge transnational state, controlled by a monarch (or twin rulers for the split empire), who exploited a common ideology of rulership. Relying on the military traditions which had brought Rome to world power in the first century BC, the empire dominated neighbors and rivals by the systematic and effective deployment of military resources and threats of force. This military capacity in turn depended on an administrative capacity to raise taxes from the subject provinces. This way of describing the Roman state is not exhaustive or comprehensive. It passes over many of the cultural consequences of empire, such as its impact on religious developments, in particular the transformation of Christianity itself into an imperial religion, the spread and function of the classical languages Latin and Greek, the creation of an intellectual heritage derived from classical literature and art, and lifestyles reflecting the norms of behavior established in Graeco-Roman cities, for which we can use the shorthand description civilization.
The Roman Empire collapsed as a major political presence in the west by the end of the ifth century, and was a much weakened presence in the east by the mid-seventh century. The question of the decline and fall of Rome as a political and military power, which had been unfashionable in mainstream research on the Roman Empire for much of the period that followed the publication of A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire, in 1964, has re-emerged in recent scholarship. W. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (2001), preponderantly examines an enormous dossier of evidence relating to the east up to the seventh century, while Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire. A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (2005), and Brian Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), deal with the consequence of the barbarian invasions of the western empire in the ifth century. The proposition that Rome’s power declined in late antiquity is also the principal conclusion of David Potter, The Roman Empire at Bay (2004), summed up in the assertion that “the Roman State passed from hegemonic power to regional power in the course of the third and fourth centuries.”4 The studies of Heather and Ward-Perkins have been characterized as constituting a “counterreformation” in the study of late antiquity,5 A reaction to the new historical approach initiated by Peter Brown and his followers. On the other hand scholars who have championed the approach to late antiquity as a period of innovation and creativity, one which generated vital new religious and cultural developments, have expressed regret that to study the late Roman world as a paradigm of imperial decline seems dispiritingly old-fashioned. Such an approach focuses attention mainly or exclusively on a limited number of central functions which constitute a narrow view of what the empire stood for. “An opportunity to offer a new survey of the later Roman Empire is also an opportunity to imagine how a new history might be written.”6
Preparing a revised edition of this book is not a moment to undertake an entirely new survey, but it is important to record that further revisionism is not only under way, but has irmly taken shape in work on the largest scale. Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages (2005)), has a strong claim to be the most signiicant new contribution to our understanding of the period, perhaps indeed the most important work on later antiquity to appear since A. H. M. Jones’ great survey. Wickham himself has also written a large-scale history up to the year 1000, The Inheritance of Rome (2009). Another valuable panoramic study is P. Sarris, Empires of Faith (2011). Remarkably, the last two titles belong to series devoted to the history of Europe. Neither adheres geographically to European boundaries, either as defined in antiquity or today. The Inheritance of Rome devotes more than a quarter of its pages, and Empires of Faith more than three of its nine chapters to the “empires of the East.” Framing the Early Middle Ages is based on an exhaustive analysis of ten regions, three of which - Syria and Palestine, Egypt, and the Byzantine heartland - were all firmly nonEuropean parts of the eastern Roman Empire. These studies adopt a broadly transitional approach to the period, fixated not on the decline of Rome but on the evolution of the economic structures, institutions, and cultural ideas of the later Roman Empire into those of the early Middle Ages or of early Islamic society. Thus much of the major impetus of contemporary work has reinforced the concept which first obtained wide currency with the publication of Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne, that the history of northwest Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East is only fully intelligible when it is approached as a unity.7 This is also a central tenet of most modern studies of late antiquity, which avoid being confined to the notional geographical boundaries of the Roman and Sassanian empires, or the world of the early Islamic caliphate.
This fresh work on the transition to the Middle Ages also relativizes, although it does not seek to deny the importance of the collapse of Roman imperial power. Wickham’s work in particular diverts attention away from political history and the direct impact of empire to other underlying features of early medieval societies: “the form of the state (in particular its financing), the aristocracy (in particular its wealth), the peasantry and the structures of rural society, urban society and the economy, and networks of exchange.” This highly materialist approach can be conceived of almost as an archaeological excavation into the layers of social and economic organization that underpinned late Roman and post-Roman society, and it places the heaviest emphasis on questions relating to taxation, land-tenure and ownership, productivity, distribution of wealth, manufacture, and trade. It provides an opportunity for further refiec-tion on the issues of Rome’s decline, fall, and transformation, or, put in other terms, of the end of antiquity and the coming of a post-Roman era both in Europe and in the Near East.8
World History
