At the end of the sixth century the East Roman empire was, as we know
with hindsight, on the brink of dramatic transformation: the rise of Arab
power would rob it of its eastern and southern provinces; the settlement
of the Slavs in the Balkan peninsula would deprive the eastern empire of
those provinces and isolate New Rome from Old Rome; the last vestiges of
a traditional city-based society seem to have crumbled in an empire now
barely capable of defending its capital, or regenerating itself after natural
disaster or epidemic. It is difficult not to see seeds of all this as we survey the
history of the sixth century. The idea of an orthodox Christian empire did
cause both divisions between Christians in the east, and tensions between
the increasinglyGreek Christianity of the empire and the Latin Christianity
of Rome and the west; the public spaces of the city ceased to be used, and
were left to decay or be encroached upon by more private activities.
Although all this is true, to think in terms of decline is to look at only
part of the picture. The public life of the cities may have declined, but it
yielded to the demands of the Christian church for space for its activities:
increasingly the urban rituals that expressed such sense of civic identity as
survived became Christian rituals. The church buildings themselves became
increasingly important as public places and moved from the urban periphery
to dominate the centre, while the episcopal offices grew in size, in
parallel with the developing role of the bishop. The growth in devotion
to icons, for which our evidence increases dramatically in the latter half of
the sixth century, has been plausibly attributed to ‘the continuing needs
of the ancient city’.45 Such Christianisation is neither a vampirish corollary
of decline nor evidence of the success of Christian mission; it is rather
evidence for change and needs to be evaluated on its own terms. What
was taking place at the level of the city had a parallel in, and may have
been inspired by, transformation of imperial ritual. In the latter part of the
century, we see a growing tendency to underwrite the imperial structures
of authority by appeal to Christian symbols: the court of the emperor is
presented as reflecting the heavenly court, Constantine’s labarum is joined
by icons of Christ and His Virgin Mother.46 While this transformed society
may have come close to disaster in the seventh century, it contained
seeds of survival and renewal. What survived was, however, a significantly
different society from that of the Roman empire at the beginning of the
sixth century.
World History
