Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

134 5. the western kingdoms
growth of the claims of the church of Armagh and its manipulation of its
Patrician foundation led to the fabrication of complex historical myths.
What relationship the political organization of Ireland in the fifth century
had to that in the seventh or the ninth is not as easy to say as has sometimes
been believed.
In general, the fifth and sixth centuries in the former provinces of the
western Roman empire saw the fragmentation and rapid disappearance of
the imperial administrative structures, and their replacement by the new
Germanic kingdoms. These were, however, dependent on Roman traditions
of government, and in many cases benefited from the close involvement
in the administration of leading members of Roman provincial
society. Initially, some of these realms had the character of little more than
a military occupation, with most of the civil administration remaining in
Roman hands. The law codes of the German rulers were also largely
Roman in content and in the forms that they took. In some cases, such as
that of the Vandals, no real rapprochement ever seems to have taken place
between the German garrisoning forces and the Roman civil population,
even though many of the invaders appear to have become increasingly
Romanized in their lifestyles. This left their kingdom peculiarly vulnerable
once an eastern army was able to land in Africa in 533. Wars, largely motivated
by the expansionary needs of first the Visigothic and then the
Frankish kingdoms could also lead to the elimination of some of the minor
regional powers, such as those of the Burgundians in 534 and of the Sueves
in 585. For those kingdoms that were able to survive and to expand, the
sixth century was marked by an increasing integration between the indigenous
population and the conquerors, a process that was not completed in
either Gaul or Spain before the seventh century. However, in both the
Frankish and Visigothic kingdoms the elimination of religious conflicts
between the two elements of the population, symbolic not least of wider
cultural cleavages, opened the way to the disappearance of the division
between Roman and German. In the case of Spain the Arab conquest of
711 aborted this process, but it led in Gaul to the absorption of much of
the indigenous population into a new Frankish ethnic identity. In Britain,
where political fragmentation had been more intensive and the development
of alternative structures of power more localized, cultural and
governmental unity could not be re-established at more than a regional
level. In Italy, where imperial authority, however much diminished, had survived
longest, the Ostrogothic kingdom had offered the best example of
the kind of Roman administrative and cultural continuity that could be
established under a dynasty of German kings. However, Justinian’s protracted
war of reconquest wrought so much damage that the peninsula was
not to regain political unity for well over a millennium.
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