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Luke VanderpoolDr. CraneHi302/Historiography 08 December 2015

The Transition of the Roman Empire into the Early Middle Ages

as Explored by Various Historians

The decline and collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of the early Middle Ages

in Europe during the fifth and sixth centuries was a gradual process. During this time,

Roman citizens saw their Empire shrink under increasing pressure from the Germanic

peoples North of Italy. Historians, viewing the collapse from the Roman perspective, study

how the Germanic tribes, collectively known by the Romans and today as “Barbarians,”

were dealt with in a variety of manners including war, accommodation, and ultimately

capitulation. In studying the collapse of the Empire from the Germanic perspective,

historians learn how the conquering forces, specifically, the Ostrogoth Theoderic, handled

their new acquisitions, how they dealt with the subjugated peoples of Rome, and how they

reorganized themselves to form what is today known as early Medieval Europe.

However, beyond these simple distinctions of “Germanic” or “Roman,” modern

historians have employed a variety of approaches to studying this collapse as well as

studies of it throughout history. These approaches include such categories as

deconstructionism, nationalism, and global historicism. This paper aims to address and

compare a selection of these different approaches as they relate to one another in terms

content as well as the time in which they were written.

One perhaps need look no further than Edward Gibbon’s monumental work “The

History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” in order to study, with a remarkable

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degree of precision, the collapse of the Empire. The burden of accuracy in a study of this

kind, (as many modern historians might put it) however lightened it may be by Gibbon’s

scholarship, lies primarily on the reader and his or her interpretation of Gibbon’s words.

According to Stephen Snobelen, in an article written for the Canadian Journal of History,

Gibbon’s work was sorely misappropriated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

primarily by Protestant readers who applied a religious slant to Gibbon’s otherwise

atheistic texts.

Snobelen says that many of these readers “belonged to the historicist school of

interpretation,” and that this school’s “proponents [held] that the Book of Revelation

[predicted] the broad sweep of history in Europe and the Near East from the end of the first

century to the final battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming.”1 In searching for

parallels between Gibbon’s work and the Book of Revelation, many of these scholars

skewed Gibbon’s words to fill the role of an apocalyptic commentary that defended “a

particular interpretation of the Apocalypse” despite his clearly atheistic views.2

His skeptical attitude toward religion, in the eyes of scholars during this time,

served as a reason to “assert that this made him a superior witness”3 who was free of the

biases of religion. His apparent impartiality was recognized by these scholars but was still

appropriated to serve their own religiously biased views, thereby creating, by modern

historiographical standards, a rather inaccurate interpretation both of the events described

by Gibbon’s and of Gibbon’s intent in writing about them.

1 Snobelen, Stephen D, “A Further Irony: Apocalyptic Readings of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” Canadian Journal of History, 33(3) (2001): 392.2 Ibid., 396.3 Ibid., 398.

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Although Gibbon’s has certainly had his description of the fall of the Roman Empire

skewed, he is not without his own biases. Writing from a Deistic perspective, Gibbons

exhibits “an aversion to Christian intolerance.”4 He certainly places much of the blame for

the fall of the Empire squarely on Christians, stating that Christianity, in offering a Deity

above and beyond the Roman gods, created a serious atmosphere of subversion that

ultimately crippled the Empire. More specifically, he states that the “zeal of the Jews” and

the “more liberal zeal of the Christians” as being the specific reason for their resistance.5

Gibbon goes on to state that, “But as often as [idolatrous practices] occurred, they

afforded the Christians an opportunity of declaring and confirming their zealous

opposition. By these frequent protestations their attachment to the faith was continually

fortified; and in proportion to the increase of zeal, they combated with the more ardour

and success in the holy war which they had undertaken against the empire of the

daemons.”6 The daemons he refers to are the Romans and their gods, a clear enemy of

Christianity in what he terms a “holy war.” The teachings of Jesus (Paul in particular

expands upon these teachings in his letters) form a clear and zealous basis for this line of

reasoning.

Although his conclusion is very much in line with the general trend of

Enlightenment thinking, it does not seem to be inaccurate. In demanding that its adherents

refrain from and even shun any idolatrous practice, Christianity necessarily sets itself

against any sort of state mandated religion. Further, in the early days of the Christian

4 Hoefferle, C, The Essential Historiography Reader. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2011), 44.5 Gibbon, Edward, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 12 vols. (New York: Fred de Fau and Co., 1906), vol. 2, 267.6 Ibid., 278-279

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Church, Christians often set themselves apart physically, further creating an atmosphere of

“otherness” in the otherwise cohesive areas of the Empire.

Though many modern historians to a large extent still hold with Gibbon’s views,

standard practice seems to have become slightly more balanced in assigning blame (though

Gibbon, and those who write in his school of thought certainly place a heavy weight on the

Christian faith) for such terribly complicated events as the fall of the Roman Empire. Arnold

Jones states that, “the misfortunes of the empire had increased with the growth of

Christianity,” a line of thought that clearly has its roots in Gibbon’s work. He goes on,

however, in quite a different direction, saying that Western historians “have tended to

forget, or to brush aside one very important fact, that the Roman empire, though it may

have declined, did not fall in the fifth century…but in Asia Minor the empire lived on, and

later…recovered much territory that it had lost in the dark days of the seventh century.”7

Gibbon must have been to some extent aware of the events surrounding the splitting

up of the Roman Empire into multiple parts (something that will be discussed later in this

essay) but probably did not have anywhere near the amount of Byzantine sources in the

eighteenth century that would have been available to Jones in the twentieth. Jones, in

analyzing a greater variety of sources (though Gibbon certainly had knowledge of a vast

variety of sources, all meticulously catalogued in his work) writes from more of a

Deconstructionist mindset, “closely analyzing [texts] as if they were archeological

fragments of the worldviews from which they were created.”8

7 Jones, Arnold H.M, The Later Roman Empire 284-602: A Social Economic and Administrative Survey, 2 vols. (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 1964), vol. 2, 1026-1027.8 Hoefferle, The Essential Historiography Reader, 214.

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Neither Jones nor Gibbon accuses Christianity of being the sole contributor to the

demise of the Roman Empire, however. Jones, in fact, states, “in the 110 years since

Diocletian had handed over the rule of the West to Maximinian in 285 the empire had been

united only for brief periods.”9 This long period of conflict signified the death throes of the

once mighty empire. Gibbon even goes so far as to say that, in 395 AD, “The genius of Rome

expired with Theodosius, the last of the successors of Augustus and Constantine.”10 Despite

acknowledging the death of Theodosius as the source of the last critical divide of the

Roman Empire, Jones does say that “the significance of this fact can be exaggerated” due to

the 110 years of conflict preceding it.11

What is clear from both of these views is that Gibbon and Jones alike view

Diocletian’s splitting of the empire into four parts as the beginning of the long descent into

chaos. The dissent and disunity caused by this action opened the way for the Germanic

invaders, a connection not lost on Jones, who states, “this situation gave Alaric, king of the

federate Visigoths…an admirable opportunity to advance his own interests and those of his

people by playing off one government against the other.”12 The entry of the Germanic tribes

into the remains of the Empire and, ultimately, into Rome itself, were the beginning of the

transformation of Europe into its early medieval form.

It is at this point, in 410 AD, that historians really begin to disagree on certain

things. Peter Heather, who approaches the subject as a “Global Historian,” utilizes the

“histoire croisée” method, that is, “[referring] to histories which are intercrossing,

9 Jones, The Later Roman Empire, vol. 1, 182.10 Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 5, 107.11 Jones, The Later Roman Empire, vol. 1, 182.12 Ibid., 183.

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intersecting, interconnected, and entangled on many levels.”13 Instead of looking at one

event following another in some sort of sequence of chronological inevitability, Heather

zooms out, so to speak, to look at the tangled web that was the dying breath of the Empire

in the West.

He does so by stating unequivocally, “No single source lays out for us in one clear

sequence everything leading up to this momentous event, let alone explores their

underlying cause.”14 Whereas Gibbon and Jones may have taken more telescopic approach,

Jones begins his investigation by recognizing the incredibly messy state of affairs that

existed in the early fifth century. In realizing that “The sack of Rome was the end product of

an interaction between multiple protagonists that no contemporary historian—none, at

least, whose work as survived—was able to understand in its entirety.”15 And really, how

could anyone have hoped to understand such massively complicated event in its entirety

and in its immediacy?

Heather’s view, then, looks at the Germanic invasions, in terms of the multiplicity of

peoples involved. While Jones and Gibbon touch on the diversity of the invaders, it is a

ginger touch compared to the slap that is found in Heather’s work. He lists at least eight

different factions of Germanic and Middle Eastern peoples who participated in the

conquest of much of the former Roman holdings, indicating how each was connected to the

others and how each became involved in the first place.

For example, the Alans, a group of Iranian-speaking nomads, are described as being

“the first population group to feel the power of the Huns [and who] quickly fell under [the

13 Hoefferle, The Essential Historiography Reader, 257.14 Heather, P.J., The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 192.15 Ibid.

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Huns’] domination.”16 He goes on, however, to make the distinction that because “the Alans

were organized into numerous autonomous subgroups…several remained independent of

the Huns after 376.”17 This was, however, only the beginning of much intermingling that

would occur between the various Germanic-speaking peoples and other outsiders as they

all rushed to conquer the land that, up until that point, had been under reasonably secure

control.

Heather, in a view more in line with Jones, points out that “Some historians have

criticized Constantinople for not doing more in the fifth century to save the embattled

west.”18 It is worth noting that Chapter Nine in Heather’s book and Chapter Twenty-Five in

Jones’ book are almost identical in terms of their thematic content. The fact that Heather’s

book was written over forty years after Jones’s might rightly lead many readers to assume

a connection between the two works.

For instance, expressing concern over the accusations against Constantinople, both

Jones and Heather speak about the different topics afflicting the East and the West. These

observations are followed directly by an analysis of the capabilities of the armies of the

East. Heather does still differ in his approach, focusing less intently on any one cause

regarding lack of aid and instead looking at a wide variety of influences. Jones, on the other

hand, picks two main roots on which to focus regarding the weakness of the army, namely,

the vast and uncontrollable increase in size and the lopsided proportioning of cavalry to

infantry.19

The Germanic peoples certainly captivate a wider audience than just these two

16 Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 195.17 Ibid.18 Ibid., 385.19 Jones, The Later Roman Empire, vol. 2, 1035.

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historians, though. Guy Halsall takes particular interest in the melding of the German and

Roman peoples as well as how this process has been studied over the years. He states, in an

essay on just this topic, “nineteenth-century preconceptions about the Germans and their

migrations remain fundamental to much writing about post-imperial Europe” but that

“many of these ideas have been closely scrutinized as researchers have re-examined the

written and especially the archaeological evidence.”20 What readers receive as a result of

Halsall’s approach is an interesting blend of old and new, that is, of the more traditional (at

least in terms of the last century) views of Jones and the more modern views of Heather. He

exhibits the qualities of both a Deconstructionist and a Globalist.

By looking at the Germans as “real peoples on the move,” Halsall, and other scholars

in this school of thought, have altered traditional nationalistic views regarding the progress

of the German people from antiquity to the present. In pursuing this humanizing method,

more anthropologically minded historians utilize “scientific (or pseudo-scientific)

methodologies to examine migration.”21 What this means, essentially, is that these pseudo-

scientists are using genetic and biological data to study ancient Germans. Halsall takes

issue with this approach when he says, “the danger, barely addressed, is of reducing

ethnicity to biology and thus to something close to the nineteenth century idea of race, at

the basis of the ‘nation state.’”22

These kinds of nationalist histories, modern as they might be in their approach, are

dangerously misleading. Hitler used just such types of history to fuel his rampaging rise to

power in 1930’s Germany. Many American fall prey to the same type of rhetoric when they

20 Halsall, Guy, “Two Worlds Become One: A ‘Counter-Intuitive’ View of the Roman Empire and ‘Germanic’ Migration,” German History 32(4) (2011): 517.21 Ibid., 518.22 Ibid.

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ascribe any serious meaning to an American master narrative. The more globally minded,

though some what relativistically tinged ideas of men like Heather and Halsall seem to be

both compelling and more accurate to the true nature of such complicated events as the

Germanic invasion of Rome.

Where Halsall diverges in his views regarding the Germanic peoples (even going so

far as to trace the term “Germanic” to a blanket usage by Tacitus23), he adds something

valuable to the discussion, that is, that the German peoples were not at all unified.24 Now,

even though Heather identified something similar in his work, Halsall chooses to address it

as a source of dichotomous thinking that had, in large part, dominated thought concerning

Romans and Germans. As he points out, “the persistent assumption of a unified ‘Germanic’

culture is one area where the notion of a binary opposition between Roman and barbarian

worlds is manifested. Its roots lie, again, in classical ethnography.”25

What is the value in recognizing a fact like this? Primarily, it allows historians to

better understand the methods of appeasement used by Romans after the sacking of Rome.

One such historian, Walter Goffart, writes specifically on the processes of accommodation

utilized by the Romans in the wake of their first violent encounters with foreign invaders.

He says, “Barbarian settlement is almost always said to have taken place in accordance

with the terms of Roman military quartering.”26 Further, “The sources…use the words

“hospitality,” “hosts,” and “guests” in speaking about the relationship between Roman

provincials and the newcomers.”27

23 Ibid., 519.24 Ibid., 520.25 Ibid., 521.26 Goffart, Walter, Barbarians and Romans A.D. 418-584: The Techniques of Accommodation. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 40.27 Ibid.

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What this amounts to is that the barbarians, at least to some extent, were allowed

peacefully into Roman territory. This sort of view is much more formal in Jones’s work,

which speaks of the resulting system of billeting, saying, “A [Roman] soldier was entitled to

occupy a third of the house in which he was billeted, and when the Visigothic and

Burgundian federates were settled permanently they were apparently granted one-third of

the estates on which they were planted.”28 Jones, along with Goffart, seem to hold that this

was part of an imperial initiative to appease the incoming Germans. Halsall, however,

disagrees with this point, stating, “This vision has been redressed in academic work; sadly,

that correction has rarely been taken beyond the halls of academe.”29 One of the points he

makes against the notion of Roman land accommodation is that “the existence of an

imperial Roman frontier ‘policy’, or ‘Grand Strategy”30 is simply incorrect. These kinds of

notions certainly have their roots in the ethnographic and nationalistic trends in

historiography discussed above.

In Halsall’s analysis, the Romans had no real idea of any sort of master strategy, and

were instead utilizing situational remedies to try to stem this disruptive influx of

foreigners. This may seem to be a counterintuitive series of events, considering the

recently recognition of the disunity of the Germanic peoples. However, as all the evidence

and research shows, their disunity was a non-issue in terms of the sheer mass of their

collective numbers.

Halsall may be onto something when he addresses the absence of a master strategy,

but he doesn’t seem to make it quite the argument well enough. Goffart shows any idea of

28 Jones, The Later Roman Empire, vol. 1, 249-250.29 Halsall, “Two Worlds Become One,” 522.30 Ibid., 521.

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Roman control regarding this process to be largely irrelevant by the end of the fifth

century, as their lands were by this time fully under Germanic control. He instead assesses

that the “legal basis for these allotments was provided partly by tax law and partly by the

laws governing the issue of military rations.”31

This is certainly an interesting point because the maintenance of the Roman legal

system was only in effect in certain areas under Germanic holding, namely, those under

Theoderic. According to Jones, Theoderic “had a genuine respect and admiration for the

roman way of life, and sedulously preserved ancient institutions.”32 In fact, Goffart credits

Theodosius, in the aptly named Theodosian Code, for developing the billeting system. Many

of this Code’s precepts were covered across a wide swath of Germanic culture, including

the Ostrogoths, the Visigoths, and the Burgundians. These three groups, according to

Goffart, Jones, Halall, and Heather, comprised the main largest part of the Germanic peoples

in the European portions of the former empire.

Not all historians are convinced of the authenticity of Theoderic’s responsibility for

these sorts of legal precedents, however. Sean Lafferty, an historian who partially falls into

the category of a microhistorian, that is, one who “takes a small area…perhaps a

protagonist [that] illuminates something more general than itself, but…is not necessarily to

be thought of exactly as “evidence” of a given type.”33 He also seems to be something of a

semiotic historian, or one who asserts that “since the meanings of language structures are

culturally and individually determined, all meaning must be relative to the specific culture

31 Goffart, Barbarians and Romans, 54-55.32 Jones, The Later Roman Empire, vol. 1, 248.33 Hoefferle, The Essential Historiography Reader, 218.

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in which it is understood and reflexive to the writer and reader of the text in which it is

expressed.”34

In his work, he points out a number of issues regarding the contrast between

Theoderic’s actions and position as it related to the Code itself. For one, he points out that

the first edition of the Theodosian Code to be published was done so by “the French

humanist Pierre Pithou” and that “the circumstances of that edition are well known

through a letter dated 2 January 1579.”35 Although Pithou identifies Theoderic as the

original author of the work, his formula36for attributing the Code to the king appears to be

rather ambiguous. According to Lafferty, “in total, there are eight kings known to us from

historical sources who ruled under this name.”37 These eight Theoderics are spread all the

way from the Ostrogothic Theoderic I, in 418, to Frankish Theoderic IV in 721. Lafferty, in

terms of this mostly semiotic approach, seems justified in calling Pithou’s methodology into

question regarding this matter.

Where things get confusing in terms of Lafferty’s analysis come not two full pages

later when he states, “in light of this evidence, there is little doubt that the [Theodsian

Code] was produced in Italy sometime during Theoderic’s reign.”38 The evidence he speaks

about are three separate edicts within the code that all “address issues particular to the

34 Ibid., 212.35 Lafferty, Sean. W., “Italy in the Twilight of Empire: The Decline of Roman Law and Culture under Theoderic the Great (c. 493-526),” Canadian Journal Of History, 45(3) (2010): 461.36 Ibid. Lafferty, speaking on Pithou’s error, claims the following; “Pithou identified the [Theodsian Code] as the work of the Ostrogoth Theoderic…referring to his 1579 edition as the Edictum Theoderici regis Italie, a title he apparently derived from the formula that appears at the end of the text: Explicit Theoderici Regis. But the formula does not specify—as Pithou does—that the Theoderic to whom the Edict is attributed is king of Italy, only that he is king.” 37 Ibid.38 Ibid., 463.

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Italian peninsula.”39 Pithou’s sudden vindication and Lafferty’s change of tack are enough to

confuse any reader, but together, they illustrate further the significance of the disunity of

the German peoples in terms of historical thought.

Whatever Theoderic’s true role in creating the Code, he was the undisputed ruler of

the Italian peninsula from 493 to 526 AD. In discussing the development of early medieval

Italy, Giovanni Tobacco puts it rather succinctly when he says, “the political equilibrium

which has usually been attributed to a decision by Theoderic was in reality suggested by a

far deeper equilibrium between opposing and coexisting social orders. It was not the

improvised policy of a rule, but his recognition of the real conditions of a the country that

permitted an effective dualism of political power for more than thirty years.”40

Tobacco, who falls into the same deconstructionist camp as Jones, asserts that

Italians and Germans had been in the contact and in the process of assimilation for quite

some time before the sack of Rome. Theoderic’s influence in this process cannot be too

much set aside, however, because with his death in 526, serious problems began to emerge

surrounding the Ostrogothic way of government on the Italian peninsula. Tobacco

enumerates several issues, including “pro-Roman emphases and anti-Roman distrust,…the

alarmed or uncertain expectancy of the senatorial class, Catholic clergy and Gothic army,

[and] with the rise to the Byzantine throne of a prince, Justinian, who had broad plans for

the restoration of the empire.”41 The fact that Theoderic was able to keep these many and

39 Ibid.40 Tobacco, Giovanni., trans. Jensen, Rosalind B., The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: Structures of political rule. (Cambridge, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 67.

41 Ibid., 68.

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variegated forces at bay and in balance was certainly no mean feat and doesn’t seem to be

fully realized by any of the other sources discussed herein.

From the towering might of Gibbon to the confusion of Lafferty, a great deal of

study, conclusion, argument, and revision has gone into the study of the fall of the Roman

Empire and the transition into Early Medieval Italy. The Romans surely saw their demise,

according to these authors, as a result of the rise of Christianity, lack of aid from the

Eastern Empire, and from the massive influx of Germanic peoples that came in from all

directions. Though these things may be agreed upon, the methods used to arrive at these

conclusions as well as many of the particulars for each vary widely amongst both

contemporary and deceased historians.

Bibliography

Goffart, Walter. Barbarians and Romans A.D. 418-584: The Techniques of Accommodation.(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

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Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 12 vols. (NewYork: Fred de Fau and Co., 1906). December 8, 2015.<http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1366>

Halsall, Guy. (2014). Two Worlds Become One: A ‘Counter-Intuitive’ View of the RomanEmpire and ‘Germanic’ Migration. German History 32(4), 515-532.

Heather, P.J. The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians.(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

Hoefferle, C. The Essential Historiography Reader. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall,2011)

Jones, Arnold H.M. The Later Roman Empire 284-602: A Social Economic andAdministrative Survey, 2 vols. (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 1964).

Lafferty, Sean. W. (2010). Italy in the Twilight of Empire: The Decline of Roman Law andCulture under Theoderic the Great (c. 493-526). Canadian Journal Of History, 45(3),457-483.

Snobelen, Stephen D. (2001) A Further Irony: Apocalyptic Readings of Edward Gibbon’sDecline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Canadian Journal of History, 33(3), 387-416.

Tobacco, Giovanni., trans. Jensen, Rosalind B. The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy:Structures of political rule. (Cambridge, Great Britain: Cambridge University Press,1989).

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