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the maintenance of order 479
The efficient exercise of imperial or royal authority required a substantial
community of interest between such local grandees and the monarch.
In the east, the emperor preserved the balance in his own favour. Even in
the Balkans, when the obscure Scamareis took advantage of the severe disruption
caused by Slav invasions to rob an Avar embassy, Tiberius could
identify the guilty and restore some of the property; under Maurice a
savage brigand chief was persuaded by a personal letter from the emperor
to stop his activities and come to court. 32 Brigands might well be people of
some local prominence who had become marginalized, perhaps through
no particular fault of their own, and whom it was important for emperors
to reattach to the proper channels of authority: a good example of the
process is the fourth-century Gallic brigand Charietto, a man whose
support for an unsuccessful usurper destroyed his connections with the
imperial centre, but who was then brought back into the fold by Julian.
In the west, the inability of the emperor to maintain such control led to
the emergence of ‘warlordism’. 33 Local groups had to undertake their own
protection with scant regard to central interests: depending on the point of
view of the source, their leaders might be termed ‘kings’, as were Aegidius
and Syagrius in their principality at Soissons, or the groups dismissed as
bagaudae, whether it is correct to interpret these contentious people as the
Gallic equivalent of the private retinues of magnates in Asia Minor or as
peasant communities that had relocated themselves away from areas of
regular fighting. The members of such communities may well have
acknowledged imperial authority in theory, but have been more reluctant
to accept it in practice, especially if their preferred emperor was no longer
in control. 34 The establishment both of the Visigoths in Aquitaine and,
more certainly, of Alans in northern Gaul has been seen as an imperial
response to such loss of civilian authority in parts of Gaul, and Aetius was
prepared to use the Alans to regain control of subject Romans; if this
hypothesis is correct, the strategy brought no more than short-term relief,
since the main beneficiaries were the tribes. 35
Within the emerging tribal kingdoms, rulers faced similar problems of
authority, albeit on a smaller scale. In Visigothic Spain, kings had a fundamental
problem in attempting to make royal authority anything more than
nominal outside the immediate location of the court: in the mid sixth
century the inhabitants of Cordoba could rout the king, appropriate his
treasure and, like Mérida, maintain virtual independence for several years.
Such determined conduct required joint action by local Romans and
Visigoths against their supposed master. 36 The king had no less difficulty
than a Roman emperor in retaining full control over his military following
32 Menander fr. 15.6; Farka (1993–4). 33 Whittaker (1994) ch. 7.
34 Van Dam, Leadership and Community ch. 1.3; Drinkwater (1992); cf. ch. 18 (Wood), pp. 502,9 below.
35 Wood, Merovingian Kingdoms 8–12; Burns (1992) 56–7. 36 Collins (1980) 198–201.
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