With the collapse of the old administration local populations were now coming to terms with their new Germanic rulers. Walter Goffart (see above) had argued that this was a relatively peaceful process. However, more recent surveys have been less supportive of Goffart and his followers. While in many areas accommodation had been taking place over decades and without major upheaval, the disintegration of the old trading networks and the disruptions of ravaging armies led to a major economic breakdown. There are reports of armed peasants, the bacaudae, looting the countryside. As Bryan Ward-Perkins has shown in his The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford, 2005), the results were often cataclysmic, not least in the loss of skills. Britain was especially badly affected; here living standards fell back to what they had been before the Roman conquest. A telling shift, seen in northern Gaul as well as in Britain, is from arable farming that depends on stability and security, to pastoral farming with sheep and cattle that can be moved away during times of disorder.
The picture in Italy is also of serious economic decline. The port of Ostia was already in decay as early as 350—when cracks appeared in the walls of the theatre they were patched up by using the inscribed plinths of statues of former notables, an ominous sign of a city which had lost its pride. The villa economy around Monte
Cassino in Italy seems to have collapsed as early as ad 400. By the sixth century there was no longer any navigation up the Tiber, and the Via Ostiense, the main road into Rome from Ostia, was described as totally overgrown. Rome’s population shrank dramatically in the sixth century, from perhaps 100,000 at the beginning of the century to 30,000-40,000 by the end. The only areas where a functioning economy, including a range of coinage, survived were those coastal areas, southern Spain, southern Gaul, Italy, and the African coasts, where trade continued with Constantinople. The breakdown of trade meant not only the loss of consumer goods but the disruption of cultural connections. The isolation that followed as the empire fragmented was beyond anyone’s previous experience. (Part I of Michael McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy, Cambridge, 2002, discusses the archaeological evidence for the changing patterns in trade.)
The letters of the Gallic aristocrat Sidonius Apollinaris provide a fine picture of how a sophisticated man, schooled in classical traditions, could survive. Sidonius, the son-in-law of Avitus, had inherited a beautiful if remote estate in the Auvergne. Here he cultivated the life of a landowner and, like many of his class, became a bishop, of Clermont in 470. The church now provided the only avenue through which a Roman aristocrat could maintain status. When his city was besieged by Visigoths in 475 Sidonius directed its defence, but after its surrender he worked hard to cultivate relationships with his new overlords. He was shrewd enough to recognize that the Visigoths offered the best hope of defence against other attacks, and to sustain the relationship he was even prepared to visit the Visigothic king, Theodoric, to play backgammon with him. The appearance and manners of those Germans billeted on his estate he found less palatable.
The fragmentary evidence, especially from Germanic law codes (themselves modelled on Roman ones, see below), suggests a variety of arrangements: the direct seizure of land by the migrants, an imposed division of estates between owners and their newcomers, with two-thirds of an estate allocated to the ‘barbarians’, or simply an acquiescence in the occupation of land with the original Roman owner being eased out over time. The vast imperial estates of Gaul appeared to have been appropriated intact by the Merovingian kings (see below p. 643). As Sidonius’ experience suggests, it must have been up to landowners to negotiate the best deal they could, often using one lot of newcomers as defenders of their estates against the next wave of violence. If the new administration could tax those seizing land then it may have relieved the burden of the original landowners, giving them a reason to acquiesce in their losses. Some aristocrats found new roles as advisers to the barbarian leaders or, within a generation or two, as warriors defending the new regimes against rival states. Those prepared to compromise could certainly survive.
Sidonius’ experiences also provide a reminder that the church remained with its administrative structure intact. Its estates were large and could support its clergy. The clergy were exempt from taxation and military service so there was no shortage of recruits. As Childeric, king of the Franks, put it: ‘Our treasury is bankrupt and all our wealth has been transferred to the church. Only bishops have any power.’ The bishops maintained rudimentary structures of control while the church was the only institution able to administer any form of welfare. In Gaul and Italy a quarter of the church’s revenue was earmarked for widows and ‘the poor’. The fifth and sixth centuries saw the emergence of a range of charitable institutions, hospitals, hospices for reception of pilgrims, and orphanages, and this role of the church was to be sustained in the centuries that followed. (See the closing chapters of Brown, Through the Eye of the Needle, for these developments.)
This was also the age where relic cults became prominent. Miracles now became widespread. It is fascinating to contrast Augustine’s dismissal of the miraculous when first converted (in 385) to his full acceptance of the phenomenon by the 420s (as described in the closing chapters of his The City of God). He even berates his parishioners when they don’t publicize their healings. In her excellent study The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, 1991), Valerie Flint shows how the church in Europe tolerated and even absorbed pagan ‘magical’ practices in order to extend its authority over the pagan masses. Some kings, Guntram of the Burgundians, ruled 561-92, for instance, claimed to be able to perform miracles, a mark of sacred kingship that persisted in France until the early nineteenth century.
While the church survived as a force for cohesion, so then did Roman law. The church used it (as the law code of the Franks put it, ecclesia vivat iure Romano, ‘the Church lives according to Roman law’). One of the last joint achievements of the eastern and western empires had been, in fact, the Law Code issued by Theodosius II (emperor in the east 408-50). It was a definitive collection of imperial laws issued from the time of Constantine onwards, proclaimed throughout the empire in 438. Many German rulers now adopted it for their ‘Roman’ subjects. King Alaric II made an abridgement of the Code for his Aquitanian subjects in 506 while the Ostrogoth king Theodoric promulgated it in Italy about 500. The proclamation of a law code boosted the status of a ruler while Roman jurists found new roles as advisers. The use of Roman law also perpetuated the concept that the state should take responsibility for justice on behalf of an individual and that there were personal rights that should be protected. However, it also meant that other features of Roman society such as slavery persisted with legal support. The number of slaves, or those exploited enough to be considered to be of servile status, appears to have increased on the large estates. Slaves were also exportable commodities to the eastern Mediterranean (see Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, Cambridge, 2002, chapter 9). The trade in slaves in England was forbidden for the first time only in 1102.
The administrative functions of the church may have helped to sustain urban life but most towns in the west were mere shells of what they had been. In the north-west of the empire they had virtually ceased to exist after ad 400. The process goes hand in hand with the disappearance of coinage and the return to rudimentary bartering systems. One finds cities such as Aquileia that simply fade away (in this case after being sacked by Attila in 452). A rough wall dating from the 550s still stands around the basilica, separating it from the abandoned town. The basilica’s magnificent fourth-century mosaics disappeared under the silt with which they were slowly covered (but so being preserved in the fine state they are in today). Other towns were reduced to little more than markets for peasant exchanges, temporary barracks for soldiers on campaign, and fortified refuges to be used in times of trouble. Lugdunum (Lyon) had covered 160 hectares in its heyday—by the sixth century it was down to 20. Cathedrals might still be built in cities but in Gaul the Franks tended to build their churches on the sites of Roman estates with villages growing up later around them. Communities now centred on the courts of the Germanic kings or monasteries. This was now a rural world and its horizons were inevitably narrower than they had been.
World History
