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.