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of the prevailing form of civilization, ushering in a prolonged period of what used to be called The Dark
Ages? The Dark Ages-- roughly the sixth to eleventh century. This is a term we don't like to use. It implies a
value judgment that is not only not necessarily accurate, but also expresses a certain kind of point of view of
what are good periods in history and what are bad periods in history.
Chapter 2: Catastrophe [00:05:18]
But I'd like to just probe this third question first. That is, how severe a catastrophe was this? So is it the end
of civilization la Planet of the Apes or Blade Runner or any of those apocalyptic image we have? Or is it
merely a shift in power and the survival of Roman institutions such as the Church, while Roman political
infrastructure-- the emperor, the consoles, the praetorian prefects, and so forth-- while that collapses?
A medieval historian named Roger Collins in a book called The Early Middle Ages writes, "The fall of the
Roman Empire in the west was not the disappearance of a civilization. It was merely the breakdown of a
governmental apparatus that could no longer be sustained." The key word here is merely. The destruction
of the Roman political apparatus may simply mean that the Roman state ceased to function, but that
everything else continued.
But really, the question is, could everything else continue in the absence of a state and of a political order?
The destruction of the political order also means, after all, the destruction of the military system. When we
opened this class, we talked about a civilization built on such things as the rule of law and the maintenance
of peace. These are no longer possible if there is no military governmental structure.
As we'll say a little later, to some extent people didn't know that it was the end. Because for a while, things
seemed to go on as before. People were speaking Latin, they were living in cities, the cities were much less
populated, but nevertheless, they were still there; there were still rich people; there were still poor people.
In retrospect, though, we can see that things really did change. How much they changed is the subject of a
lot of historical controversy.
The world of the late Roman historians is divided, roughly speaking, between catastrophists and
continuists. As you may guess, the catastrophists think the fall of the Roman Empire -- whether we date it
476 or theres some reasons to date it, really, 550 for reasons we'll learn in next week. Between 450 and 550,
a catastrophe happened. A civilization was wiped out. And really, if not literally a Dark Ages, a more
primitive, more war-like, more illiterate, and more rural period was ushered in.
The disappearance of ancient texts, things that the Romans knew from that lost Hortensius dialogue of
Cicero that Augustine was so fond of to many other kinds of works that had been known to the Roman
world, right? I can't remember exactly how many plays Aeschylus wrote, but it's something on the order of
60, and we have three. So the disappearance of text. The end of literacy, except for a very small portion of
the Christian clergy.
A more primitive architecture. The end of grand civic projects like aqueducts, coliseums, theaters, baths. A
more isolated society without these urban centers. A diminished population spread across the countryside,
mostly engaged in subsistence. Hence, the, if not end of trade, the radical diminution of trade.
The continuists, people like Collins whom I just quoted, see the political changes as dramatic all right, but as
essentially surface phenomena based partly on archaeology and partly on a more sympathetic
understanding of Christian practices. In other words, they don't think that the proliferation of churches,
saints, cults, is necessarily a sign of primitiveness. So based on both archaeology and an understanding of
Christianity, these continuists point to the survival of trade, the role of bishops and other church officials, as
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The continuists argue, with some justice, that between 250 and 600 what changed was not that primitive
warriors conquered a civilized state, in the way that say, the Mongols conquered China in the thirteenth
century but that the ancient world became the medieval world. That is, an urban culture became more
rural. A Latin culture became amalgamated to a German one. Pagan society became Christian.
Having said this, it's nevertheless true that the most dramatic event to the fifth century is that people who
had been outside the empire were now in it. If we ask why the Western Empire collapsed, the simple, most
immediate answer is it was taken over by German confederations, tribes. They came not so much as
conquerors as military recruits, or as allies, or as refugees.
So rather than as guys with knives in their teeth hacking and slashing and burning, they came as pathetic
refugees, maybe doing some hacking, slashing, and burning; as military recruits; and as military allies.
Again, not without a certain amount of H. S. B.: (hacking and slashing and burning). But not a cataclysmic
amount. They admired Rome. They wanted to continue its institutions. They regarded Rome as a rich and as
civilized. The last thing they wanted was to still live in little huts in the forest.
They were not the bringers of a revolution. They were not even that numerous, amounting to some tens of
thousands. Nevertheless, they ended Roman government, accelerated the changes we've already described
towards depopulation, decentralization, ruralization-- a less cultivated, less literate, less Mediterraneancentered society.
Chapter 3: The Roman Army and the Visigoths [00:18:18]
So I want to begin the description of this process by the changes in the Roman army. We saw that
Diocletian, around 300 AD, militarizes Roman government, pays for the, perhaps, doubling of the military
presence of the Roman army by changing the taxation system. So the twin pillars of the empire in the fourth
century are army and taxation, the latter requiring a civilian governmental apparatus.
The army was a problem in terms of the recruiting of soldiers. This may have to do with the population; it
may have to do with the unattractive nature of military life, but nevertheless there was already, in the fourth
century, a tendency to get the more familiar barbarians into the army as Roman soldiers. Because they were
available, they were near the frontiers-- this may seem odd. Why hire your potential enemy to be soldiers?
But there's a lot of precedent.
Very often, empires don't really want to supply their own manpower. And the people who are the best
soldiers are also the people who may, in the future, be most threatening. I don't want to pursue this simile,
but the Afghan Mujahideen were trained by Americans, because at one time they were opposed to the
Russian occupation of Afghanistan. As it happened, in retrospect, that had some bad consequences. But at
the time, it seemed like a good idea.
So in the 370s a group called the Visigoths asks to be admitted to the Roman Empire as an allied army. In
other words, the whole group will be federated with the Romans. And federati is the term given for
barbarian troops serving under the Roman Empire.
Why were they on the move? These are not really nomadic people. They don't live in yurts or travel across
Central Asia. They tend to be settled in villages. They have dairy cattle rather than have some kind of
nomadic sheep, or something like. They're pretty settled. Nevertheless, in 378, they were on the move. And
we don't know why. Some enemy pushing them across the Danube into what's now Romania? It may be the
weakness of the Empire. They may have seen that the empire was not so strong and made a proposition,
kind of like a takeover. You don't seem to be doing so well in your stock or your finances, so we're going to
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A little coda, however. In 493, the Eastern emperor in Constantinople convinced the Ostrogoths to get out of
Hungary, stop threatening the Eastern Empire, and take Italy from Odovacer. Once again, the Eastern
Empire is capable of deflecting barbarians into the west, because they're too strong. So in 493, our friend
Odovacer was overthrown by the Ostrogoths and their leader Theoderic.
Chapter 5: Accomodation [00:33:54]
So what's the impact of all of this? On the ground, if you were looking around in 480s, 490s, you would see a
kind of accommodation. The Roman elite accommodated themselves to, compromised with, negotiated
with, their new rulers. So, for example, a member of a very wealthy Roman family, a man named Sidonius
Apollinaris in southern France, was a bishop and a great landowner. And we have a lot of letters of his that
tell us about his negotiations with the Visigothic king Euric. He found the Visigoths uncouth, hard to deal
with, not knowledgeable of the Latin classics, but not very frightening, either. Not particularly formidable.
So accommodation, improvisation. We have a saint's life that is a biography of a saint, a man named-- I'm
sorry that I'm writing on the board so much today. Usually, as you know, I'm a little more in control. But
these are great names. And some of them are good cats names or dog names, too. Severinus of Noricum.
You know, Stop scratching the furniture, Severinus. That kind of thing. Severinus of Noricum. A saint in
what's now, more or less, Austria. His life tells us that he learned of the end of the Roman Empire this way:
"At the time when the Roman Empire was still in existence, the soldiers of many towns were supported by
public money to guard the frontier. When this arrangement ceased, the military formations were dissolved,
and the frontier vanished. The garrison of Passau, which is still a town in modern Bavaria, the garrison of
Passau, however, still held out. Some of the men had gone to Italy to fetch for their comrades their last
payment."
This resembles a corporation-- somebody, actually, was telling me yesterday they worked for Eastern
Airlines, a company that went out of business in 1990. And so sudden was the collapse of Eastern, even
though it had been predicted, that she was a flight attendant and had to get on another airline in order to get
home. She lived in New York; she was in Florida; Eastern ceased to exist. So these soldiers are in the same
position. They want to get their last paycheck.
They were never heard from again. Nobody knew that they, in fact, were killed by barbarians on the way.
"One day, when Saint Severinus was reading in his cell, he suddenly closed the book and began to sigh. The
river, he said, was now red with human blood. At that moment the news arrived that the soldiers had been
washed ashore by the current.
Interestingly enough, he doesn't just stay in his cell and pray. He starts to organize this society. He is active,
although some of it involves some miracles, in poor relief. He deals with the local barbarian king, the king of
the Alamanni, remonstrates with him.
He helps in diverting Odovacer into Italy. Again, like Pope Leo, we have a member of the church, and in this
case somebody that you would think was a recluse, indeed had been living like a recluse, nevertheless taking
over the responsibilities for a population abandoned by its civilian government. That is then one of the
forms of accommodation.
Chapter 6: Decline [00:38:55]
Another aspect of this era, however, is decline. The urban population declines. The society and economy
experienced what Wickham euphemistically calls, a radical material simplification. The term he uses, I
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believe, on page 95 and 105. Radical material simplification means that your standard of living plummets.
Cruder ceramics. Instead of that nice, north African red slip ware, you've got mud that you baked at home.
Fewer imports, no pepper. More homemade, crude building materials. Fewer luxury goods.
The Vandal control of North Africa meant the end of the Roman wheat supply. The countryside of Rome had
not grown enough wheat to feed the city since 200 BC. So for 600 years, minimum, Rome was dependent on
other sources of supply. Southern Italy, Sicily, North Africa. The moment the Vandals cut the supply, the
city could no longer support its massive population, could not feed everybody. When you multiply this
phenomenon, it's not a surprise that the city's decline in population, and that the society becomes more
rural, more agricultural, more subsistent.
And here's where I think Collins is naive to speak of merely a political decline. Without a government and
military structure, trade could not take place on the scale it had before. And without that trade, cities could
not survive. There is no denying a decline in culture, economy, and population. Let's just look at Roman
population figures, based on things like pork supply figures, public-- well, I mean, nobody took a census in
Rome. We don't really know exactly how many people lived there at any given time.
But historians and archaeologists looking at things like food supply, public welfare payments, water delivery
figures, for aqueducts, and the abandonment of houses and of building sites. Probably in 5 BC, the Roman
population was 800,000. That would be a fairly conservative estimate. Maybe as much as a million, but
definitely 800,000. 5 BC. Yeah?
Student: This is just the city of Rome?
Professor Paul Freedman: Just the city of Rome. Yes, just the city of Rome. At the time of Constantine,
sort of where we begin the course, more or less, in the early fourth century, the population had declined
probably to 600,000. After the sack of Rome in 419, probably 300,000 to 500,000. Obviously, these are
very rough figures.
But after the sack of Rome, more than half of the population that had existed in 5 BC is gone. With the end
of grain shipments from North Africa, we don't really know immediately. We can estimate that by 590, there
could not have been more than 150,000 people in Rome. This is after not only the Vandals, but after a
catastrophic war in Italy launched by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, who we'll be talking about next
week.
In 800, on Christmas Day, Charlemagne was crowned in Saint Peter's in Rome as Roman Emperor by the
pope, an act whose implications we will be exploring towards the end of the class. On that day, Rome
must've had maximum, maximum, most optimistic estimate, 30,000 people. This does not necessarily
mean that they were primitive, but they were living in the Coliseum, for example. People built houses in
there. They used the walls of the Coliseum as a fort. There is a certain Planet of the Apes quality, in fact.
Rome, still to this day, is filled with picturesque ruins, even though it is a city of two and a half, three million
people.
As I said, people were not necessarily aware of this change. For example, lots of churches were built at this
time, and some of them have mosaic pavements that have mottos about the grandeur of the Roman name,
and the usual classical kind of mottos. But then again, people often aren't aware of what's happening to
them. I mean, what if somebody in the future points to the fact that New Haven, in 1920, had far more
people living in it than it does now? New Haven lost a third of its population between 1950 and 1980.
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What if some future historian is scandalized at the fact that in order to get into Yale a hundred years ago you
had to know Greek and Latin. If you look at what those gentlemen C students had to study, or were
responsible for, in say, 1925, it's extraordinary. It's not very impressive in the sciences, but the decline of the
humanities, if by decline we mean things like knowledge of classical literature, is stunning.
Somebody may decide in a few hundred years that the Dark Ages began in about 1950. And that those
pathetic people in, say, 2011 impressed with their little technological toys, nonetheless didn't know
anything. Now I don't actually believe that. There are some people who do. There's a philosopher at Notre
Dame named Alasdair MacIntyre who really believes that the Dark Ages began a long time ago, and we
simply don't know. We simply refuse to recognize this.
I was impressed by an obituary for a man named Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died at the age of 96 earlier this
year. This is the last of the great British characters of the twentieth century. He not only was classically
trained, wrote a lot about Greece, lived in Greece, he, in World World II, disguised himself as a Greek
shepherd in Crete, engineered the capture of a German general, and the delivery of that general after three
weeks of hiking through the mountains of Crete to a British destroyer. It's in a movie called Ill Met By
Moonlight, if you ever want to check this out. Not a great movie, but
Patrick Leigh Fermor also wrote two books out of a projected three about walking from Holland to
Constantinople or, Baghdad actually, I think, in the 1930s. But the obituary describes a conversation he had
with this German general, whom he is trying to get across Crete. And the general at one point, over some
fire in the wilderness, quotes a line from Horace, the Roman poet, that then Patrick Leigh Fermor finishes is
for him, and indeed, quotes the next two stanzas.
Well, that world is over. That world is over. I don't pretend to be part of that world, either. And that's a
world that would have existed in the time of Horace, or the years after Horace, who lives at the time of
Augustus. This would have existed in 300 A D. It would have existed, at least, in a few monasteries in 800
AD. It would have flourished in the Britain of the eighteenth and nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
So again, I don't think that civilization came to an end. What came to an end was a civilization, a certain
kind of society. It has some heirs, however, like all dead entities. There are four heirs to the Roman Empire.
One is the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, which calls itself the Roman Empire. It doesn't
call itself the Eastern, doesn't call itself the Byzantine, it calls itself the Roman Empire, even though it does
so in Greek.
The second heir are the barbarian kings. We'll be talking about them on Wednesday. They are attempting to
prop up the remnants of Roman culture, civilization, and material society.
The third heir in some ways, is Islam, which we meet in the seventh century, the century of its invention.
And the fourth heir is the Church. Even though the Church grew up in opposition to the Roman Empire, it
will preserve Latin, cities, learning, classical civilization. OK. So barbarians on Wednesday.
[end of transcript]
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