Rome: An Empire's Story (48 page)

Finally the empire collapsed back on itself, and retrenched, not on Rome, of course, but on Byzantium.
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Retrenchment did not only mean shrinkage: the fundamental economic and administrative structures of the empire were in the process remodelled. Even at the beginning of the eighth century, when everything south of Anatolia was lost, and Arab invaders were crossing into Spain; when the Lombards had swept away most of Justinian’s gains in Italy; and much of the Balkans was effectively outside the control of the emperors, Constantinople remained a spectacular city. But it was in some senses now the only real city in a miniature Christian empire stretched around the Aegean Sea. Its complex administrative and legal systems remained characteristically Roman long after Latin had disappeared from everyday usage, and the ceremonials and intrigues of the palace were as elaborate as ever.
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As the power of the Franks grew from the eighth century onwards, Byzantium was the only possible model for imitation, and the city still offered a fascinating spectacle to the descendants of western barbarians as late as the eleventh century, when crusading brought the societies into yet another relationship. The three heirs of Rome—as western Christendom, Islam, and Byzantium have been aptly called
¹⁰
—were the products of fragmentation, invasion, and shrinkage. Each part had its own imperial destiny and dreams, but the story of Rome’s empire ends here.

Fig. 23.
A mosaic portraying the Emperor Justinian from San Vitale, Ravenna

Continuities in the Long Term

The detailed political history of the sixth and seventh centuries does not offer an explanation of the end of the Roman Empire. Those who wrote that history—whether chroniclers of disasters like Zosimus, or ambivalent recorders of imperial success like Procopius—had no real sense of the big picture. Christian historiography told its own stories, in some of which political changes hardly signified: the Church marched on as earthly kingdoms came and went. Otherwise political history took the familiar Roman form of an alternation between more and less successful emperors. Social, economic, and other trends were almost invisible from their perspective on the ground. As a result, the successes of Justinian in the sixth century, the disasters of the reigns of Maurice and Phokas that followed, and the triumphs of Heraclius against the Persians in the early seventh century do not explain the structural transformation of the empire. I shall not try to summarize those narratives here.

During the course of this book, I have drawn attention to a number of contexts that made the success of the Roman Empire possible. The Mediterranean basin offered a corridor within which communication was relatively easy. The Sahara and the Atlantic together provided boundaries that, once reached, did not really need to be defended. The Iron Age civilizations of the Mediterranean world and its hinterlands produced sufficient demographic and agricultural surpluses to support the rise of cities and states, even given the technological limits of antiquity. Climatic conditions, broadly similar to those we experience today, had perhaps contributed to the general prosperity of the period, making it easier for peasant cultivators to produce the surpluses on which states and empires depended.

Little of this had changed by the seventh century
AD
. Plagues had occasionally ravaged the empire. Epidemics of different kinds had moved back and forward between the more densely populated (and so urbanized) portions of the Old World since at least the middle of the last millennium
BC
. But it is likely that this had been happening every so often since the first domestications of animals and the appearance of the first towns. The disease pools of Eurasia had been loosely connected by trade routes and urban systems from the Neolithic. Mediterranean plagues tended to come from the east, as Chinese ones did from the west.
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Literary sources—our only evidence—record terrifying epidemics in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, in the middle of the third century
AD
, and again in the reign of Justinian. But
it is very difficult on the basis of contemporary testimony alone to assess either the severity of these episodes, or their long-term impact on the economy or on population levels. The question of climatic change is equally difficult. Even minor changes in the mean temperature can have dramatic impacts on the fertility of marginal areas. Sea level rises are recorded in late antiquity in some areas while dendro-chronological (tree-ring) data has been taken to suggest a slight drop in fertility. But it is difficult to make close connections between changes at this scale and historical questions, such as the relative success of the empire in resisting incoming groups in different periods. Few historians today subscribe to either an epidemiological or a climatic explanation for the collapse of Roman power, and few believe in a dramatic collapse in the population of the empire. But research is moving fast in these areas, and the balance of probabilities may well change.

If the external environment of the Roman Empire were broadly unchanged, then the crucial variables must lie among the institutions and routines out of which Roman rule had first been constructed and later sustained. I have emphasized the use made of the family, slavery, and the city; the community of interest engineered between local and imperial elites; and the power of ideological productions, including those associated with state cults, to capture the imagination of Rome’s other subjects. None of these had remained fossilized over the seven centuries that separated Polybius from Zosimus. But many features of Roman society remained recognizable.

Continuities are most clear at the lowest level of organization, the family and slavery, linked as ever to the primitive conditions of economic production on which the empire rested. Cassiodorus’ writings and the legislation of Justinian show us how vital some of these most basic building blocks of empire remained in the sixth century. Roman styles of family life were perhaps more widespread than ever before, disseminated by the spread of citizenship, the moderate extension of education in late antiquity, and the cultural convergence of the empire’s elites. Notions of slavery and the family that would have been recognizable to Cicero remained enshrined at the heart of Roman and barbarian law codes alike. Probably the numerical balance between slaves and free had shifted very slightly. But where records are good, as in late antique Egypt, there is no sign of a dramatic change in social structure.
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Transformation, rather than crisis, is the preferred term among scholars working on these subjects.

Fundamental change is much more evident at what we might term higher levels of organization, that is in relation to the city, local, and imperial
elites and the government of the empire itself. The idea that collapse often occurs through the shedding of the highest levels of social complexity perhaps has some application here.
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At the highest level, the power and authority of the emperor, there was clearly enormous change as the empire fragmented, for all it was mystified by traditionalism and ritual.
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Roman scholars were, to some extent, able to reproduce their accustomed lifestyles in the chaos of Ostrogothic Italy or under the increasingly centralized power of Justinianic Constantinople. Rural lifestyles were least affected. But the picture looks different if we focus attention on that level of imperial society represented by cities, landowning elites, and the fiscal systems through which they had been linked ever since the Roman Empire was transformed from conquest state to tributary empire.

Cities and their Rulers

The early empire rested on a collusion of interests between the propertied classes of Rome and their counterparts in Italy and the provinces. Many of these elites were already installed within a world of city-states, whether of Greek, Punic, Etruscan, or other origin. Others were drawn into that mode of aristocracy, and shaped in their image. Across the western and northern provinces, in interior Spain and North Africa and Anatolia, in Syria and eventually even in Egypt, cities on the classical model were established. Those cities provided the emperors with their most fundamental instrument of government. The local property classes that ruled them kept order and collected taxes, and in return the empire preserved and enhanced their power over other members of their societies.

Today, Roman cities evoke images of temples and basilicas, theatres and bathhouses, grand amphitheatres and enormous circuses, the representative highlights of a monumentality that, with some variations, came to characterize the early Roman Empire wherever it could be afforded.
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Monuments of this kind represented a commitment—financial and moral—on the part of the rich to a particular urban version of civilization. That civilization included a public style of politics and social life, and a festival culture that alluded to the past, celebrated the present, and was designed to ensure the future.
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The remains of those monuments are the physical traces of urban societies, the hard fossils from which the ephemeral material of human life and public rhetoric has since withered away.

Sixth-century rulers were as spellbound as we are by these traces of urban civilization. But by their day, they were no more than traces in most parts of the empire. Almost all the great monuments of provincial cities were built before the middle of the third century
AD
: even maintaining them was a concern for rulers of all kinds.
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The letter quoted at the head of this chapter was penned by Cassiodorus for the Gothic king Athalaric who was keen to encourage the propertied classes to return to their notional urban bases. Procopius wrote a long account of Justinian’s building works, but when
On Buildings
is examined closely we see the emperor’s attention was focused almost exclusively on churches and fortifications. When he did found the city of Justiniana Prima at his birthplace in Thrace, it covered around 7 hectares (around 17 acres): early imperial cities often extended well over 100 hectares (just under 250 acres). Already in Italy and much of the west, the propertied classes had moved out to their grand estates hundreds of years before. Urban contraction was most dramatic in the northern provinces, where occupied areas dropped to a third by around
AD
300: by the end of the fourth century some were no more than refuges, fortified strongpoints built out of pillaged monuments in the middle of vast deserted towns, in which abandoned residential quarters were gradually crumbling where they had not already been turned into gardens and fields.

That vision looks catastrophic to us. But in most areas the process of change was probably a gradual one and the product of choice not necessity. The wealthy had always had homes in both town and country, and over time they spent more time (and money) in the latter than in the former. Public building and the sponsoring of festivals in most cities dried up between
AD
200 and 300. Meanwhile the villas of the fourth century display extravagant elaboration and ornamentation. Wherever the elites were absent from the cities, urban economies shrivelled up without the huge stimulus of their spending and that of their slaves, freedmen, and clients and without the support of their occasional benefactions.

Charting and explaining the collapse of classical urbanism has been a major research priority for archaeologists and for historians of late antiquity.
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One clear finding is that there were exceptions to this picture, but they are not where we might have expected them. Rome, for example, underwent dramatic population decline. Estimates for the age of Augustus are around one million, by the early fifth century it was about a third of that, and when Justinian’s armies recaptured it from the Gothic kings in 536 it was around 80,000. The decline set in far too early to be explained by the
Gothic wars or even the fall of the west. On the other hand a small number of cities show evidence for building of private housing and extensive trade well into the fifth and sometimes the sixth centuries. Marseilles and Carthage, Ephesus, Alexandria, and Caesarea are particularly well studied: all were, as it happens, port cities.
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This pattern is superimposed on some broad regional variation that can be (crudely) summarized as follows. Britain, Germany, and northern Gaul experienced earlier and more severe urban contraction than anywhere else, while Syria and western Asia Minor seem to have sustained urban styles of life longest, with clear continuity in Syria into the period of Islamic rule. Spanish cities were transformed during the fourth century, insofar as Christian building replacing older monuments is concerned, but there is little third-century construction of public monuments.
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Many African cities do well into the fourth century and later, but others do not.
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Urbanism generally did not flourish in the Balkans, but in much of the interior cities had never been very large. Egypt had no catastrophic decline, but temple building declined from the third century, some time before churches begin to appear. Many classical cities had their afterlives, at least as places invested with memories. Many had been built on key sites in communication nodes; centuries of road building and port construction had only emphasized these advantages. Bishoprics were also based on the urban framework of the second century. Many towns survived to the Middle Ages only as wall circuits enclosing churches, and in a few cases the palaces of barbarian kings. Otherwise, the physical cities crumbled or were absorbed. Temples naturally found fewer sponsors after Constantine and some were physically dismantled, but many became churches. Aqueducts functioned for surprisingly long periods after the end of their construction. Shops, stalls, and markets encroached on the great colonnades and public squares of Syrian cities during the sixth century.
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