Chapter 7: Late Antiquity

Reconstruction Under Diocletian and Constantine

Political Measures

Under Diocletian, Augustus’s polite fiction of the emperor as first among equals gave way to the emperor as absolute autocrat.
The princeps became dominus (lord).
Diocletian recognized that the empire had become too large for one man to handle and divided it into a western half and an eastern half.
Diocletian assumed direct control of the eastern part; he gave the rule of the western part to a colleague, along with the title augustus.
Around 293 Diocletian further delegated power by appointing two men to assist the augustus and him; each of the four men was given the title caesar, and the system was known as the tetrarchy, meaning “rule of four.”
He further divided each part of the empire into administrative units called dioceses, which were in turn subdivided into small provinces, all governed by an expanded bureaucracy.
The reorganization made the empire easier to administer, and placed each of the four central military commands much closer to borders or other trouble spots.
Like Diocletian, Constantine came up through the army, and took control after a series of civil wars.
He eventually had authority over the entire empire, but ruled from the East, where he established a new capital for the empire at Byzantium, an old Greek city on the Bosporus, naming it “New Rome,” though it was soon called Constantinople.
The emperors ruling from Constantinople could not provide enough military assistance to repel invaders in the western half of the Roman Empire, however, and Roman authority there slowly disintegrated.

Economic Issues

Diocletian and Constantine were faced with a number of economic problems, including inflation and declining tax revenues, and their attempts to solve them illustrate the methods and limitations of absolute monarchy.
In a move unprecedented in Roman history, Diocletian issued an edict that fixed maximum prices and wages throughout the empire.
Diocletian issued an edict that fixed maximum prices and wages throughout the empire.
Constantine continued these measures and also made occupations more rigid: all people involved in the growing, preparation, and transportation of food and other essentials were locked into their professions.
The emperors’ measures did not really address Rome’s central economic problems, however.
Consequently, large tracts of land lay deserted.
Landlords with ample resources began at once to reclaim as much of this land as they could, often hiring back the free farmers who had previously worked the land as paid labor or tenants.
Free farmers who remained on the land were exposed to the raids of barbarians or robbers and to the tyranny of imperial officials.
Free men and women were becoming tenant farmers bound to the land, what would later be called serfs.

The Acceptance of Christianity

Diocletian stepped up persecution of Christians who would not sacrifice to Rome’s traditional deities, portraying them as disloyal to the empire in an attempt to wipe out the faith.
These persecutions lasted only a few years, however.
Increasing numbers of Romans, including members of prominent families, were converting to Christianity.
Constantine reversed Diocletian’s policy and instead ordered toleration of all religions in the Edict of Milan, issued in 313.
Christians disagreed with one another about many issues, which led to schisms, denunciations, and sometimes violence.
In the fourth and fifth centuries disputes arose over the nature of Christ.
For example, Arianism, developed by Arius (ca. 250–336), a priest of Alexandria, held that Jesus was created by the will of God the Father and thus was not co-eternal with him.
Arian Christians reasoned that Jesus the Son must be inferior to God the Father because the Father was incapable of suffering and did not die.
In 325 he summoned church leaders to a council in Nicaea in Asia Minor and presided over it personally “as your fellow servant of our common Lord and Savior.”
The council produced the Nicene Creed, which defined the position that Christ is “eternally begotten of the Father” and of the same substance as the Father.
Arius and those who refused to accept Nicene Christianity were banished.
Their interpretation of the nature of Christ was declared a heresy, that is, a belief that contradicted the interpretation the church leaders declared was correct, which was termed orthodoxy.
The Nicene Creed says little specifically about the Holy Spirit, but in the following centuries the idea that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are “one substance in three persons” — the Trinity—became a central doctrine in Christianity.
Religious and secular authorities tried in various ways to control this diversity as well as promote Christianity.
In 380 the emperor Theodosius made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the empire.
Later emperors continued the pattern of active involvement in church affairs.

The Growth of the Christian Church

The Church and Its Leaders

With the empire in decay, educated people joined and worked for the church in the belief that it was the one institu- tion able to provide some stability.
Bishop Ambrose of Milan (339–397) is typical of the Roman aristocrats who held high public office, were converted to Christianity, and subsequently became bishops.
Ambrose’s assertion that the church was supreme in spiritual matters and the state in secular issues was to serve as the cornerstone of the church’s position on church-state relations for centuries.
Ambrose came to be regarded as one of the fathers of the church, that is, early Christian thinkers whose authority was seen as second only to the Bible in later centuries.
Gradually the church adapted the organizational structure of the Roman Empire begun during the reign of Diocletian.
Bishops claimed to trace their spiritual ancestry back to Jesus’s apostles, doctrine called apostolic succession.
Because of the special importance of their dioceses, five bishops— those of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Rome — gained the title of patriarch.
The bishops of Rome stressed that Rome had special significance because of its history as the capital of a worldwide empire.
Thus as successors of Peter, the bishops of Rome— known as popes, from the Latin word papa, meaning “father” — claimed a privileged position in the church hierarchy, an idea called the Petrine Doctrine that built on the notion of apostolic succession.
They stressed their supremacy over other Christian communities and urged other churches to appeal to Rome for the resolution of disputed doctrinal issues.
In the fifth century the popes also expanded the church’s secular authority.
Pope Leo I (pontificate 440–461) made treaties with several barbarian leaders who threat- ened the city of Rome.
Gregory I (pontificate 590–604), later called “the Great,” made an agreement with the barbarian groups who had cut off Rome’s food supply, reorganized church lands to increase production, and then distributed the additional food to the poor.
The Western Christian Church headed by the pope in Rome would become the most enduring nongovernmental institution in world history.

The Development of Christian Monasticism

Since the first century, however, some especially pious Christians had felt that the only alternative to the decadence of urban life was complete separation from the world.
This desire to withdraw from ordinary life led to the development of monastic life.
Monasticism began in third-century Egypt, where individuals like Saint Anthony (251?–356) and small groups first withdrew from cities and from organized society to seek God through prayer in desert or mountain caves and shelters, giving up all for Christ.
Gradually large colonies of monks gathered in the deserts of Upper Egypt.
These monks were called hermits, from the Greek word eremos, meaning “desert.”
Many devout women also were attracted to this eremitical type of monasticism.
The Egyptian ascetic Pachomius (290–346?) drew thousands of men and women to the monastic life at Tabennisi on the Upper Nile.
Saint Basil (329?–379), an influential bishop from Asia Minor and another of the fathers of the church, encouraged cenobitic monasticism.
Starting in the fourth century, information about Egyptian monasticism came to the West, and both men and women sought the monastic life.
Most of the monasticism that developed in Gaul, Italy, Spain, England, and Ireland was cenobitic.

Monastery Life

In 529 Benedict of Nursia (480–543), who had ex- perimented with both eremitical and communal forms of monastic life, wrote a brief set of regulations for the monks who had gathered around him at Monte Cassino between Rome and Naples.
Benedict’s guide for monastic life, known as The Rule of Saint Benedict, came to influence all forms of organized religious life in the Western Christian Church.
Men and women in monastic houses all followed sets of rules, first those of Benedict and later those written by other individuals.
Because of this, men who lived a communal monastic life came to be called regular clergy, from the Latin word regulus (rule).
Priests and bishops who staffed churches in which people worshipped and who were not cut off from the world were called secular clergy.
According to official church doctrine, women were not members of the clergy, but this distinction was not clear to most people.
The Rule of Saint Benedict outlined a monastic life of regularity, discipline, and moderation in an atmosphere of silence.
Benedictine monasticism also succeeded partly because it was so materially successful.
Finally, monasteries conducted schools for local young people, and monks and nuns copied manuscripts, preserving classical as well as Christian literature.

Christianity and Classical Culture

The earliest Christian thinkers sometimes rejected Greco-Roman culture, but as Christianity grew from a tiny persecuted group to the official religion of the Roman Empire, its leaders and thinkers gradually came to terms with classical culture.
Saint Jerome (340–419) translated the Old and New Testaments from Hebrew and Greek into vernacular Latin.
Called the Vulgate, his edition of the Bible served as the official translation until the sixteenth century, and scholars rely on it even today.
Saint Jerome believed that Christians should study the best of ancient thought because it would direct their minds to God.

Christian Notions of Gender and Sexuality

Early Christians both adopted and adapted the then-contemporary views of women, marriage, and sexuality.
Early Christians often met in people’s homes and called one another “brother” and “sister,” a metaphorical use of family terms that was new to the Roman Empire.
Women and men joyously accepted the ascetic life, renouncing marriage and procreation to use their bodies for a higher calling.
Not all Christian teachings about gender were radical, however.
In the first century c.e. male church leaders began to place restrictions on female believers.
Christian teachings about sexuality built on and challenged classical models.
The rejection of sexual activity involved an affirmation of the importance of a spiritual life, but it also incorporated the hostility toward the body found in some Hellenistic philosophies and some of the other religions that had spread in the Roman Empire in this era, such as Manichaeism.
Manichaeism, a dualistic religion based on the ideas of the third-century Persian thinker Mani, taught that the spiritual world was good and the material world was evil, so salvation came through education and self denial.
Thus the writings of many church fathers contain a strong streak of misogyny (hatred of women), which was passed down to later Christian thinkers.

Saint Augustine on Human Nature, Will, and Sin

The most influential church father in the West was Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430).
Augustine took teaching positions first in Rome and then in Milan, where he had frequent conversa- tions with Bishop Ambrose.
Through his discussions with Ambrose and his own reading, Augustine rejected his Manichaeism and became a Christian.
Augustine’s autobiography, The Confessions, is a literary masterpiece and one of the most influential books in the history of Europe.
Written in the rhetorical style and language of late Roman antiquity, it marks the synthesis of Greco-Roman forms and Christian thought.
Augustine’s ideas on sin, grace, and redemption became the foundation of all subsequent Western Christian theology, Protestant as well as Catholic.
He wrote that the basic force in any individual is the will, which he defined as “the power of the soul to hold on to or to obtain an object without constraint.”
Because Adam disobeyed God and fell, all human beings have an innate tendency to sin: their will is weak.
But according to Augustine, God restores the strength of the will through grace, which is transmitted in certain rituals that the church defined as sacraments.
Grace results from God’s decisions, not from any merit on the part of the individual.
When Visigothic forces captured the city of Rome in 410, horrified pagans blamed the disaster on the Christians.
In response, Augustine wrote City of God.
Augustine maintained that states came into existence as the result of Adam’s fall and people’s inclination to sin.
He believed that the state was a necessary evil with the power to do good by providing the peace, justice, and order that Christians need to pursue their pilgrimage to the City of God.

Barbarian Society

Scholars have been hampered in investigating barbarian society because most groups did not write and thus kept no written records before Christian mission- aries introduced writing.
Historians are increasingly deciphering and using the barbarians’ own written records that do exist, especially inscriptions carved in stone, bone, and wood and written in the runic alphabet.
Runic inscriptions come primarily from Scandinavia and the British Isles.

Village and Family Life

Barbarian groups usually resided in small villages, and climate and geography determined the basic patterns of how they lived off the land.
Within the villages, there were great differences in wealth and status.
Free men and their families constituted the largest class.
Slaves acquired through warfare worked as farm laborers, herdsmen, and household servants.
Ironworking represented the most advanced craft; much of northern Europe had iron deposits, and the dense forests provided wood for charcoal, which was used to provide the clean fire needed to make iron.
In the first two centuries c.e. the quantity and quality of material goods increased dramatically.
Goods were used locally and for gift giving, a major social custom.
Families and kin groups were the basic social units in barbarian society.
Families were responsible for the debts and actions of their members and for keeping the peace in general.
Barbarian society was patriarchal: within each household the father had authority over his wife, children, and slaves.
Women worked alongside men in the fields and forests, and the Roman historian Tacitus reported that at times they joined men on the battlefield, urging them to fight harder.
Once women were widowed, they sometimes assumed their husbands’ rights over family property and held the guardianship of their children.

Tribes and Hierarchies

The basic social and political unit among barbarian groups was the tribe or confederation, a group whose members believed that they were all descended from a common ancestor and were thus kin.
Tribes were led by chieftains.
Closely associated with the chief in some tribes was the comitatus, or war band.
These warriors swore loyalty to the chief, fought with him in battle, and were not supposed to leave the battlefield without him; to do so implied cowardice, disloyalty, and social disgrace.
Although initially a social egalitarianism appears to have existed among members of the comitatus because they regarded each other as kin, during the migrations and warfare of the third and fourth centuries, the war band was transformed into a system of stratified ranks.
During the Ostrogothic conquest of Italy, warrior-nobles also began to acquire land as both a mark of prestige and a means to power.

Customary and Written Law

Early barbarian tribes had no written laws.
Law was custom, but certain individuals were often given special training in remembering and retelling laws from generation to generation.
The law code of the Salian Franks, one of the barbarian tribes, included a feature common to many barbarian codes.
Any crime that involved a personal injury, such as assault, rape, and murder, was given a particular monetary value, called the wergeld (literally “man-money” or “money to buy off the spear”), that was to be paid by the perpetrator to the victim or the family.
The wergeld varied according to the severity of the crime and also the social status of the victim.
The wergeld system aimed to prevent or reduce violence.
If a person accused of a crime agreed to pay the wergeld and if the victim and his or her family accepted the payment, there was peace.

Celtic and Germanic Religion

Like Greeks and Romans, barbarians worshipped hundreds of gods and goddesses with specialized functions.
They regarded certain mountains, lakes, rivers, or groves of trees as sacred because these were linked to deities.
Among the Celts, religious leaders called druids had legal and educational as well as religious functions, orally passing down laws and traditions from generation to generation.
The first written records of barbarian religion came from Greeks and Romans who encountered barbarians or spoke with those who had.
In the Roman Empire the days took their names from Roman deities or astronomical bodies, and in the Germanic languages of central and northern Europe the days acquired the names of corresponding barbarian gods.

Migration, Assimilation, and Conflict

Celtic and Germanic People in Gaul and Britain

By the fourth century c.e. Gaul and Britain were under pressure from Germanic groups moving west- ward, and Rome itself was threatened.
Imperial troops withdrew from Britain in order to defend Rome, and the Picts from Scotland and the Scots from Ireland (both Celtic-speaking peoples) invaded territory held by the Britons.
Saxons and other Germanic tribes from the area of modern-day Norway, Sweden, and Denmark turned from assistance to conquest.
As more Germanic peoples arrived, however, they took over the best lands and eventually conquered most of Britain.
Historians have labeled the years 500 to 1066 (the year of the Norman Conquest) the Anglo-Saxon period of English history, after the two largest Germanic groups in England, the Angles and the Saxons.
Anglo-Saxon England was divided along ethnic and political lines.
The Germanic kingdoms in the south, east, and center were opposed by the Britons in the west, who wanted to get rid of the invaders.
The Anglo-Saxon invasion gave rise to a rich body of Celtic mythology, particularly legends about King Arthur, who first appeared in Welsh poetry in the sixth century and later in histories, epics, and saints’ lives.
In their earliest form as Welsh poems, the Arthurian legends may represent Celtic hostility to Anglo-Saxon invaders, but they later came to be more important as representations of the ideal of medieval knightly chivalry and as compelling stories whose retelling has continued to the present.

Visigoths and Huns

Pressured by defeat in battle, starvation, and the movement of other groups, the Visigoths moved west- ward from their homeland north of the Black Sea, and in 376 they petitioned the Roman emperor Valens to admit them to the empire.
The Visigoths revolted, joined with other barbarian enemies of Rome, and defeated the Roman army at the Battle of Adrianople in 378, killing Valens and thousands of Roman soldiers in the process.
This left a large barbarian army within the borders of the Roman Empire, and not that far from Constantinople.
Valens’s successor made peace with the Visigoths, but relations worsened as the Visigoths continued migrating westward.
One significant factor in the migration of the Visigoths and other Germanic peoples was pressure from nomadic steppe peoples from Central Asia.
Under the leadership of their warrior-king Attila, the Huns attacked the Byzantine Empire in 447 and then turned westward.
Later leaders were not as effective, and the Huns were never again an important factor in European history.
Their conquests had pushed many Germanic groups together, however, transforming smaller bands into larger, more unified peoples who could more easily pick the Roman Empire apart.

Germanic Kingdoms and the End of the Roman Empire

After they conquered an area, barbarians generally established states ruled by kings.
However, the kingdoms did not have definite geographical borders, and their locations shifted as tribes moved.
The Visigoths exercised a weak domination over southern France and much of the Iberian Peninsula.
The Vandals, another Germanic tribe whose destructive ways are commemorated in the word vandal, swept across Spain into North Africa in 429 and took over what had been Rome’s breadbasket.
Barbarian states eventually came to include Italy itself.
The Western Roman emperors were generally chosen by the more powerful successors of Constantine in the East, and they increasingly relied on barbarian commanders and their troops to maintain order.
In 476 the barbarian chieftain Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustus, the last person to have the title of Roman emperor in the West.
Emperor Zeno, the Roman emperor in the East ruling from Constantinople, worried about Odoacer’s growing power and promised Theoderic (r. 471–526), the leader of the Ostrogoths who had recently settled in the Balkans, the right to rule Italy if he defeated Odoacer.
Theoderic’s forces were successful, and in 493 Theoderic established an Ostrogothic state in Italy, with his capital at Ravenna.
For centuries, the end of the Roman Empire in the West was seen as a major turning point in history, the fall of the sophisticated and educated classical world to uncouth and illiterate tribes.
Old Roman families continued to run the law courts and the city governments, and well-educated Italians continued to study the Greek classics.
In other barbarian states, as well, aspects of classical culture continued.
Barbarian kings relied on officials trained in Roman law, and Latin remained the language of scholarly communication.
The kingdom established by the Franks is a good example of this combination of peaceful assimilation and violent conflict.
The Franks were a confederation of Germanic peoples who originated in the marshy lowlands north and east of the northernmost part of the Roman Empire.
The reign of Clovis (ca. 481–511) marks the decisive period in the development of the Franks as a unified people.
Through military campaigns, Clovis acquired the central provinces of Roman Gaul and began to conquer southern Gaul from the Burgundians and Visigoths.
From Constantinople, Eastern Roman emperors worked to hold the empire together and to reconquer at least some of the West from barbarian tribes.
The emperor Justinian (r. 527–565) waged long and hard- fought wars against the Ostrogoths and temporarily regained Italy and North Africa, but his conquests had disastrous consequences.

Christian Missionaries and Conversion

Missionaries Actions

During the Roman occupation, small Christian communities were scattered throughout Gaul and Britain.
The leaders of some of these, such as Bishop Martin of Tours (ca. 316–397), who founded a monastery and established a rudimentary parish system in his diocese, supported Nicene Christianity.
Tradition identifies the conversion of Ireland with Saint Patrick (ca. 385–461).
In his missionary work, Patrick had the strong support of Bridget of Kildare (ca. 450–528), daughter of a wealthy chieftain.
The Christianization of the English began in earnest in 597, when Pope Gregory I sent a delegation of monks under the Roman Augustine to Britain.
In the course of the seventh century, two Christian forces competed for the conversion of the pagan AngloSaxons: Roman-oriented missionaries traveling north from Canterbury, and Celtic monks from Ireland and northwestern Britain.

The Process of Conversion

When a ruler marched his people to the waters of baptism, the work of Christianization had only begun.
Christian kings could order their subjects to be baptized, married, and buried in Christian ceremonies, and people complied increasingly across Europe.
Missionaries and priests got masses of pagan and illiterate peoples to understand Christian ideals and teachings through preaching, assimilation, the ritual of penance, and the veneration of saints.
Deeply ingrained pagan customs and practices could not be stamped out by words alone, however, or even by royal edicts.
The ritual of penance was also instrumental in teaching people Christian ideas.
Christianity taught that certain actions and thoughts were sins, meaning that they were against God’s commands.
Most religious observances continued to be community matters, as they had been in the ancient world.
People joined with family members, friends, and neighbors at their parish church to attend baptisms, weddings, and funerals presided over by a priest.
The parish church often housed the relics of a saint, that is, bones, articles of clothing, or other objects associated with a person who had lived (or died) in a way that was spiritually heroic or noteworthy.
Christians came to venerate the saints as powerful and holy.

The Byzantine Empire

Sources of Byzantine Strength

While the western parts of the Roman Empire gradually succumbed to barbarian invaders, the Byzantine Empire survived Germanic, Persian, and Arab attacks relics Bones, articles of clothing, or other objects associated with the life of a saint.
Constantinople had strong military leadership and even more in the city’s location and its excellent fortifications.
Attacking Constantinople by land posed greater geographical and logistical problems than a seventh- or eighth-century government could solve.

The Law Code of Justinian

One of the most splendid achievements of the Byzantine emperors was the preservation of Roman law for the medieval and modern worlds.
Sweeping and systematic codification took place under the emperor Justinian.
He appointed a committee of eminent jurists to sort through and organize the laws.
The result was the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law), a multipart collection of laws and legal commentary issued from 529 to 534.
The first part of this work, the Codex, brought together all the existing imperial laws into a coherent whole, eliminated outmoded laws and contradictions, and clarified the law itself.
The second part of Justinian’s compilation, the Digest, is a collection of the opinions of foremost Roman jurists on complex legal problems, and the third part, the Institutes, is a handbook of civil law designed for students and beginning jurists.

Byzantine Intellectual Life

The Byzantines prized education; because of them, many masterpieces of ancient Greek literature have survived to influence the intellectual life of the modern world.
The literature of the Byzantine Empire was predominantly Greek, although politicians, scholars, and lawyers also spoke and used Latin.
The most remarkable Byzantine historian was Procopius (ca. 500–562), who left a rousing account praising Justinian’s reconquest of North Africa and Italy, but also wrote the Secret History, a vicious and uproarious attack on Justinian and his wife, the empress Theodora.
Although the Byzantines discovered little that was new in mathematics and geometry, they made advances in terms of military applications.
The Byzantines devoted a great deal of attention to medicine, and the general level of medical competence was far higher in the Byzantine Empire than in western Europe.
By the ninth or tenth century, most major Greek cities had hospitals for the care of the sick.
The hospitals might be divided into wards for different illnesses, and hospital staff included surgeons, practitioners, and aids with specialized responsibilities.

The Orthodox Church

The continuity of the Roman Empire in the East meant that Christianity developed differently there than it did in the West.
The Orthodox Church, the name generally given to the Eastern Christian Church, was more subject to secular control than the Western Christian Church, although some churchmen did stand up to the emperor.
Monasticism in the Orthodox world differed in fundamental ways from the monasticism that evolved in western Europe.
First, while The Rule of Saint Benedict gradually became the universal guide for all western European monasteries, each individual house in the Byzantine world developed its own set of rules for organization and behavior.
Second, education never became a central feature of Orthodox monasteries.
Like their counterparts in the West, Byzantine missionaries traveled far beyond the boundaries of the empire in search of converts.
The Byzantines were so successful that the Russians would later claim to be the successors of the Byzantine Empire.
For a time Moscow was even known as the “Third Rome” (the second Rome being Constantinople).