The Sword of Attila (33 page)

The period of the late Roman Empire in the West refers to the century and a half following these emperors and up to the fall of the last western emperor in
AD
476. The first half of this period was a time of revived prosperity and security as the reforms of Diocletian and Constantine took positive effect. A visitor to Rome would have seen a city grander than it ever had been before, with magnificent new basilicas, including St Peter's. But the second half was another matter altogether. No amount of strategic flexibility, treaties and concessions could contain the barbarian threat from the Rhine and the Danube frontiers, and a rupture in the fabric of empire was inevitable. In
AD
376 at the Battle of Adrianople a combined eastern and western Roman army was defeated by the Goths, who then moved inexorably forward through Greece and Italy until they sacked Rome itself – a devastating psychological blow from which the West never truly recovered. Despite able commanders, the Roman army was hamstrung by weak emperors more concerned with deploying the army to bolster their own security than using it to defend the frontiers. Other barbarian armies followed the Goths, from Vandals to Saxons, the former marching through Gaul and Spain and the latter forcing the final Roman withdrawal from Britain. The stage was set for the extraordinary historical backdrop to this novel, a story of tragedy and inevitability but also of courage and military prowess against the odds that puts the achievements of the late Roman army alongside those of its illustrious forebears of earlier centuries.

By the decade beginning in
AD
430, the time of the opening of this novel, Rome was a changing place. A significant proportion of the administrative classes now had some barbarian ancestry, a result of pacified Germanic chieftains sending their sons to Italy to be educated, Germanic mercenaries in the army rising to high rank, and intermarriage. Although people were living in more fear than ever of barbarian invasion, the ethnic distinction between Roman and barbarian was becoming blurred. Stilicho and Flavius Aetius, the two most able Roman military commanders of the fifth century
AD
, were respectively of Vandal and Goth ancestry, and many among the common soldiery had ancestors who had been mortal enemies of Rome in the forests beyond the Rhine and the Danube only a few generations before.

Significant changes in lifestyle and material culture were also taking place. Scrolls were being replaced by codices – books as we know them today; togas were being discarded in favour of trousers and tunics. The old monetary system based around the silver
denarius
had been replaced by a new gold standard in the form of the
solidus,
with silver and base-metal coinage no longer having such widespread acceptance as a result of debasement and economic instability. The city of Rome, no longer the capital of the empire, was changing in appearance too. At the time of my first novel, set in the second century
BC
, the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the imperial palaces had yet to be built; by the fifth century
AD
they were already monuments of the past, the last gladiatorial display in the Colosseum having taken place in
AD
386 and the palaces now being secondary to the new imperial capitals at Constantinople in the East and Milan and Ravenna in the West. The buildings that were to survive – temples and law courts and amphitheatres – often did so only because they had been converted to places of Christian worship. The fifth century thus saw the beginnings of a new order, but it was one that was to come crashing down before the world that we would recognize as medieval really took hold; and behind that descent into darkness lay one barbarian warlord more than any other, the fearful figure of Attila the Hun.

Administration of Empire

The first emperors liked to claim that they were merely caretakers of the Republic, that the title
princeps
was just another version of the old emergency title
dictator
assumed by Julius Caesar to tide the Republic through the civil wars. This of course was a fiction; after Augustus, ancient Rome was never again a republic. But the main administrative institutions of the Republic did survive, particularly the Senate, and the devolved form of provincial management established in the late Republic provided a blueprint for the empire. The success of this system in the new provinces depended on empowering the native elite – encouraging them to take up administrative roles in the towns and to see the attractions of Romanization. If we think of the great monuments around the Roman Empire, of the amphitheatres and aqueducts and basilicas, few were actually ordered and funded from Rome; many were the result of competitive munificence among the Romanized native aristocracy, men keen to bolster their prestige and secure election to office. In a province such as Britain the majority of people living a Roman lifestyle were natives, with retired soldiers making up the only sizeable immigrant population, one integrated through marriage – and those veterans were not always Romans themselves or even from Italy. This system proved an effective means of maintaining peace and prosperity in the provinces, encouraging enough wealth generation to sustain a high rate of tax and providing the basis for its collection through the development of towns and road networks.

The circumstances that prompted the emperor Diocletian's reforms were a massive breakdown in this administrative system during the third century
AD –
a period that saw more than thirty emperors in as many years, as well as increased barbarian pressure on the frontiers and an economic collapse that threatened both the supply of food for the army and the bullion needed for their pay. Rather than attempting to reconstitute the old system, Diocletian and his advisers created a tighter structure based around smaller provinces arranged into ‘dioceses'. The old province of Africa Proconsularis, for example, became the three provinces of Byzacena, Zeugitana and Tingitana; Britain became Britannia Prima and Britannia Secunda. Most dramatically, Diocletian divided the empire into West and East, with a ruling tetrarchy made up of a senior ‘Augustus' and a junior ‘Caesar' in each. By so doing he paved the way for Constantine to create the new imperial capital on the Bosporus and for the shift in Italy away from Rome to Milan and Ravenna, which became the new administrative hubs of the West. As well as being a matter of administrative practicality, Diocletian's division recognized deep-seated social, economic, linguistic and religious differences between East and West, and eventually led to their formal creation as separate empires in
AD
386. By the time of this novel, therefore, soldiers in the western army would have been swearing allegiance not to a ‘senior' emperor in Constantinople, but rather to their own emperor in the new western capital of Milan.

The later Roman emperors often seem to us to have been more autocratic and despotic than their predecessors. Partly this was a consequence of greater state control of economic activities, including the production of foodstuffs and equipment for the army as well as the obligation for people to stick with their occupations, making many jobs hereditary by law. Another factor was the shift in focus to the East, where the tradition of semi-deified kings was more deeply embedded. Whereas in Rome the emperor and his family had been a visible presence, in Constantinople and the new capitals in Italy the imperial court was more remote and regal. This remoteness is embodied in the statue of Constantine erected in his new basilica in the forum in Rome: colossal, highly stylized and gazing to the heavens rather than to the people, ironically commissioned just as he was about to renounce pagan religion and the imperial cult. If we look at the coin portraits of the western emperors over the following century the picture is varied, with some showing the gritty realism of soldier-emperors for whom despotism meant being hard-nosed and brutal, rather than depicting any kind of elevated self-image. Problems arose through attempts at dynastic succession where weak emperors were propped up by men of nefarious ambition; capable army commanders such as Stilicho and Aetius could spend more time battling court intrigue than staving off barbarian invasion. This as well as dynastic strife was to play a major part in the undoing of the Roman West as an administrative entity in the fifth century
AD.

Christianity

A huge change in late antiquity was brought about by the emergence of Christianity as the state religion. Its adoption was born out of war – a vision in battle had caused the emperor Constantine to convert to Christianity, leading to its acceptance by the state on his death in
AD
331. Christianity appeared to offer much to the common people that pagan Roman religion did not. In its earliest form, three centuries before Constantine, Christianity was less a
religio
– in the original Latin meaning of the word, an ‘obligation' – than it was a course of moral teaching, more philosophical, interactive and relevant to day-to-day life than pagan religion. It was inclusive, welcoming all into its fold, whereas pagan religion at the state level had been exclusive and remote, restricting participation in ritual to the priests and the privileged. At a time when whimsical cruelty was commonplace, the Judaeo-Christian tradition offered a code of morality that had little precedent in the classical world; there had been no equivalent to the Ten Commandments in pagan Rome, only obligations to sacrifice and worship and threats of divine retribution against those who failed to do so. Christianity attracted the downtrodden by showing them how to gain strength by living an overtly moral life, and thus offered consolation to less privileged people who were severely restricted in the ancient world in their scope for social betterment or material gain.

It would be mistaken, though, to think that those in power in Rome who made Christianity the state religion were swayed by these factors. For Constantine the Great it was more a matter of
realpolitik
than personal revelation, despite his claim to have ‘seen the light' in the battle against his rival Maxentius in
AD
312. Constantine would have known how the Sassanid rulers in Persia – Rome's arch-rivals in the East – had used monotheism to their advantage, harnessing the Zoroastrian religion to strengthen their own power base. Already the Roman emperors in the third century had encouraged the worship of Sol Invictus, ‘invincible Sun', similar to the worship of the sun god in ancient Egypt, and had aligned it with the imperial cult. In doing so they paved the way for the transition to the single Judaeo-Christian God after
AD
331.

The conversion to monotheism lost the emperor his divine status, the basis for the imperial cult – he could no longer be a god – but that was swiftly replaced by the notion of the emperor as divinely appointed, as Christ's chosen one, equal to the Apostles. As a result, the early Christian emperors could be even more godlike in their behaviour than their predecessors, some of them exerting this new image powerfully, but the weaker ones existing as little more than symbols, living remotely in their palaces, puppets in the hands of the strongmen who really ran the empire.

In other ways too the transition to state Christianity represented less of an upheaval than might be imagined. The old ‘Capitoline triad', the gods Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, translated into the Holy Trinity of God, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Mater Magna became embodied in the Virgin Mary, and the many saints that soon proliferated in Italy and elsewhere took over from local pagan gods. The idea of priests as divinely ordained, as necessary intermediaries between the people and God, gave the clergy a status similar to the old priesthood, enhanced by the development of arcane rituals and liturgies that further set them apart from the common people. Christianity began to take on many of those features that had turned people away from pagan religion. As Constantine had foreseen, the inclusivity of Christianity – the size of its congregation – meant that the population could be controlled through the Church. Christian morality being rooted in poverty and abstinence suited an empire of high taxation, hereditary jobs and servitude that for many citizens bordered on slavery because, as Christians, these citizens were more likely to accept their lot. Far from being a transition to enlightenment after a cruel and amoral pagan past, Christianity became a means for a totalitarian administration to control and oppress a population that otherwise might collapse into anarchy and turn against the emperor.

At the time of this novel, a hundred years after Constantine, many of the institutions of later Christianity were becoming well established, including the papacy, bishoprics and monasteries, the earliest of which were sited in the fortified rural villas characteristic of this period. The Roman dating system changed from
ab urbe condita,
‘from the foundation of the city', to
anno domini nostri iesu,
from the year of the birth of Our Lord, a date fixed by the Thracian monk Antesius. In the cities, a pressing need was for buildings large enough to take big congregations, to provide ‘Houses of God'. In Constantinople this need was met by the great church of Hagia Sophia, its domed form influencing the design of many churches in the East as well as the first mosques in the seventh century. In Rome, it was the old law courts or ‘basilicas' – a term originally derived from the Greek for ‘king', and meaning ‘palace' – that provided the blueprint, their oblong colonnaded design with an apse at one end being seen in the early basilican churches such as St Peter's. In addition, many pagan temples became churches – for example, the Pantheon in Rome – and other buildings such as the Colosseum were consecrated as holy places because of their association with early Christian martyrdom, ironically ensuring their survival to modern times.

Despite the earlier history of Christianity, before Constantine, as a persecuted religion, there was no systematic retribution against those who continued to practise pagan religion after
AD
331; we would be wrong to project backwards to the Roman period a view conditioned by our picture of extreme religious intolerance by the western Church in the medieval period. On the whole, Christianity was attractive enough to the masses for forced conversion to be unnecessary. Pagan sacrifice was banned, but not polytheism. Pagan religion continued to have enough cachet for the emperor Julian ‘the Apostate' in the mid-fourth century to return to polytheism and to persecute Christians during his reign. Of the four main historians of the fifth century, the earliest of them, Eusebius, was profoundly anti-Christian, blaming the woes of the empire on the rejection of the old gods and the adoption of Christianity. Among the Roman army, there can be no doubt that deeply embedded pagan practices continued, including the worship of gods traditionally favoured by soldiers such as Mithras, Isis and Sol Invictus.