Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

conclusion 237
and Athens, is paralleled in Ostrogothic Ravenna 236 and – if on a more
modest scale and some decades later in time – by abundant church building
in remote western Aquitaine, 237 and as far north as Trier and
Cologne. 238 In a sense the golden age of Visigothic Spain following the
conversion of the Goths to Catholicism in 589 represents the last
flowering of that revival. 239 But in the east the plague of 542 240 inaugurated
a period of deepening crisis, which in due course spread to the
whole area of the old empire: repeated visitations of plague, first Persian,
then Arab invasions of the east, Slav invasions of the Balkans and
Greece, 241 Lombard advances into Italy. Byzantine Italy was ‘militarized’,
242 and the Arabs conquered Spain. The chaos of the internecine
wars among the Franks in the mid seventh century may have been exaggerated
by Carolingian propaganda. 243 Nevertheless, when order was
restored, Gaul and Italy had moved significantly further from their classical
condition. This was the starting-point of Pirenne’s famous theory
that, without Muhammad, Charlemagne would have been inconceivable.
244 Pirenne was probably wrong about the importance of the Arab
conquest’s effect on Mediterranean trade. But it remains true that the economic
and political centre of the western Christian world moved to the
much more weakly Romanized north of Gaul and the Rhineland. The
latest mention of a city council and a defensor in Gaul occurs on a formula
from Poitiers of 805. In Italy most councils seem to have disappeared by
700, leaving the bishop, now by far the greatest landowner, supreme in the
city. 245 Leo VI (a.d. 886–912) formally abolished city councils in the
Byzantine empire. 246 By then, surviving councils had long become an
anachronism. When the restoration of stability was begun by Charles
Martel (a.d. 719–41) in the west and by Leo III (a.d. 717–41) in the east, 247
administration in neither area was any longer based on the ancient city
units, and cities no longer functioned as centres of secular administration
for an attached rural territory. In both east and west the history of the
ancient city might be said to have come to an end with the emancipation
of the countryside, even if the emancipation took very different organizational
forms in what had been the eastern and western halves of the
old empire. 248
236 Deichmann (1976–89). 237 Rouche (1979).
238 Kempf (1968); Oswald, Schaefer, Sennhauer (1966) 140, 150, 154.
239 Palol (1968); Fontaine (1959).
240 Conrad (1986); Durliat (1989) argues that the immediate impact was rather less.
241 Huxley (1977); Wiseman (1984); Spieser (1984). 242 Brown, Gentlemen and Officers.
243 Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms 255–9.
244 Pirenne (1939) 234; cf. Hodges and Whitehouse (1983); Barnish (1989).
245 Wickham (1981) 19. 246 Leo VI, Nov. 46–8.
247 Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century 84–91.
248 Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century 180–207 on ‘themes’.
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