The attempt to reconquer Italy from the Arian Goths was not a success. (Its events are described in Chapter 35.) Justinian had hoped to restore some form of classical, albeit Christian, civilization to the west but wars often achieve the opposite of their aims. One result of the eastern intervention in Italy was the disappearance of the senatorial aristocracy. Many were simply eliminated by the Goths as suspected traitors. In 547 the Gothic king, Totila, had taken Rome, now reduced to a population of some 30,000, and seized the treasures of the senatorial palaces. Many senators had simply fled with all they could carry. The last of the Gothic leaders, Teias, massacred some 300 children of senatorial families whom he was holding as hostages. The villa economy, on which the senators’ wealth depended, also seems to have disappeared at the same time, doubtless dislocated by the protracted wars. The senate ceased to meet in the 580s and it is in these years that the image of Rome as an abandoned city, its great monuments falling into ruin, first emerges.
There is, however, one magnificent set of survivals from these troubled years, the churches of Ravenna. The city had been the capital of the western emperors from 402 but achieved its full glory under Theodoric, one that was sustained when Ravenna came under eastern control after 540. The splendour of these churches lies in their mosaics, all the more treasured because so many works of religious art in the Byzantine east were destroyed by the iconoclasts of the eighth century. Mosaics had originally been used only on floors, but from the fifth century they were increasingly displayed on walls and vaults with the tesserae set at an angle to each other to produce a shimmering effect.
The earliest mosaics at Ravenna are to be found in the mausoleum built for herself, but never used, by Galla Placidia (425). They are Hellenistic in style, Christ as the Good Shepherd being shown relaxing among a group of sheep. When Theod-oric came to build his palace church, to Christ the Redeemer (but later rededicated to St Apollinaris, by tradition the first bishop of Ravenna), in 490, he used mosaics to cover the whole length of the walls including the earliest known extant cycle of Gospel scenes. The interior is lit for effect by large windows in the clerestory. The church, now known as San Apollinare Nuovo, retains the traditional basilica shape as does a slightly later Ostrogothic church, San Apollinare in Classe (in Ravenna’s port, Classis) begun in the 530s. Here again there are fine mosaics (in particular of St Apollinaris in a wooded and green landscape surrounded by sheep) in what remains one of the most harmonious of early Christian interiors.
A different and individual approach was taken in San Vitalis, begun under the Ostrogoths in the 520s. The church is essentially an octagon surmounted by a cupola (inspired by the contemporary church, which still survives, of Sts Sergius and Bacchus in Constantinople) but there are the additions of a chancel and entrance porch. The interior is broken up by a series of columns and arches superimposed on each other. The whole is beautifully integrated and given even greater magnificence by its mosaics, which were added, in 548, after Justinian’s reconquest of Italy. Here are the celebrated portrayals of Justinian and his consort Theodora bringing gifts to Christ, but they are only a few of the host of images and symbols that blend in with the architecture of the church.
When Justinian had finally achieved some sort of victory in Italy in 554 he attempted to reimpose an imperial system of administration, staffed by eastern officials. It was bitterly resented by the demoralized population. In any case, there was little in the way of an administrative structure left outside that provided by the church. Yet here too there was a breakdown after the rejection by most Italian clergy of Justinian’s condemnation of the so-called Three Chapters, texts that supported the Nestorian view that Christ had a distinct human nature (see Chapter 35).
Up to the fifth century the bishops of Rome, though maintaining some authority in the church as a whole as the proclaimed successors of Peter, had played little part in formulating Christian doctrine. The Christian world was predominantly Greek, the great councils of the church at which doctrine had been decided took place either at Constantinople (381, 553) or even further east (Nicaea (325), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451)). The dominant figures in these councils had been the emperors, who had called them and proclaimed their findings through imperial decrees, rather than the bishops. With Christianity now the official religion of the state, it mattered as much to the emperors as to the bishops that there was doctrinal unity and it was hard, in any case, to see how any resolution of complex theological issues could have been achieved without imperial backing.
Rome’s attempts to exert influence were not helped by the comparative isolation of the city from the east and its own internal decay. There were individual Italian bishops, Ambrose in Milan, for instance, who found themselves closer to the western emperors, and thus, as we have seen, p. 616 above, in a position to exercise greater influence over them, than a bishop based in the shell of the ‘Eternal City’. It was not until the Council of Chalcedon in 451, when the so-called tome (letter) of Leo was read (in his absence), that ‘for the first time Rome took a determining role in the definition of Christian dogma’ (Judith Herrin) and even here there was a challenge to Rome’s claims to primacy when, to Leo’s fury, the proclamation of 381 that Constantinople’s status was second only to that of Rome was confirmed. The council held in Constantinople under Justinian’s auspices in 553 conducted its business totally independently of Rome.
When in 590 a new bishop of Rome, Gregory (540-604), was consecrated, it seemed that the supremacy of the Greek east in defining Christianity would continue. Gregory had spent several years in Constantinople and had expressed some sympathy for the eastern position on doctrine. The emperors must have hoped that he could be controlled. These hopes were soon dashed. Gregory was a Roman aristocrat (in fact a former City Prefect) and was defined by his class as a patrician figure of the old school. His affection and concern for the city remained strong and his benevolence unquestioned. He fed Rome’s often starving population from his own estates. Despite his stay in Constantinople he was not learned in Greek and represented the new clerical culture of the west, in which learning in the Latin classics was combined with a devout and somewhat austere Christianity, but remained always subservient to it. His happiest days, he recalled, were those when he was living as a monk in a community he had founded in Rome.
Gregory is undoubtedly one of the greatest spiritual leaders the west has ever produced. As societies disintegrated around him, he felt the challenge of living ‘in the last times’. It was a matter of urgency that he should restore to Christianity a moral integrity that had risked being lost in the vindictive debates of the fourth century and the diversion of resources into opulent churches. (The Anglo-Saxon historian of the church, Bede, writing in the eighth century, noted that ‘whilst the popes devoted themselves to the task of the building of churches, and adorning them with gold and silver, [Gregory’s] prime concern was the saving of souls’.) He knew the value of moderation in pastoral care (expressed in his most famous work the Liber Regulae Pastoralis, ‘the Book of Pastoral Care’). It was he who endorsed the Rule of Benedict, which, in contrast to the extreme asceticism of the fourth century, accepted that measured discipline was the way forward if monasteries were to remain settled and humane communities. His ideal pastor must, he wrote in his Condescensio, learn ‘to be intimately close to each person through compassion, and yet to hover above all through contemplation. It was a nice mix. His endorsement of the Rule was perhaps the single most enduring initiative in the history of medieval Christianity.
Yet there was no compromise on papal authority. Gregory exploited his freedom from imperial control and doggedly set out on a new path that was to define the nature of western Christendom. The bishop of Rome was to be the presiding force in Christian Europe with his fellow but subordinate bishops strengthened as leaders of the Christian communities. The authority of the church rested jointly on the four Gospels and the four ecumenical councils (Nicaea, Constantinople (381), Ephesus, and Chalcedon) but ‘without the authority and consent of the apostolic see [Rome]’, insisted Gregory ‘none of the matters transacted [by a council] has any binding force’. It was a sophisticated rationale for papal power that owed much to the theology of Augustine but rested ultimately on the direct succession Gregory claimed from the apostle Peter.
So the foundations had been laid of the medieval papacy. They were reinforced by the widening doctrinal split with the east, and a growing isolation from the traditional Greek-speaking centres of Christianity as the leading members of the western church (Augustine, as has been seen, is one example) were unable any longer to work in Greek. Later, in the seventh century, Rome’s position was further strengthened by the eclipse of two traditional rivals, the bishoprics of Alexandria and Antioch, by the Arab invasions so that one can justly talk of ‘the Roman see as the single isolated, religious centre of the barbarian west’ (Robert Markus).
Yet few in the late sixth century could have predicted the later supremacy over Europe of the popes. Rome as a city was by now isolated, little more than a few churches encircling the ruined centre. By the 570s another set of invaders from the north, the Lombards, had overrun many of the larger Italian cities and Gregory had only the most fragile of contacts with the rest of Europe. The mission he sent to England that initiated the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons was in the circumstances a magnificent achievement, even though Christ became a warrior god for the rulers of the combative Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The acceptance of papal authority was slow (the Irish St Columban was still arguing in the seventh century that if any one bishop had the right to exert supreme authority in the church that was surely the bishop of Jerusalem), but there is no doubt that Gregory’s reign marks a turning point in the history of Christianity and it is a fitting point with which to end this chapter.
Not least of the achievements of Gregory and his fellow bishops was to ensure the survival of classical Latin as the language of church law and administration in the Middle Ages and beyond. There was also a more colloquial Latin, the language of ordinary people of the empire. (In 813 a council of bishops at Tours ruled that sermons had to be in rustica romana lingua, colloquial Latin while, presumably, the rest of the service continued in classical Latin.) It was from these local dialects that the Romance languages appear to have emerged in those areas where the Roman population was a majority, the Iberian peninsula, Italy, France, and Romania. A barrier between these areas and those further north where German became the majority language has lasted from the sixth century to the present day and is a fine reminder that despite the collapse of the empire its legacy in Europe persisted.
Historians should always be sensitive to continuity. Yet the framework of life in the early medieval centuries was dramatically different from that of the classical world. While secular rulers struggled to keep their authority, the church consolidated hers in the west through the well-established network of bishops, many of them from the former Roman aristocracy. To a large extent Christianity successfully accommodated itself politically with the emerging dynasties and the warlord mentalities of the age. Christ is now predominantly a warrior sanctioning success in battle, in this sense not very different from the Roman gods of war. Once again Christianity was absorbing pagan values rather than vice versa.
Yet, in contrast to Roman religion, there was an increasing preoccupation with preparation for the afterlife and the rise of the patron saint as a mediator at the court of the Last Judgement. Relics become important symbols of prestige, offering protection to cities as they struggled to keep their identity in a precarious world. In place of the vibrant pagan mythologies, a new set of mythologies based on the holy deeds of saints or the miracles of relics take their place. This was indeed a new world, no less fascinating than the old but markedly different from it. (See Charles Freeman, Holy Bones, Holy Dust: How Relics Shaped the History of Medieval Europe, New Haven, 2011, which begins the story in ad 300.)
World History
