In the previous post I was arguing, ultimately, that explaining ‘the end of Mediterranean unity’ is not a question of finding an ‘event’ that ruptured Mediterranean unity (the Arab conquests, Vandal Piracy, etc) as much as looking at why the features that had held it together earlier – and which had overcome those features that might militate against unity – came to an end. This post muses rather meanderingly on that issue.
Of course, it might be the case that some decisive event killed off the features that had unified the Mediterranean but there are two points that emerge from that possibility. One is that it seriously recasts the question, and the other is that what we might call structural features do not tend to be killed off by single dramatic events unless they’re already dying. As an example, look at towns ravaged by earthquakes, sacks by enemy armies, great fires, or plagues, but which continued to survive as successful urban centres.
How the Roman World came together
Let’s look first, briefly, at the features that held the Mediterranean World (and indeed the empire, loosely defined, as a whole) together in the earlier Roman period, and then at how these features came to an end. Above all, though the early Roman polity was created by conquest, it was held together by the desire of local communities to be part of the Roman world. This, as far as I can tell, not being a specialist in either Republican or early imperial history, worked differently, in detail at least, in the different parts of the empire (I am going to use that term, all in lower case, to cover the Republican as well as the imperial period). A point often forgotten, at least by us non-specialists in earlier Roman history, is that Rome conquered most of the eastern Mediterranean before it conquered the West. Roman military intervention in Greece began in the last decades of the third century (at the height of the second Punic War) and Greece was effectively conquered when the Romans sacked Corinth in 146 BC (the same year as the destruction of Carthage). By then, Rome controlled much of North Africa and the eastern half of Spain. Some of the Mediterranean coast of Gaul had taken place in 121BC but by the time Caesar began the conquest of further Gaul in 58 BC pretty much all of the Eastern Mediterranean – Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor, the Levant, Tripolitania – had either been annexed or made into tributary states. The conquest of Marseille didn’t take place until 49 BC, the final conquest of Spain took place after the conquest of Egypt, and of course that of Britain even later. Even the conquest of northern Italy occurred after Roman claims to hegemony over Greece had been laid down.
There are several key points that emerge from this. Possibly the most important is that in east and west (albeit in different ways) close cultural ties preceded military conquest. Though not a Greek colony, Rome was already a part of the Hellenistic world by the third century. Many of its rivals for domination in Italy were Greek colonies and the Republic had to fight and win a tough war against Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus, a cousin of Alexander the Great. Additionally, Rome bought into the Greek discourse about ‘barbarians’ in its political claims for domination (see, e.g., Emma Dench’s From Barbarians to New Men[1]). All this meant – and this, it seems to me, is a very important point – that Rome looked eastwards rather than westwards. In some ways the Republic was drawn into military action in the eastern Mediterranean and that leads to a third point, which is that Rome exploited regional rivalries to play contenders off against each other. It did this everywhere and even in the late Empire it remained a key strategy beyond the frontiers.
That brings us to the issue of military dominance. I don’t want to dwell too long on this but once upon a time, in military historical circles, there was long discussion about the somehow inherent supremacy of the Roman legionary ‘system’ over the Macedonian/Hellenistic phalanx. This sort of discussion rapidly leaves the realm of historical argument (and indeed, in my view, that of history full stop) and enters that of hypotheticals and counter-factuals – ah, but what if the Macedonians had had a general as good as Alexander? What if this or that factor had not applied? Yeah, what if…? The significant point is that for some reason or other, the Romans do seem to have had a long run of military success against the Hellenistic states (although of course it's worth remembering that the evidence we have is hardly even-handed). The simple fact of being an army that fought regularly and usually won very likely (in my view) had an incalculable effect upon the confidence, morale, and fighting spirit of veteran Roman troops, while repeated defeats possibly had an equal and opposite effect on their enemies. This would be the case regardless of the ‘tactical system’ being used. Certainly, above all, it increased the attraction of allying with, or subscribing to the protection of, Rome. This was the case, a fortiori, in the west, where Roman armies must have outnumbered, ‘out-armoured’, and ‘out-equipped’ their ‘barbarian’ enemies, in addition to having better logistics, heavy siege weapons and so on (Roman accounts of Gallic or Germanic armies numbering many tens of thousands are simply incredible); this fact needs to be internalised when thinking about Roman wars, and indeed the quality of the Roman army, in the West (after all, sometimes they lost…). The ‘bottom line’ was that Roman military success made Roman support or protection worth having and that meant that some communities turned to Rome and drew it further into local rivalries.
In the West, communities in Gaul, Britain and Germania were already linked into Roman cultural orbit before they were conquered. Objects from the Roman world were deployed to display status and prestige and drew people into Rome’s sphere of influence (see Greg Wolf’s Becoming Roman[2]). This continued after conquest when people within local communities competed for standing (after being demilitarised and having their more warlike elements hived off into the auxilia: see Ian Haynes’ work on this, especially: e.g. Blood of the Provinces) by displaying their ‘Roman-ness’ in new Roman-style towns, villas and so on, and above all by seeking status through involvement in local government. These features seem to have been far less significant in the East (where after all it was more a case of the Romans being drawn to Hellenistic culture, something topped up, in the late first and early second century especially, with the Roman attraction to the Greek culture of the ‘second sophistic’) but they were not absent. A few towns even built amphitheatres... Competition between for communities, played out by striving for the advantages of particular legal status, within the Roman system, remained an important element of local or regional politics even into the late imperial period, and even beyond.
The features sketched out created an exceptional situation, as mentioned, where the west and north-west were drawn into a Mediterranean world and where that world was itself unified by constant reference, in local and regional politics, to Rome and its rulers. Eventually I will come back to the issue of whether this situation was repeatable. For now, let’s examine what happened when these circumstances no longer pertained.
The fracturing of the early Roman world
By the third century, if not slightly earlier, many of the factors that had led to unity no longer applied. The products that, in the West at least, had been used to signal participation in the Roman world were by then mostly being manufactured regionally rather than being imported from Mediterranean centres. Economically the western half of the empire went back to being a series of largely independent regional economic networks. Possibly more importantly, the political advantages gained by involvement in, and financial expenditure on, local government, monumental works and so on, were generally no longer brought by this sort of activity. Parts of the west had been over-urbanised in the rush to become Roman. A retreat from this high-point followed. When the Antonine Constitution made all free-born inhabitants citizens, Roman citizenship was no longer something to be competed for. In this situation, in some ways the ‘crisis’ of the third century was always going to be on the cards. However one adds nuance to old views of the ‘third-century crisis’ (it wasn’t as bad everywhere, and not at all on some regions; it didn’t last as long, or occur at the same time everywhere, etc), this was a serious moment. The Palmyrene and Gallic Empires showed that the notion that there might be multiple ‘Roman Empires’ was not seen as entirely alien. With a few different conjunctures the Empire could have fragmented in the third century. One feature that helped ensure that this didn’t happen, as I suggested in Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, was the continuing hegemony of the notion of Roman ‘civic masculinity’. There were as yet no real alternatives to that in establishing legitimate power at a regional, local, or even familial level. What this meant was a continued relevance of some of the aspects of ‘being Roman’ that had brought the Roman world together. This was a crucial resource and a glue that still held that world together. Again, note that the crucial issue here is one of mentalité.
Responses and problems
As it happened, of course, the Empire did not fall apart and responded effectively to the changes that had threatened fragmentation. Obviously, much of this response was pragmatic and piecemeal and effected over a long time, rather than being the result of the imperial rulers sitting down with their advisors one day and formulating a coherent set of policies. Nonetheless, the Empire as it emerged at the end of the Tetrarchy was a very different place from that which had existed 100 or 150 years earlier.
Various responses, changes, and developments – administrative reform; the emergence of a new civil bureaucracy; the separation of civil and military branches of service; new forms of aristocracy and rewards for service; new capitals; moving the emperor to the frontier – all produced an Empire that was as strong as it had been in the second century and remained so, in the West, for a century (and longer in the East). All these developments, though, had corresponding weaknesses. The picture that follows is broad-brush and (over-)simplified, as well as almost certainly needing updating, but it and – more importantly – the issues it raises still seem to me to be generally valid, in outline at any rate.
The foundation of Constantinople created a focus for the eastern provinces (pinning the Balkans to and Greece to Asia Minor and the Levant, etc) and thus increased the coherence of the East (and continued to do so in some ways well beyond the Arab conquests and into the middle Byzantine period; I am thinking here of John Haldon’s argument that the seventh-century Empire functioned effectively as one huge city state[3]) it created a separate, alternative, eastern pole of attraction. The fact that it was a new foundation had important advantages but it also meant a crucial reorganization of fiscal resources. The Egyptian grain fleet was now diverted to the Bosphorus. As I see it, this made for a more significant rearrangement of existing economic ties and networks than would perhaps have been the case had the emperors decided upon, say, Antioch as the central point of the East.
Moving the western capital to frontier cities, above all Trier, was pragmatically a very effective move. It bound Gaul, most importantly, but also other frontier regions tightly into the imperial state. Older nobilities had to travel to the north to compete for imperial patronage in order to maintain their traditional aristocratic culture of otium and negotium. At the same time, though, it seems to have created a certain resentment among those traditional elites, not used to being sidelined. By early in the fifth century the Gallic and Italian aristocracies largely formed separate networks and this, as I see it, became a crucial feature to be overcome in fifth-century politics. Gratian’s move of the capital back to Milan in 380 was also, in my view, crucial. Though, as I look at it now – 16 years on from Barbarian Migrations – it seems like a potentially imaginative response to the emerging problems of the fourth century western Empire,[4] as it turned out it precipitated crisis. It removed most of the Gallic and Germanic provinces, and Britain, from the close connection with the Emperor to which they had become accustomed; stress and usurpation soon followed.
With the emperors in the west hardly ever resident in Rome, the Empire now had two very separate political centres or foci for political activity. Indeed, the end of the de facto political (rather than ideological) centrality of Rome itself helped unpick the ties that had bound the eastern and western worlds together. The two halves of the Empire began to face in different directions. The social and cultural contacts between east and west began to reduce (which is, obviously, not to say that they ended or became insignificant). I also have an impression (rightly or wrongly) that, after the early fifth century, the direction of those links that remained very much tended to be west to east.
Similarly, though it was an effective response to the problems of the third century, the separation of civil and military branches of imperial service, led to the emergence of an alternative, martial or military model of Roman masculinity, one that stressed things that were antithetical to civic masculinity. This would turn out to provide a political resource for those outside the ambit of the legitimate imperial government in the fifth century: one that hadn’t existed in the third century. Another alternative was found in Christian models of masculinity, not least those stressing asceticism and renunciation. (I have a feeling that the disputes within Christianity also helped divide east and west.)
A key point is that although the new system worked well for a century in the west (and for longer in the east), it was, at least in the west, fundamentally fragile. It worked very well as long as there was an adult emperor able to command armies and manage the distribution and redistribution of patronage (offices etc) between the various interest groups within the Empire. There were numerous groups, especially regionally-focused ones, whose interests needed to be balanced. In Barbarian Migrations I appeared to think that this was a peculiarly late Roman weakness; clearly it wasn’t but the problem does still seem to me to have a distinctive flavour in the late period. Without an active, adult emperor, the focus of politics would turn inwards on the palace itself and efforts to maintain the governing faction’s position. The legitimate western Emperor was a child (or adolescent) for twenty years after 383 leading to internecine struggles for control of the palace and repeated usurpations.
That leads me to my next point. The West was riven by repeated civil wars between 383 and 425. The importance of this can’t be overstressed. The Romans had massive reserves of manpower, of course, but what was lost in these battles was the cutting edge of the Roman army: troops who could be replaced in quantity but not quality. The wars followed at such regularity, moreover, that there was hardly time for a new army to be built up and recover its effectiveness and esprit de corps before it was fighting other Roman armies again and suffering heavy losses even if it won. It was these wars, not the Great Invasion of 406 – which seems not to have involved any serious defeat of a Roman field army – that fatally weakened the Western Empire’s army, leading to the creation of new types of army, based around the groups of barbarian descent that were now within the imperial frontiers.
On the other hand, all of this wasn’t irreversible. After 425, the lesson learnt after 40 years of failed usurpations seemed to be that dynastic succession trumped everything else. For the next decade the western empire had a minor on the throne but the nature of politics changed away from attempted usurpation to struggles to control the court, which could potentially act as a cohesive force.[5]
Nevertheless, and unsurprisingly, when the Valentinianic/Theodosian dynasty came to an end with the assassination of the (like Honorius) possibly underestimated Valentinian III in 455 (a date later given significance by Marcellinus Comes as that of the end of the western Empire) the lack of such legitimacy proved fatal for all the different emperors and their backers. None could defeat the others decisively or otherwise persuade them to submit to their authority.
And yet … two things:
First, people in the west still thought they were part of the Roman world, indeed of the Roman Empire, beyond 480 and on into the 6th century. After 476, if Candidus the Isaurian is to be believed, embassies from Gaul still reached the emperor in Constantinople asking him to resolve western disputes. Western kings still based the legitimacy of their claims to rule on their Roman titles.
Second, through the period cultural connections remained. Traders still sailed the length and breadth of the Mediterranean after the end of the western imperial command economy, demonstrating that, as more recent work has argued, that the latter was not the only force to determine continued commercial and exchange connections. Indeed, as the increasing connections round into the eastern shores of the Irish Sea show, those who were involved in commerce could still adapt to changing circumstances. A key factor here might be the fact that those links became very important to western British leaders responding to the crisis of the fifth century. Like their predecessors, centuries earlier, it mattered to them to be connected to the Roman Mediterranean.
So – where (if anywhere) have we got to? A few key points:
- Cultural networks seem to me to be vitally important. Rome looked eastwards because of the cultural world it had become part of; the western expansion of Rome was very much driven by cultural relationships.
- The expansion of Roman power relied as much upon local and regional groups buying into Roman protection and or Roman culture as upon simple conquest.
- Ideas and culture remained crucial in maintaining the cohesion of the Roman world throughout the period discussed (from say 200 BC to 500 AD).
- Political history, economic history, and the history of culture, ideas and mentalité do not always run on parallel tracks. Events in the first do not always have effects in the others; changes in the other areas do not always have political consequences.
- Physical geography – seas, tides, currents, the direction of rivers, the location of mountain ranges, high plâteaux, forests, etc – do tend to bind or separate regions but, while extremely important we should not (pace, maybe, Halsall 2007) regard this as naturally, or automatically, determinant, and certainly not as insurmountable. Mountains can be barriers, but passes are links and thoroughfares; seas and rivers connect and divide. None of this is new. We should not assume that the cultural features that overcome certain aspects of physical geographical constraints cannot themselves come to be seen as just as ‘natural’. After all, why would Rome, a city state on the western coast of Italy, look east, especially given the difficulties of navigation between Rome and the eastern Mediterranean?
- We might then, equally, suppose that when physical geography does (as I put it – and I am now wondering whether this wasn’t considerably oversimplistic) ‘rear its ugly head’ and connections between regions weaken or end, this might be just as much a cultural response, a decision rather than the inevitable triumph of nature and geography over mentalité (spoiler alert: this will be crucial to my argument next time).
- Key events or developments are contingent upon the circumstances that created them. We ought not to see them as automatic, or that the results they had were those that the actors involved had in mind (the piecemeal imperial response to the failings of local government and their overall result might be a case in point).
- Nor do we have to assume that the strategies that were adopted, and which worked, or the features that tended in a particular direction, were (even in the case of strategies or policies followed consciously) automatically the best, or the only ones that could have had that outcome. As Roman history shows quite clearly, there are various ways in which the supposedly determinant features of physical geography could be and were overcome. There were always different paths that could have ended up being followed.
- Hand-in-hand with that, just as particular effects might not be the result of deliberate policies or strategies achieving their goals, and that even beneficial long-term results might not have been those actually intended (or conceived), none of the developments I have been considering seems to me to have been irreversible. [I think that none of the last three points will be surprising to anyone who has followed my work over the last 25 years at least.]
Having proposed all this, we are – I hope – now in a position to have another look at what did happen in the later sixth and early seventh century and possibly even to suggest a slightly different take on it.
Notes
[1] It occurs to me that several of the works I allude to in this piece are 20-30 years old. This is essentially because I haven’t thought much about the issues they discuss for over a decade. That said, they’re good books and the general points they make, and to which I refer, seem to be good ones. Clearly, if I was doing anything more serious, I would need to get up to date.
[2] See note 1.
[3] See note 1.
[4] I might write a separate post speculating on this.
[5] This after all is the argument usually deployed with regard to later seventh-century Francia.