A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

supported by large numbers of mercenaries, were unable to coordinate
counterattacks. The Vandals swept first into Spain in 409, and then in 429 into
North Africa. They reached the gates of Hippo in 430 when Augustine lay dying
there. Gaiseric, the Vandal leader, was able to attack Rome by sea in 455; in 458
he captured Sicily, which had been a Roman province for 700 years. Both North
Africa and Sicily had been important sources of tax and grain and were now lost.
A few Roman generals had temporary successes but usually only through the
recourse of using one of the invading peoples against the others. In the Life of
Severinus, the last days of a frontier guard on the northern borders are described
as they lose contact in the 450s with administrators to the south, fail to be paid
and eventually disband themselves. Officially the end of the empire came in 476
when the last emperor, the boy Romulus Augustulus, was deposed. His place
was taken by a German, Odoacer, who in theory at least was acting as the
representative of the eastern empire, but Odoacer was murdered in 493 by the
Ostrogoth Theodoric, who imposed his own rule on much of Italy.
Although Theodoric and his Ostrogothic successors worked hand in hand with
the remnants of the Roman elite, central rule had vanished. 2 Justinian’s invasion
to restore Roman rule in the west, launched in 535, brought even more
disruption, and about 560 Pope Pelagius I refers to ‘the devastation which more
than twenty-five years of continuous warfare, still now by no means abating,
inflicted on ltaly’. 3 Plague was a further drain on the population from the 540s,
before in 568 another set of invaders, the Lombards, swept into northern Italy.
In recent years some historians have glossed over the effects of these massive
disruptions as if Germanic rulers smoothly replaced the Roman administrations.
It is true that there were treaties, such as the one concluded with the Visigoths in
Aquitaine in 419 that allowed the invaders to settle, while some Roman
aristocrats appear to have maintained their estates intact. 4 The Ostrogoths, a
minority within a much larger Italian population, used effective Roman
administrators, of whom Cassiodorus and Boethius were the best known, and
even restored some of the decaying buildings of Rome. Yet this all took place in
a crumbling economy, and it is important to turn to the archaeological evidence
to get a fuller picture of what was happening.
When the empire was at its height, the effective control of mare nostrum - ‘our
sea’, the Mediterranean - allowed the Romans to exploit its trading potential to
the full. The accumulation of years of experience in a stable landscape meant
that even smallholders could afford mass-produced goods, many of which were