The New Order
What was new about the “new order” of the sixth century was less the rise of
barbarian kingdoms than it was, in the West, the decay of the cities and
corresponding liveliness of the countryside, the increased dominance of the rich, and
the quiet domestication of Christianity. In the East, the Roman Empire continued,
made an ill-fated bid to expand, and finally retrenched as an autonomous entity: the
Byzantine Empire.
THE RURALIZATION OF THE WEST
Where the barbarians settled, they did so with only tiny ripples of discontent from
articulate Roman elites. It used to be thought that the Roman Empire granted the
invaders vast estates confiscated from Roman landowners. It now seems that the
new tribal rulers were often content to live in cities or border forts, collecting land
taxes rather than land.
For Romans, the chief objection to the new barbarian overlords was their Arian
Christian beliefs. (Recall that Ulfila had preached that brand of Christianity to the
Goths.) Clovis, king of the Franks, may have been the first Germanic king to
overcome this problem. (If so, Sigismund, king of the Burgundians, was a close
second.) Clovis flirted with Arianism early on, but he soon converted to the Catholic
Christianity of his Gallic neighbors.
In other respects as well, the new rulers took over Roman institutions; they issued
laws, for example. The Visigothic Code—drawing on Roman imperial precedents like
The Theodosian Code (see below, p. 34), on the regulations for rural life found in
Roman provincial law codes, and possibly on tribal customary law as well—was
drawn up during the course of the fifth through seventh centuries. Sigismund, king of
the Burgundians (r.516–524), issued a code of Burgundian laws in 517. A Frankish
law code was compiled under King Clovis, fusing provincial Roman and Germanic
procedures into a single whole.
Written in Latin, these laws revealed their Roman inspiration even in their
language. Barbarian kings, some well educated themselves, depended on classically
trained advisors to write up their letters and laws. In Italy, in particular, an
outstanding group of Roman administrators, judges, and officers served the
Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great (r.493–526). They included the learned
Boethius (d.524/526), who wrote the tranquil Consolation of Philosophy as he
awaited execution for treason, and the encyclopedic Cassiodorus (490–583), who
