Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

state and aristocratic distribution 379
The fragmentation of power in the west, of course, created in the fifth
and sixth century a scattering of smaller political capitals within the territories
of the former empire. Although we know very little about them
archaeologically, these towns, such as Toulouse for the fifth-century
Visigothic kingdom, Paris for the sixth-century Merovingians, and Toledo
and Pavia for the sixth- and seventh-century Visigoths and Lombards,
must have benefited from their new status. It is, however, notable that none
of these new capitals (except Ostrogothic Ravenna) has so far produced
the spectacular signs of wealth (imposing defensive walls, rulers’ palaces,
numbers of large churches, splendid aristocratic houses and secular monuments)
that are so obvious in the new imperial residences of the fourthand
fifth-century empire (as at Milan, Trier, Ravenna, Thessalonica etc.).
Indeed, the only new capital to have been extensively excavated in recent
times, Carthage, seems to have declined in size, wealth and splendour
through the fifth century, despite becoming in this very period the centre
of a new Vandal kingdom which no longer needed to send the vast tax
revenue of Africa to Rome. Perhaps Carthage and the other new capitals
did gain from their new status, but only in relation to other, smaller centres;
and perhaps this gain does not show up readily in the archaeological and
monumental record because it was swallowed up in the massive overall
decline in urban prosperity which took place in the fifth- and sixth-century
west.
The areas that directly benefited from state spending in the Roman
world were always limited. Unlike a modern state, which spends on a wide
range of salaries and capital projects (for health-care, transport, etc.) and
which often tries to share out the benefits of government money both geographically
and socially, the late Roman state spent most of its wealth on
one sector alone: the army. And much the greater part of the army was
located in one – admittedly very large – region of the empire, the principal
frontier zone which stretched from Antioch in the south-east to the Rhine
mouths in the north-west. As we have seen in the case of land contiguous
with the military road through Asia Minor, other restricted areas within the
interior of the empire could also benefit from state spending; but, for the
most part, the provinces at peace simply paid up and got little in return,
except, of course, the all-important gift of peace.
Rates of taxation were high in the late Roman world. Land around
Ravenna in a.d. 555 paid more to the state in tax than it did to its landlords
in rent; and in the mid seventh century, the proportion paid to the state
from the Sicilian lands of the Ravennate church was only slightly less:
15,000 solidi in tax were sent annually to Constantinople, and 16,000 in rent
to the church treasury at Ravenna. It has, indeed, been argued that rates of
taxation in late antiquity may have been responsible for pushing some land
out of cultivation. The extensive archaeological evidence we have of an
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008