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

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.

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'.

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

A Methodology Inquiry

In their article ‘Farming in Mediterranean France and Rural Settlements’, historians Aline Durand and Philippe Leveau, use an interesting methodology. They use pollen analysis to describe the changes in climate, and then move on to suggest that an interdisciplinary alliance between palynology (study of pollen) and history. I want to look at interdisciplinary alliances a bit more closely.

There seems to be two basic types of alliances between history and other disciplines: natural and unnatural.

History is the study of human civilization since the inception of writing. The focus is largely on literate societies (with a few exceptions) that live in the past. Other disciplines like archaeology, cultural anthropology and to some extent philosophy have similar agendas. Each studies the evolution of human culture and ideas. The methodologies are readily implementable (philosophy is trickier, please look at the first chapter of The Future of History, by Breisach). These constitute ‘natural’ alliances.

There has been, in the past, interesting alliances. For instance, Michael McCormick has used medicine to argue that the pathogen that caused the plague in the middle of the sixth-century was Y. Pestis (the same pathogen that causes the bubonic plague). Horden and Purcell have also looked at climate change and physical geography to look at the unity of the Mediterranean world.

These alliances appear to me as being unnatural alliances. There is an element of subjectivity to historical debates. As my professor Ian Wood told me, ‘we look at history through the spectrum of our education’; in other words, both the literary material AND the analysis is subjective. History is an interpretation of the past, a logical inference made by a single person about a particular event. The perspective the historian chooses; the methodology is logically arbitrary: it makes sense to a person (the historian) and to a culture (his society). In that regard, there appears to be a fundamentally different perspective between history and geology for instance.

That is not to say that, as historians, we should not use scientific data and methods. McCormick, for instance, makes a persuasive case for the use of medical methodology in medicine. But, when using disciplines that are fundamentally different from history, the historian must be careful in that he may not be qualified to answer the questions that can be interpreted from this new data.

On methodology, there are so many books, it is difficult to start:

1) The Future of History- Breisachvery abstract, close to philosophy2) Histories: French construction of the past

important historical tradition, but there are many other traditions that are worthwhile. Good place to start.

3) Toward a Molecular History of the Justinianic Pandemic- Michael McCormick- In Plague and the End of Antiquity by Lester K. Little

very good, but still contested results.

4) The Corrupting Sea- Horden and Purcell

seminal work, but very very very long.

Ethnogenesis in the Early Middle Ages I: Definition and Necessity

This rather esoteric term is often confounding for lay audiences. What is ethnogenesis? Ethnogenesis is a method of analysis for the study of barbarian[1] peoplesin the period before barbarians groups entered the Roman Empire.

When you read the eighth century Historia Francorum of Fredegar, you find that Merovech, the alleged founder of the Merovingian dynasty, was conceived when king Pharamond's wife encountered a Sea-Monster. As far as we know, there are no sea monsters dwelling in the channel, however, this legend shows a connection between the Salian Franks (of which Merovech belongs) and the sea. This connection between Franks and the sea is corroborated in various histories, where Franks are described as raiding pirates. The study of identity through text is called ethnogenesis.

Why do we need a specific method to study the barbarian groups? Barbarian societies did not leave us any text that we are able to work with. The various Origo Gentis (Origins of a People) were written long after the barbarians entered the Roman Empire. The Getica (Origins of the Goths) of Jordanes was written in the second half of the sixth century A.D., at the court of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (r. 527-565). In the Getica, Jordanes relates events that took place almost 500 years earlier. Furthermore, as Professor Peter Heather has shown,[2] there is evidence that Jordanes borrowed elements of the histories of fourth-century Roman historian Ammianus. Consequently, the texts that deal with barbarian histories lack a certain level of authenticity.

Furthermore, the histories focus almost exclusively with events that took place close to the time of the author. The History of the Franks of Gregory of Tours devotes only one chapter out of ten to the early history of the Franks. This history calls for a Panonian (Panonia is a Roman province, that is now in the South of modern-day Hungary) origins of the Franks, which Professors Wood and Geary have identified as being an attempt by Gregory of Tours to link the Franks with his illustrious predecessor in Tours, St Martin, a saint from Panonia. Thus, it is difficult to find solid facts in the histories of Gregory of Tours.

So what does ethnogenesis consist of? Ethnogenesis is a method that is based on a theory that was proposed by Wenskus is his work Stammesbildung und Verfassung (1962- this text was not translated from the German). For Wenskus, ethnic identity is purely cultural. This makes sense, as anthropologist have discounted any biological component to identity;[3] that means that physiological traits (skull size or shape, hair or eye color, etc…) are not requirements for any appurtenance to an ethnic group; therefore, ethnic identity is based on cultural characteristics. Luckily we can see cultural traits in either texts or material data (coins, swords, grave goods, brooches…). Ethnogenesis, as conceived by Wenskus stipulates that, groups form around families who can prove their descent from the gods, through various achievements. These achievements form a ‘nuclei of traditions,’ which one would have to adhere to in order to belong to a group. Thus, in order to belong to the Ostrogoths, one would have to recognize the supremacy of the Amal family (that is, Theodoric’s family) and its traditions.

Ethogenesis has come to mean different things to different people, as Professor Wood pointed out. However, there is one constant: the studies of ethnogenesis are the studies of how stories of origins are developed.

Thanks to Franks Cotham for the first illustration, and most importantly, to the incomparable talent of Gosciny and Uderzo for the second drawing, taken from Asterix and the Goths.

For Further Reading:

I think the following is a fairly good introductory read:

Wolfram, Herwig. The Roman Empire and its Germanic Peoples.

For slightly more difficult, yet fascinating, reads, the following are good:

Geary, Patrick. Before France and Germany.

Kulikowski, Michael. Rome’s Gothic Wars.

Wood, Ian. The Merovingian Kingdoms.

For more detailed readings, please contact me and I will gladly email you my bibliographies.

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[1] Let’s be clear: barbarian is a general term that I will use to describe all groups that entered the Roman Empire, namely, Goths, Franks, Alamanni, Burgundians, Vandals etc… .

[2] Peter Heather, Cassiodorus and the Rise of the Amals: Genealogy and the Goths under Hun Domination’, Journal of Roman Studies 79 (1989), pp. 103-128.

[3] Michael Kulikowski gives an interesting synopsis of the theories. See Michael Kulikowski, ‘Nation versus Army: A Necessary Contrast?’, in On Barbarian Identity, ed. by Andrew Gillett (Turnhout, Brepols, 2002), p.69-85.

The Life of St Leander of Seville by Isidore of Seville (De Viris Illustribus 61)

St Leander of Seville was born in 534 and died in 600.

St Leander of Seville

http://saints.sqpn.com/saintl50.htm

This post is a translation of the life of St Leander of Seville by his brother and successor to the bishopric of Seville, Isidore. I decided to translate and post this particular text to prepare the next post, which is homily delivered by Leander of Seville at the Third Council of Toledo (more about that in the next post). 

The original Latin text is from the Patrologia Latina.

De Viris Illustribus, Caput XLI

57. Leander was born to Severianus, his father, of the province of Carthage. He was a  monk by profession and from a the monastic [profession], was established bishop of the Church of Seville of the province of Baethica. He was a pleasant man in speech, surpassing all in character, most famous in life and also in doctrine, so that the Gothic people were returned to the Catholic faith from the Arian folly[1] by his faith and his work.[2] In fact, during the travel of his exile, he composed two books against the doctrines of the heretics; they were richly adorned with the erudition of the Holy Scriptures, and in them he pierced with a vigorous pen the impieties of the Arian [faith], and he, pointing out (one might know) the thing which the Catholic Church might have against them, [and] how different it stood either from that religion or from faith in the sacraments, laid bare its perverseness.

 58. And there stood out another laudable trifle of his against the customs of the Arians, in which, after he set forth his positions, opposed their replies. In addition, he published one small book, for his sister Florentina about the Institution of Virgins and the contempt of the world, a book marked with distinctions of titles. And the very same man accordingly worked in the offices of the church not with small zeal; indeed, in the whole psaltery, he wrote down orations in a two faced edition; likewise in the sacrifice, he composed many [songs] of sweet sound for psalms and praises.

 59. He even wrote many letters: one to the pope about baptism, another to his brother, in which, he forewarned everybody that death should not be feared. Also he published many intimate letters to the rest of the bishops, and if [they were not] splendid in words, they were nevertheless wise in thought. He flourished under Reccared, a religious man, as well as a glorious ruler, in whose marvelous time Leander finished the end of his life in death.

About the next post: 

The  next post will be the translation of the homily by St Leander of Seville that closes the Third Council of Toledo (589). In the post, I will discuss the significance of the council. This next post will close (temporarily) the chapter on Spain and we will move to a discussion on 'ethnogenesis', that is, the study of identity through text. 

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[1] The word used is insania and is fairly commonly used by Nicene Christians when describing the Arian controversy.

[2] The portion really reads: et fide ejus atque industria- the prepositions et, atque have emphatic meanings. That is, Isidore holds Leander solely responsible for the conversion of the Goths.