CONCLUSIONforgotten in the search for explanations of its supposed decline and fall. Thus,
while Justinian’s wars may have overstretched the state economy, he was nev-
ertheless able to sustain a massive war effort over a very long period and on
several fronts, to establish a new and substantial Byzantine administrative and
military system in the newly reconquered provinces of North Africa and Italy,
to reclaim these provinces from Arian religious rule and build or remodel
many churches, and to carry through an empire-wide building programme
which was impressive on any estimate. That his successors experienced dif-
fi culties in maintaining his example was hardly surprising.
The empire was vulnerable to external developments as well as to its own
internal problems. Not merely was it faced by extensive barbarian settlement
in the west and the expensive and diffi cult Persian wars, in the east, followed
by the Arab conquest. Changes in central Asia led in the fi fth century to dan-
ger from the Huns, fortunately dissolved after the death of Attila, and later
to the appearance of the Hephthalites, who threatened Constantinople at the
end of the reign of Justinian. By this time the empire was already attempting
to use the Avars to control other groups such as the Slavs in the Danubian
regions. Corippus approvingly describes their haughty reception by Justin II
at the beginning of his reign, but Justin’s high-handedness to these and other
potential enemies proved disastrous; large payments to the Avars by his suc-
cessor Tiberius II (578–82) did not prevent them from becoming a major
threat, or from besieging Constantinople in 626.^17 Needless to say, contem-
poraries had only a vague idea of the ethnic origins of the Avars and the
Turks,^18 whose prominence in the late sixth century was followed in turn by
the emergence, by the end of the seventh, of two other Turkic peoples, the
Bulgars and the Khazars. Faced with these movements, the empire oscillated
between trying to make alliances, backed up with payment of subsidies, and,
when necessary, fi ghting. This was indeed the normal state of affairs, varying
only in degree; war, not peace, was the norm, and when peace did prevail for
a time it had usually been bought at a high cost.
Seen against this background, the ‘decline’ explanation appears inadequate.
It is premised on the idea that it is reasonable to expect cultures and socie-
ties to be able to maintain themselves indefi nitely in the same state. Phrases
such as ‘the end of classical antiquity’ and the like assume an entity, ‘classical
antiquity’, which is not itself liable to change. But societies do not exist in a
vacuum. Changes in late antique urbanism have received enormous attention
as indicators of decline or transformation; yet cities in antiquity, like cities
now, did not exist in a steady state but were constantly being remodelled and
adapted. Then, as now, the human environment was one of constant change.
Myriads of small and large changes were taking place both within the vast ter-
ritories of the empire and outside its borders: it is these changes taken together
which have misleadingly been labelled ‘decline’. Words such as ‘decline’ are
irredeemably emotive, and it is not the historian’s place to sit in moral judge-
ment on his subject or to impose inappropriate classical norms.^19
A different mode of explanation can be derived from recent work in