From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms

Thomas F.X. Noble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134337644
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Roman Ancient History
• Index: History

This prestigious collection of essays by leading scholars provides a thorough reassessment of the medieval era which questions how, when and why the Middle Ages began, and how abruptly the shift from the Roman Empire to Barbarian Europe happened.

Presenting the most current work including newly-available material such as translations of French and German essays, From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms gathers the key thinkers in the field together in one easy-to-use volume.

Examining a wealth of material on the origins of the Barbarian people and their tribes, Thomas F.X. Noble studies the characteristics of the tribes and debates whether they were blood-tied clans or units bound by social, political and economic objectives.

Highly readable and student friendly, From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms includes a general introduction, clear prologues to each section and makes the key debates of the subject accessible to students.

Part I
Barbarian Ethnicity and Identity

The first and longest part of this book takes up one of the liveliest and most controversial areas of research in the history of Late Antiquity. The fundamental question that this research has been addressing is who were the barbarians? The question is of great importance because in about A.D. 300 most of the barbarians were to be found outside Rome’s frontiers whereas in 500 Rome’s former western provinces had turned into a series of barbarian kingdoms. Clearly it is important to try to understand the people who played such a dramatic and decisive role in transforming the Roman world.

Over the course of the twentieth century, scholars gradually realized that the barbarian tribes were in fact confederations that formed, unformed, and reformed many times in different circumstances. The Romans perceived these tribes as distinct peoples but their perception was inaccurate. The emerging understanding of the tribes as confederations resulted in part from a careful reassessment of the Roman sources themselves and in part from scholarship in fields such as anthropology and archaeology, and even in political theory. That is, in many parts of the world, over extended periods of time, long and coherent histories have been assigned to, or claimed by, peoples who were imagined to be more or less coherent biological, that is racial, entities. Such histories are highly revealing about the people who articulate them but rarely of much value in understanding the past.

The sources that have stirred up so much controversy are often histories. For instance, Jordanes, a Goth about whom not too much is known, wrote c. 552 a book called Getica, On the Goths. Jordanes traced the history of the Goths from southern Scandinavia, across the lands of central Europe, over the Roman frontier, and into Italy where they, at any rate the Goths whom history came to call the Ostrogoths, established a kingdom in 496 that was eventually crushed by the armies of Emperor Justinian in a long and devastating war (535–555).

The first three studies in this book deal at length with Jordanes and with what kinds of information one can legitimately extract from his work. Is there anything in his centuries-long historical account that is authentic? Are his stories those of a relatively small Gothic elite around whom other people rallied to form the “Goths”? Were the stories themselves ancient or quite recent? Do the stories help us to understand who the Goths were, or how the Goths came into being? The reader will encounter sharp disagreements on these subjects.

Much of the best work has focused on the Goths but it is important to point out that origin legends crop up in the historical writings of many other peoples too. One study included in this book treats some fascinating and puzzling Frankish legends that assert a Trojan origin for the Franks. Another chapter in this first section treats the Origo gentis Langobardorum (The Rise of the Lombard People) and Paul the Deacon’s eighth-century Historia Langobardorum (History of the Lombards). Some reflection on these legends helps to put Jordanes’ stories about the Goths into a wider perspective. People told stories about their past as a way of identifying themselves, marking themselves off from others, and establishing ideological relationships with the Romans.

People did not turn exclusively to the remote past, to historical writing, to express their identity. They also signaled their identity by means of cultural practices ranging from hair-styles to legal practices. Scholars today speak much more often about identity than about ethnicity. In doing so, they are acknowledging that the peoples of Late Antiquity perceived the uniqueness of specific groups but avoiding the implication that biology or race actually marked one group off from another.

Another contribution in this first section addresses the theme of gender by looking at tales about the Amazons and then by studying the lives and achievements of some Lombard queens. This chapter contributes to the discussion in two ways. On the one hand, it explores how women, and by reflex how men too, were constructed in various kinds of literary accounts. On the other hand, this paper asks how women contributed to the formation and transmission of the origin legends that have been the subject of so much controversy. The chapter invites us to ask if, in studying the formation of the barbarian peoples, we are primarily learning about the deeds of great men and of the memories held and communicated by men alone.

The last paper in this first section is by an historian/archaeologist. If historians who work primarily with written evidence have not been able to agree on the very nature of that evidence, much less on the validity of the information contained in it, then perhaps archaeology can yield evidence that is more empirical and use methods that are more objective. Unfortunately, as the reader will learn, archaeologists have not been able to escape ideological battles and intellectual fashions any better than historians have. Racist ideologues, for example, have claimed that the barbarians were “Germans” and the ancestors of modern Germans. Moreover, relatively coherent sets of artifacts found in specific places have been identified with those “Germans” and then some modern Germans—particularly in the Nazi period—have asserted a right to specific lands on the basis of continuous ethnic habitation. This is nonsense and no serious archaeologist now believes any of it.

Nevertheless, archaeologists are confronted with the problem of explaining the artifactual record that their excavations have unearthed. Can the material record reveal ethnicity? Or do implements—jewelry, weapons, ceramics, for example—reveal only an asserted or ascribed identity? How consistent over time are identities? How can one determine the age, sex, and status of the persons whose graves have been excavated? The reader will see that archaeologists have gone from serene confidence to agitated skepticism about the correlation between material culture and human groups.

A closely related set of questions turns around the matter of whether material remains can be made to yield information about the movement of peoples. Right away the whole issue is complicated by the fact that “tribes” are seen to be rather changeable groups. Coherent migrations are thus hard to talk about. Then too, people can borrow or exchange material goods from different sources at different times. It is hard to say that a given set of artifacts is pure; pure in the sense of being Gothic, or Frankish, or Lombard.

In sum, then, the studies in Part I explore the complex matter of who the barbarians were, what sources we have, and how we study them.

1
The Crisis of European Identity

Patrick J. Geary

The following pages constitute the “Introduction” to Patrick Geary’s most recent book, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe. Geary is professor of history at UCLA. Here the reader has a chance to see how recent events in European history have had an impact on how both academics and the public have understood Europe’s remote past. One key point is that each generation makes its own understanding of past realities. Another important issue is that the past is not a tidy truth awaiting its discovery by a patient and objective observer. Things happened in the past. That is certain. But past events gain meaning when we moderns interpret and explain them. People living in Europe have all sorts of reasons to construct the past in particular ways. Geary helpfully reflects on the very recent past in this selection. The rest of his book ranges widely over the period from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century to show how different people, in different times and places, have attempted to understand the barbarian peoples, their roles in the transformation of the Roman world, and their alleged roles in the making of the nations of Europe.

* * *

Just a few short years ago, when Western Europeans looked to the future, their thoughts were almost entirely on the full implementation of the European Community’s economic and financial reforms of 1992. Some awaited with relish the prospect of currency unification, the elimination of internal tariffs, and the free circulation of citizens. Others did so with hesitation or even fear. Still, by and large, the nations of the Community saw the problems facing Europe in a particularly narrow perspective. First, they took a remarkably parochial view of what constituted Europe. Second, they saw their challenges relating more to the economic problems of the future than to the emotionally explosive problems of the past. The very name of their organization betrayed the comfortable myopia that the postwar political configuration had made possible. The “European Community” was no such thing. It was actually the Western European Community, to which the addition of Greece had already created considerable problems. For these nations, “Europe” stopped at the so-called Iron Curtain: Beyond that lay the Warsaw Pact nations, poor but blessedly distant cousins, largely irrelevant to the economic and, increasingly, even to the military concerns of the Community.

Within this “little Europe,” the old problems of nationalism, economic competition, and social tensions seemed, if not entirely solved, then at least manageable. Separatist movements in Northern Ireland, Corsica, and northern Spain continued to shed blood, but these were limited in scope and geographically isolated. Elsewhere, as in the South Tyrol, Brittany, and Catalonia, the micronationalist movements of the 1970s had largely devolved into folkloric tourist attractions. Even the antagonisms between Walloons and Flemings in Belgium had subsided, as Brussels moved forward as the capital of the Community. National boundaries, for centuries causae belli, had not only been fixed by treaties and guaranteed by the Helsinki Accords, but, with implementation of the 1992 program, they seemed destined to become irrelevant. England continued to be uncertain about whether it wanted to be part of Europe, but the rest of the United Kingdom had no such hesitation, and the “Chunnel” promised to unite France and England in a manner that would permanently end the island’s geographical and psychological isolation. After four decades of irritating military and ec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of maps
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• A chronology of Romans and barbarians in Late Antiquity
• Introduction: Romans, barbarians, and the transformation of the Roman Empire
• PART I Barbarian ethnicity and identity
• Part II: Accommodating the Barbarians
• Part III: Barbarians and Romans in Merovingian Gaul
• Index