‘Armenia’ has always had an ambiguous place between the major powers, be they the east Roman empire and Sasanian Iran, the Byzantine empire and the caliphate, or the Ottoman empire and the Safavids. Armenian loyalties have not been consistent, either in support of a coherent internal policy or with regard to external diplomacy. The very definition of ‘Armenia’ highlights the problem. Does the term refer to a geographical entity – and if so, what are its borders? Or does it refer to a people with common bonds – and if so, are those bonds linguistic, religious, cultural or political?

Despite the conversion of king Tiridates to Christianity, probably in 314, and the establishment of an organized church, the continuing strength of Iranian traditions and the cultural and kinship ties of the Armenian nobility to Iran made Armenia an uncertain ally for the Romans. Yet since the Armenian monarchy was a branch of the Arsacid dynasty which had been overthrown by the Sasanians in 224, relations between Armenia and Iran were already strained. Tiridates’ conversion compounded an already difficult situation, for the shahs naturally became suspicious of the future loyalty of Armenians to their Iranian heritage. In the fifth century, attempts by the shahs to impose Zoroastrianism led to armed conflict – while to the west, the Armenians found their relationship with fellow Christians increasingly marred by their involvement in the struggles over orthodoxy. The division of Armenia c. 387 into two monarchies and two spheres of influence – a large Iranian sector east of the forty-first parallel of longitude, and a much smaller Roman sector west of that line up to the Euphrates – did not solve ‘the Armenian question’.

THE ISSUES AND THE EVIDENCE

The vast majority of the population of the Roman empire, as in all pre-modern societies, worked on the land. There is a great deal we would like to know about these people: exactly how many they were; how many others they fed (whether artisans, soldiers and clergy, or idle rich); which areas they cultivated, and with what crops and which methods; to what extent their agriculture was specialized and tied into commercial networks of exchange; what types of settlement they lived in; and how tightly their labour was controlled – how many agricultural workers were free peasants cultivating their own plots, and how many dependent tenants of great landlords, wage labourers, or even slaves?

In looking at these questions for the fifth and sixth century we are often moving from a period in which the data are severely restricted into one in which they are almost completely absent. However, by combining written and archaeological evidence, and with the aid of some informed guesswork, we can sometimes at least refine the questions, even if we cannot honestly provide any very firm answers to them.

Over the last thirty to forty years, our picture of the Roman and late Roman countryside has been greatly enhanced, and in some areas transformed, by archaeology. When, in 1964, Jones published his magisterial account of the late Roman empire, he was still able largely to ignore archaeological evidence when discussing rural life.

When he assumed sole rulership of the eastern half of the Roman empire in 408, Theodosius II became head of a state which during the short reign of his father Arcadius (395–408) had experienced an extraordinary array of crises. Gothic troops in Roman employ had risen in revolt under the leadership of Alaric in 395 and spent much time during the following years freely plundering the Balkan provinces until Alaric eventually decided to move westwards (401). Also in 395, nomadic Huns had invaded the empire through the Caucasus, bringing widespread destruction to Syria and eastern Asia Minor until 397. Another Goth named Gainas, who held a command in the Roman army, instigated a revolt which was only suppressed in 400 with much bloodshed in and around Constantinople. Within a few years there was further turmoil in the capital over the bitterly contested deposition and exile of the bishop John Chrysostom (403–4), while eastern Asia Minor suffered a prolonged bout of raiding by Isaurian brigands (403–6). In addition to all this, relations with the western half of the empire throughout Arcadius’ reign were characterized by antagonism and mutual suspicion, the result of the ambitions and rivalries of dominant individuals, such as Eutropius and Stilicho, at the courts of Arcadius in Constantinople and his younger brother Honorius in the west.

The period from a.d. 425 to the eve of Islam was a momentous one for North Africa. At its start, what is now seen to have been one of the most prosperous and urbanized of Roman provinces, even if that development came somewhat later than elsewhere, passed without real struggle into Vandal control. The monarchy then established lasted until a.d. 533/4, when a Byzantine force under Belisarius re-established Roman rule, again with surprising speed. The new province established by Justinian’s Pragmatic Sanction of 534 endured in theory, if not fully in reality, until the fall of Carthage itself to the Arabs in a.d. 698; even though Arab armies had defeated and killed a Byzantine exarch in 646–7 and founded an Islamic city at Kairouan in 662, ties between the province and Constantinople were not entirely broken.

These changes of fortune also implied political, religious and economic changes which have been the subject of much recent discussion. The main stimulus for this re-examination has come from archaeology – first and foremost the important series of excavations conducted by a number of national teams at Carthage during the 1970s under the general auspices of UNESCO; these have provided, in many cases for the first time, reliable information at least about parts of the city and its development during this and other periods, and have stimulated and made possible further important developments in such disciplines as the study of ceramics. In turn, the results of these excavations, even though not all are yet fully published, have contributed to the re-examination of issues such as long-distance trade and its place in the Mediterranean economy in the sixth and seventh century.

INTRODUCTION: LAW IN THE LATE ROMAN EMPIRE

Law was central to the social structure of the Roman empire in the fifth and sixth centuries a.d., more so than in the principate and in the neighbouring barbarian kingdoms. The administration of justice, and of finance, had been strengthened by the reduction in the size of provinces and by the reforms which both relieved governors of military responsibilities and provided them with a substructure of bureaucratic support. The legislative machine had also become more energetic. The legislative functions of the senate in Rome had been transferred to the imperial consistorium in Constantinople and Ravenna, which worked with more expedition and produced incomparably more enactments. The number was especially high at the beginning and towards the end of our period – that is, a.d. 425–60 and, even more so, 527–46. Tradition had by this time built up a vast store of legal literature, impressive alike in its volume, antiquity and quality. A civilized state, based on the rule of law, seemed on the surface of things to be assured, and this must have enhanced Roman pride. With the exception of the Vandals, one nation of Germanic barbarians after another sought to emulate this Roman ideal (see pp. 260–87 below).

In 425, in the circus at Aquileia, the emperor Valentinian III watched the ritual humiliation and execution of the defeated usurper John. This bloody spectacle celebrated the restoration of Italy to its rightful place as the centre of Roman imperial rule after two years of secessionist government. Less than two centuries later, in 605, the Constantinopolitan emperor Phocas ratified a series of treaties with the Lombards which acknowledged, implicitly if not explicitly, that large areas of Italy had been lost to imperial rule. Between these events occurred the dismemberment of Roman Italy, together with its increasing marginalization in the empire. At the outset of this period, Italy was still the centre of the empire; by its end, however, it had become a frontier province, fought over by Lombard potentates and Byzantine military governors.

This chapter will trace this political fragmentation and show how it was reflected in the transformation of local society throughout Italy. The political disintegration has long been known. Certain stretches of Italian history in the fifth and sixth century are narrated in detail by contemporary historians and chroniclers, although overall the coverage is rather patchy, while the epistolary, exegetical and hagiographical works of Gregory the Great present a haunting vision of Italy after decades of debilitating wars. At an institutional level, the letters of Cassiodorus give valuable insights into the administration of Ostrogothic Italy, while inscriptions, though not so numerous as for earlier periods, add further detail to the picture, announcing the ambitions of rulers or recording the achievements of local aristocrats.

This chapter will examine some of the overlapping groups – communities – in which individuals acted for different purposes, and the transformation of these communities, in the period c. 400–600. It is focused on the west, because it was here that the greatest changes in our period took place, and where there was least continuity through imperial institutions such as the army and administration. The chapter draws on, and is intended to reflect, recent work on the social history of the early medieval period, and examines both horizontal ties, bonds between relatively equal peer groups, and vertical ties, such as those of patronage and support between lord and follower. It is divided into two parts. The first section focuses on the different sense of community operating at the level of the political centre: the Roman empire as a whole and the kingdoms which succeeded it. The spotlight is then transferred to more local communities. The two types of community are, of course, closely linked. An overall theme of the whole essay, indeed, is that socio-political transformations at the centre had profound effects upon the construction of local community, and vice versa.

THE COMMUNITY OF THE REALM

In c. 400, western Europe was dominated by the Roman empire. Britain south of Hadrian’s Wall, France, the Iberian peninsula, the Benelux countries, Italy and much of Germany and Austria were under its direct rule. Roman power also loomed over the empire’s neighbours. By c. 600, this European superstate had given way to a series of far from stable successor states: kingdoms built around Franks and Burgundians in France and Benelux, Visigoths and Sueves south of the Pyrenees, Ostrogoths and Lombards in Italy, Anglo-Saxons in southern and eastern Britain. The first half of this essay is concerned with the transformations in political economy which accompanied this fundamental revolution in European history

CHRISTIANITY AND LAWS ON THE FAMILY

Before Constantine, no Roman emperor, not even Augustus, had displayed such a strong ambition to reshape family legislation and initiate thereby an extensive project of moral reconstruction: pudor tutus, munita coniugia was how a panegyrist pithily expressed it as early as 321. In some respects, Constantinian legislation merely brought to completion tendencies that had been operative for some time; in others, it was more innovative. On the whole, it aimed at asserting principles of rigour, order and temperance in family relationships. Often it revealed a somewhat darker side, betraying both acute perception and ill-concealed pessimism, and alongside the wishful imperatives we also find realistic laws concerning concrete situations. The frequency and variety of these measures testify to the importance of political policy on these issues.

Constantine’s laws had three principal aims, all closely interlinked: to safeguard celibacy, to encourage the matrimonium iustum and to protect infants and minors. The first was accomplished by repealing the Augustan marriage laws, which had penalized celibates and childless couples (by restricting their ability to receive inheritances and legacies) and provided incentives to matrimony and procreation. A variety of measures contributed towards achieving the second aim: socially mixed unions and concubinage were repressed; greater significance was attributed to the promise of marriage; abduction was severely punished; accusations of adultery could no longer be made by outsiders, but only by the husband or by the wife’s close male relatives; adultery was punished by death.

GAUL: VISIGOTHIC KINGDOM, 418–507

In 418 the patrician Constantius concluded a peace treaty with the Visigothic king Wallia (415–18), giving him and his following the province of Aquitania Secunda and some adjacent territories to occupy. This completed a process initiated in 416 when Wallia returned his predecessor’s widow, Galla Placidia, to her brother, the emperor Honorius. He had subsequently campaigned for the emperor in Spain, destroying the kingdoms of the Alans and of the Siling Vandals. The nature of the Visigothic presence established in Aquitaine by the treaty of 418 remains controversial. The argument concerns the nature of the process known as hospitalitas. Traditionally, this has been interpreted as involving a major change in land ownership, with the Visigothic ‘guests’ receiving two-thirds of all Roman estates within the designated regions. More recent arguments have seen it as involving not a physical redistribution of land, which would involve large-scale expropriation by the empire of aristocratic property, but a revision of tax obligations, with the Roman landowners having to pay the fiscal burden on two-thirds of their property directly to the designated Visigothic recipients rather than to the imperial administration. According to the view adopted, the Visigoths can be seen in the aftermath of the treaty either as being settled on the land and widely distributed throughout southern Aquitaine or as forming a purely military presence, based on a limited number of urban garrisons.

Some time in the 520s, the Great Old Man Barsanuphius, an Egyptian recluse, wrote from his cell in the vicinity of Gaza, in order to comfort a sick and dispirited monk:

Throughout the Christian world of the fifth and sixth century, the average Christian believer (like the sick monk, Andrew) was encouraged to draw comfort from the expectation that, somewhere, in his own times, even, maybe, in his own region, and so directly accessible to his own distress, a chosen few of his fellows had achieved, usually through prolonged ascetic labour, an exceptional degree of closeness to God. God loved them as his favoured children. He would answer their prayers on behalf of the majority of believers, whose own sins kept them at a distance from him.

The Roman empire was a structure created and sustained by force that had to be available for deployment both against external threats to the state’s existence and against any of its inhabitants who attempted to reject or avoid its authority. But for its first 250 years the empire managed to maintain a considerable separation between civilian and military spheres: soldiers were legally and socially distinct from civilians, and to a large extent geographically as well, since most major concentrations of troops were located along the empire’s frontiers. As a result, many of the ‘inner’ provinces could appear demilitarized: soldiers might pass along the arterial roads or be on hand when a new census was held, but they were outsiders, in the main recruited from, stationed in and demobilized into other less civilized (i.e. less urbanized) parts of the empire, either the periphery or the uplands and other marginal areas. There was also, however, a close mutual interdependence: the army consumed much of the surplus product of the prosperous peaceful provinces, so that soldier and civilian were tied economically; the emperor was both commander-in-chief of the armies and the ultimate source of law, political authority and social status; provincial governors and most other commanders of armies were members of the senate, the pinnacle of the civilian social structure.

In the late empire this tidy picture was greatly complicated, primarily as a result of extensive tribal invasions: provinces and cities that had once been unmilitary had to remilitarize themselves; the army became an important potential means of political and social advancement, successful tribes created new centres of power where new rules governed relationships; all the time the military had to extract resources from an economy that was often suffering the effects of war.

By the year 425, Egypt had achieved a provincial arrangement that would last for well over a century. A single province under the principate, it had come under Diocletian to be divided into three smaller provinces. It all began in the last decade of the third century when a new province of Thebaid, coterminous with the old Theban epistrategia, was created out of the southern part of the original province of Egypt (Aegyptus); subsequently, Libya was separated off to become its own province. Each new province had its own governor, but all three – Aegyptus, Thebaid, Libya – were subject to the plenipotentiary authority of the Augustal prefect, resident in Alexandria.

By the latter part of the fourth century, when Ammianus Marcellinus was penning his well-known digression on Egypt (22.15–16), the threefold division into Aegyptus, Libya and the Thebaid seemed to the historian to have dated ‘to ancient times’ (priscis temporibus); other subdivisions were the creations of more recent times (posteritas). A province of Augustamnica, a revival of the short-lived Aegyptus Herculia, consisting of the eastern Delta and the old Heptanomia, had been created out of the territory of Aegyptus, which retained the western Delta, including the city of Alexandria; and the province of Libya had come to be divided into Pentapolis (Libya Superior) and ‘Drier’ Libya (Libya Inferior).

INTRODUCTION

Buildings are the most tangible witnesses of the character of a civilization. Their scale, their function, their elaboration and their novelty as compared to earlier types are all significant pointers. A survey of architecture in the fifth and sixth century leads to one inescapable conclusion: mutatis mutandis, life in both city and countryside went on as before in areas under the effective control of the empire. If a citizen of Ephesus of a.d. 300 had been reborn in a.d. 600, he would not have found himself in an alien environment. The forum or agora remained a focus of city life (Fig. 43), as did the bath (Fig. 47) and circus. Of course, most of these traditional buildings were not newly built structures in late antiquity, since most cities had received lavish public buildings in the imperial period. Made to last, they needed upkeep but not replacement, unless they burnt or fell in an earthquake. Unless, therefore, a city was expanding (e.g. Constantinople (Fig. 40), Caesarea, Jerusalem, etc.), was a new foundation (Dara, Justiniana Prima (Fig. 41)) or had been raised in status (Dyrrhachium), there was little call for new public buildings. One novelty was the invasion of the city centres by large churches, but even in this domain, the essential structures had been architecturally developed in the century prior to a.d. 425, although there was still room for expansion. Other new architectural elements were monasteries (Figs. 49–50), martyria (Figs. 56–7) and welfare establishments.

The figure of the late Roman emperor dominated his society as few rulers before or since. To convey what it would be like to die and meet God, a contemporary evoked the emperor emerging from his palace, and an age obsessed with religion constantly linked emperor and God: ‘God needs nothing; the emperor needs only God.’ The emperor’s body was human, but his imperial power made him ‘like God’. Yet the all-powerful ‘Master of Earth and Sea and Every People’ never appeared alone: he was always accompanied by others, who bathed in the reflected glory of his splendour. Onlookers envied the luck of his closest attendants and companions, despite the realization that exalted rank at court was precarious.

The concept of court conveniently encapsulates the convergence of people and structures at the pinnacle of late Roman society around this awesome figure. The remarkable social group surrounding the emperor encompassed but transcended the chief institutions of government and now assumed more elaborate forms. The recent and definitive establishment of imperial residences in the new capitals of Constantinople and Ravenna helped precipitate this change. A travelling monarchy yielded permanently to a sedentary one, and stable palace milieux began to drive roots into capital cities. This occurred in both halves of the empire and affected all other developments, although the evidence is much richer for the eastern empire.

JUSTIN II

Imperial succession

Despite his age and the conspiracies of his latter years, Justinian took no steps to designate a successor. Whether he could not decide between the merits of various relatives, or stubbornly preferred to allow the traditional constituencies of senate, army and people to select a suitable candidate, is unknown, but as a result the succession was presented to the man on the spot, his nephew Justin, son of his sister Vigilantia and husband of Sophia, the ambitious and competent niece of Theodora. Since at least the early 550s Justin had been curopalatus, a position of modest significance but central to palace life, and had shown resolution in quelling faction rioting in 562, but his career does not appear as distinguished as that of his main rival within the extended imperial family, his cousin Justin, son of Germanus, who had won victories in the Balkans and was currently serving as magister militum on the Danube. Justin the curopalatus, however, was in Constantinople and was well supported: the comes excubitorum, Tiberius, was a protégé, and his presence in command of the imperial bodyguard indicates that Justin had been planning ahead; other supporters included the quaestor Anastasius, and the newly-appointed patriarch of Constantinople, John Scholasticus, who had transmitted the prediction of Justin’s succession made by Symeon Stylites at Antioch, and who now performed the coronation; Callinicus, a leading senator, invited Justin to accept the succession, while his brother Marcellus and son-in-law Baduarius were both patricians.