Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

peers and lords: local communities 455
the élite landowners of a particular region, rather than a politically distinct
caste of militarized immigrants. The royal courts of the post-Roman west
were central to this transformation. 57
ii. peers and lords: local communities
The basic local political unit of the Roman empire was the civitas (city),
encompassing both an urban centre and a dependent rural territory. Within
this unit, taxes were allocated and collected, and smaller legal issues settled
by the defensor civitatis (an innovation of the mid fourth century). The urban
centre also acted as a religious, political, economic and, indeed, cultural
focus for the population of its dependent territory. Officially at least, the
later Roman empire continued to value the classical urbanism it had inherited
from the Greeks, and saw the public institutions (fora, etc.) and communal
amusements (bath, theatres, etc.) of the self-governing town as the
ideal type of human community. 58
The fourth century had seen both the growth of an imperial bureaucracy
and wholesale transfers of financial assets away from the cities (see p. 438
above), but the civitas continued to shape basic senses of local community.
Most of the new imperial bureaucrats retained strong roots in their local
communities. Periods of service were short, and the imperial authorities
used retired honorati for important jobs in their localities, such as supervising
tax reassessments. Honorati likewise tended to have made good contacts
while serving at the centre, and were thus in great demand as patrons. While
there was no longer one council of landowners (the curia), the administrative
functions focused upon the civitas (tax, law, etc.) continued to make it
the local community par excellence for honorati, principales and all other
members of the empire’s landowning classes. 59
1. The end of the civitas?
In part of the post-Roman west, local civitas communities continued to play
roles of fundamental importance. Sixth-century Visigothic Spain, for
instance, provides the examples of Cordoba and Seville, which threw off
central government and acted entirely independently – the former for
twenty-two years. 60 In Italy, taking a longer perspective, the city remained a
vital structure in the landscape to the end of the first millennium and
57 Claudius: Lives of the Fathers of Merida, CCSL 116, 5.10.Different visions of intermixing: Heather
(1996) 284ff. (Visigothic kingdom); Halsall (1995) 26–32 (Frankish); Amory (1997) esp. ch. 3
(Ostrogothic), although I would argue that Theoderic’s Goths brought many of their women with
them, and were dominated by a political élite of free warriors (Heather (1996) 170–2 and App. 1). Hence
they were originally more coherent than Amory would allow.
58 With strongly Christian overtones, this ideal still suffuses the mid-sixth-century Buildings of
Procopius. 59 E.g. Liebeschuetz (1972) esp. pt v; Heather (1994) 25ff. 60 Collins (1980).
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