Europe: A History (45 page)

Following the chaos of the previous century, the economy of the Empire was restored to a modicum of prosperity and stability. Civic munificence was diminished from earlier levels; but provincial cities, especially on the frontier zones of central Europe, retained a solid measure of pride in their public works. Diocletian’s tax reforms, based on assessments of agricultural labour, had provided the basis for regular budgetary planning. They also swelled the imperial bureaucracy. Complaints were heard about tax-collectors outnumbering tax-payers. The gold coinage, struck at the rate of 60 coins per pound of bullion, offset the debasement of copper coins and laid the foundations of Byzantium’s stable currency.

The Empire’s frontiers were holding firm; in fact, for a time they were slightly expanded. The valuable province of Armenia had been wrested from Persia in 297, and through romanization and christianization was laying the basis of a permanent and distinctive culture. To facilitate administration, the Empire was divided into the four prefectures of Oriens (Constantinople), Illyricum (Sirmium), Italia et Africa (Milan), and Gaul (Trier). In the West, in Britain, the depredations of the Picts and Scots had been held at bay by the expedition of Constantine’s father. The separatist ‘emperors of Britain’, Carausius and Alectus, had been brought to heel. In the East, Sassanid Persia threatened, but did not overrun. In the south, Moorish tribes were pressing on Roman Africa.

The most important changes to Europe’s political and ethnic map were proceeding beyond the Empire’s limits and beyond the reach of documentary history. The huge region of Celtic supremacy was dwindling fast. The Celts’ western strongholds in Britain and Gaul were heavily romanized. Their homelands in the centre were being overrun, absorbed, or destroyed by the movement of Germanic and Slavonic tribes (see Chapter IV). The Franks were already settled on either side of the Rhine frontier. The Goths had completed their Long March from the Vistula to the Dnieper. The Slavs were drifting westwards towards the centre, where Celtic Bohemia was heading for slavicization. The Baits already lived on the Baltic. The Finno-Ugrians, long since divided, were well on their way to their future territories. The Finns were on station on the Volga-Baltic bridge; the
Magyars were settled at one of their many halts along the southern steppes. The nomads and the sea-raiders remained for the time being along the outer periphery. The Scythians were no. more than a distant memory. The Huns were still in Central Asia. The Norsemen were already in Norway, as shown by the oldest of their runic inscriptions.

Constantine’s view of the outside world would have been governed by the state of Roman communications. China, which was still disunited by the chaos of the recent ‘Three Kingdom Period’, was known through the fragile contacts of the silk route. It had been visited in
AD
284 by the ambassadors of Diocletian. It was nominally subject to the Chin dynasty, whose influence was slowly spreading from north to south. It had largely abandoned the philosophy of Confucius and, through the flowering of Buddhism, was building strong cultural ties with India. India, whose northern region had just come under the rule of the Gupta emperors, the greatest patrons of Hindu art and culture, was much closer to Rome and was much better known. News of the crowning of Chandragupta I at Magadha in 320 would almost certainly have reached Constantinople via Egypt. Egypt was also the source of news from Abyssinia, which was the target of Christian missions from Syria and Alexandria. The Sassanid Empire of Persia, which shared a long and fragile frontier with Rome, was the object of intense interest. It had rejected the hellenism of the previous era and passed into a phase of militant Zoroastrianism. Mani, the prophet of dualist Manichaeanism, who had sought to marry Zoroaster’s principles with those of Christianity, had been executed some sixty years before. The boy-king Shapur II (310–79) was still in the power of his priests and magnatial guardians, who, apart from completing the compilation of the holy scriptures, the
Avesta
were conducting a thorough persecution of all dissenters. The Roman-Persian peace, which had not been broken for thirty-three years, was due to hold until Constantine’s death.

The founding of Constantinople in 330, which was a clear-cut event, seems to support the widespread practice of taking the reign of Constantine as the dividing line between the ancient and the medieval periods. In this, it has to vie with a number of competing dates: with 392 and the accession of Theodosius I, the first emperor whose empire was exclusively Christian; with 476 and the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West (see p. 240); with 622 and the rise of Islam, which divided the former Roman world into Muslim and Christian spheres (see pp. 251–8); and with 800 and Charlemagne’s restoration of a Christian empire in the West (see pp. 298–306). If this sort of dividing line were to be taken seriously, there is a danger that the young Constantine might be judged an ancient and the older Constantine a medieval.

Much more important is the overall balance at any given time between the legacy of the past and the sum total of innovations—what professional historians sometimes call the ‘continuities’ and the ‘discontinuities’. On this basis, one can state with some confidence that no such tipping of an important balance occurred in Constantinople in
AD
330.

The city of Rome was inevitably diminished, not least when Constantine abolished the praetorian guard and razed their Roman headquarters. But Rome’s practical importance had declined long since. In the long run it actually benefited: by losing control of an empire which was set to crumble, it ensured that it would not be linked to the Empire’s fate. It was to find a new and lasting role as the home of Christianity’s most powerful hierarch. The current Bishop of Rome, however, was far from assertive. Sylvester I (314–35) attended neither the Council of Aries, which Constantine convened in 314 to end the Donatist quarrel, nor the General Council of Nicaea.

Most historians would agree that the core of Graeco-Roman civilization, as solidified in the later phases of the ancient world, lay first and foremost in the Empire and secondly in the complex cultural pluralism which it patronized and tolerated. The core of medieval civilization, in contrast, lay in the community of Christendom and its exclusively Christian culture. It developed through the mingling of ex-Roman and non-Roman peoples on a territorial base that coincided with that of the former Empire only in part. In 330, very few of the processes which led from the one to the other had even begun. Constantine himself was no European.

One must not forget the sequence of events. The span of time which separated Constantine from Charlemagne was greater than that which separated Constantine from Caesar and Augustus. It was equal to the span which encompasses the whole of modern history, from the Renaissance and Reformation to the present.

Yet Constantine did plant the seed of one historic notion—that the Christian religion was compatible with politics. Christ himself had categorically rejected political involvement; and prior to Constantine, Christians had not sought to assume power as a means of furthering their cause. After Constantine, Christianity and high politics went hand in hand. This, in the eyes of the purists, was the moment of corruption.

Appropriately enough, therefore, Constantinople soon became the founding seat of Christian power. It was made the official capital of the Roman Empire in 331, on the first anniversary of its inauguration, and it retained the distinction for more than a thousand years. Within one or two generations it assumed a predominantly Christian character, with the churches outnumbering the temples, until the temples were eventually banned. It was the source, and later the heart, of the ‘Byzantine’ state—the senior branch of medieval Christendom, and, despite the devotees of ‘Western Civilization’, an essential constituent of European history.

ORIGO

The Birth of Europe,
AD
c.
330–800

T
HERE
is a sense of impending doom about most modern attempts to describe the late Roman Empire. The fact of the Empire’s decline and fall is known in advance to virtually everyone, and it is all but impossible to recreate the perspectives of those long centuries when the eventual outcome was a mystery. Voltaire dismissed the history of the late Empire as ‘ridiculous’; Gibbon wrote that he had described ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’.

Yet contemporaries could hardly have shared the viewpoint of the Enlightenment. True enough, they were very conscious of living through difficult times. Nothing is more redolent of the age than the melancholy reflections of the late Roman philosopher Boethius (c.480–525). ‘The most unfortunate sort of misfortune’, he wrote in his
Consolations of Philosophy
, ‘is once to have been happy.’ On the other hand, if they watched the Empire’s decline, they did not necessarily foresee its fall. For many Christians, the end of the Empire came to be synonymous with Christ’s Second Coming, with Doomsday itself. But Doomsday was so often postponed that it ceased to play a part in practical considerations. What is more, it is doubtful whether the barbarians, whose incursions were the most visible symptom of the Empire’s weakness, had any intention of destroying it. On the contrary, they wanted to share in its benefits. The shocking sack of Rome in
AD
410 occurred because the Emperor had refused to settle Alaric’s Goths in the Empire. From the modern vantage-point, the real marvels to contemplate are the longevity of the Roman Empire, and the growing interdependence of the ex-Roman and the ex-barbarian worlds. In the long run, this was the interaction which gave birth to the entity called ‘Christendom’, the foundation of European civilization.

At the death of Constantine, the division of the ‘known world’ into two simple parts, the Roman and the barbarian, generally still stood. On one side of the frontier the reunited Roman Empire held firm; on the other a restless mass of peoples, largely in the tribal stage of development, tilled the forest clearings or roamed the plain. Understandably enough, most Romans saw this division in terms of black
and white. For them, the Empire was ‘civilized’—that is, subject to ordered government; the barbarians were, by definition ‘uncivilized’. Though the concept of the ‘noble savage’ certainly existed—as when the captive British chief, Caractacus, had been paraded through Rome—the crossing from the Empire to the uncharted lands beyond was seen as a step from sunlight into shade.

In reality, the distinction between the Roman and the non-Roman world could never have been so stark. Roman armies regularly fought under barbarian generals, who used barbarian auxiliaries to help repel the Empire’s barbarian foes. The countries adjacent to the frontier had been exposed to Roman influence for centuries. Roman traders and artefacts penetrated far beyond the imperial frontiers. Roman coins have been unearthed throughout Germany and eastern Europe. Hoards and graves have yielded stunning Roman gold, bronze, and silver ware, at Hildesheim near Hanover, at Lubsow in Pomerania, at Trondheim in Norway, at Klajpeda in Lithuania, even in Afghanistan. Important Roman trading-stations operated as far afield as south India.
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It is equally hard to be precise about the tempo of the Roman Empire’s decline. Three grand historical processes which begin to take centre stage after Constantine were already in motion; and each of them lasted for many centuries. The first was the relentless westward drive of the barbarian peoples from Asia into Europe (see pp. 215–38). The second was the growing rift between the Western and the Eastern halves of the Roman world (see pp. 239–51). The third was the steady export of Christianity to the pagan peoples (see pp. 275–82). These three processes dominated the period which were later to be dubbed ‘the Dark Ages’. A fourth, the rise of Islam (see pp. 251–8), exploded out of distant Arabia in the seventh century, and rapidly set the southern and eastern limits within which the others could interact.

For modern readers, one main problem lies with the traditional romanocentric and christianophile perceptions of European historians whose approach to ‘the Dark Ages’ has strongly reflected both their classical education and their religious beliefs. Of course, there is no reason why one should not put oneself in the shoes of a Boethius or a Gregory of Tours, and empathize with their gloomy judgements. If one does, the sense of impending doom can only be reinforced. On the other hand, there is no reason why one perspective should be accepted to the exclusion of all others. If only the sources were more abundant, one could empathize no less properly with the experiences of the advancing barbarians, of the pagans, or of the Muslim warriors. In which case the prevailing air would probably become one of excitement, of expectation, and of promise. According to Salvian of Marseilles, many Romans of good birth and education took refuge among the Goths and the Franks, ‘seeking a Roman humanity among the barbarians, because they could no longer support barbarian inhumanity among the Romans’.
²