The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, 395-700 AD

THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITY

date therefore traditionally marks the ‘fall of the western empire’. The eastern
Emperor Justinian’s much-vaunted ‘reconquest’ (Chapter 5), launched from
Constantinople in the 530s, aimed at reversing the situation, but was only
partially successful. North Africa remained under Byzantine rule until the late
seventh century, and a Byzantine presence was maintained in Italy in the face
of Lombard incursions, based round the exarchate of Ravenna, but the west
remained divided in the late sixth century, the Merovingian Franks ruling in
France and the Visigoths in Spain. In Italy itself, the eventual but very hard-
won Byzantine victory hailed in the settlement known as the ‘Pragmatic Sanc-
tion’ of AD 554 and accompanied by concerted attempts to impose orthodox
Christianity, not least in Theoderic’s capital at Ravenna, met with a new chal-
lenge from the Lombards; the Fifth Ecumenical Council held by Justinian in
Constantinople in 553 received a negative reception in Italy, and the papacy,
especially under Gregory the Great (590–604), acquired considerable secular
power in the context of increasing fragmentation. All the same, much that was
recognizably Roman survived in the barbarian kingdoms, and the extent of
real social and economic change is still debated.^4
The debate about periodization (when did the ancient world come to an
end?) is livelier than it ever was. On the one hand, we have the concept of a
‘long’ late antiquity, with continuity observable even as late as the Abbasid
period,^5 on the other, a reassertion of the ‘fall’ of the Roman empire in the
fifth-century west.^6 However, Christopher Wickham’s magisterial book,
Framing the Early Middle Ages. Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (2005),^7
avoids such choices, while also providing a comparative analysis of overall
trends which affected both west and east. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas
Purcell, The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History (2000), also avoid
periodization, by concentrating on continuities over very long periods. For
Peter Heather, the story of the first millenium is that of the transition from
a Roman, Mediterranean hegemony to the beginnings of Europe.^8 Whether
the notion of a Mediterranean world really does work for late antiquity, or
whether this is an example of ‘Mediterraneanism’, rather like Orientalism,^9 is
a topic to which we will return at the end of this book.

Previous approaches

The transition from classical antiquity to the medieval world was the sub-
ject of Edward Gibbon’s great work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1787), and very few themes in history have been the subject of so much hotly
debated controversy or so much partisan feeling. For Marx and for historians
in the Marxist tradition, the end of Roman rule provided cardinal proof that
states based on such extreme forms of inequality and exploitation as ancient
slavery were doomed eventually to fall. On the other hand, many historians,
including Gibbon himself, and the Russian historian M.I. Rostovtzeff, who
left Russia in 1917, also saw the later empire as representing a sadly degener-
ate form of its earlier civilized and prosperous self, which (like Gibbon) they