Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

peers and lords: local communities 461
because cities were exercising control over a smaller percentage of the
kingdom. 73
Outside Frankish Gaul, such processes took longer to unfold. In
Lombard Italy, the state continued to operate through the civitates to a much
greater extent. Only with the collapse of Carolingian rule, and the incastellamento
of the later ninth century and beyond, did the Roman administrative
landscape finally fragment. 74 For Spain, there is at present a much less
clear picture. There is a little evidence, however, that, although strong in
certain areas of the peninsula in the sixth century (see p. 455 above), in
others the civitas structure had begun to break down. The Life of St Emilian
(26) refers in passing to a mysterious ‘senate of Cantabria’ (not a pre-existing
Roman unit) whose independence was suppressed by Leovigild. A
chance survival from the late sixth century likewise demonstrates that taxation
was then being assessed on several cities as a group and levied by royal
officials, rather than as the responsibility of individual civitates and their
curias. 75 The Islamic conquerors of the kingdom also made a treaty in 713
with a Visigothic noble named Theodemir, whose semi-independent lordship
was acknowledged over seven towns of south-east Spain. 76 Whether
this fief represented another late Visigothic grouping of previously independent
civitates or an ad hoc creation of the Arab invasion period, however,
remains unclear.
Across post-Roman Europe, then, there were wide variations in the
history of the civitas. In some areas, the fifth-century invasions delivered a
coup de grâce. In others, civitates survived to play important roles in the successor
states, sometimes for many centuries. Everywhere, however, the role
of the city community was, if gradually, undermined by the disappearance
of those state institutions which had demanded the creation and maintenance
of the civitas network. There is reason to think that this process of
communal dissolution was paralleled by an increase in the degree of private
dominion being exercised by at least the larger landowners. It is to this
subject that the final part of this essay will turn.
2. Local lordship and its limitations
As we have seen, the erosion of the state in the post-Roman period generated
some increase in local autonomy. More than that, it led to adjustments
in the social bonds operating at all levels of local society. The
evidence strongly suggests that, in the longer term, the post-Roman
73 I generally follow here James (1982) 62–4. For revisionist views, Fouracre (1995); cf. Ganz (1995)
12–16. I am not, however, totally convinced that the lack of documented lay immunists is significant.
74 See e.g. Wickham (1981) 163ff.
75 The so-called De Fisco Barcinonensi; for discussion, see King (1972) 69–70.
76 Collins (1983a) 153–4.
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