Inheritors of the Roman Empire

The era of the **Inheritors of the Roman Empire** lasted from about 476 AD until 565 AD. It began with the deposition of the last emperor of the west, Romulus Augustulus, by a Germanic warlord. It then ended with the reign of Emperor Justinian the Great, whose ambitious attempt to recover the territories of the defunct Western Empire proved ultimately futile.

There were, in effect, three inheritors of the classical Roman Empire. The first was the so-called *Barbarian Kingdoms* founded by various Germanic peoples, in which lie the origins of the first nations of Western Europe; though when the *western empire* disappeared the barbarian peoples did not occupy areas that looked much like later states. They fall clearly into four major and distinctive groups. The northernmost, the Anglo-Saxons, were moving into the old Roman province of Britain well before the island was abandoned in 407, until they occupied the fertile plains of what is now England, fringed by a Celtic world consisting of Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. Across the Channel, France was contested between several Germanic groups, until one state becomes stronger than the rest and ultimately achieves domination. This was the Franks. Their great king Clovis made himself the ally of the Romano-Gallic population and clergy by converting to orthodox Christianity, and founded dynasty that ruled France and parts of Germany for the next two centuries. Clovis had left the Visigoths virtually confined to Spain, where they created the polity for which they are best remembered. Viewed on the map, Italy looks the most natural of political units. And finally in Italy, the Ostrogoths, and their greatest king Theodoric, fought-off other Germans to establish a kingdom notable for taking what was best from Roman culture and combining it with Gothic energy. In material terms, *barbarian* Europe was a more primitive, more war-like, more illiterate, more rural and economically poorer place than the *empire*. Yet out of this confusion something quite new and immeasurably more creative than Rome would emerge in due course.

The second inheritor of Rome was the Christian Church, the supreme relic of empire west of Constantinople. The Church and its leaders were at first slow to recognise an opportunity in the disaster. Three institutions were to provide a lifeline in these dangerous rapids. The first was the network of bishops which the Romans had established, province by provinces, city by city. Bishops were lettered men among a new unlettered ruling class, and at least as likely as anyone else to be intellectually equipped to grapple with new problems. Naturally, new tasks were thrust upon them. The second institution was monasticism. Its success is demonstrated by the appearance of monasteries everywhere in the West. Many of the greatest churchmen of the age were monks; monks played a pivotal role in preserving and celebrating the culture of the classical world; and monasteries became the key source of missionaries for the conversion of the pagan northern Europe. And the third institution was the *papacy*. The bishops of Rome had been important in late antiquity, but it was in the sixth century that they began the rise to the splendid pre-eminence which was taken for granted by the medieval world.

The third inheritor, in some ways, was the continuation of the eastern half of the *empire*; henceforth referred to as the Byzantine Empire. The empire remained the most powerful economic, cultural, and military force in the Mediterranean world for much of its existence. Its dream of recovering the lost territory of the defunct *Western Empire* briefly materialized during the reign of Justinian the Great. Not only did Justinian reclaim North Africa, Italy, and coastal Spain, but he also commissioned the building of the Hagia Sophia, the world's largest and most architecturally advanced cathedral for nearly a thousand years. A still more resonant aspect of his legacy was the uniform rewriting of Roman law, which is still the basis of civil law in many modern states. If we look at his reign with the unforgiving eye of hindsight then Justinian seems something of a failure. By the end of the sixth century, most of Italy was gone again; this time to the Lombards. Yet he did what most people still expected that a strong emperor would; to seek to restore the Roman Empire to its former glory. After all, no one could really conceive a world without it.

## History

### Western Collapse

The European Middle Ages are still sometimes referred to as the ***Dark Ages***. This concept originated with the Italian humanist Francesco Petrarch, and then referred to the entire medieval period; which he regarded as "dark" compared to the "light" of his own Renaissance age. As the accomplishments of the era came to be better understood, scholars began restricting the *Dark Ages* appellation to the Early Middle Ages (476-978). Today, scholars tend to avoid its usage altogether due to its negative and dismissive connotations. Yet the epithet *Dark Ages* is still apt in one sense; we have literally been kept in the dark by the scarcity of contemporary accounts, at least in the early centuries after the fall of the Rome. It is still very hard to be sure we understand the period. Modern historians tend to fall roughly into two camps; the "*Catastrophists*" and the "C*ontinuists*". As you may guess, the *Catastrophists* think a catastrophe happened; a civilization was wiped out, and a more primitive, more war-like, more illiterate, more superstitious, and more rural period was ushered in. The C*ontinuists*, people like Roger Collins, see merely the breakdown of a governmental apparatus, but a great deal persisted from earlier times; people still spoke Latin; they lived in cities, perhaps less populace cities, but still there; and the *barbarian kings* themselves tried, with some success, to perpetuate the Roman order (tax collection, public works, maintenance of order etc). If there is a consensus, it is that of a *Moderate Catastrophist*. In retrospect, we can see that things really did change; it didn’t happen all at once, but it was pretty radical. The foundations of a new civilization had to be laid in *barbarism* and backwardness, with only a handful of civilised men to tame and cultivate it. The cities in which a small minority of its people lived were built among (and of) the ruins of what the Romans had left behind; none of them could remotely approach in magnificence Constantinople, Baghdad, or Ch’ang-an. Europe would long be a cultural importer. It took centuries before its architecture could compare with that of the classical past, and, when it emerged, it did so by borrowing the style of Byzantine Italy and Muslim Spain. For just as long, no science, no school in the West could match those of the *Imperial University* of Constantinople and the *House of Wisdom* of Baghdad. Nor could the western Christian Church produce an effective political unity or theoretical justification of power, such as the *eastern empire* and the *caliphate.* For centuries, even the geatest European kings were hardly more than warlords to whom men clung for protection; and in fear of something worse. If the comparison is with Byzantine *empire* or the Islamic *caliphate*, then Europe west of the Elbe was, for centuries after the Roman collapse, an almost insignificant backwater of world history.

In the Germanic migrations of the fifth century lie the origins of the first nations of modern Europe; though, when the *Western Empire* disappeared, the ***barbarian kingdoms*** did not occupy areas that looked much like future states. By the year 500, the Anglo-Saxons were in England, and the Franks controlled northeastern Gaul. The Burgundians were in the Rhône valley, with the Visigoths as their western neighbours. The Ostrogoths were established in Italy, and the Vandals in Africa. There is some debate about how "barbarian" the various Germanic peoples actually were. They had been at the borders of the *empire* for centuries; they often wore Roman military-style clothing, and had picked up Roman habits. Many of them had spent some time in Roman provinces before establishing independent kingdoms; the different sets of Goths, in particular. Almost all the Germanic élites intermarried with Roman families, spoke Latin, and a few were well-educated, cultured men. Most of them were Christians of a sort; the major exceptions were the Franks and Anglo-Saxons. Being Christian, it is true, was not in itself a sign of uniformity. The fourth and fifth centuries were a major period of religious disagreement; Nicaeans versus Arians in the post-Roman west; and Nicaeans versus Monophysites versus Nestorians further east. This Romanisation no doubt made accommodation easier. What happened in province after province is that Roman local élites simply came to terms with their new Germanic masters, entering their courts and offering to help them govern; in as Roman a way as possible, naturally. So, for example, Sidonius Apollinaris, a bishop and a great landowner in southern France, spent time in the court of Theodoric II, king of the Visigoths. His collection of letters are one of our most important sources for fifth century Gaul. They tell us about his dealings with the Visigoths; he found them uncouth, hard to deal with, but not very frightening..

But, however Romanised the Germanic peoples were, society was to be long and irreversibly shaped by a *barbarian* past. The first change is that the Germanic peoples did not call themselves "Roman". In this respect, they were quite unlike the Germanic political actors of the past; men like the Vandal Stilicho or the Visigoth Ricimer, who sought to rule as Romans through *puppet emperors*. No successful Germanic king ever came to see himself as a Roman. Indeed, in long-lasting kingdoms, like the Visigothic Hispania or Frankish Gaul, the reverse happened; Romans began to see themselves as Goths and Franks. The second shift was that the old unity of the west, everything from Hadrian’s Wall to the Sahara, had vanished forever. Even Justinian did not recover the whole Mediterranean, and no-one has since. Separate political systems emerged, with separate political foci; Paris for the early Franks; Toledo for the Visigoths; Pavia for the later Lombards in Italy. All three of these cities had been marginal in Roman times. The third change was the Germanic tradition of kingship; their kings were, above all, warleaders. The office was theoretically hereditary, but blood mattered less than strength. Any new king required the consent of the *thing*, the assembly of freemen, The idea of a very wide legitimising community, meeting publicly, mattered very greatly in all the *barbarian kingdoms*; royal justice, for example, was done "*in the presence of the whole people, in common counsel with us*" (as the Lombard king Liutprand put it). Post-Roman kings may have been at times quite restricted in their practical power. The Germanic peoples put loyalty to their "kin" above all else. If one of your kin was murdered, you were duty bound to avenge this death. Eventually a system of payments evolved, the *weregild* ("man price"), where money would be accepted instead of the life of the murderer, with strictly defined prices according to the status of the victim; you paid more for having murdered a warrior than you would for having murdered a peasant. The *barbarian kingdoms* more and more write down such customs. The *Lex Burgundionum* (c. 500), a particularly early example, was written in Latin, with the assistance of Gallo-Roman jurists and containing much from Roman tradition, but the actual laws were Burgundian; a Germanic spirit inhabiting Roman flesh. Pulling a man’s beard, an insult among Germanic warriors, drew a steep fine; those who deserted a comrade in battle were sentenced to death; a man who wished to transfer property to another had to do so in the presence of the *thing*. The "publishing" of law codes helped to establish the borders of a kingdom, which to this point had been rather amorphous. There can have been no point in imagining devices such as the *Pillars of Ashoka*, since literacy was so rare. Recording for future consultation was the most that could be envisaged. The fourth major change was arguably the most important. A sophisticated financial system had allowed the Roman state to raise significant taxes, which, despite endemic corruption, supported a large regular army; easily the *empire*’s greatest expense, with the civilian bureaucracy a distant second. This meant that money and goods regularly moved north, from rich southern provinces such as North Africa and Egypt, to the northern frontiers where armies were mostly located; as well as to Ravenna and Constantinople, the imperial capitals, and to Rome, which for symbolic reasons, was largely fed by the state. When, however, the *empire* disappeared in the west, tax revenues abruptly ceased to be moved around. Moreover, the new Germanic élites had different priorities from the rebellious Roman soldiers of the past. The latter had mostly wanted higher pay; but their Germanic successors wanted to be landowners, like the provincial élites they now dominated. This very Roman desire had a very un-Roman effect: it became less and less necessary to pay the now landed army. The tax systems could slowly shrivel away. The *barbarian* kings continued to tax as long as they could, it is true; but already when Justinian conquered the Vandal Africa and Ostrogothic Italy, he found that re-establishing taxation was hard and unpopular. In Frankish Gaul, by the time Gregory of Tours was writing in the 580s, the kings can be seen granting tax immunities as a standard political privilege. The kings came to rely on revenues from their royal estates, which were very extensive everywhere, rather than tax receipts. The whole economic basis for political action shifted, from taxation to landowning. One important result of this was that the western provinces became less economically complex. The kings were less rich, even if they had lower expenses. Nor was the aristocracy of the early middle ages anywhere near as rich as the *senatorial* élites of the Roman world. The *pax Romana* had provided safe conditions for trade and manufacture for export; this had gone, which meant that interregional exchange decreased steadily, and in most of the western provinces was restricted to luxury goods by 700 or so. At the same time, since aristocratic demand fuelled much of the exchange inside regions, commerce at all levels decreased almost everywhere. The market for the early medieval trader was the local village or manor house. Their internal economy was based on barter, not money. The *barbarian* kings often minted their own coins, in imitation of Roman and Byzantine forms, but, for a long time, there wasn't much coinage about, especially of small denominations. The weakening of the élites was not all negative, by any means. There is plentiful evidence that landowning peasants with little (or no) dependence on aristocrats were more numerous; and may well have been more prosperous. But they bought few goods, so did not prevent economic simplification. Anyone who wants to argue for continuity between the Roman and the post-Roman world must come to terms with these sharp economic changes.

A highly militarised aristocracy, the politics of land, Christianity, the culture of assembly politics, a simpler economy, a more independent peasantry: all these features marked out the post-Roman kingdoms. Of formal culture, the Germanic peoples brought nothing with them to compare with antiquity. There was no *barbarian* contribution to the civilized intellect. Yet out of this confusion something quite new and immeasurably more creative than Rome would emerge in due course.

### Christian Church

The Christian Church was, in most place, the sole institutional survivor of the *Roman Empire* west of the Elbe. Its bishop had been important in late Antiquity, but it was in the *Early Middle Ages* that they really became major political players. Cathedral churches were rich in land, donated by the faithful, which put any bishop on a par with the Germanic élites as soon as he took office. They not only controlled urban religious life, but, as imperial administration crumbled, they became increasingly accepted as municipal authorities. Socially, they were often drawn from the leading local families; in fact, provincial aristocrats sometimes confirmed their high standing in their communities by becoming bishops. And kings and other royal officials took them seriously as local political leaders; a semi-pagan ruling class looked to bishops with superstitious awe. The new political prominence of bishops was partly because secular urban structures had melted away, and partly because, as a well-organised pressure group, they could make their voice heard in the weaker kingdoms of the post-Roman world better than in the imperial political system that had created them. This was not all. Since bishops were lettered men among a new unlettered élite, they were at least as likely as anyone else to be intellectually equipped to grapple with new problems. Naturally, new tasks were thrust upon them.

The Church and its leaders were at first slow to recognise an opportunity in disaster. They identified themselves with the civilisation which had collapsed, not the one yet to be born. But the end of the classical world saw two new institutions emerge in the western Church, which were to be lifelines in these dangerous rapids. The first was **Christian monasticism**, a phenomenon first appearing in the East. It was about 270 that St. Antony retired to a hermit’s life on the fringes of the Egyptian desert. There had been many ascetics before him, but he has rightly been called the "*Father of Monasticism*", because, as his fame spread, he gathered a group of would-be disciples; indeed, he eventually moved farther into the desert to avoid them. Accounts of the devil's attempt to fight Anthony by afflicting him with temptations were later to prove irresistible to generations of painters. Although the earliest monastics lived as hermits, they were rarely completely isolated; living in proximity to one another. And soon loose-knit communities began to form; for most of the week they maintain their solitary life, but, on Sunday, came together for worship and communal meals. The earliest fully communal monasticism took place in Egypt too. Around 320, St. Pachomius, a hermit living in an abandoned village at Dandara, persuaded his brother to join him, and soon more than a hundred monks were living nearby. Pachomius decided to mold his disciples into a more organized community, with rules for daily life; by his death, there were ten monastic communities, two for women; his disciples called him *Abba* ("father" in Aramaic), from which we get "Abbot". In the next century, this new form of communal spirituality spread first to Palestine and Syria, and then throughout the Roman world. In a crumbling society such as the fifth century western provinces, the monastic ideals of undistracted worship and service to God was attractive to many men and women of character and intellect. Through it they could assure personal salvation. These communities sometimes attracted critics, who hankered for the old Roman ideal of service to the state; nor did churchmen always welcome what they saw as the desertion of the most zealous among their congregations. Yet the institution prospered, and many of the greatest churchmen of the age were monks. Landowners founded communities or endowed existing ones with lands. There were, no doubt, many compromises of principle in grappling with patrons and men of power. One Italian monk found the state of monasticism shocking. This was St. Benedict (d. 547), one of the most influential men in the Church’s history. According to Pope Gregory, who provides us with the only early account of his life, Benedict was the son of an Italian noble, who sent him to Rome to be educated. He dabbled in the less respectable pastimes available to him, but eventually grew so exasperated with the licentious city that he left and became a hermit in a cave in the Apennine Mountains, near the modern town of Subiaco. News of the pious hermit in the wilderness spread, and, several years later, monks in a nearby monastery asked him to come and take charge of their community; since their abbot had just died. Benedict agreed, but the experiment failed. His solitary meditation had given him a vision for monastic life that was regulated, quiet, and productive. The legend goes that the monks, unused to such strict supervision, tried to poison Benedict's drink; but, when he prayed a blessing over the cup, it shattered. Thus, he left and went back to his cave. There, a number of disciples established themselves nearby to be under his guidance. Around 529, he led them up a mountaintop, near the town of Cassino, where an old temple of Apollo had been slowly decaying into ruins. Benedict and his followers began to build in its place a monastery of their own. In this monastery, Monte Cassino, Benedict developed the rules by which his community would live: the *Rule of St. Benedict*. They shifted the focus of the monks from the personal salvation, to the spiritual and material well-being of the community as a whole. The Benedictine way of life was, above all, orderly; each monk was to devote a prescribed number of hours per day to prayer, to sleep, to manual work, to sacred reading, and to works of charity; silence was preferable, since speech so often led to sin; monks were to own nothing, not even books or writing materials; more than half of the *Rule* were about how to be humble and obedient, and what to do when a monk was not; the abbot was to consult the monks over major decisions, but, in the end, his decisions were final. St. Benedict did not set his sights too high and this was one secret of his success; monks were not expected to suffer unduly. Its good sense as a practical basis for communal life was demonstrated by the appearance of Benedictine monasteries everywhere in the West. From the ascetic traditions of Egypt a new weapon in the armoury of the Church was forged. Monks became the key source of missionaries for the *Christianisation* of Europe, the expansion of the *church*, and the furtherance of its mission. Learning had once been prized in Rome; now only the Benedictine monastery were engaged in scholarship and the preservation of classical culture. In the west, only the Irish Church clung to the earlier, ascetic model of the monkish life.

The Church’s other great support was the **Papacy**. In Roman times, the Church had adopted the same organisational structure as the *empire* itself: *dioceses* corresponded to imperial provinces, with the bishop of the provincial capital (*archbishop*) overseeing the entire dioceses. Of these dioceses, the *First Council of Nicaea* recognised five as holding special pre-eminence (*patriarchal sees*): Rome was the one. Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem had been prominent from the time of early Christianity, while Constantinople came to the fore upon becoming the imperial residence in the fourth century. Infighting among the *sees*, and particularly the rivalry between Constantinople and Rome, prevented the "five" from ever becoming a functioning administrative reality. Constantinople's claim was obvious. Since the days of Constantine the Great, the *emperors* had viewed themselves as purposefully Christian monarchs, with an explicit duty to protect the Church and uphold right doctrine. To know whether secular or religious priorities were dictating Byzantine policy is often impossible; was missionary work a branch of imperial diplomacy, or was the salvation of soul part of the *emperor*'s duty? Rome's claim was subtler. The *popes* came to see themselves as the *apostolic* successor to St. Peter, to whom primacy was conferred by Jesus. But in principle, Rome had little else to offer; the western Church was a junior branch, and it was in the east that the closest links with the *Apostolic age* could be asserted. Something more was required for the *papacy* to begin its rise to the splendid pre-eminence which was taken for granted by the medieval world. To begin with there was the city itself. Rome had been seen for centuries as the capital of the world. Its bishops were the business colleagues of *Emperor* and *Senate*, and the departure of the imperial court only left their eminence more obvious. The arrival in Italy of Justinian's tax collectors, whom the Italians disliked as much as they did the Ostrogothic *barbarians*, directed new attention to the *papacy* as the focus of Italian loyalties. It was, importantly, the only *patriarchal see* in the West. Bishops almost everywhere did not necessarily welcome interference by the *patriarchs*. But in a world turned upside-down such as fifth century western Europe, they became more and more willing to accept Rome's claim for primacy. The Western Church was to develop a more rigidly hierarchical structure than ever existed in the East. This was the setting of the papacy’s emergence as a great historical force. Leo the Great (440-461), bishop of Rome, has a claim to be the "first pope". An *emperor*, Valentinian III, declared *papal* decisions to have the force of law, and Leo vigorously asserted the doctrine that the *popes* spoke in the name of St Peter. He assumed the title *pontifex maximus*, discarded by the *emperors*. It was believed that his intervention with Attila had staved off the Hun attack on Italy. Still, though, Leo was a part of the state church of an *empire* whose religion was seen as, above all, the *emperor*’s concern. The *pope* in whom the future medieval papacy is most clearly revealed was **Gregory the Great** (590-604). He was the first monk to become *pope*, thus bringing together the two great institutional innovations of the early Church. A Roman aristocrat, loyal to Byzantium and the *emperor*, he was nevertheless the first *pope* who fully accepted the *barbarian* Europe in which he reigned. During his papacy, the most pressing problems were earthly, not spiritual; the Lombard invasion of Italy had cut Rome off from Ravenna, and thus from Constantinople. This made Pope Gregory, of necessity, a political power. By 593, the Lombard king Agilulf was at the very walls of Rome. Gregory sent messages to Constantinople, warning the *emperor* of his peril and begging for help. But Emperor Maurice had his own hands full with Avar incursions into the Balkans and Persian complications to the east. No imperial troops arrived, so Gregory took matters into his own hands. Not only did he pay the troops at Rome out of church funds, but he had to negotiate with the Lombards; Agilulf ultimately agree to withdraw, in return for five hundred pounds of gold, also from church funds. Gregory had saved Rome, a feat that even more than his spiritual accomplishments earned him the honorific “the Great”, Gregory was finally able to turn away from political matters. He is credited with re-energizing the Church's missionary work among the pagan peoples of northern Europe. His most famous mission was sending a monk named Augustine over the water to England, to take orthodox Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons. He struggled against the Arian heresy (see below), and was delighted by the conversion of Visigothic Hispania to orthodox Christianity; Gaul too was orthodox Christian thanks to Clovis. This realignment of *barbarian* allegiance to Rome in religion shaped medieval Europe. Significantly, Gregory did not read or write Greek; nor did he feel he needed to. Christianity had been a part of the classical Roman heritage, yet it was now becoming something distinct from it.

The fourth and fifth centuries were a major period of religious disagreement, with different parties arguing over the nature of God, and accusing each other of **heresy**; Arians versus Nicaeans, and Monophysites versus Nestorians**.** Although the Roman *emperors* had promoted the unity of orthodox belief (the Nicene Creed) throughout the *empire*, there were a number of movements which questioned the Church's teachings. And despite sporadic persecution, some of these movements remained widespread into the sixth century and beyond. Inevitably, our own secular age finds even the greatest of such quarrels difficult to fathom. The issues which divided orthodoxy and heresy can seem almost meaningless. It requires an effort to recall that behind the exquisite logic-chopping of theologians lay a concern of appalling importance; nothing less than the salvation of mankind. Theological and doctrinal difference could affect world history as powerfully as the movements of armies. One episode provides an outstanding example, the debate on **Arianism**. Arius (d. 336), a priest in Alexandria, taught that if one believed that God created everything, then at one time, he must have created Christ. Indeed, the very term "*the Father and the Son*" implied that Christ was subordinate to God. The bishop of Alexandria excommunicated his troublesome priest, an act which provoked rioting, and thus moved Emperor Constantine to convene the *First Council of Nicaea* (325). The schism opened by Arius seemed to be firmly closed, when the *Council* announced that that God and Christ were identical in essence and that Christ was a manifestation of God himself on earth. During the lifetime of those who gathered at Nicaea, Arianism remained a controversial issue; Arius himself was exiled, and then brought back again. Finally in 381, a new generation of bishops and a new *emperor*, Theodosius, conclusively condemned Arianism as heresy. And there the matter would seem to have ended. But it transpired that Arianism, like an irrepressible virus, had already spread elsewhere. The carrier was a remarkable Christian missionary named Ulfilas (d. 383), who invented a Gothic alphabet, and used it to translate the Bible into the Gothic language. Ulfilas was a zealously Arian Christian. The Arian faith eventually became something of a national creed for the Germanic peoples, a marker of their standing as outsiders to orthodoxy and imperial power. It was adopted, from the Goths, by the Vandals, and Burgundians, among many others. And with the Germanic migrations and upheavals of the fifth century, Arianism spread westward. At various times in the fifth and sixth century, Italy, Hispania, North Africa, and much of Gaul were largely Arian. The heresy was eliminated in most of these areas by the late sixth century. This trend began with the Franks in 496, then the Burgundians in 516, the Visigoths in 587, and the Lombards between 653 and 671. However, among those who were orthodox in their adherence to the Nicene Creed, a new division arose: given that Christ was God and he was a man, exactly how did these two natures exist in one person. There were two schools of thought. The first held that the two natures had become mystically one, united in the person of Christ in a way impossible to tease out by reason; this became known as **Nestorianism**, after Nestorius (d. 451), a *patriarch* of Constantinople and its most ardent supporter. The second, more radical school held that in Christ the human nature was completely absorbed by the divine, leaving only a divine nature; **Monophysitism**. The delicious subtleties of the long debates which these views provoked must, perhaps regrettably, be bypassed here. The theology of such deviants mattered less than the fact that they became increasingly identified with important cultural groups; Nestorian Syrians and Monophysite Egyptians. Attempts by Constantinople to produce a compromise formula and to reconcile with their large heretical minority provoked many of the early quarrels with Rome, which ultimately ended in the Great Schism of 1054, the tragic sundering of Christendom into the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths. On the other hand, harrying heretics did nothing to renew the loyalty of these provinces to the Byzantine Empire; and contributed to the ease with which the armies of Islam conquered them in the seventh century.

### Post-Roman British Isles

What is remarkable about the four centuries of Roman rule in Britain is what little permanent impact it had on the island. Romano-British civilization disappeared more completely than its equivalents anywhere else in the western empire. Even the language was to go, replaced almost completely by a Germanic tongue. Of administrative or cultural continuity between the imperial province and the *barbarian kingdoms* there is virtually no trace. Christianity, whatever it may have been, retreated for a time to the misty fastnesses, where there brooded the monks of the *Celtic Church*; it was another Rome which was to convert the English. The imperial heritage of the future England was purely physical. It lay in the ruins of abandoned towns and rural villas, or the occasional great constructions like Hadrian’s Wall, which were to puzzle newcomers until they came, at last, to be believed the work of bygone giants. Some of these relics, like the complex of thermal baths at Bath, disappeared from sight for hundreds of years, until rediscovered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The roads remained, sometimes serving for centuries as trade routes, even when their engineering had succumbed to time, weather, and pillage. Britain had fallen into what can rightly be called the *Dark Ages*, for no written records have survived. The ninth century histories, by monastics such as Bede and Gildas, are too simplistic, too moralistic, to be quite true. A Roman general-turned-warlord named Vortigern, may well have invited two Saxon brothers named Hengest and Horsa, from the distant North Sea coast (just west of modern Denmark), to join the remaining Romano-British soldiers in their fight against the northern Picts and Irish seaborne raiders (the Scoti). But it is much more likely that Saxons were settling on the southeastern coast as *foederati* (mercenaries), well before Constantine III abandoned the island to its inhabitants in 407; who then turned against their master because the all-important supply of money ran out. The Saxon, once established in the green land of Sussex, had ambitions to spread farther. Soon, wave after wave of their countrymen, along with Angles and Jutes (allies who lived on the Danish peninsula just north of them), were arriving in new shiploads. Destruction reigned. The nature of the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain is still a matter for fierce debate. Was it a rapid, violent invasion, resulting in the extermination of the native peoples, enslavement or forced migration towards the west? So suggests the celebrated last message of the Britons to Aetius, *magister militum* in Gaul. Such a view is broadly supported by linguistic evidence; vanishingly few Old English words of Latin or Brittonic origin. Or was it a less traumatic process, involving inter-marriage and voluntary cultural emulation by the native majority? Well, maybe. But no one knows. The question is further complicated because of its relation to various foundation myths of the future English nation; the Victorian theory that it was "*in the free forests of Germany, beyond the Roman frontier, that the infant genius of our liberty was nursed*". Even if the Germanic war-bands did not displace the existing population, they certainly killed or drove out the Romanized élites. The discovery of the *Mildenhall Treasure* - a magnificent collection of fine Roman silver and pewter tableware - shows that one villa owner did what many of his fellows did; buried his heavy valuables and took to flight, first to the hills of the west country, and then across the Channel to a new home in what became Brittany. It is hard luck for the Romano-Britons that they cannot speak for themselves; later Anglo-Saxon historians are our sole guide, along with Celtic myths around the shadowy figure of "*the last Roman*", Ambrosius Aurelianus, and his even more shadowy successor, King Arthur. There may well have been a great victory at Mount Badon, which stemmed the German advance into the south-west for a time, but, twenty-six years years later, the "*saviour of Britain*" was mortally wounded in battle at Camlann; and the hand that killed Aurelianus/Arthur was British, not Saxon. In the middle of the sixth century, to be "British" meant to be not Saxon, and independent warlords were jealous of their power, no matter who threatened it. By then, the invading Anglo-Saxons were firmly established in what now became known as "Angle-land". The Angles also gave their name to East Anglia. Another group of Angles moved inland to create a kingdom in the Midlands called Mercia. The name is an Old English word for "boundary folk", suggesting that the kingdom originated along the frontier between the native Welsh and the German invaders. Meanwhile, the Saxons had established a string of kingdoms that evolved into English counties: the South Saxons (or Sussex), the East Saxons (or Essex), and the Middle Saxons (or Middlesex). The largest of these Saxon kingdoms was the West Saxons (or Wessex); too large, in fact, to be remembered as a modern-day county. Yet another Saxon kingdom was established north of the Humber, unimaginatively named Northumberland (which stretched well into modern-day Scotland). Finally, the oft-forgotten Jutes, the smallest of the three tribes, remained in Kent and colonized the Isle of White; a triumph that failed to impress historians. The relative fortunes of these kingdoms ebbed and flowed, but, for the next couple of centuries, there were roughly seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, which we call the Heptarchy, fringed by a Celtic world consisting of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall.

The western island of **Ireland**, never occupied by Roman legions or criss-crossed with Roman roads, was taking its own winding path towards nationhood. Like the Germanic peoples, the Irish were a collection of tribes and clans, each boasting a certain local power and led by a warleader and his family. But even without Roman conquest, the Irish tribes were not free from Roman influence. In the middle of the fifth century, the strongest tribe was the Féni, and its strongest clan was the Connachta, led by Niall of the Nine Hostages; his mother was a Roman woman, who had been captured in a raid on Britannia. The Irish chronicles, most of which come from centuries later, weave his exploits into legend, and combine them with the accomplishments of other Irish kings, make it difficult to sift out exactly what Niall accomplished. In the tale, Niall’s brothers (all legitimate sons, unlike him) acclaim him as clan leader of their own free will. But Niall’s rise to power, first of his clan and then to the kingship of the Féni tribe, was undoubtedly accompanied with violence, force, and bloodshed. Over the decades of his reign, Niall earned his nickname by expanding his power over the nine powerful kingdoms that lay around him; taking hostages to guarantee the loyalty of their kings. With Ireland more or less united under his rule, the first *High King* launched raids on the coasts of Britain. During one such raid, he captured a Romanized Briton named Patrick (or Patricius), and took him back to Ireland, where he was sold into slavery in Antrim. This serious young man spent six bleak years herding sheep on Slemish, during which he turned more and more to his Christian faith for comfort. Upon dreaming that the ship in which he was to escape was ready, he fled his pagan master and somehow found passage back to Britain. The best known passage in his *Confession* tells of another visionary dream, in which the "Voice of the Irish" beseeched him to return, and teach them of Christ. Because of the shortcomings in his education, Patrick was reluctant for a long time to respond to the call. He left his family, over their protests, and travelled to Gaul where, after years of study, he received priestly orders at Auxerre. By the time Patrick arrived back at the *High King*’s court, Niall of the Nine Hostages had died, and his sons were battling over the kingdom. While internecine warfare raged around him, Patrick devoted himself to the spread of Christianity, so successfully that Ireland became Christian long before the British island. Later Christian historians knew him as Saint Patrick, the *apostle to the Irish*, and credited him with driving the snakes out of Ireland. In fact, there had been no snakes in Ireland since the end of the Ice Age; for Christian writers snakes (which were associated with the druids, the practitioners of the indigenous religion of the British Isles) symbolized the new faith supplanting the old. By the time of Patrick’s death, sometime around 492, three sons of Niall held power over three kingdoms in the northern half of the island: Midhe (roughy modern Meath), where the royal city of Tara lay; Ulaidh (or Ulster); and Connachta (or Connacht), the original homeland of the clan. Their descendents would rule as separate Ui Neill dynasty for six hundred years. Niall had not conquered the whole island. The Eoghanach tribe of Munster (in the south-west) had resisted the spread of Fenian power. To the east, the Laighin tribe of Leinster held onto most of its land as well; though some clans left, in the face of ongoing attacks from Niall’s descendents, and established the kingdom of Dyfed in the area that became Wales. Saint Patrick seems to have established a church along continental lines, with *parishes* grouped together in *dioceses* overseen by bishops, and with boundaries similar to those of Irish clans of the time. Fairly soon, however, it began to take a distinctive form, which we call the *Celtic Church*. For a century or so, the Germanic conquests of Britain and Gaul cut them off, from the continental Church and the *Papacy*. In isolation, they developed a set of traditions and practices that were not seen in the wider Christian world. The division of Ireland into provincial kingdoms and local clans led to bishops being numerous, each of them overseeing a clan or two with spiritual functions only. On the other hand, local chiefs vied with one another to be patrons of monasteries, and their founders, like St. Finian at Clonard or St. Ciarán at Clonmacnoise, became revered figures for centuries to come. The true ecclesiastical power in the *Celtic Church* lay in the hands of abbots, rather than bishops. Irish monasteries became famous centres of scholarship. Even though Ireland had never been a Roman province and Latin was for everyone there a foreign language, Irish monks played a pivotal role in preserving and celebrating the culture of the classical world. Because of their sanctity and security, they also became the nearest equivalent Ireland had to large towns; the markets, the arts and crafts centres of Ireland. The achievements of early Christian Ireland in illuminated manuscripts like the *Book of Kells*, in metalwork like the *Ardagh Chalice*, and the many carved high carved stone crosses that still dot the island today, had a profound influence on Western medieval art. Many Irish monks, however, were determined to remove themselves from worldly temptation. They joined remote communities on mountainsides and on sea islands, though none were perhaps as desolate as the cluster of hermit cells on Skellig Michael (a barren islet, seven-miles off the coast of Kerry). In the *Celtic Church*, a distinctive form of penance developed, where confession was made privately, under the seal of secrecy, and where penance was ordinarily performed privately as well. In antiquity, penance had been a public ritual. The Irish practice would spread throughout the continent, and eventually became the norm. A final distinctive tradition was the popularity of *peregrinatio* ("*exile for Christ*"), referring to leaving Ireland to spend one's life far from friends and family. Most of them were seeking solitude and personal spiritual fulfilment, Some simply put out to sea, which is how the Irish came to be the first humans to set foot in Iceland. But other *peregrini* or exiles became involved in missionary endeavours. Pre-eminent among these is St Columba (d. 597), responsible for taking the faith to Scotland.

### Post-Roman Gaul

The fate of the Roman heritage across the English Channel was quite different, as the persistence, if not the predominance, of Latin elements in language suggests. After its devastation by Attila the Hun, the growing frailty of a western imperial government created a power vacuum in **Gaul**. It was filled at first by the Visigoths of Aquitaine, whose share in repelling the Huns gave them greater importance than ever; the Visigothic Kingdom (418-720). Their king Euric (466-484), the third son of Theodoric I to obtain the throne, took up the Visigothic flag, and started storming around land that had once been Roman with it. By his death, he ruled a kingdom that stretched from the Loire River almost all the way across Hispania. The Burgundians, who had settled in the Upper Rhine valley as *foederati* (mercenaries), followed suit, moving their capital to Lyons and taking possession of what is now Burgundy and Auvergne. Gaul suffered badly from these developments. Communities near the Rhine were destroyed by war. Refugees fled south to Roman territory, only to find themselves burdened by crippling taxation and administrative corruption. As is evident from the writings of Bishop Sidonius Apollinaris of Clermont (d. 490), however, the economic power and with it the lifestyle of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy remained remarkably resilient. Thus, at least in the centre and south of the country, the Roman cultural legacy was bequeathed intact to the successor-kingdoms. Nature abhors a vacuum; sooner or later one state becomes stronger than the rest and ultimately achieves domination. This time it was the Franks.

    The **Franks** were among the least Romanised of the Germanic groups that conquered a slice of the Roman world in the fifth century. Unlike the Visigoths and Burgundians, they had not been converted to Christianity, not even the Arian heresy; in part because of this the future was to belong to them. The Franks took over the Lower Rhine (what is now Belgium), a region that had suffered particularly from the troubles of the previous century. And they were not by any means a unified people at first, and, up to the late fifth century, there were many petty Frankish kingdoms, scattered throughout north-eastern Gaul on both sides of the Rhine. The best known group, the Salian Franks, moved west and settled in and around the city of Tournai. They were sometimes referred to as "*long-haired Franks*", because their kings wore their hair long to distinguish them from the ordinary Franks; which became a symbol of their right to rule. Under their Childeric (458-481), son of the part-legendary Merovech, the Salians came to dominate the others. It remain vague whether Childeric's father was the unnamed Frankish chief said to have fought against the Huns in 451 or a mythical sea creature. Childeric spent most of his reign fighting against neighbouring kings, against renegade Roman warlords, against Odovacer of Italy, against Alemanni invaders to the east, and against Saxon pirates. When he died, he was merely chief of the Salians, despite styling himself “*King of the Franks*”. But he was succeeded by his fifteen-year-old son, **Clovis I** (481-511). At twenty, Clovis attacked and defeated Soissons, the last Roman rump-state in northern Gaul, and folded its land into his own; effectively putting an end to all western Roman authority outside Italy. This was the first major victory of his reign. Over the next ten years, he took land from the nearby Thuringii, Burgundians, and Alemanni, and his knack for leading the Franks to victory earned him greater and greater authority over the other Frankish rulers. Clovis made alliances by marriage as well, contracting a diplomatic match between himself and the daughter of the Burgundian king. This princess, Clotild, was an orthodox Christian, despite the Arianism of her father's court. The Frankish historian Gregory of Tours tells us that she began to evangelize her husband, which he initially resisted. But in 496, Clovis found it politic to agree with his wife. According to Gregory, he is on the battlefield, fighting a losing battle against the Alemanni, when he raises his eyes to heaven. “*Jesus Christ,*” he prays, “*if you will give me victory over my enemies, I will believe in you. I have called upon my own gods, but, as I see only too clearly, they have no intention of helping me*”. At once the Alemanni break their ranks and surrender. Clovis returns home a Christian, and he and Clotild summon the bishop of Reims, who baptizes him on Christmas Day 496. For Gregory, Clovis is the Frankish Constantine. And he was indeed following Constantine’s lead. The Franks were a confederacy, not a nation: they were held together by custom, by geography, and by necessity. They had lived within Roman boundaries for over a century, but did not enjoy the support of the Gallo-Roman population. Like Constantine, Clovis saw that a stronger bond was needed to hold his people together; and to allow him to claim the right of kingship over them all. Christianity would serve as the new glue of the Frankish nation. Gregory insists on Clovis’s sincerity: “*He stepped forward to the baptismal pool, ready to wash away the sordid stains which he had borne so long*”. And then he adds, “*More than three thousand of his army were baptized at the same time*”. The mass conversion of the army was the necessary and politic counterpoint to Clovis’s own redemption: the Christian royal family and the Christianized army would be the attractive core of a newly united Christian nation of Franks. The benefits of conversion were not long in coming. By 507, Clovis was confident enough to launch a concentrated attack on the heretical Arian Visigoths of Aquitaine. Reinforced by soldiers lent by his father-in-law, the Burgundian king, Clovis marched towards the Visigothic frontier on the Loire. The two armies met at the Battle of Vouille (507), near Poitiers. The Visigoth king Alaric II was slain, and the Visigoth army scattered. The Franks then stormed southward, capturing the Visigothic capital at Toulouse itself; and the remnants of the Visigothic court fled into Hispania, with Alaric II’s five-year-old son Amalaric (522-531) in tow. This brought the armies of Ostrogothic Italy into the fight. The daughter of Theoderic the Great had been married to Alaric II, so that Theodoric now became a sort of regent for boy-king Amalaric; forming a brief Gothic superstate. Ostrogothic armies arrived at the head of the Rhône river in 508, and forced Clovis to withdraw from the little patch of Gaulish land known as Septimania (now Languedoc), right on the coast. But this was a small victory. It kept Clovis from establishing himself on the Mediterranean coast, but Toulouse remained in Frankish hands. Following his victorious campaign, Clovis received a letter from Constantinople. Emperor Anastasius had granted his fellow Christian monarch the status of a Roman *patrician* (aristocrat) and an honorary *consulship*, as a shining light in the *barbarian west*. Clovis misinterpreted the gesture. He named himself “*Augustus, Consul of the West*”, and donned a purple tunic and diadem. This is undoubtedly not what the *eastern emperor* had in mind, but he did not object: Clovis was far away; his power would check Theoderic of Italy, who was a much greater problem; and there was no harm in letting him wear a purple cloak in the shabby little city of Tournai. Clovis did not remain in Tournai. He had killed off the Frankish chiefs, one at a time, who might challenge him for sole power; frequently by cold-blooded assassination. Now that he was the first king of all the Franks, the first Christian king of the Franks, he needed a new capital city. He settled on the old Roman town *Lutetia Parisiorum* (Paris), on the Seine, and began to reinforce its walls. From 509 until his death, Clovis ruled from his new capital, where he issued a set of laws for his domain. The *Salic Law* was written in Latin to reflect Salian Frank custom and Christianity; the laws were very specific in forbidding the old Germanic traditions of blood revenge. His descendents, taking their name from Clovis' grandfather Merovech, would occupy the throne for the next two two hundred and fifty years as the Merovingian Dynasty (481-751); the first royal dynasty of what would become France.

When Clovis died, his kingdom was left jointly to his four sons. His realm was filled with independent-minded Franks, who still cherished the old Germanic ideal of kingship: that they had the right to choose their king. They would have resented any attempt to leave the realm to a single designated heir. Instead, Clovis had left rule to his "clan", which was a much more familiar idea; the Franks were already accustomed to the leadership of the Salians over the others. Each of the four sons chose a different city to set up his court; the oldest son, Theuderic (d. 534), went to Reims; Chlodomer (d. 524) claimed Orleans; Childebert (d. 558) stayed in Paris; and the youngest son, Chlothar (d. 558), took Soissons as his capital. In 524, the first crack appeared in this arrangement. When Chlodomer was killed on a campaign against the Burgundians, his three siblings together captured Orleans, and killed the dead brother’s sons, before they could lay claim to their father’s portion of the crown. The four kings had become three. By 558, illness and murder had left the last surviving son, Chlothar, ruling, like his father, as king of all the Franks. This second unification lasted only three years. In 561, Chlothar died, and his realm was divided, in a replay of the events of fifty years earliest, between his four sons. The old ideals of the Frankish warrior-chief survived; Chlothar had won his crown by outlasting, outwitting, and outfighting his brothers, and his own sons would have to earn the high kingship of the Franks, not merely inherit it. The four brothers realized that they were in competition from day one, and behaved accordingly. When one brother died in 567, the three remaining kings seized his territory, and the Frankish kingdom assumed a three-way division that would dictate its politics for the next century. The north-eastern territory, ruled by Sigebert (d. 575), was known as Austrasia; its capital was originally Reims, though Sigebert moved his seat to Metz, nearer the border to guard against the marauding Avars. Guntram (d. 592 ) ruled over Burgundy to the south-east, which had been folded into the Frankish realm some years before. And Chilperic (d. 584) controlled the western Frankish lands, a territory known as Neustria, which contained the city of Paris. Chilperic of Neustria and Sigebert of Austrasia were always enemies, but Guntram of Burgundy, with a smaller and weaker territory, changed allegiances back and forth, depending on who seemed less likely to try and kill him. The Frankish kingdom had become three independent, essentially hostile realms.

### Post-Roman Hispania

To the west, Clovis had driven the Visigoths almost entirely into **Hispania**, where their court was eventually re-established at Toledo. Because the Germanic Suevi maintained an independent kingdom in Galicia, and the native Basques steadfastly opposed all attempts at subjugation, the Visigoths did not control the entire peninsula. Nor did the Hispano-Roman population easily absorb the Arian Visigoths; and there were not so very many of them, some two-hundred-thousand at most. To the great satisfaction of many, Byzantine authority was restored by Justinian along the coast of southern Spain in the mid sixth century; the province of Spania (552–624). However, the most effective of the Visigothic kings, Liuvigild (569-86), advanced the unification of the peninsula by conquering the Suevi, subduing the Basques, and began to drive Byzantines out of the lands they held. Though constantly at war, Liuvigild adopted Byzantine administration, and the pomp and ceremony of its kingship; the throne, diadem, purple tunic, and he struck coins in his own name. A committed Arian Christian, Leovigild sought to unify the kingdom by modifying the old law code (*Code of Euric*) to eliminate the legal distinction between Visigoths and Hispano-Romans; for example, inter-marriage had once been punishable by death. Leovigild’s policy of uniting the people would be taken to its logical conclusion by his son Reccared (586-601). Arianism had been a marker of their Germanic blood, a leftover of the days when they were outsiders both to orthodoxy and to political power. Reccared became the first orthodox Christian king of Visigoths, moving the Spanish kingdom closer to the political mainstream. As the Gothic nobles and bishops followed his lead, a principal obstacle to the assimilation of Visigoths and Hispano-Romans was lifted. Thereafter, the Romanized population, no longer expecting deliverance from Byzantium, developed a firm allegiance to the Visigothic monarchy. As a consequence, Swinthila (621–631) was able to complete the conquest of Byzantine Spania, and extend Visigothic authority throughout the peninsula. Religious unification strengthened the political power of the church, which it exercised through *Councils of Toledo*, along with the nobles. Because the Visigoths had a reputation for assassinating their kings, the bishops tried to safeguard the ruler by declaring their person sacrosanct, regulating the process of succession, and deciding to meet on a regular basis. Despite all this, coups continued to take place. Toward the end of the seventh century, a critical time in Visigothic history began.

### Byzantine Empire (457-518 AD)

It turned out that the collapse of Roman administration in the west left the eastern half of the empire with nearly a thousand years of life before it. Its inhabitants went on calling themselves "Romans", and their own eastern neighbours called them that, while people in the west came to call them "Greeks"; historians call them the ***Byzantine Empire*** (330-1453). The terms "Byzantine" is somewhat problematic. It was coined by western scholars about a century after the Ottoman conquest. They were proud of their own cultural heritage from, what they perceived as, the authentic and classical Roman Empire, and wanted to differentiate that from its eastern and Orthodox Christian derivation. The term eventually picked up a derogatory use, finally coming to mean "complicated", "effeminate", or "treacherous" in general. As one historian puts it, "*the term was invented in order to cut the Eastern Roman Empire out of history, and create a cleaner narrative of the rise of the West, in which Western Europeans rediscovered the glories and rationality of antiquity, on their way to Enlightenment and a Roman-like domination of the world*". Some people have argued unconvincingly that a "Roman" empire that did not include the city of Rome itself is an absurdity; but Rome had not been the political centre of the empire since at least Diocletian in the late third century. Some have argued that Byzantium was Greek, rather than Latin-speaking; but the classical empire had always been bilingual; Latin was the language of the army and administration, while Greek the language of learning and culture. Others highlight institutional and cultural changes so profound in their cumulative effect that the *empire* differed markedly from its earlier forms; but the continuation, succession, and reinvention of the Roman Empire is a running theme of its history; the Rome that went into the Punic Wars, or Augustus' reign, or the Crisis of the 3rd-Century, or Constantine's reign, was not the same Rome that came out, but it was still Rome. At the end of the day, it is a futile gesture not to use terms like "Byzantine" or "Byzantium", but we should always remember that, when Constantinople finally fell in 1453, it truly was the end of two millennia of continuous Roman history.

The eastern half of the *empire* had not been indifferent to the last years of the western provinces. But the court at Constantinople was preoccupied with its own difficulties; Germanic generals dominated them too. In 457, the *eastern emperor* Marcian died at the age of sixty-five; his wife had died four years earlier. The Theodosian dynasty that had ruled in Constantinople since 379 had ended. With no blood heir available, the army had the greatest say in who would become *emperor* next. Their commanding general would normally have been a leading candidate, but, in 457, the army was commanded by a man of Germanic descent: Aspar (d. 471), of Alanic origins. The *eastern empire* still clung to its old suspicion of *barbarian* blood: Aspar could no more become *emperor* of the eastern realm than the Vandal Stilicho or the Visigoth Ricimer could have become *emperor* in the west. Instead, Aspar chose an obscure member of his military staff, **Leo I** (457-474), to be his *puppet emperor*. Aspar had misjudged Leo however. Far from a willing pawn, he had created a dangerous rival for power. Aspar had the loyalty of the army, so, in order to reduce his influence, Leo forged an alliance with another influential group within the army; the Isaurians, a mountain people of central Anatolia (modern-day Asiatic Turkey). The Isaurians had been under Roman rule for five hundred years, but they had remained barbarous warlike folk, carrying on their own affairs almost independently on the slopes of the Taurus Mountains. Nonetheless, they were, thanks to the centuries since their incorporation, undisputably "Roman". Leo, who had no sons, made a match between his daughter Ariadne, and the Isaurian leader Zeno (d. 491). A feud between Aspar and Zeno simmered throughout the late 460s. It appears that Aspar was responsible for an army mutiny in Thrace in 469, that forced Zeno to flee for his life; it was actually Aspar's son Ardabur who was directly implicated in the plot. This event proved the last straw for Leo; he summoned Aspar to the palace, where had him all killed by the palace guard. A subsequent purge led to the end of the Germanic domination of Byzantine military policy. Three years later, the elderly *emperor* died, and was succeeded by his daughter's six-year-old son, Leo II, with his father Zeno as regent. The child ruled for ten months, rubber-stamping his father’s coronation as co-emperor, and then dying. This left **Zeno the Isaurian** (474-491) on the throne of the *Eastern Roman Empire*. A string of domestic revolts plagued his reign, partly due to his Isaurian origins; though financial difficulties resulting from a disastrous Vandal expedition of 468 did not help. Zeno was immediately faced by the conspiracy of Leo's widow Verina and her brother Basiliscus. Zeno was forced to flee from Constantinople, and Basiliscus crowned himself *emperor*. However, since Zeno had managed to take the imperial treasury, Basiliscus was forced to levy heavy taxes, and quickly became very unpopular. Meanwhile, Zeno had gone home and assembled an Isaurian army, which he marched back into the capital eighteen months later. The financially strapped population greeted him with relief. Firmly back in power by 476, Zeno watched from the east as Odoacer, the Germanic general, deposed the last *western emperor*. Hoping to secure his position, Odoacer asked Zeno to dissolve the separation of the *empire* and rule as sole *emperor*; all he asked was to be recognised as *patrician* (not king but governor) of Italy. Zeno was uncomfortable with this arrangement, since it had been presented as a *fait accompli*, But, with his own position so precarious, he accepted the offer for the time being. Odovacer, having obtained a measure of legitimacy, went on to completely ignore Zeno and do exactly as he pleased. In 477, he conquered Sicily, which had been in the hands of the Vandals; the great Vandal king Geiseric had died, and the Vandal Kingdom rapidly declined in power without his leadership. Odovacer went on to make treaties, just like an independent king, with the Visigoths and the Franks. By 488, Zeno was seriously worried about his would-be governor's growing ambition. And he had another western problem to solve, the Ostrogoths.

The **Ostrogoths** have as yet intruded less than the Visigoths upon Roman history. In their territory, north of the Black Sea, they had been subdued by the Huns. But after Attila's death and the collapse of Hunnic power, the Ostrogoths pressed down across the Danube into the Balkans, where they became a constant source of trouble; alternating between supporting the *emperor*, and aiding his enemies, to extract more money, land, and titles. In 486, the Ostrogoths revolted once again, and began moving east towards Constantinople itself. They were led by Theodoric, better known as **Theodoric the Great** (475-526). He had spent his formative years in Constantinople, a hostage guaranteeing his father's good behaviour, where he received an excellent Roman education, and an understanding of Roman politics and ways. Zeno now decided to solve his two problems at the same time; he offered to recognise Theodoric as ruler of Italy, if he would go west, and get rid of Odovacer. Theodoric agreed and marched towards northern Italy at the head of as many as a hundred thousand people. When he arrived, Odovacer tried to resist the invaders on the plain of Verona, but Theodoric defeated him. Afterwards, Odoacer retreated to Ravenna, where he withstood a siege of three years. Theoderic found the siege frustrating; Odovacer was able to resupply the city by sea, and Theoderic, with no fleet, couldn’t stop him. Finally, in 491, the two men agreed to a compromise, signing a treaty making them co-rulers of Italy. Two years later, however, Theodoric invited Odoacer to a banquet. There, he killed his guest with his own hands; according to a contemporary account, he hewed the man in two with one huge blow, "*boasting that his suspicions were at last confirmed; Odovacer had no backbone*". Theodoric's reign in Italy began with treachery, but that proved untypical of the Ostrogothic king. By all accounts, he ruled Italy wisely and well for thirty-three years, bringing a welcome period of calm to turbulent peninsula; the **Ostrogothic Kingdom** (493-540). Theodoric scrupulously observed his earlier agreement with Zeno, to be his governor and head of the army (*magister militum*) in Italy. Although coins carried his own monogram, the only portrait they bore was that of the *emperor*. Most of the civil administration and scholarly culture of Italy were preserved during his rule, and staffed exclusively by Romans. Indeed, one of Theodoric's Roman officials, Boethius (d. 524 AD), has a strong claim to be the most important single thinker of the 6th century. It is largely through his treatises and commentaries that the legacy of the classical world passed to medieval Europe; Plato and Aristotle were unknown except for his Latin translations. While Romans held civil offices, military posts were held almost exclusively by Goths. The arrangement suits everyone, even the Christian Church. Although Theodoric and his Goths were of the Arian (non-orthodox) faith, he took pains to cultivate religious tolerance, and made no attempt to interfere in Church affairs. Indeed, when there were two rival claimants to the papacy in 498, both factions agreed to allow Theodoric to arbitrate. Nevertheless, the rule of a *barbarian* and Arian king in the symbolic heart of the empire was unacceptable in the longer term. The inadequacy of Theodoric's immediate successors eventually prompted the Byzantine conquest of Italy by Emperor Justinian.

Emperor Zeno died in 491, having finally freed the empire (or, at least, that part of it still controlled from Constantinople) of the Ostrogoths. The only major problem that he had failed to solve was the religious one; the Monophysite heresy continued to gain ground in Egypt and Syria. In 482, Zeno and Patriarch Acacius together had sought to paper over the different views about the nature of Christ by avoiding the word "nature" altogether. Known as the *Henotikon* (or "instrument of union"). It had only aroused the hostility of both sides. Most outraged of all was Pope Felix III, who had actually excommunicated the Patriarch of Constantinople; the *legate* who carried the sentence, lacking enough courageous to pronounce it, pinned the parchment to the back of Acacius' cope during a service in the Hagia Sophia. Acacius, discovering it, instantly excommunicated the pope back, thereby confirming an open schism between the eastern and western churches that was to last for the next thirty-five years. The *Acacian Schism* has been described as, "*the first time, West lines up against East in a clear-cut fashion*"; an early step towards the East-West Schism of 1054. Zeno's only son had predeceased him, and the choice of his successor fell on his widow Ariadne; the daughter of dead Emperor Leo. Ariadne chose a favoured member of the Imperial court, **Anastasius** (491-518), who she soon married. One of his first acts was to expel all Isaurians, who had shown a tendency to rebel, from the capital, and later resettle them in Thrace, where new peoples were threatening to overflow the Danube; the Avars, the Slavs, and the Bulgars. The Isaurians had been used to beat the Germans, and now their own dizzy rise to power ended. In his foreign policy, Anastasius was less successful. After a long period of peace, he provoked the war with Sassanid Persia in 502, by refusing to share the cost of defending the Caucasian Gates, a narrow pass through the mountains used by northern nomadic tribes to raid both Persia and Byzantium; previously the Byzantine's had paid the sum voluntarily. Kavadh (488–496), the Persian king at the time, had infused his empire with a new vigour; sometimes called the *Second Sassanid Golden Age* (498-622). His armies sacked the Roman half of Armenia, and took the border city of Amida after an eighty days siege. Kavadh may well have followed up these triumphs had he not found himself dealing with another enemy; an invasion of his eastern border by the Hephthalites (or Hunas), the same people who had caused trouble for the Guptas of India. Although fighting on two fronts, the Persians continued to gain a little more than they lost, until a peace was concluded in 506. Not much had been accomplished, except that the Byzantines did agreed to some payments to the Persian king. Tensions remained, however, and prompted the building a great fortified city at Dara, in the immediate vicinity of the Persian frontier. Anastasius' reign is most noteworthy for his economic reforms. The Roman monetary system had suffered a partial collapse in the Crisis of the 3rd-Century. Sunsequent reforms by Diocletian and then Constantine had reintroduced a stable gold coin, the *solidus*, but this only really helped the very rich; the middle-class had been left to the ravages of inflation. Anastasius perfected the system by reviving the copper coinage, the *follis*, and its fractions*;* the coin used in most everyday transactions. This changes seemed to work well; Roman merchants slowly began to prosper once again. Meanwhile, Anastasius was able to eliminate the practice of paying taxes in kind rather than hard currency. This reduced the need for the transportation and storage of goods, and allowed for easier accounting and helped minimise corruption. Taxpayers seem to have had smaller tax bills, while government revenue increased. This increase, in turn, allowed the *emperor* to pay soldiers a higher wage, which attracted native Romans back into military servive. Anastasius' sunsequent campaign against unnecessary government expenditure was to leave the imperial treasury richer by 320,000 pounds of gold; which allowed his successors to pursue more ambitious policies, most notably Justinian. Some time before his death, the childless Anastasius became consumed by indecision over which of his three nephews should succeed him; or so the legend goes. So he invited all three to dinner, and put a message under one of three couches; whichever nephew chose that couch would be his heir. Alas, two of the young men chose to share a couch; the marked one remained empty. After fervent prayers for a sign, Anastasius determined that the next *emperor* would be the first person to enter his bedchamber the next morning; that person turned out to be Justin, commander of the palace guard.

### Byzantines under Justinian (518-565 AD)

**Justin I** (518-527) was born of peasant stock in Illyria, an area which had suffered severely from *barbarian* incursions. As a youth, he and a few companions set out for Constantinople, with nothing more than the ragged clothes on their backs and a sack of bread between them, to escape the grinding poverty of their homeland. These young Thracians were enrolled in the newly formed palace guard, the *excubitors*; created by Emperor Leo to replace the old German dominated guard. Justin was evidently a competent soldier who rose through the ranks, and in 518, when Emperor Anastasius died, he was commander of the *excubitors,* the only effective troops in the palace. The death took place at night and Justin was among the first to hear the news, which allowed him to outmanoeuvre his rivals, and secure the throne. The new *emperor* was scarcely of imperial calibre. He seems, however, to have possessed plenty of self-confidence, and not a little peasant cunning. He was also uncompromisingly orthodox Christian, in contrast to his predecessor's Monophysite leanings. which facilitated the ending of the *Acacian Schism* with Rome. But Justin's greatest asset was his brilliant and mercurial nephew Justinian (d. 565), who took a greater and greater part in the government. Indeed, several sources claim that he was functioning as *de facto* *emperor* long before the end of Justin's reign. It was Justinian who, for example, engineered the reconciliation with the papacy. And it was he who celebrated his own *consulship* in 521 with the most lavish games that Constantinople had ever seen. The contrast with the austere, penny-pinching days of Anastasius was dramatic, and the message clear: the empire stood on the threshold of a new and glorious age. Only a year or two after this came another turning-point in Justinian's life; he met his future *empress*. Theodora was not an ideal match. Her life is chronicled by Procopius, an unrelenting critic, but there is little reason to think his basic facts were wrong; Theodora’s past was well known to her contemporaries. Her father had been a bear-keeper at the Hippodrome, her mother an actress; more than enough to debar her from polite society. But that was not all. Her father died, leaving her mother with three small girls under the age of seven. In order to survive, young Theodora had to follow her mother's example on the stage as an actress; a profession that in the east had long combined on-stage risqué performances with off-stage prostitution servicing low and high status customers. Later, a teenaged Theodora traveled to Libya as the mistress of a Roman official, who soon threw her out. Destitute, she settled for a while in Alexandria, where she became a heretic; for the rest of her life she held strong Monophysite views. Even Procopius has to acknowledge that, from this time, she gave up prostitution, and, having no livelihood, went to stay with an old friend in Antioch. This friend, Macedonia, had found a new way to survive; by joining the imperial secret police; Justinian had a network of informers to keep him abreast of any unseen developments. At some point he must have visited Antioch, because Macedonia introduced him to her friend. Justinian was at once smitten beyond all reason, and determined to make her his wife. By 522, Theodora was living in Constantinople, in a house he provided, and Justinian was trying to talk his uncle into approving the marriage. One complication was a law from Constantine's time that barred anyone of *senatorial* rank from marrying actresses. But the greater obstacle appears to have been Justin's wife Euphemia, who was strongly opposed the match; not because the young woman had been an actress, but because she was a Monophysite. Sometime around 524, Euphemia died. Almost at once, the elderly Justin agreed to revoke Constantine’s law, and Justinian married Theodora in the first basilica of Hagia Sofia. This was Justin’s last major act as emperor. He was approaching eighty, and often in pain from an old wound. He formally named Justinian as co-emperor and heir in April 527. Justin died a few months later; Justinian became emperor, and Theodora, who would have considerable influence over his reign, was crowned empress.

**Justinian the Great** (527-565) came to the throne full of ideas, full of confidence, full of energy. Procopius calls him "*the emperor who never sleeps*"; sometimes sleeping only an hour a night and forgetting to eat for a day or more. He is widely held as the greatest (and most controversial) Byzantine *emperor* in history. But Justinian was never loved; indeed he was on the edge of losing the throne early years of his rule. The new *emperor* had ambitious plans for great building projects, for reconquering lost lands in the west, for burnishing the *empire* into its former glory. For all these extravagances and many others, the necessary funds were found largely through the outstanding ability of his finance minister, John the Cappadocian. Taxes were efficiently collected, accounts audited, misappropriated money tracked down, public expenses pruned, and city spectacles cut down; thus alienating rich and poor alike. In 532, public discontent was voiced most dramatically in Constantinople by the **Nika Riots**; *Nika, Nika!* ("win, win!") was the cry of rival factions at the races in the Hippodrome (the huge chariot-racing venue in the centre of the city). Since the time of Constantine, the traditional Roman gladiatorial games had been systematically replaced by chariot-racing; which was not so closely associated with pagan Roman worship. In all the larger cities of the east, it dominated the sports and entertainment scene, and was a citywide phenomenon; everyone knew who the star chariot-drivers were; everyone had at least a passing acquaintance with the results; and a good percentage of the populace identified, however loosely, with one of the chariot-racing teams. In Constantinople, the Blues were one group of fans, the Greens another. These fans hated one another with a zeal that historians have tried to explain by finding a deeper reason; perhaps the Blues were inclined to be aristocrats while the Greens were merchants; maybe the Blues were orthodox Christians and the Blues preferred Monophysitism. None of these explanations really hold up. By Justinian's day, they were increasingly violent, always ready to seize any excuse to beat each other senseless; similar to the football hooliganism in modern times. Constantinople was a powder-keg just waiting for a spark. On 10 January, two murderers were to be publicly executed; one happened to be a Blue, the other a Green. Unfortunately, the executioner botched the job; the two men escaped and sought sanctuary in a church, where they successfully resisted several attempts to remove them. Justinian was nervous; he was in the midst of delicate negotiation with the Persians over a peace treaty, and now faced a potential crisis in his city. Therefore, he decided to commute their sentences to imprisonment. But it was not enough; the Blues and Greens demanded that both men be pardoned entirely. Then, on 13 January, as the *emperor* took his place in the Hippodrome for the races, his appearance was greeted by angry chants. For first time, the Blues and Greens were speaking with one voice; and their clamour was directed, not at each other, but at him. The races were soon abandoned, and the mob poured out of Hippodrome, hell-bent on destruction. For the next five days, the palace was under siege. Countless public buildings all over the city went up in flames, including the city's foremost church, the Hagia Sophia. The rioters, by now probably being egged on by vested interests, then demanded the dismissal of John of Cappadocia and two other officials; a demand Justinian, now seriously alarmed, granted at once. And then the mob found themselves a new emperor. Hypatius, a nephew of dead Emperor Anastasius, had done his best to hide when the mob began calling his name; but they ran him to earth and dragged him to a coronation in the Hippodrome. Meanwhile, in the palace, Justinian had decided to flee the capital, but his wife Theodora stopped him; insisting that she would stay, she quoted an ancient saying, "*the imperial purple makes a fine burial shroud*". Justinian, snapped out of his panic, formulated a plan that centre on two men; the first was an Illyrian general named Belisarius (d. 565), still in his twenties; the second was a deceptively frail-looking Armenian eunuch, Narses (d. 573). Belisarius slipped out of the city to rally whatever soldiers he could muster from nearby cities. Meanwhile, Narses went to the Hippodrome with a bag of cash for bribes, and stoked dissension between Greens and Blues. Soon after, Belisarius' forces stormed into the Hippodrome, taking the mob completely by surprise; Procopius reports that over thirty thousand people were slaughtered. A trembling Hypatius was then led before the *emperor*. Justinian was inclined to be merciful, but Theodora prevailed upon him to see the involuntary usurper executed. The Nika Riots left Justinian firmly in charge; the populace was cowed, and the aristocratic opposition, that had surfaced during the revolt, was forced underground. Nearly half of Constantinople had been reduced to smouldering ruins, but that cleared the way for Justinian to rebuild the city on a yet grander and more impressive scale. In **Hagia Sophia**, his two chosen architects, Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, achieved one of the finest and most justly famed buildings in the world. Justinian's building bore no resemblance to its predecessor. First, it was infinitely larger; far and away the largest religious building in the entire Christian world for nearly a thousand years. It was also square rather than rectangular, reaching its climax, not with an apsed sanctuary at the eastern end, but with its magnificent central dome filled with mosaics. So revolutionary was the concept, indeed, that it seems likely that the *emperor* had already been planning it long before the Nika rising made it necessary. No wonder that Justinian, entering the completed building for the first time on 27 December 537 (just five years and ten months after the laying of the first stone), stood for a long time in silence before being heard to murmur, "*Solomon, I have surpassed thee*"; in reference to the first *Temple* in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the two heroes of the Hippodrome, Narses and Belisarius, went on to new appointments: Narses propelled to the most influential figure at the imperial court; Belisarius to make his reputation at Dara on the Persian frontier.

While polishing up his capital, the *emperor* had turned his mind to the recovery of the lost western half of the *Roman Empire*. Justinian himself was no soldier, but he found in Belisarius the one man, he believed, to whom this sacred task could confidently be entrusted. Belisarius was a distinguished commander, a superb strategist, an inspiring leader of men, and, as shown in the *Nika Riots*, obviously loyal to the *emperor*. Moreover, his wife Antonina was an old friend of Theodora; she too had been an actress. But Justinian first intended to secure his eastern frontier. Skirmishes between Byzantine and Persian armies continued, even if neither empire was willing to commit to full war. With the death of Persian king Kavadh, and accession of his third and favourite son, Khosru (531-579), the situation changed. Since Khosru wasn’t the eldest, he found himself obliged to defend his throne against his other brothers. The two rulers, thus, came to terms, concluding the *Everlasting Peace* in 532, for which Justinian would pay an annual tribute of 11,000 pounds of gold; ostensibly as a contribution to the defence of the Caucasus passes. Turning his attention to the west, Justinian settled on the Vandal Kingdom of **North Africa** for his first reconquest. The great king Genseric was long dead, and relations with the Byzantine Empire had normalized; though tensions flared up occasionally due to the Vandals' Arian faith; religious conflict was more intense in North Africa than any other *barbarian* kingdom. In 530, the pro-Roman king Hilderic was deposed by a distant cousin named Gelimer (530–534). When Hilderic appealed to Constantinople and Justinian protested, Gelimer replied, in effect, that he "should mind his own business". The *emperor* took this fighting talk as a pretext to launch his expedition. Belisarius set sail from Constantinople in June 533, with five thousand cavalry and ten thousand infantry. He arrived at the coast of North Africa at an opportune moment: half of the Vandal army was in Sardinia, putting down a revolt. The Roman army then began its march towards Carthage, following the coastal road. It was still ten miles from the capital when the Vandals struck. Deprived of his best troops, Gelimer had planned an ambush in the valley of Ad Decium, and, in a three-sponged encirclement, destroy his enemy; his brother Ammatas would block the Byzantine advance, while a nephew named Gibamund swept into their left flank, and he himself with the main army attacked from the rear. Unfortunately his communications let him down. Ammatas arrived too early, was almost immediately killed, and his soldiers soon lost heart. Gibamund's force was encountered by a strong contingent of Roman scouts and scattered. Unaware of all this, Gelimer arrived with the main army, and, although outnumbered, the battle was evenly contested until he came upon his brother's body; and the fight went out of him. The next day, Belisarius occupied Carthage without a fight. Gelimer fled westward into the deserts of Numidia, where he was soon joined the forces which had been recalled from Sardinia. But in December, he suffered another crushing defeat at Tricamarum, and fled pell-mell back into his Numidian fastness. This time it was the end. At first Gelimer refused to surrender, but, after an uncomfortable winter besieged in a remote mountain fortress, he finally gave up. The Vandal Kingdom ended, and North Africa was reorganized as a Byzantine province, though it would teeter on the brink of collapse for a decade or more, amidst warfare with the Berbers (or Moors), the indigenous tribes of the desert interior. Belisarius would not remain long in Africa. He was recalled to Constantinople, and granted the honour of a *Triumph*; the first to be celebrated in Constantinople, and the first granted to a private citizen in over five hundred years, Belisarius marched into the Hippodrome at the head of his soldiers, followed by Gelimer, his family, Vandal prisoners, and wagons of spoils. Afterwards, the former King of the Vandal gratefully accepted an ample estate, where he lived in quiet retirement to be an old man.

    Justinian's thoughts now turned to **Italy**; a Roman Empire that did not include Rome was an abomination. Clearly, then, the Ostrogothic Kingdom that did must be ended; but how? Unlike Gelimer and his Vandals, the Gothic kings ruled in the emperor's name as his vassals. Though Arian, they had enjoyed great popularity with the church and the leading Roman citizens. As in North Africa, dynastic struggles provided an opportunity for intervention. When Theoderic died in 526, he was succeeded by his ten-year-old grandson Athalaric (526-534), who became the pawn in a struggle for power between his mother Amalasuntha as regent, and the Ostrogoth nobles who wanted to control the kingdom from behind the throne. Amalasuntha had received a Roman education, she was fluent in both Latin and Greek, and enjoyed a breadth of culture rare among the Goths. However, this did not find much favour with the Gothic nobles, who in addition resented being ruled by a woman. Knowing how they plotted against her, Amalasuntha maintained close ties with Constantinople; which only made the nobles resent her even more. In this poisonous atmosphere, the young king sought comfort in wine, and drank himself to death before he was eighteen. The queen regent then offered the crown to her elderly cousin Theodahad (534-536). This was likely to legitimize her own ruler; Theodahad led the life of a gentleman-scholar, so would hopefully enjoy all the pleasures and privileges of kingship, while she effectively ruled on his behalf. As a precaution, however, she also made preparations to flee to Constantinople, and even wrote to the *emperor* asking for sanctuary. Justinian saw his chance; with Theodoric's daughter at his side, he would be able to count on considerable support from the Goths themselves; he might even regain Italy without bloodshed. But events moved too fast for him. In early 535, Theodahad had Amalasuntha seized and imprisoned in an island-castle on Lake Bolsena, where she was shortly afterwards strangled in her bath. The murder gave Justinian precisely the excuse he needed. The Byzantine-Gothic War (535–554) began on a wave of optimism. It must have seemed to Justinian that the Gothic regime was tottering, because he ordered Belisarius to sail to Italy with barely eight-thousand men. Belisarius landed on Sicily in late 535, and conquered the island with scarcely a struggle. He then crossed to the mainland, and met no resistance until he reached Naples, where the Gothic garrison defended the city stoutly for three weeks. The city, being taken by storm, was sacked by the Roman army. This defeat unseated Theodahad; the Ostrogoths, displeased by his ineffectiveness in war, deposed and replaced him with a warleader named Witigis (536-540). While Witigis withdrew to Ravenna to consolidate his forces, Belisarius advanced northward and occupied undefended Rome in December of 536. Recovering Rome was one thing, however; holding it was quite another. Belisarius knew the Goths would soon be back, and immediately set about preparing for a long siege. And so it was. Witigis and his army took up their positions around the city in March 537; they were to hold them for a year. There were sallies outside the walls, and several minor engagements, but, as the summer drew on, the sufferings increased on both sides; for the Romans, famine; for the Goths, pestilence. Only in November did the balance begin to shift, with the arrival of 5,000 reinforcements from the east, under a general known simply as John. Belisarius took the offensive, dispatching John on a punitive campaign. Leaving a trail of devastation behind him, he advanced rapidly up the peninsula to Rimini, which became his base-of-operations. With the invaders now occupying a city two-hundred miles in his rear and only thirty-three from Ravenna, Witigis raised the siege of Rome. Conflict within Belisarius' command hampered the Roman advance further northward. Knowing that John was still dangerously exposed, he ordered him to leave Rimini, and rejoin the main army. But John refused. Shortly after, the Goths, coming from Rome, put the town under siege. The fury of Belisarius at the news can be imagined; the loss of John he could bear, but his best cavalrymen were less easily spared. Any relief expedition would be highly dangerous. The arrival of fresh troops from Constantinople under Justinian's most trusted confidant, the eunuch Narses, resolved the issue. Narses was no soldier. He had been given him the command for one reason: Justinian was beginning to worry about Belisarius. The general was too brilliant, too popular, and too young (being still in his early thirties). He was the stuff of which *emperors* were made; he needed watching. Immediately on his arrival, Narses advocated a relief expedition to Rimini, and Belisarius (who seems to have kept silent so as not to be overruled) made his plans accordingly. A week or two later, he put the besieging Goths to flight. John emerged, bitter and ready to ally himself with Narses against Belisarius. The rift between Belisarius and Narses grew to the extent that the army in Italy divided into two parties. Justinian himself felt obliged to send a letter, stating, "*We have not sent our steward Narses to Italy in order to command the army; for we wish Belisarius alone to command the whole army... and it is the duty of all of you to follow him*". The division remained, however, and the city of Milan was to fall victim to it. In the spring of 538, Milan revolted against the Goths, and opened her gates to the Byzantines, who sent a small garrison to secure the city. Witigis called upon the Franks for help, and a force of 1,000 men unexpectedly crossed the Alps. Combining with the Goths, they laid siege to Milan. A relief force was dispatched by Belisarius, but its commander, seeing the enemy numbers, hesitated and asked for reinforcements from John. John, in turn, refused to move without orders from Narses. By the time Narses repeated the order, it was too late. Milan was recaptured by Witigis. The desperate garrison had been promised safe-conduct, in return for abandoning the city. But the offer did not extend to the population, who in the eyes of the Goths were traitors; many were massacred and the city was razed. The fall of Milan was a catastrophe, but it had one useful consequence; Justinian did not assign blame, but he did recall Narses. Freed from dissension within his ranks, Belisarius was able to reduce the last few pockets of resistance, and, by the end of 539, all Italy south of Ravenna was back in Byzantine hands. The Ostrogothic capital was besieged, and cut off from supplies by the Byzantine fleet. Disheartened, the Goths made Belisarius an offer: they would proclaim him *emperor* in the west, reviving an office which had lapsed in 476. Belisarius accepted; or at least feigned acceptance. Thus in May 540, the Roman army entered Ravenna. For the first time in over a hundred years, the *empire* teetered on the edge of a restoration. But rather than allowing him to consolidate his conquests in Italy,, Belisarius was recalled to Constantinople. The *emperor*'s motive may have been the danger on the eastern front, as much as distrust of his brilliant young general. In any case, Belisarius, with Witigis in tow, made his way to the capital, where the *emperor* was in no mood to celebrate; there would be no second *triumph*.

Of all the Sassanian Kings, Khosru was the most illustrious, and is still the best remembered. And yet, progressive as his policies and reforms were in many ways, in others he was very much the man of his time. His wars with the Byzantine Empire, for example, were fought, unashamedly, for money. Justinian's wars in North Africa and Italy, not to mention the enormous building projects in Constantinople, had drained the imperial treasury. The *Everlasting Peace* stipulated that Byzantium would pay the Persians an annual tribute, but Justinian could no longer afford it. The payments went into arrears. In the spring of 540, Khosru stormed into Syria province, and headed for the ancient city of Antioch in punishment. Belisarius had not yet arrived back from Italy, while the eastern frontier had been somewhat neglected, and Justinian simply did not have the means to fight back. In June, Khosrow reached Antioch, where he offered its custodians not to attack in return for 2,000 pounds of silver; but his offer was rejected. As a result, he took and sacked the city, a devastating blow to imperial prestige. Justinian sued for peace, having managed to scrape together the tardy tribute. However, Khosru withdraw back through the Syrian province very slowly, dragging captives from Antioch with him. As he went, he demanded ransom money from the towns and cities along the way, at which point Justinian called off his truce. By this time, Belisarius was back in the east, taking command of the Persian frontier. He won a few smallish victories, but before long the war began to swing the Persian way; Khosru’s armies captured the fortress of Petra, while Belisarius’ attempt to take the fortress of Nisibis failed. The fighting had not gone well,, but a blacker enemy hovered. In the spring of 542, a ship docked in Constantinople, bringing much-needed grain from Egypt; years of cold wet summers after 535 had led to poor harvests, and the people were already hungrier and weaker than normal. But not long after, a sickness began to spread through the capital. Procopius gives us a good account of the outbreak, known as the ***Plague of Justinian***; sudden fever, swellings in the groin and armpit, coma, and death. This was clearly bubonic plague, carried by the fleas that travelled from port to port on ship’s rats; the first recorded major outbreak and the worst until the *Black Death*. Some took agonizing days to die, screaming in pain when the swellings burst. Others were struck down by fever so sudden that they fell in the streets and lay there until they died. Procopius notes that there was no room to bury the dead, and "*an evil stench pervaded the city*". Among those stricken was Justinian himself. For weeks during that nightmare summer he lay between life and death; leaving authority in the hands of his wife. Theodora knew that her whole future was at stake. She and Justinian were childless; if he should to die, her only chance of retaining her position lay in arranging for a successor of her own choice: a faithful courtier, perhaps, whom she could marry. Traditionally, however, the choice of *emperor* lay with the army, most of whose senior officers were away in the east. At a meeting, they swore to oppose any candidate chosen without their consent. Reports of this meeting reach the capital only after Justinian was out of danger, but Theodora flew into a fury. Two generals in particular were believed to have instigated the meeting. One of them, Bouzes, was flung into the notorious palace dungeons, where he languished in total darkness for two years and four months. The other was Belisarius. He was too popular to be similarly dealt with, but, upon his return to the capital, he found himself relieved of his command; and his property was confiscated for allegedly enriched himself unduly with plunder. It was not until 543 that Justinian fully recovered. Soon afterwards, Belisarius was partially restored to favour. Theodora wrote in a letter that she had forgiven him because of her friendship with his wife. But there was another reason: the military situation was deteriorating everywhere. In the eastern provinces, the plague had brought a temporary end to the war with Persia; the sickness appeared in Ctesiphon, and Khosru went home to take care of his people. But in 543, he was able to return, and annihilate a Byzantine army of some 30,000 men with a far smaller force. The next year Khosru besieged Edessa, a much more strategically important city than Antioch; if Edessa fell, the Persians could sweep all the way into Anatolia (Asia Minor). But the city fought back hard, and saved itself; and Khosru had to be satisfied with the relatively small ransom in gold. Shortly afterwards, he was able to force Justinian to pay 5,000 pounds of gold for a 5-year truce. It was an uneasy peace but it more or less held. But in North Africa, a Berber insurrection was spreading with terrifying speed; and in Italy, the remaining Ostrogoths elected a new king, a brilliant young leader named Totila, and began to fight back against Byzantine occupation. This was, in short, no time to keep the *empire*'s best general dishonoured in Constantinople.

There is no more convincing testimony to the genius of Belisarius than the collapse of Byzantine power in Italy after his departure in 540. With his triumphal entry into Ravenna, the whole peninsula seemed to have been recovered for the *empire*. True, the Ostrogoths still controlled Italy north of the Po, but surely it was inconceivable that they could hold out for long. Nor would they have done so, if Justinian had appointed an Italian commander-in-chief. Clearly, he feared that some commander might be tempted to set themselves up as king of Italy. So compelling was this fear that he left five generals jointly to consolidate the Byzantine position, all distinctly second-rate. Much of the time they refused to work together, and simply focused on how to profit personally from the campaign. Meanwhile, the Goths rallied around a charismatic and energetic leader, **Totila' *(541–552)***, still in his twenties. He never forgot, however, that the vast majority of his subjects were not Goth but Italian. The Italian aristocracy had rallied to the empire, and so it was to the humbler echelons of society that young Totila now appealed. They were already suffering from the attentions of Justinian's tax-collectors. Totila posed as a national liberator who would throw off the renewed chains of Roman oppression. The slaves would be freed, the great estates broken up, the land redistributed. It was hardly surprising that the people listened to him; and followed. So indeed did many imperial soldiers. Within a year of his accession. Totila had driven one imperial army from the gates of Verona, and to annihilate another near Faenza. He followed these victories by besieging stoutly-defended Florence, in an effort to open the route to Rome. When an imperial relief force arrived, he withdrew north and then routed his pursuers near Mugello. In the spring of 542, Totila shifted his operations to the south, since the imperial forces in central Italy were too formidable. His strategy was to move fast and take control of the countryside, leaving the Byzantines in control of well-defended cities, especially the ports. Chief among them was Naples; and it was to Naples that he now laid siege. The Goth blockade of the city was total; the Justinian's plague was at its peak, so making relief efforts and resupply dangerous; and, in March 543, the starving defenders surrendered. Totila's terms were characteristically generous: the imperial garrison was granted safe conduit to Rome; and food was at once supplied to the famished inhabitants. Realizing the gravity of the situation, Justinian finally decided to send Belisarius back to Italy. The general knew from the start that he would have to fight his second Italian campaign with one hand tied behind his back; Justinian, more suspicious and parsimonious than ever, would not back him with sufficient men, money, or authority. He did his best. Belisarius successfully reoccupied much of southern Italy, but was unable to march to Rome's relief. In December,545, Totila laid siege to the city, which held out for about a year, before falling to the Goths; most of the populace had already fled, including Pope Vigilius; Procopius tells us that only 500 were left. Totila then threatened raze Rome, if the Byzantines did not withdraw from Italy and leave him in peace; but Belisarius persuaded him otherwise, highlighting that his good name would forever be tarnished. Totila satisfied himself with plundering the city, and then left in pursuit of the Byzantine forces in Campania. Belisarius immediately reoccupied empty Rome, hastily rebuilt demolished sections of wall, and, to Totila's chagrin, successfully withstood a second siege. By the summer of 548, it was clear that a stalemate had been reached; Belisarius decided on one last appeal to the emperor to secure reinforcement. His envoy was his wife Antonina. She arrived in Constantinople only to find the city plunged into deepest mourning; Theodora was dead. Justinian, prostrated with grief, would see no one. All that Antonina managed to obtain was the recall of Belisarius; if failure in Italy was inevitable, she was determined that her husband should not carry the blame. After Belisarius' departure, Totila took Rome once again. But now Italy had powerful advocates in Constantinople; Pope Vigilius was there, embroiled in the Three Chapters dispute, and with him were several Italian nobles who had fled. In 550, Justinian took action. He put his talented cousin Germanus in charge of a large expedition to Italy. Theodora had always regarded Germanus as a rival, and his career no doubt suffered as a result; but now Theodora was gone. While preparing for the campaign, however, Germanus took sick and died. To replace Germanus, Justinian turned to Narses, now well into his seventies. Narses' greatest asset was Justinian's complete trust; his old age meant that he would never be able to rebel successfully; his access to the imperial treasury allowed him to amass an army of almost thirty thousand men; most of his troops were barbarian mercenaries, particularly Lombards, since the plague had made army recruits hard to find. In the spring of 552, Narses led this army around the head of the Adriatic into Italy, intending to march down the Via Flaminia to Rome. Totila, meanwhile, advanced up the same road to block their path. So it was that the Roman and Gothic armies met for the decisive encounter of the war. The Battle of Taginae (June 552) was over quite quickly: the Gothic army was progressively outflanked and outfought, until, as the sun was sinking, it fled in panic and disorder, with the Byzantines in hot pursuit. Totila himself, mortally wounded, took flight with the rest, and died a few hours later. The Goth nobles elected another king, but he too fell in battle. The Ostrogoth domination had ended; now Italy would be ruled in the name of the Byzantine *emperor* by a provincial governor based in Ravenna. Constantinople had regained the heart of the *empire;* but only after years of war that had destroyed the countryside, wrecked the cities, and impoverished the people. In 552, Justinian also regained control of **southern Spain**. The Visigothic king had been murdered, and the court was in disarray; one of the rival claimants, Athanagild, sent a message to Constantinople, appealing (unwisely) for help in seizing the throne. Byzantine ships arrived to support him, and Athanagild got his throne, but, by 554, Byzantine armies had captured ports and fortresses all along the southern coast, and Justinian was able to establish a new province there; Spania (552-624), with Cartagena as its capital. In the wake of the plague, Justinian was finding victory. He was on the edge of rebuilding the old Roman empire, restoring the old glories; Byzantine administration now reached to the western edge of the Mediterranean. Throughout that sea, too, the imperial fleets reigned supreme; for a century after Justinian’s death, Byzantine ships moved about unmolested.

A still more resonant aspect of Justinian's legacy was the complete recodification of the Roman law; the Code of Justinian. Early in his reign, he had appointed a committee, headed by an extraordinary Greek jurist named Tribonian, to the enormous task of collecting and rewriting the unwieldy morass of laws passed by emperors over several centuries into a single coherent code. The committee was explicitly authorized to delete the obsolete or contradictory, and to change text into clear, concise language, all the while, ensuring that there was nothing incompatible with Christian teaching. On 8 April 529, less than fourteen months after work began, the new *Codex* was ready; and a week later it came into force in every court throughout the *empire*. In 530, a second commission under Tribonian began a collection of the writings of many ancient Roman jurists. Known as the *Digest*, it was the first attempt ever made to bring these into a methodical legal system. Finally in 533, there appeared the *Institutes*, a handbook of extracts from the two main books designed as a textbook for law students. Justinian's law code was to form the basis of Byzantine law until the empire's fall in the 15th century. The only western province where the *Code* was introduced was Italy, where it become the basis of ecclesiastical *Canon Law* in the 11th century, and then *Civil Law* throughout Western Europe; which was eventually spread by Europeans to the Americas and beyond. Meanwhile, the *Code* passed through direct Byzantine influence to Eastern Europe, and then on to Russia. Its legislative style remained influential at least until the *Napoleonic Code* of 1804. Justinian's own laws reveals an emperor full of reforming zeal. On some matters he strikes us as progressive; a woman's right to conduct business in her own right was finally granted. On other matters, particularly religion, he seems bigoted; he wanted to be a Christian emperor, not a ruler of unbelievers. Pagans were forbidden from teaching in public, and, after eight hundred years, the *Academy* in Athens was finally shut down. Its faculty emigrated to Persia, where they founded a school that lasted into the Islamic period; and perhaps late enough to influence the *House of Wisdom* in Baghdad. Worse still, he barred Jews from all remaining public offices and took away their right to bequeath property to non-Christians; thus accelerating the demotion of the Jewish civic status. Things had already gone a long way by then. Pogroms had long been connived and synagogues destroyed; what was new in Justinian was that Jews were lumped together with heretics and pagans; synagogues were no longer officially recognised as places of worship, so could be arbitrarily converted into churches. Such legislation was hardly enforced, but, nonetheless, set a precedent. Long before the cities of western Europe, Constantinople had a ghetto. In ecclesiastical matters, Justinian was all the more confident of his right to assert imperial authority. Sometimes the consequences were unfortunate; such an attitude did nothing to renew the loyalty to the empire's Monophysite minority. The empire began to create its Ulsters. Harrying heretics intensified separatist feeling in Egypt and Syria. In his immense zeal to unite the western and eastern Churches, the *emperor* succeeded only in deepening the rift between. The special Christian role and style of Byzantine civilisation crystallized under Justinian. The *emperor* claimed for himself the double legitimacy of Roman custom and Christian authority; he was both the heir of Augustus and the representative of Christ on earth, seeing no contradiction between the two. The West was never to accept this union of religious and secular authority, which became the heart of the political ideology of the eastern empire. Misfortune crowded into the final years of Justinian's reign. In the summer of 556, the Samaritans, an ethno-religious group similar to Judaism, revolted in Palestine. The next year, in December, an earthquake shook Constantinople, and the main dome of *Hagia Sofia* eventually collapsed; and had to be rebuilt with a new design. Around the same time, the Avars reached the Byzantine borders, forcing Justinian to buy them off. They were followed by the Bulgars (proto-Bulgarians), a Turkic people left behind by the Huns to the north of the Azov Sea. The Avars had conquered their eastern tribes, agitating the remaining tribes into crossing the Danube in early 559. Rather than pay them off too, Justinian recalled Belisarius from his retirement; he was still in his fifties and had lost none of his brilliance. Using a scratch force and a hundred of his veterans, he drew the Bulgars into an ambush and routed them. Once the immediate danger was over, Justinian took charge and granted them safe passage back across the river; where they too fell prey to the Avars. In 562, a would-be assassin attempted to kill the *emperor;* the chief conspirator was a goldsmith and banker, which suggests that Justinian had resorted to forced loans; his successor would certainly inherit an empty treasury. Justinian’s old suspicions saw Belisarius accused of participating in the conspiracy. He was put on trial, convicted, and imprisoned; though, not long after, the *emperor* relented and pardoned his old friend. This proved the last skirmish between the pair. Both men died in 565; Justinian was eighty-three, Belisarius sixty. Theodora had died childless in 548, probably of cancer, and Justinian had never remarried; he had no sons. His nephew Justin II became emperor in his place. If we look at his reign with the unforgiving eye of hindsight then Justinian the Great seems something of a failure. Yet he behaved as people thought an *emperor* should; he did what most people still expected that a strong emperor would; for all the wide sweep of the empire’s enemies, he could still think plausibly of reuniting and restoring the old empire, centred on Constantinople though it now had to be. We labour under the handicap of knowing what happened, but his contemporaries were more struck by his temporary successes. They expected them to herald a real restoration. After all, no one could really conceive a world without the empire.