Constantinople Deflated

The Debris of Empire

The Stary of Justinian’s empire after his death is an embarrassment to all who try, still, to praise him. Count no man happy, the old Greeks had said, until he has died; and one should count no emperor a success until one knows what becomes of his creations after he is gone. Justinian falls rapidly from his pedestal when we look at what he left behind.

THE POET CORIPPUS gives an account of the night Justinian died, which reads like a fragment of Soviet Kremlinology in the latter days, when Brezhnev gave way to Andropov, who yielded to Chernenko, each a more preposterous parody of Bolshevik loyalty than the one before. You can almost hear in Corippus’s lines the purring engines of big black limousines sliding through the streets around the palace as the word got out among the leading courtiers that the time had finally come. There were many choices, at that point, for emperor; but the deal was clearly done and the fix was in: Justin—Justin II in the history books—was the man.

Nephew of the emperor

Justin was in his mid-forties, a nephew of the emperor, married to a niece of Theodora’s: his relationships gave him a claim to power. He had a cousin, also named Justin, the son of a cousin of Justinian’s: Germanus, who had been moving into leading military commands in the late 540s until premature death removed him from the scene. This other Justin showed promise, often a strong disqualifier in imperial politics. Worse, he was away from court doing useful military service in the Balkans when Justinian’s end came, and thus was at a disadvantage in any competition requiring stealth and intrigue at court. The successful Justin had waited there in a discreet administrative role since 552 and had won the support of the church in the person of the patriarch, John Scholasticus—and of the military in the person of the count of the excubitors, Tiberius, a Balkan officer of real talent, as we shall see.

Justinian died in the palace he had scarcely left for years. Callinicus, the majordomo of the imperial residence (we might render his official title “provost of the sacred bedchamber”), claimed obligingly that Justinian had named his nephew to succeed him. The machinery of court spun into action. The excubitors blockaded the palace, the patriarch raised the crown on Justin’s head, and before anyone was the wiser, the new emperor was installed.

GREGORY’S WORLD

Rome’s Remains (565- 604)

The final scenes of our drama: in which it has begun to seem normal that the city of Rome is a pale shadow of its old self and that the older order of life in much of the Roman world has given way to new routines and new figures of authority. During these scenes, “noises off” will remind us of what is to come, while memories of a more robust imperial past will remind us that the medieval future was made possible—or necessary?— by the hubris of an empire that did not know what was in its own best interest.

Learning to Live Again

Justinian died on November 14, 565. We will visit his airless palace and witness his botched succession in a few pages, but we will see best what he left behind if we look first to the four corners of his earth. The affairs of the court at Constantinople were now, almost suddenly with Justinian’s passing, diminished in scale and importance. One can almost look around the world of 565, take a deep breath, and say, Well, that’s over. Justinian had worn out his mandate and his throne, and even the Ottomans would never match what Constantinople had known in antiquity. We are suddenly in a different world, where people were learning to live again, with very dif¬ferent expectations.

NORTHERN EXPOSURES

Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, but left the job unfinished. What he left undone made the European middle ages possible. Nowhere in the Roman world is the question of “decline and fall” more irrelevant, for northern Gaul was the part of the Roman empire that rose under Rome’s rule, rose again as that rule faded, and continued to rise almost without interruption for hundreds of years.

Consider again Theoderic’s fortunes in Gaul. He succeeded in staking a claim for himself across the Alps—a remarkable achievement for a king based in Italy and rivaling the success of the Roman republic in expanding into this territory after the Punic Wars. But Provence and the Rhone valley up to about Lyon were all he could manage. Aquitaine—that is, southwestern Gaul from the Mediterranean coast to the Atlantic and up to Bordeaux on the Garonne—was always beyond his reach. Farther north, another world.

Formally, of course, Roman rule of law had extended throughout the land. Gifts of land to colonists created nuclei of romanization, and more prominent figures came to possess extensive estates over which they presided from dignified country villas. But at no point did the landscape of northern Gaul—a landscape we now associate with the heart of what is French, from Normandy to the Ile de France to Champagne and Burgundy—ever become the home of the kind of aristocracy, first arriviste and then eventually quite settled and self-satisfied, that marked the lands of the south kukeri carnival.

More than that, northern Gaul, like the other western provinces, lacked the healthiest form of premodern culture, the village of peasant farmers. The villa and its plantation dominated in Africa, Italy, Spain, and Provence; they never had the kind of well-rooted local communities of people who farm the land because they care about it. That absence is what made these provinces most unlike the eastern realms of Syria and Egypt. It doesn’t matter so much whether peasants owned the land or rented it, as long as they had control over their lives and produce and had opportunities to benefit from what they did. The great Roman estates in southern Gaul offered few such opportunities, and created a population dependent on its “betters” for social leadership and economic development. Farther north, until you came to the Rhine valley and Rome’s military presence, there was even less structure.

When Theoderic crossed the Alps into Gaul, therefore, the advantage he had over Julius Caesar’s armies almost 600 years earlier was that there was already a natural community of interest and even family relationship between southern Gaul and northern Italy, and a long history of collegial association. By contrast, northern Gaul was terra incognita—dark much of the year on winter days shorter than the Mediterranean ever knew, dank, and too close to the military frontier for many travelers to venture that way. Militarily, the Roman momentum ran out at the Rhine, true enough, but the force of Roman civilization had truly dissipated hundreds of miles before reaching it. If Rome had really been ready to preserve and even extend its northern frontiers, it would have built cities in places like Trier and Strasbourg that were not merely camps and markets but centers of influence and radiation well beyond, supporting the growth and enrichment of people inside and outside the boundaries of the empire.

12 Theological handbooks

What that amphibiousness entailed needs a moment’s further reflection.12 Theological handbooks can tell us the distinction between Arian and Nicene doctrines of Christ, but not many of the military men on the frontier could have explained how their creed differed from Rome’s. The distinction was important, because religion had become integrated with the community in a manner casting long shadows into the future. Modern people may identify with a religious tradition even when, often, they do not practice it; by contrast, traditionalist ancient men and women all practiced religion, but they did not personally identify with it. As late antique religions gradually became part of people’s identities, those identities themselves began to be portable.

So if you let your religion mark you completely, then you were no longer defined by your birthplace, your family, or any other social status. You could pack up, move, and still be who you were before you moved. Social mobility was possible in the ancient world; but if you moved from Antioch on the Orontes to Rome on the Tiber, you didn’t just learn a new language: you probably also changed your religious practices. Judaism first, then Christianity, and then, especially, Islam capitalized on this emerging form of religion-based identity to enable believers to live more independent and mobile lives, and not incidentally this had the effect of making the religions themselves more powerful, cohesive, and influential. The Arians of the frontier would vanish into the Catholic community of the Latin church eventually, but not for decades or centuries after they began living among the Catholics. In the meantime, their presence would anticipate and rehearse our modern confrontations between cult, creed, and identity.

Think of Theoderic as Othello. Shakespeare’s Moor appears in his first scenes very much like the Theoderic we have met. Othello is the best of generals, but a gentleman withal, keenly intelligent, articulate, soft-spoken, patient, and magnanimous: the best of the Venetians, yet for all that, men call him “Moor” to claim superiority over him. Imagine Othello, only moderately darker of skin than the Venetians, rather better dressed, rather better spoken, and considerably more intelligent than those who surround him. The tragedy of that Othello lay in others’ ascribing to him the Moor’s stereotyped traits, traits entirely alien to him. In the course of the play, the people around him tell the story of Othello the Moor so convincingly that eventually the man becomes what people fear him to be. Desdemona’s killer is the man whom such fear and ignorance have created, and his tragedy is the betrayal of his true self. A fate not unlike Othello’s awaited Theoderic at the end of his life.

A BAD HALF CENTURY

Ordinary bad times in the Roman empire had brought hunger and disease to this city or that province, but worse lay in store when the heavy hand of distant government grew unsteady or unpredictable, and the years from the 420s to the 470s accustomed dwellers in the Latin west to an enduring, dispiriting sense of crisis. People who live through such times are seldom rational or farsighted in their interpretation of events around them balkan tours.

The Latin provinces of the empire, from the western Balkans through the upper Danube and the Rhine valleys to Britain, then down through Gaul, the Iberian peninsula, around to Africa, and back to Italy and the islands between, exemplified old Roman characteristics, yet did so on the periphery of the Mediterranean. How was that west different from the Greek, Syriac, and Egyptian lands to the east? First and most simply, Rome had gone from obscurity to empire by picking the right enemies and learning from them. Its best models were the seagoing, prosperous Carthaginians, who challenged Rome and lost, leaving the Romans suddenly masters of far more than they had ever dreamed possible .

But Rome and much of what it had conquered were unready for empire. Though Greek and Carthaginian outposts boasted some history and culture, the romanization of the west came about through the establishment of colonies of retired soldiers and the extension of institutions of Roman government and taxation to the new countries. A little emperor worship and a lot of taxpaying were enough to satisfy the government, and Latin was the language of prestige among elites—unless you had the pride of knowing Greek. The cities the Romans built all had a bit of modern-day planned cities like Brasilia or Canberra about them, and not much of the commercial vigor and sprawl of Mumbai or Chicago. They were official constructions, with economies that depended heavily on a government far away. Carthage, destroyed in 146 BCE, then reborn from the ruins, might claim to be the second city of the west, but there was never a serious candidate for third. The natural condition of the countryside, moreover, was villa rather than village: the home of large landowners and their tenants rather than the autonomous community generating its own prosperity. (Rome itself was the unruliest Roman city of all, the one that hadn’t been planned and embraced a nearly constant flow of immigrants.)