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

  The scale of the army and its presence everywhere, and the need to keep it properly provisioned and equipped, made it the major concern of the whole Roman state. The state had a developed system of frontier fortifications and its own food-supply lines: the distribution of oil amphorae along the lower Danube, for example, shows that the army there was supplied from the Aegean into the late sixth century. It also had its own factories for military equipment, of which thirty-five are listed, distributed all across the empire, in the Notitia Dignitatum, an account of the imperial military structure dating to the end of the fourth century. Perhaps a half of the entire imperial budget went on feeding and paying the army, and the logistics of army supply were the single most important element that linked all the imperial provinces together, along with the permanent need to feed the imperial capitals.

  Underpinning all these structures, and making them possible, was the imperial tax system, which was based above all on a land tax, assessed on acreage, though also buttressed by a much lighter tax on merchants and artisans, by the revenues from imperial lands and by a variety of smaller dues. In recent years some historians have reacted against an earlier image of the ‘coercive state’ of the late empire, taxing so heavily that land was abandoned and the economy began to break down; this revision is correct, but they seem to me to have gone too far in their arguments. Taxation does seem to have been very heavy overall: in the sixth century a small number of sources, mostly from Egypt, converge in showing that a quarter of the yield of land could go in tax, and it was more in times of extra taxation (superindictiones) which was assessed on top of the main tax burden. This is a very high figure for a precapitalist, agrarian society, with a relatively simple technology. But the high taxes were needed to pay the salaries of all those soldiers, bureaucrats and messengers, and to feed the capitals; they were needed to fund the enormous scale of Roman public buildings and state wealth. They also connected the different parts of the empire together physically, as grain moved northwards from Africa, Sicily and Egypt, and olive oil moved out of Africa, the Aegean and Syria, in ships themselves commandeered by the state (shipowners moved goods for the state as part of their tax liability). This movement of goods was essentially Mediterranean-based, as it was far easier and cheaper to transport in bulk by water than by land; Gaul, the Rhineland and Britain formed a smaller and separate network, and inland Spain, far from both sea and frontiers, seems to have been somewhat marginal. The core of the empire remained Mediterranean, and it, at least, or, rather, its two halves, were unified by the fiscal movement of goods.

  A land tax cannot work properly, especially when it is high, unless assessment is accurate and collection systematic. This takes work. The state has to have up-to-date records about who owns the land; these are not easy to obtain systematically (and no easier to keep in order for easy reference), and establishing them requires a considerable amount of personnel and intrusive information-gathering. Land sales had to be publicly registered in the late empire for this reason, and such registrations can sometimes be found in the rare collections of private documents from the late empire, usually papyri from Egypt, although a few texts do survive elsewhere. And, most important, from the fourth century onwards the government issued laws to tie the peasantry, who were actually paying the taxes, to their place of origin, so that they would not move around or leave the land, thus making tax-collection more difficult. These laws were part of a general legislative package aimed at ensuring that people essential to the state stayed in their professions, and that their heirs would do so too. Curiales were tied to their offices, as we have seen; so were soldiers, and the workers in state factories; so were shipowners and the bakers and butchers of Rome, who were essential for the annona of the capital. Even if this network of laws was regularly obeyed, which we can doubt, they make up a large proportion of the imperial codes, and they were generated by the need to stabilize the tax infrastructure of the empire. Add to that the actual collection of taxes, which could be a tense and violent moment, and was certainly undertaken by armed men, and the impact of the imperial fiscal system was continuous, capillary and potentially coercive of nearly everybody in the empire.

  This intrusiveness was made worse by illegality. The rich could buy immunity corruptly; assessors and collectors certainly got rich corruptly. The victims were almost always the poor. They responded by fleeing the land (hence the laws tying them down), or by seeking protection from the powerful against having to pay taxes to the state. There are also laws against such patronage, although we have seen that patronage, too, was a stable part of the Roman political system. Most taxes were, it is true, probably paid regularly and even legally; it is striking that the Egyptian papyrus archive of the sixth-century Apion family, then one of the richest families of the Greek East and overwhelmingly dominant in their home town, the city of Oxyrhynchos (modern Bahnasa), shows them paying taxes in a very routine manner. But given the weight of tax, and the endemic injustice that marked the Roman system, it is not surprising that corruption should focus on it. Social critics, more numerous as the empire went Christian and a radical fringe of moralists gained a voice, very frequently stress fiscal oppression in their invective; only judicial corruption and sexual behaviour were as prominent. This would last as long as the empire.

  Taxation thus underpinned imperial unity itself, for it was the most evident single element in the state’s impact on the population at large, as well as the mainstay of the army, the administration, the legal system and the movement of goods throughout the Mediterranean and elsewhere, all the elements which linked such a large land area together. If it failed, the empire would simply break up. But in fact the empire broke up for other reasons, as we shall see in Chapter 4. After it did so, taxation was a casualty in the West, but survived in the East. This contrast cannot be underestimated, and it underpins many of the events described in later sections of this book. All the same, fiscal breakdown was not yet predictable in 400, or even 500 in some places. In 400 the stability, and relative homogeneity, of the imperial system was not yet seen by anyone to be at risk.

  So far, we have focused on the state, and the imperial political system in general. Local differences have been downplayed, and our vision has been top-down, seen from the viewpoint of administrators and the rich. Let us now look at the rest of the population, and at some of the regional differences which we can pin down in the late Roman empire.

  The first thing to be stated is that the population of the empire consisted overwhelmingly of peasants: families of cultivators, who worked the land they owned or rented, and who lived off the food they themselves produced, as well as giving surpluses to landlords (if they had them) in rent, and in tax to the state. Many of them were servi, unfree with no legal rights, particularly in parts of the West, but the plantation slavery of early imperial Italy and Greece had almost entirely vanished by the late empire, and free and unfree peasants by now all lived their lives in similar ways. (This book will as a result not use the word ‘slaves’ for unfree peasants, as it is misleading; the word will be used only for unfree domestic servants, who were fed and maintained by their masters as plantation slaves had been.) In the early Middle Ages, peasants made up 90 per cent or more of the population; the proportion must have been less in the late empire, as more people lived in towns - in Egypt, exceptionally, up to a third of the total population - but could have been as much as 80 per cent, still an extremely high proportion.

  Most peasants were probably the tenants of landlords. Legislators certainly assumed so, for their laws tying peasants to the land were directed to coloni, the standard Latin word for tenant. The huge estates of the emperor and of Roman senators, and the even greater collective landed wealth of all the provincial and curial élites, also presupposed the existence of millions of dependent tenants who supplied their rents. This was often through middlemen, conductores, who leased whole estates from the great landowners; but some of the latter paid considerable attention to managing their own estates f
or profit, such as the Apions in sixth-century Egypt, and Palladius, the estate-management manualist, in fifth-century Italy. Unfortunately, our evidence is not good enough to tell us how often, and where, peasants owned their own land. Egyptian papyri show that some city territories were dominated by owners of large estates, but others had a substantial landowning peasantry and much more autonomy. A good example is the territory of the large village of Aphrodito (modern Kom Ishqaw), from which many sixth-century documents survive, as we shall see shortly. The still standing late Roman villages of Syria and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean show in the best preserved cases (such as in the Limestone Massif of northern Syria: see below, Chapter 10) an architectural ambition and a homogeneity of house types that is difficult to square with tenurial dependence; there are few visible estate centres, in particular. It is generally thought, therefore, that these villages mostly belonged to independent owners.

  Overall, it seems that there were more peasant owners in the East than the West, which also fits the fact that fewer hyper-rich landowners are known of in the East. In the West, by contrast, much of Italy and Africa in particular and parts of Gaul were probably dominated by landowners, and we know of more estates which included large areas; one of Melania and Pinianus’ estates in Africa was ‘larger than the city itself’, that is to say, the city territory of the nearest town, Thagaste. (In Africa, where not all dioceses were based in towns, some estates were so substantial that they had their own bishops.) But in both West and East, even large estates were normally highly fragmented and scattered, and many consisted of hundreds or thousands of separate land parcels; there was plenty of space for peasant owners and village-level élites to exist in between them. Some tenants owned land as well, and the laws on tax-paying distinguish between coloni who owned some land, who paid taxes directly to collectors, and coloni who owned none (called adscripticii), who paid taxes through their landlords. The latter were much more dependent, more similar to unfree tenants (who did not pay tax: their lords paid it directly); Justinian, indeed, in one of his laws, wondered what real difference there was between servi and adscripticii. The answer probably varied regionally: tenure was certainly more flexible in Egypt, where leases were shorter, more peasants owned land, there was more wage labour and rural unfreedom was very rare; in Italy, by contrast, there were whole estates with only unfree tenants, and rural subjection was probably greater overall.

  One real difference between East and West was that peasants lived in villages much more often in the East. Some of the villages still stand, as just noted, at least in marginal areas where the land has since been abandoned to pasture or desert. But documents and archaeology both show that villages (komai or chria) were normal in most of the Greek- speaking world, and they could be tightly organized, with their own headmen, as in particular in Egypt. Owners and tenants lived side by side in these villages, and peasant society was, simply for that reason, relatively coherent and autonomous (eastern landed aristocrats, as we have seen, normally lived in towns), as well as potentially more fraught, as village factions fought over pasture and water rights, or over the pecking-order between the successful and the less successful that existed in every village. We know so much about the Egyptian village of Aphrodito because we have the papyrus archive of Dioskoros, son of Apollos (lived c. 520-85), who was a fairly well-off village leader there: he was sometimes its headman, as his father had been. Dioskoros had a literary and legal education, probably in Alexandria, and became a local notary when he returned; more unusually, he was also a poet, and wrote praise poems to local dukes and other officials. He is interesting for a variety of reasons. He is the best-documented village-dweller of the whole late empire; but his personal character comes across in the sources as well. Although he was certainly from the local élite, he felt threatened on all sides: by the governor of the nearest city, Antaiopolis, jealous of Aphrodito’s autonomy; and by neighbours, tenants, shepherds and creditors in his own village. We have some of his lawsuits; his poems, too, often end with pleas for help; they were transactions in his extensive patron-client network. Aphrodito was not a peaceful village. We even have a double-murder investigation by a senior military official, in which the senatorial aristocrat Sarapammon and his associate, the soldier Menas, defend themselves and accuse the villagers themselves of the crime. It is clear, however, that no single person could control it, and keep down its tensions. Aphrodito was only united when it faced off other villages and threats from Antaiopolis. These fractious societies were typical of the East.

  The West was different. Here, villages were rarer, except in some mountain zones; instead, as much archaeology shows, the countryside was scattered with isolated farms and the rural villas or estate-centres of major landowners. Even the concept of the village territory was hardly present in most places; land was simply identified by its owner, and most estates had their own names. We do not have Egyptian levels of documentation here, so it is hard to tell how rural societies worked, but it is likely that they were less coherent than in the East, for there was less to bind them together. Probably the tenants of single estates had something to link them, the common experience of paying rent to a landlord or conductor; this did not match the coherence of village life, but it could increase local tensions. The gap between the powerful and the poor was in general wider in much of the West, in fact, and we can sometimes see its results.

  One example comes from Augustine’s Africa. Augustine, as bishop of Hippo, appointed his monk Antoninus in the 410s to be bishop of a subordinate diocese at Fussala, one of Africa’s relatively few villages, in the hills of what is now eastern Algeria. Antoninus turned out to be a bad man - he was young and from a poor family, he was promoted too fast - and he terrorized his village, extorting money, clothing, produce and building materials. He was also accused of sexual assault. Augustine removed him, but did not depose him, and tried to transfer him to the nearby estate of Thogonoetum. Here, the tenants told Augustine and their landowner that they would leave if he came. Antoninus caused no end of trouble, even appealing to the pope in Rome (this being the context in which two surviving letters were written about him by Augustine, in 422-3). Augustine was very embarrassed, as indeed he should have been (‘I did not dare look the people of Fussala in the eye’). It is interesting, however, how scared the peasants were: in their angry and bitter witnessing, even after Antoninus’ removal, they would not give their names. The people of Fussala included tenants (who were interrogated without their conductores being present, to try to get them to relax), but probably not all of them were dependent; it is interesting, conversely, that the coloni of Thogonoetum were more prepared to resist Antoninus than were the villagers - illegally, too, for they were of course tied to the land by law. All the same, peasant protagonism here seems largely negative, marked by bitterness, fear and rejection. There was too much separation in this part of Africa between peasants and landlords, and more hostility between them as a result; there was no Dioskoros to mediate between the peasants and the authorities. It is not surprising that Augustine’s main fear was that the peasants would revert to the Donatist church (see Chapter 3), abandoning Catholic Christianity altogether.

  Another element that was very different from place to place were the patterns of commercial exchange and artisan production. Three decades of archaeology have led to a major revaluation of late Roman commerce, which as late as the 1970s was thought to be marginal to the economy. On archaeological sites, the density of finds of amphorae (which carried wine, oil and fish sauce above all, that is, food products) and fine pottery (a guide to other large-scale artisanal products such as cloth and metalwork) allows us to say which areas of the empire were major exporters, and where their products typically went. North African Red Slip tableware is found all over the late Roman Mediterranean; similar tableware from Phocaea on the Turkish Aegean coast and Cyprus matches it in the eastern Mediterranean as well. It evidently travelled by sea, but can be found quite far inland in Italy and in Syria
and Palestine. In northern Gaul and Britain and in inland Spain it was not available in more than tiny quantities, but large-scale local production is found instead; for this reason above all we can say that those areas, although active, were separate from the main Mediterranean economic network. Cloth, always the main artisanal product, is not easy to identify archaeologically, but literary sources (including the detailed lists in the imperial Price Edict of 301) show that Italy, Gaul, Egypt and Syria were among the major exporters. Amphorae allow us to add African, Syrian and Aegean oil, and south Italian, Palestinian and Aegean wine. These were large-scale distribution networks, and the commodities concerned were evidently produced on a large scale as well. Indeed, the African (that is to say, above all, Tunisian) and coastal Syrian/Palestinian economies probably depended substantially on exports for their prosperity. Internally, too, the complexity of the economies of southern Italy, the Aegean, Egypt and Palestine in particular, seems to show a dense network of inter-city and city-country exchange.