Late antiquity: the reconfiguration of the Roman world
The Roman Empire of late antiquity was no longer the original empire of its founder, Augustus, nor was it even the 2nd-century entity of the emperor Marcus Aurelius. In the 3rd century the emperor, who was first called princeps (“first citizen”) and then dominus (“lord”), became divus (“divine”). The powerful religious connotations of the imperial office were adopted even by usurpers of the imperial throne, backed by their armies, who then ruled autocratically at the head of a vast bureaucratic and military organization. Internal and external crises during the 3rd and 4th centuries resulted in the division of the empire into an eastern and a western part after 285, with the east possessing a great and flourishing capital built by the emperor Constantine—Constantinople (now Istanbul)—and far more economic, political, and military resources than the western half. The administration of the entire empire was restructured to finance immense military expenditures, giving the western European provinces and frontier areas greater importance but fewer resources. Most of the population of the empire, including soldiers, were frozen hereditarily in their occupations. The Western Empire, whose capital moved north from Rome in the 4th century to a number of provincial cities—Trier, Arles, Milan, and ultimately Ravenna—became less urbanized, more ruralized, and gradually dominated by an aristocracy of landowners and military officials, most of whom lived on large villas and in newly fortified cities. The provincial economy had become increasingly rural and localized and was dominated by the needs of the vast military bases near the frontiers.
The great and small estates were worked by slaves, freedmen, and coloni (“farmers”), who had once been independent but had voluntarily or involuntarily subordinated themselves to the great landowners as their only protection against imperial tax collectors or military conscription. The landowners dispensed local justice and assembled private armies, which were powerful enough to negotiate on their subordinates’ behalf with imperial officials. Mediterranean trade diminished, and the production of more and more goods was undertaken locally, as was the organization of social, devotional, and political life.
Non-Roman peoples from beyond the frontiers—barbari (“barbarians”) or externae gentes (“foreign peoples”), as the Romans called them—had long been allowed to enter the empire individually or in families as provincial farmers and soldiers. But after 375 a number of composite Germanic peoples, many of them only recently assembled and ruled by their own new political and military elites, entered the empire as intact groups, originally by treaty with Rome and later independently. They established themselves as rulers of a number of western provinces, particularly parts of Italy, Iberia, Gaul, and Britain, often in the name of the Roman emperor and with the cooperation of many Roman provincials.
Roman ethnography classified external peoples as distinct and ethnically homogeneous groups with unchanging identities; they were part of the order of nature. Adopting this view, philologists, anthropologists, and historians in the 19th century maintained that the Germanic “tribes” that first appeared in the 3rd century were the ethnic ancestors of the “tribes” of the 5th century and that the ethnic composition of these groups remained unchanged in the interval. Late 20th-century research in ethnogenesis thoroughly demonstrated the unreliability of Roman ethnography, although modern concepts of ethnicity continue to exploit it for political purposes.