From Roman Empire to Renaissance Europe

Denys Hay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429594731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1953 From Roman Empire to Renaissance Europe looks at the broader picture of the Middle Ages, drawn in terms of the men and women and the situations that they had to face. The constant theme of change is revealed not by detailed narrative of elements but by commentary and examples that show how ideas and systems developed, and how theses affected the patterns of everyday life. The book looks at how the Roman Empire of the West gave way to a decentralized society, vigorous, brutal and inventive for which the only unifying factor was a universal acceptance of Latin Christianity. In turn Christendom began to lose its coherence during the 13th and 14th centuries and by the fifteenth century Europe had emerged as a rival term, a Europe in which the landed magnates had capitulated to the omnipotent and ubiquitous prince, commerce, as well as land now being a source of wealth. This is not a static picture of the 'Middle Ages' with fixed characteristics, but of real men and women facing genuine situations.

Part I From Empire to Christendom

CHAPTER I

ROMAN SURVIVALS

Empire, Christendom, Rome; rise and character of Roman Empire; its disintegration; survival of Romance language; and of Christian religion.

THE title of this book might have been ‘Medieval Europe’. This has been avoided for several reasons and not least because the phrase is misleading. For almost the whole of the period covered here it is incorrect to use the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘European’. The men and women who lived in the area we now call Europe used a different word on the rare occasions when they wished to refer to the limits of a society larger than their village or parish, county or diocese, or kingdom. They described themselves as ‘inhabitants of Christendom’. There are, moreover, practical difficulties in equating medieval Christendom with modern Europe. The two areas were not coterminous, for Christendom included large parts of Asia Minor, while Europe today includes parts of Germany and the Slav lands farther east which only came properly into Christendom at the end of the fourteenth century. Only one other concept existed as a rival to the notion of Christendom: that of the Empire. Yet that was always a weak competitor, for during the Middle Ages there were always two Empires, one in the East and one in the West, and in neither did all princes acknowledge themselves to be subjects of the emperors. The universal acceptance of Christendom as an inclusive term was not, of course, true of the second and third centuries, and we shall see that in the fifteenth century it was already ceasing to be entirely appropriate.

In the second and third centuries the broadest unit was still the Roman Empire. From the Atlantic seaboard of Spain and Gaul to the Black Sea, from the Tyne, the Rhine, and the Danube in the North to the Sahara in the South, the provincial organization of the Roman Empire stood intact and hundreds of cities reproduced in miniature the life of the City itself, Rome. So unalterable did this situation seem to contemporaries that the final overthrow of the old way of life has naturally tended to be regarded by later historians as a catastrophic event in which the defences of the Empire, maintained for so many centuries, suddenly collapsed under the overwhelming pressure of the barbarians from Germany and the central Asian plains. In fact the Romans of the third century deluded themselves. The outward structure of their society was to some extent preserved, its inward spirit was already dead. The wonder is not that that Empire finally disappeared but that it managed to survive for so long.

The farming communities of central Italy, banded together under the leadership of Rome, had, in the third and second centuries B.C., conquered the whole of the Italian peninsula and the Mediterranean littoral. Often booty had been a prime motive—the tangible wealth of captured weapons, precious metals, slaves. These commodities were poured into Rome itself and the other great towns of Italy and as the domination of Roman armies was extended, the newly conquered provinces were usually organized administratively round colonial cities modelled on the mother city of Rome. In the first century B.C. the pace of conquest slackened; groups of Roman citizens in Italy itself conspired to monopolize the dwindling income of war; and civil disturbances broke out which were only ended by a weary resignation of power into the hands of one man. Thus the Empire or Imperium, the extraordinary delegation of all power to an omnipotent military magistrate, was superimposed on the old republican forms. The Senate, for long the supreme authority in the State, gradually dwindled in importance as the Emperor and his companions controlled the army, the provinces, and the City itself.

The inhabitants of Italy and especially of Rome were entirely dependent on the issue of the simple rations of the South: bread, oil, wine. This became the principal concern of the State. The provinces themselves were equally parasitic, their towns existing mainly as centres of administration and tax collection. The taxes were gradually collected with less efficiency and more corruption; money payments became discarded in favour of payments in kind; and, although the currency was successfully reformed in A.D. 296, there was a marked reduction in the circulation of money in the following century, and an attempt to fix maximum prices was a total failure. These developments would, of course, have been fatal for a commercial, let alone an industrial, economy. But Rome had never known either. Commerce was largely concerned with luxuries and was in the hands of Syrian and Jewish merchants. Land was occasionally exploited in big estates (the latifundia) worked—very inefficiently—by slaves; but only a handful of great landowners regarded their estates as economic enterprises and in any case the supply of slaves dried up with the end of aggressive war. Most telling fact of all: for the Roman, a business man meant above all a money-lender and it would not be far from the truth to say that the only lively commercial activity was usury. The great highway of the Mediterranean was thus not thronged by a Roman merchant navy. The Roman roads, which are often such marvels of engineering skill, are quoted as evidence of Roman grandeur; but in fact they are pathetic monuments to a society which knew little real trade, whose towns were arbitrarily established as units in an administrative hierarchy, joined together by a network of predominantly military communications.

As the impetus of aggressive war slackened it became harder and harder to maintain the coherence of the Empire. The army, whose supremacy in politics was inevitable in a society orientated to war, made and unmade emperors, but was soon itself a feeble military instrument. The borders were protected by enlisting the barbarous and semi-barbarous tribes on the frontiers and the regular forces were concentrated for garrison duties in the vulnerable towns. Paid now, like everyone else, in doles of flour and wine, the ‘Roman’ soldier was usually not Roman or even Italian by descent and the outlandish origin of some of the emperors, several of whom came from the mountains of Dalmatia, bears witness to the change in the one binding force within the Empire, the army. Some of these general-emperors were remarkable men: Gallienus, Aurelianus, above all Diocletian. But their attitude to the decrepit society they were called upon to govern was essentially military. The militarization of the Empire was in any event a congenial solution to a Roman and the steps which were taken, harsh though they were, seem to have excited no active resistance. The Empire itself was divided into two great sections, the western half centred on Rome and the eastern half (after Constantine) on Constantinople: the dividing line, first made in A.D. 293, but not permanent until 364, ran north and south to the east of the heel of Italy: Illyria was in the western Empire, the Greek provinces in the eastern, Tripoli in Africa went to the western Empire, and Libya and Egypt to the eastern. In a sense this merely recognized the need to divide the defences of a vast area; but it equally pointed to a tendency for each province to become a self-sufficient entity; and, by doubling imperial establishments, it created another drain on the depleted income of the State.

For the emperors were by the third century behaving less like Roman magistrates and more like Oriental kings. The subtle compromise devised by Augustus, the first emperor, which maintained the old republican forms and concealed the authority of the first citizen (princeps), was abandoned by Diocletian and his successors. Their courts were now inflated in numbers and the courtiers were ranged in hierarchies of dignity according to their proximity to the imperial person. The old cursus honorum, the promotion of the rich public-spirited citizen through the ranks of the magistracy, was dead even in Rome, where the emperors scarcely ever resided in the third and fourth centuries; and in provincial cities the exercise of public office was an affliction, a corvée, for which candidates could only be found by making it an hereditary obligation. This creation of hereditary obligations was, in fact, the device adopted for solving all social problems. First the workers in State mines and factories, then the shippers of the vital supplies of Rome, then the bakers, the building workers, timber merchants, all were rigorously enlisted in guilds and subjected to hereditary discipline and compulsion. Even the pleasures of the town—and every third day in Rome was a holiday—became an inherited charge on the families of the performers, actors, musicians, gladiators. Above all, in the great estates which supported the wealthy, as exploitation by slaves gradually declined, the master was compelled to let out his land to tenant farmers, the coloni. These coloni, free in theory, were in fact bound to the land they worked and could not move or marry out of their master’s territories without his permission. There was little difference by the third century between the slave and the colonus.

Even the army, the ‘military militia’, as it was called to distinguish it from the ‘official or administrative militia’, was infected with the caste system. The legions, of old the instrument of aggression and victory, where valour and fortitude had been cultivated by real Romans, were latterly recruited exclusively from the dregs of the free population; conscription of rural recruits was made the responsibility of the wealthy senatorial class which, like the dwindling group of slaves, was excluded from military service. Service in the militia was no longer regarded as honourable: the legion, once 6,000 strong, was, under Constantine, seldom a sixth of that, although by then many more legions were under arms than the twenty or thirty which had been enough under Trajan and Hadrian. Small wonder that only rough provincials, wild warriors from the perimeter of the Empire, provided the main body of the army. It had once been an attraction of a military career that it either conferred or led to Roman citizenship. As time went on that became less coveted as a reward and it is hardly surprising that barbarians alone in the fourth century regarded service in the army as worth while or proved themselves to be able commanders. As barbarians pressed in upon the shrinking rim of the Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, Roman defence was usually successful in so far as it was conducted by troops only one stage less barbarous than their opponents.

This general relaxation of the Empire, increasing provincialism, an un-Roman army, were not matched by a lack of will at the centre. On the contrary, some remarkable emperors arose who were conscious of the malaise of the State. To their efforts, and notably to the efforts of Diocletian and Constantine, we must ascribe the success which in some measure attended those brutal arrangements we have touched on, the regimentation of every social activity. Everything that could be done by imperial edict was done, and harshness was often tempered by a charming paternalism: savage customs, like the exposure of sick slaves, were condemned; the rights of orphans were protected; a whole host of laws were concerned to shield the weak from the strong. It was, indeed, during the later centuries of the Empire, and particularly in the eastern Empire under Justinian, that Roman law acquired its final form, codified, civilized, resourceful: an elaborate legal structure which had so little real scope in the dreary days when it was being perfected (the very reiteration of imperial commands being a sufficient commentary on their ineffectiveness), but which, as we shall see, was to be revived to some purpose by a later age (below, p. 197).

In two important respects, however, the Roman world of the third and later centuries was composed of more enduring material: language and religion. Language, be it noted, and not literature, for the literary tradition of Rome, so vital in the late Republic and the Augustan period, was desperately ill-served by the handful of savants and the few academies, the pedestrian poets and rhetorical writers of the third and later centuries.¹ It was at this stage, indeed, that scholarship became a mere knowledge of grammar, literary ability consisted in the composition of pastiches, and the classical writers were read usually in epitomes. These features of Dark Age and early medieval literature were contributed by the late Empire: it was the latter-day Romans, in effect, who mislaid so much of Livy and made it possible for later generations to turn Virgil into a magician. Yet by the time that this loss of inspiration had attacked literature (and it was equally felt in science, philosophy, and the fine arts), the Latin language was as firmly entrenched in the provinces of the western Empire, as Greek in the eastern. Gaul, Spain, Italy of course, and Illyria had been Roman for so long that the language of the conquered peoples were almost totally submerged by what (significantly enough) was called, not Latin, but lingua Romana, the ‘romance language’. Even in the so-called classical period it seems likely that a wide gulf separated written literature from spoken or vulgar Latin; soon dialects developed which, after a further infusion of barbarian speech, were to crystallize later as French, Spanish, Italian and other Romance tongues. Britain and the Balkan and North African provinces had never been so thoroughly Romanized and were, in any case, subjected to larger and more damaging invasions later on. There Latin was almost entirely wiped out. But in the older area of Roman domination the Rhine and the Alps remain to this day an enduring linguistic boundary.

Christianity is the other immediate contribution of Rome. At first the religion of the followers of Christ was confined to a comparatively small number. It spread where there were Jews, and there were Jews in most of the big towns of the Mediterranean area. Thence it gradually attracted Gentile adherents. It was a time when the severity of the older Roman religion had for the most part been dissolved into scepticism among the cultivated and superstition among the rest. The transcendental religions of the East had considerable appeal. Isis and Mithras were the weightiest of the rivals for popular favour and, in general, Christianity was too intransigeant, too much an affair of abnegation and retreat, to make rapid headway. The early Christian instinctively rejected the World, accepted persecution as his lot, and—even when, like St. Augustine, imbued with the best that the Latin culture of the time could produce—tried to abandon the heritage of Hellenistic tradition in science, philosophy, and literature. In his City of God (426) St. Augustine drew a bold line through the totality of experience. On the one hand lay the earthly city, whose citizens aimed only at profits and peace here below: on the other hand the heavenly city, whose citizens lived on earth as pilgrims, ‘as if they were in captivity’. This division was to have far-reaching consequences, but as a picture of the attitude of the majority of Christians in his own day, early in the fifth century, it was sadly out of focus. Almost a century before St. Augustine wrote his City of God, the Emperor Constantine had taken the first momentous steps towards the official recognition of Christianity by the ‘earthly city’, the Roman State which had hitherto been its enemy.

In 313 the Emperor in the ‘Edict of Milan’ granted religious liberty to ‘Christians and all men’ (et Christianis et omnibus). This, in fact, was a favour to Christians rather than to ‘all men’; from being persecuted Christians were now to live ‘without any anxiety or hurt’, without being mulcted by rapacious officials, with full legal protection for themselves and their buildings. For some, Constantine’s action seemed part of a divine intervention in human affairs; this was the view Christians took at the time, and it was accompanied by a tradition that Constantine had had a vision, had been dramatically converted to the new faith. For others, Constantine seems to have played a cynical role, the shrewd politician seeking to bolster the tottering Empire with a dynamic moral force. Others again have argued that he was neither devout nor sceptical, but profoundly superstitious, seeing his lucky star in the sky over Bethlehem; they would add that the relatively small number of Christians in the early fourth century were divided among themselves by bitter doctrinal disputes, and that they were most influential in the eastern half of the Empire where the reinforcement of imperial authority was least needed. But in a sense such speculations are beside the point. What is of supreme importance is that within a short space of time Constantine’s successors persecuted non-Christians, turned Christianity into an official cult, absorbed the other-worldly Church into the wordly State.

The results were profoundly to affect both Church and State. The Emperor became, in a very real sense, head of the Church and regarded it as his duty to intervene even in the most complicated theological questions. It thus came about that the doctrine of Arius, which solved a Christian paradox by denying the divinity of Christ, was condemned by Constantine and the Council of Nicea in 325, despite the many adherents which its simplicity secured for it, especially among the barbarians; some later emperors, it is true, supported Arianism, but by that time the Nicene Creed had established itself, above all in the western Empire. The emperors who summoned councils, appointed patriarchs and bishops, were indeed almost priestly in their own persons. They had shed the divine attributes of their pagan predecessors only to don a quasi-apostolic garb and in art they were frequently depicted bearing the halo of sanctity. The effects on the ordinary believer were in the long run to be equally disturbing. The Christian now had behind him the resources of imperial authority and by the fifth century the new religion could claim the allegiance of a majority of Romans. Christianity and civilization were thus made coterminous; only the rustic, the paganus, was not a member of the Church. The bishops, already established in many towns, became the representatives, not merely of the emperor, but of Roman culture, a part which the average bishop was well equipped to play since he came usually from the upper classes. The faithful no longer assembled in furtive secrecy, but took possession of old temples and built new ones of their own. The rigorous practice of a holy life ceased to be possible for all Christians, and became more and more the job of a specialized priestly calling.

Bishops and priests, indeed, were themselves so intimately bound up with secular matters that, in the confused and troubled world of the fifth and sixth centuries, merely to be a priest seemed inadequate to those who longed for God. True, by every reasonable means the hierarchy of clergy which was gradually emerging under patriarchs and pope sought to differentiate the order of priesthood, and make it pure as well as efficient. Such aims led to the growing authority of certain bishops over other bishops in their vicinity, of bishops over the subordinate clergy in their dioceses, and an attempt was made to enforce celibacy on all ordained servants of God. Yet, to the devout, these measures were mere palliatives. A strain of Oriental mysticism was, after all, implicit ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Part I From Empire to Christendom
• PART II Manor, Feof, and Church
• PART III From Christendom to Europe
• Index