Bang, The Roman Empire
Aristocracy, courtly privilege, Christianity, fragmentation, Germanic mercenaries..
The Source:
The Oxford World History of Empire, Volume Two, edited by Peter Fibiger Bang, C. A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press 2021
Excerpts: Chapter 9 ‘The Roman Empire’, by Peter Fibiger Bang
Aristocracy
“There can be no peace among the peoples without soldiers, no soldiers without pay, and no pay without taxes.”
The order of stable empire, captured in this striking adage of the historian and senator Tacitus, had required the establishment of a basic division of labor. …
… In the Roman case, respect for tradition required the emperor to enter into dialogue with a range of elite communities across the empire, but above all the senatorial class of the city of Rome itself. The time-hallowed institutions of the Roman city-state, embodied in the republican political system, had to be preserved, or rather reconfigured.
Membership of the senatorial order, the highest echelon of the Roman imperial aristocracy, was defined by the holding of the republican offices: quaestor, aedile, praetor, consul. … But the restored republic did not provide a legal framework that could effectively curb the ruler. He was absolute and, in practice, above the law. Yet, saddled with the political idiom of the more egalitarian aristocratic collective of past times, the imperial monarchy has caused some commentators to focus primarily on the tension between absolutist reality and republican language.
The Augustan Principate has even once been proclaimed the regime most lacking in legitimacy throughout history. … stuck between traditional legitimacy and revolutionary absolutism, the Roman emperors had the republican constitution re-tailored as one element in a wider reform of Roman society. Formal signifiers of status difference were more clearly articulated, and opportunities for distinction were offered as never before.
While the highest political office, the consulate, had in the past been available to only two annual incumbents, it now became common to have up to almost two handfuls, who took turns over the year. What the aristocracy lost in effective power to rule, it received back, plentifully, in the currency of honor. Greater numbers of prominent and powerful families were able to reach the most coveted and prestigious official positions in Roman society.
The second, slightly broader order of the Roman elite, the knights, equally got opportunities and privileges to serve the emperor in honourable positions; and with these also came opportunities for self-enrichment.
In short, the old republican system was subsumed within the wider set of honours, benefits, and positions used as instruments by the emperors to place themselves at the center of aristocratic life as the ultimate arbiter of rank and privilege.
Courtly Government and the Politics of Distinction and Privilege
… The greatest celebration of the republican past, it should be noted, was penned by Livy while he enjoyed the patronage of both Augustus and Tiberius. … What Livy’s cornucopia of exemplary tales and heroic sacrifice offered in an age of monarchy was not primarily nostalgia, but rather an ideal of self-control and service, stories of aristocrats curbing their personal ambitions and desires, winning glory by putting the commonwealth ahead of their own interests. … In setting up a court, the Roman emperors could cannibalise the old republican establishment as a set of distinctions and collective myths in order to rebuild the aristocracy and channel its competitive energies into the service of monarchy and empire. …
… At the court of the emperor, the leading members of society came together to vie for preeminence and compete over access to the resources of empire. Aristocratic life remained fiercely contentious, but it now took place under the watchful gaze of the caesars.
Factions of nobles that became too powerful, ambitious, or overly proud—forgetting the proper bounds of behaviour—or favourites who were elevated to high position and then overplayed their hand, were at risk of sudden death and the confiscation of their fortunes. So too were emperors who aimed at confrontation.
With intrigues, conspiracies, and reigns of terror, the Roman court took a heavy toll from its players. Merely participating in the culture of conspicuous consumption expected of aristocrats placed high, potentially crippling demands on wealth. Withdrawal from the front tier was sometimes necessary. Aristocratic families responded to the stresses of court life by narrowly limiting the number of heirs, in order to avoid having to divide up their fortune. The risk, of course, was that no child would survive to carry on the line. As a group, the high aristocracy was unable to reproduce, and hereditary succession within the senate was surprisingly low. Every generation, its ranks had to be topped up with newcomers. …
… The most powerful families in imperial society gravitated to the court in Rome, where they were needed to fill ceremonial duties and government positions. Annual officeholders, commanders of legions, and provincial governors were selected from a pool of some 600 senators and perhaps as many knights. The formal establishment was minuscule compared to the size of the empire. Fewer than 200 officials were required on “overseas” duty annually. To this, of course, must be added the far more numerous slave servants, soldiers, and friends who would normally accompany them.
Still, it is not an exaggeration that the empire represented, as it has aptly been phrased, a form of “government without bureaucracy” [Peter Garnsey & Richard Saller in Archive LINK]
Officeholders were generally recalled after only a few years of service. Efficiency was less important than preventing rebellion by keeping officials from putting down roots in provincial society and building up a power base of their own. This light structure could work only because the pull of the court extended far beyond this select group of privileged officials. …
Imperial Monotheism: The Rise of Christianity
… The religious universe of the ancient Mediterranean was characterized by polytheism; it was a world “full of gods” whose cults were mainly anchored in local ritual contexts … There was nothing inevitable about the eventual triumph within the empire of the Christian faith. Rather, the sect seemed poised to insert itself as one seam within the layered fabric of imperial civilization. Many other prophets were on offer who promised access to divine truth … [including] a single all-encompassing godly truth that lay behind innumerable local cultic instantiations across the earth.
To an outside observer, it might even have seemed far more plausible that a faith of his type would have won out, embedded as it was in Greek philosophy and the existing polytheistic universe. Indeed, the followers of Jesus had sometimes attracted the suspicions of the imperial authorities and occasionally been targeted as anti-social for their stubborn rejection of gods other than their own and avoidance of the cult activities of the wider community.
But all of this changed when the emperor Constantine became attracted to Christianity and threw the weight of imperial sponsorship behind it. Just as he had reunited the realm, he wanted a divine faith to reflect the accomplishment. Barely had he defeated the last of his opponents than he called a council of bishops in 325 CE, to unify the character of Christian belief: a Catholic Church for a Universal Empire—one god in heaven and one emperor on earth to mirror one other.
Enjoying the support of the imperial dynasty, the good tidings of the Church quickly began to resonate with the elites of the empire, and a wave of conversions followed over the next couple of centuries.
By the 380s, the new faith had consolidated its position as sole state religion, while the ancient cults of the empire’s many civic deities, starved of funds and their ritual sacrifices outlawed, began to transmute into worship of local Christian saints. The Church elbowed its way to the center of civic life, and its bishops stepped up next to the nobles as leaders of their communities. …
… the monumental church served as the proud and ambitious proclamation of a Christian world order, an order that significantly was projected from the city that Constantine had (re)founded on the Bosporus as his new seat of government. Rome had ceased to be the political center of the imperial ecumene. The grand city still held symbolical prestige, to be sure, but the empire could no longer be governed from the Tiber Valley. Nor could it be held together, for the most part, as a single entity. The unity achieved by Diocletian and Constantine was a tenuous one. Barely had the bishops agreed to a single creed for the Christian communities than theological controversies over the unity of God took new flight. Minute differences of belief electrified competing regional networks of power, influence, and connection to produce division within the universal Church. Rival factions vied for the support of the ruler and the law courts in order to flesh out, with the firm backing of government, a distinction between right-minded orthodoxy and—on the side of the losers—heresies, whose members had to be condemned, expunged, and excluded from society.
The Rise of Provincial Elites and the Fragmentation of Power
As Christianity was immediately beset by schism, so the monarchy tended to break up into regional courts of co-rulers who competed as much as they collaborated with one other. The expanded administration that the emperors had developed, in their desperate efforts to recapture their revenue-base, provision the armies, and pay the salaries of the soldiers, was not merely an impersonal bureaucratic machine of humble civil servants. Sociologically, the administrative corps of vast pre-colonial empires may be characterised as patrimonial or personal bureaucracies; they remained an integral part of the system of privileges and honors that helped reproduce noble status.
The emperors continued to rule as the leaders of an aristocratic society. As the final arbiter of rank and right, they responded, much as before, to requests and petitions from the leaders of largely self-organising communities.
To achieve their goals, the emperors had to allow the entry of leading families of the provincial cities into the growing number of official government positions. Some even settled for a mere title and entered the books among the so-called supernumerarii, serving in no real function, but claiming the status and privilege only. This process used to be discussed in terms of the weakening and decline of city councils; it was, instead, the final triumph of provincial aristocratic landowners. The leading families of the cities had muscled their way upward to obtain imperial rank.
Out of the reconsolidated imperial state there emerged a strengthened provincial aristocracy that was able to fortify its position and build up its portfolio of properties and landed estates. The share of agricultural revenues claimed by this class imposed clear limits on the amount of taxes that the emperors were able to command. Centralisation had produced its own countervailing centrifugal forces. …
… In the Roman instance, the outcome was division, followed, in part, by fragmentation. By the turn of the fourth century CE, the reins of the empire had been split between a Western and an Eastern court, located in Milan and Constantinople, respectively. …
… As part of their efforts to shore up the fiscally challenged military might of the realm, the emperors had recourse to hiring so-called barbarian troops from beyond the borders of tax-paying provincial lands. These “barbarian” federates were good soldiers, expendable and cheaper than the regular units raised from the provincial population. To avoid conscription of their peasants, landowners in the provinces were even, on occasion, willing to pay an extra tax to enable the court to hire mercenaries instead.
There was nothing new about the use of such troops. Augustus himself had a bodyguard of Germanic origin. But the intensified mobilisation of “barbarian” regiments by a cash-strapped court had unforeseen consequences. The military society that had developed along the frontiers of the Rhine and the Danube experienced an enormous pull toward the empire. Stirrings among the nomadic warriors on the distant central Asian steppe may be speculated to have sparked some of the movement in a knock-on effect. However, the attraction and dynamics of imperial society were much the stronger force.
Not entirely unlike their republican predecessors, the “barbarian” federates hoped to receive lands or proceeds from these. Sometimes the courts gave their sanction to these ambitions, at other times they were forced to accept that the soldiers had helped themselves, either because of lacking payment or simply because they could. In the Western part of the empire, things spiralled out of control.
Over the span of a generation, the provinces of Gaul, Spain, and Africa were hollowed out from within, taken over by a mushrooming number of “barbarian” warrior groups. Goths, Burgundians, Franks, Vandals, and Huns, a sprawling patchwork of ethnicities were born—on the march, so to speak—as communities of soldiers were engaged, and to some extent even given their names, by the Roman courts.
The division of labor that lay at the heart of the imperial peace began to unravel. Now settled on their own territories, this class of federate soldier had less need for the fiscal mediation of the court, since they now had direct access to agricultural revenues.
To make things worse, provincial aristocratic landowners, faced with the well-armed and warlike newcomers, often preferred to reach an accommodation directly with the so-called Germanic warlords who had settled in their midst, rather than hope for the protection of a distant ruler whose coffers were running increasingly empty.
The Western court was trapped in a suffocating stranglehold from which it could not break free. Occasionally, help was sent from its Eastern twin. In the long run, however, assistance was no substitute for the ability, which had been lost with the empire’s division, to rely on the rich taxes of the East to help stabilise the tottering finances of the West. With revenue streams gradually dwindling, the Western court withered away until a Germanic warlord simply returned the imperial insignia to the Eastern emperor in 476.
Constantinople, however, still stood tall and proud. As the undisputed, sole seat of Roman power, perched on the border between Asia and Europe, the sparkling capital presided over an imperial ecumene, with the Eastern provinces mostly intact and an orbit of Western Romano-Germanic successor kingdoms that remained under the diplomatic, financial, and military influence of the universal ruler of Christendom. By the 530s, Justinian felt strong enough to embark on a campaign of reconquest. Africa, southern Spain, and Italy were taken back. …
… Just as the empire seemed resurgent, it was hit by another plague, this time bubonic, a pandemic so severe that it would not be surpassed again before the arrival of the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Suddenly, the program so gloriously conceived by Justinian had become too ambitious and therefore unsustainable.169 The great loss of human life seriously dented the tax base of the empire, straining government finances to the breaking point. The demands made on the peasantry and the landowners became more onerous, and complaints of the emperor’s capriciousness multiplied. …
… Rallying around the revelations of Muhammad and spurred on by the need to sustain the flow of pay and plunder that undergirded their political hierarchy, a coalition of Arab tribal warriors broke in on the Roman and Sasanian world. In less than a decade (633–642), Syria, Egypt, and most of the Sasanian Empire fell [Sasanian: a dynasty that ruled Persia from the early 3rd century AD until the Arab Muslim conquest of 651].
Over the next decades, a mopping-up operation followed that took the power of the caliphs all the way to southern Spain, Afghanistan, and North India. The established universal monarchies of Western Eurasian antiquity had been eclipsed by the Islamic Empire and its new politico-divine dispensation. Roman historians have for some time debated whether the Germanic federates of the fifth century were settled on the land and allowed to collect the yield directly, or whether they merely received rights to imperial revenue. In reality, it may well have been a mixture of the two. In comparison to the practice of the Arab conquerors, however, the method of taxation gave way to direct occupation of the land by warriors, more often as landlords than cultivators, both in the Western successor kingdoms and even in the rump Roman state that remained after the catastrophic loss of its Levantine and South Mediterranean provinces.
The mantle of empire, with its supporting division of labor, had passed to the caliphs, who proudly proclaimed their Pax Islamica. With the construction of the Dome of the Rock on the old temple mount in Jerusalem, the message was made clear. Once a Jewish and Christian location, it was the followers of Muhammad who now held the succession of empire and could build a new order on the foundations of the old.
As for Rome, its story, then, may be summarised in three concentric waves of conquest. First, Romano-Italian armies united the greater Mediterranean. Then the provincials took over the empire. Finally, most of the realm was captured by groups emerging on its militarised frontiers.
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