l. The Emergence of a New Order
The Roman Twilight
THE 'Fall of the Roman Empire', in the sense that a coherent and
unified system of military and civil administration covering most of
western Europe and North Africa, which was in being at the begin-
ning of the fifth century had ceased to exist by its close, was a process
scarcely perceived by those who lived through it. In place of the
universal dominion of the emperor, Germanic kings and their follow-
ers, partly by force and partly by agreements, set up realms having a
rough correspondence to the military divisions of the former Empire.
These kingdoms were in some cases, notably that of the Franks in
Gaul, to last for centuries and help to mould the future political and
social geography of western Europe. Although the process of transi-
tion was at times and in places violent and destructive, reactions to it
were generally limited and localised, and more often marked by co-
operation between the Roman provincials and their new masters,
than by resistance.
The sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 created a considerable
stir amongst those for whom the city was the symbol not just of a form
of society, but, more importantly, of a cultural tradition. But the
event itself was, in material terms, transitory, and of no long-lasting
significance, beyond giving occasion for Augustine'S writing of The
City of God.! When Rome was again sacked, by the Vandals in 455, it
created no literary repercussions. As for the gradual dismembering of
the Empire that took place throughout the first half of the fifth cen-
tury, and which really marked its fall, this aroused remarkably little
comment and no real meditation upon the nature of what was hap-
pening. Some have seen moralising treaties by contemporary Chris-
tian authors, such as the On the Governance of God by the Gallic priest
Salvian, as reflections of an awareness of malaise and decline.^2 How-
ever, this is to misinterpret the interests and intentions of authors
whose concern was with the spiritual reformation of men held to be
too absorbed by the transitory and illusory ties of the secular world.
That emphasis on the heavenly society, the true counterpart to the
fleeting earthly one, and the rise of interest in asceticism and the
monastic life in the West, were unconscious reactions to the disinte-
gration of the social and political structures of the Roman Empire is
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