Debating medieval Europe: The early Middle Ages, c. 450–c. 1050

By Craig Caldwell, Paul Fouracre, Jinty Nelson and 5 more

Debating medieval Europe serves as an entry point for studying and teaching medieval history. Rather than simply presenting foundational knowledge or introducing sources, it provides the reader with frameworks for understanding the distinctive historiography of the period, digging beneath the historical accounts provided by other textbooks to expose the contested foundations of apparently settled narratives. It opens a space for discussion and debate, as well as providing essential context for the sometimes overwhelming abundance of specialist scholarship.

Volume I addresses the early Middle Ages, covering the period c. 450–c. 1050. The chapters are organised chronologically, and cover such topics as the Carolingian Order, England and the ‘Atlantic Archipelago’, the Vikings and Ottonian Germany. It features a highly distinguished selection of medieval historians, including Paul Fouracre and Janet L. Nelson.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526117342

Book preview

How to use this book: a guide for students

Stephen Mossman

This book is aimed at students who are beginning the study of medieval history at university. It is the first of a two-volume set that will cover the western (‘Latin’) area of the European land-mass across the entire chronological span of the Middle Ages, from the mid-fifth to the mid-fifteenth centuries. To use the technical language, that means from late antiquity to the Renaissance, when status-minded Italians declared that in them and in their cities classical antiquity had been re-born (hence re-naissance), and the 1,000 or so years since the fall of the Western Roman Empire could safely be classified as an intermediary period, a medium aevum (‘Middle Age’, hence medi-eval), that was now over, to general relief and satisfaction. You will immediately grasp that the intellectual foundations upon which ‘the medieval’ is defined as a coherent period are shaky at best, and that they have more to do with the civic pride of those compatriots of Leonardo and Michelangelo than with the application of robust historical method. As most students who encounter medieval history at university do so on the basis of no prior knowledge – just as with so many new chronological periods, geographical areas and methodological approaches with which a student of history must get to grips for the first time – securing an understanding of what ‘the medieval’ is all about is no mean feat.

That task can feel as if you are suddenly required to absorb a great mass of knowledge about an entirely alien world. This textbook does not aim to provide you with a narrative presentation of events. There are some excellent narrative studies already, and it is extremely useful to have to hand a reliable account of just what happened when, to whom. Yet if your first encounter with medieval history is through a dense narrative, this can mean that the subject as a whole can seem like an impenetrable thicket of dates and names: a set body of facts and details that must be learned. It is also true that, whether a narrative or a thematic presentation, textbook accounts of medieval history take certain positions in historiographical arguments and debates, but tend to make none of those standpoints explicit. All is offered to the reader as an essentially incontrovertible wall of fact. It is hard for the uninitiated to see where decisions have been taken to present one view and not another, let alone why those decisions were taken, or what might be at stake in the matter. Without further guidance, the effect can be to make medieval history seem exclusive, or, worse, tedious in comparison with the apparently more hotly contested and therefore exciting study of modernity.

What this textbook aims to do is to introduce you to the study of medieval history in a different way, by drawing attention precisely to those contested issues – which are, for the record, just as present in medieval as in any other field of history – and by explaining how it is that historians have gone about their exploration of those issues, in order to enable you to engage with them and with the underlying evidence independently. What this textbook does is what your mathematics teachers will have told you to do at school: to show the working, not just to state the answer. In this way, we intend that you will find a swifter and more engaging way to enter the field yourself, and to be directed to key scholarly contributions to pursue particular topics. Like attending a lecture, reading a chapter of this textbook is only the beginning of your intellectual work. It is a gateway that helps you to access learning and know what to look for, but is never the totality of necessary understanding in itself. The footnote references and bibliographies are there to point you towards the resources you will need, not to provide comprehensive lists of all potentially relevant studies. You can then identify and access those resources through your university library catalogue.

Our focus throughout has been to concentrate on current matters of debate, making reference to seminal developments in the broader field as necessary, but not to rehearse the entire history of the historiography on every single topic. We do that only in rare cases, where it would otherwise be impossible to understand why a certain line of argument should exist at all (for a good example of just such a case, see the discussion of the German Sonderweg in Thomas McCarthy’s Chapter 4, on Ottonian Germany). We can, of course, only present the current debate as it stands at the time of writing (2018–19). You should make it part of your regular practice to scrutinize your library catalogue and the most recent issues of relevant learned journals to locate what has just been published on any given subject, and so to ensure that your understanding of that subject is at the cutting-edge. Your task can be assisted here by advanced online resources, notably the International Medieval Bibliography (http://www.brepolis.net), to which your university has to subscribe, and the open-access Regesta Imperii catalogue (http://opac.regesta-imperii.de).

Our geographical focus rests on what was, broadly speaking, the former western half of the Roman Empire. There are many ways of defining the geographical extent of what constitutes medieval history. All have claims to validity. In very recent years, for example, there has been a new and vocal call to study ‘the global Middle Ages’, expanding the scholarly remit of the medieval historian beyond Europe. In itself, that is a worthy and worthwhile enterprise, though how far it will prove to be more than an extended exercise in comparative history, given how profoundly disconnected the medieval globe was, remains to be seen. The global approach is not that which we take here. That would require an altogether different sort of textbook. What we have been firmly keen to avoid, by contrast, is the extremely narrow focus of traditional accounts, which wrote of medieval Europe, but in practice meant by that England, northern and central France and, at a push, northern Italy. These were the conventional geographical foci of Anglophone scholarship. Other areas, like the German-speaking lands and the Iberian peninsula, were lucky to be mentioned at all. So, in this volume, although for pragmatic reasons of coverage we exclude the Eastern Roman Empire (‘Byzantium’) and the Slavic lands, we aim at a reasonably even-handed geographical coverage within the post-Roman western world. This means that France and Italy must share the limelight with Spain and Germany; that England must be decentred from its privileged position and treated within the broader context of the British Isles and the North Sea cultural sphere; and that Norman power, emergent at the end of the period covered in this volume, is to be understood equally from a Sicilian vantage point as from the very familiar English perspective.

The transformation of the Roman world in late antiquity, that bundle of interrelated phenomena to which convention applies the simplistic label ‘fall of Rome’, is explored in Craig Caldwell’s first chapter. As we move through the textbook chapters, we encounter a picture of disintegration on many levels: political, social, religious, ethnic, linguistic and more besides. That is in part because there was indeed such disintegration, from the more obvious forms of fragmentation (the breakdown of an empire into smaller polities) to the less obvious forms (the transformation of spoken Latin into a series of different and mutually incomprehensible vernacular languages, like French and Spanish). In part it is an illusion created by the geographical scope of our textbook, the product of pragmatic necessity. If we were to have focused instead on the eastern Mediterranean, we would have a completely different image. There the Roman Empire did not ‘fall’, but instead proved remarkably resilient, and in the sixth century resurgent and actively expansionist. It was not disrupted until the seventh and eighth centuries, when the rise of Islam as a religious and political force in the Arabian peninsula and the subsequent Islamic conquests of the Middle East and North Africa brought a new kind of reintegration in the wake of Roman power. Here, though, our restricted western European geographical scope proves beneficial, because when students of medieval history usually encounter Islam it is only in terms of this ‘rise’, as an essentially distant and distinct entity emergent in Arabia and so not really European at all. The benefit of an even-handed treatment of western Europe is to notice that one very significant part of it was, from the early eighth century onwards, very much Islamic, namely Iberia. And there is nothing distant or non-European about Spain and Portugal.

Some geographical fluctuations in coverage will nonetheless remain. The enormous weight of Anglophone historiography on Anglo-Saxon England, for example, or the far greater scholarly attention that the Norman Conquest of England has received in comparison to that of southern Italy, means that certain imbalances will inevitably arise in a textbook that aims to introduce you to the contours of scholarly debate, although we have sought to direct your attention explicitly towards those imbalances. There is also a much more significant force at work, and that is the impact of institutional – and so documentary – continuity. The tendency in older scholarship to present Frankish history as the totality of early medieval history – that is, to write the history of medieval Europe using exclusively Frankish sources, or even sources from just one small region of France – is not the result of some kind of misplaced national partisanship. It arises from the astonishing institutional continuity of Frankish monastic houses and their production and preservation of documents in more or less unbroken sequence from the sixth and seventh centuries through to their dissolution at the time of the French Revolution. This continuity, and the density of such institutions which manifest it, is true of almost nowhere else in Europe, and it means that historians interested in long-term patterns of social change across the early and central Middle Ages have relied necessarily on Frankish sources. It is only recently that historians have begun to grapple with the implications of this geographical imbalance, rather than simply assuming that what was true of a given area of Francia was true of everywhere else. They have done this either by turning to other source types beyond the written word for comparison, or by contextualizing Frankish sources in relation to what can be known of the documentary tradition from isolated locations beyond Francia. You will find this methodological problem explored directly and confronted head on in both of Paul Fouracre’s chapters, which cover topics traditionally understood exclusively on the basis of Frankish resources.

Each chapter is divided thematically. It would be impossible to introduce you to every topic of current debate in relation to the geographical and chronological areas covered in the chapters of this volume. We have chosen governmentality, identity and religiosity as the three guiding themes by which to structure each chapter. The aim is for you to be able to follow a coherent path from chapter to chapter in the absence of the narrative presentation that we have set out to avoid. These three categories, which will be explained properly in a moment, are heuristic divisions. In other words, that means that they are not, in the real world, discrete categories of human experience: they are very firmly interrelated. (That said, certain labels – like those of ethnicity – really did matter in the early Middle Ages, as the first chapters will make clear.) Take a moment to observe the front cover of this volume. The image is the frontispiece of a manuscript from the New Minster of Winchester in southern England, made in the year 1031. It is called the Liber vitae (‘Book of Life’). This is because it contains a list of the names of the deceased monks and prominent donors of the New Minster, for whose souls the monks would pray and whose names would come to be written in heaven in eternal life, just as they are actually written in the book itself. We see the Danish ruler Cnut, king of England (r. 1016–35), and his queen, Emma of Normandy (d. 1052), here labelled with the Anglo-Saxon name Ælfgifu, which she was given to use for official purposes. Emma had been married previously, to Æthelred II, Cnut’s immediate predecessor as king of England. This gave her a certain claim to Englishness with which Cnut, who had seized the English throne by conquest, sought to associate himself. Here, Cnut and Emma give a ceremonial cross to the New Minster, a royal foundation in the town that had served as the effective capital for the ancient kings of Wessex, who had become the first kings of all the Anglo-Saxons during the reign of Alfred ‘the Great’ (d. 899). The Danish monarch and the Norman princess thus laid claim to an English identity, but the angels who place the crown and the veil on their heads point towards the real source of their authority: Christ enthroned in majesty above. The monks in their choir below the royal couple’s feet look upwards, their hands raised in prayer. The figure in the centre holds the physical Liber vitae (i.e. this very book!) that corresponds to the heavenly copy in Christ’s hands. Cnut holds the cross in his right hand, such that his act of giving is frozen in time and his receiving of heavenly reward becomes similarly continual. His left hand grips firmly the hilt of his sword, symbol of government and conquest. The complex interplay of identity, religiosity and governmentality – not to mention gender, art and language! – is well grasped in this image.

The choice of these particular categories is determined in part by their centrality to current scholarship and in part by their conceptual breadth. ‘Governmentality’ is about more than just government and rule, and encompasses broader questions of social organization; ‘identity’ as much social as political, extending to include law and family as conduits for the formation of identity; and ‘religiosity’ as much about belief and mentality as about institutions. Two chapters, those on Iberia and on the Vikings, are bipartite, handling identity and religiosity together, given the significance of religious faith to identity in both cases. Governmentality, identity and religiosity are not the only categories that could have been chosen: spatiality and temporality, literacy and literature, and women and gender present themselves as immediately obvious alternatives, but pragmatic decisions must be made. Those alternatives are not less important themes. They are merely less suitable for the structuring of this introductory textbook. We have sought further to avoid the reification of gender, a crucial category of historical analysis, into a study of women dissociated from their historical contexts. You will find that gender is more present – because it is more ‘detectable’ in the source material – in the discussions of religiosity, and to some extent of identity, than of governmentality. You will also find that gender (as with other categories of analysis) becomes more prominent in the later chapters, as the level of scrutiny descends to more tightly defined geographical regions and temporal periods. That said, the limited attention given to a gendered perspective in the study of issues covered in the earlier chapters may be, as Paul Fouracre notes in his chapter on the so-called ‘Successor States’, still somewhat of a blind spot in the scholarship.

Let us now consider briefly each of these three structuring categories in turn, beginning with governmentality. It is a term first coined by the French theorist Michel Foucault in the later 1970s, but we do not use it here with all of its specifically Foucauldian connotations. We use it in its more liberal sense, as a term that enables the consideration of forms of social organization beyond the narrow strictures of the traditional study of government and governance, with its constitutionalist and top-down perspectives, and its intrinsic connection to the teleological search for the origins of modern European nation-states (i.e. interpreting the medieval evidence in the light of what we know would later happen). In this way, Caldwell’s first chapter, on the transformation of the Roman world in late antiquity, does not offer a political history of the ‘fall of Rome’, but interrogates instead the structures by which central power was exercised and maintained (i.e. taxation); the debates surrounding the stability and persistence, or change and transformation, of those structures over time; and the concrete manifestation of those structures. This interrogation provides an understanding of how that ‘power’ was felt and experienced, and in what it actually consisted. Coinage is a principal concrete manifestation of this kind. The provision of coins was not the public service that it is now, but a means by which a regime could raise tax revenue, as it enabled the conversion of agricultural surplus into precious metal. The imagery on coins was also one of the only means that a regime had to advertise its existence to those whom it sought to govern. ‘Regime change’ was always marked by the striking of new coins.

This approach to the scrutiny of ‘state power’ is continued in Fouracre’s chapter on the ‘Successor States’. Attention is directed here to the debates concerning how far this power extended from central places (i.e. the locations where a regime’s leading members based themselves); and how, in these very large territorial units – far larger than their modern equivalents and in some cases empires in their own right – the provinces were governed in any meaningful sense, and how the periphery related to the centre. This is an important theme for Janet Nelson in the next chapter, on the ‘Carolingian moment’, which explores the Frankish empire built by Charlemagne (r. 768–814) and his heirs as a ‘family-state’, an exercise in Foucauldian bio-power, where membership of the regime was synonymous with membership of the royal family. Yet not all early medieval governmentality was ‘statist’. McCarthy’s chapter on the German-speaking lands under Ottonian rule explores a form of social organization in which government was so decentred as to be performed without anything recognizable, even in early medieval terms, as a state. It is medieval Germany above all that puts the lie to the idea that there is anything normative or necessary to the concentration of authority in a strong central government, resident in a fixed location.

Identity, our second category, is discussed in a post-Roman context initially in terms of ethnicity. In part that is because ethnicity is how modern debate has framed the study of late antique and early medieval identity, searching in those ethnic labels (‘Angles’, ‘Franks’ and so on) for the origins of modern European national identities. In part, as Fouracre’s chapter on the Successor States makes clear, it is because this is what early medieval historians said happened: that states formed around particular peoples who conquered tracts of formerly Roman territory and gave their ethnic designations to the new kingdoms. The connection, reliant as it is on a privileging of textual over material evidence, is not always straightforward. Charles Insley explains in his chapter on the Vikings that although early medieval historians wrote of ‘Danes’ and ‘Norwegians’, these labels do not correspond to what we now understand as Denmark and Norway. Identity as a form of ethnicity is, of course, a collective matter, not an individual affair. Ethnicity and other forms of collective belonging based around peoples or regions (what modern historians would discuss in terms of ‘nations’) are also only one aspect of identity formation. Social identity was equally if not more important in an early medieval context. It probably mattered a great deal more to be a slave or other type of unfree person – or, for that matter, to enjoy rights of liberty, or to belong to the slave-holding elite – than it did to participate in an amorphous sense of belonging associated with a given ethnic label. Law is also, as Nelson’s chapter on the ‘Carolingian moment’ explains, an often overlooked structuring principle of identity. Living under a certain system of law was frequently a focus for the construction of a particular collective identity. Inhabitants of Aquitaine in the eighth and ninth centuries called themselves Romans because they subscribed to Roman law. Taken as a whole, these aspects invite the exploration of identity in a sense far removed from the modern preoccupation with self, and yet precisely because of that it is a matter of urgent pertinence.

Religiosity is perhaps the most difficult category for the modern student to approach. There are very many reasons why understanding medieval religion is so important, but I have found that two above all have helped my own students to grasp its relevance. First is the exceptional significance of religious belief to medieval life and mentality. A ruler like Charlemagne saw himself as equally responsible for the spiritual as for the physical well-being of his empire (and look again at Cnut in the New Minster Liber vitae, with one hand on the cross and one hand on his sword). These were not understood as separate dimensions. To take some modern analogues, no one would attempt to study the modern state of Israel without understanding Judaism, or modern France without taking account of the stridently secularist principle of the post-Revolutionary French state, or modern Iran without considering political Islam. The annual rhythm of the Christian liturgy structured the pattern of the year for everyone, whether in terms of the celebration of ecclesiastical feasts like Christmas (‘holy days’ without work, hence holi-days), or of the points when taxes fell due. Second is the significance of religious institutions to the preservation of early medieval material and especially documentary culture. Almost our entire written record survives because it was kept by monastic and/or ecclesiastical institutions. A few papyrus fragments aside, the only reason why any of the Roman classics survive is that they were copied and recopied in the Middle Ages by monastic scribes, often as educational tools to teach young boys the principles of good Latin style, and then preserved in monastic libraries. If we want to understand, for example, why we have what we do of the Roman classics (and not some different selection), and how what we have today relates to what was known to the Romans – in other words, if we want to understand this subject apparently entirely unrelated to medieval religion – then we have to understand the medieval monastic context in which those texts were selected and reshaped.

It is, further, a consequence of that institutional culture of documentary preservation that we have more evidence for the study of medieval religiosity than for any other subject. Religiosity, as we understand it here, encompasses both Christianity and Christianization (and, in Iberia, Islam and intercultural relations) as systems of belief, as well as the formation and development of institutions. Recent scholarship has invested much effort to move away from a ‘constitutionalist’, top-down narrative – the older discipline of ‘Church History’ – but we cannot, and should not, avoid understanding the significance of institutional change. It is in the nature of our sources that the study of early medieval religiosity can only ever offer intermittent insights into what scholars of the central and later Middle Ages term ‘personal piety’, the religious beliefs and practices of the laity beyond ordained and/or professed members of the ecclesiastical order. Such insights into individual mentalité, when they do occur, as in the case of the Liber manualis written by the Frankish princess Dhuoda in the years 841–3 for her son William, and discussed in this volume by Nelson, emerge only from the very highest social echelons. We must beware of generalizations from such evidence, while recognizing the immense value of the survival of any text of this kind.

As I mentioned briefly above, in two chapters the study of identity and religiosity is combined, because the two are not just interrelated, but in those specific cases inseparable. Robert Portass’s chapter on Iberia deserves a special word at this point. You will swiftly notice that it is twice the length of the other chapters, and that it contains a much longer introduction. This is for good reason. Iberia is a kind of ‘double anomaly’. It is often treated as a distant and peripheral element in the study of the Islamic world, with its Middle Eastern geographical focus, and simultaneously as a case apart in the study of medieval Europe, rarely integrated in any meaningful sense into that history. It is all the more important, consequently, that we take proper account of Iberia in this volume, with its ambition to give even-handed geographical coverage over a defined region, and recognize the importance of Iberia in the western European context. Take note of Portass’s statement that ‘from the 930s Córdoba was to enjoy its heyday as the pre-eminent power of tenth-century Europe’, and remember it as you read: for all the historiographical noise around Anglo-Saxon England in the mid- to late tenth century, the pre-eminent western European power at the time was Islamic Córdoba. The longer introduction will provide ready orientation that cannot be found elsewhere (in English works, at least). The length of the chapter is a result of its being two chapters in one, on the Christian and the Islamic polities of early medieval Iberia, but which are much better considered together rather than separately, given that so much of their governmentality, identity and religiosity was shaped by their interaction and engagement, their interrelationships and their conflicts.

To guide you into the further reading that you will need to do to understand properly any of the debates addressed in this volume, each chapter has a bibliography in which is assembled the full references for you to locate the works noted in short-title form in the footnotes. We have given primacy to English-language works. It is all too common to hear that a subject like medieval Germany or medieval Iberia cannot be studied by an Anglophone audience because there is nothing in English for students to read. That might have been true a generation ago, though it has always seemed doubtful, but it is certainly not true now. At the same time, we have ensured that a certain proportion of works in European languages other than English are included in each bibliography. It is important to understand that English is not always the principal language of scholarship in a given field of study, and all professional historians must master a range of modern foreign languages. If you have even a limited knowledge of a foreign language, then you should definitely make the effort to spend some time with a key article or book chapter in that language, using a dictionary to help you with the new vocabulary. Your linguistic skill will quickly accumulate, and you will be repaid with much more than just the factual content of what you read, because you will be acquainting yourself with different scholarly traditions, ways of thinking and styles. This is valuable experience and a critical skill in itself, quite apart from the utility to your understanding of medieval history.

CHAPTER 1

The transformation of the Roman world, c. 450– c. 550

Craig H. Caldwell III

INTRODUCTION

To understand the early Middle Ages as a transformation of the ancient Roman world, we must begin with the legacy of the Roman Empire. For more than 500 years, from the reign of Emperor Augustus until the deposition of the last western emperor in the well-known year 476, the Romans united tens of millions of diverse peoples across Europe, North Africa and the Middle East within one political, economic and cultural framework. Roman rule was far from uniform and exerted different weights within its territory: it was strongest in the urban landscapes of the Mediterranean, while it overcame the mountains and dense forests of central Europe with difficulty. Above all, the Roman Empire was remarkable for its endurance. In addition to its unique social and military attributes, it persisted through its two technologies of concrete: the manmade stone that enabled the creation of complex structures, and the legal system that described and connected its people and property through a formal web of obligations and special procedures. In the second quarter of the fifth century, a special imperial commission collected important enactments into what we now call the Theodosian Code, which preserved the ‘wordy business’ of Roman government so that its legal tenets would be obeyed wherever they were relevant.¹ This effort to unite the empire through law, expressed in its original tongue of Latin, became an anchor for many medieval legal systems, and it provided a threefold division of the Roman heritage that informs this chapter. The compilers of the Code began with the foundations of the state, which we shall consider as governmentality; they then turned to matters of law that included the status of persons and, for our purposes, identity; and finally they considered the Christian religion, which will serve as our final analytical theme. In each of the categories that comprise this chapter, historians must contend with another problem modelled by the Theodosian Code: as A. H. M. Jones put it, laws are ‘records of the aspirations of the government and not its achievement’.² Every historical approach to the early Middle Ages must reconstruct the past by striking a balance between the aspirational aspects of our sources and the often thin and contradictory evidence for their impact in the real world.

GOVERNMENTALITY: What survived?

To what extent did state power in the fifth and sixth centuries still ‘wear a Roman face’?³ The phrase comes from Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, and the concept of ‘late antiquity’ has embraced post-Roman western Europe with difficulty.⁴ Some scholars such as Bryan Ward-Perkins have criticized that label for minimizing the real discontinuities and decline that we often call the ‘fall of Rome’. If our only concern lay with the fate of the Roman Empire as a political regime in the west, the fifth century was indeed its nadir. Following the lasting separation of the administration of the western provinces from the more stable and prosperous eastern Mediterranean in 395, the difficulties of maintaining central government mounted. Michael Rostovtzeff believed that the empire had gone rotten: widespread economic decline foreordained its political and military collapse.⁵ Other historians, especially A. H. M. Jones in The Later Roman Empire, 284–602: A Social, Economic, and Administrative Survey, a comprehensive study assembled on the model of Royal Commission reports, describe a state that was still viable until it suffered a few critical defeats in wars with barbarian outsiders.⁶ Historians often highlight the Roman loss of North Africa and its resources to the Vandalic invasion of 429–39 as the death blow to the Western Empire.⁷ These armed groups from outside the empire will occupy our full attention in the next section, but we must note that the ‘fall of Rome’ story has always required them as dancing partners for inept, often underage emperors who presided over imperial ruin. Honorius (r. 395–423) is emblematic of these trends. After becoming emperor in his own right at age ten, he became a portable figurehead in the removal of the imperial court from Rome to Ravenna (near modern Venice), his administration probably detached the province of Britannia from imperial support, and he failed to avert the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410. His government temporarily lost northern Gaul and Spain to usurping generals and permanently loosened its fiscal control over southern Gaul, and he died without an heir after twenty-eight years of rule. But while the biographies of Honorius and others like him, including Romulus, the final western emperor, who was deposed in 476, may tell tales of decline and fall, the structures of empire are where we may find the persistence of Rome.

Rather than listing the heroes and villains of late Roman political history, our answers to the question of ‘What survived?’ must consider the principal exercise of Roman power: taxation, which was the sustenance of states, and its evolution or devolution. Intrinsic to the study of taxation is the examination of which people constituted the taxpayers and tax collectors. Our discussion of governmentality surveys an array of approaches within the ‘Romanist’ tradition: these historians emphasize the continuity of the Middle Ages and the Roman Empire, albeit in strikingly different ways.⁸ The roots of this interpretation stretch back for centuries, but restricting our view to the scholarship of the last forty years yields three major strands of thought, represented here by the work of Jean Durliat, Chris Wickham and Walter Goffart.

We can begin by asking whether the Roman Empire, or more specifically its pattern of government, actually declined and disappeared from Europe at all. Jean Durliat’s administrative history smoothed over the break between the ancient state and its medieval successors by effacing political events in favour of fiscal structures.⁹ In Durliat’s view, the later Roman Empire subsisted for its income upon a decentralized system of ‘tax farmers’ (a type of tax collector) called possessores, who collected stable revenue, roughly 20 per cent of the harvest, from fiscal districts known as possessiones, villae and fundi. Local officials then divided the proceeds three ways to support local government, the army and the central government. Far from evading taxes, the aristocratic administrators maintained this arrangement because it benefited them financially along with supporting the empire. As this administrative terminology survives in documents across the early medieval period, Durliat asserted that no substantial changes occurred in the late Roman fiscal apparatus. Most historians accept that the Roman framework of land taxation persisted to some degree following the empire’s political collapse, but they add the caveat that early medieval states could not assemble the same level of resources and were thus diminished in comparison with their Roman precursors. In what has been called a ‘hyper-romanist’ perspective, Durliat instead favoured continuity of public expenditure to reject the weakening of post-Roman states. Since his later Roman Empire was already fiscally localized, its successors in western Europe did not privatize state revenues, but rather profited from their persistent, unatrophied collection. Central to this interpretation is the fixed fiscal meaning of technical vocabulary, such as defining possessores as collectors of taxes rather than conventional taxpaying landowners, or coloni as proprietors rather than tenant farmers. The rise of the Christian Church as a major landowner is unproblematic in this model because it was simply another part of the Roman administration, receiving state support in exchange for the role of ecclesiastical personnel in maintaining its government. Durliat used the apparent persistence of certain threads of the complex late Roman administrative apparatus to argue for the seamless survival of Roman fiscality, and thus for a Rome that, in one salient way, did not fall.¹⁰

Chris Wickham’s analysis joined the transformation of the Roman economy with its underlying society, and his use of social theory yielded a history with more texture than Durliat’s purely administrative and legal model.¹¹ He set out to provide a sweeping explanation that ‘framed’ the diverse elements within societies as well as showing how patterns of commerce and landownership affected social structures. To that end, Wickham assembled textual and archaeological evidence for a ‘pan-Mediterranean Roman fiscal system’ that taxed and redistributed revenues on an unprecedented scale. The state orchestrated flows of money and goods, which had capillary effects that propelled trade among and within its provinces. The geographically smaller successors to the Roman state represent a spectrum of greater or lesser continuity with their Roman parent, and Wickham’s task was to explain how and why different parts of the post-Roman world adapted its surviving elements in diverse ways. The argument favoured regional factors, such as the wealthier aristocracy in Gaul compared with other parts of Roman Europe, over sudden external influences due to wars and immigration, and it thus emphasized continuity, especially for the 90 per cent of the population who constituted the peasantry. Logically, those regions that the Roman Empire had integrated into the wider Mediterranean economy suffered the most when it collapsed, but the model must also be able to explain why relatively isolated Britain and the interior of Spain also suffered severe reductions in trade.

Wickham used the highly stratified society of the later Roman Empire as a starting point to assess relative levels of change. While the aristocratic landowning class remained prominent in the early Middle Ages, especially around the Mediterranean and in Gaul, it grew weaker everywhere due to the replacement of Roman government by unstable regimes. A single imperial state no longer existed to legitimize the elite, and they could no longer tap into its system of taxation to support themselves. Uncertainties about who was in charge meant that landowners’ purchases supported fewer trade networks across Europe, and they exercised less control over the peasants than Roman potentes, ‘the powerful’, had done in the fifth century. Wickham calls the situation ‘fluid’, with vague titles such as nobilis replacing precise Roman ranks like illustris, and with peasants able to ally themselves with different aristocrats. The decline in the quality of material culture such as pottery resulted from weakened aristocracies and more autonomous peasants, who used their own local products rather than imported ones. The end of literature that imitated the classics of the Roman world indicated not a ‘dark age’, but rather a newly militarized aristocracy, who consciously abandoned the educated leisure that produced the poems of Ausonius or the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris. The style of these aristocrats was more consequential than their identity, which Wickham downplayed by noting similar social changes in regions with evident immigration, such as England, and those without, including Wales. An early medieval domino effect is apparent here: the political and fiscal unity of the Roman Empire dissolved, and the ensuing simplified means of taxation reduced the power of aristocracies, who then purchased fewer goods through long-distance trade, which then affected the quality of the material culture revealed in archaeological excavations. Of course, some important dominoes are missing, since critics have noted that Wickham’s survey is uneven due to its roots in the surviving material record, and he chose to exclude the