As I have discussed before, the term "fall of the Roman Empire" is a misnomer. No one thought the Roman Empire had fallen until close to a thousand years after it had supposedly done so. There were still Roman emperors (in Constantinople and, in the west after 800, in Germany), Roman cities, Roman religion (Christianity), Roman language, Roman roads, Roman monuments, and so on.
The seat of Empire had shifted from Rome to Constantinople (in Byzantium) in the fourth century, under the emperor Constantine (guess how Constantinople got its name), so in many ways you could say the Empire did not fall until 1453, with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. (It was at this point that the church of Hagia Sophia, seen below, became a mosque.) From the fourth century to the late fifth, there were sometimes two emperors, one in Constantinople and one in Rome, until the last separate western one was assassinated at the orders of the Byzantine one.
And yet a whole lot indubitably changed during the "long" sixth century, from the late fifth century to the early seventh century. This is one of the least well documented periods of the history of western Europe in the last two millennia, which is why British scholars have sometimes called it the Dark Ages. But this term has unfortunate negative undertones (you mean the sun never came up?) which is why the term Late Antiquity is now mostly used instead for the fifth through seventh centuries. (For one thing, the term recognizes that the Empire of antiquity was still around.)
The "long" sixth century is bracketed by the disappearance of separate Roman emperors in the West after the 470s or so, although there continued of course to be Byzantine Roman emperors who sometimes visited the West, like Justinian, and by the rise and spread of Islam in the first half of the seventh century, which radically changed the culture of the Mediterranean, which had been known as a "Roman lake."
The sixth century was also an awful time in many ways, marked by the first outbreak of the Black Death, and by several very cold years of disastrous harvests, probably caused by a volcanic eruption. The pandemic and breakdown of trade and communication meant that cities, which had been central to Roman civilization, radically shrank. After all, people could recognize that infection was a lot higher in a crowded city even without knowing about bacteria, and a city can't survive if the countryside isn't producing enough surplus food to sell to city-dwellers.
The cities persisted, however, as religious and governmental centers, even if with much smaller populations. In some old Roman cities, like Nîmes, people retreated inside the amphitheater, treating its outer walls like the new city walls. The city of Rome itself shrank into a new, smaller area with its own walls, leaving the area between the old and new walls, that had once had a large population, dotted with orchards, villas, and monasteries.
Constantinople had the same problems as the West with disease and famine, and orders stopped coming from Byzantium. But a lot of the governmental structures stayed in place. As provincial governors stopped ruling cities, bishops took over the role. New kingdoms, such as those of the Franks in what is now France and the Visigoths in what is now Spain, became established, using Roman laws and Roman taxation systems as they replaced Roman regional administrators. They dropped their original Germanic languages like hot potatoes in favor of Latin. Urban populations continued to be literate, writing on papyrus, with city archives recording important events in people's lives.
The Franks, Visigoths, and many other so-called Germanic people were once described as invaders, destroying Roman civilization, but in fact they had been neighbors to the Empire for several centuries, traded with them, and were often recruited into the Roman armies. The only part of the Empire where Germanic people could be said to have radically changed the culture was what was now England, with the arrival of the Angles and Saxons.
Elsewhere the new arrivals clearly wanted to be Roman, adopting the culture as well as the language. A lot of the new arrivals kept their traditional names, however. Yet the same family might include a Theoderic, who served the king as a regional lord (a count), and an Anthony, who entered the church. The first was a "Germanic" name, the second a "Roman" name, indicating sons destined for different functions.
In the cities, people went to church, scribes kept records, and merchants sold goods, some of which continued to come from some distance away in spite of all the trade disruptions. Kings and counts went to war with each other and collected booty. In the countryside, people farmed, tended vines, and raised their animals. One crucial sixth-century development was the end of agricultural slavery, as the legions were no longer bringing home huge numbers of people to be worked to death, then replaced. Peasants became serfs instead of slaves, legally unfree but with their own families, houses, and plots of land. People of whatever status recognized the need to work together in dangerous times.
A good book about the movement of so-called Germanic peoples into the Roman Empire, refuting the notion that they somehow destroyed it, is by Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
© C. Dale Brittain 2023
For more on Rome and the Middle Ages, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.
