The Barbarian Kingdoms: Rome Without Rome
The kingdoms that replaced Roman administration in the western provinces were not anti-Roman. This is the most important correction to the standard narrative of Rome’s fall, and it matters because the standard narrative — civilized Rome overwhelmed by barbarous outsiders — is both factually wrong and interpretively misleading. The Visigothic kingdom in Spain, the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy, the Burgundian kingdom in the Rhône valley, the Frankish kingdom in Gaul — these were not negations of Rome. They were, in varying degrees, continuations of Rome under different management, sustained by Roman administrative forms, legitimated by Roman imperial titles, and often governed by rulers who had spent significant portions of their careers in Roman service and who regarded Roman civilization as the culture they had inherited rather than the culture they had defeated.
Theodoric the Great, who ruled the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy from 493 to 526 AD, is the best-documented case. He had spent a decade as a hostage at the imperial court in Constantinople, receiving a Roman education and absorbing Roman political culture at the highest level. He returned to lead his people, conducted military campaigns in the service of the Eastern Empire, and eventually established a kingdom in Italy at Constantinople’s invitation — removing the previous ruler Odoacer — that explicitly maintained Roman administrative structures, employed Roman administrators in senior positions (Cassiodorus managed much of his correspondence and policy), and presented itself as a continuation rather than a replacement of Roman governance. Theodoric issued edicts that drew on Roman legal tradition, maintained the Roman Senate as a functional institution, and patronized Roman cultural life. His court correspondence, preserved through Cassiodorus’s collection, is composed in impeccable Latin by a man who had never learned to write himself — he signed documents with a gold stencil — but who understood that Latin administrative prose was the language in which legitimate power communicated.
The Visigoths who settled in southwestern Gaul and eventually Spain followed a similar trajectory. The Visigothic Law Code — the Lex Visigothorum — drew substantially on Roman law while incorporating Gothic customary law, producing a hybrid legal system that served both the Gothic and the Roman populations of the kingdom. The Roman provincial population continued to be governed largely by Roman legal principles; the Gothic military aristocracy maintained its own customs; the administration that connected them used Latin and Roman administrative forms. The Visigothic kingdom was a bicultural state, awkward in the ways bicultural states tend to be, but recognizably operating within a Roman institutional framework.
The Franks present a more complicated case. Clovis, who unified the Frankish tribes and converted to Catholic Christianity around 498 AD — a politically significant choice in that it aligned him with the Roman population of Gaul against the Arian Gothic kingdoms — received from the Eastern Emperor Anastasius an honorary consulship that gave his rule imperial legitimacy, however nominal. The Frankish kingdom’s relationship with Roman administrative forms was less systematic than the Ostrogothic or Visigothic kingdoms, and the process of Romanization of the Frankish elite and de-Romanization of the local population occurred simultaneously in ways that produced the hybrid culture we call Merovingian Gaul. Latin survived as the language of the church and of documentation; the spoken language of the population in the north began its drift toward what would become Old French; the Roman urban network contracted but did not disappear.
What the barbarian kingdoms preserved from Rome was selective and reflects the practical interests of rulers trying to legitimate their authority and administer their territories. Roman law was preserved because it was the legal tradition that the surviving Roman population was accustomed to and that provided the most sophisticated available framework for adjudicating property disputes, contracts, and family matters. Latin was preserved because it was the language of the church, which was the primary literate institution in most of the western kingdoms and the only organization with the capacity to train administrators. Roman urban infrastructure — roads, walls, administrative buildings — was maintained to the extent that resources permitted and need required, which meant some deterioration but not complete abandonment.
What the barbarian kingdoms could not preserve was the fiscal and military infrastructure that had sustained Roman civilization at its peak scale. The tax revenues that had funded the legions, the building programs, the grain dole, and the administrative apparatus shrank dramatically as the kingdoms fragmented, consolidated, and reorganized. The legions that had maintained the frontiers were replaced by warrior bands with different tactical profiles, different material requirements, and different relationships to the populations they were supposed to protect. The long-distance commercial networks that had integrated the Mediterranean economy contracted as political fragmentation increased transaction costs and reduced security. The cities that had been the empire’s administrative and cultural centers declined in population and sophistication as the functions they had served were either eliminated or reorganized on a smaller scale.
The result was not barbarism — the term is too loaded to be useful as a historical description — but it was contraction: a medieval European world organized on a smaller spatial and institutional scale than the Roman world it had replaced, operating with fewer people per unit of territory, less specialized division of labor, less sophisticated administrative and commercial systems. That this medieval world eventually produced its own remarkable achievements in philosophy, theology, architecture, and eventually science does not diminish the scale of what was lost in the transition. Both things are true: the barbarian kingdoms were Roman in important ways, and the world they produced was smaller than the world that preceded them.