- ArmedZombie
- Jun 6, 2004
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My first undergraduate class on Late Antiquity, so way before the specialized material or seminars or anything, the professor introduced it by saying that the Völkerwanderung was just like the Syrian refugees, and that the Muslims in Europe, like the Goths, would turn on their benevolent hosts for no reason (and yes, this is how he later taught the battle of Adrianople too). That was day one, and was like that for the whole class. He mentioned Islam as the destabilizing force in Late Antiquity in the first lecture, despite... well more stuff than I can get to here, but Greg Fisher has written some really cool stuff on that. In terms of presenting periodization to the class... mentioning Islam before the Crisis of the Third Century is pathological.
What's crazy is this professor had worked with Umberto Eco, Peter Brown and Avril Cameron, the later two basically developed the whole field of Late Antiquity specifically because the barbarians at the gates model was the result of Gibbon's anxieties about Britain becoming an empire (and ruling over racially inferior asiatics) for the "Roman" perspective and sentimental 19th century German nationalism for the "Barbarian" perspective. It's not a coincidence that the best academic in the field, with respect to Brown and Cameron, is Chris Wickham who is a materialist historian with a Marxist bent. His prose is drier and less engaging than Eric Hobsbawm's, unfortunately, but when you read his economic and social histories - and all of his books are at least based on a socio-economic understanding - in my opinion, there's no other way to understand 300-1000. The reason social history and materialist economic history have such strong explanatory power is basically because Marx was right. Which means, basically, that professor I mentioned was so mad about Muslims that it overrode his entire training and career.
At the time Marx was writing, many of the key sites in the discipline hadn't been excavated, hell Ravenna had barely received a study, many texts were untranslated or forgotten, but still Marx's explanation matches the evidence we uncover today. At any conference on Late Antiquity, even if people don't refer to Marx, or subscribe to his theory, or even know much about it, you'll find that the evidence presented conforms to Marx's understanding. That's pretty loving cool, and significant. There are some aristocratic British pop historians trying to push counter-revisionism, and basically it works because the general history paperback buying public thinks that's a better story, but I think Late Antiquity came into its own and secured its place as a discipline when a materialist approach became front and centre - it's through that lens, looking at fibulae, coins, even inscriptions, that you realize "Roman" and "Barbarian" were not at all bound by the geographical definitions and neat borders the old school subscribed to (this is called Frontier Theory and is also very cool), but that the same is true of Arabs, Bulgars, Berbers and many other peoples as well.
The reason is that nationality, race, even religion, took on concrete meanings in the Enlightenment and are central to liberalism and how liberals see the polity.They then project that backwards. That's why I want to blow a gasket at people milking university administrators, the media and publishers by talking about "People of Colour in Antiquity", "Blackness in the Roman Empire". They didn't see it in those terms and you're not learning or explaining anything if you try to frame it in those terms. Quite literally, you're ignoring everything we know about their lived experience to talk about Rome as if it was 21st century America, exactly what we criticize Old White Men for doing in the 19th and 20th centuries. To link it to that news item a while back, even if you think Cleopatra VII Ptolemy was "Black" however you want to define that - but let's be real, in terms of race as understood in contemporary America (she wasn't) - neither she, nor anyone around her would have seen her or interacted with her in those terms. Which means it has no explanatory value.
I could talk about this all day. One thing I'll say, you will often see liberals in other fields dismiss materialist approaches, even get angry, and say "are you saying people didn't believe in things?!" - particularly when you talk about syncretism, Christianization, "Romanitas". It's one thing that is almost guaranteed to come up when you mention it to people who trained in different fields - for example most people I work with have degrees in non-History fields or Canadian History or Military History.
Explaining how people became Christian, does not mean they did not believe in Christianity. In fact, it confirms that they did, by going further to explain how they did. People live their beliefs, that's what you have study. Conversion is an act, a process, it's felt, it's lived. This is one of those things where liberals just don't get it and I can never understand why. It doesn't matter if local folklore passed into their beliefs they still believed. It doesn't matter if the shrine they travelled hundreds of kilometres through the desert to visit was dedicated to Isis before Saint Anthony, they still went there. It doesn't even matter if rising through the ranks of the Roman Army or at court required them to convert, because their conversions were still sincere. I'll put this to the thread: is this because liberals believe beliefs (lol) must be self-contained and perfect or something?
Belief is what you do, that's why it defines who you are. It's active. Historians believe one of the single greatest contributors to Islam was that it brought stability to a region that had seen over a hundred years of unspeakable civil war and sectarian violence over the nature of Christ. The reason the shahada was and is so central to Islam is that it provided a simple, unifying belief, in a region where Icons, the nature of Christ, the substance of Christ, the veneration of saints and the observance of feast days had all led to riots and open warfare. Nobody had been able to work out a simple belief that, for example, "There is no god but God, and Jesus Christ is the Son of God". They had fought about the Trinity, they had fought about the nature of the Holy Spirit, they had fought about Jesus being God, an apparition of God, an aspect of God, ascending to Godhood (I will be here all day trying to list them all). It's not that Islam "put people to the sword", which is what right wing people have been talking about since 2001 and is particularly popular with the history dilettante alt-right. No, the beliefs were adapted, because people were already being put to the sword, had been for hundreds of years, and Islam provided a way to focus on plowshares instead.
That's an infinitely more compelling pitch to people than the fine points of theology, and that material reality, that's where belief lives.
In Africa, pretty much everyone welcomed the Arabs as mediators because there had been a four hundred year civil war between "Orthodox" Christians and Donatists, even after Constantine travelled there to settle it, and even after the "Barbarian" Arian Christian Vandals were in charge. What caused this bloodletting? During the Great Persecution of Diocletian in the 300's, clergy were threatened to surrender Holy books on pain of death. It was agreed upon that the holy office of those who had done so rather than accepting martyrdom, regrettably, was invalid and so any priests ordained by them were invalid also, as Apostolic Succession was broken by apostasy and/or excommunication. That was generally not a problem, and was resolved within a few decades, it was just a matter of finding church records (or forging them...) to see who had consecrated who, and then either giving them the option to be ordained under Catholic auspices or dismissed.
This is kinda-sorta how Anglican priests and bishops can become Catholics even if their Apostolic succession was broken by those who submitted to Henry VIII. Both issues are way more complicated than I'm explaining and involve church records, but what historians like Wickham have identified is that, like the Investiture Controversy that tore the Church apart in religious violence in the Early Middle Ages, this was really about politics. Most of the wheeling and dealing involved power and wealth, rather than belief per se, or the legalistic technicalities dug up in church records. When records were produced showing that the ordination of the person who ordained you was illegitimate because the person who ordained them had surrendered the Gospel to the persecutors - and therefore yours was too - that was about power.
That's what being a bishop was in Roman Africa, which had more Bishops than any other Roman province. Bishops there were the most powerful members of the community by far, because the Roman Army was barely present, there were no Federated Chieftains (until the Vandals showed up), and for reasons I don't have the word count to get into, the estates held by bishops were often larger and more productive than the Latifundia. That meant they were rich and powerful, and that explains their behaviour and the centuries of civil war over control of the bishoprics. Why are historians so confident in this?
I mentioned earlier that everyone agreed that handing Holy books over to the Persecutors could only be forgiven by God. However, the Donatists further believed that anyone who handed over books they pretended were the Holy Gospels to the ignorant Persecutors had also sinned gravely. Because of the wealth and power of the Church in Africa, the bishops often came from the upper class (like St. Augustine of Hippo), which means they also read for pleasure like other Roman aristocrats and had large collections of books on philosophy, poetry, whatever.
Their collecting is part of the reason collection of the Great Library of Alexandria had actually been dispersed centuries before it burned. When it was a pagan temple of Sarapis, the pagan priesthood oversaw the books (actually scrolls), and considered the Platonist (?) works near-holy texts, or whatever pagan nonsense and superstition. They kept the collection together and curated it. When Christians took over possession, they saw them as library books to be leant out, sold or donated, like any others. The knowledge wasn't "lost or destroyed" (another fixation of liberals I don't understand), it was distributed.
Anyway, they handed over those books. The pagans burned them and went home. Now, the first thing social historians say, is that in these narratives we might actually be seeing deals being made. The pagans could read, most of them had an idea of what Christian beliefs were by 300, even what Christian texts looked like. It's quite possible that what we're seeing is closer to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjbPi00k_ME
because, remember, the bishops were rich and powerful aristocrats at the top of local networks of power. So there's an interplay between the local power, the bishops, and the representatives of the distant state, the Persecutors. To reiterate the part liberals have a hard time with, that doesn't mean both parties' beliefs weren't sincere.
They were, but beliefs are lived and what we see here is that the Persecution was the state asserting control over local networks of power that were outside their control. When Constantine later converted, and in his case there really is serious debate over to what degree and when, but regardless, when he converted, that was the Roman State making a deal to integrate the Church instead of trying to dominate it. Not everyone who persecuted was evil and believed all of the pagan fairy tales with all their heart, not everyone who converted was good and virtuous and became a Christian in a way we understand it, with complete orthodox beliefs or whatever. But, in both instances, people are trying to navigate social transformations.
Back in Africa, even after the Christians triumphed (and, again, liberals get tripped up because this was not immediate, universal, or imparted pure, correct beliefs in everyone. That does not make Christianization less real as they lived it), there was trouble. This might come as a surprise (and does to liberals) because there was a Christian/"Christian" Emperor not just calling the great Church Council of Nicaea - even attending - and who personally traveled to Africa to resolve the Donatist controversy.
The reason nobody could resolve it, not the renewed empire under Constantine, not the Vandals, nobody until the coming of Islam with the Arabs, is because there was no distinction between religion and politics - just like belief and material conditions were often the same thing. Religion - particularly what we call heresy - was a sectarian affiliation, which meant it was also political, also economic, and grounded not in belief about the nature of the trinity or, in this case, handing over fake books, but in material conditions. Heresies almost always, were not some wacky thing some group started believing in and that's why they ended up in conflict with society. Heresy was how groups in conflict with the dominant group organized to act in their material interest - while, for the tenth time, also believing it too. Liberals say, but I suspect lol don't have a felt belief, that politics is collective decision making and intergroup conflict over the allocation of resources. That's what religion was.
From primary sources, records of last names, grave stones etc. the Donatists were not just random people who believed handing over books was bad, but competing families within the Province of Africa. They had been kept out of power, and so wealth, by other families that monopolized power. Some scholars further see this as an urban-rural divide, or regional, or "ethnic" but the gist is that, whatever the fault line, there were competing coalitions comprised of what I suppose in Marxist theory were networks of aristocrats and peasants. Clientela was the distinctive relationship in Roman society between the patronus and their cliens, and it was the building block of, well I guess what we would call politics, coordinating activity to determine the allocation of resources within society. You couldn't be a plucky Mayor Pete meritocrat and run for office back then. If your family was perpetually frustrated by the Old Boys club, there's no way to move up.
Remember, in the Province of Africa, the Old Boys are the bishops, so it's not a holy office removed from this, it's the single most important position for steering patronage, forging alliances over long distances, interacting with the central state (and so having Imperial sanction to gently caress over your rivals). If you have a bishop in your family, or are friends with a bishops, it's not a nice, quaint thing. You don't say in hushed tones "it's a shame he's in the closet." "I know! Isn't it strange he went into the priesthood after Georgetown?". No, it's like having an in with Mayor Daly, or Tammany, or, sometimes, the Mafia. It's like having an uncle who's a senator (US senator I mean), or a general in the Army.
So, as the entire structure of Roman society recovers from the Crisis of the Third Century, reorganizes with a new form of Imperial government, dual power with the Church, these huge mix ups, people are optimistic because there's a new social contract being negotiated. And part of a new social contract being negotiated, is the chance for people to cut the right deals and move up in the world. So, they say that their enemies, for obscure religious reasons, should not be in positions of power in local society. That's the conflict. It runs for 600 years, but now, I hope, you can understand why - because there was a world to be won. Donatism provided the ideology, the reason they could wage war within society - nobody likes thinking of themselves as antisocial, right, everybody needs a cause - and of course they did believe it was bad to hand over holy books. Or not holy books. Or, listen, the bishop's family killed your uncle in the decades-long, preexisting vendetta, and isn't that as bad as handing over holy texts? Well, if he killed your uncle, he probably did that too, so better write a letter to the Emperor denouncing him.
And of course the other group is doing the same thing. They become "Orthodox", which is to say the Church adopts the position that handing over fake books is okay, because they are the ones who meet with the Emperor when he comes to Africa. Liberals like to say this is a gotcha - Constantine was a dumb, formerly* pagan soldier, why was he deciding Christian doctrine? "By their own logic XYZ, therefore it is irrational that the Church and Empire supported these people. How could you believe in an irrational religion or belong to an irrational church after learning this?" This is the kind of point missing I mean. It was not, strictly speaking, about doctrine, it was about power. Constantine was the ultimate authority, in terms of state violence, legitimacy, whatever. It did not matter if he was a religious scholar and his ruling did not have to be theologically sound. That doesn't make it less true. See? Who was a heretic and who was orthodox broke down just like Guelph and Ghibellines, the supporters of the Emperor and Pope, in the centuries long civil wars in Italy 500 years later. In both instances, yes the law says this, canon law says that, but these are political conflicts about the allocation of resources.
How did Islam resolve this conflict? They literally changed the ownership of the means of production, with new arrangements of fields and estates, and everybody was Muslim, which meant they were equal - or they were equally not-Muslim. Each sect usually had a clergyman at court, unless one heresy really did believe something far out there and at odds with Islam - they didn't count as People of the Book. Usually Muslim rule sucked the air out of religious conflict, nearly straight away. In Arabia, Egypt, Africa, Syria - hundreds of years of sectarian bloodshed ended in decades. That was because in addition to the above, the Muslims had the required state capacity for violence to keep the peace.
Which is to say, they came to an Africa with a two-way civil war between factions of the aristocracy and their supporters, overseen by a third faction - which was Romanized by then, but - because culture also has material causes - insisted on make-believe Germanic pretensions to underwrite the legitimacy of their exclusive control over all of the aristocratic offices - and the resources those steered - like Manchu Bannermen in Qing China. The Arabs created new social order where the (minuscule) number of Arabs were on top, but there was a new balance between the three other groups, and while they couldn't contest the privileged place of the new Muslim ruling class, they either benefited materially or had security in keeping what they had. Islam ended the conflict not by barbarously converting everyone (there are still Christians throughout the Roman World btw) but by creating a new social order people benefitted from and had a sense of security in. Otherwise a few hundred Arabs could not have ruled over tens of thousands - and this is true everywhere. (I know Mughal India did things differently Tankbuster, don't @ me on this)
You have to see this is materialist terms, for it to make sense. To relate to the discussion above about Islam, materialist historians see Constantine's conversion as a similar sort of deal. Not the same one the Arabs offered first the blood-soaked and exhausted clans of Arabia, then ... everyone else, but a deal nonetheless. The template everywhere is that the King converts and then everybody else does too - Boris I, Stephen I, Wenceslas, Clovis, Constantine. It was a 18th and 19th century preoccupation that they did this with brutality, the mass conversions weren't sincere etc. As you might guess, liberals say the same thing now. Here's the thing "L'État, c'est moi". In a monarchy, the ruler converting to a new religion is the opening of a new social contract. People who want to align with the monarch sign on, people who were already in a state of rebellion or were otherwise contesting state authority, don't. The holdouts didn't believe in Odin, Serapis, Sol Invictus more than everyone else, they rejected the "deal" offered by religious conversion because they were in conflict to one degree or another. There are more than a few cases where the first Christian King is martyred, that's what this is. People making grabs for power. So, Constantine's conversion was negotiating a new Rome.
The Church provided an ideology and legitimacy with a strong social base, which the Roman State desperately needed. Not only had the Empire nearly collapsed in the Crisis of the Third Century, felt belief in it (again, there's a lot to be said here) had almost been totally lost in the chaos. To whatever extent people had believed in the official Imperial Cult, after Quintillus reined for 17 days before being murdered, one of perhaps ten or more emperors to be killed and usurped in your lifetime, could you believe in the Emperor in a way that made you feel like you belonged to a community, that the Emperor was a stabilizing force that offered you protection? No.
You might turn to the local Roman general and see his immediate ability to protect you as more important than any sacred office of Emperor, any sacred Empire, and, in some regions, even than being "Roman". That's how empires break up. The Empire doesn't give you a reason to feel allegiance to it, so you turn to people who - in clear materialist, social and economic terms, offer you something - and so you believe in them instead. This is why Constantine needed the Church, and so, you could say in very practical terms he found God. Again, liberals don't like this, but belief is what belief does. He unified the Church, gave it wealth and power it had never had before, gave the Church the ability to save countless souls, I mean, there's a reason he was sainted. The people who lived then could understand how he was so saintly he must have had a divine apparition at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (or dream the night before, which is how pagan gods sent messages. You see, people believed what fit in their existing belief structure).
He was also a terrible person. He killed his son, and that's like one of a dozen equally absolutely awful things. He does not seem to have had particularly Christian personal attributes. He may have continued sacrificing to pagan gods, or maybe just Sol Invictus. He was also involved in Mithraism, the cult of the Roman Army (which was syncretic with Sol Invictus anyway). When he described the Christian God and Jesus, he did not always formulate the orthodox creed. Sometimes it sounded barely Christian, other times, not at all. In other words, it's not clear exactly how much he understood or believed in Christianity, and it is clear he certainly did not live in emulation of Christ and the apostles. So, how on earth could people see him as saintly?
Because his actions unified the Church behind a coherent belief, even if he himself did not believe it (coherently or otherwise). Which is to say, it was his use of power. It might be this is what liberals avoid like the plague. He used power to do good, even if he himself was an awful guy. He fundamentally changed the socio-economic position of the Church, incorporated it into the state in a way that changed Rome forever, and restored the legitimacy of the Roman Empire. This is my final point.
Romans did not feel about Roman history the way we do. They did not see the Augustinian Age as a Golden Age or Marcus Aurelius as particularly important. Virtuous, in the same way as other Virtuous Pagans. A Good Emperor, like the other Good Emperors. They did not see their own time as being worse. They did not perceive decline and fall. In fact, and this is the remarkable thing about the primary sources, they were optimistic in a way that's almost impossible to express. Why?
Because to them, the old empire not only had gone away but should have gone away. They had a different relationship to the past, for one thing. It hadn't been put up on a pinnacle by all of those Enlightenment people. Our "Rome" was not their Rome. There were other cities that were more important. The character of the empire, religiously, culturally, as a polity - how people felt about it and how they believed in it - that had changed. They did not care about the pagan alter in the Senate (for a while they did, along with dozens of other pagan sites, because they were important politically, not religiously. To them, there was no real conflict) or the other symbols and beliefs that undergirded the ideology of previous centuries. It's like when Americans go to London and it feels quant, outdated, like a museum more than a city. On top of that, in real, material, ways, the world had changed, the socio-economic system had changed, and so to them, the new, Christian Empire was something to be incredibly excited about.
When the Imperial court moved to Constantinople, Nicomedia, Sirmium, Milan, Trier, and Ravenna, people were not sad that the city of Rome was being abandoned. First, the pagan senatorial families lost their prominence, and as a result ambitious Christians could now actually move up in Roman society. Think of this like when Brazil or Burma moved their capitals and new cities sprung up over night. If people loved Rio, why were they so eager to move to Brasilia? If they loved Rome, why move to Milan or Ravenna?
Because it offered hope (lol and change). It was an age of optimism. Why would they mourn the old system that boxed them out when, rather than being considered provincial because their family had not been from Rome a thousand years earlier (509 BC - 500 AD), they could actually improve their material conditions in the new court in the new city? Do you see what I mean? New cities were exciting. The court was closer to where most people actually lived. Instead of being at crossroad of the old Etruscan and Greek roads of Italy, the new capitals were astride lines of communication of the Mediterranean-spanning empire, and so government was more responsive.
Play around with ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World
to see this in the terms that mattered to people then, not in the Enlightenment. Their material conditions improved. Why the gently caress would they see that as "decline and fall"?
Ravenna meets their material needs, Rome does not. Therefore the capital moving to Ravenna makes them feel like the Empire is improving, not declining. And the same goes down through all of these changes. When Theodoric rides to Ravenna, people are not running around terrified by "barbarians" because, for all of the reasons listed above, this arrangement better meets their material needs, and so is legitimized. They believe the Ostrogothic Kingdom is the Second Rome because Theodoric does poo poo for them, they're safe, the economy is good, their needs are met. Material conditions. Also, for those same reasons, Theodoric acts like a model Roman. You might even consider Ostrogothic Ravenna the site of the first Renaissance, the first blooming of Roman-inspired culture, after Roman rule. People were loving stoked by all of the positive changes "barbarian" rule brought, people talked about Theodoric as a good king for hundreds of years afterwards.
Liberals never understand this poo poo I swear to God.
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Nov 3, 2022 23:47
