Eharding on the fall of the Roman Empire, Part V/XII: new city, new people, new money, new faith
To Palestinian archaeologists, the Roman Empire fell with Constantine’s triumph over Licinius. To British and Dutch ones, it fell with the military pullouts of Constantine III. To Italian ones, it fell with either Odoacer or Theoderic. To ones operating in Greece, it fell during the seventh century crisis. To the inhabitants of the City of Rome, and, thus, to the people of the Latin West, the Empire fell during the second half of the eighth century. To the inhabitants of Constantinople, however, the Empire only fell with the Frankish conquest in 1204. The Byzantine Empire is phrasing thought up in the sixteenth century and popularized in the eighteenth as a convenient way to signify the Empire of the Romans that ruled over Constantinople. The Byzantines, needless to say, always continued to call their race Roman, as did the ancestors of the the Modern Greeks during the Early Modern era. This label was fully justifiable even in the sense of “genetically similar to the population of the City of Rome”; under the Late Republic and Early Empire, the City of Rome had become overwhelmingly Greek, Anatolian, and Levantine. Even during the Severan era a majority of Roman Senators had come from outside Italy, and a majority of these came from the Eastern provinces. Even in that happy age traces of Italian national chauvinism and ethnic elitism still persisted. During the Age of Constantine, on the other hand, after it was demonstrated repeatedly any man in the Empire could conceivably rise to the imperial throne, all traces of that ancient provincialism had vanished. The Ancient Romans who had walked along the banks of the Tiber under the Early Republic had, by the time of Constantine’s victory over Licinius, long since been drowned by the waters of the Greek Meander, Syrian Orontes, and Thracian Danube. It was in this fashion that the Ancient Romans had disappeared over the course of the second and third centuries, in much the same fashion as the Asiatic Turks have become extinct in Anatolia by dissolving themselves into the former Anatolian Romans and creating a new Great Turkish ethnicity. The new Romans of the Mediterranean were a nation of awesome size and extent, if somewhat less than that implied by the Empire’s citizenship figures due to the persistence of unromanized minorities. If a Hispanic or an Illyrian could claim to be a Roman by race in the third century, certainly an inhabitant of the great cities of Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, Antioch, or Beirut could express a like claim to descent from the Ausones (Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium, p. 63). The Ancient Greeks, thus, much like other ancient peoples, became extinct over the course of the third and fourth centuries, their children fully identifying themselves with Rome. As Aelius Aristides stated at the height of the Empire,
It was not because you stood off and refused to give a share in it to any of the others that you made your citizenship an object of wonder. On the contrary, you sought its expansion as a worthy aim, and you have caused the word Roman to be the label, not of membership in a city, but of some common nationality, and this not just one among all, but one balancing all the rest. For the categories into which you now divide the world are not Hellenes and Barbarians, and it is not absurd, the distinction which you made, because you show them a citizenry more numerous, so to speak, than the entire Hellenic race. The division which you substituted is one into Romans and non-Romans. To such a degree have you expanded the name of your city.
The process of Greek ethnic assimilation into Roman national identity from beginning to end took around four hundred years, a similar timescale as for the Gauls and Carthaginians. The Britons, of course, had not completed this process, as the Romans had dominion of that island from start to finish for only about 350 years. The end result was, of course, that the inhabitants of Greece from the fourth to eighteenth centuries almost to the man considered themselves as fully Roman as the men of Southern Gaul whose descendants were still called “Romans” by the Franks during the first half of the eighth century. Only during the Odoacer/Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy period did the Romans under the rule of Constantinople ever have a concept of “Byzantium” to refer to their directly ruled territories, and quickly lost it after they had taken possession of the City of Rome. By the end of the eighth century, however, as all other Romans outside the Papal States had been conquered by foreign powers and deromanized, the word “Roman” in the Empire of Constantinople became a label for the exclusive use of the native Greek-speaking inhabitants of Greece and Anatolia, even if these Medieval East Romans were a rather small subset of the Great Romans that had existed four hundred years back. In Italy, of course, the residents of the Papal States also continued to call themselves “Romans”, derisively calling the remaining Imperial Romans “Greeks”. By the ninth century, the Frankish emperors were concerted in their efforts to deny the Eastern Romans’ status as Romans on the basis that they had “lost entirely lost the Roman people (gens) and the language itself, and have migrated in all things to another city, seat, people (gens) and language”. But this loss and migration was not merely a phenomenon of the fifth and eighth centuries, but also one of the third century. While there was a localization of Roman identity following the Empire’s withdrawal from many of its former provinces, it did not disappear either in the Papal States (thus “Romagna”) or the Aegean (thus “Rumelia”) until the twentieth century. Modern “Italian” and “Greek” identities are constructed national identities which only became prominent during the national liberation movements of the nineteenth century.
SOURCES: Theodosian Code, De rebus bellicis,
Not only did Constantine create a second Rome, he created the beginnings of a second monetary system. Though he and his immediate successors continued to debase the nummus used for day-to-day transactions (though not for tax payments), he, in 309, after having paused precious metal coinage for two years, standardized the weight of the gold solidus, which had been unfixed in weight for over seventy years and was almost unused in Diocletian’s day. The new coin, replacing the generally unused Diocletianic coin of 1/60 of a Roman pound and, as with the Diocletianic coin, divided into twenty-four siliquae (carats), weighed 1/72 of a Roman pound, each siliqua of gold weighing .189 grams. The standardization of the new solidus would remain fixed (more or less) for over half a millennium. After his defeat of Licinius in 324 (resulting in the closure of the London mint one year later) use of the solidus became universal throughout the Empire as Constantine confiscated the gold of classical temples to raise revenue for his monetary experiment. For the first time in many decades, the Empire had a currency that was simultaneously a reliable store of value, medium of exchange, and unit of account. It was certainly more difficult to print out of thin air than the billon coinage that dominated the Empire during the century between Valerian and Constantius II. But it was unquestionably easier to spend. Paying men from outside the Empire certainly became much more straightforward than before. The result, partially compensating for the increased difficulty in money creation, under Constantine’s successors, who greatly increased the minting of the solidus, was a vast shift away from in-kind tax payments and toward tax payments in gold coin (see also The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, Chapter 18). Eventually, the solidus became so ubiquitous as a form of large-scale payment, it became known as the nomisma in Greek. The total annual revenue of the Empire was some 18 million solidi (Treadgold, History of the Byzantine State and Society, p. 144), or about three tenths of a solidus per capita. Imperial annual GDP per capita was equivalent to perhaps four solidi, each solidus worth roughly the equivalent of $400 in 2020 U.S. dollars. Wheat sold at some ten artabae to the solidus; typical wheat yields in Egypt were about a dozen artabae per arura per year, or about 540 liters per acre per year.
SOURCES: Theodosian Code, Eusebius, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans
Constantine’s founding of Constantinople and restoration of fixed standard gold coinage were not even his only decisions to have world-historical impact that would echo for centuries. A few months following Constantine’s victory over Maxentius, thus becoming the sole Western emperor, and a few months prior to Licinus’s defeat of the famous persecutor of Christians Maximinus Daza, thus becoming the sole Eastern emperor, Licinius and Constantine continued on the path of the policy change implemented by Galerius on his deathbed ending the Christian persecution begun with his enthusiastic support eight years prior, supporting restoring property previously expropriated from Christians. Constantine also apparently converted to the Christian religion around this time. So impressed was the Roman client king of Armenia by this shift in policy in the most populous empire in the world that he converted his kingdom to the Christian religion the following year. The year after that, Constantine, formerly a public devotee of the old cult of Sol Invictus, would mint the first official Roman medallion containing the Christian Chi-Rho. By 325, the Lateran archbasilica would be in Christian hands and Sol, present on the coins of almost all Roman emperors from Commodus on, would be gone from their faces, though Christian imagery would not be present on them on a large-scale until the reign of Valentinian I. Crucifixion as a form of punishment was abolished.
Over the following few decades, the Georgian states (spurred on by Armenia), Aksum, and some Germanic tribes beyond the Danube adopted the Christian religion, as well, though the Germanic tribes, at least, would be quite slow to accept the trinitarian doctrine adopted in 325 at Nikaia, likely because Constantine himself, a strong supporter of prosletyzation to non-Romans (according to Kulikowski) appears to have become a skeptic of the Nikaian formula in the last years of his life, spurred on by Eusebius of Nikomedia. Non-trinitarian missionaries translated the Bible into Gothic during the fourth century, though the Goths would remain pagan until their entry into the Empire. The century following the council at Nikaia became the period of the flourishing of all of the four Great Eastern Roman Fathers and three out of the four Great Western Roman fathers. Through his unification of the interests of the military, bureaucracy, landed aristocracy, and church, Constantine can be said to be the founder of both the Eastern and Western European autocratic traditions. The half-century between Aurelian and the Council of Nikaia can be said to be the one of the greatest constructive top-down cultural change of any society in history prior to the fifteenth century. It is not the least bit surprising then, then, that Constantine was the first emperor since Valerian to be depicted on his coins beardless, in the manner of Augustus, thus creating precedent for an uninterrupted series of beardless emperors (with the four exceptions -all usurpers- of Julian the Apostate, Procopius, Eugenius, and John) to Maurice. While Aurelian restored the Roman world and Diocletian preserved it by placing it on new foundations, Constantine created an altogether new Roman civilization.
The Roman transition to Christianity had been made all that much easier by the third century crisis and Diocletianic restoration resulting in the discarding of so many elements of the Hellenistic culture that Christianity was so strongly opposed to. Despite the tremendous power of the uppermost ranks of the landed aristocracy throughout the second century, it had, by the later fourth century, become the least powerful of the four branches of Roman government (the others were the military, the bureaucracy, and the church).
The quality of Roman art on coins began to decline in the early fourth century -after Diocletian, but before the reunification of the Empire under Constantine. The collapse was complete by the middle of the fifth century. Realistic two-dimensional art would only come back into vogue a thousand years later in the same place the Dark Ages first began –Belgium and the southern Netherlands. Officially sponsored sculpture followed the same trend, only earlier, becoming less realistic and more cartoonish -and, overall, simply less produced. As in the case of two-dimensional art, the quality and quantity of sculpture would only recover in a thousand years. The trend might have hit privately and religiously sponsored art later and more gradually, but it was very much in the same direction -toward a simpler, more primitive, more Medieval culture. Cities that did not have a need to construct defensive walls began to take on a more characteristically Oriental look. As the Cambridge Ancient History 14 states (p. 606), The unplanned village-town is the characteristic feature of late antique settlement in the near east. The transformation to Medievalism was not yet complete by the fourth century- many Roman theaters continued to be repaired until the days of Justinian (see also Cambridge Ancient History 14, p. 940). The militarization, bureaucratization, federalization, and Christianization of Roman government all worked toward a political sidelining of the landed aristocracy and a deemphasis on public art in the High Imperial style. This did not mean the decay of private wealth, which was in a very good state in most of the territories of the Late Empire, but simply its declining public display outside the religious realm.
The most stereotypical public building of the Old Rome was the theater, condemned by the church fathers as a pit of depravity. The most stereotypical public building of the New Rome was the church –the theater of God. By the beginning of the fifth century, the frequent and explicit scenes of sexual debauchery that had been ubiquitous at the time of Constantine’s defeat of Licinius had almost entirely surrendered their places to the cross of Christ. The temple of Venus constructed under Hadrian in Jerusalem was converted into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. “Hellene” (that is, Ancient Greek) became a dirty word, used for pagan barbarians. A millennium of Hellenism was evaporating. The old Roman concept of virtue was replaced with the Christian concepts of repentance from sin, true doctrine and a thoroughly apolitical, afterlife-focused concept of good works. The sacrifice of animals and mass burning of incense to appease the gods stopped. The central struggle of the Christian religion was not, as with the old Roman religion, against misfortunes created by both Gods and men, but against Satan and his demons, including all idols and heretics. An interesting byproduct of this was the separation of church and state, something that did not exist in the Old Rome. The most celebrated figures of the Christian religion were never warriors and aristocrats, but monks and bishops. The Christian religion of the Roman Empire was never intended to be a mere civic religion of the most powerful and developed state on Earth, but a universal, Catholic, intolerant, totalitarian, doctrinal religion that gave the opportunity for every earthly king, whether Vandal, Aksumite, or Armenian, to bow down before the one, specific, and universal -and, very much unlike Jupiter, Mars, Juno, and Sol, omniscient, loving, and perfect- King of Kings. To a much greater extent than any religion of the past, the Christian religion detached heaven from Earth.
In the Old Rome, the Emperor was pontifex maximus and occasionally a god himself. From the fourth century to the ninth, whenever the Bishop of Rome and the Emperor of Constantinople disagreed on some aspect of theology (the Trinity, Miaphysitism, Monothelitism, Iconoclasm), the Bishop of Rome would ultimately win every time except on the Three Chapters question under Justinian, in which the Pope was forced to accept the Three Chapters as overly Nestorian, and, arguably, on the ninth century Photian question (though not for very long). Though some political figures would be canonized by the Roman churches, the old Roman doctrine of caesaropapism would not be revived until Hobbes, writing one thousand years after the monothelite controversy and the conversion of the English to the Christian religion. The patristic age following the Nikaian council may be divided into five parts: the first stage (324-428), Alexandria and Rome triumphing against Constantinople, Carthage, and Antioch and focusing on the Trinity, the second stage (428-519), Rome triumphant over all other churches and focusing on the relationship between the two natures of Christ, the third stage (519-610), Constantinople dominant over all the other churches and focusing on the relationship between the two natures of Christ, the fourth stage (610-726), Rome dominant and focusing on monothelitism and monoenergism, and, the fifth stage (726-787/843), Rome dominant and focusing on iconoclasm.
Despite nominally representing the whole church in communion with the Romans from Arabia to Ireland and from Morocco to southern Russia, the membership of every single one of the seven ecumenical councils was overwhelmingly Roman, particularly Eastern Roman, and every single one was held in a narrow coastal band in present-day Turkey with the recommendation not of the Bishop of Rome, but always of the Emperor of Constantinople -a Romanization of Christianity, as Peter Heather points out, as significant as the Christianization of the Empire. Except in the case of the Fifth Ecumenical Council, the Bishop of Rome had no objection to this; six out of seven councils were simple impositions of Western Roman doctrines onto the Eastern Roman Church. There were also other early Christian councils and decisions in regions not in communion with Rome, particularly in Miaphysite Egypt, Ethiopia, Armenia, and among the Nestorian Christians of the Persian Empire and Kerala, but this is a post about the Romans, not the others, so they will not be discussed in any depth here.