In 751 the Lombards captured Ravenna and thus strengthened their capacity to threaten Rome; the Frankish leader Pippin assumed the kingship with papal approval; the Abbasids established a new regime at Baghdad; and the eastward expansion of Islam clashed with imperial China near the Talas river.1 Whether these coincidences form a critical turning point in global history or not, there was a fundamental shift in Europe that forced Pope Stephen II to seek a military alliance with the Franks. This freed Rome from its traditional relationship with Constantinople and set the papacy on a new trajectory, immediately reinforced by the forged Donation of Constantine. If the role of Ravenna was crucial to this history, why did it not produce its own historians to celebrate its importance?
It probably did, but the zenith of the city’s influence occurred too early and most records from that time have not survived. Before he died in 526 Theoderic commissioned Cassiodorus to write a History of the Goths but it only survives in Jordanes’ version. Archbishop Maximian, who inserted his image and name next to Justinian’s in the famous San Vitale mosaic, wrote a history. In the ninth century Agnellus told his listeners, ‘read the chronicle of Archbishop Maximian: there you will find many things about her [the Empress Galla Placidia] and about many Emperors and Kings.’2 We cannot do so for the chronicle is lost to us. Nor do we have a copy of the illustrated Annals of Ravenna, the calendar that recorded the city’s life and times. Such losses that we know about are matched by others of which even the memory has been vaporized. There is a great deal of losing and forgetting about Ravenna as well as physical dismantling, which is also a form of forgetting.
The fate of Cassiodorus’ writing and his library is a striking example of the centrality and dissipation of Ravenna’s influence. His father served as provincial governor and, from his estates in Scyllacium (Squillace) in southern Italy, supplied horses for the army. He supported the Goths against the enfeebled late fifth-century Roman administration and sent his bookish son to the court of the new Gothic king, who had spent his formative years in Constantinople. Cassiodorus became a leading mandarin – the man who wrote official letters for the Gothic rulers and sprinkled them with his own rhetorical expertise on a wide variety of topics, designed to show off his skills. After the capture of Ravenna in 540, Belisarius took King Witigis and many Goths and members of the administration back to Constantinople, including, it seems, Cassiodorus. He stayed in the Queen City for about fifteen years, editing his own correspondence, known as the Variae, while finding, copying and having unfamiliar texts translated.3 In 554, when Justinian’s Pragmatic Sanction guaranteed their estates to exiles or émigrés who had fled to the East, he returned to Scyllacium and founded a monastery called Vivarium after its fishponds. His collected manuscripts formed the base of the library, where he drew up clear instructions, the Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning, that taught monks to cherish secular as well as spiritual works.4 When he died at a great old age, well over ninety, his collection was dispersed or lost. Some scattered volumes were later found at the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, others disappeared. But his great work of instruction, De orthographia, on how to make and copy manuscripts, remained a guide for later monks in Italy and beyond.
Without Ravenna and its multilingual traditions Cassiodorus might have been no more than a studious Roman monk. But identifying the city’s role in the formation of western Christendom is as challenging as filling the many gaps in the history of Cassiodorus’ scriptorium. We do, however, have one historian, Agnellus, writing in the mid-ninth century three hundred years after Cassiodorus. His Book of the Pontiffs is an absolutely crucial testimony to the history of Ravenna, listing the lives and times of all the bishops of the city from its conversion to Christianity.
Its effect is to set out how the bishops of Ravenna played a vital role in the continuity of its administration. Through his determination to glorify these ecclesiastical rulers, Agnellus captured the rise of a civic, cityanchored identity in Ravenna, with both religious and secular components. Constricted by its structure as a list of the holy fathers, it is leavened by its discursive storytelling and asides, such as the one just quoted about Maximian’s Chronicle. Agnellus’ Book of the Pontiffs often embellishes halfremembered, sometimes mythic accounts that imagine triumphs and conveniently invented episodes. For all his unreliable details, he demonstrates how the church of Ravenna was a major force in Italy. He shows how its leaders built up resources, keeping close control over its landed estates in remote areas (Sicily, Istria, Dalmatia), and attracted additional gifts of land and produce from local inhabitants. It then used its accumulated wealth to beautify the city with monuments decorated in the most extravagant, fashionable styles, using the most soughtafter, imported materials.
In other cities throughout the West, bishops assumed leadership roles that gave them authority in the political sphere and confirmed their importance to the well-being of their sees (for instance, in Clermont-Ferrand, Arles, Seville or Trier). But more than any of these, in Ravenna bishops such as Maximian, Damianus, Felix and Sergius, whom I have tried to bring to life, focused the loyalty of local inhabitants into a selfconfidence that ensured the city’s selfpreservation and also projected its power across north-east Italy and even further afield. We sense the force of this civic religion in the welcome given to Archbishop Peter in the 570s when he returned from his consecration in Rome and the Ravennati went out to greet him with celebratory songs. Such formal ceremonies for the arrival of a newly appointed archbishop, accompanied by chants in Greek and Latin, were later reworked for Charlemagne and other western emperors. A similar collective spirit endorsed the reconciliation organized by Exarch Callinicus and Archbishop Marinianus in 599 when Maximus of Salona came to Ravenna to be readmitted to communion with Pope Gregory I, and when Archbishop Damianus successfully resolved the bloody intercommunal battles of the late seventh century with a penitential procession involving the entire population. Another key moment occurred when Exarch Theodore persuaded the clergy at S. Apollinare in Classe to return to the city and resolve their dispute with Archbishop Theodore. At these solemn and carefully arranged ceremonies the authority of the church of Ravenna, represented by its leader, often with the collaboration of the exarch, concentrated the inhabitants’ attention on their city. With immense pride they exalted their leaders and celebrated their own participation in symbolic instances of the ‘most noble’ Ravenna, as its mosaics glittered from the walls.
Whether or not Agnellus exaggerated these moments, as he read his book out loud to his audience, he also reminded them of the existing inscriptions that recorded the activity of these bishops, their contribution to the city’s appearance and the elegant sarcophagi that marked their final resting places. As S. Apollinare in Classe gradually became the church in which most archbishops elected to be buried, close to the early Christian patron of the city, their tombs were designated as places for ritual veneration, where annual commemorations of past leaders could be performed. In these ways, the civic role of church leaders became deeply implanted in the collective memory and could be reasserted when the city needed confirmation of its achievements.
Today the historian of Ravenna has to work with surviving evidence that is only a very partial trace of what was once recorded and even less of a record of what happened. Indeed, already in the ninth century Agnellus often referred to buildings and monuments that had been dismantled or decayed. Hence the need to treat the sources that do survive forensically, to work out what they can tell us about both the major events and how life was lived in Ravenna. It is a process that demands imagination and rethinking the role of Ravenna. For while the historian must be tethered to the tangible evidence of primary accounts, she can’t limit herself to their remains. So, I’ve joined a close investigation of life in Ravenna, including legal and medical as well as religious and cosmographical ideas, with the larger panorama of shaping influences to try and overcome some of the gaps caused by such losses.
An instance of the physical loss is visible in the impressive basilica dedicated to Christ that Theoderic built as his palace church, now S. Apollinare Nuovo. The mosaic image of the Great Palace of the king dominates the southern wall at the western end, opposite another of the harbour at Classis. From these secular representations of the twin cities, two immense processions of saints, male and female, advance towards the Virgin and Christ. Within the image of the palatium a colonnade of eight chambers flanks a larger central space in which Theoderic was enthroned. Here, acclaimed on either side by courtiers, the great king was pictured in his glory.
But we do not see him.
Let’s pause on the extraordinary example of an image of a secular ruler and his court so prominently put up in a church. In palaces and city squares equivalent images would be normal. There is a long tradition of such displays of power, for instance in Constantinople, where Theoderic would have seen them as a young man. Emperors, their wives and victorious generals like Belisarius were portrayed in mosaic in public spaces, even though none have survived. Indeed, Agnellus refers to the existence of mosaics of Theoderic in his palaces at Pavia and elsewhere. But in Ravenna Theoderic followed the example set by Galla Placidia, who had erected portraits of herself, her children and her ancestors in the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista, which she had commissioned about seventy years earlier. Placidia was probably the first Christian from a ruling imperial family to place an image of herself within the sanctuary of a church – a boldness that appears to have been limited to Ravenna for many decades. When Theoderic did the same on a spectacular scale, it was to counter the example of an empress who had once been married to a Goth.
At the same time, through his wise management of the separation of Gothic Arians from local Catholic Christians, Theoderic insisted on a degree of toleration and permitted Bishop Ecclesius to plan the construction of San Vitale. After the king’s death and the successful reconquest of Gothic Italy by imperial troops under Belisarius, Bishop Victor and Ravenna’s new rulers made their counterclaim to imperial authority. The unique representation of Justinian and Theodora right in the sanctuary of a very unusual octagonal church was their response to Theoderic’s blazing presence in his golden palace church. And it is because they are in churches that have been in continuous use that they have survived.
Or at least partially, for within about fifteen years of the dedication of San Vitale’s imperial panels in 547, Arianism was prosecuted. Theoderic’s basilica was converted to the Catholic faith. The mosaic images of the two cities were left intact. But within the palace and in front of the harbour wall, the images of the heretic Arian king and his courtiers were cut away. The central space that had been Theoderic’s was filled with gold tesserae as if in his honour, while curtains replaced the figures within the colonnade. Only the hands of courtiers that overlapped with pillars and the feet of those who stood in front of the harbour wall were left behind, while the bodies were obliterated. Of Theoderic’s portrait not even a fingernail survives.
It is easy to imagine how Theoderic might have appeared enthroned. Agnellus relates that in the palace there was a mosaic of him on horseback holding lance and shield, flanked by personifications of the cities of Rome and Ravenna. Ravenna was said to have one foot in the sea and another on land, a symbolic vision of the watery environment.5 In its prime his palace would have been covered with such mosaic images of Theoderic and his victories, now reduced to dust. Indeed, the best construction elements of the palace were later recycled so thoroughly for new uses that excavation has revealed only traces of their foundations. Possibly when Charlemagne visited the city, he could have seen some of them.
What is certain is that in 787, 800 and finally, as the newly crowned emperor in 801, Charlemagne looked upon the panel of Justinian, whose faith he shared, whose laws he respected, in the apse of San Vitale. His gaze, however, was not that of a tourist, primed to experience the unparalleled achievements of ‘early Christian art’. For him, the representations of Christ, of scenes from the Old Testament and of the emperor and empress bearing their gifts to the altar, were expressions of the power of God, with Justinian as his true representative on earth. The images proclaimed a social order and its purpose, setting an example for Charlemagne to follow.
This he did by ordering the construction of his palace chapel at Aachen to adopt the unfamiliar octagonal form of San Vitale with building materials taken from Ravenna. In Rome, where he was crowned, Charlemagne doubtless admired the Christian churches and mosaics put up by bishops in the vast ancient capital, now depopulated and still filled with collapsing monuments to a failed pagan empire. But it was Ravenna, built for purpose as a Christian capital, that the Frankish ruler determined to emulate. And he also took with him the great statue of a mounted emperor that Theoderic had made to represent himself. The Gothic king may have been an Arian, but he was also an invader reshaping the legacy of Rome, with whom Charlemagne could identify. In addition, the most powerful western ruler of the late eighth century saw himself as the successor to the Emperor Justinian as portrayed in the mosaic panel, opposite his wife Empress Theodora, both of them participating in a liturgical procession. In this integration of Christian philanthropy, imperial distinction and exceptionally rich symbolic costume, Byzantium set the standard: this is what it means to be an emperor.
If Ravenna was so central to the process of fusion that Constantinople initially oversaw and Charlemagne eventually personified, why has this not been recognized? The city’s monuments have attracted many academic studies; its mosaics continue to inspire with continuing vitality across one and a half millennia. Yet Ravenna itself seems voiceless. This creates a second level of loss due to the fact that its leading role was thrust upon it by outsiders, first by Honorius, the emperor who abandoned Roman Britain to invading forces, then found himself faced with similar problems in Milan and moved his capital to Ravenna. Almost certainly it was Stilicho who calculated that this small centre had advantages that would protect the court from attack: a wellconstructed harbour at Classis that ensured immediate access to the sea route to Constantinople, as well as to imperial territories in Istria and Dalmatia across the Adriatic; a setting dominated by water and marshes that made it very hard to besiege, with a relatively undeveloped urban plan that allowed the imperial court to impose its presence, while – in strategic terms – its conquest was uninviting for an army determined to control the Italian peninsula.
Ravenna was in effect chosen again by Theoderic as the capital for his kingdom, as this reinforced his claim to be the legitimate representative of the East Roman empire. His realm would extend over the whole of Dalmatia as well as today’s southern France and Catalonia – territories at least as great in extent as modern Italy, which he also ruled. Under his regal authority and informed by his experience of the imperial court, Ravenna became the fulcrum of energies that engendered early Christendom. Perhaps if Theoderic had been able to pass on this achievement to a capable son, born and trained in Ravenna, the kingdom would have become an independent state. But he produced only a daughter, though she made a remarkable effort to continue his rule. The problem of the succession was also related to the particular form of Theoderic’s authority. As a Gothic king ruling in official association with the emperor in Constantinople, he was unable to create the equivalent of a senate, such as existed (however feebly) in Rome, in the eastern capital and, later, in Venice. His Gothic comitatus of noble counsellors and largely Roman-style administration represented distinct interests that could not unite to secure the power and interests of the city when the succession crisis became real.
Instead, Theoderic’s achievements were claimed directly by Constantinople. After Belisarius’ successful reconquest of Carthage in North Africa, his eastern forces arrived in Ravenna in 540 to impose a government appointed by Emperor Justinian. The two exarchates of North Africa and Italy received imperial investment and kept the ideal of city life alive in what remained of the western empire. By 540 Ravenna was a perfect centre for the exercise of imperial influence, whose power originated elsewhere. The city became Constantinople’s entry point into western Europe for government personnel, imported goods such as papyrus from Egypt, silks, spices and ivory, legal, liturgical and theological texts and changing ideas about imperial rule that circulated in the Mediterranean world. It was a hub for the dissemination of Justinian’s new laws (Novellae) as well as fashions in architecture, court etiquette, saints’ Lives, Neoplatonic philosophy and even dress. Through Constantinople’s insistence on the closer integration of Germanic, Gothic and Arian loyalties, Christian laws promulgated in the East also protected women, children and slaves in a firm legal framework that endured and influenced other legal codes. While Carthage, Syracuse and Naples also provided entry points, ease of access to transalpine regions via the Po valley gave Ravenna primacy in this role of disseminating imperial decrees and benefits.
The administrative pattern of the exarchate meant that Ravenna was dependent on Constantinople. It did not lack a culture of selfbelief, as is clear both from its pioneering, belligerent contests that became a mark of city life in northern Italy, and its Cosmographer who placed the ‘most noble Ravenna’ at the centre of the known world. But it could not generate and direct its own future. And the external forces that dominated the city were themselves constrained and redirected by much larger developments across the four hundred years of Ravenna’s prominence, from the arrival of Honorius in 402 to the third and last visit of a very different emperor in 801.
The city rarely ‘made history’ in an obvious, shaping fashion. Despite its intellectual, artistic, legal and medical contributions, in the fraught centuries that generated early Christendom, Ravenna was never fully its own agent, as classical Rome had been, as Byzantium became and as Venice would become. Local writers surely attempted to record the city’s history and achievements, but more powerful centres did not feel the need to acknowledge its influence.
In two phases the Roman empire gave way, first in the West and later in the South-East, bringing a shared emphasis on belief and religious observance, which lay at the heart of the world of Islam as well as early Christendom in both its eastern and western forms.6 Although Islam made little immediate impact in the city of Ravenna, the wider consequences of its rapid spread resulted in a basic transition, ‘from bread and circuses to soup and salvation’.7 For the Roman world had been built on control of the Mediterranean coastline and the granaries of Egypt and North Africa had fed Rome and Constantinople.
Recent studies of ‘the decline and fall of the Roman empire’ in the West have taken quite opposite positions. Some insist on the highly destructive nature of barbarian incursions that led to a catastrophic and total collapse, followed by impoverishment and division after Charlemagne. They brand Byzantium’s effort to sustain its authority as one of these hostile external forces, a perspective that updates but narrows the ‘decline and fall’ of Rome so brilliantly documented and mourned by Gibbon. Others find more evidence of piecemeal assimilation and gradual integration.8 Against both views, I have attempted to show that creation and innovation accompanied the conflicts and immiseration; that what had been the western Roman empire experienced the birth pangs of a new social order as much as the death throes of the old one. A long process engendered the new social, military and legal order we can call early Christendom.
As we have seen, many distinct forces destabilized the influence of classical Roman authority once based on the Tiber, both internal – the overextension that expanded the empire beyond its own capacities – and external – the pressure of many ‘barbarian’ forces along the frontiers that were now too long to defend. And all these coincided with the threat of alternative centralized powers – Persia and, later, Arabia – to replace the entire Roman order with their own language, religion and legal structure. Constantine I’s creation of a new eastern capital was partly motivated by the need to mobilize against such serious threats, as well as the greater wealth of the eastern provinces. It transferred and thus sustained the Roman empire in an overtly Christian setting, combining ancient administrative, technical and legal capacities with the popular energies and theological claims of Christian faith, and the learning and culture of Greece. Through this transformed legacy of antiquity Constantinople eventually achieved the ambition that had eluded classical Rome: it inspired its armies under the banner of Christ, the symbol of the cross and the icon of Mary and crushed Persia.
But this eastern shift weakened the western half of empire and the poorly defended ancient capital, where a very different transformation took place. The western challenge of the Goths, Burgundians, Franks and Lombards was quite different to that of the great Persian empire at Ctesiphon or of the Arab centre at Mecca. Although the Huns were primarily destructive, most of the newcomers, having lived for several generations in close contact with the empire, sought to make the Roman way of life their own on imperial territory. They deprived it of essential tax revenue and supplies, while adopting many of its features. Crucially, they all embraced Christianity as their faith and most used Latin for their written texts, though the Goths maintained their own Arian Christian definitions celebrated in Gothic. They brought undeniably novel ideas and practices into the world that had been dominated by polytheistic Roman political rule for centuries, and assailed classical attitudes towards city life and the countryside, commerce and overseas trade, diet, dress, education, the family and religious belief. But they did so while claiming to reproduce the new Roman faith of Christianity and absorbing the Roman legal system codified by Theodosius II and Justinian. Many had been recruited into the Roman armies or held at armslength by alliances and treaties that also began to integrate them into the Roman world, which was itself changed in the process and then overrun. In the north-western region of the Roman world this process led to what we know as the medieval civilization of the West, with its ferocious, restless dynamics.
During the turbulent fifth century, across the West, the result was an overall urban decline accompanied by ruralization.9 It is particularly marked at Rome, where the vast population that had been accommodated within very extensive city walls dropped from perhaps 600,000 before the sack of 410 to only tens of thousands by the sixth century.10 This meant that there were never enough men to defend the city, although when the city gates were firmly closed it was still difficult to capture by assault. As the enormous palaces, baths, temples, theatres, villas and insulae (large blocks of apartments) were no longer regularly used, they inevitably fell into disrepair. Christian monuments slowly took their place, adapting some old buildings to new uses or reemploying their solid building material for new constructions.11 Similar stories fill the pages of contemporary chronicles, describing how, throughout the West, cities shrank.
The exception was Ravenna. The source of its flourishing was the eastern Roman empire, which renewed and consolidated its authority not only in the capital but also across its provinces, where new palaces, churches, aqueducts, baths and charitable institutions surpassed the monuments of ancient Rome. As Rome became depopulated, Constantinople expanded, adding a third to its size in 413 by the construction of the huge ring of walls with towers, later supplemented by an outer wall and a walled moat that stand to this day. Ravenna shared in this imperial expansion, as Honorius, Galla Placidia and local bishops patronized new buildings, making it an outstanding exception to the degeneration of most classical cities and settlements. With Constantinople’s approval, Theoderic integrated eastern influence into Ravenna’s Christian Gothic administration that made the king more Roman than most Romans. While he appeared to conform to Gothic ideas of kingship, he brought to the West a grasp of imperial traditions that consolidated a very particular combination of elements: an understanding of the importance of law and the administration of justice; an acknowledgement of the differences in Christian belief that made a degree of toleration essential; a respect for superior Greek education; and a capacity to collaborate with the bestqualified and mostskilled individuals who could assist his ambitions. Through these features, observed and adopted in the East, Theoderic oversaw the symbiosis of Germanic and Roman elements into a meaningful unity, which would be continued under the exarchs thereafter.
As well as his great church of S. Apollinare Nuovo, Theodoric’s mausoleum is a telling witness to this integration of ‘barbarian’ and imperial Roman qualities. Here the king who had dominated the West, governing in the name of the eastern rulers of Constantinople, had constructed a domed tomb fit for an emperor. Visitors even today can marvel at the single slab of Istrian marble that forms the roof – how on earth did they raise it in the early sixth century? And once installed, why did it survive? Most early Christian buildings that remain standing today do so because they have been continuously occupied, renovated and kept in use as sacred buildings, often by monastic communities in Ravenna. The more secular palaces, residences, assembly halls, houses and trading places that make up medieval settlements rarely retain such attention, were often pillaged for building material and then replaced by grander, better constructed, more fashionable or serviceable edifices. At some date Theoderic’s tomb was transformed from its funereal function into a nunnery, and this kept it in use. But its original purpose was not forgotten, and the king’s fame was preserved in the huge purple sarcophagus still visible.
In other western regions a similar symbiosis occurred, from Visigothic Spain to the Anglo-Saxon, Frankish and Burgundian kingdoms, where court rituals, coinage, imperial costume and patterns of patronage were imitated. But in north-east Italy the imperial framework provided by the eastern capital in Constantinople requires particular emphasis. For without Byzantium, there would have been no ‘western Europe’. After the Arab conquests of the eastern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean, Constantinople barred their expansion into the European continent through the seventh and eighth centuries. In defending the Queen City in 667–9 and 717–18, the eastern emperors provided the shield that excluded Islam from further advances into the West; they scattered a massive Arab mobilization, which would otherwise have unified the entire Mediterranean under its sway. In 732 Charles Martel’s victory at Poitiers also frustrated Umayyad expansion north of the Pyrenees, but this was an opportunist raid seeking treasure and weakness, not the fullscale mobilization by land and sea that fell upon – but failed to take – the Queen City.
The significance of Constantinople in the transformation of western Europe was not merely that of an outward shield, however. The imperial framework exercised a cultural hegemony that facilitated a fusion of nonimperial forces and transmitted a variation of its own policy of acculturation to the West via the Gothic king Theoderic and the exarchs. Through its capital in Ravenna the empire sustained the ideal of efficient government sanctioned by law within the West itself. In multiple ways its benefits commanded respect and a tinge of admiration for the eastern emperors among even the most hostile enemies, and in Italy an underlying loyalty to Constantinople persisted through the sixth century and beyond. The influence of Byzantium was diffused especially through Ravenna. The city acted as an essential catalyst to the development of a society that would eventually outstrip it. In this way the Christianized New Rome was a constant, built-in inspiration for the powers that took over the West. Charlemagne has traditionally been hailed, in Alcuin’s phrase, as the ‘father of Europe’, as if he acted alone.12 But the foundations of western Christendom that he exemplified were laid in Ravenna, whose rulers, exarchs and bishops, scholars, doctors, lawyers, mosaicists and traders, Roman and Goth, later Greek and Lombard, forged the first European city.