The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 Read online

  A particularly good example of this balance between central and local politics is Desiderius of Cahors, for we have not only a saint’s life for him but also his letter collection; his experiences sum up much of the foregoing. Desiderius was a member of the remarkable set of administrators educated and trained in the court of Chlotar II and Dagobert I, along with, among others, Audoin of Rouen, who had been Dagobert’s referendarius before he became a bishop in 641, and Eligius of Noyon, made bishop in the same year, who had been Dagobert’s main financial official (we even have some of his coins). Desiderius himself, slightly older, had been thesaurarius for Chlotar, and later patricius of Provence, before returning to Cahors as bishop in 630. This talented group of men were friends, and, as Desiderius’ letters show, stayed so. Audoin and Eligius were bishops of sees close to the royal palaces of Neustria; Desiderius was not, and one gets a sense from the nostalgia of some of the letters that he felt rather cut off from the buzz of politics, for Cahors is more than 600 kilometres south of Paris and Metz. He was not so very isolated, all the same; we have patronage recommendations from the 640s to the maior of Austrasia, Grimoald, and to Arnulf of Metz’s son, and a letter from Sigibert III agreeing to some of Desiderius’ requests. The fact is that all these episcopal appointments, particularly well documented in this period but with plenty of parallels before and after, spread a court consciousness and a court culture across the whole of Frankish Gaul, as Dagobert surely knew. Desiderius got letters from his informants which told him exactly where the king was: he has moved from Verdun to Reims, then he will go to Laon then back to the Rhineland; he is now in Mainz - the bishop needed this constantly changing information, from hundreds of kilometres away, so as to keep abreast of affairs. And he did so even though he was from one of Cahors’ major families (he succeeded his brother as bishop), with huge local wealth, and devoted his later life to the city, repairing its water supply, building big stone buildings, defending episcopal lands against other local bishops, and helping along its citizens, not least in the king’s court. Desiderius was all the more effective in being a bishop because his heart was still at court, and all the more effective an ambassador for royal centrality because his wealth and office was in the south. Those were Merovingian norms, and they held the kingdoms together.

  The troubles of the late seventh century shook this organic pattern, as we have already seen; the Merovingians lost their centrality as political actors between around 655 and 675, and, although their courts remained strong foci for political action, outlying principalities gained practical autonomy, and some other dukes and bishops looked less to Merovingian or Pippinid patronage. The period of instability stopped with Tertry in 687; but it is actually the period of Pippin II that may have seen the lowest level of royal, or, by now, mayoral protagonism. It is striking that the documentation for capillary royal actions of the type listed in Marculf’s formulary runs out in the late 670s; later royal or mayoral documents are restricted to the confirmations of rights, and to judicial placita. No proceedings survive from any church councils between 675 and 742, either. It seems that Pippin’s regime was less organizationally ambitious than those of his predecessors, including Ebroin and Childeric II. This may indeed have contributed to the decisions by some political leaders to deal in local or regional rather than court politics more than they had done before, even in the period of the civil wars. But this localization had not got very far by the time of Charles Martel’s reunification. Charles did not reverse the relative inaction of central government just described - that was for the next Carolingian generation - but his overthrow of so many members of an older regime and, above all, the annual aggregation of aristocrats to take part in his wars, the most committed and consistent military mobilization in Francia since the sixth century, reversed any temptation to localization. Nor had it been so very hard; the Frankish political system, even if at times ramshackle, was not yet in poor shape.

  6

  The West Mediterranean Kingdoms: Spain and Italy, 550-750

  In October 680, Wamba, Visigothic king of Spain (672-80), fell seriously ill, and thought he was going to die. Like some other kings, he undertook penance, and was tonsured in the presence of his magnates; he designated his successor Ervig (680-87) in writing and in another document asked for him to be anointed as soon as possible (anointing to the kingship was in fact a novelty, introduced, as far as we can tell, by Wamba himself in 672). Wamba did not die; but he was tonsured now, and the sixth church council of Toledo (638) had prohibited anyone who had been tonsured from being king. Ervig quickly called the twelfth council of Toledo, which met in January 681, less than four months later, in midwinter, and as their first act the bishops of the kingdom ratified his succession and all the associated documentation (this is our only source for it, in fact), and cancelled the oath of allegiance the Spanish had sworn to Wamba. As their second act, they discussed what would happen if someone was given penitence and the tonsure while unconscious and, recovering, wished to reject it and return to a secular career: they enacted that the penitence and tonsuring must hold. Like most commentators, I see this as a response to a protest by Wamba that he had been deposed without his consent; but the careful legal framing of an effective coup is nonetheless striking.

  The seventh-century Spanish political community were not always as respectful of the forms of law as this. The rules on legitimate succession laid down by the fourth council of Toledo in 633 were almost never followed, for example. But legal enactments, both secular and ecclesiastical, were part of the currency of Spanish political practice. People were aware of them, if they were aristocrats and bishops, at least; and even kings, if their support was weak enough, as was presumably the case in 680, could be trapped by them. This is a marker of a different style of politics from that of Francia: in Visigothic Spain, as to a lesser extent in Lombard Italy, legal principles were important points of reference, as they had also been in the later Roman empire, to which the Visigoths and Lombards were in some respects closer than were the Franks. In the case of Visigothic Spain in particular, historians have indeed often paid too much attention to law, for there are few narratives and documents for the period, and immense quantities of secular and ecclesiastical legislation. Spanish history often looks fairly arid as a result. But we cannot and should not argue that law away; its very quantity tells us something about the values of the Spanish establishment. I shall begin with Spain, move on to Italy, and then compare them; we shall then see better what sort of range of development from Roman practices was possible in the post-Roman West.

  Spain (that is, the Iberian peninsula, including what is now Portugal) was partly conquered by the Vandals after 409, and then, after 439, mostly conquered by the Suevi. In 456 the Visigoths invaded and swiftly destroyed Suevic power, confining it to the far north-west. The obscure process of Visigothic conquest began here, speeded up in the 470s, and was probably complete by 483, when King Euric had the main bridge at Mérida, the Roman capital of Spain, repaired, as an inscription attests. The Visigoths were still based in Gaul, however; even after their great defeat by Clovis in 507 their capital remained in Narbonne, in the tiny strip of Mediterranean Gaul (modern Languedoc) that they kept hold of. After 511 Theoderic the Ostrogoth established a regency for the Visigothic child king Amalaric (511-31), and Spain was effectively ruled from Italy until Theoderic’s death in 526. There followed another forty years of relatively weak kings, succeeding each other by coup. Athanagild (551-68), based apparently in Seville in the south, rose up against Agila (549-54) and fought a civil war against him; he asked for Justinian’s help to do so, and this gave the east Romans the excuse to establish a bridgehead in Spain, the south-eastern coastal strip, in 552, which they held until around 628. Athanagild died in his bed, unlike any of his sixth-century predecessors; he was succeeded by Liuva I (568-73), who was again based in Narbonne, but who soon divided his kingdom with his brother Leovigild (569-86), giving the latter the whole of Spain and keeping only Visigothic Gaul.


  The mark of the whole period 409-569 in Spain is instability. Perhaps in 483-507 there was relative peace, and also probably in 511-26, but in both periods the peninsula was ruled from outside, from Gaul and then Italy. The empire was not so long gone, when the western Mediterranean had been a single unit, but in our rare sources for this period Spain seems an appendage almost in a colonial sense, and largely left to its own devices. As we saw in Chapter 4, the archaeology for the later fifth century, particularly for the inland plateau of Spain, the Meseta, shows a weakening of rural estate centres, villas, and also a sharp contraction of the scale of ceramic production, which became more localized and simpler. The first of these developments, which became accentuated in the sixth century, might simply show cultural changes, as it did in the militarized northern Gaul of the late fourth century, but the second shows a simplification of the economy as a whole, which implies a decrease in aristocratic demand. The insecurity of the fifth and a great part of the sixth centuries, in some parts of the Iberian peninsula, seems to have hit many of the basic economic structures inherited from the Roman world quite hard.

  The other effect of this instability was the fragmentation of the society of the peninsula. Spain is mountainous, with poor communications between the great plateaux and the major river valleys, and very great ecological differences between the wet climate of the north-west, which resembles Cornwall, and the desert of parts of the south-east. It would be easy for it to break into pieces with very different experiences, and this is what seems to have happened in this period. In parts of the north, we find references to semi-autonomous communities, either ruled by local strong-men like the senior Aspidius (575) in the Ourense area, or, more often, apparently collectively run, like the Sappi of Sabaria, perhaps near Zamora (573), or the hardly Romanized tribal groups of parts of the north coast who were generally called Vascones and many of whom spoke Basque. Such communities could have more Roman trappings, however, as was apparent in Cantabria (574), the Ebro valley upstream from Zaragoza, which was ruled by ‘senators’ (major local landowners) and a senate. In the south, it was cities that established autonomy, such as Córdoba (550-72). Southern cities could indeed remain very prosperous in an entirely Roman tradition, as is clear in Mérida, not a fully autonomous centre but for a long time hardly looking at all to the kings, whose bishops and aristocrats maintained considerable wealth (attested in the episcopal saints’ lives for the city), and where several Visigothic-period urban and rural churches and even some villas survive. There were thus two processes of fragmentation in this period. One was the loss to central authority of numerous sections of Spain, up to a third of the peninsula. The other was the development or revival of political practices that were different from those of Rome, more collective, even tribal, in some parts of the peninsula, notably the north. It must be stressed all the same that much of Spain remained very Roman, whether it obeyed the Visigothic kings or not, especially along the Mediterranean coast and in the rich Guadalquivir valley in the south, a zone which extended inland to Mérida. One of the Variae of Cassiodorus from around 524 shows the Ostrogoths taking the land tax, and a document surviving for Barcelona and nearby cities from 594 shows that taxation (in that area it was run by counts and bishops) could, at least locally, be quite high.

  It was this doubly fragmented situation that Leovigild faced; he reversed it by military action. The dates in parentheses in the previous paragraph are those of Leovigild’s conquests, which were systematic in the 570s, and which culminated in the overthrow of his son Hermenegild’s five-year Seville-based revolt in 584 and the annexation of the Suevic kingdom in 585. By Leovigild’s death in 586, only the Roman-controlled coastal strip in the south and the Basques in the north remained outside royal authority. As with Charles Martel in Francia in the 720s-730s, the Visigothic power-base cannot have been so reduced, or Leovigild could not have managed this at all, however much more determined he was than his predecessors. It is clear from the Mérida saints’ lives that he wanted to make his power felt inside the lands he controlled as well. Leovigild appointed an Arian bishop, Sunna, to oppose the rich and locally influential Catholic bishop of Mérida, Masona (who was himself a Goth), and eventually summoned Masona to his court at Toledo and exiled him for three years. He exiled and expropriated lay aristocrats, too; and, not least important, he issued a major revision of the law code. Leovigild was not simply a soldier; he was a unifier. Toledo had already become the main royal residence under Athanagild, but under Leovigild it became a focus of political and religious activity, a real capital. The choice of Toledo, not previously a major centre, was itself significant, for it was exactly in the middle of the peninsula: it marked royal ambition. Leovigild founded his own new city, too, Recópolis, to the east of Toledo, as a further sign of prestige, although Recópolis was never very large, as excavations show.

  Leovigild also faced up to the problem of religious disunity. The Goths in Spain had remained Arian; Leovigild in a church council at Toledo in 580 sought to soften that Arianism doctrinally, to make it more palatable to Catholics, while also persecuting at least some Catholic activists. This has parallels to Vandal procedures in Africa a century earlier, but the attempts to find a doctrinal middle road more resemble the policies towards Monophysitism of eastern emperors such as Justinian, as we have seen. Essentially, however, Arianism was practised by too few people by now; the Goths were only a small proportion of the population of Spain, a few per cent at most, and not all of them were Arian, as Masona shows. Hermenegild, too, adopted Catholicism in the course of his revolt. Once religious unity came to be seen as desirable, it was most likely to be on Catholic terms. Indeed, Leovigild’s second son and successor, Reccared (586-601), switched to Catholicism almost immediately after he became king, in 587, and at the third council of Toledo in 589 Arianism was outlawed, far more uncompromisingly than Leovigild had sought to oppose Catholicism. Reccared faced a series of revolts and conspiracies as a result, up to 590 at least and perhaps longer. But Arianism must have been weak by now, for it did not reappear as a rallying call in the renewed instability that followed Reccared’s death.

  Reccared’s son Liuva II (601-3) did not last long, and between 601 and 642 there were nine kings, only one (Suinthila, 621-31) lasting as much as a decade; three were sons of their predecessors, but they were particularly swiftly overthrown. Fredegar in Francia referred to this constant series of coups rather smugly as the ‘disease of the Goths’ - to a Frank, of course, non-dynastic kingship looked like chaos in itself. But what did not happen in this generation was any reversion to the political fragmentation of the pre-Leovigild period. The kings fought frontier wars, against the Basques, the Franks and the east Romans on their coastal strip, and Suinthila finally conquered the latter region around 628. Internally, the sequence of coups at least shows that the dukes and provincial governors of the kingdom were interested in central kingship, rather than autonomy. The kings themselves, even Suinthila, did not leave much mark; Sisebut (612-21) was an author of poetry, letters and a saint’s life, the only western ruler in this book except Alfred of England to gain a reputation as a writer, as well as being the first serious persecutor of the Jewish population of Spain, but he seems otherwise undistinguished. The only major innovation of this period was the inauguration, with the fourth council of Toledo in 633, of a steady series of plenary councils of bishops, called by kings at Toledo - thirteen from 633 to 702 - which became so crucial a part of the political aggregation of the kingdom that periods without regular full councils, notably 656- 81, were sharply criticized by the church, even if provincial councils had been called in between. The collective role of bishops in the political aggregation of the seventh-century Visigothic kingdom was a specific feature of Spain; neither Francia nor Lombard Italy put as much weight on church councils. Their legislation was secular as well as ecclesiastical, and the king presided, often reading out an initial statement of intent. They contributed greatly to the ceremonial importance of the capi
tal.

  The cycle of coups was broken by Chindasuinth (642-53), who took over the throne at the age of nearly eighty, and who curbed the aristocracy by executing 700 of them (Fredegar claims), depriving others of their civil rights, and enacting a draconian law on treason. Chindasuinth was hated for this even by some of his protégés, such as Bishop Eugenius II of Toledo (d. 657), who wrote an abusive epitaph for him. Feelings remained sufficiently strong that once a king succeeded who was in a weak position, Ervig in 680, the thirteenth council in 683 restored the noble status and civil rights of all those who had lost them since 639: aristocratic (and episcopal) solidarity had kept the issue alive for forty years. But conversely the coups ended, or, perhaps better, remained provincial and no longer succeeded at national level; so Reccesuinth (649-72) defeated Froia in 653, Wamba defeated Paul in 673, Egica (687-702) defeated Sisbert in 693. Royal succession became peaceful, even when controversial: Reccesuinth was Chindasuinth’s son; Wamba was elected at Reccesuinth’s deathbed; Ervig’s succession was at least uncontested; his successor Egica was his son-in-law, and Wittiza (694-710) was Egica’s son. Only in 710 was there a contested election, perhaps a coup, with Roderic (710-11) imposed by court officials. This general tendency away from political violence was not lessened by the clear evidence we have that most of these kings were opposed to their predecessors. Ervig with respect to Wamba is one example; Egica with respect to Ervig is even clearer, for at his accession he asked the fifteenth council to let him dispossess Ervig’s family (the council refused). Both Ervig and Egica also took some pleasure in reversing their predecessors’ laws. Wittiza apparently cancelled his father’s expropriations too, and Roderic was later thought to have been opposed by Wittiza’s family. Tensions thus evidently remained, and they could be savage (particularly under Egica), but they were patterned by ceremonies of public solidarity and legislation, not by war.