3
In the late 460s, as Sidonius Apollinaris related to a friend, the bishops of Lyon and Autun had the task of choosing and consecrating a new bishop of Chalon-sur-Saône. There were three candidates, unnamed, one claiming the office because his family was old, one who had built up support in the city by feeding people, and one who promised church lands to supporters. The bishops instead chose the holy cleric John, who had slowly moved up the local church hierarchy, thus confounding local factions. Sidonius himself was not yet bishop of Clermont; when he became so, one of his first tasks was to hold a similar election at Bourges, in 470. Here, although there were again numerous candidates, many of the citizens wanted Simplicius, a local notable from a senatorial family. Sidonius, initially wary of their choice, warmed to him, and preserved his speech to the citizens on the subject, which said, in (considerably shortened) paraphrase: If I choose a monk, you will say he is too other-worldly; if I choose a cleric, many will think I should choose only by seniority [as had happened at Chalon, in effect]; if I choose a lay official, you will say I have chosen someone like myself. But I do have to make a choice; many of you may be episcopales, worthy of being bishop, but you cannot all be. So I choose Simplicius, a layman, but one whose family is full of both bishops and prefects - and so is his wife’s - and who has defended the city’s interests before both Roman and ‘barbarian’ leaders. So Sidonius did indeed, in this second election, choose someone just like himself, a local secular married aristocrat. The office of bishop in Gaul was becoming a standard part of a secular career progression for city notables, just as the pagan priesthood had been before; the traditional hierarchy of the Roman world had effectively absorbed the new power-structures of Christianity. And yet it was not universally so; Sidonius’ own enthusiastic support for the election of John of Chalon, in the teeth of local notables, shows that it did sometimes remain possible to use different criteria to those of wealth and birth in the church hierarchy. Christianity was substantially absorbed into traditional Roman values, but never entirely.
A slightly more combative example of the same point is Synesios of Cyrene, who was recommended as bishop of neighbouring Ptolemais in 411 to Theophilos, patriarch of Alexandria. Synesios was another secular local notable, like both Sidonius and Simplicius; he both represented Cyrenaica in Constantinople, successfully seeking tax relief for the province, and organized local defence against Berbers; he was the kind of useful man who would be very valuable as bishop as well, and he was active in that role in the two years or so before his death, as we saw in Chapter 2. Synesios, however, was also a skilled Neoplatonist philosopher, with numerous writings to his credit, so steeped in the classical philosophical tradition that people have wondered if he was even Christian (though he surely was), and not only trained by the renowned pagan mathematician and Neoplatonist Hypatia in Alexandria, but a close personal friend of hers, as his letters show. Theophilos for his part was a hardliner, who had had Alexandria’s most famous pagan temple, the Sarapaion, destroyed in 391; his successor Cyril’s mob would indeed lynch Hypatia in 415. Synesios nonetheless wrote an extraordinary open letter before his ordination, stating his philosophical and moral values. He would not renounce his wife; they would continue to sleep together, hoping for children. ‘As for the Resurrection, an object of common belief, I consider it a sacred and mysterious concept, about which I do not at all agree with the views of the majority.’ The world was not due to end, either. Philosophy would remain his private calling if he was consecrated, whatever untruths he said in public, and Theophilos must know this. We are not here in the sometimes intellectually provincial world of Gaul, but in the harsh heartland of violent and uncompromising religious debate. Theophilos consecrated Synesios all the same. Local status and support counted in Alexandria as much as in central Gaul, if it was strong enough at any rate.
The Roman empire was by no means fully Christian yet in 400. There were pagan aristocrats in Rome still, although perhaps not by 450; in Constantinople there were still some a century later. There were pagan teachers in Athens and Alexandria until the sixth century (Justinian closed the Athens school in 529), and some smaller cities, notably Baalbek and Harran in Syria, probably had pagan majorities. The countryside, that is, most of the population, was largely pagan everywhere except in Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Africa, and there were plenty of pagans in these provinces too. They continued for some time; we have an account by John of Ephesos of his active mission work in Anatolia in the mid-sixth century. There were also substantial Jewish communities in Galilee and Samaria in Palestine, in Syria and the Euphrates valley, in western Anatolia, in north-eastern Spain, in Alexandria, Rome, and in smaller groups in most cities of the empire; these were politically marginal, but less subject to official persecution in this period than later. But all the emperors, except Julian for three years, had been Christian since 324 (Constantine converted in 312, but he did not rule the whole empire for more than a decade). Steadily across the fourth century paganism had become separated from public life, and in 391-2 Theodosius I had banned the mainstays of much traditional paganism, public sacrifice and the private worship of images. This coercive legislation was further reinforced in the fifth century, and Justinian added the finishing touches, banning pagan cults and enforcing baptism on pain of confiscation and sometimes execution. As with laws on Christian heresy (see below), this was never more than partly effective - pagan festivals continued even in major Christian centres like Edessa in the late fifth century - but the exclusion of paganism from the official Roman world was by now complete.
Christian vocabulary, imagery and public practice were thus politically dominant in the empire by 400, a dominance which would only increase thereafter; and in cities, which were the foci for almost all political activity, Christians were for the most part numerically dominant as well. But we must ask what sort of Christianity this was, what effective content it had: how much it absorbed traditional Roman values (and even religious practices), how far it changed them, and what its own fault-lines were, for there were many of these. The first part of this chapter will be concerned with these issues, essentially those of religious belief and practice; the second part will extend the frame more widely, and look at other rituals in the public sphere, and at more deep-seated values, including assumptions about gender roles.
Christianity by 400 was on one level simply defined, as the religion of the New Testament; if one believed in the divine Trinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and if one believed that Jesus Christ, crucified in around AD 33, was the Son of God, and that no other gods existed, then one was Christian. These beliefs generally went together with an exaltation of poverty - for the good Christian ought to give everything to the poor - and a presumption that this world was only a brief testing ground before the eternal joys of heaven or the eternal tortures of hell, which meant that pleasure was risky, and that asceticism, sometimes self-mortification, was increasingly seen as virtuous. But it has never been the case that most Christians have taken the second of these sentences as seriously as the first; and this presents a problem for us. When looking at the question of what sort of Christianity we are dealing with, whether in this period or later, we immediately run into the question of source material. The huge quantity of Christian writing after 350 or so substantially outweighs in quantity the work of late Roman secular élites (even though this survives quite generously from the fourth to the sixth centuries), but was almost entirely the work of men who were much more rigorist than their neighbours. The degree of rigour varied, from the relative pragmatism of an Augustine, through the more uncompromising denunciations of a Jerome or a Salvian, to the extreme purism, separated from the possibility of normal emulation, implied in the hagiographical accounts of ascetic saints, such as Antony or Simon the Stylite. All of these, nonetheless, were highly critical of the more easygoing but still Christian world around them; and the aim of all such writers was to reform by criticism, rather than to describe accurately. It is therefore not always easy to tell if people ever did the things that were criticized, let alone how common such actions were, or, least of all, what sense these actions made to the people who performed them. Between the comfortable assimilation of traditional hierarchies and values into Christianity by a secular-minded aristocracy, such as that of Sidonius, and the rigorism of a minority of more committed authors - not always a popular or influential minority, either - there was an ocean of different kinds of religious practice carried out by everyone else, whose meaning has to be guessed at through the accounts of hostile observers.
Take festivals. Traditional Graeco-Roman religion had a year studded with major religious festivals, which Christians naturally opposed. An important one was the First of January, a three-day festival marking the changing of the year. The traditional sacrifices associated with this were banned, but did this make the festival religiously neutral, simply marking pleasure and civic solidarity, for Christians as well? It seems clear that people generally thought so, but a stream of Christian writers, including the authors of sermons preached in public, were violently opposed to it - not least because it was competition for Christmas (itself, ironically, the direct replacement of a pagan festival, the Winter Solstice), but also because it was irredeemably tainted with paganism in their minds. The First of January survived as a festival into the eighth century and later, but whether it was perceived by ordinary people as Christian, or secular, or pagan, and when and how much, we do not know. Bishops dealt with festivals of this kind above all by organizing their own, thus creating the Christian religious calendar, with its focus on Christmas, then Lent, then Easter and Pentecost, above all December to May, extended across the rest of the year by local saint’s-day celebrations. This did indeed in the end win out over the pagan calendar: Christian time replaced pagan time. A fierce stress on Sunday as an unbreakable day of rest, which by the sixth century was policed by miracles (according to Gregory of Tours (d. 594), Sunday agricultural workers became cripples, and the children of Sunday sexual intercourse were born crippled), also marked the definitive Christianization of time. But people still maintained the ‘wrong’ attitudes; they treated the new Christian feast-days in the same ways as they had treated the old pagan ones, as opportunities to get drunk and have a good time, as Augustine complained about a local martyrial feast-day. This way of understanding the Christian calendar, through public enjoyment rather than (as Augustine proposed) psalm-singing in church, was pagan in the eyes of most of our sources, but doubtless fully Christian in the eyes of celebrants; and this double vision would long remain.
Much the same can be said about the Christianization of geographical space. Pagan cults had studded the landscape of the Roman empire, a sacred spring here, a hill-top temple there, each perhaps with its own god; indeed, the whole landscape had potential sacred elements. As these were slowly prohibited or destroyed, and new Christian cult-sites built, around the tombs of martyrs or rural saints by preference, there was a risk that the latter would simply give a new religious veneer to older traditions, as with the major rural cult-site of Saint-Julien at Brioude in central Gaul, located at a martyr’s tomb to be sure, but also in a place formerly known for an important sanctuary of Mars and Mercury; the changeover seems to have come in the mid-fifth century. People got drunk at martyrs’ tombs too, after all; who knows what they were really celebrating, the martyr or the traditional cult-site. Perhaps there were moments when rituals, even festivities, were so significantly inverted that the pilgrims who came to the same cult-site properly took on board that something major had changed, as Pope Gregory the Great intended when in 601 he proposed to the missionaries to Anglo-Saxon England that they should take over pagan temples, but force visiting worshippers to eat the animals they had brought for ritual sacrifice. But perhaps not; a Christian topography could look suspiciously like a pagan one.
But in this case change was possible, all the same. For a start, whereas to pagan eyes an entire landscape could be numinous, to Christian eyes only specific cult-sites were so, points of light in an otherwise secular space. These were always, or soon became, churches, so they were highly visible. Few churches were ever built directly on or in temples, and those few were almost all urban. In cities, indeed, Christian topographies were in general rather more different from those of the pagans. Traditional public religion had been focused on the ceremonial buildings around the forum in the centre of the city, but churches for Christian worship were often on the edges of town, or outside, in cemetery areas. Urban religious activity became much more decentralized as a result, and cities even became spatially fragmented in some parts of the empire (in Gaul in particular), with little settlement nuclei around scattered churches, and in some cases a traditional city centre left in ruins. This was sometimes because city centres seemed just too pagan, or too secular; in Rome, major Christian capital though it became, no church was built in the wide forum area until 526. It was also linked to some real changes in ideas of the sacred, and of what caused spiritual pollution. Traditional Graeco-Roman religion regarded dead people as very dangerous and polluting; no adult could be buried inside city walls or in inhabited areas, and cemeteries were all beyond the edges of settlements. Martyrs and other saints were seen by Christians as different, however: not as sources of pollution, but the opposite, as people to venerate (in some cases, indeed, as not really dead). Relics of saints began to be associated with major churches as early as the fourth century; increasingly, these churches were inside city boundaries. And the positive power associated with these bodies meant that people increasingly wished to be buried beside them. The first burials of non-saints inside cities date from the late fifth or early sixth century in most parts of the empire; first bishops and local aristocrats, later ordinary citizens. By the seventh century urban cemeteries were increasingly common. The dead remained edgy, ‘liminal’, sometimes powerful - they still are - but the visceral fear of their polluting power had gone.
The unseen world changed, too. To most pagans the air was full of powerful spiritual beings, daimones in Greek, who were sometimes beneficent, sometimes not, sometimes controllable by magic, but above all fairly neutral to the human race. To many Christians - including the authors of our sources, certainly, but also the ordinary people who appear in the stories of saints’ lives - this unseen world came to be seen as sharply divided into two, good angels and bad demons (the word daimones was still used); Christianity inherited this dualism from Judaism, which in turn may have been influenced by parallel beliefs in Zoroastrianism. We get to hear rather more about demons, too: they intervened more in daily life. Christianization thus developed the sense that this unseen world was more fraught with danger than it had previously been (this went for the afterlife, too, for the Christian hell expected to see far more sinners than the pagan Tartarus or the Jewish Gehenna). Demons in Christian eyes caused illness, ill-luck and ill-doing of all kinds, and demonic possession was commonly seen as the cause of mental disturbance. Demons lived among other places in pagan shrines and idols, in uncultivable areas such as deserts, and also in tombs (this latter belief was in part the heir of traditional beliefs about the pollution of the dead). They could be defeated by clerical exorcism, and many Christian ascetics gained a considerable reputation as demon-busters. Theodore of Sykeon (d. 613) was a particularly active example, performing exorcisms throughout central Anatolia, as demons disturbed village harmony or possessed the weak and ill, in some cases as a result of spell-casting, in some cases because the incautious had disturbed tombs, perhaps in a search for treasure. Christianity innovated in religious terms in giving more space to the interventions of human beings in supernatural affairs, if they had church authority or if they were themselves particularly holy. Although all such men and women would have said that they only channelled the heavenly power of God and the saints, they were treated by many less exceptional Christians as if these spiritual powers were wholly theirs, a product of their own charisma.
It has often been implied that pagan and Christian religion operated at different levels, with paganism paying more attention to public ritual (such as sacrifice), Christianity paying more attention to belief. This would be an overstatement if it was put too crudely, for both religious communities practised both, but there is an element of truth in it all the same. Christianity was also concerned with setting spiritual boundaries - between sacred and secular, or between good and bad demons - that were more nuanced (or fuzzier) to most pagans; and it was initially less committed to public and collective activity, too (though this would quickly change). There are some parallels here to the Reformation Protestant challenge to Catholic Christianity in the sixteenth century (parallels which Protestants quite consciously sought to play up). They are there too in the nineteenth-century ‘modernist’ critique of the public world of the ancien régime, as characterized by Michel Foucault. There is, that is to say, a tension between promoting collective ritual which brings social and moral solidarity, and trying to change people’s minds; this tension has long existed in human history, and in some societies one side gains ascendancy over the other, for a time. In the late Roman context, it would probably be best to say that this tension existed, not only between pagan and Christian, but inside Christianity itself; for Christian attitudes to the public did quickly change, and the religious enthusiasm involved in festivals and pilgrimages, indeed in churchgoing, was by no means the same as the divine grace or mental discipline, or both, thought by rigorists to be necessary to attain individual salvation. This was something of which Christian writers who were bishops, and therefore had to straddle both, were well aware. This tension in some of our authors indeed provides much of their interest.
Changing people’s minds was harder, however, and, at the level of everyday morality and values, Christianization changed much less. For example, apart from the occasional rigorist criticism, for example by Gregory of Nyssa (d. c. 395), there is no sign whatsoever that legal unfreedom was regarded as wrong by most Christians, despite Christianity’s explicit egalitarianism; anyway, freeing slaves (manumission) as a pious act at death, common in late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, had impeccable pagan antecedents. Opposition to social hierarchies based on wealth, or to judicial torture, was only developed at any length by heretical movements. Every single Christian writer inveighed against sexual misbehaviour (some against all sexual activity, invoking virginity as superior to marriage, as Jerome (d. 419) did), but it is unclear that this had any effect on daily actions. Christians also campaigned against divorce, however, and this did become increasingly difficult in law, and, in the West at least, eventually impossible later on in the early Middle Ages; practices which legislation could reach were more likely to change, hence also the abolition of amphitheatre games. Family-level assumptions, by contrast, including about gender roles, did not change greatly, as we shall see later in this chapter; nor did the civic values of Roman public life. One important exception was charity to the poor, which had been a mainstay of Christian community activity since its early years as a persecuted minority. It remained a major responsibility for good Christians, more than it had been for pagans, and was also a major role for churches (and for the bishops who ran the principal churches in each city) as they increased in wealth, as well as providing a justification for that wealth, given that the Christian gospels put so much stress on poverty. This emphasis on charity would later be inherited by Islam too.
These shifts in cult practices and religious culture went together with three other important innovations brought by Christianity to the Roman world: the church as an institution; the political importance of correct belief; and new social spaces for religious rigorists and ascetics. Let us look at these in turn.
Pagan religion did not depend on a very elaborate institutional structure, and the cults of each city were all organized locally; rabbinic Judaism, too, was very decentralized (Jews did have a single patriarch until around 425, but it is unclear how wide his powers were). Christianity, however, had a complex hierarchy, partly matching that of the state. By 400 there were four patriarchs, at Rome, Constantinople (since 381), Antioch and Alexandria (a fifth, Jerusalem, was added in 451), who oversaw the bishops of each city. The patriarch of Rome was already called by the honorific title papa, ‘pope’, but it was only after the eighth century that this was restricted to the pope in Rome. Bishops were soon arrayed in two levels, with metropolitan bishops (called in later centuries archbishops) at an intermediate level, overseeing and consecrating the bishops of each secular province. Inside the dioceses of each bishop, which normally covered the secular territory of their city, bishops had authority over the clerics of other public churches (although privately founded churches and monasteries were often autonomous, a situation which produced endless disputes and rivalry for the next millennium). The church in the fourth and fifth centuries became an elaborate structure, with perhaps a hundred thousand clerics of different types, more than the civil administration, and steadily increasing in wealth as a result of pious gifts. It was not part of the state, but its wealth and empire-wide institutional cohesion made it an inevitable partner for emperors and prefects, and a strong and influential informal authority in cities; the cathedral church by 500 was often the largest local landowner (and therefore patron), and, unlike in the case of private family wealth, its stability could be guaranteed - bishops were not allowed to alienate church property. It was ecclesiastical wealth and local status that led the episcopate to become part of élite career structures by the fifth century in Gaul; this process took place later in Italy and some of the eastern provinces, but by 550 or so it was normal everywhere. Even in a church context, bishops generally identified themselves with their diocese first, with wider ecclesiastical institutions only secondarily. But they were linked to the wider church hierarchy all the same: they could be called to order and dismissed by metropolitans and by the councils of bishops that steadily became more frequent, whether empire-wide (the ‘ecumenical’ councils) or at the regional level, in Spain or Gaul or Africa. The fact that this institutional structure did not depend on the empire, and was above all separately funded, meant that it could survive the political fragmentation of the fifth century, and the church was indeed the Roman institution that continued with least change into the early Middle Ages; the links between regions became weaker, but the rest remained intact. The problem of the relationship between the church as an institution and secular political power has existed ever since in Christian polities, and has often caused considerable conflicts, as it already did in the fifth century, and would again in the eleventh, in the Reformation, and in the post-Enlightenment states of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Pagan political practice valued religious conformity, but did not have sharp divisions over variations in religious belief. Here, Christianity was very different. From early in its history its adherents argued over theology and accused each other of deviant belief, ‘heresy’, and in the fourth century this became an affair of state. What may well have surprised Constantine most on his conversion to Christianity was the internal conflict in the religion he had chosen, and the importance to its members of winning without any compromise. Constantine took seriously the task of achieving Christian unity, but he did not succeed (this may have surprised him too). To his successors, unity around a single correct view became increasingly important, including for the welfare of the empire as a collectivity; by the end of the fourth century religious deviance was thus politically dangerous and needed to be extirpated by law. The laws against pagans were polished first on Christian heretics, that is, those on the losing side in the great theoretical battles, and they were always far more systematically used against heresy. So heresy was both increasingly dangerous and increasingly common in the late empire. It was regarded as a problem in later centuries, too (particularly in the thirteenth-century West), but only the Reformation matches the intensity of the religious disputes of the period 300-600.
The first dispute Constantine faced was between Donatists and Caecil ianists in Africa over whether the bishops who had compromised their faith during the recent persecutions of Christianity could continue to consecrate bishops thereafter. It was a characteristic issue for the pre-Constantinian church, but this African dispute was by far the most serious example. The Donatists held that Bishop Caecilian of Carthage, the local metropolitan, was consecrated by an apostate and could therefore not be a bishop or consecrate others; Constantine judged against them in 313, but they did not concede. This was technically a schism, not a heresy, as it did not involve differences in belief, but it immediately became a structurally serious dispute, for since the Donatists accepted no African bishop consecrated by Caecilian, they created their own rival hierarchy, and there were 270 Donatist bishops by around 335. This schism was restricted to Africa, but it dragged on for a century there, with violence on both sides and also fierce written polemic (Augustine wrote some of it), until a systematic persecution of Donatists, following a formal debate at Carthage in 411 (see Chapter 4), weakened them substantially.
Donatism was the only home-grown division seriously to disturb the late Roman West. It did mark one concern that was more of an issue for the Latin than for the Greek church: the personal purity of the men who consecrated others and who presided over the eucharist, the central ceremony of Christian worship. The next western heresy, ‘Pelagianism’, declared heretical by the emperor Honorius in 418 and (rather unwillingly) by the western patriarch, Pope Zosimus of Rome, in the same year, as a result of the pressure put on them by Augustine and Alypius, was also related to issues of personal purity. Pelagius argued that a committed Christian could avoid sin through God-given free will, which Augustine regarded as impossible. Pelagians were never more than a minority, however, and the most lasting effect of this division was Augustine’s development of his theory of predestination to salvation through God’s grace, which remained controversial (and misunderstood, particularly in Gaul and Italy) but did not result in further declarations of heresy. It may be relevant here to note that the question of the purity of clerics remained important in the West. In the West, but not in the East, all clergy were supposed to avoid sexual activity, according to councils as early as 400 (in the East, this only applied to bishops, and only after 451). Not that western clergy always matched up to theory, and there were legally married clerics in many western regions into the late eleventh century, but the principle that priests should be sacrally distinct from their congregations was established early.
In the East, the most divisive issue was quite different: it was the nature of Christ. Constantine also found that there was dissension between Patriarch Alexander of Alexandria and his priest Arios over whether the Son was identical in substance, or equal, to the Father in the Trinity; Alexander maintained he was so, and Arios maintained he was not. Constantine, who did not think the issue particularly important, called a council of bishops to Nicaea in 325, the first ecumenical council, which, remarkably (it was the only ecumenical council to manage this), got both sides to agree on a formulation, the Nicene creed, essentially supporting Alexander. Some extreme followers of Alexander, however, notably Athanasios (d. 373), Alexander’s successor, refused to maintain communion with Arios, even though he had signed up to the Nicene creed, and the dispute broke out again. Versions of Christian belief closer to those whom Athanasios called ‘Arians’ were popular in many parts of the East, notably at Constantinople, including with the mid-century emperors, Constantius II and Valens; it was not by any means obvious to everyone that the members of the Trinity were all equal. Athanasios was also personally unpopular for his violent style, and had widespread support only in the West. But a new generation of Nicene supporters gained force in the 370s, thanks in particular to Basil, bishop of Caesarea in Anatolia (d. 379), and his associates. At Valens’ death at Adrianople in 378, a western ally of Basil became eastern emperor, Theodosius I, and his ecumenical council at Constantinople in 381 finally declared the Nicene creed to be orthodoxy. This paradoxically (but not uniquely among heresies) caused ‘Arianism’ itself to crystallize as a worked-out religious system, in effect for the first time. All the same, it lost imperial patronage and thus wider support thereafter (although, in the eastern capital, not until Patriarch John Chrysostom’s vigorous preaching in 398-404), except among the Goths and, by extension, other ‘barbarian’ groups in the North.
The Nicene victory meant that Christ, though human and capable of suffering, was seen as fully divine as well; but how were humanity and divinity to be combined? This was the major focus of fifth-century debates, which were in many respects power-struggles between Alexandria and Antioch, with Constantinople generally on Antioch’s side. Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria (412-44) argued that the human and divine elements in Christ’s nature could not be separated; Antiochenes such as Nestorios, patriarch of Constantinople (428-31), saw them as distinct. The danger in Cyril’s position, which we call ‘Monophysite’, was that Christ would lose his humanity altogether; the danger in Nestorios’ position was that he would turn into two people. Neither danger had been realized yet, but opponents of each believed it had been. The third ecumenical council, at Ephesos in 431, a theatre of remarkably cynical management by Cyril, condemned and deposed Nestorios. Ephesos also legitimated the cult of the Virgin Mary asTheotokos, ‘mother of God’, a formulation Nestorios in particular opposed, but one which has dominated most Christian churches since; the great councils as a whole did not only argue about Christology. But the Alexandrian attempt to go after all the Antiochenes, one by one (notably Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, who was briefly deposed in 449), rebounded on them, largely because of western opposition, focused on the actions and writings of Pope Leo I (440-61), and also because the Alexandrians had alienated the empress Pulcheria, their supporter at Ephesos. A fourth council at Chalcedon in 451 rejected the Alexandrian ‘Monophysite’ position (while maintaining a rejection of Nestorios), and set out a ruling that Christ existed ‘in two natures’, divine and human, while remaining one person.
This established an orthodoxy that dominated the West and the Byzantine heartland ever after. But it did not end the disputes, for Monophysitism had grass-roots support that previous losing interpretations did not have, in particular in most of Egypt, increasingly in Syria and Palestine, and in Armenia. Emperors, themselves sometimes personally sympathetic to Monophysitism (as with Anastasius, and also the empress Theodora, Justinian’s powerful wife), saw the Chalcedonian- Monophysite split as a political rather than a theological issue, and attempted several times to promote intermediate positions between the two: Zeno’s Henotikon in 482, Justinian’s fifth council at Constantinople in 553, Heraclius’ ‘Monothelete’ pronouncement, the Ekthesis, in 638. These did not work because there was less and less common ground between the two sides (even though the issues at stake became increasingly arcane); by the late sixth century, indeed, the Monophysite provinces were establishing an entire parallel episcopal hierarchy to confront the Chalcedonians. The emperors found themselves anathematized by both sides, and also faced schism with the West, which was uncompromisingly Chalcedonian. (When the popes of Rome were bullied into accepting the council of Constantinople in 554, they too faced opposition from much of the West, the so-called Three Chapters schism, and it took them a hundred and fifty years to end it.) Arianism continued as the Christianity of ‘barbarian’ groups, notably Goths, Vandals and eventually Lombards, into the seventh century. ‘Nestor ianism’ continued too - in more extreme forms than Nestorios had ever proposed - but mostly outside the empire, in Persia and as far east as China. But it was Monophysitism that divided Roman Christians most radically and completely, and the division was never healed.
It is impossible to characterize these conflicts accurately in a few words, for the theology at issue is amazingly intricate, depending on tight definitions and Platonist philosophical developments of concepts which would take many pages to set out in English (it was, furthermore, a debate which made most sense in Greek even then; Leo I was the last Latin-speaker really to grasp and contribute to it). Such detailed characterizations do not belong here. But it is important to stress that they did matter. Pagan observers found these debates ridiculous, even insane, as well as amazingly badly behaved, but having an accurate and universally agreed definition of God became increasingly important for Christians between 300 and 550, not least because the political power of bishops steadily increased. It is relevant that they mattered more in the East, where technical philosophical debate was longer-rooted in intellectual life, but with the ‘barbarian’ conquests Christological issues came to the West as well, and Arian-Catholic debates were bitter there, too; anyway, the Augustinian problematic which dominated theology in the West, centred on predestination and divine grace, was no less complex, even though it sidestepped Christological debate. It is of course impossible to say how many people properly understood the issues at stake at, say, Chalcedon: perhaps only a few hundred, although one should not underestimate the theological sophistication of the citizens of the great cities, exposed as they were to the sermons of some high-powered thinkers. But the problem of the real divinity of a human god, who had even died, at the Crucifixion, was at least an issue that would have made sense in the late Roman world, where the cult of the emperors as gods was still remembered (indeed, it was still practised by some) and the divine being was not, in the fifth century at least, as distant from humanity as he (or they) would be in some versions of Christianity.
These divisions also matter because they mobilized large numbers of people. Fifth-century Christianity was a mass religion, reaching more and more of the peasantry. Its participants were very loyal to their bishops and other local religious leaders, and could be mobilized in their support, city versus city or province versus province. Political faction-fighting could be expressed in religious terms too, and local secular leaders could find themselves involved in ecclesiastical disputes for the whole of their political lives. In cities, mobs could fight it out; Cyril in Alexandria, where rioting had a long tradition, was well known for his manipulation of them. The Donatists had an armed wing of Circumcellions, ascetic peasants or seasonal labourers. Monks from the countryside were also used as shock troops, usually on the Monophysite side; Jerusalem was a dangerous place because of the number of monasteries around it, which could quickly be mobilized, as when Juvenal, patriarch of Jerusalem, was expelled by monks in 452 for a year, because he had accepted Chalcedon; the army was needed to restore him. Monks were not normally educated, but they were certainly fervent. The roughness of their political protagonism broke the rules of late Roman élite decorum, and troubled politer observers, as it does some modern historians. These monks look too fundamentalist, too fanatical, and they were; but they were at least a sign that Christianity had penetrated the countryside, and that its divisions involved more people than narrow élites.
This brings us to a final Christian innovation, the development of new spheres for social behaviour. In general, committed Christianity involved a personally pious lifestyle, which indeed mattered more than theological disputes to most of its adherents; but rigorists could and did go well beyond mere piety. From early on in Christianity, self-deprivation of food or comfort, self-harm and the avoidance of human society were regarded by some people as ways in which humans could get closer to God. These forms of ascesis were popularized by Athanasios’ hugely influential Life of Antony, written at the death of the Egyptian desert hermit Antony in 357 and almost at once translated from Greek into Latin. ‘The desert’, a physical location for Antony, became an image for all ascesis, and men and women could create their own local deserts by shutting themselves away, or by standing on columns, often for decades, as stylites from Simon the elder (d. 459) onwards did - inaccessible (except by ladder), but clearly visible all the same and of public interest as a result. One influential stylite, Daniel (d. 493), had his column beside one of the major Bosporos ferries, east from Constantinople - he, certainly, was in the public eye (someone even asked him how he defecated: very dryly, like a sheep, he replied); but Simon, too, had his column in the middle of the rich olive-oil hill-country of northern Syria, and crowds would watch him repeatedly touch his toes with his head, counting 1,244 such movements on one occasion, as Theodoret of Cyrrhus recounted. Theodoret wrote a systematic account of the remarkable (and often, to his eyes, foolish) ascetic feats of Syrian holy men, which also stressed how respectful they were to Theodoret himself, their bishop. Ascetics sometimes caused resentment in the standard church hierarchy, for their spiritual powers (accurate advice, particularly effective prayers, sometimes miracles) were the results of their own efforts, rather than being bestowed by bishops. But most had episcopal support and patronage, and some of them (Theodore of Sykeon was one) became bishops themselves.
The influence of these ascetics broke all Roman social rules: few were aristocratic, few were educated, but people sought their advice persistently. We have replies of two elderly hermits living just outside Gaza in the early sixth century, Barsanouphios and John, to some 850 questions of all kinds put to them by laity, clerics and monks, which can pass for the sixth-century equivalent of Dear Abby. If I want to give grain and wine to the poor, should I give them the best quality? (no, you needn’t). Since we must not kill, should I lie to allow a murderer to escape the death penalty? (maybe, as long as you tend to lie under other circumstances). Can I buy in the market from pagans? (yes). Can I eat with a pagan? (no). What about when he is important? (still no, and here is a polite excuse). Do I really have to give my cloak to every beggar, and go naked? (no). And, perhaps the feeblest of all: I can’t make up my mind, what should I do? (a perhaps exasperated reply: pray to God, or else ask us again). It is clear in all of this that ascetics were trusted to know; educated or not, they had access to spiritual truth.
Christian ascetic holy men and women have an established niche in modern history-writing by now, and it is important not to be seduced by Theodoret and others into thinking that they were everywhere; as Peter Brown has recently written, they occupied ‘little of the public space of late Roman society’, even in the East, and they were never as common in the West. But they created an idiom of self-mortification which potential saints would systematically seek to copy in the future, with hair shirts, flesh-eatingly tight belts, chains and the like. Their less extreme acts could be copied by everybody, such as the pious Roman aristocratic women Paula and Melania, whose choice to walk around fourth-century Rome in rags, unwashed and smelly, was eulogized by Jerome in disturb ingly lip-smacking terms. And they were regularized and generalized by monasticism. Not that most monks imitated a full-on ascetic extremism, but the development of groups of celibates, living apart (in ‘the desert’), was influenced by Antony, and set roots on a large scale in Egypt first; indeed, ascetics themselves eventually found that they had a monastic community forming around them, or they sought one out on purpose. The ascesis of monasticism mostly consisted of absolute obedience to an abbot’s rule in a fixed daily routine, and such rules were written down from early on: by or for Pachomios in Egypt and by Basil in Anatolia in the fourth century, by Shenoute in Egypt and John Cassian in Gaul in the fifth, by Benedict of Nursia (modern Norcia) in Italy in the sixth. In the West, Benedict’s rule eventually became the gold standard; in the East, it was Basil’s. Benedict’s rule, more humane than many, is as striking for its insistence on the equal treatment of monks of different social status as it is for its moderate ascesis (only vegetables, except when ill; only light clothes, except in winter): egalitarianism was as difficult in the hierarchical world of late Antiquity as was self-deprivation. Nor were all monasteries remotely egalitarian; many resembled comfortable house-party retreats for aristocratic males and females. But the image of equality (of subjection) was intrinsic to monastic regulation, and in this respect, even if in no other in late Rome, equality was theoretically possible to achieve; a social space had even been created for this.
One simple result of these processes is that Christian writers tell us more about the peasant majority than pagan writers had ever done. Peasants could become saints if they were very exceptional; they also bore witness to the remarkable acts of rural holy men and women, living far from urban élites, so saints’ lives give us vignettes of village society that were almost entirely absent in earlier literature. The poor could go to heaven as easily as the rich, after all (in Christian theory, more easily), and even the most aristocratic and snobbish bishops - Gregory of Tours in sixth-century Gaul, for example - regularly preached to them, and sometimes listened to them, too. In recent decades, historians have abandoned their earlier caution about miracle stories, and rightly, given that these tell us so much more about non-aristocratic society and cultural and religious values than we can get elsewhere. They are not a direct window onto peasant society; no text is ever that, and they were seldom written by peasants (though one or two were - the Life of Theodore of Sykeon is one). But they are the best guide we have, and, however fully studied they now are, they still have more to tell us.
Part of the reason why ascetics occupied little Roman public space was that that space was huge. Even when we move away from a specifically religious focus, we must recognize that the Romans lived a great part of their political lives in public. The year was studded with public processions in cities; indeed, urban planning itself was affected by it, for the wide and straight streets of Roman cities, in the East garlanded with colonnades as well, were specifically built like that, and kept clear of obstructions, so as to allow processions (when processions ceased in the East after the Arab conquest, streets infilled fairly fast: see below, Chapter 10). Political power was structured around the most formal versions of such processions, as with the rituals for imperial arrival (adventus) into cities, which were later matched by the most elaborate ceremonial entries of the Renaissance. One famous case, Constantius II’s arrival in Rome in 357, described by Ammianus in detail, shows the emperor in a bejewelled car, with a vast military retinue; Constantius turned neither his head nor his eyes, nor his hands - he did not even spit - during the entire procession to the forum. This was a victory procession (undeserved, Ammianus thought; he loathed Constantius), which had a long tradition behind it, and a long future ahead, at least in the East, for Constantinople’s main west-east streets saw regular processions of this kind right to the end of the period of this book and beyond: the tenth-century Book of Ceremonies, compiled on the orders of an emperor himself, Constantine VII (913-59), describes them in great detail, stage by stage (see Chapter 13), and it is far from the only source. But major political and religious moments of all kinds were marked by processions in cities. Here, Christianity simply appropriated the practice, and bishops developed formal processions between urban churches as part of the presentation of their local power; these often took on penitential or protective roles, and it became common for bishops to process around city walls with relics or religious symbols, to protect the city during sieges, as during the siege of Clermont in around 525 or at the siege of Constantinople in 626 (according to our hagiographical sources, they were always successful). Pilgrimages to local saints’ tombs, themselves commonly orchestrated by bishops, as Gregory of Tours did for St Martin’s tomb there, had something of the same public formality, at least at the major festivals of the saint.
The public sphere did not only operate through processions. Constantius after his arrival in 357 hosted games; so did Theoderic the Ostrogoth in his formal visit to Rome in 500. The Circus Maximus, the largest chariot-racing stadium in Rome, was just below the imperial palace on the Palatine hill, from where the ruler could watch; in Constantinople, too, the Hippodrome was beside the palace, with a direct back entrance into the imperial box. This was the location (particularly in Constantinople, for emperors actually lived there) for a structured dialogue between emperor and people. Emperors generally controlled this, but it did at least allow some popular response through the leaders of the main circus ‘factions’, the Greens and the Blues (the colours of the teams), either through verbal dialogue or through riot. Matters occasionally got out of hand, as with the Nika riots of the Constantinople factions in 532, during which much of the city was sacked and which nearly brought Justinian down, but circus riots in major cities tended more to be a safety valve, a warning of discontent which emperors occasionally heeded, as well as, perhaps most normally, simply being for fun.
Political decision-making had a substantial public element as well. There were public disputations (particularly about religion or philosophy), speech-making was carried out in the forum, and there was a crowd to hear Sidonius choose the bishop of Bourges. The political community meant the élite, of course, and there was nothing even distantly democratic about Roman political procedures, but their results were communicated verbally in public, often quite quickly, at least in cities. Imperial laws were proclaimed as well; Anastasius’ abolition of the unpopular merchants’ and artisans’ tax in 498 was read out at Edessa - a major commercial entrepôt, but a long way from Constantinople - in the same year and occasioned a spontaneous festival.
The emperor had an ambiguous relation to the public world. The late Roman empire was a period in which imperial ceremonial became increasingly elaborate, partly to distance the emperor from other people, ‘imprisoned inside the palace boundaries’, as Sidonius put it. Inside the palace, etiquette was very elaborate as well. Meals with the emperor, a great honour, were carefully controlled, and Sidonius recounts one with Majorian in 461 at Arles in which the emperor conversed in turn with each of the seven guests, who were expected to shine in their replies, and got applause if they did so. (One aspect of the Persians that seemed very strange in Roman eyes was that their religious rituals forbade them to talk at meals.) But this formality was balanced against a presumption of accessibility. The practice of petitioning the emperor, for help or against injustice, was long-standing in the Roman world, and did not weaken at all in the late empire; indeed, the laws in the imperial codes are often explicitly responses to petitions. Petitioners seldom met the emperor in person, and it was of course the bureaucracy that really dealt with their pleas (or else did not), but the principle of direct response was preserved. Daniel the Stylite briefly left his column in 475 to protest against the usurping emperor Basiliscus’ support for Monophysitism, sending critical letters to Basiliscus, and eventually getting the emperor to recant publicly in the cathedral of Constantinople itself; the image of dialogue in his saint’s life must have been a plausible one, even if the details were invented. And this sort of imagery worked. Imperial authority remained popular, taken for granted. Roman envoys to Attila’s court in 449 greatly offended the Huns when they said that, although Attila was a man, Theodosius II was a god; this was a self-evident statement in Roman eyes, even though the envoys were doubtless overwhelmingly Christian. The gods were gone, but imperial status remained unchanged - divinus remained a technical term meaning ‘imperial’. The emperor’s position was all the more central in that the Roman empire was regarded as, by definition, always victorious, a belief that survived even the disasters of the fifth century. Indeed, Christianization reinforced this: if the empire fell, many believed the world would end. Romans were nothing if not confident.
The Romans drew a clear line between the public and the private. Politics in a formal sense took place outside private housing, which was regarded as in part separate from public activity. Senatorial palaces could be entered by almost anyone, and much political business was transacted there, but they contained carefully calibrated communal and more personalized spaces for the reception of clients and would-be clients; and except for extreme crimes the behaviour of family members inside the walls of a house was the responsibility of the paterfamilias, the male head of the household, and beyond the remit of public law. The household was the basic unit, called domus in Latin when its physical setting was stressed, and familia when referring to its personnel. It was centred on a nuclear family of husband, wife, children; other kin were normally more distant, part of political alliances rather than family structure, although parents, if living, still had a major influence. Slaves were part of the familia as well, however, as unfree domestic servants, and they were ubiquitous among families who had any resources to spare at all. The familia was very hierarchical; the paterfamilias was supposed routinely to beat slaves and children. Augustine’s account of his violent father Patricius in his autobiographical Confessions, an important source, shows that he considered it commonplace for husbands to beat wives too, although wife-beating seems to have been regarded as normal only in the Latin West, and with greater hostility in the Greek East; in surviving Egyptian divorce petitions, violence is rarely referred to. In law, the authority of the paterfamilias did not actually extend to wives, who were still subject to their own fathers (if living), but it is clear that in practice husbands ruled. Augustine, again, depicts his mother Monica (who had no qualms about trying to dominate her son) telling off her female neighbours in Thagaste for moaning about their husbands, saying their marriage contracts ‘bound them to serve their husbands’; nor was this just rhetoric: Egyptian marriage contracts systematically enjoin husbands to protect, wives to obey. Augustine criticized a certain Ecdicia for being celibate, wearing widow’s clothing and giving her property to the poor during her husband’s lifetime and without his permission: this lack of submissiveness nullified the virtue she sought to attain. The state may have stopped at the wall of the house, but Roman values did not, and hierarchy was taken for granted in both. Nor did Christianity change anything significant in this respect.
It would not be hard to argue that late Roman family life was tense and loveless. Marriages were almost always arranged by parents, after all, with an eye to safeguarding and extending property; husbands were routinely a decade older than their wives. Domestic slaves could undermine the stability of their master’s family by malicious gossip, and were thought (perhaps rightly) to be deeply hostile to their masters in general: ‘It is agreed and totally plain that all masters are bad,’ a slave is made to say in the early fifth-century comedy Querolus. Children are frequently seen as resenting and rejecting paternal restrictions in late Roman narratives (particularly those where virginally minded daughters are forced into marriage, and then child-bearing, by parents and husbands). Augustine certainly disliked his father, and, while revering his mother, had to resort to deceit to escape her when he left Carthage for Rome at the age of twenty-eight. All the same, in late Rome as elsewhere, happy families give authors less to write about. It may be that the idyllic love and concord celebrated by the pagan Roman aristocrats Praetextatus (d. 384) and Paulina in poems supposedly written to each other and inscribed on a stela after Praetextatus’ death, are not totally formulaic or atypical: ‘I am happy because I am yours, was yours, and soon - after death - will be yours.’ The ‘amicable and decorous bonds’ of marriage were normally unequal, but they did not necessarily fail because of that.
Women were legally subject to fathers, effectively subject to husbands. They had full inheritance rights over paternal and maternal property, however, equally with their brothers, and legally controlled their own property in marriage. Husbands were expected to front for wives in public affairs such as court cases, but women had full legal rights to act on their own if they chose. Until the late fourth century widows could not be legal guardians of children, and their powers were circumscribed, but in practice they often did so (Monica certainly held the purse strings for the near-adult Augustine after Patricius’ death in 372). Women were not regarded as part of the public sphere and could not hold office. But there is at least one example of a female city governor, Patrikia in Antaiopolis in Egypt in 553; and Hypatia in Alexandria, as the city’s major intellectual, had a formal role in public ritual, receiving ceremonial visits from officials. Indeed, powerful empresses were common in the late empire (particularly in the fifth- and sixth-century East: see Chapter 4), and not obviously resented for their power, despite the rhetoric of political opponents and some Christian extremists. The sphere of women in the late Roman period was universally regarded as the home: they ran the household economy. But they were not prevented from being economic actors. Egyptian evidence shows widows, at least, buying and selling property without male consent or intervention (women seem to have owned 17-25 per cent of the land of fourth-century Egypt, not a trivial amount), and also renting out property, money-lending, and acting as independent artisans and shop-owners. Women (except prostitutes and dancers) were expected to dress modestly, but they were not veiled in their normal daily lives; they could show or claim status with expensive clothing, and they do not seem to have been secluded. The double standard of sexual behaviour was standard and sanctioned by law (men routinely had concubines, but brides were supposed to be virgins, and female adultery was seen as indefensible); but the empress Theodora may have been an actress, and thus automatically in a legal category akin to prostitution - even if Prokopios’ lurid account of her activities is demonstrably rhetorical - without it constraining her later authority. Women were regarded as weak and ignorant, but, even excluding Hypatia, there is plenty of evidence for female literacy and literary engagement, particularly but not only among the aristocracy.
How do we assess this network of contradictions? It is not possible, with the evidence at our disposal, to tell what was typical in practice in each case, female constraint or female autonomy. Doubtless, as in many societies, we could expect autonomy for a few successful women, who nevertheless might find themselves more exposed to greater scrutiny than men, and also to some moral condemnation, particularly if their husbands were alive; the majority were maybe more subject and passive, whether voluntarily (as with Monica) or not. This general picture could well have been the case at every level of the social hierarchy, for the Egyptian material extends to peasants and artisans on occasion. And the space Christianity gave to ascesis allowed small, but visible, numbers of women to escape from family pressures altogether, as long as they maintained celibacy and disciplined behaviour, preferably indoors and in groups. The very quantity of these contradictory rights and constraints, all the same, was greater than in many societies: the early medieval West often assumed rather more uncompromising legal and social constraints on female action, as we shall see in Chapter 8. There was space inside the contradictions for late Roman women to construct their own social personae, if they wished to and if they were lucky. But they did so in a world full of gendered imagery that was negative about women, propagated by the public secular world and the church alike, with maleness and male virtues seen as the norm (virtus itself means ‘maleness’ as well as ‘virtue’) and femaleness seen as weakness and even danger, particularly to male ascetics, for whom female sexuality was, understandably, one of the greatest threats.
Men, too, faced contradictory signals in the world they lived in. Late Roman society was very hierarchical and social mobility was in many cases constrained by law, as we have seen, although it was also fairly common; the mixture of caste-like assumptions of inequality and the presence of ‘new men’ always creates tensions. Roman men were very ready to take offence at breaches of etiquette by upstarts and outsiders; they got angry very easily, and could be violent if they did. Faustus, bishop of Riez (d. c. 490), remarked sourly in a sermon that a powerful man may do us an injury or angrily abuse us and we suffer in silence, to avoid greater injury, but if an inferior person abuses us we get angry and revenge ourselves. The violence of late Roman political and judicial practice meant that such threats could be dangerous. But educated élites were also trained to decorous and courteous formal behaviour; it was part of élite education, in fact, and it included never losing one’s temper and aiming to convince - or humiliate - by rhetorical skill rather than by threat. How could one do both? One could not, of course. Educated men of the late Roman period were appalled by monastic vigilantes, or the mob of Alexandria, or powerful men with a military background like Valentinian I, for their lack of self-control and their violence. On a small scale, Sidonius was delighted when, at his dinner with Majorian, his enemy Paeonius became visibly annoyed at a minor slight in front of the emperor, a damning breach of etiquette; the emperor’s decorous but amused laugh was enough for Sidonius, who referred to it as ‘revenge’. But decorum was all the more important because men were recognized as passionate. And anger could also be used politically, breaking through the barriers of decorum, to make a point, to show that one was serious, all the more effectively because of the formality of ‘normal’ political behaviour. In the post-Roman West, politics became less formalized, but the political force of anger remained a powerful weapon for kings and princes.
This chapter, and the last, present a stable late Roman world, not unchanging by any means (this was above all a period of notable religious innovation), nor, of course, conflict-free, but all the same not in any sense doomed to dissolution. We shall see in the next chapter how it was that Roman political power did break down in the fifth-century West, despite this internal stability. But it is also worth asking at this stage what, in the political, social and cultural patterns described so far, would survive to form the Roman inheritance for future centuries. This is easiest to answer for the present chapter: most of the patterns described here survived. The structures of the church were the institution which changed least as the Roman West broke up, and they became politically marginal only in the south-eastern and southern Mediterranean, with the Muslim conquests of the seventh century. The importance of correct belief survived in Byzantium and in parts of the West, as we shall see in later chapters. Ascetic religious commitment and religion-based critiques of secular society never lost their force in the next centuries, and we shall see them constantly recur. These were a specific Christian Roman legacy for future ages. The public institutions of the Roman empire survived as a fundamental political template for both Byzantium and the Arab caliphate, too, still based on a continuing system of land tax. Taxation steadily broke down in the post-Roman West, however, and political institutions radically simplified. All the same, the political and institutional framework of the Roman empire was so complex that these new simpler versions could still provide a basic Roman-style governmental system for the ‘Romano-Germanic’ kingdoms, in particular the Franks in Gaul, the Visigoths in Spain and the Lombards in Italy, the leading polities of the two centuries after 550. And this went with a sense of public power, and of a public space for political practice, which was largely a Roman inheritance. This public politics lasted in the West until past the end of the Carolingian period, up to the tenth century at least, and often later; its breakdown, where it occurred (most notably in France), was momentous. That moment will indeed mark the end of this book, for in the West at least it represents the end of the early Middle Ages.
Many things did change at the start of the early medieval period. Religious and cultural continuities cannot mask the importance of the breakdown of state structures; the exchange economy also became much more localized in both East and West, and less technically complex, too, at least in the West. Aristocratic society became more militarized, and a secular literary education became much less important, particularly in the West; our written sources become far more religious as a result, in both East and West. Aristocratic identity changed everywhere too, with the political changes of the fifth-century West and the seventh-century East; global aristocratic wealth contracted in most places, and the hyper-rich senatorial élite of Rome vanished. One must not overstate this contraction, for aristocrats with Roman ancestors continued to be major players, but, given the cultural changes just referred to, their Roman antecedence becomes much harder to see. Peasants also became more autonomous, as global aristocratic landowning decreased and as state power in the West lessened; by contrast, the constraints on women arguably increased. And, above all, each region of the Roman empire had a separate political, social, economic, cultural development henceforth. Before 550, the East and the West are treated together in this book, but thereafter they must be discussed separately; and the histories of the Frankish lands, Spain, Italy, Britain, Byzantium and the Arab world will all get individual treatment, as will the non-Roman lands of the North. This localization and overall simplification marks the early Middle Ages above all else. But underpinning every political system we look at in the rest of this book, outside the far North at least, was the weight of the Roman past, which, however fragmented, created the building-blocks for political, social and cultural practice in every post-Roman society, for centuries to come.