Thursday, August 12, 2010

Preliminary Remarks on Ancient Slavery

I have to admit, I am approaching this particular subject with trepidation. First, I will summarize the works of one of my favorite historians. I am afraid that my summary will not do justice to the cogent argument proposed in The Origins of European Economy. Second, writing about the slave trade is not an easy endeavor for anyone born in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. Latent in my subconscious are images of one ethnicity, believing in its innate superiority over another, abusing its brethrens. I have to consistently remind myself of two important details: that analyzing the slave trade with the eyes of the historian does not make me pro-slavery, and that ancient slavery differed in significant ways from the US and Brazilian experience.
It was more humane in that slaves were not of one particular ethnicity: they were pluriethnic, and in Late Antiquity, it is clear that some might have come from the same region, shared the same religion and customs, and yet one was master, the other was slave. In an interesting tale, the fifth-century historian Gregory of Tours mentions that Frankish kings (after Clovis's death, the Frankish kingdom was divided in three kingdoms), would often send young men as hostages. These men were royal, or at least of prominent families. They were part of the court life, until, Gregory tells us, war would break out between the two kings at which points the hostages were sold into slavery (History of the Franks, III.15).
Furthermore, in the first century A.D., the philosopher Seneca wrote a letter to a brethren, Lucillus, in which he outlines the proper treatment of slaves. In short, he stipulates that masters should not be afraid to welcome a slave at their table, that it is not beneath their rank as masters to do so. He explains that slaves did everything for the master, ranging from shopping to providing healthy remedies. Furthermore, he reminds domini that they themselves are slaves to someone or something else, and so should treat their slaves the way they would want their master to treat them (Letter 47). Seneca points to the value of the slave for the home, but slaves were also useful outside of the homes. They provided entertainment as gladiators, and some gladiators were extremely popular (in that regards the movie Gladiator is not a total historical loss- I love that movie...); and, slaves or freedmen (that is slaves who have been freed) were employed by their masters or former-masters to perform some clerical tasks. The historian A.H.M. Jones offers an explanation for this: 'Employers no doubt also preferred to use in positions of trust men whose characters they knew, and on whose obedience they could rely; slaves could be chastised if they disobeyed instructions, and freedmen had formed the habit of executing their master's orders' ('Slavery in the Ancient World,' The Economic History Review 9.2). This does seem an acceptable answer, and I do not have the means at the moment to either prove or disprove this particular statement. In other words, slaves were not limited to doing manual labor or servile duties, and the learned ones served more important roles in the administration of the houses of important people.
I want to explain what I am going to do in the following blog-post. The goal will be really to summarize McCormick's argument for an early-medieval slave trade, and to explain why I think he is correct in his assessment. Doing so, I have realized that I was doing the kind of history that I love: looking at periods of transition. The period that I shall describe is not in any history book, though it is an underlying theme often recurrent when one considers the differences between the ancient and medieval worlds. It is an economic transition: from slavery to serfdom. While I will show that serfdom and slavery co-existed for extensive periods of time, and that serfdom did not occlude the slave trade, the fact remains: slavery disappears from Europe during the Middle-Ages.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Migrations, Ethnic Identity and What Constitutes Modern History

This blog post is dedicated to two friends, who, in two different conversations, have convinced me that studying barbarians is not squarely an intellectual pursuit (it only mostly is...).

'L’HISTOIRE nationale est, pour tous les hommes du même pays, une sorte de propriété commune ; c’est une portion du patrimoine moral que chaque génération qui disparaît, lègue à celle qui la remplace'- Augustin Thierry1

Translation: National History is for the men of a country, some sort of common property; it is a part of the moral heritage that each disapearing generation entrusts to the one that replaces it.

The question of national identity and cultural background is one that concerns historians, especially historians of the medieval period. Indeed, the medieval period, and especially the Early Middle Ages have been vastly used in the past as means of defining a national identity. The barbarians were, to quote Ian Wood, used and abused. The nomenclature of some modern countries and regions take their name after a barbarian tribe: France is linked to the Franks, Burgundy, to the Burgundians, Lombardy, to the Lombards (or Langobards), Germany in English to the Germans (from the Roman province) and Allemagne in French to the Alamanni. Furthering the examples is a useless pursuit, what is important is the feeling that there is a direct continuity between ancient peoples and modern ones (there are other links: Attila and Verdi, .
Is there any truth to this? Let's rephrase this question: is there anything pertaining to French culture that would make Clovis French? Aside from territorial tenancy (and even then, his kingdom was more centered around the Pas-de-Calais and Belgium), not much. Furthermore, as Patrick Geary pointed out in Before France and Germany, French history begins with Asterix and jumps to Charlemagne, completely ignoring the Merovingians who are left with the sobriquet: Rois Fainéants or Lazy Kings. But this was not always the case, Augustin Thierry, in the 19th century starts his history of France not with the Celts, but with the Merovingians; so central were the Merovingians to French History that François Hotman, a french protestant of the 16th century, used this idea that the French monarchy originated in Merovingian times to criticize absolutism. In his view, the French monarchy originated from the Merovingians, and the Merovingians were Germanic. Germanic populations, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, were governed by assemblies. Thus, he concludes that absolutism is in some ways, anti-french.
Let us fast-forward to the twenty-first century. A friend of mine was at a welcoming party, and someone told her that the United States has a small cultural heritage, and went on to compare the US cultural heritage to Mexican heritage, which he traces back millenias to the Aztecs first, and then the Mayas. I am not a specialist of pre-colonial and colonial Mexico, so I will leave the examination of this claim to the specialists. However, if we are merely looking at territorial occupancy, the continental US were peopled as early as 11500 B.C., with the peoples of the Clovis culture (and possibly earlier). But if U.S. History books rarely mentions them, French History books have no qualms telling children about Lascaux, a 17,000 year-old cave in Dordogne (worth a visit). So why does the US not mention these cultures?
If one looks at US History, it generally begins with Jamestown, and Captain John Smith. A few chapters (maybe two) deal with pre-colonial America, but in very broad terms, focusing on the well-known Aztecs and Incas, and, to an extent the Iroquois and the Cheyenne. This may be due to the paucity of documents on pre-colonial America (as a whole), or perhaps this is due to the US national identity, that is, the US it is a country founded and built by colons. Emma Lazarus's famous poem The New Colossus echoes this view; addressing the 'Old World', the Statue of Liberty shouts: 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.' Where did these poor come from? It is generally acknowledged that there were many waves of immigration, and included Spanish, English, Germans, Dutch, French, Irish, Poles, etc...; furthermore, more than fifty percent of the US was ruled by Spain, and yet, it is to England that the Americans trace their origins (and this makes sense for other reasons, but I am looking at territoriality).
The question then becomes, who decided this? Recently, the Texas Board of Education chose a new path for US history. While the Union was previously born of the Enlightenment, with ideas such as religious tolerance, and the separation of Church and State, it will now be a part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. While this is true (true, but one could also place the US in a Roman context...), this shift was decided by a panel of elected officials (most of whom are educators but not historians). For more information, see the New York Times article on the matter at www.newyorktimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html).
And this takes me back to ethnogenesis and ethnic identity in the Early Middle Ages. We have seen in a previous post that ethnogenesis is a theory that stipulates the following: 'The leaders and chiefs of “well-known” clans, that is to say, of those families who derive their origins from gods and who can prove their divine favor through appropriate achievements, form the “nuclei of tradition” around which new tribes take shape. Whoever acknowledges the tribal tradition, either by being born into it, or by being “admitted” to it, is part of the gens and as such a member of a community of “descent through tradition” (Herwig Wolfram, History of the Goths, trans. by Thomas J. Dunlap, p.6). In other words, a group of people decide what is part of the history of their people, and what is not. When Jordanes, a sixth century Goth, wrote a history of his people, he based his account on the much larger work by Cassiodorus, which was commissioned by Theodoric.
What truth is there to this? Walter Goffart and others say none: 'Tales of the early Goths were eventually told […]; and they have nothing to do with our standards of credible history. We can repeat these stories in their proper chronological and cultural context as testifying to a highly civilized desire to reconstruct the origo gentis. But since such tales lay in the future, their contents would be out of place in a background to the Goths in fifth-century Aquitaine' (Walter Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, p.8; he wrote another two books on the subject, the most famous, The Narrators of Barbarian History, is worth a read). Ultimately, I agree with Michael Kulikowski who states in his article 'Nation vs. Army: A Necessary Contrast?' that until we have a time machine, we won't know what the truth is. What matters is what people believed. And so the Goths in fifth-century Aquitaine may have no recollection of their Iron-Age past in Scandinavia, just like most French people have little concept of what life was in the Early Middle Ages, or how most American cannot fathom the hardships of living in post-Elizabethan England or pre-unification Prussia. So again, what is cultural background? It is a generational legacy, written by its elites, and in which is distilled what is valued by that generation.

Next: Slavery and the Slave Trade.

For further reading on ethnic identity:

Fernand Braudel, Grammaire des Civilisations (basically deals with what will be in French History text books).
Patrick Geary, The Myth of Nations
Walter Goffart, The Narrators of Barbarian History
Ian Wood (forthcoming), Fall of the Roman Empire and the Barbarian Settlements
Bonnie Effros will also have a book dealing with the 19th century archeology of the barbarians.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

The Annona and Rome


I said I would write more about the Ancient Borderlands Conference, and so, here is a discussion on a paper that was particularly interesting to me: Roman Grain Supply 442-445, by Jason Linn of UCSB.
Before I address the argument contained in this paper, I must backtrack a bit, and tell the history of the Vandals. The Vandals are an interesting group of people. In a lecture, Ian Wood called them a 'band of refugees'. And it does seem like this is the case: among the Vandals, we find, Suebi, 'Vandals' (two different groups, the Hasdingi and the Siling), Alans, Sarmatians, Alamanni, Franks, Herulii; all manners of peoples that dwelled in the Austro-Hungarian steppes and along the Rhine banks. The amalgam of peoples began when, pressured by the Huns, they moved to the banks of the Rhine, and broke the Rhine defenses in 402/03 and made their way to Spain. There they settled, until they crossed to Africa in 429, and in 439, they made a treaty with the Romans recognizing their territory in North Africa.
Why is this relevant? A grain fleet from North Africa and Egypt, called the Annona, sailed from Carthage and Alexandria to approvision Rome with basic cereals. With Carthage falling under Vandal jurisdiction, this could pose a problem, as Rome might be missing key supplies, thus potentially leading to starvation. The Vandals initially cooperate and maintain the annona until 442, when in another treaty with the Romans, they reduced the amount of the grain that they would ship, and managed to keep 7/8th of the tax revenues provided by the African provinces of Numidia and Mauretania Sitifensis.
With the loss of this bread-basket, what was the ultimate result on the population of Rome? Jason Linn argues that the result was not so great. The strongest part of his argument is undoubtedly the reaction of the emperor Valentinian III: he did not react; at least not with regards to Rome (he did pass a few laws helping out African refugees in exile). No evidence or rationing in Rome, no evidence of any law that sought to divert other grain supplies to the city of Rome. It is indeed hard to imagine that an emperor would let Rome starve without lifting so much as his little finger. Furthermore, there is no evidence that Romans ever rose up against the lack of grain; which was not the case when there were other grain or food shortages under the second triumvirate and later when Alaric besieged Rome (a Roman lady opened the door to the Visigoths to alleviate the hunger).
In the response by Professor Humphreys criticized Jason's use of numbers. Jason Linn used a numerical study to show that the effect of the loss of the annona did not affect the army, which had been reduced in number, and thus was not as dependent on imported grain for supplies. Professor Humphreys' criticism focused on the 'minimalistic' choice of Jason's assessment of the late-Roman army. The size of the Roman army, Humphreys argues (quite rightly I think), is more relevant of which school of thought one ascribes to (minimalist vs. maximalist).
Where I think Jason is absolutely right is in saying that the loss of the north-African annona had little effects on Rome itself. The reasons to me are (aside from the ones stated above) manifolds, and three strike me as important: 1) the political situation in the provinces dependent on the western emperor had shrunk tremendously; 2) the Egyptian annona maintained grain supplies to Rome until the mid-fifth century; and 3) the size of the Roman population did not necessitate a large grain supply.
For points 2, and 3- see Michael McCormick, The Origins of European Economy.
The Political Situation in the Western Roman Empire.
When Peter Brown first set forth his arguments for change and continuity of classical culture into Late Antiquity, he thought that the arguments for Decline and Fall focused almost entirely on the western world, whereas the Roman Empire was a larger territory that included the Greek east and Egypt. It seems that we have gone full circle and now focus almost entirely on the Mediterranean at the expense of Gaul, Britain and Spain.
If there were one major political trend in Late Antique Gaul and Britain, it would be fragmentation. In 410, Britain was left to fend for itself against invading Saxons and Picts, when the usurper Constantine III moved his troops from Britain and into Gaul (his rebellion ends with his surrender in 411). In other words, Rome did not have to worry about supplying the British troops any longer.
Constantine III's defeat at the hands of the general Flavius Constantius is also telling of the state of affairs in Late Roman Gaul, militarily speaking. First, Constantine's general Gerontius had proclaimed his own candidate Maximus to become emperor. This volte-face allowed forced Constantine III to seek help from the Franks and the Alamanni as auxiliary fighters in what Peter Heather dubs a 'relief army'. This shows one of two possibilities: either Constantine's army had been exhausted by the three-year conflict, OR Flavius Constantius's Italian army was significantly larger than his. Both explanation are possible and not mutually exclusive.
At any rates, that Constantine used barbarians to fight is part of a larger trend in late Roman military. When the eastern army was 'destroyed' (the extent of the destruction is debatable) by the Goths at Adrianople in 376, the Roman emperor Theodosius used 'federate' Goths to fill in the holes. Later, when the Roman general Aetius faced Attila at the battle of the Catalaunian fields, present with him were Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians.
With Britain out the way, one can wonder what happened in Gaul. There, political fragmentation also ensued. The pressing need for local leadership led local 'bandits' to rise up. By the time the Vandals made their treaty limiting the supply provided by the annona, Gaul resembled a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. The Bagaudae had revolted and taken control of Armorica, the Visigoths were settled around Toulouse and slowly moving into Spain, the Burgundians were slowly expanding in the Jura, and the Franks were moving down into northern Gaul, an area Ian Wood described as a power vacuum.
Dwindling territories also mean dwindling political and dwindling need for military supplies. As Ray Van Dam argued, problems of rebellions can best be seen in light of the large dismantling of leadership at the local level. Imperial ability to respond to local crises is evident, and this would tend to show that by 442, the Italian government did not have to worry about the supply of a large army. In other words, I feel that Jason is absolutely correct in his assessment of the end of the annona in 442, except that it shows an increasing fragmentation of the Mediterranean.
Some ideas: What are the areas of interests for Valentinian III? What areas did his laws touch? What are their overarching themes?
In conclusion, thanks Jason for getting to me think about these problems.
see also:
Peter Heather- The Fall of the Roman Empire- Good overview, easy read
Michael Kulikowski- Rome's Gothic Wars- shorter, more concise read
Michael McCormick- The Origins of European Economy
Ray Van Dam- Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul- less of a reference book than Heather or McCormick.

Monday, April 19, 2010

The Second Bi-Annual Ancient Borderlands Conference: Beyond Borders- Ancient Societies and Their Conceptual Frontiers

I was privileged to present a paper at my Alma Mater, the University of California Santa Barbara. The conference is part of a broader project headed by Professor Digeser (department of History) and Professor Thomas (department of Religious Studies) to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue and to see the applications of the Borderlands Theory to discourses of the past.
What is the Borderlands Theory? The Borderlands theory began in anthropology, specifically in Scandinavia and the American West. Borderlands are broadly defined as areas where no one group (a group is a set of people who use identity markers as common denominators. These include, ethnicity, race, religion, culture, territory) has hegemony over another. One modern example is Iraq, where there is a slight Shia Muslims hold a slight majority over Sunni muslims. Borders are then artificially constructed to separate the groups.
So these borders can be physical (between states), religious (Jew, Christian, Muslim, pagan, and so on), cultural (art trends), philosophical (platonic Christians, Catholics, …), and these categories of course intertwine. The congress addressed many types of borders.
One such border was the identity boundary between Christians and Jews, as presented in a very interesting paper by Ms. Robyn Walsh. The paper dealt with an element of Jewish worship, a menorah, that was present in a Christian basilica. The building, Ms. Walsh argued, was in fact, a synagogue, before being re-consecrated as a Christian house of worship (which is something that happens a lot in Anglo-Saxon England and in later missionary efforts). Should Ms. Walsh be right in her assertion (she certainly presented a strong case for it), this would help shed light on early diaspora communities in the west.
Another border that was considered is the gender boundary in religious discourse. Jeff Herrick did a wonderful presentation on a letter by St Jerome to Lady Eustochium, in which he uses penitential images most often used to characterize female wailing and mourning. Doing so, Jerome emasculates himself, and makes himself more like a woman. The discussion that followed was most interesting. If Mr. Herrick's proposal that he was appealing to his female patrons is certainly true, there is, in fourth-century Christian rhetoric, a trend that seeks to remove gender from holiness. Traditionally female behaviors are becoming acceptable for males. Female saints, like the Desert Mothers, undergo a physical transformation. Through fasting, they lose appendages that are female: breasts disappear, faces are emaciated. Jerome's discourse was recast into this trend during the panel discussion.
Michael McCormick once said that the conferences where he learns the most are not always the ones that pertain directly to his subject. I completely agree. The paper that followed mine considered the rhetorical boundaries that are created in Chile. These boundaries separated the civilized conquistadors from the barbarian, or savage Mapuche indians. Language plays a role, Professor Goicovich; as arguments are formulated to explain what one sees, language limits the ability of a person to describe reality. In other words, language is part of the cultural spectrum that filters information and, to an extent, corrupts it. In another paper, Jon Felt argues that Borderlands are often negative constructions, used to increase the reputation of a particular center. Looking at Chinese Buddhist texts from the 3rd century A.D that consider China as a Boderland rather than a center, he analyzed that this was part of a larger trend that viewed Chinese Buddhism as inherently inferior to Chinese Buddhism; that Indian culture was the beacon of light, not Chinese culture. Tipping the scale back the other way was a main effort by the Tang dynasty to reformulate the central role of China in world history.
Overall, this was very well put-together congress, and I learned quite a bit. Pictures will be up soon.
I will address a paper that was very close to my area of expertise in a subsequent post.

Monday, March 15, 2010

an interesting piece of information

This looks rather promising.
http://www.uwestfjords.is/icelandic_courses/gisla_saga_and_classical_icelandic/

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

The Dangers of Comparative History


This post deals with a different subject than normal, but important nonetheless. This is a review of an article by Professor Sherman comparing modern-day Afghanistan to early-modern France.

Professor Drake opened the first lecture of his Roman undergraduate research seminar by telling us: 'We always learn the wrong lessons from history.' In an article published in the recent Foreign Affairs, Professor Sherman argues that the processes of centralization in early-modern France can be used as models for state-building in modern-day Afghanistan. While the analogy works at a superficial level, a close look at the details shows that these processes cannot be of immediate usefulness for the Obama administration.
Professor Sherman presents an interesting analogy between 21st century Afghanistan, and pre-modern France. She identifies (correctly I think) that one key problem of the situation in Afghanistan is the lack of authority that the central government has at the local level. Warlords, drug-dealers or Talibans rule the areas not immediately adjacent to Kabul. Similarly, Hugh Capet, the first king of the Capetian dynasty, ruled little else but Ile-de-France at the time of his election as Rex Francorum (king of the Franks) in 987. The local leadership was in the hands of the local nobles (and that had been the case since Charles the Bald a century earlier). Perhaps the analogy should stop here, but she states that Louis XIII, and Louis XIV's policies of rendering the nobles dependent on royal authority can also be applied to Afghanistan.
What I feel Professor Sherman misses in her analogy is time. The processes of centralization in early-modern France are not limited to Louis XIV, or his predecessor. Rather, I would argue, they are the heirs of five-hundred years of policies on the part of the kings of France. Centralization of moneys, and especially single-currency date back to the time of Philippe the Fair. Key disputes were still resolved by the king. For instance, in the claim of inheritance of Artois, Mahaut and her nephew Robert appealed to Philippe the Fair and his sons to resolve their disputes. Talibans do not extend the same courtesy to adultery cases.
There emerges from these remarks a fundamental difference between medieval France and modern-day Afghanistan. There seems to be a respect of the royal office that is absent in Afghanistan. In both major dynastic shifts (from Merovingian to Carolingian, and then from Carolingian to Capetian), the new rulers required the help of the Pope in the first one, and the bishop of Reims, that is, the one who crowns the kings of France, in the second. By bringing in the clergy, Pepin the Short and Hugh Capet were able to secure divine support. Similarly, the feudal oath, albeit not as binding as legal constitutions or armed forces, also presupposes the recognition of a single authority as higher than another, with the top being the king or the emperor. When Rene I, duke of Lorraine, gave homage to the king of France, he effectively switched his allegiance away from the Holy Roman Empire and recognized Charles VII as his suzerain (see Feudalism chart).
Royal authority was strengthened tremendously in subsequent centuries, especially under Francis I and his impressive building program, as well as his building a professional army, independent of the levies provided by his vassals (nobles). Though there were rebellions against the royal order throughout the Middle-Ages and into the Renaissance (Cathar crusade, the Fronde), royalty was always on a different plane. Coronation rites suggested divine mandates, and the canonization of Louis IX in 1297 made the Capetians a holy family. Louis XIV capitalized on that. It was not enough to be considered holy, he would show it. Versailles, what Professor Sherman considers the symbol of centralization, was in fact its end, a visual marker to symbolize the magnificence of the king.
Central to state building is the idea of authority. To be viable, centralized authority must have the recognition of its constituencies (on that topic, see Constantine and the Bishops by H.A. Drake). In other words, the Versailles palace was symbolic of Louis XIV's authority, it did not create it, his authority had already been recognized by his constituency. Karzai can build whatever palace he wants, his constituencies will not recognize him in the same way that Louis XIV's noble did. Lastly, and perhaps most important, Sherman does not recognize that Louis XIV and the French kings were building an absolutist state, Karzai and Obama are trying to build a democracy. State building in early-modern France occurred in a different setting, with different variables, to achieve different results. So the question remains: what can we do to create a stable democracy in Afghanistan?

The image is from

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.icsd.k12.ny.us/legacy/highschool/socstud/global2_review/feudal_chart.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.icsd.k12.ny.us/legacy/highschool/socstud/global2_review/the_middle_ages.htm&usg=__d66b9DtwbSZc_gtY5cEgXmc0xyw=&h=399&w=671&sz=19&hl=en&start=2&sig2=R65UVA3RihkopxcM1hhBjA&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=HGqZ2OhVuR_V-M:&tbnh=82&tbnw=138&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfeudalism%2Bchart%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DX%26rls%3Dcom.microsoft:en-us:IE-SearchBox%26tbs%3Disch:1&ei=H-iXS_9op860A-iluMIB

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

A Peaceful Transition: a Few Remarks

This blog post is a bit different from the others as it concerns the preliminary knowledge requisite to the understanding Walter Goffart's argument of peaceful transition. I have had many conversations, with many different people on the nature of the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages, and most (both lay and professional historians) speak of transition rather than sudden change. This blog post is solely for lay historians who wish to understand the reasons behind the argument of peaceful transition.
The notion that the historical period is an artificial construction is philosophical in nature (see Breisach). For me, the historical period is fairly real on two levels: 1) when I apply to graduate school, I have to choose a field of inquiry, defined by a historical period; and 2) a historical period is defined as a general set of ideas that apply to a certain time period. For example, the Renaissance is clearly an age where Humanist ideals of grammar and rhetoric take precedence over theology, law and medicine, all prized disciplines in the Middle Ages. That this happens in different areas at different times is not necessarily relevant. At some point in time, a historian can say: 'we have left the Middle-Ages.' With this in mind, I will retrace some ideas pertaining to the blurring of historical periods: the peaceful transition between the classical and the medieval periods.
Walter Goffart's main argument in Barbarians and Romans deals with the allocation of land for the Goths, the Burgundians and the Lombards from a legal perspective. That is, why in 410, we have a western Europe governed by the Romans, when in 418, we see a Visigothic enclave, in 443, a Burgundian enclave, and in 500, no more Romans in Western Europe. In roughly 90 years, the territories of the western empire disappear. Why?, and perhaps most importantly how?
First, Goffart, as opposed to Ward-Perkins (see previous post), states that this process was peaceful and smooth (it is actually the first sentence of the book). Ward-Perkins' remark that the Vandals raped nuns is not necessarily the best one to use. Goffart himself states that the Vandals expropriated sometimes violently the Romans. Again, the argument here would be that processes of change occur differently, in different areas, at different times.
Goffart is right to question the idea of violent transition. First of all, almost of the initial barbarians (Franks, Goths, Alamanni, Burgundians, the Huns being the sole exception-- and even then...) had been in contact with the Empire for extended periods of time. The Franks were probably a conglomerate of peoples already mentioned by the first century author Tacitus in Germania. The Goths are known as Goths in the literary sources by the mid-third century (ostensibly later than the Franks), but Wolfram states that the Goths' arrival in the Roman orbit might have occurred as early as 238, and the Cernjachov culture (possibly Gothic culture according to Peter Heather) as early as the second century. Thus, those barbarians, that supposedly caused the Roman Empire to collapse had been in contact with Rome for a few hundred years. In other words, if one is to say that the barbarians caused the fall of Rome, the history of decline must start as early as the first century (which few will actually do).
Furthermore, barbarians, via the military had clearly infiltrated the Roman civil life. Silvanus, a Frank, was a Roman general, and a brief usurper in 355. More successful were the barbarians Stilicho (regent in 400-408), Ricimer (de facto ruler 456-472), and Odoacer (general and king of Italy after he deposed the Emperor Romulus Augustulus, whose own father Orestes was at least partially non-Roman). The army provided the barbarians with a way in, an apparatus to use to gain access to Roman civil power (for more on this, see the first chapter of Before France and Germany by Patrick Geary).
To conclude: the barbarians we are dealing with are NOT foreign invaders. They were settled peoples, whose life, as Goffart states, resembled the life of the Gallic (and thus 'Roman') peasants. Thus, back to our original question: how did these barbarians acquire land?
Next post will deal with Goffart's argument on the matter.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

The Decline and Fall of the Classical World



It is difficult to envision the end of classical civilization without the barbarians. The names Franks, Goths, Saxons, Angles, Vandals, and Burgundians have become synonymous with successor kingdoms. Indeed, each of these peoples established kingdoms in territories around the western Mediterranean. The Franks settled in northern Gaul, and under Clovis, expanded to the south defeating the Visigoths decisively at Vouillé in 507. The Visigoths, after a settlement with the Roman emperor Honorius in 418, settled in Aquitaine around Toulouse; then, after Vouillé, they centered their kingdom around Toledo. Their eponymous 'cousin'people, the Ostrogoths settled in Italy from 489 to 580. The Angles and the Saxons moved to Britain after the departure of the Roman troops in 410. The Vandals swept through Gaul and into Spain, but eventually crossed the Gibraltar straight and created a kingdom in Northern Africa, with Carthage as its capital, until Justinian invaded in 534. Finally, the Burgundians (who had been a 'Rhine People' at least as early as the fourth century), settled in central Gaul.
This little story tells us that these 'barbarians' redrew the map of the western empire.The question that historians is whether or not these movements ought to be dubbed invasion or migration. The first term implies violent, armed contacts between Romans and barbarians, whereas the second term implies a far more peaceful process. I shall present both arguments individually, and present what I have come to understand regarding the fifth and sixth centuries.
Scholars such as Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins (the latter more so than the former) see the barbarians (and especially the Goths) as key players in the dynamics of decline and fall. Bryan Ward-Perkins, in The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (a work responding to modern trends which recast the barbarian problem in terms of peaceful migration and progressive acculturation), states that 'until recently, very few have seriously questioned the violence and disruption of the Germanic takeover of power. And indeed, Ward-Perkins has reasons to see the change from the classical world to the medieval world as more violent than processual. There is, in the written sources, evidence of violence. In 446, Leo, the bishop of Rome, for instance, addresses the problem of nuns who had been raped by invading Vandals in his twelfth epistle. These raped nuns became an intermediary class between holy widows (generally aristocratic women who had taken their vows after the demise of their husband) and nuns who had not been raped, and thus maintained their holiness intact. As Ward-Perkins points out: 'the unfortunate nuns and Bishop Leo would be very surprised, and not a little shocked, to learn that it is now fashionable to play down the violence and unpleasantness of the invasions that brought down the empire in the West.'
Ward-Perkins finds further evidence of invasion in what he considers an abrupt end to comfort. At a conference (I did not have the pleasure to attend, but Professor Drake and many of my friends did), he showed the difference of quality between late-antique and early-medieval potteries, and ancient potteries. Professor Drake stated that the differences are indeed palpable. Furthermore, in the archaeological record, there is a lack of remains of luxurious villas. Michael Kulikowski (in an absolutely awesome book called Late Roman Spain and Its Cities) notices that some Spanish villas became the locus of small communities (more about that later). Another example shows the site of Augusta Raurica, a thriving colony along the Rhine frontier in the second century, becomes abandoned in the fourth to make way for a castrum, or military camp. The baths, a symbol of Roman luxury were integrated in the castrum. In the fifth, the use of the baths is discontinued, and the camp becomes the site of yet another small community.
Thus, in what has become known to me as the catastrophist theory, the Roman Empire indeed falls, and it falls quickly... and violently. Barbarian invaders destroy the classical world in less than a hundred years, population dwindles, nuns are raped, and a climate of violence reigns.
In the next chapter, I will look at the opposite view, promulgated by Walter Goffart in his book Barbarians and Romans, and introduce the arguments of change and continuity of Peter Brown.

For Further Reading:
1/ Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (good place to start)
2/ Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire (more nuanced, political account)
Oldies
3/Courcelles, Histoire Literaire des Invasions Barbares
4/Gibbon, Decline and Fall (vol.3). The classic. His arguments are summarized in other books like Ward-Perkins'.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Post-Modernizing the Goths

I was reading an interesting book The Future of History by Breisach. The book itself focuses on the way post-modernism has shaped history. One particular aspect of post-modernism has affected a particular line of historical argument: ethnogenesis (see earlier posts for a thorough discussion of ethnogenesis).
According to Breisach, post-modernist philosophers sought to re-evaluate the role of time in the shaping of history. More specifically, nexuses, that is, the ways of explaining history, were declared 'characteristic only for one period of human development', or, as Breisach states '[nexuses] were no more than pragmatic, contextual constructions of Western culture for coping with life.'
One particular passage in The History of the Goths by Herwig Wolfram came to my mind as I was reading these considerations. As historians of the barbarians, we have, literally, no direct sources for the study of the Goths prior to their entry into the Roman world. Consequently, we have to rely on archeology, but if archeology can shed light on day-to-day life, they cannot help us derive a concrete picture of the history of the Goths. Furthermore, the lack of structural remains means that we have little or no idea as to the political structures of the Goths.
Wolfram remedied to this problem in an interesting way. He uses the Gothic bible of Ulfila (Bishop of the Goths, translated the bible into gothic, died ca.380), and compares it to the gothic terms found in the bible. For instance, Ulfilas chose to translate the word sanhedrin, the ruling council of the Jews, as gafaurd, which he transforms into a tribal council. Similarly, he finds that the gothic leader Athanaric (who led the Gothic army against the Huns) is not a military leader, but a 'judge', that is, which can be likened to the role of censor in the Roman republican apparatus.
This methodology begs an interesting question. Did Ulfila use these terms because they represented an actual situation, or did he use these terms to explain the Jewish reality in the first century B.C.? In more concrete terms, is the gafaurd a sanhedrin or merely the closest political structure to the sanhedrin? Whenever we write history, we have to make sure that our intended audience understands our argument. As such, the nexus to which Breisach refers to must be a compromise: that is, it must satisfy our quest for the truth, but it must also be understood by the people who are reading us. This begs a further question: can we really truthfully explain the past, or are we limited by our own social constraints?

For Futrer Reading:

1)Breisach, The Future of History
2)Wolfram, The History of the Goths
3)Grafton, Worlds Made by Words