This essay is the last of a three-part feature series on “Dawn of the Modern World”. Read Part I, here. Part II, here.

Part III: “From Pirate-State to Third Rome: The Ethnogenesis of the Rus”

So far we have covered the major schism of the Mediterranean. Germanics in the West (whose Church retained the kultur of the Roman empire) and Arabs in the East (whose equivalent was Iranian). 

The two peoples who rose above this division were, first, the Eastern Romans who sustained the notion of an ecumenical romanitas (built, nevertheless, on a form of nationalism) centered on Constantinople. Second, the Rus whose Roman religion was welded to a Norse cum Tatar polity that iced a thick sponge of Slavs (a configuration not unlike the Avar federation). Only one of these units has survived, however, so I shall focus on the unusual ethnogenesis of the Rus.

The legend of Riurik claims that in the ninth century quarrelsome Slavs and Finns invited the Vikings Riurik and his brothers to bring peace and order to their tribes, just as the Britons had once beckoned the Saxons. Their Scandinavian brethren weren’t to be left out of the power grab, however, and so the main motif of early records is how Riurik’s descendants — men like Vladimir — methodically eradicated rival dynasties led by warriors such as Rogvolod. The reasoning being that their leadership should avoid reflecting the scattered units of Slavs.

This might not be a world with which many western readers will be familiar. To orientate ourselves, let’s start with some ethnology. The tribes around Novogorod were Slovenes. To the south around Kiev were the Poliane, Slavicised Iranians. Kievan Rus was fringed in the north by the Finnic Chud. In the north east lay the Muroma and Merya tribes on the Volga. To the south, Slavic agriculturalists occupied the forests that halted the giant steppe populated by nomads. In the east, Tmutorokan formed an entrepôt on the shores of the Sea of Azov.

The most important pins in the early Russian state were Novgorod at its northern end and Kiev in the south. Other important settlements tended to be tribal centres. Smolensk, for example, was the major town of the Krivichi; Turov the same to the Dregovich; Chernigov to the Serveriane tribes. Rostov, though built by Vladimir on Lake Nero, performed a similar function for the Merya people. Meanwhile, Rogvolod’s capital had been Polotsk. And Pereiaslavl stood nearest the steppe frontier. 

If this picture lacks coherence, imagine all the rivers (Volkhov, Dvina, Volga, Oka, Desna, Pripiat, Dneiper, Don etc.) that lead from the northerly Baltic and White Seas down to their southerly twins, the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. The Rus can fairly be viewed as both a river and a forest people; a bristling wall of nature standing against the steppe peoples of Khazaria^[1] (around the Don) and the Volga Bulgars; a string of militarised traders who took the wares of the North (fur, wax, honey, etc.)^[2] down river and returned with silver, gold, and silk.^[3]

At this early stage the majority were still pagan. Vladimir, for instance, sponsored the erection of a temple on a Kievan hill dedicated to six idols: Perun/Thor (war), Striborg (sky), Dazhboh (light), Mokosh (mother nature), Khors (sun god), and Smimargl (fertility god of Iranian origin who appealed to the Poliane). Christianity had been known however for at least a century. Vladimir’s grandmother, Olga — despite a rather colourful, often vengeful life — had been a Christian.^[4] Moreover, the cathedral of St Elias in Kiev had functioned since 944 (when the Christian retainers of Vladimir’s grandfather, Igor, were said to have sworn oaths there). 

According to the Primary Chronicle the subsequent upswing in Christian activity was the result of Vladimir’s diplomatic inquiries to the powers of the major faiths. The Rus subsequently rejected Islam due to its prohibition on pork and alcohol; the Jews because God could hardly be said to be on the side of those who had no country of their own; and the Latin faith because it “contained no glory.” Only in Constantinople did they… 

“Know not whether they were on heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells there among men.”^[5]

A continuation of the chronicle, however, noted that Vladimir led a campaign against Cherson, an Eastern Roman city. He then held it as ransom until he received the hand of the emperor Basil’s sister Anna in marriage. When she arrived, Vladimir was baptised and returned the city. Back in Kiev, Vladimir conducted a mass baptism and smashed the pagan idols.^[6] In their place, he built the stone church of the Theotokos (AKA the church of the Tithe). The arrival of the clergy (who threw the popular idol of Perun into the Volkhov) was not quite so joyous in Novgorod, however. In fact it provoked a rebellion. Eventually quelled, the city soon boasted its own cathedral dedicated to St. Sophia — surmounted by thirteen domes — though paganism took several centuries to die down.^[7]

The faith did little to quell the death machine that was the Riurikid succession model. Ideally, it allowed brothers to play musical chairs within a hierarchy of cities with the head of the family ruling from Kiev.^[8] In reality, squabbles over seniority resulted in an eternity of fratricidal warfare that bestowed Rus with its first two native saints (Boris and Gleb) when they were portrayed as martyrs willing to die at the hand of Sviatopolk rather than betray the Christian ideal of brotherly love. 

The best that can be said of these conflicts is that they were good training for the opportunistic raids that spliced life. In 965, for instance, Sviatolslav attacked the fortress of Sarkel, which had a domino effect on Khazaria (most of which subsequently collapsed). A trickier opponent was the Pecheneg who occupied the steppe. Numbering eight hordes, they controlled the trade paths that led to Roman Cherson or Constantinople. Hence Constantine VII’s excursus that:

“Nor can the Russians come to this imperial city… either for war or trade, unless they are at peace with the Pechenegs, because when they come down the rapids of the Dneiper… the Pechenegs set upon them and easily rout their foe.”^[9]

Indeed, Vladimir’s father Sviatoslav was killed in a Pecheneg raid. The Primary Chronicle claimed his skull was “made into a cup overlaid with gold,”^[10] a steppe habit inflicted on the emperor Nikephoros one-hundred-and-sixty-one years before. Similarly, Vladimir only avoided death in one of the late tenth-century raids by hiding under a bridge. 

What really plagued early Rus, however, was less the lords of the steppe than a plastic notion of seniority in the succession rules. Thanks to its lateral (agnatic) notions of succession (brothers, uncles, etc., taking precedence over direct verticals such as sons in primogeniture) cousins from elder branches of the Riuriks repeatedly challenged nominated heirs. This civil war dynamic became so intense that in the eleventh century that it was agreed only those princes whose fathers had held the throne of Kiev could occupy it.

This had unforeseen consequences, however. First, branches of the dynasty — by becoming ineligible for the Kievan throne — presided over principalities that became increasingly independent. In such circumstances, Kiev adopted an honorary role as the first city rather than a capital giving direct orders. Second, the new rule didn’t stop the keenest contenders (the princes of Polotsk 1067-69, for example) who simply fought for re-entry into the order of succession. In the centrifugal chaos only three cities stood fast as the core of Kievan kingdom: Kiev, Chernigov (on the Desna River) and Pereiaslavl (the steppe frontier city).

The last became famous mainly for its north-easterly acquisitions, lands that are variously called Rostov, Suzdalia, or Vladimir-Suzdal (a region so pagan that its revolts were invariably led by sorcerers). Another important addition was Vladimir, on the bank of the Kliazma River, in 1108. Though none of these cities really shone like Novgorod, which in essence was the font of all trade in Rus and as such suffered a governor sent from Kiev. It also acted as a springboard to the North. Conquering the Finno-Ugric tribes between Lake Onega and the White Sea, it pressed onwards to the Urals to form a giant resource basin.^[11]

With such power came the prestige of intra-dynastic marriages. Iaroslav (d. 1054) married the daughter of the Swedish king Olaf. Among his sons, Iziaslav (d. 1078) married the sister of a Polish king, Sviatoslav (d. 1077) married the sister of the bishop of Trier, and Vsevolod (d. 1093) married a member of the [Roman] imperial family. Vladimir Monomakh, a product of the last union, married an English princess.^[12] Ties with Constantinople were the most cherished, however. A point most comically demonstrated when the people of Kiev threatened to abandon the city for Byzantium in 1069. 

Before that, however, the Pechenegs had to be definitively defeated, which was achieved beneath the walls of Kiev in 1036. Indeed, its battleground became the site of St. Sophia Cathedral. To reach it, a Golden Gate — in imitation of Constantinople^[13] — was built in the southern wall and was — like the Chalke — surmounted by a church (of the Annunciation).^[14] A moment nicely crowned by the reception of Kiev’s first native metropolitan, Hilarion, in 1051. 

Though Kiev’s metropolitans were appointed by the patriarch of Constantinople, the Short Pravda — the first law code of the Rus — formed a substantial civilizational counterbalance to Byzantine influence. Codified during the reign of Iaroslav and essentially Norse in character, it contained passages on wergilds (paid in grivnas)^[15] and theft (often repaid in marten pelts).

The defeat of the Pechenegs did not spell the end of the steppe threat. They were replaced by Torks, who in turn were displaced by Cumans whose federation was centred around the Northern Donets River basin. The Cumans repeatedly defeated Rus’ princes and devastated much of the country for almost two decades. All looked lost until Sviatoslav’s small retinue of three-thousand made a last stand near Chernigov against over twelve-thousand Cumans. This momentous victory at the end of 1069 clearly signalled that the Rus were not the easy pickings many on the steppe had hoped.

The dystopia that followed, however, was in many ways just as bad as the Pechenegs ingratiated themselves into Rus military culture and allied themselves with princes whose horns were locked in internecine warfare. As Kievan Rus fell into a death spiral (in which Tmutorokan was lost) only the conference at Liubech (1097) saved it. Teaming together (and thus rejecting Pecheneg civil war dynamic), they defeated the Cumans in 1103, repulsed the attacks of 1105 and 1106, and mounted a victorious campaign into the steppe in 1111.

Behind them stood a culture that had developed a sense of style that was not entirely derivative of Byzantine models. Novgorod, for instance, was distinguished by its helmet-shaped domes and austere aesthetic. Vladimir’s Cathedral of the Dormition was a broader, heavier, and brooding animal. The real pearl, however, was the church of the Intercession of the Nerl. Built in the perfect proportions using white stone, bands of arcading and ornate carving, its beauty is now considered archetypal.

Not to be outdone, of course, were the monasteries. The most prominent of which was Pecherskii. Located two miles south of Kiev, it was founded in the eleventh century by St Anthony who had been a monk at Mount Athos before becoming a hermit in the caves near the Rus capital. Home to the nation’s first substantial library, it compiled successive versions of the Primary Chronicle,^[16] the book that went on to form the first “national” part of many localised histories such as the Laurentian Chronicle of Suzdal and the Hypatian Chronicle of Kiev.

An equally important development occurred during the reign of prince Iurii Dolgorukii of Rostov (r. 1125-57) when the outpost of Moscow was built in an extension of his principality to Ustiug. It was the rise of regional powerhouses like Suzdal that made the sack of Kiev (1169) by princes of Rus relatively unremarkable. This was, after all, an atmosphere in which Iurii’s son, Andrei, felt able to attempt to remove his domain from Kiev’s ecclesiastical structure. An environment in which Novgorod’s veche (popular assembly) felt entitled to elect their own posadnik (mayor) whose powers overlapped largely with those of the prince selected by Kiev. Sometimes the city even expelled princes sent to it in favour of their own candidate. In 1156, it had the chutzpah to choose its own bishop (who was swiftly raised to the rank of archbishop).

The indulgent chaos of the lateral succession conflicts (exacerbated by centrifugal spin-off principalities) was brought to an juddering halt in 1223 when a Mongol army appeared on the steppe.^[17] The astonished Cumans joined the Rus but were defeated at Kalka, where three princes were captured and at least five others perished. The urban death-toll was no less severe. Riazin fell within one week. Moscow, a year later. Then Suzdal was burned. Pereislavl was razed, followed by Chernigov. Finally, Kiev surrendered at the end of 1240.

Kiev, in the words of Friar Giovanni de Pian de Carpine, was reduced to “almost nothing.” The surviving population reduced to “abject slavery.”^[18] Almost all its trade was funnelled via Sarai (north of Astrakhan). Furthermore, a bishopric was set up there.^[19] And each prince was forced to “go to the Horde” to receive the Great Khan’s iarlyk (patent to rule his domain). 

The Tatar yoke was total. All the fighting men of Rus were drafted into Mongol armies where they were deployed in the most vulnerable forward positions i.e. as fodder. Several leaders were martyred at the horde. Mikhail of Chernigov, for instance, was ordered to purify himself by walking between two fires and then kowtow before an idol of Chingis Khan. When he refused he was killed (and later canonised). Indeed, the process of “going to the Horde” was tiresome statecraft as it had to be repeated each time a khan died. During these lengthy and repetitive sojourns, court factions manoeuvred their favourites like chess-pieces and had a habit of producing the sort of unpredictable results that hardly made for stable government.

The first signs of resistance coagulated around prince Daniil of Volynia and Galicia. Oddly perhaps (considering the behaviour of crusaders in 1204) he established close ties with the papacy in the hope that military aid would follow. To this end he received a crown and the title of ‘Rex Russae Minoris’ from Innocent IV. Though the idea was ditched when a crusade never materialised and Daniil was defeated in 1260. The opposite strategy was most obvious in the figure of Fedor Rostilsavich, prince of Iaroslavl, who married the daughter of Khan Mengu-Timur (though to little long-term benefit).

Beneath these two outliers in elite behaviours, two major currents can be discerned. The south-western lands of Rus became attached to Poland and Lithuania, while the north-western lands slowly fell under the hegemony of Muscovy. The reasons for the latter are twofold. First, Moscow’s clean, vertical succession (at a time when many principalities were cannibalised into ever smaller appanages to provide for multiple heirs) kept it large, powerful and intact. Second, and more importantly, though the Tatars initially confirmed the princely candidates for the grand princedom^[20] on the basis of Riurikid principles of succession, by the fourteenth-century they had fallen into abeyance. 

Instead, the khan’s favour — beginning with Iurii of Moscow (d. 1325) — repeatedly fell on the princes of Moscow. Though the Daniilovichi were illegitimate rulers in terms of dynastic traditions (they had never held the grand princedom), it mattered no longer; the Golden Horde had fashioned a new model of legitimacy. And so the remainder of the almighty Rus found itself ruled by some bloke in a little wooden kremlin (fortress) on earthen ramparts; a little rustic idyll, whose rule was achieved mainly by bullying the rich North into giving more silver for Mongol tribute. 

From these inauspicious beginnings, Moscow’s princes married wisely and added several regions to their domain. It was fortunate that its only real competition, Tver, which hosted a line of powerful legitimate princes, was smashed by the Mongols in 1327. Still, historical relics remained. The metropolitanate of Kiev was transferred to Vladimir in 1354. And Tver had its own bishop while Moscow was just one part of the Rostov see. 

These were the awkward facts that Ivan I of Moscow managed to steer around by convincing the metropolitan Petr to sponsor the construction of the church of the Assumption (Dormition) in the kremlin. He then buried the prelate there when he handily popped his clogs (generating an important shrine) shortly afterwards.

More important than domestic politics was the fact that the Ming expelled the Yuan dynasty from China in 1368, producing civil war among the Mongols. When Tokhtamysh established himself at Sarai (1378) Mamai’s fiscal position became untenable. To fight the warlord, he needed revenue and that meant confronting Dmitry, the prince of Moscow, who had a track record of ignoring the fact Mamai had repeatedly bestowed the grand princedom on Mikhail of Tver. 

The battle took place on a field called Kulikovo Pole (Snipe’s Field) near the upper Don River. It was a Russian victory (1380). Though the pudding should not be over-egged in a nationalist manner given the aftermath. When Tokhtamysh subsequently defeated Mamai at Kalka River (1381) and approached Moscow, Dmitry ‘Donskoi’, hero of Kulikovo, fled to Kostroma as his own city was besieged and sacked. More to the point, his tribute was then set at a higher rate than before and his son, Vasily, was taken hostage at court for several years when he’d delivered it.

Moscow, however, was no longer the wooden fortress it had once been. Limestone walls were erected in 1367-68.^[21] Inside, the Chudov monastery stood, while to the east and southeast of the city the Andronikov and Simonov monasteries were also built. In the same period, St. Sergei of Radonezh — originally a hermit in the forests north of Moscow — founded St. Sergius Monastery. Other Rus — such as St Stefan of Perm — went on the spiritual offensive too, converting the Finno-Urgic populations along the Vychegda and Vym Rivers. 

It was a golden age for Russian art. In 1378, Theophanes the Greek arrived and decorated several churches before settling in Moscow where he worked on the iconostasis of the church of the Annunciation as well as the church of the Archangel Michael. Andrei Rublev — having spent his early years as a monk at St Sergius monastery and providing assistance to Theophanes in several projects — also began his work. Marked by a certain grace and a distinctive use of ethereal colours for heavenly subjects, as well as brighter, more solid ones for earthly figures, his works are still prized as Russia’s finest today.

Back on the geopolitical stage, the Golden Horde fragmented when Edigei was evicted from the Horde by his son-in-law, Timur (1411). By 1420, a Crimean khanate had materialised. By 1445, another had coalesced around Ulu-Mohammad at Kazan. This left only the Great Horde, a shadow of its former self. And even this morphed still further into the diminished khanate of Astrakhan — a no-mans-land where diplomats (such as Ambrogio Contarini) and merchants (like Afanasii Nikitin) complained they were robbed^[22] — though it was still capable of attacking large cities such as Riazan (1460).

Moscow had its own problems. In 1425, Vasily I left both lateral and linear heirs. In a replay of the bad old days, his son Vasily II was opposed by an uncle named Iurii who won several battles before dying in 1434, leaving an heir (Kosoi) who Vasily II promptly blinded. Seven years later the grand prince rejected the union with Rome that Cardinal Isidor offered. And a few years after that the same ruler had the indignity of being captured in battle in 1445 — his release being conditional on raising the Horde’s tribute.

Still more tragedy was on the menu. When Vasily II returned to Moscow, Kosoi’s brother Dmitry Shemiaka had him blinded, ostensibly for being a shill for the Tatars but really in revenge for taking the sight of his sibling. The city subsequently turned against Shemiaka, however, and the blind Vasily II returned in 1447. These politics were par for the course to most travellers, however. What most surprised them more were the markets held on the frozen Moskva River where: 

“Cows are frozen whole. It is a curious thing to see so many skinned cows standing upright on their feet; a meat that has sometimes been killed three months or more before.”^[23]

Talking of animals, Novgorod had become sick of playing the golden goose to Moscow and flirted with the idea of Lithuanian protection. This led to its subjugation by Moscow in 1471 and 1478. Serious defeats that resulted in the withdrawal of the city’s rights to select its own prince, summon its own veche, and elect its own officials. As a display of his authority, Ivan III even had the veche bell removed from Novgorod, arrested all its boyars and seized almost all its landholdings.

At roughly this time, the Rus suffered the strange problem of large swathes turning culturally Jewish, most likely in response to the end of time not occurring seven thousand years after creation i.e. 1492. Among the heresies attributed to them by archbishop Gennadius were iconoclasm, anti-Trinitarianism, the observation of the Sabbath on Saturday rather than Sunday, and a rejection of the Orthodox calendar. 

Other confrontations included the non-possessors (who wished the Church would reject the sin of possession/property as it kindled other vices) versus the possessors (who insisted institutional power was necessary to provide charitable functions and provide a check on the secular arm). The former position was held by an important translator that Vasily III had hired for Chudov monastery in 1518: Maxim the Greek. An idealist at heart, the Athonite soon found himself incarcerated for dubious heresies, which essentially boiled down to upsetting Moscow’s applecart. 

The ‘Third Rome’ theory was much more appetising than Maxim’s purism. Articulated in a series of three letters — at least one of which was written by the monk Filofei (abbot of Eleazarov monastery in Pskov c. 1523) to the state secretary of Moscow — they warned that many of the clergy were inadequate to their task; that there was too much diversity in ritual; and that too much suffering cursed the realm. He continued, blending carrot and stick with aplomb:

“If thou rulest thine empire rightly, thou wilt be the son of light and a citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem… But now, I say unto thee, take care and take heed… all the empires of Christendom are united… in thine, for two Romes have fallen and the third exists and there shall be no fourth.”^[24]

Show Footnotes

¹ Its capital at Itil was located on a branch of the Volga delta and was the point at which the Volga route leading to the Caspian Sea intersected with a major east-west route that ran across the steppe.
² Items imported included silks, satins, brocades, jewellery, goblets, wines, olive oil, naphtha, boxwood combs, spices, fruits and nuts, marbles. The marble used to decorate the church of the Tithe in Kiev, the church of the Theotokos in Tmutorokan, and the cathedral of the Transfiguration in Chernigov were also imported through Constantinople, as were their tiles and icons.
³ Good trade links imitated diplomatic relations. The Rus were still considered Viking in Scandinavia hence the refuge and assistance Vladimir found there when he felt threatened by Iaropolk. Rus similarly offered sanctuary to exiled Scandinavians such as Olaf Trygveson after his father had been murdered. His half-brother, Harald Hardrada, who would become the husband of Iaroslav’s daughter Elizaveta and the the king of Norway, also found refuge at Iaroslav’s court. He served with the prince’s retinue for several years before embarking on a series of adventures including Byzantine military campaigns that eventually led him back to Norway to claim his kingdom.
⁴ Famous mainly for burying alive the emissaries of the Drevlians after their people had killed her husband (Igor), Olga “radiant as pearl in the mire” (according to the Primary Chronicle) was baptised in Constantinople with the emperor Constantine VII as her godfather in 957.
⁵ The Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text, trans. and ed. S. H. Cross and O. P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor (1953) 110-111.
⁶ The chronicle and its continuation is an amalgam of legend and fact. Most historians rationalise the account by portraying as follows. Basil II suffered defeats in Bulgaria and rebels at home. Desperate for military support he requested assistance and found it in Vladimir who sent a large Varangian force. In return, the emperor promised his sister on the condition Vladimir converted to the faith. By the spring of 989 the Varangians had crushed Basil’s foes but the emperor sought to renege on the agreement and so Vladimir attacked Cherson and only returned it once his imperial bride was sent.
⁷ According to late eleventh-century canonical texts, church marriages made no headway among ordinary folk who preferred to arrange their unions during festival dances. Indeed, bride abduction and bigamy continued into the thirteenth century. Furthermore, mothers with ill children invariably resorted to pagan powers – if nothing else as an insurance policy.
⁸ Riurik initially ruled the tribes around Novgorod, Izborsk and Beloozero with his brothers. After his brothers died, Riurik ruled alone. This pattern of triad and monarchy repeated itself when Sviatoslav died and his three sons shared the realm: Iaropolk at Kiev, Oleg among the Derevliane, and Vladimir at Novgorod. Through warfare Vladimir became the sole prince but his death caused another round of warfare with Sviatopolk at Kiev murdering Boris and Gleb, as well as a half-brother called Sviatoslav. His brother Iaroslav then defeated Sviatopolk who fled to Poland and later died leaving Iaroslav on the throne.
⁹ Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, pp. 49-53.
¹⁰ RPC, p. 90.
¹¹ The main tribes outside the state were the Karelians beyond Lake Onega and the Komi around Perm.
¹² Gyda or Gytha of Wessex, daughter of Harold II. Meanwhile, among Iaroslav’s daughters Anastasia married Andrew I of Hungary, Anna married Henry I of France, Elizaveta married Harald Hardrada, while Agafia may have been the wife of Prince Edward the Exile (N. W. Ingham, “Has a Missing Daughter of Iaroslav Mudryi Been Found?” RH, Vol. 25 [1998], pp. 231-270).
¹³ Built by Theodosios I in the late fourth century or Theodosios II in the early fifth.
¹⁴ Romanos I (r. 920-44) attached a small chapel dedicated to Christ Chalkites to the Chalke.
¹⁵ Grivnas were silver ingots that weighed roughly the same as the Roman/Byzantine pound.
¹⁶ Also known as the Tale of Bygone Years, it was begun in the 1030s and was written, edited and rewritten by a series of at least six chroniclers including the monks Nikon and Nestor.
¹⁷ Though it did not halt immediately, it slowly tapered out. The last case of lateral succession in Moscow occurred in 1353 when Ivan II succeeded his elder brother Semen. This occurred in the absence of any candidates in the vertical line.
¹⁸ The Texts and Versions of John de Plano Carpini and William de Rubruquis, ed. C.R. Beazley (1903, repr. 1967) pp. 87-88, 122.
¹⁹ In 1267 the Church was exempted from Tatar taxation and conscription.
²⁰ After the bounce-back of the city of Vladimir from the Mongol sack and the absence of an equivalent miracle in Kiev, the grand princedom was transferred to the former. Furthermore, the seat of the metropolitan was formally transferred there in 1354.
²¹ These were upgraded to thick brick walls in 1485-95. Other improvements occurred around the same period, too. When the cathedral of the Assumption (Dormition) fell into decay, a replacement began in 1472. However, it collapsed two years later, forcing Ivan III to to send for Aristotle Fioravanti to design and help construct the cathedral. It was subsequently joined by the cathedral of the Annunciation (1484-89), the church of the Deposition of Our Lady’s Robe (1485-86) and a new cathedral of the Archangel Michael (1505). The last was designed by Alevisio Novi of Milan and housed the tombs of the Daniilovichi.
²² Despite his loss Nikitin’s travels took him all the way to India. English translations of his account are available in S. Zenovsky’s Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles and Tales (1974) pp. 333-353. The diplomat was Venetian, his account can be read in Contarini, “The Travels of the Magnificent M. Ambrosio Contarini,” in J. Barbaro & A. Contarini, Travels to Tana and Persia (1873) pp. 151-154, 157.
²³ J. Barbaro & A. Contarini, Travels to Tana and Persia (1873) pp. 161-162.
²⁴ D. Stremoukoff, “Moscow the Third Rome: Sources of the Doctrine,” repr. M. Cherniavsky, The Structure of Russian History: Interpretative Essays (1970), p. 115; originally published in Speculum, vol. 28, no. 1 (Jan, 1953), pp. 84-101.

Henry Hopwood-Phillips is a Byzantine historian from London. Find his articles: byzantineambassador.com, or his tweets: @byzantinepower.

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This essay is part II of a multi-part feature series on “Dawn of the Modern World”. Read Part I, here. Part III, here.

Part II: “Islam’s Late Antiquity”

Just as conventional historiography has typically downplayed the ease with which the philosophical schools of late antiquity segued into the Church Fathers, so it has overplayed the disruption of Islam on seventh-century society. This is because the Arabs’ evangelism was achieved mainly via the sword, a novel means after Judaism’s tribal genesis and Christianity’s martyrs.

Ultimately Islam looks, walks, and talks like a nationalised Judaism for Arabs. Its universalist aspect is almost accidental; a by-product of its semi-unique element: the call to jihad (striving/war).^[1] While pagans get short shrift in the Qur’an – a laconic menu of “conversion or death” — several passages argue that non-violence is the best way of dealing with Ahl- al-Kitab “People of the Book” i.e. their monotheistic cousins.^[2] These are abrogated, however, by later militant excerpts in which Muslims are urged that the path of God involves war on non-Muslims and that those shirk this duty fail Allah.^[3]

During Mohammad’s life, these verses operated (and justified his actions) in an Arabian setting. After his death in 632, however, jihad took his followers across the Levant (642) to Tangier (703) and Narbonne (719). This whirlwind of conquests (the last major victory was Taormina in 902) was halted only by the Spanish (Cantabrian and Iberian) mountains in the West, the Taurus in the East, and the Ferghana range in the Far East.

In the Far East, Talas (751) proved imperialism’s effort-to-gain ratio stopped making sense east of Islam’s barracks, Khorasan. In the Levant, Constantinople’s formidable power was begrudgingly acknowledged. Heraklios, for instance, was admired as a great emperor whose triumph against Iran was supposedly predicted in the Surat al-Rum. In Spain, however, the Christians were deemed barbaric mountain folk who pushed down from Leon and Burgos like slurry through a gutter (not that this haughty self-image prevented intermarriage between the Umayyads and the princesses of Pamplona).^[4]

Though the prospect of total victory faded, caliphs upheld their credibility among the ummah by launching symbolic jihad. Al-Mu’tasim, for example, came to the throne by coup d’etat and so sacked Amorion (birthplace of the emperor Theophilos) largely as a flex in 838. Likewise, Muslims razed Santiago de Compostella (another highly symbolic target) in 999.

The pendulum had swung, however. The Eastern Romans took Malatya (934), Tarsus (965), and Antioch (969). Indeed, matters got so bad that armies of volunteers from Khorasan — who demanded that the tide be reversed through jihad — had to be crushed by the Buyids in 966.^[5] Worse, riots in Baghdad demanded the caliph lead them in jihad (972).^[6] And the political climate looked no better on the other side of the Mediterranean. After the fragmentation of the Cordoba caliphate into factions, the Christians became mercenaries with a danegeld dynamic and took to demanding ever greater quantities of tribute in cash (or even land) from the Taifa rulers in return for their services.

Far from the bookends of the ummah, anarchical bands of Muslims tried their luck. Muslim outlaws took Crete in 827, though it was retaken in 961.^[7] Another force set up a pirate base at Fraxinetum in Provence in 891 which operated until 973. Another “emirate” was established at the mouth of the Garigliano river in 881 which – despite raiding prestige sites like Monte Cassino in 883 – survived until 915.^[8] These were flies around the cow’s tail, however, compared to the conquests of previous centuries.

To return to the original point, being successful at war hardly disqualifies Islam from late antiquity. Neither does monotheism. In fact, both are leitmotifs of the period. The Arabs, too, had been part of the Middle East’s fabric for as long as anybody could remember.^[9] So why do historians take it as axiomatic that Islam knocked the kneecaps off the first civilised chapter of Mediterranean history?

In large part, the answer relies on the fact that — despite belonging to the Mediterranean world for extended intervals — the Arabs took their high culture from Iran rather than Rome.^[10] Worse, their low culture was inherited from the jahiliya (pre-Islamic Arabia) with its cult of poetry and warriors, its fierce loyalty to kith and kin.^[11] A double (Arabic/Persian) linguistic barrier was therefore erected and it placed even Christian intellectuals (such as Theodore Abu Qurra) and scholars (like Agapius of Manbij) behind it.^[12]

Western sullenness at this cultural denouement means it feels justified at dealing all sorts of historiographical sleights of hand. The major one being to compare the Levant of the Abbasids to that of the House of Constantine instead of, say, the Bilad al-Sham of Mu’awiya to the Syria of Heraklios. It’s news to nobody that four centuries (the same interval as Elizabeth II from James I) produces more divergence than two decades.

There’s the sentiment that Arabs were parvenus, too. In other words, the suspicion that — despite the fact their conquest was neither particularly violent nor destructive for the standards of the time — they should never have had the temerity to engage in the enterprise in the first place. Sure, the Persian invasions (602-28) were far more hellish but at least their hell had pedigree.

Caricatures of the Arabs as simpletons on camels have led to all sorts of misconceptions about the conquests. Most of the conquerors were not nomads, for instance, but came from the settled areas of Yemen. They lived in stone towns on terraced mountainsides. Others came from highly irrigated cultures that had produced wonders of the ancient world such as the Marib dam. These were often men who were more acquainted with the lords of Himyar and Dhu Raydan than the Bedouin life. And they fought in Islamic armies that battled mostly on foot, not horseback.

Perhaps it was the novelty of the initial Islamic tax system that struck a discordant note with historians. Structured around booty from war against the kafir, jizya from the dhimmi (non-Muslims) and the ‘ushr (tithe) that wealthy Muslims had to pay for widows and orphans, it admittedly created confessional chattel on a remarkable scale. It was based on the idea that if the Arabs were to retain their culture and elite status then they had to settle as a (parasitical) class of hereditary pensioners in new cities known as amsar. Famous amsar include Kufa, Basra, Fustat, Qayrawan and Jabiya.^[13] This caste lived off their subject peoples through ata‘ (gifts/salaries) and rizq (supplies).^[14]

Membership to this exclusive club meant one’s name was recorded on the diwan (register). The politics surrounding these documents caused the caliph some of his biggest headaches. The major problem was that the diwan was hereditary and based on sabiqa (precedence based on actions during conquest and to a lesser extent pre-Islamic status). This status quo was accepted by the first generation, of course. But as time passed and these privileges were handed down the generations, they became frustrated at being financially frozen with the status of their grandparents. Worse, few military virtues were passed down these generations so that within a remarkably short period the corps had morphed from world conquerors into corrupt archetypes of the eighteenth-century janissaries i.e. only taking up arms to defend their privileges.^[15]

The localism of the diwan (register) and fay (assets conquered)^[16] also meant that no matter how impressive the Arabic empire looked on a map, only a tiny fraction of tax was channeled to the caliph.^[17] This led the Umayyads to hire (usually Bedouin) private armies and buy up diya (estates) to shore up their position.^[18] The Abbasids – unable to recruit from the same tribes^[19] thanks to their support for the opposition – went outside the Islamic world and employed Turkic mercenaries.

More seriously, the ‘ata (gifts the diwan bestowed) was not affordable in the medium-term. Not only did those entitled to receive ‘ata increase with each generation but new demographics were continually integrated in order to co-opt groups for political reasons. Revolts then shook the empire as governors found themselves unable to pay the ‘ata. And ultimately Islamic rulers had to reverse their tax positions. Moving away from the diwan, they shifted back into the fold of typical superpower tax systems and (by the end of the eighth century) demanded the kharaj (land-tax) from land-owners – a very late antique device.^[20]

If taxes eventually normalised, perhaps Islam’s real imposition on late antiquity was the mosque; that great inversion of the Byzantine genius. Designed to celebrate the Trinity, it perversely proliferated under the crescent to glorify tawhid (one-ness of God) instead. The mosque also becomes associated with a notional upheaval in which a Hippodamian heaven of fora, temples, theatres, baths, and colonnaded streets was assaulted by narrow streets, private courtyards, mosques, madrasas, funduqs, and suqs; the architectural equivalent of a weasel-eyed street-urchin, an evil Aladdin.

This urban transformation had older roots than Islam, however. Civic autonomy, for example, had evaporated between Aurelian and Constantine. Christianity had closed the temples. The monumental baths fell into disuse as budgets or tastes allowed for much smaller alternatives. Even the theatres that still hosted performances tended to specialise more in acclamations, grievances, or punishments i.e. public politics rather than drama. In sum, urban planning adjusted from representing an aggressive, decentralised pagan society to a defensive, centralised Christian one.^[21]

Islam simply pushed this logic to its extreme.^[22] The streets narrowed as pack animals and porters replaced wheeled vehicles. Churches gave way to mosques. The political functions (such as the recitation of the ba’ya, the oath of allegiance) of the theatre were transferred to the mosque. The sanctity of family resulted in residences turned inwards. Finally, it is no coincidence that the Islamic hammam resembles nothing quite so much as a sixth-century Byzantine bath.

Many cultures that frame their counterparts as antagonists have their hatred ironed out by tourism or trade. But apart from occasional visits by pilgrims (such as Arculf^[23] and Willibald^[24]) and the occasional monastery,^[25] the Levant was only known to the West through biblical reference points. The irony being that when tourism received a real uptick (from 1000 onwards) it heralded a crusade.

Worse, when it came to trade the only thing the West possessed that Islam wanted was slaves — preferably of the occidental variety — sold mainly in Venice.^[26] A fact that produced farcical diplomatic exchanges such as when the Margravine Bertha of Tuscany — looking to butter al-Muktafi up in 902 — struggled to think of anything she could add to her gift of Slavic ladies, and eventually had to settle on some swords. The pious fiction that enslavement was fine in the West because the victims were pagan Slavs was threadbare, too, as a travel account by the Bernard the Monk makes clear. In his Itinerarium, he recounts how he took a ship bound from Taranto to Alexandria with nine thousand Christian captives who’d been taken in raids on Italy.^[27]

Despite the above, perhaps Islam’s iconoclasm is a better answer as to why it was jettisoned from late antiquity. While Judaism sustained similar beliefs, its aniconism was insular and rarely affected society at large. In Islam’s hands it was a different creature. Quite apart from the friction caused when Muslims assaulted icons and processions, iconoclasm was often the most convenient casus belli for Islamic violence in general. Examples include efforts to forcibly convert Christian Bedouin and the eruption of riots around churches and monasteries — the worst occurring after the death of caliph Harun al-Rashid in 809.

The death of this caliph also signalled the arrival of another stage of ‘otherness’ in the Islamic identity. In the civil war that followed al-Rashid’s demise, the Abbasids were only able to re-establish their rule by recruiting Turkic and Iranian horsemen from the Steppes. Most of these new troops were mounted horse-archers. Deadly on the battlefield and expensive off it, not only was their image^[28] foreign to the West but their involvement in politics — namely, taking caliphs hostage in their complex at Samarra — was inimical to the feudal loyalty valued there too.^[29]

With the caliphs reduced to puppets, the empire frayed at the seams. Provinces such as Khorasan drifted away, never to return. Egypt had to be reconquered (and even then its yields evaporated). Perhaps most devastating was the Zanj revolt in the Sawad — the jewel of the empire — where East Africans (who cleared salt off the fields) caused chaos for fourteen years (869-883), even sacking Basra. Worse, the salinization of the soil (caused by continuous irrigation and lack of proper drainage) accelerated. All these trends collapsed the tax base, which rulers tried to reverse by handing out state revenues and assets as iqta’ (tax fiefs) to generals. As a result, all control was lost over both the collection of taxes and payments of salaries. Marking in a very real sense an end to the Islamic chapter of late antiquity.

Show Footnotes

¹ I’ve qualified “unique” because a doctrine of crusading is discernible in Heraklios’ reign. “Unique” is still the correct word, however, because neither the Torah nor Bible explicitly states that violence is a religious duty unlike the Qur’an (see T. M. Kolbaba, “Fighting for Christianity,” Byzantion, Vol. 68, No. 1 [1998] 194-221).
² R. Firestone, Jihad (1999) 69-73.
³ Ibid. 84-91.
⁴ Similarly, many of the Abbasid caliphs were sons of Byzantine concubines. Indeed, there is no record of high-status Muslim women having relations with Christians until Zaida and Alfonso VI’s relationship at the end of the eleventh century.
⁵ Ibn Miskawayk, Eclipse (1921) I, 234-42.
⁶ Ibid. 326-28.
⁷ These reprobates had been expelled from Al-Andalus and then from Alexandria. Their polity sustained itself by indulging in slave raids and sales.
⁸ The West’s states were often too at odds with one another to provide the Church with any coherent power. In the case of Garigliano, the cities of Gaeta and Amalfi were more concerned with upholding their independence and sustaining their trading opportunities with the Muslims to make a war against the latter viable. It was not until Pope John X (at the head of an army from the papal states) teamed up with the Eastern Roman Empire (which sent its general Nicholas Epigingles with another army) that the Muslim statelet perished at the Battle of Garigliano (915).
⁹ The historical peoples of these areas were divided by language into Greek, Syriac (a north Syrian and Mesopotamian version of the Aramaic lingua franca of the ancient Near East which also developed as a literary language) and Arabic speakers (who mostly inhabited the desert margins but also places like Damascus and Hira). Greek was mainly spoken in settlements along the Med coast, Syriac in the hinterland. Jews also had large contingents in Antioch, Edessa and the towns of Galillee, the Golan and southern Palestine. While the Samaritans’ HQ was Neopolis/Nablus.
¹⁰ A cultural heritage – perpetuated by the dehqan landowners that remained when the Yazdigird III fled east – that reached a triumphant conclusion in Firdausi’s Shahnama c. 1000. Its place at the Islamic table was secure thanks to the desire rulers had to absorb the previous Persian tax administration so it could get the most out of important resources like the awad of Iraq, which had once been dil Iranshahr (the heart of Iran).
¹¹ Collections of poems and legends relating to the ayyam, the “days” or battles of the pre-Islamic tribes were venerated almost as much as Mohammad himself. This corpus was to the Arabs what the pagan equivalent was to the Christian world.
¹² See S. H. Griffith, Arabic Christianity in the Monasteries of Ninth-Century Palestine (1992).
¹³ Interestingly, Jabiya was never settled in large numbers. Muslims in Syria preferred to inhabit the ancient cities like Damascus, Homs and Qinnasrin. This was probably because Syria had been partially Arabised. Many of the conquerors, for instance, came from tribes already resident in Syria or its frontiers such as the Kalb of the Palmyrena or the Lakhm and Judahm of southern Palestine.
¹⁴ The fattest calf was the sawad of Iraq, which contributed roughly four times as much revenue as its nearest competitor, Egypt (see H. Kennedy, “The Middle East in Late Antiquity,” Fiscal Regimes [2015] 391). It had been conquered by tribesmen from northern and eastern Arabia who joined the Islamic force at a relatively late stage and continued to emigrate after the battles had been won in order to win booty in the campaigns against Iran. These were very different Arabs to those of the Quraysh and other tribes of the Hijaz who formed the elite of early Islamic society.
¹⁵ Sanctioned by no less a figure than caliph Umar I, the system was seen not just as part of the conqueror’s dunya (earthly rights) but their din (religion). Arabs waxed lyrical about the payments but were reluctant to provide the corollary military service. In 695, for example, a fellow was brought before al-Hajjaj for claiming he was too ill to go on jihad and that he’d happily return his salary to the treasury. Al- Hajjaj, however, was not in a good mood and had him executed (Al-Tabari, Ta’rikh, II, 858).
¹⁶ When al-Mukhtar wished to recruit mawali into his ranks (mawla was used at this stage to refer to freedmen or non-Arabs who attached themselves as clients to Arab tribes to become part of the Muslim community. It died out at end of Umayyad period as word acquired other meanings) Ibn Muti’ rallied crowds of Arabs against him, saying “Oh people, these people are fewer than you and wicked in religion. Go out against them, defend your women, fight to protect your misr (territory) and defend your fay (assets)” (Al-Tabari, Ta’rikh, II, 627).
¹⁷ Dennett, for instance, estimated that no more than five per cent of the revenue of Egypt was forwarded to Damascus in the reign of Marwan II (d. 750). Indeed, Arab politics often revolved around powerful men trying to gain further office by adding new names to the local registers. In 683 for example ibn Ziyad, in seeking to take over Basra, claimed that he had increased the number of the Basrans recorded on the diwan from 70,000 to 80,000. Others squabbled over who had the futm, the right to recruit young men to the diwan. Some even dangled the prospect of a place on the diwan as bait to get men to join unpopular military campaigns (Al-Tabari, Ta’rikh, II, 463-44; 1020).
¹⁸ For example, there were 5,000 Dhakwaniya commanded by the mawla Muslim ibn Dhakwan and raised by the Umayyad prince Sulayman ibn Hisham (Al-Tabari, Ta’rikh, II, 1871-82).
¹⁹ The tribes of pre-Islamic Arabia had their genealogies written up and elaborated in great detail in the eighth century, with thousands of names supposedly arranged with their correct precedence like a giant decentralised Debretts. This erudition gave a spurious clarity to the question of nomad descent.
²⁰ The development of a new professional standing army led the governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, to feel able to send his forces into difficult regions such as eastern Sistan and Zabulistan. The treacherous campaigns, however, resulted in the rebellion of “native” i.e. “Iraqi” men, and from henceforth they were excluded from the army.
²¹ A. Wharton, Refiguring the Post Classical City (1995).
²² Despite the Islamic reputation for cramped, dark cities within fortifications, the urban citadel didn’t become a typical part of the Islamic landscape until the arrival of the Seljuks in the eleventh century. Marw being the classic example in that century, though Damascus also acquired a citadel at roughly the same time.
²³ See De locis sanctis.
²⁴ See Vita Sancti Willibaldi.
²⁵ Such as the monastery and hospice Charlemagne had erected in Jerusalem in the late eighth century.
²⁶ These slaves were usually exchanged for spices like pepper and cinnamon, incense for churches and textiles. The only other major items the West could exchange were furs and timber.
²⁷ Itinerarium Bernardi Monachi Franci, 309.
²⁸ The supremacy of the horse-archer ended in 1514 when Ottoman canon demolished the conventional Qizilbash forces of the Safavid empire.
²⁹ The abandonment of Samarra was due to a number of factors: the gravelly plateau on which it was built prevented the use of canals; the distance from the Euphrates meant that grain could not easily be imported from al-Jazira; while the sawad was further away down the course of the Middle Tigris. Large amounts of money were spent by the caliphate trying to bring water to the city but without effect.

Henry Hopwood-Phillips is a Byzantine historian from London. Find his articles at: byzantineambassador.com, or his tweets: @byzantinepower.

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This essay is part I of a three-part feature series on “Dawn of the Modern World”. Read part II, here. Part III, here.

Part I: “200-700: The Anvil of Europe”

For answers as to why Europe has its identity, one must return to its formation in the early medieval period. However, the DNA of these cultural kernels can be traced as far back as the third-century crisis. Indeed, while the West likes to paint itself as an iteration of the Antonine Age, in reality, it’s the product of every transformation that followed.

The third-century involved historical firsts on several fronts. Elagabalus introduced official worship of the Semitic sun-god Helios-Baal. The murderers of Caracalla and Severus Alexander were Macrinus (the first non-senatorial emperor) and Maximinus (the first soldier-emperor to rise through the ranks). The costs of the army, reasonable when conquests paid for themselves, absorbed half the state’s income. And its Latin character vanished in favour of troops from the frontier regions.

Going local, however, in a globalised world had its own risks as Constantius II found to his cost when he approached Julian for crack troops (such as the Petulantes) for an eastern campaign. Instead of complying, they complained:

“We are being exiled to the furthest points of the earth like condemned criminals and our families will become slaves of the Alemanni after we have already freed them once from captivity in desperate battles.”

This shift in attitudes can roughly be dated to the 160s. In those halcyon days, the legions could be persuaded to pursue almost any threat. Yet even then it was easier to post smaller detachments (c. a thousand men) known as vexillations. Perhaps these pawns wouldn’t have had to have been pushed around so much if their placement had owed more to grand strategy than political arithmetic (to deter coups).

A glance at any third-century map reveals familiar names. This is because the majority of civitates became medieval cathedral cities. Some boast even older heritages as pre-conquest oppida. To give a single example, the Breton tribe of Namnetes was governed from the Civitas Namnetum, which became the city of Nantes.^[2] In France, Bourges, Chartres, or Poitiers also fit this category though the majority of medieval towns were Roman in origin.

It was insecurity on the Danube that produced the keenest figure in the historical imagination of the Dark Ages: the walled city. Most obviously at places like Serdica, Philippopolis, and Nicopolis ad Istrum. This instability snowballed when barbarians learned to sail. In 262, the Germanics hit hard, and in the words of Aurelius Victor:

“Plundered Gaul, seized Spain and, after laying waste and almost destroying Tarragona, eventually took boats and got as far as Africa.”^[3]

Five years later the Goths forced the Dardanelles with a fleet acquired on the Black Sea and sacked Greece (though Claudius II thrashed them at Naissus in 268). In 271, Aurelian repulsed the Alemmanic invasions from the Po valley and then fortified Rome in the Hellenistic manner. His walls were completed by Probus who became renowned for having brought almost all the Germanics to heel. The emperor Julian later admired him as the man who “set seventy cities back on their feet in less than seven years.”^[4]

But the charisma of emperors could not always be on hand to deliver emergency victories and so Aurelian’s successors ordered the construction of formidable defenses. Some of these Roman fortifications still remain in cities such as Bourges, Le Mans, Tours, or Evreux. This new defensive agenda absorbed even the symbols of Rome’s past. The tombstone of a procurator of Britain — Julius Classicianus — for instance, found itself repurposed in the foundations of a bastion in Londonium’s Roman walls.

In this defensive atmosphere, the circuits of walls took eccentric routes to incorporate monumental architecture such as amphitheatres and fora. This created a new economy of space in which contraction was necessary and so cathedrals and granaries moved within the walls. In fact, Ausonius went so far as to describe the fortifications of northern Gaul to be “non casta, sed horrea Belgis” (not the castles but the granaries of Belgica).^[5] These facts all slot conveniently together to form our modern prejudices of what makes a city. Namely, a bishop and walls.

Talking of bishops, the ink on Nicaea (325) had barely dried when the military commander in Britain Magnus Maximus involved the imperial authorities in a quarrel between the Spanish ascetic Priscillian of Avila and his accusers. The trial and decapitation of the bishop (385) — the first time a Christian ruler had executed a subject for heresy — divided the Gallic church into pro-imperial and anti-imperial factions for over a generation.

In Maximus’ reign, the contours of post or sub Roman units (or at least the delusional aspects of the imperial project) can be discerned. This was, after all, a man who felt at ease threatening Ambrose of Milan with his turmae translimitanae (foreign troops).^[6] In this topsy-turvy world, the halves of the empire preferred to battle it out (as at Frigidus, 395) rather than fight Franks and Alemanni who had developed a worrying habit of winning the occasional victory (as in 387-8). Such a muddled state of affairs meant that when the Rhine frontier was irretrievably breached at the end of 406, it was Frankish federates who beat the Vandals back (it was the latter’s Alan reinforcements that won the eventual victory).

This caused chaos in Britain where the rapid succession of three leaders suggests a civil war (or at least lethal elite maneuvering) over how to react. One may have wanted to nationalise the Roman army, another to take the fight to the barbarians and make a bid for supreme power, and another a half-way house. Constantine, who clearly supported the aggressive option, crossed to Boulogne in 407 to ‘do another Constantine’, i.e. seize the purple and then crush the Germanic menace. After beating the loyalist general Sarus the Goth, he managed to set up court at Arles and declare himself Constantine III with Apollinaris (grandfather to Sidonius) as praetorian prefect. In an odd twist, it was Constantine’s son Constans who — in the suppression of loyalist elements in Spain — first used barbarians thereby acquainting them with Spain (a knowledge promptly utilised when they invaded in 409).

By Constantine III’s death in 421 the political terrain had again changed. First, the Burgundians had been settled at Worms (413) in the first federate kingdom. Second, the Visigoths were introduced to Spain by Constantius in order to mop up the remains of Constans’ troops, before being placed in Aquitania Secunda as the gatekeepers of Iberia. Third, the ever-dwindling parts of the empire that remained under Rome were plagued by Bacaudae, Robin Hood elements of the population who saw local government (and resistance) as superior to the expensively supine techniques of the imperial seat.^[7] Finally, almost no bronze coin reached Britain after 404 and its pottery industry died.

At this point the Goths tried to seize Arles, which would have given them a port and therefore access to African grain. Aetius relieved the city in 427, however, and destroyed a large Gothic force at Mons Colubrarius. In reality, the Goths form a shadow dance to the ultimate show: imperial disunity. If Felix, Aetius and Boniface had formed a triumvirate and fought on their respective fronts, much would have been possible. Instead, Aetius had Felix murdered and was in turn defeated by Boniface at Rimini (432) who did Aetius the favour of dying from his wounds shortly afterward. This left all of Africa save Carthage in Vandal’s hands.

Aetius is the ultimate symbol of the empire’s cannibalisation. Hiring Huns, he promised subsidies and largesse (a credible offer based on his rank — he was a patrician by 434 — and knowledge of the empire) and in return they buffed Rome’s tarnished military standing. Supported by such a force, Aetius played the powerbroker facing down Burgundians on the Upper Rhine, Franks to the north, Goar’s army of Alans, the Bacaudae of Armorica under Tibatto, and the Visigoths.

By this point, the phallic direction tags of ethnic labels often drawn on Volkswanderung maps had receded in importance in comparison to the feminine, assimilative aspect of the land. Romans found themselves de-ethnicising (or should that be re-ethnicising) in the sense that they attached themselves to defenders of their locale (who were often Germanics) against the violent disorders of the Age. Sidonius, for instance, recounted how Romans fought alongside Germanics with their military standards.^[8] Prokopios even claimed these men were still identifiable thanks to aspects of their dress such as shoes.^[9]

At this point Britain seized the opportunity to request Roman reoccupation, which appeared a delightful prospect to fearing slavery or death at the hands of the Irish, Picts, Frisians, Saxons, Angles or Jutes on a daily basis.^[10] This was declined, however, just as a deputation from northern Spain had failed in a similar quest fifteen years earlier.

When Attila attacked, the game was up for Aetius. If the Roman general had lost at the Catalaunian Plains (451) he would have become superfluous to requirements in a Hunnic empire. Yet in victory, his Huns were obliterated as a domestic power base. Time was also called on imperial government in the West, which ended not so much with a bang but a whimper as — after Majorian’s murder (461) — the general Aegidius refused to recognise the puppet emperor Libius Severus or the Eastern emperor Leo I. Instead he staked out a territory around Soissons which he handed to his son Syagrius, a realm that only survived Odoacer’s transfer of Rome’s regalia to Zeno by a decade.^[11]

As imperial rule fled to Constantinople, the West entered a ghost story. Literally in the case of Germanus of Auxerre (d. 448) who sought shelter one night in a deserted villa only to find it was possessed.^[12] Its torch-carrying ghoul led the bishop through the ruins and told him that he lay with a friend — both executed criminals — enchained and unable to rest. The trauma only ended when Germanus found his skeleton and gave it a Christian burial.^[13] A neat metaphor for the post-Roman West.

More to the point, the post-Roman West was haunted by Rome. Take Germanus’ visit to Britain, for instance, the island that had fallen hardest and quickest from its imperial heyday.^[14] Still, Rome’s shadow fell on everything. Germanus was met on arrival by ecclesiastics (admittedly Pelagian but that was the reason for the cleric’s visit) from a typical late Roman Church as well as a man holding the rank of tribune. Indeed, the Gallo-Roman aristo’s mix of Romanitas and orthodoxy (the same thing in early medieval eyes) was so potent that it only took a few ‘alleluias’ from him to defeat the combined forces of the Picts and Saxons in battle.^[15]

Back on the continent — thanks to two-way Germanic-Roman assimilation — there were many Gallic aristocrats who worked for the Frankish king in parallel with their Germanic counterparts. But the cursus honorum no longer existed, or more accurately only the top five percent of jobs survived and these few posts were the preserve of the potentissimi. A fact that led young aristos to flee to the western outposts of the Eastern Roman empire: Ravenna and Rome to take up the posts of tribune or notary.

Those who remained resigned themselves to the Church or hoped to be appointed comes civitatis (count of the city) by the king. Sometimes a Merovingian king needed a figure who could lead more than a single city into war and so the late Roman military rank of dux (duke) was adopted for the leaders of these larger armies. Indeed, some counts (of Anjou, for example) and dukes (of Aquitaine, for instance) accrued such vast powers that they effectively later became independent rulers.

Despite these measures, the disparity between a centralised imperial and a decentralised feudal state was clear in matters of security. Bandits, pirates, and low-level anarchy was endemic in any part of the West that lacked the presence of a court or army. Into this breach stepped the bishop. Petitioning against rash massacres, ransoming prisoners, and providing famine relief — often facilitated by cathedral bakeries — these actions also handily proved to be very effective means of evangelism.

As courts took up military and diplomatic duties, so the cathedrals took on all the people-facing equivalents. Soon it was the cathedrals — under the patronage of successive bishops — that took centre stage rather than itinerant potentates and their households. Indeed, cathedrals operated like courts. Sat on a cathedra in the apse, the bishop faced his congregation gathered in the nave like a civil magistrate seated in an urban basilica.

The sole arbiter of non-violent power, the bishop had a monopoly on baptism (until rural baptisteries began to compete with this prerogative) and led their communities at the great feasts (Easter, Christmas, and Pentecost) when landowners were forbidden to celebrate at their villa chapels with estate clergy. In so doing, villages and towns with no primary identity slowly but surely came to identify themselves with their local city’s bishop and saint.

Originally, there were too few churches for dedications to matter, as well as a slender number of relics to go around. It was only in the early fifth century when urban churches began to multiply and relics began to migrate West that dedications took on a life of their own. Many of the oldest French cathedrals, for instance, were originally dedicated to St Stephen because his relics were discovered in Palestine (415) and taken to Gaul. Interestingly, Gaul’s earliest taste for martyrs appears to have been inflected by Milan, especially cults sponsored by Ambrose such as Agricola, Vitalis, Gervasius, and Protasius.

With these saints and martyrs, the ‘Dark Ages’ of historiography was lived as an Age of wonders by contemporaries. Often humble oratories or wooden martyria preserved the memories of these heroes until vitae were written and stone memoria/churches erected. These buildings preserved two main Roman architectural forms: the rotunda and basilica. Some parts of these complexes didn’t even need to be built. The baptistery at Marseille, the largest in France, for example, occupied the Temple of Diana. Indeed, in a world of wood and mud, churches and cathedrals were the only ones who could offer a glimpse of orthodox Romanitas, of heavenly permanence. Hence the gusto of the chronicler at Nantes, who enthused about how:

“Bishop Felix put in the cathedral marble altars, the like of which are not to be found even in Rome. He had made very many columns, with sculptured capitals of divers marbles… [and there were] mosaics of marvellous workmanship…”^[16]

Beauty aside, it was the saints who provided a strong cultural glue. Beneath frescos of these spiritual superstars, the Romans embraced the Germanics — who’d previously been chalked up as pagans without souls — as brothers in faith. In turn, the Germanics learned to venerate (often exotic) military saints who’d ultimately fought in armies opposed to their presence. And so together they prayed to an unlikely canon that included Marcellus of Tangier, Maximilian the Numidian, St Maurice, and the Theban Legion, etc.

More destructively, their new asabiyya (to borrow Ibn Khaldun’s terminology) was based around clubbing together to fight pagan armies, smash their sacrifices, seize their lands and women, topple temples and columns, and chop down sacred trees. And they did it in the name of a heaven that looked remarkably like a Roman court. Hence all the vitae in which angels drop down from the sky only to look and sound very much like Roman soldiers.

Rome’s heavenly intercession was constantly called upon. As the superpower had receded, unknown powers had taken advantage: magic had come to the fore. And its black form required the Church’s intervention. Sorcery’s efficacy was never denied. Only its source was critiqued as being biblically sanctioned or otherwise. And so the Church found itself at the heart of a magical economy that involved curse tablets, lost items, illnesses, runaway workers, promotions, legacies, tax issues etc. Indeed, uneducated clerics could often find themselves in hot water by solving these problems via bibliomancy and sortres quas sanctorum vocant (the sortes/lots of the saints) — the sort of grey areas that gave the top brass grey hairs.

Rome’s faith was also called upon to tackle the pagan cycle of the seasons. The sixth-century diocesan synod at Auxerre, for example, put a stop to folk dressing up as livestock at winter solstice, delivering new year’s gifts to sprites, having private ceremonies, keeping vows at thorn bushes, holly trees and springs, and carving wooden ex votos of human figures. Pagans were continually looking for loopholes in such legislation, however, hence the persistence of human figures made from wheat-flour cakes into the eighth century.

Just as the Church based its pattern of bishoprics on that of the Roman civitates (split into the pagi, rural districts, that gave pagans their name), so the pattern of its rural churches was based on the vici (towns usually based around a market or an industry like iron smelting or pottery) and villas of landowners. The ecclesiae diocesanae (churches around the vici) were the basis which extended the organisation of the urban church into the surrounding countryside. Bishops toured these dioceses, the units that made up their see, to ensure staff and doctrine were kept up to scratch. Interestingly, in roughly the same period the Greek word ‘parochial’ (parish) also came into use. Its original meaning was a community of Christians within a town under the charge of a bishop but it soon came to mean anybody under the charge of a particular priest in the modern sense.

Under such a set-up, wily magnates trying to usurp the Church’s benefits could be just as trying as pagan confrontation. Often the ratio between private estate and diocesan churches was as bad as three-to-one. And so Church councils, therefore, found it necessary to repeat that estate churches were not private property outside the diocesan structure. Indeed, the Church in Italy refuses churches their consecration unless their founders renounced all rights other than those of a typical layman. Similarly, in Spain, the council of Lerida (524) decreed that no church could be withdrawn from episcopal control.

Defining the parish boundaries became an essential job for those who wished to impose the next stage of Christianisation: tithes. A moral obligation in the sixth century, Pippin III made them compulsory in 765. In England, they became obligatory under Edmund (939-46). This caused a slight clash in ecclesiastical structures, however, as the older financial rights of the ecclesiae diocesanae (which had set up much of the rural pastoral care) rubbed against the new seigneurial parish churches. This often resulted in a division of funds (ratios dependent on politics) between the new parish church and what became the “Old Minister.”

Back on the geopolitical plane, the West’s regions had not totally collapsed in on themselves. In London, there was an emporium visited by every nation. In Paris, the fair of St Denis (founded in 634) welcomed merchants from all over the West. Gaul, as usual, operated as the middle man with a foot in both the Mediterranean and the insular worlds that spun off it.^[17] This was, after all, an Age in which a merchant in Bordeaux, for instance, could have a relic of St Sergios of Resafa at his house; a Syrian could become bishop of Paris; and Byzantine merchants of Orleans could celebrate the adventus of king Guntram into the city.^[18]

In the mid-sixth century, the eastern Roman emperor still appeared on the gold coinage of the West (including Visigothic Spain).^[19] In fact, some regions went even further. Marseille and the rest of Provence struck a pseudo or quasi imperial gold coinage (580-613) in the names of successive Eastern Roman emperors.^[20]

Indeed, this was still an Age when “senatorial” families existed, often in ways that belie the fact they are often presented as totally reliant on Germanic patronage. Take, for instance, the senatus Cantabriae, a little state controlled by Roman magnates in the Cantabrian mountains that wasn’t conquered until Leovigild’s reign 570-86.^[21] The very fact it had to be defeated shows just how threadbare the legal fiction was by which Germanic rulers were presented as allies of Rome with no sovereign rights.^[22]

Despite the continuities, however, long-distance trade came to a permanent end in several parts. Papyrus, for example, was native to Egypt and when Justinian II quarreled with Caliph Abd al-Malik, the latter issued a trade embargo and insisted on placing a Muslim religious formula on the authentication of each sheet. Pope John VII was therefore presumably unaware that one of his papal bulls opened with the statement that there was no God but Allah (in Arabic).^[23] The Merovingian chancery suffered no such blunders thanks mainly to a lack of supply. While papyrus use ended north of the Alps, however, appearances were kept up at both Ravenna and Rome until the eleventh century.

If a medieval Age has any historiographical legitimacy — was/is not the entire Western project “sub-Roman” i.e. realising Constantine the Great’s vision, in essence? — then its hinge should be placed squarely on the life of Dagobert I (629-39). Under him, regional powers were trounced and Paris took on its role as the capital of a centralised Frankish state. Indeed, he rebuilt the martyrial church of St Denis and established it as the burial place of Frankish kings, forming an axis of power that remains today.

That this new Paris-centric world was more insular than its predecessor is clear from the fact a place as irrelevant to Rome as Hibernia (Ireland) began to influence it. In 585, Columbanus landed near Nantes with twelve companions where he formed a powerful catalyst to the Church (in types of penance and the development of extramural monasteries) before crossing to Bobbio (Lombardy) where he founded a monastery. Missions like these — which would soon spur the English to evangelise half of Germany — showed that the Atlantic seaboard was no longer the Mediterranean’s backwater; that the peoples who bordered great Oceanus had the potential to be a cultural engine room.

The ‘West’ was no longer an agglomeration of faithless fools. As it moved into the seventh century, the landmass realised it had the potential to be a Kingdom for Christ (Christendom) that looked east to Constantinople for culture, south-east to Jerusalem for faith, and south to Rome for guidance. The Gallic hinterland and Atlantic fringes suddenly mattered: missionaries went on hobbit-y adventures in their hundreds to evangelise the pagenses of the wooded and remote regions that would one day become the cockpit of Europe.

Show Footnotes

¹ Ammianus Marcellinus XX, 4.
² Sadly, the ecclesiastical geography of France was swept away by the revolutionary government and its old names replaced by rather banal river names. The same logic doesn’t apply to England due to the Anglo-Saxon conquest, nor Spain thanks to the Islamic invasions.
³ Aurelius Victor, De Caesaribus XXX, 3.
⁴ Julian, Convivium 314b. Interestingly, S. Frere (Britannia [1987]) suggests that Probus may have created the litus Saxonicum.
⁵ Austonius, Mosella 456-7.
⁶ Letter of St Ambrose, P.L.16, 1036.
⁷ The Bacaudae appear in the late third century with the requisition in kind of the annona militaris, then disappear from our sources in the fourth century when monetary taxation and an effective western regime had been restored, only to reappear in the fifth century. Almost certainly a reversion to local leadership among peoples who believed imperial authority had failed them or required “illegal exactions,” they retreated to easily defensible places such as forests and woodlands. Romans tended to depict them as stupid provincials who sought to revert to type i.e. their older barbaric ways.
⁸ Sidonius, Panegyric on Majorian 211-56.
⁹ Prokopios, History of the Wars V, xii, 8-9.
¹⁰ This missal is known as “gemitus britannorum” (groan of the Britons) or “ter consuli” (thrice consul) which can only refer to Aetius.
¹¹ Soissons was lost to Clovis in 486.
¹² Constantius of Lyon, Vita Germani 10.
¹³ Similar hauntings may be why skeletons at places like Brislington villa (Somerset) were thrown down wells and buried beneath over six feet of rubble (see K. Branagan, The Romans in the Bristol Area [1969] 25).
¹⁴ Germanus appears in British history cum legend as a major opponent of Vortigern and a teacher of St Patrick. See N. Chadwick, Poetry and Letters in Early Christian Gaul (1955).
¹⁵ Constantius, Vita Germani, 17-18. M. E. Jones reckons the miraculous elements of Germanus’ victory formed a Christianising cloak to excuse the fact such a prominent cleric was also a great military leader (see “The historicity of the Alleluja Victory,” Albion, Vol. 18, No. 3 [1986]).
¹⁶ Chronicle of Nantes (ed. R. Merlet, 1896), quoted Pietri T.C.C.G. V Lugdunensis Tertia, 90.
¹⁷ Though this dynamic should not be over-emphasised. Insular import wares for instance arrived in Britain via the straits of Gibraltar and the Atlantic seaways, not southern Gaul. Despite these impressive connections, some of the geographic links vitae throw up are not what they seem. The life of St John the Almsgiver, for example, contains a story connecting trade between the Eastern Roman Empire and Britain. The original of this text written by Sophronios of Jerusalem in 633-7, however, is lost. Instead, we have a supplement added by Leontius of Neapolis containing an episode in which a captain clams to have sailed to Britain. This was conflated with two earlier vitae and produced a story in which an Alexandrian ship captain down on his luck is given money for a new boat by the patriarch John the Almsgiver. After two unsuccessful attempts he managed to sail to Britain with a cargo of corn (with the aid of a magic mist and a ghostly helmsman) and returns with the “British metal” lead that is miraculously turned into silver.
¹⁸ Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, VII, 3; X, 26; V, 1.
¹⁹ The exception was Theodebert I of Metz (534-48) who acquired so much gold in booty and subsidies that he managed to have a coinage struck in his own image. This breach of the imperial prerogative caused a grave scandal in Constantinople.
²⁰ Currency is the most obvious inheritance from this period. Late Roman coinage was based on the solidus and its third, the tremissis. While the Franks imitated the latter in the seventh century, its content had been increasingly diluted with silver. Around 670 this pale gold coinage was replaced with silver deniers. The English followed suit and c. 675 the pale gold English shillings were replaced by new silver coins called “pennies.” Ultimately, gold had been better for long distance trade but for a smaller world framed by places like Hamwic (Southampton), Lundenwic (London’s port in area of Covent Garden and Aldwich) and Frisia, silver did the job.
²¹ In its last stages the Roman empire seems to have egotiated tax settlements with leaders of communities. Subsequent Germanic kings appear to have had the same relations with these seniores, principes or reges and forced new settlements upon them through arms or simply conquered them. Apart from the subjugation of the senatus Cantabriae, there’s the case of Aepidus, senior loci in the Aregenses montes, who appears to have been forced into submission too.
²² Two of the most important early medieval missions from Rome were Gregory the Great’s mission to England and his work with Leander of Seville (d. 600) to convert the Goths to Catholicism. In many ways the pope’s relationship with England and Spain prefigured the relationship of the papacy with the Carolingians.
²³ J. K. Knight, End of Antiquity (2007) 168.

Henry Hopwood-Phillips is a Byzantine historian from London. Find his articles at: byzantineambassador.com, or his tweets: @byzantinepower.

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