Such as Gundila

This disposition still favored the rich, such as Gundila—those who had something left—over those who had been forcibly uprooted and fobbed off with a pittance. Someone who could keep a low profile, however, could very often succeed in hanging on to what he had owned, especially if he and his family had remained in a particular place for all the years since Odoacer and Theoderic entered Italy. A man like that who had been calling himself a Goth under Theoderic’s successors may just have forgotten to answer to this label any longer.

One windfall came to the church, naturally, when Arian church lands were confiscated and made over to the orthodox church. We know of surprisingly few such Arian churches—especially if one considered Theoderic’s Italy an Arian, Gothic kingdom—but they faded away quickly at this moment.

Power began to fragment. Provincial governors—there would be a dozen in Italy at one moment now—could be nominated locally by the traditional local luminaries, but also by bishops. Tax collection, moreover, now devolved away from Ravenna and fell to the hands of the governors. Troops were to be provided for gently, as it were, by purchases of food and goods at market prices, not by tax, confiscation, or forced sale; and it was stipulated that in the toe and heel of Italy’s boot, such purchases could be made only at the regular public markets. Civil law was to be restored, but in the absence of a strong central administration, this meant effectively the drumhead justice of local potentates, in some places generous and wise, in others doubtless extortionate and cruel.

On a bridge over the Anio River

The city of Rome was to be brought back to life. On a bridge over the Anio River not far outside the city’s walls, an inscription made in 56512 speaks of “the restoration of the liberty of the city of Rome and the whole of Italy.” When Boethius was executed for hoping for “liberty for Rome,” he could scarcely have had this in mind. Free grain for the citizenry and subsidies for the fine professors of the liberal arts were ensured at Rome, as well as funds for the repair of public buildings and aqueducts. We know that the old schools in which those professors taught were on their last legs by now. Of other restorations, there is not much evidence customized tours balkan.

Ravenna told a different story. There, an infusion of energy and subsidy from the east kept the city’s golden age alive a little longer. Theoderic’s capital had seen art and architecture of substance and value, but it was now Bishop Maximian, placed in power in the church there under Belisarius in 546 and remaining until 556, who became the senior churchman in Italy in the absence of Vigilius and brought the new capital to architectural glory. Maximian was the first bishop of Ravenna to be called archbishop, and his rise is a sign of Constantinople’s willingness to turn away from the city of Rome, which was socially messy, indefensible, and (from Constantinople) hard to reach. Ambitious building had continued past Theoderic’s death, and his tomb and the great church of San Apollinare Nuovo reflect the wealth and very Roman taste and style of that generation. We wish Theoderic’s palace, an elaboration of what he found on arrival, had survived as more than a faint rumor. A banker, Julian, dedicated a new church to Saint Michael the archangel and finished it before Maximian became bishop.

Gervase and Protase

At the same time, a greater church had been abuilding from 526, dedicated to Saint Vitale, a bogus patron of the local church. Vitale was the father of saints Gervase and Protase, who had been martyred under the last of the bad emperors before Constantine. Their bodies had been conveniently discovered by Saint Ambrose in the 380s and played a dramatic role in solidifying the authority of the Nicene bishop in Milan when Arian forces seemed destined to prevail.13 According to the legend in Ravenna, all three had been martyred on the site there where the church in honor of the father would be built. The astonishing church, still intact and richly adorned with famous mosaics continuing the tradition that had flourished under Theoderic, was completed and dedicated on May 17, 548, when the empress Theodora lay dying in Constantinople. Anyone who thinks he knows what Theodora and Justinian looked like draws his ideas from the mosaic procession here, which shows them and their retinues at the moment of ritual entrance to a church they never saw. Maximian finished a second new church in Ravenna, San Apollinare in Classe, in 549, after a visit to Constantinople.

Then funding slacked off, and Ravenna settled into its destiny as a provincial capital. No emperor ever set foot there again.

Separate reckoning flourished in imperial offices

Meanwhile, a separate reckoning flourished in imperial offices, the so- called indiction, which is effectively the name for a tax year on a fifteen- year cycle. Hence men would speak of the “first indiction” or “the twelfth indiction” and the first would follow again the year after the fifteenth. This system had begun under the reforming emperor Diocletian in 297 and had run for almost fifteen full cycles when our story begins. The practice reminds us that for many purposes, even something so inefficient was serviceable. Periods longer than fifteen years didn’t come to mind very often, not as requiring exact dating, but the tax man came every year and defined economic reality for many. People did not much talk about how old they were until their relatives needed to write their age on the tombstone—and often not even then. The people in this story lived in the bright light of the present, with far less sense of an accurately accounted history—short or long—than even poorly educated moderns have.

Rome in 500: Looking Backward

Rome didn’t see many emperors in the fifth century. Nero’s death let fall a diadem, and in the year 69 CE, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and finally Vespasian grasped at it. Tacitus drily observed that the success of such provincial generals revealed the “secret of empire”—that emperors could be created somewhere other than at Rome. From Augustus to Nero, Rome had been the only obvious dwelling for an imperator, and Tiberius’s self-exile to Capri brought scorn and salacious gossip about what he was up to while swimming with slave boys. After 69, emperors spent more and more time with their armies and on the frontiers. Hadrian in the early second century and the Severan emperors around 200 were away almost as much as they were home. The succession of disasters during the third century had kept emperors far from the capital, fighting each other and managing the frontiers. After Diocletian imposed his military order, he and his successors established a string of imperial cities that followed the frontier: Trier to survey the Rhine; Milan, Aquileia, and Sirmium (modern Sremska Mitrovica on the Save River in Serbia) to watch the Danube without abandoning the Rhine; Constantinople between the Balkans and the eastern provinces; and Antioch in Syria.

Rome was a nice place to visit, but a military backwater. Even many successful emperors never saw it during their reigns. Constantinople, on the other hand, was a palace town, almost constantly aware of the presence of an emperor after Theodosius’s death in 395. The military cities in the west lost their prestige when in 402 the emperor Honorius retreated to the swamp-protected Italian city of Ravenna, with its Adriatic port offering ready sea communication to Constantinople. He and his brother Arcadius in Constantinople stood at the head of a long line of emperors who were mostly figureheads, dwelling in the capital and delegating military leadership to the able.

Through all this, Rome’s emperors cosseted and cared for the city when they had time enough to pay it attention, but dramatic losses befell the city as well. The senate still met, traditional offices were filled, and the old families clung to wealth and position, but their numbers were greatly diminished. By the sixth century, there may have been only a very few dozen active senators, linked together in fewer than a dozen families. The pedigrees by which these people claimed “ancient nobility” were often sketchy as well, for Constantine’s revolution and the army he built two centuries earlier produced many rough-bred military husbands willing to marry into distinguished but impoverished families grateful for the protection and sometimes ill-gotten wealth of their new sons.1 As long as these old families were certain of their prerogatives, they were content to surrender their power to the new men. The city needed the subsidies rich families could provide and clung as well to its ancient self-esteem, but power was another matter stoletov bulgaria tours.

And Rome’s numbers dwindled. The city achieved a population of 1 million or so in the second century, but an estimate by Richard Krautheimer, a scholar who knew that late antique city as no other, brought it down to 800,000 by 400, when Constantinople and Ravenna eclipsed Rome’s real function as a capital. Rome lost half of that in the next fifty years, marked by Alaric’s brief sack of the city in 410, and it lost another half or three- quarters by the late 400s, when the Vandal raid of 455 was only the worst of a half century of indignities. There may have been only 100,000 or so people left by 500. The fortunate followed power to other capitals, while others died, failed to reproduce, or fled to the countryside.