THE year 410 had brought to all Europe a sound of a falling palace and a collapsing judgment seat: the Roman empire, it seemed, had fallen, and the underpinning of civilization with it. All men knew it. But no such general appreciation of great events accompanied the year 476: no European uneasiness, no Christian misgivings. Yet, on looking back, it seems that, if the year 410 be taken as a point of collapse and destruction, for no Visigothic kingdom arose in Italy after 410 to crown Alaric’s conquest of Rome, the year 476 may be taken as significant of a beginning of a Germanic kingship of Italy, the mother land of the Roman empire.
What happened in the year 476? Odovacar, a barbarian general and the real ruler of Italy, deposed the young emperor of the west, Romulus Augustulus, the son of Odovacar’s predecessor, Orestes, and took the government openly into his own hands. He sent envoys, claiming to speak for the Roman senate, to the emperor Zeno at Constantinople, to tell him that the army of the west had slain Orestes, its magister militum and patrician, and deposed Romulus: they laid at Zeno’s feet Romulus’ diadem and purple robe and (here was the novelty) did not ask for them back for anyone else. It would suffice, they said, that they, for the west, should do homage to Zeno: one emperor should suffice for the empire. Let Zeno confer upon the senatorial candidate for the rule of Italy, upon Flavius Odovacar, the title of patrician, and the position would be regularized. Zeno, only emperor himself since 474, and in no strong position, demurred but finally complied. Odovacar, a leader of the Germanic Scyrrii, Rugii, etc., from the lower Vistula, became patrician of Italy: but he was less versed in Roman practice and tradition than the barbarian ministers who before him had governed Italy under the nominal rule of an emperor, and he conceived of himself, as did his contemporaries, rather as a Germanic king than a Roman magistrate. He issued grants in the name, not of Odovacar Patricius, but of Odovacar Rex: and for the first time, barbarian troops were quartered permanently on the Italian countryside. The barbarians had begun to rule the heart of the empire: their kingdoms had already been set up in the outlying provinces. The future in the west of Europe lay with them, as for many centuries at Constantinople it still lay with the old, unbroken rule of Rome.
Odovacar ruled Italy and Noricum for seventeen years from his citadel in marsh-girt Ravenna, and five other barbarian kings in the year when he slew Orestes shared the rule of western Europe between them. Euric the Visigoth ruled a people settled between the Loire and the straits of Gibraltar: Gaiseric and his Vandals ruled north Africa: Gundobad and his Burgundians were settled in the valleys of the Rhone and the Saône: Frankish princes, one of them the father of Clovis, held the mouths of the Meuse, Moselle and Rhine: the Suevi had a small kingdom in Portugal and north Spain. In Britain there was as yet no single Germanic kingdom: but in 477 Ælla landed in Sussex, and by 490, through capturing Pevensey and turning the Roman fortified line of defence, he was saluted as overking or bretwalda of the invading Saxons. There was now, therefore, no large area in western Europe where a Roman magistrate ruled: Syagrius the patrician, indeed, defended himself and his provincials at Soissons till 485, and in Brittany, Wales and Strathclyde the provincials, relapsing in fact to a primitive tribal life, still cherished the religion and the memory of Rome, and the name of Constantine for a ruler. As a whole, however, if a political observer could have flown above Europe in a plane from the Adriatic to the Bay of Biscay and from the Rhine mouth to Tripolitania, he would have seen the fair-haired, moustached, short tunicked or trousered Germanic invaders settled among and ruling the many races of dark-eyed Roman provincials.
All these Germanic invaders had braved the difficulties of migration and conquest for the same object: to possess themselves of homes in warmer, richer, more fertile lands than the trans-Rhenane and the trans-Danubian forest and plains whence they had come in the latter stages of their wanderings. To possess, moreover, lands rich because planted with cities and traversed by traders. The Roman empire where they coveted rule was, to them, unimaginably rich, because fertile and long civilized. But when they had fought their way in and fought their way through a great part of western Europe, and when their tribal leader, sprung from the sacred royal family of the tribe and raised on the shield in approbation by the nobles and freemen, had carved himself out a new kingdom: the invaders found themselves with another heritage than the cornlands and vineyards and riches of the Roman world. They inherited the Roman past.
They lived among provincials in most cases more numerous than themselves and in some cases much more numerous: and these provincials, now their fellow subjects, had their own institutions, laws and religion. The conquerors might take their villas, or their lands; but the conquerors, or their leaders, had a suspicion that their conquered subjects could do some things better than they themselves could: they could not, of course, fight as well, but they could write. Notaries were useful enough in government, and most Germanic kings used them. And build: most of the Germanic peoples had used timber for the king’s hall and any other structure; but, settled in a land of marble and stone buildings, they admired and copied the stone buildings they found. Their attitude to the Roman heritage differed from tribe to tribe and depended partly on the extent of their previous intercourse with Roman civilization, and partly on the education and statesmanship of their kings: Alaric the Visigoth admired and Gaiseric the Vandal despised the Roman heritage; but, in any case, it was there, for them to use. ‘We admire the titles bestowed by the emperors more than our own,’ said one barbarian king, writing to an emperor. Most of them did, in fact, solicit recognition and a Roman title from the emperor at Constantinople: and while some admired the Roman heritage more than others, all built their new kingdoms on a Roman substructure. A Germanic society settled down upon Roman foundations, till, curiously enough, a particularly successful Germanic king, surrounded by a band of scholar ministers, and with a pope at hand to serve his own purposes by taking the initiative, assumed or acquiesced in the assumption of the old Roman title of emperor. On Christmas Day in the year 800 the wheel had come full circle.
To consider then the Roman heritage, as it offered itself to Odovacar’s ‘Rugians’ or ‘Scyrrians’, hospitati on the provincials of north Italy: or to the Franks in Gaul, equally devout to the celebration of the Lord’s passion and the preservation of the Germanic blood feud; or to the Anglo-Saxons in Britain who had little enough of Romanitas: in what did the Roman heritage consist? It consisted of a society, in the modern cant phrase, a way of life, with a government that had been in the past amazingly successful in combining central rule with preservation of local social and legal custom; an agriculture that fed or paid for feeding the populations of the towns; an urban population, with a developed commerce and currency: an art of building and a learning inspired by the Greek east, and a law that was peculiarly Roman. It included also, in the year 476, the Christian religion, with the majority of its bishops and sees in the eastern empire, but its magistral chair for the west in the old capital of Rome.
In dealing even shortly with the Roman heritage, it is of some importance to remember that the Germanic settlers could not be immediately well informed about it, because they did not, for the most part, use the instrument of writing. They had their own culture, and it was an unwritten, oral culture; their tribal history was handed down in the songs of bards, acclaiming the king and his ancestors at court banquets: their Germanic law was unwritten and preserved in the memories of councillors. Few of them could write, though their princes, ruling bands of federates in the Balkans or on the Rhine, used notaries who could. Wulfila indeed translated at least portions of the Old and New Testaments into Gothic, and there was enough writing skill to ensure that copies were made, certain of which have survived. But in the main, the Germanic tribes had an oral culture, and it was not from books, but from provincial scholars and ministers that Germanic kings learned of the law and achievement of Rome. They knew of the autokrator at Constantinople; they wondered at the Roman arts of peace; but they knew little Roman history. They knew the titles of certain great officers who upheld the empire; they knew the standards of the legions and the vexilla of the cohorts; they knew the diadem of golden laurel leaves and the purple belt with its gold ornaments of the Roman magistrate; but naturally little of the origin of the office he held.
The Roman empire had been founded by Augustus, who ruled from 27 ?B.C. to A.D. 14, and had, with considerable skill and the experience of Julius Caesar behind him, converted the old Roman republic into an empire. In appearance the republic was preserved and power shared between Augustus and the senate.
To describe for a moment the political side of the Roman heritage: its scheme of government. The old republican officers, the two yearly consuls, the pro-consuls, the duces of the legions, the tribunes of the cohorts and the lesser civil and military officers, remained. They were to remain for 400 years of empire and their titles were to persist in the new courts of the barbarian kings; but Augustus himself in fact controlled the Roman civil service and the Roman army. He had his own imperial treasury or fisc, and appointed the governors of all border provinces. The senate’s position was honourable and its powers, under him, still considerable; but they soon shrank. The emperor’s household came to govern the empire, and the emperor alone provided for and controlled the army.
Local government in the provinces of the empire was carried on by the emperor’s deputy; taxes were raised by the province; imperial villas or corn lands in each province belonged to the fisc and contributed to the revenue. The boundaries of the empire were defended by the legions, and within them the pax Romana made up to peasant and townsman for a time for the levies of the tax collector. These boundaries enclosed an empire focussed on the Mediterranean, for though Spain, Gaul and (since A.D. 43) Britain were within the empire, there was no Atlantic outlook to other islands or land mass. The Roman empire from Augustus’ time included western Europe to the line of the Rhine and the Danube; the upper waters of these rivers rise near together by lake Constance, and the re-entrant angle formed by their upper waters in the eastward slant of this frontier was abolished by the limes joining its extremities, constructed by the Flavian emperors. It was the only part of this northern frontier which needed walled defence; elsewhere the rivers themselves supplied a limes which was in use rather a line of customs posts than a contested barrier. The emperor Hadrian, after Claudius had added Britain to the empire, visited it and surveyed its northern defences, and drew the limes of Hadrian’s Wall across northern Britain.
To the north, then, the frontiers of the empire were natural; in the east they included the Black Sea, the mountains of Armenia, and the sandy deserts east of Palestine and Arabia. To the south the Saharan desert and its tribes hemmed in the narrow but fertile strip of Roman Africa, and to the west the Atlantic bounded the Roman empire and the known world. Within these frontiers the Augustan empire numbered twenty-seven provinces.
For some 200 years from Augustus the system worked well: but two inherent difficulties were even then apparent and were to threaten collapse later. The first was the succession difficulty and the second that of securing continuous statesmanship in a one-man government. The empire was not, theoretically, hereditary, but elective; and though Augustus and his successors tried to avoid disputed successions by adopting a candidate and making him a Caesar, with the prospect of succession, this system only worked as long as there was a respected imperial family to draw upon, the Caesars, the Claudians, the Flavians. Even in the early period there was the possibility that an emperor might be assassinated and the succession seized. The second difficulty in the Augustan scheme of government, where so much depended on the man at the top, was to secure hard-working, well-balanced and able emperors; while the system supplied a Hadrian and a Marcus Aurelius, it also supplied a Caligula and a Nero. Moreover, though Roman government, Roman law, the Roman civil service were good articles of their kind, they were expensive: by the time of the Antonine emperors, a.D. 138–180, taxes had already become crushing.
After working fairly well for nearly 200 years, the Roman scheme of government nearly broke down over the succession difficulty. The Roman army from the time of the Antonines had to withstand continuous pressure on the Rhine-Danube frontier, as well as defend Armenia and Syria from the Persians; it was vital to security, and it was now composed, not of Italians or even Roman citizens, but of the barbarian nations willing to enlist. Support of the army came, in the third century, to condition a candidate’s chances of election to the imperial throne: the third century, that of the ‘barrack emperors’, saw many disputed successions and short-lived emperors. Collapse seemed possible; but a great constructive reform carried out by the emperors Diocletian and Constantine (284–337) prolonged the régime.
The empire, as the barbarians found it at the beginning of the fifth century, was governed on the lines laid down by these two emperors. The frequent periods of anarchy in the empire, due to civil war over the succession, and the impossibility of a one-man government’s coping with attacks on distant frontiers, were both remedied by Diocletian’s scheme, at a further cost in the expense of the government. Diocletian planned that the empire should have two Augusti and two Caesars, each heir to the position of the Augustus who had adopted him. From A.D. 288 there were two such Augusti and two Caesars: Diocletian being the predominant partner. The succession scheme, however, did not work out exactly as planned: and in 306 the young Constantine, son of a general then defending Britain, had himself proclaimed emperor. After eighteen years’ struggle and civil war, he succeeded in making himself sole emperor, and the founder of a dynasty much stronger than that of any recent imperial family. He preserved, however, and completed the reorganization begun by Diocletian, and this is of importance because the Roman empire which the barbarian nations found was working, or collapsing, roughly according to this scheme.
The defence of the northern and eastern frontiers had proved easier with the defence organized and led from four palaces: Diocletian himself had remained usually at Nicomedia; and though Constantine had united the empire under his sole rule, at Constantinople, the earlier system of divided control prepared the way for an empire divided into east and west.
Local government had been completely separated from military command and much subdivided, so as to minimize possible danger from pretenders. The empire was divided now into four praetorian prefectures: the Gauls (including Britain); Italy, with Africa and Pannonia; Illyricum (the Balkans); and the East. These four prefectures, under their ‘illustrious’ prefects, were divided into thirteen dioceses (a purely secular term in origin) under imperial vicars, who ranked as spectabiles: under the vicars, various governors of various ranks but all clarissimi ruled the 116 new provinces. Provinces were much smaller than under the Augustan scheme; Britain had two provinces in the first century, but five after this reform. The system of official ranks and titles was retained by the more intelligent Germanic rulers; the early Merovingians used illustres plentifully, and Cassiodorus compiled for the Ostrogoths a collection of diplomas, or letters of appointment, to be sent to recipients of the various titles.
Finally, it should be noted about this matter of Roman government, as the barbarians found it, that the empire did not remain undivided, as under Constantine: and that the later emperors reigned but did not rule. Constantine had moved his capital, and his Latin-speaking court, to Byzantium, and the main fund of Romanitas remained from this time rather in the east than the west. But not completely. Constantine died in 337, and the empire was divided between his three sons; a single emperor followed, Constantius II (351–361), and then two others, Julian and Jovian, till 364. The rule of Valentinian and Valens followed, Valentinian ruling the west and Valens the east. The able Valentinian died in 375: when Valens was killed in battle in 378, he was succeeded by Theodosius the great, ruling the east only at first, but east and west from 383 till his death in 395. From that year the empire was permanently ruled by two emperors, in east and west; the first were Theodosius’ two sons, Arcadius and Honorius. This division of power in the empire conditioned the barbarian settlements in the west. The Balkans were nearer the Gothic home in south Russia, and on the Danube, and Byzantium would have been a rich prize to the Goths; but after two emperors, Decius and Valens, had both been defeated and killed in trying to defend the Balkans by arms, the later emperors of Constantinople, Zeno in particular, resorted to the policy of letting the west go to save the east. On intimation of danger to Illyricum, they were willing to deflect the barbarians to Italy and the west. Honorius ruled the latter unfortunately till 423, acquiescing in the loss of Britain, but encouraging the provincials to go on defending themselves there from their encircling raiders: his minister Stilicho did much to regularize, though he could not prevent, the Frankish settlements in north Gaul; Valentinian III had a long reign, 423 till 455, and there followed nine western emperors, the real power resting usually in the hands of some barbarian general. The last of them was Orestes, murdered in 476. It was natural enough that Odovacar and his followers should find no particular attraction in the title of emperor, since for about seventy years the Roman officer in the west who opposed or dealt with them had been a barbarian minister or magister militum rather than the emperor himself.
The Roman army underwent great changes in the period of Diocletian and Constantine. In the earlier period, and from Republican days, it had been, though composed of legions of infantry, an army of manœuvre, a shock force. The Roman legions, with their standard the eagles, and their subdivision the cohort, officered by the tribune and with the light-air dragon, suspended from a lance, as its own standard, had marched where directed and been a match for such mounted forces as barbarians might bring against them. Such enemies (like the Roman cavalry auxilid) could not deliver a charge to break the legions, because they rode bareback, without saddle or stirrups and with their horses unshod. Such a band of horsemen usually contented themselves with hurling spears, when near enough, and if an embattled force stood firm against them they turned and rode off.
In the course of the third century, however, in that home of the horse-borne nomad, the grasslands of central Asia, Persia and the Ukraine (Sarmatia), great discoveries arose to change the course of military history. Horses there were now shod with iron, and ridden with saddles and stirrups. The horseman, firmly supported now in the saddle, and armed with spurs, could begin to wear defensive armour: to use a leather jerkin strengthened with iron rings or scales, a head-piece, and, for weapons, a sword or long lance. The charge of such horsemen could break a line of Roman legionaries.
Though the Romans met such forces on the eastern frontier, it was the Germanic tribes, long in touch with eastern Europe, who first took to imitating their manner of fighting on horseback. The Goths, pushing out the Sarmatians in the Ukraine, adopted their skilled horsemanship. Pressure from the Huns spread the practice among Vandals, Gepids and the Alemans. The Roman army, forced, as M. Ferdinand Lot says, to adopt the same method of fighting or disappear, adopted it, but at first with small success. The astonishing defeats of the emperors Decius, Valerian and Valens show that the Roman armies practised a new tactic clumsily and unsuccessfully; in the past, when dealing with armed horsemen like the Persians, they had tried to meet the difficulty by increasing their auxiliary cavalry. The desperate need of heavy cavalry in the Roman army in the fourth and fifth centuries accounts partly for the ever-increasing numbers of barbarians enrolled: they had more experience of this manner of fighting, for which the peasant coloni of the landowners were quite unqualified.
The legionary army of Augustus had become, in the three intervening centuries not a shock force, but a stationary frontier guard: limitanei: and it had shrunk in numbers. The number of legions at its highest, under Septimius Severus, had risen to 33; if each legion had numbered the traditional 6,000 men, this would have meant a force of some 198,000 legionaries. Such a force was, however, impossible to recruit in peace time from the towns, or even from the young peasants, who could, moreover, ill be spared; and thus the legionary forces were, while retaining the name of legions, reduced in strength to mere cohorts. For the striking force, the army of manœuvre, which was now plainly needed in addition to the frontier legions, three armies were raised, for Italy, for Gaul and for the east, and raised as cavalry forces, as comitatenses, or companions of the emperor. They were more highly paid than the old legions, and as palatini, or palace troops, had a higher status. They might be led, even, by barbarian officers of the highest rank, for such men were versed in the new tactics, and could scarcely become dangerous by aspiring to the imperial diadem. In the early fourth century, public opinion could scarcely have conceived of a barbarian emperor. Britain, it is true, in the course of the fourth century, supplied an unusual number of military pretenders, for there it was possible to persuade legionary troops to follow to the continent a general who raised their status and their pay from limitanei to comitatenses; but neither Maximus nor Constantine III attained permanent success.
It should be noticed, however, that though Diocletian’s reform of the army succeeded in some cases in holding the invading barbarian in the fourth century, it broke down in the fifth: perhaps because the barbarian invaders were now more numerous: but also, possibly from the crushing expense of maintaining it. The Roman cavalry army seems, in fact, to have dwindled to very small proportions. Possibly, also, the barbarians had more direct access to that supply of horse power, the Ukraine. It has been computed that the generals of the emperor Constantius II had at their disposal against the invading Franks and Alemans, no more than 35,000 men for the defence of Gaul, Rhaetia and Italy: a very small force. The evidence of the Notitia Dignitatum, dealing with a period fifty years later, gives the regiments of infantry and cavalry available to hold back the migrating barbarians at figures obviously inadequate. In 409 the emperor Honorius, blockaded in Ravenna, prepared to sail for Constantinople: he was saved by the arrival from the east of as small a force as 4,000 men: six numeri. Stilicho failed to prevent the passage of the Rhine by a horde of barbarians in 406 by leaving Gaul and Britain denuded of troops; the army of the Rhine was gone, and Gaul was ravaged. The pretenders themselves, Constantine III from Britain (407), Jovinus from Gaul (413), led no Roman armies, but only locally raised levies. When Aëtius prepared to resist Attila and his Huns in 451, he brought a force from Italy, but the Roman army of Gaul had disappeared: he could only summon to the contest contingents of Visigoths and barbarians settled in Gaul. Twenty years before the Roman empire fell in the west in 476, the Roman army as organized in the past, limitanei, comitatenses numeri, or barbarian levies (arithmos in Greek) had disappeared; barbarian generals as magistri militum commanded the only armies at the emperor’s disposal, and they were contingents of federate barbarians.
The society which the Germanic invaders overthrew had been an urban society with a relatively high level of civilization and trade: they replaced it by a society of peasant farmers living under their tribal kings and nobles. The extent to which foreign trade declined and the century when it began to do so is still in dispute: but there is no dispute that some ‘recession’ in the progress of civilization took place. In course of time, Herr Dopsch says earlier and M. Pirenne said later, a mainly food and services economy replaced a money economy. But the barbarians of the fifth century found a civilization in which the two most characteristic organizations, the towns and the villas, had already largely decayed.
The Roman empire which the barbarians found had in the second century, perhaps its prime (when the largest number of men enjoyed the greatest comfort in life), presented, in M. Rostovtzeff’s words, ‘the appearance of a vast federation of city states’. The Roman towns, apart from those of ancient foundation in Italy and the east, were laid out by the Roman army surveyor, the gromaticus, on the same lines as an army camp; that is, with streets parallel or at right angles, and the centre of the town a rectangular open space, surrounded by the chief civic buildings. They were, for the first two centuries, unwalled, and stone built; the houses were inward looking, as in Italy where shade was a prerequisite; and either adjoined each other closely, with their two wings going back from the street and enclosing a small open court, or as corridor houses along the street; on the outskirts of the town the houses stood in their own grounds. The towns had a good, scientific drainage system, an abundant water supply brought sometimes even to the upper storeys of the houses by means of skilfully built aqueducts, covered porticoes lining the streets, to protect pedestrians from sun and rain; markets with a good water supply: beautiful baths, splendid temples with sacred groves, and, outside the city, cemeteries where beautiful funerary monuments bordered the public roads. The public buildings of the city would include curiae, meeting-places for the local senate or ordo, offices for the magistrates, a basilica for the judge and the meetings of business men and traders, theatres, stadia, circuses, in some cities public libraries, and in many the scolae where the rhetors lectured to their classes. When the Ostrogoths reached Italy and the Burgundians the Rhone valley, the rhetors were still lecturing and receiving a salary from the state. That soon ceased. But the stone-built towns, the marble monuments, of the Romans remained after their settlement and must, more than anything else, have passed on to the new populations the traditions of Roman imperium.
Though the splendour of the cities was due to the munificence of the wealthier citizens, or, in the newer provinces of the empire, to forced labour exacted by the chief of the tribe from his tribesmen at the prodding of the central government, the day-to-day expenses of the cities were met by various local charges and taxes: customs duties, charges for holding land in the city, for the right to exercise a trade, to use markets and shops, etc. The city revenue went, not in salaries to its magistrates, for these were unpaid, but in the small salaries of minor officials or the maintenance of servi publici: to the maintenance of public buildings, the upkeep of roads, the securing of an abundance of foodstuffs, the upkeep of temples, and even the payment of teachers for the education and physical training of the young. The construction and maintenance of local roads fell upon the cities, since they were needed for the transport of food supplies. The curator annonae, a municipal officer, was charged with the maintenance of the corn supply. Wealth was more evenly distributed in the second century than earlier, and the bourgeois aristocracy of the cities was able to undertake civic office and bear the municipal liturgies. To the existence of this rich, bourgeois class large, expensive tombs all over the empire bear witness, including even the remote Danubian provinces.
The commerce of the Roman empire certainly, about the year 200, was the main source of its wealth: especially foreign and inter-provincial trade. ‘The richest cities of the empire, the cities in which the most opulent men of the Roman world resided were those that had the most developed commerce and lay near the sea or great trade routes or were centres for a lively river traffic.’ Sea and river transport was much cheaper than land transport. Trade was decentralized, Italy and her towns no longer taking the lead; Gaul was now what Italy had once been, the greatest industrial land of the west. She supplied other provinces, and even Italy herself, with her red-glazed pottery, glass, woollen cloaks and bronze safety-pins.
All this commerce rested partly on coined money, and partly on the credit transactions of banks and private money-lenders. An astonishing amount of currency was demanded, even in peace time, and was in fact supplied by the mines of Europe and Asia and the mints that existed everywhere throughout the empire. Whereas earlier states had relied on silver for currency, and to some extent on gold, the Roman empire, while using both these metals, added to them the use of copper; it may indeed, in one sense, be said to have rested on the basis of the copper coin. Not only were the legionaries paid in coin, but their officers, and the civil servants. The Latin language had a word for a 200 sestercii-a-year-man, a ducenarius: and so forth. Aulus Plautius conquered Britain in A.D. 43 at a very moderate money salary.
Out in the countryside, the tribal chieftains and the heads of the civil service lived in the villas, great landed estates focussed in the owner’s colonnaded, inward-looking house, or simply in the farm buildings of the bailiff or conductor, who worked the corn lands for his master or for the emperor. Even in a distant province like Britain, the stone-built house of the villa, with its baths, chapel, apsidal chambers, and elaborately designed mosaic floors, was no rarity. At Low Ham, near Taunton, the mosaic pavement has a spirited design with ships and sailors with peaked Phrygian caps: and the ground plan of the villa on the East Cliff at Folkestone is a complex of chambers and small courts. In Italy, Gaul and the east, such country houses of the Roman aristocracy and official class were even more numerous.
With the third century, however, the prosperity of the towns had declined, with the indirect result that Roman wealth and culture withdrew for a time to the villas, before they too were wrecked by marauding bands, civil war, or the coming of invaders. The cause of the decline in Roman prosperity after the second century has been much discussed (see infra, p. 116); the violence of the third century interrupted communications, perhaps already lessening the profitable trade with Asia; and the heaviness of taxation after the age of Diocletian and Constantine wrecked in particular the prosperity of the towns. With the fall in prosperity, population too tended to fall. The new cavalry army was expensive to maintain, as were the two, three or four imperial headquarters, and the multiplied provincial staff. ‘The state was constantly draining the capital which was the life-blood of the empire.’ While the imperial efforts to get more money too often in the third century involved confiscation and violence, in the fourth, systematic taxation was apparently more just, but not less harmful. The curiales of the towns were personally responsible for the collection of imperial taxes, and deficits in the ever-increasing sums demanded had to be provided out of their own pockets; even a bad harvest, temporarily ruining the countryside, was no excuse: the curiales were themselves ruined in making good the amounts demanded. Membership of the curial class was hereditary, and when the burden in the fourth century was so crushing, its members sought escape in any way possible, either by seeking to join some humble collegium or trade-gild, or becoming the coloni of some landholder, or leaving their estates and obligations to flee (contrary to the law) to some other part of the empire. The landowner too was responsible for the payment of the land and corn tax from his estate, and from the time of Constantine the free peasant was forbidden to move from the land which, as colonus, he cultivated for his lord or patron; such movement would have diminished the yield of the estate to the tax collector. The tax was first levied by Constantine in 314, and the assessment of each fiscal unit was surveyed every fifteen years—every indiction. For ordinary purposes of dating, the first, second, etc. year of the indiction became as important as the dating by the year of the two consuls at Rome. The coloni could not be taken from the estates to receive military training, because, in the fourth century the Roman army was an expensive, professional army, and their labours had to pay for it. But when the army failed them, the untrained coloni themselves were no match for even small bands of mounted and armed invaders. M. Lot has pointed out the smallness of the force that Theoderic the Ostrogoth brought with him to the conquest of Italy; at one moment of difficulty in the summer of 489–490 he was forced to shut himself up inside Ticenum (Pavia) ‘with all his people’, and Ticenum was then a very small town; but small as were the bands the invaders brought against the coloni and the citizens, they were enough.
The invaders found then, the Roman heritage of towns and commerce already decayed; they might not, as farmers, wish to live in the towns themselves; but they wondered at the majesty of Roman buildings. It was no Burgundian, surveying the ruins of Aix in Provence, no Ostrogoth wondering at an Italian town, but a reflective Anglo-Saxon, surveying a ruined Roman city who wrote:
Wondrously wrought and fair its wall of stone,
Shattered by Fate! The castles rend asunder,
The work of giants moldereth away …
The mighty men that built it,
Departed hence, undone by death, are held
Fast in the earth’s embrace …
There stood the courts of stone. Hotly within
The stream flowed with its mighty surge. The wall
Surrounded all with its bright bosom: there
The baths stood, hot within its heart.1
Again, the Christian faith and its practice had come to seem, to the barbarians, part of the Roman heritage. Ostrogoths, Visigoths and Vandals had, indeed, their own form of the faith, deriving, through their apostle, Wulfila, from the teaching of Arius that Christ was not ’of one substance with the Father’, but a creature. It is perhaps no accident that while Arianism had been rejected at the council of Nicaea in 325, and the decision upheld at the council of Chalcedon in 451, a form of faith that did not commend itself to the profound Greek minds of Christian theologians because it equated the position of Christ with that of the heroic semi-divine figures of classical and barbarian antiquity, was for that very reason more acceptable to the barbarians themselves; the missionary whose labours produced the widest conversions, through the spreading of the Goths through Europe, was this Arian teacher, Wulfila. But apart from the difference in their theology, the worship and practices of these Arian Christians must have seemed very different to the invaders themselves from the ordered worship of the Christian basilicas of Italy, Spain or Africa. Presumably the Germanic tribes taught by Wulfila used a vernacular liturgy: the Goths at least may be presumed to have done so, for one manuscript of the Gothic Bible he made for them, the codex Argenteus, is an altar book for the reading of the gospels at mass, and at so early a date the reading of the gospel in the vernacular in the middle of a Latin (or Greek) mass was not yet practised: a Gothic gospel implies a Gothic mass. Western Europe, however, used the Latin rite, and that in itself would seem to have created a practical religious barrier more obvious to the simple Goth than the difference of belief about the person of Christ. In any case, the religious gulf was not bridged for three or four generations.
In the case of Franks and Anglo-Saxons, who settled as pagans, Christianity seemed even more clearly a part of the Roman heritage. Clovis finally accepted Christianity, as he had already adopted the notaries and formulae of the Roman king of Soissons. The Anglo-Saxons, delaying to be converted a hundred years and more after the invasion, seem no less to have accepted Christianity as part of the Roman heritage. Æthelbert was baptized in one old Canterbury church, and gave others to Augustine to establish therein his cathedra and familia; Edwin was baptized, not in his ancestral headquarters near the Malton gap, but in the newly conquered Roman city of York; Italian and Frankish missionaries baptized in Roman centres like Caratacum and Dorchester, when they could, as well as in the rivers and streams.
Finally, one most valuable part of the Roman heritage: Roman learning and Roman law, less easily perceptible and understandable to the first generation of Germanic barbarians, may be left for later discussion (see chaps. IX, XIII). The use of papyrus, sheets of writing material made by laying the pith of reeds from the Nile across one another on a frame, and damping and pressing them, had provided the Roman empire with a cheap writing material for her commerce, letters, official mandates, and literature; only valuable and solemn books, such as copies of the gospels and the codex iuris Romani were normally written upon the much more expensive vellum or parchment. The barbarian kings, taking over the Roman medium of local government, took over the scribes of the Roman law courts and imperial palaces, the notaries: and they had their letters and edicts issued in the notarial manner and writing, on papyrus. Enlightened kings, like Theoderic or Alaric, used notable scholars at their court: but that was as far as the assimilation of Roman learning could at first go.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE