Toledo

[Tore Gannholm]

Hi,
Another view is presented by Peter Brown in "The World of late  
antiquity AD 150-750"

Dirk will probably not like it as it does not fit his picure.

Tore


The ideology of the late fourth-century popes, and the cult of St  
Peter in western Europe, owe much to conscious rivalry with pagan  
exponents of the myth of Rome. Symmachus, paradoxically, was an  
unwitting architect of the medieval papacy.

But even the most enthusiastic Christian patriot had to admit that  
the cult of the Rome of St Peter was, in part, an attempt to lay a  
ghost. The last pagans of Rome reminded Christians, at the very last  
moment, of the unregenerate, pagan past of the empire. They charged  
the myth of Roma aeterna with sinister associations. Throughout the  
Middle Ages, just beneath the surface of the Holy City of St Peter,  
there always lurked, as an indelible stain on the Christian  
imagination, the idea that Rome had been 'the Devil's City'. In  
Constantinople, the Roman empire was accepted without question as a  
Christian empire. All that the bishops of the medieval West could do,  
by contrast, was to conjure up the pale clerical shade of a 'holy'  
Roman empire.

The society of the western provinces of the Roman empire was  
fragmented. In the late fourth century, boundaries had hardened, and  
a heightened sense of identity had led to harsher intolerance of the  
outsider. Senators who had participated in an impressive revival of  
high standards of Latin literature were little inclined to tolerate a  
'barbarian'. Bishops who could boast Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine as  
colleagues were in no mood, either, to tolerate those outside their  
Catholic Church. As a result, the barbarian tribes entered a society  
that was not strong enough to hold them at bay, but not flexible  
enough to 'lead their conquerors captive' by absorbing them into  
Roman life.

This is the significance of the so-called 'barbarian invasions' of  
the early fifth century. These invasions were not perpetual,  
destructive raids; still less were they organized campaigns of  
conquest. Rather. they were a 'gold rush' of immigrants from the  
underdeveloped countries of the north into the rich lands of the  
Mediterranean.

The barbarians were vulnerable. Their numbers and military capacity  
might win the battles: but they were in no position to win the peace.  
The Visigoths crossed the frontier at the Danube in 376 and turned  
their attention to Italy in 402, under their king Alaric. The Vandals  
entered Gaul and Spain in 406-09. The Burgundians settled down in the  
Middle Rhône Valley after 430. These successes were impressive and  
totally unexpected. Yet the conquering tribes were divided against  
each other and within themselves. Each had produced a warrior- 
aristocracy, far removed from the tastes and ambitions of their own  
rank and file. These warrior-aristocracies were quite prepared to  
leave their 'underdeveloped' fellow tribesmen behind, and to become  
absorbed into the prestige and luxury of Roman society. Theodoric,  
king of the Ostrogoths (493-526), was later in the habit of saying:  
'An able Goth wants to be like a Roman; only a poor Roman would want  
to be like a Goth.'

In those areas of the Balkans controlled by the court of  
Constantinople, the lessons which the Roman military experts had  
learnt in the fourth century were applied successfully. A judicious  
combination of force, adaptability and hard cash neutralized the  
effects of the Visigothic immigration. The Visigothic warrior-  
aristocracy was 'integrated' by being offered posts in the High  
Command, or set to tasks that served the purposes of east Roman  
diplomacy. When Alaric was deflected from the Balkans to the West,  
however, he faced a society with neither strength nor skill. The  
senators had failed to pay their taxes or to provide recruits for the  
Roman army; yet, when they were asked, in 408, to pay for a diplomacy  
based on subsidies to Alaric, that might have covered their military  
weakness, the Senate rejected the proposal as smacking of  
'appeasement' of the despised barbarian: 'This is a slave's contract,
not a subsidy.' Noble words: but two years later these patriots would  
have to pay three times as much as they had been asked to contribute,  
in order to ransom their own city from the Visigothic king. A  
strident chauvinism and a refusal to negotiate with the barbarians  
led to the Sack of Rome by Alaric in 410. It was not an auspicious  
beginning to the coming century of Roman-barbarian relations.

So much for the Roman senators. As for the Catholic Church, its  
bishops were the spokesmen of the prejudices of the average  
Mediterranean townsman. Townsmen dreaded the barbarians: but they  
also knew and disliked soldiers. Their Christianity was not so much  
pacifist, as resolutely civilian. Sulpicius Severus went to great  
lengths to disguise the fact that his hero, St Martin of Tours, had  
ever been a Roman officer: only in the far more military society of  
the Middle Ages did artists gladly portray him as a knight. There was  
no room for the soldier-saint in the fourth-century Latin  
congregations, and, one may suspect, they cherished little enthusiasm  
for the Roman army. As for the barbarian, he was the successor of the  
Roman soldier: he  was branded as a man of war, tainted with  
'ferocity of soul', in the midst of the peace-loving 'Sheep of the  
Lord'. He was also a heretic, for the Danubian tribes had adopted the  
strong Arian Christianity of that region.

The barbarian settlers in the West found themselves both powerful and  
unabsorbable. They were encapsulated by a wall of dumb hatred. They  
could not have been 'detribalized' even if they had wanted to be,  
because as 'barbarians' and heretics they were marked men. The  
intolerance that greeted the barbarian immigration, therefore, led  
directly to the formation of the barbarian kingdoms. To be tacitly  
disliked by 98 per cent of one's fellow men is no mean stimulus to  
preserving one's identity as a ruling class. The Vandals in Africa  
from 428 to 533, the Ostrogoths in Italy from 496 to 554, the  
Visigoths in
Toulouse from 418 and later in Spain, up to their conversion to  
Catholicism in 589, ruled effectively as heretical kingdoms precisely  
because they were well hated. They had to remain a tight-knit warrior  
caste, held at arm's length by their subjects. Not surprisingly, the  
word for 'executioner' is the only direct legacy of two and a half  
centuries of Visigothic rule to the language of Spain.

The Franks were the exception that proved the rule. They were  
latecomers: Frankish war-bands rose to prominence only in the late  
fifth century, long after the establishment of the other Germanic  
tribes. They did not come as conquerors: they had infiltrated in  
small numbers, as mercenaries. Above all, they kept clear of the  
highly articulate populations round the Mediterranean. Northern Gaul  
remained the centre of gravity of the Frankish state. Southern  
bishops and senators found it easier to accept such comparatively  
insignificant strangers. As a result, the Franks felt free to become  
Catholics. At the
Merovingian court of the sixth century, Roman and Frank butchered and  
married each other without discrimination; and Gallo-Roman bishops,  
well aware of the continued existence of strong Arian states to their  
south (the Visigoths in Spain held Narbonne, and the Ostrogoths of  
Italy expanded into Provence), hailed the unsavoury warlord of the  
Franks, Clovis (481-511), as 'a new Constantine'. The very success of  
the distant Franks, indeed, is an indication of how little tolerance  
the Roman population of the Mediterranean were prepared to extend to  
the barbarian states on their own doorstep.

This state of affairs is usually treated as inevitable by historians  
of western Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries. But it is not the  
only way in which a great empire can treat its barbarian conquerors.  
Northern China, for instance, was more thoroughly occupied by the  
barbarians of Mongolia than ever the western provinces of the Roman  
empire were by the Germanic tribes. Yet in China the barbarians 'went  
native' within a few generations, and continued the Chinese imperial  
tradition without a break, from dynasty to dynasty. The Visigothic,  
the Ostrogothic and the Vandal kingdoms of western Europe were never  
absorbed in this way: they survived as foreign bodies, perched  
insecurely on top of populations who ignored them and set about the  
more congenial business of looking after themselves.

The barbarian invasions did not destroy west Roman society, but they  
drastically altered the scale of life in the western provinces. The  
imperial government, now settled in Ravenna, lost so much land and  
taxes that it remained bankrupt up to the time of its extinction in  
476. The senators lost the income of their scattered estates. They  
were able to make good some of their losses by rack-renting and  
chicanery in the areas where their power was strongest. The great  
landowners of Italy and Gaul, whose power rested so heavily on the  
peasantry, were a threatened rump of the affluent absentee-landlords  
of the previous century. Communications suffered. In the late fourth  
century, senatorial ladies from northern Spain travelled freely all over
the eastern empire; in the fifth century, a bishop writing in Asturia  
hardly knew what happened outside his own province. In western  
Europe, the fifth century was a time of narrowing horizons, of the  
strengthening of local roots, and the consolidating of old loyalties.

Immediately after the Sack of Rome the Catholic Church asserted its  
unity: schism was forcibly suppressed in Africa after 411; in 417 the  
Pelagian heresy was chased out of Rome. Men felt they could no longer  
afford the vigorous religious strife of a more secure age. The last  
pagans, therefore, rallied to the Church. Their culture and  
patriotism now contributed to hardening the boundaries of  
Catholicism: in the mosaics placed in S. Maria Maggiore in 431, for  
instance, the Temple in the background of the scene of Christ's  
Presentation at the Temple is the old Templum Urbis. Leo I (440-61),  
the first pope to
come from the old-fashioned countryside of Rome, praised Rome as the  
see of St Peter in language that echoes exactly the punctilious  
devotion of Symmachus to the Capitoline gods. In a world increasingly  
conscious of the presence of the non-Roman, Catholicism had become  
the single 'Roman' religion.

With this new religious solidarity went a strengthening of localties.  
This can be seen most clearly in Gaul. The provincial aristocracy of  
Gaul had always been both loyal to its homeland and successful as  
suitors at court. The tradition begun at Trier in the fourth century  
merely continued with gusto in the more outlandish barbarian courts  
of the fifth. Sidonius Apollinaris (c. 431-89) included among his  
skills the gentle art of gaining a petition by tactfully losing at  
back-gammon whenever he played against the Visigothic king Theodoric  
at Toulouse.

The newly established barbarian kingdoms provided ample scope for the  
gifts of the courtier. Despite their prejudices, the local senators  
quickly realized that to have a strong man with an effective military  
force on one's doorstep has its advantages. The Romans exploited the  
divisive effects of new wealth among the barbarian nobility. They  
tended to back the kings against their unruly followers by  
encouraging them to establish strong dynasties on the imperial model.  
A typical example of the survival of the scholar-bureaucrat at a  
barbarian court is Cassiodorus (c. 490-c. 583), who was a minister of  
Theodoric the Ostrogoth and his successors in Italy. Cassiodorus  
framed the royal edicts in traditional style; he skilfully presented  
Theodoric and his
family as 'philosopher kings' (for he could hardly have called them  
legitimate Roman rulers); and he even wrote a History of the Goths  
that presented the tribe in general, and the family of Theodoric in  
particular, as co-operative participants in the history of the   
Mediterranean, from the time of Alexander the Great onwards.

More bluntly, the Romans came to recognize that the devil you know is  
better than the devil you do not. In Aquitaine, the Visigothic  
presence sheltered the villas of Sidonius and his friends from tribes  
such as the Saxons who were known to have terrorized Britain. In 451,  
it was the local senators who persuaded the Visigoths to join the  
Roman army in halting the avalanche of Attila's Huns. It was the  
presence of the barbarian garrisons in Gaul which ensured that, while  
in Britain not a single Roman estate-name survived the Saxon  
invasion, the villages of the Garonne and the Auvergne bear to this
day the names of the families that owned them in the fifth century.

The politics of Roman courtiers at the new barbarian courts were  
local politics. The idea of a united western empire was increasingly  
ignored by men who genuinely loved the smaller world of their  
province. In the letters of Sidonius Apollinaris, we see the rooted  
passions of the gentleman-farmer emerging behind the mask of the  
senator's otium. In the letters of Symmachus, we see only a style of  
life: in those of Sidonius, we move through a distinct landscape -  
his beloved Clermont: 'Where pastures crown the hill-tops and vine- 
yards clothe the slopes, where villas rise on the lowlands and  
castles on the rocks, forests here and clearings there, headlands  
washed by rivers . .




5 jul 2007 kl. 02.19 skrev Ingemar Nordgren:

> --- In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com, "faltin2001" <d.faltin at ...> wrote:
> >
>
> > Hi Ingemar,
> >
> > I'm afraid the Goths that you tell about most of the time are indeed
> > fantasy.
>
> I see. Thanks for telling me.
>
> > Different social groups require different laws. The native
> provincial Iberians largely submitted to the laws set by the secular
> Roman > authorities. The Catholic clerics submitted to church law and
> the military was subject to the "lex Romana Visigothorum", i.e. the
> Roman law for the visigothic realm.
>
> And to whom submitted the Arian priests then? The Visigothic warriors
> did not submit to a Roman law but a Gothic one. Note e.g. that
> Reccared claimed the same divine legislation as the emperor.
>
> Nor was the Gothic armies Roman armies even if the Romans had to grant
> Alaric, and later Theoderic, the title of Magister Militum to prevent
> them from looting the Balkan area. They sent them westward but did
> not in fact control them. The Gothic kingdoms were just Gothic but
> still they recognised the emperor, like kings do, which however
> doesn't make them Roman. Funny indeed that the emperor sent a Roman
> army to lay siege on Rome in 410. They respected the civil rights of
> the former Roman citizens just through having different sets of law.
> Teoderic, beside different administration, even forbade intermarriage
> to isolate the Goths as an own unit to support the Gothic ethnicity.
> Euric and Leovigild as another example both were very intent on having
> a strongly king controlled Arian church even if this later was undone
> by Reccared et consortes.
>
> I can admit that Gothic gradually declined as used language and
> specially so after Reccared but to say it totally disappeared is not
> correct.Nor is it for Italy. You can't ,besides, not use preserved
> documents as a proof since most documents are destroyed, often
> overwritten with new texts, and most of the Gothic population- and I
> assume many of the former Roman- were illiterate and analfabets. You
> must go for place names et.c. to find out the remnants.
>
> >Lets say you (and many others) believe in an old and antiquated image
> >of the Visigoths, which simply is no longer acceptable in the light
> >of the evidence. You should now that much of what we know is
> >perception and interpretion. Look, Oscar wasn't even aware that the
> >Visigoths were the Roman federate army and that they didn't drive
> >out any Roman legions from Spain. Your knowledge would be better
> >used to inform and explain such things.
>
> As I wrote they were not really the Roman federate army but rather an
> allied army under formal command of a 'Magister Militum' who was a
> real king/reiks and who didn't care a bit about the interpretation by
> the emperor in that respect. They were since long used to help the
> Romans as auxilliary forces before they crossed the limes and because
> of hunger and maltreatment started raiding Eastroman territory. A
> hundred years later the same problem occured with the Ostrogoths and
> was solved in the same way.
>
> The Vesi-Tervingi were renamed Visigoths in the time of Alaric - that
> is correct, but if it was Jordanes or Cassiodorus which did that is
> another question since Alaric set out tovards Italy via Balkan
> already in the early 400's. They,however, after were known under that
> name and still are. In the same way Greutungi and the other tribes
> became the Ostrogoths. I know you claim the Goths are not related to
> Gudones and hence there are no Goths but just a mixture of Germanics,
> Sarmatians et c. I agree there is hard to find bloodlines of a
> homogenous Gothic people after different etnogenesi but this does not
> mean you can rule out the Goths in the way you do.Archaeology is quite
> clear in that respect. They were divided in tribes and people all the
> way from the beginning and Gudones/Goths is just a collective name but
> it is as well an important ethnic tradition. Into this tradition later
> also new folks were incorporated and became accepted Goths. The Goths
> were in time influenced by the Roman civilisation to a certain degree
> but it is not until after the conversion to Catholicism that they
> start loosing their Gothic ethnicity and language as a united people.
> This occured accordingly after 568 and gradually up to 711. I am
> however fairly convinced that Gothic was spoken much later but not
> used as a written official language. Crimea is not the only place
> where Gothic speakers have been reported but it is the only documented
> place.
>
> lost their Germanic language
> > during the 5th century, after having lived among Romans for some  
> 5 or
> > more generations. The Ostrogoths may have stuck with Gothic a little
> > longer. Theoderic never referes to Gothic, but he uses the term "our
> > language". Yet, this "our language" had almost certainly very  
> little in
> > common with the Gothic of the Wulfila bible. Instead, it was  
> probably a
> > military pidgin with many Germanic, Latin and some Greek words.
>
> Of course a language developes in time like our modern ones. There is
> accordingly no sense in saying they didn't use Gothic.
>
> Thank you for your enlightment!
>
> Die besten Grüße!
> Ingemar
>
>
> 



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