scholarly journals On Tendentious Records in the Continuatio Prosperi Hauniensis

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 19-37
Author(s):  
Aleksandr Sergeevich Kozlov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Use Of Force ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Social Orientation ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
The West ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Isidore Of Seville ◽  
The Stability

This research reveals the features of ideological, political, and partly social orientation of the anonymous compilations formed in Italy (most likely shortly after 636 AD) and known as Continuatio Prosperi Hauniensis, which were the mixture of a chronicle, a duplicate of excerpts from numerous consular lists of the Roman Empire, and a brief overview of the rule of the Ostrogothic and Lombard kings. The author’s attention is focused on the composition of the part of the “Continuation of Prosper” beginning with the events of the mid-fifth century. It is shown that the records saved all the features of a late antique chronicle, though the content uncovers obvious signs of imperfection and confused and incomplete editing (especially in the sections describing the disappearance of the imperial power in the West). On the contrary, the notes on the Lombard Period are clear and consistent in conceptuality. The data in this section of the records are definitely compiled by a single author who worked in the seventh century, most likely in Pavia (the main residence of the Lombard kings), and sought to reflect in his work the need to reconcile contemporary Italian elite with the leaders of barbarian conquerors. According to this anonymous compiler, the stability of the situation in Italy no longer depended on the empire, but rather on the barbarian rulers, who were mostly skilled and pragmatic warriors and politicians. In contrast to a number of sixth and seventh century chroniclers and historians, the compiler does not share the views of Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville, and John of Biclar, who advocated the use of force as the main means to achieve stability. He was closer to the “pacification” policy personified by Pope Gregory the Great.

Dis-integration, 400–600

The Great Sea ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Old Order ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Government ◽  
The City

Ever since Edward Gibbon wrote his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire the question why, when and indeed whether this great Roman Empire fell has been vigorously pursued by historians. It has been observed that at least 210 explanations have been offered, some frankly ridiculous (‘Semitization’, homosexuality, decline in manliness). The argument that it was the barbarian invasions that destroyed Rome – both the city and its empire – lost favour and has returned to favour. Some historians have insisted that the whole concept of the ‘fall of Rome’ is a misconception, and have emphasized the continuity of the Roman inheritance. Yet from a Mediterranean perspective, it is abundantly clear that the unity of the Great Sea had been shattered by 800. That leaves several centuries in which to place the process of disintegration, and several suspects: the Germanic barbarians in the fifth century and after, the Arab conquerors in the seventh century, Charlemagne and his Frankish armies in the eighth century, not to mention internal strife as Roman generals competed for power, either seeking regional dominions or the crown of the empire itself. Evidently there was no single ‘cause’ for the decline of Rome, and it was precisely the accumulation of dozens of problems that brought the old order to an end, rupturing the ‘Second Mediterranean’. During the long period from 400 to 800, the Mediterranean split apart economically and also politically: the Roman emperors saw that the task of governing the Mediterranean lands and vast tracts of Europe west of the Rhine and south of the Danube exceeded the capacity of one man. Diocletian, ruling from 284 onwards, based himself in the east at Nikomedeia, and entrusted the government of the empire to a team of co-emperors, first another ‘Augustus’ in the west, and then, from 293 to 305, two deputies or ‘Caesars’ as well, a system known as the Tetrarchy.

Secular Monograms, Social Status, and Authority in the Late Roman World and Early Byzantium

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ildar Garipzanov
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Noble Identity ◽  
Late Roman

This chapter examines the use of monograms as graphic signs of imperial authority in the late Roman and early Byzantine empire, from its appropriation on imperial coinage in the mid-fifth century to its employment in other material media in the following centuries. It also overviews the use of monograms by imperial officials and aristocrats as visible signs of social power and noble identity on mass-produced objects, dress accessories, and luxury items. The concluding section discusses a new social function for late antique monograms as visible tokens of a new Christian paideia and of elevated social status, related to ennobling calligraphic skills. This transformation of monograms into an attribute of visual Christian culture became especially apparent in sixth-century Byzantium, with the cruciform monograms appearing in the second quarter of the sixth century and becoming a default monogrammatic form from the seventh century onwards.

scholarly journals Church and State: A Conflicting Collaboration

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentine Ugochukwu Iheanacho
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Church And State ◽  
The State ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Church

St Jerome, both in his wittiness and in his critique of the romance between the church of his time and the Roman Empire in the fifth century, believed that “The church by its connection with Christian princes gained in power and riches, but lost in virtues.” The church and the state, whether in the past or in the present, have two particular things in common: peace and order. Both institutions detest disorder and rebellion, but ironically, in their efforts to bring about the desired peace and order, they often disturbed the peace through their quarrels and quibbles. With a keen sense of history, this essay studies the reluctance with which the church in the West and in the East embraced secular authorities in the civil administration of society for the sake of “peace” and “order.”

Britain and Ireland, 100–700 CE

2019 ◽  
pp. 601-622
Author(s):  
David Petts
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Early Church ◽  
Burial Rites ◽  
Stone Carving ◽  
Church Structures ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter reviews the evidence for the archaeology of early Christianity in Britain and Ireland. Here, the church had its origins in the areas that lay within the Roman Empire in the fourth century but rapidly expanded north and west in the early fifth century following the end of Roman rule. The evidence for church structures is limited and often ambiguous, with securely identifiable sites not appearing to any extent until the seventh century. There is a range of material culture that can be linked to the early church from the fourth to the seventh centuries; in particular, there are strong traditions of epigraphy and increasingly decorative stone carving from most areas. The conversion to Christianity also impacted burial rites, although the relationship between belief and mortuary traditions is not a simple one.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 211-225
Author(s):  
Taco Terpstra
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Economic Activity ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Human Welfare ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Peripheral Areas ◽  
Western Half ◽  
Eastern Half

This epilogue addresses the weakening of the Roman state. In the third century CE, the Roman Empire began having trouble maintaining its geographical integrity, a problem that would grow noticeably worse thereafter. The split between an eastern and western half in 395 CE was the most dramatic manifestation of that decreasing ability. After the empire split in two, especially the west in the course of the fifth century saw the abandonment of peripheral areas, although signs of declining state power appeared in the east as well. However, as the western half eventually disintegrated, the eastern half recovered. In the sixth century, it managed to extend its rule over parts of the west, including the Italian heartland. But even with this westward expansion—and even allowing for healthy economic activity in some eastern regions—as a military and economic organization, the Roman Empire was nothing like the mighty state it once had been. The chapter then considers the effects of the empire's disintegration on human welfare.

Mediterranean Troughs, 600–900

The Great Sea ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Regional Variation ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
Aegean Islands ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Fundamental Unity ◽  
Mass Murderer

By the sixth century, the unity of the Mediterranean had been shattered; it was no longer mare nostrum, either politically or commercially. There have been attempts to show that the fundamental unity of the Mediterranean as a trading space, at least, survived until the Islamic conquests of the seventh century (culminating in the invasion of Spain in 711), or even until the Frankish empire of the incestuous mass-murderer Charlemagne acquired control of Italy and Catalonia. There have also been attempts to show that recovery began much earlier than past generations of historians had assumed, and was well under way in the tenth or even the ninth century. It would be hard to dispute this in the case of the Byzantine East, which had already shown some resilience, or in the case of the Islamic lands that by then stretched from Syria and Egypt to Spain and Portugal, but the West is more of a puzzle. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that some historians observe decline at the same moments as others detect expansion. To this one can sensibly answer that there was enormous regional variation; but the question remains when and whether the Mediterranean lost, and then recovered, its unity. Just as in antiquity the integration of the Mediterranean into a single trading area, and subsequently into a single political area, had taken many centuries, from the Dark Age of the tenth century BC to the emergence of the Roman Empire, so in the era of the ‘Third Mediterranean’ the process of integration was painfully slow. Full political integration was never again achieved, despite the best efforts of invading Arabs and, much later, Turks. The loss by Byzantium of so many of its mainland possessions to the Slavs and other foes did leave the empire with several remarkable assets. Sicily, parts of southern Italy, Cyprus and the Aegean islands remained under Byzantine rule, and the empire drew wealth from gold and silver mines in several of these lands. Even Sardinia and Majorca were under Byzantine suzerainty, but it is unclear whether a functioning network of communication across the Mediterranean still existed.

Egyptian—Demotic

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Friedhelm Hoffmann
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Near East ◽  
Late Phase ◽  
The State ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Textual Material ◽  
Large Corpus

Demotic is a late phase of the Egyptian language and writing which began in the middle of the seventh century BCE. When after 30 BCE Egypt became part of the Roman Empire, Demotic was still widely used by the Egyptian priestly elite. A large corpus of literary, paraliterary and documentary texts has survived mainly on papyri, sherds, and as graffiti. Only in the middle of the fifth century CE, by which time Christianity was established as the state religion, does Demotic cease to exist. This chapter gives an overview of the Demotic language and writing, as well as its rich textual material and different forms and genres, and also draws the reader’s attention to the international relations (mainly with the ancient Near East and with Greece, but also e.g. with India) which can be observed in Demotic texts.

The Emergence of Nautical Astronomy in Portugal in the XVth century

1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. G. L. Randles
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Canary Islands ◽  
West African ◽  
The West ◽  
The World ◽  
Isidore Of Seville ◽  
Navigational Aid ◽  
Christian Writer ◽  
Methods Of Measurement

Of the great oceans of the world, the Atlantic, because of its violence, was the last to be mastered by man. The task in its entirety had to wait for the Portuguese sailors of the Renaissance. Isidore of Seville (c. 570–636), a Christian writer of the late Roman Empire, had written of the Atlantic that it was ‘incommensurable and uncrossable’. Although Pliny (a.d. 23–79) refers vaguely to the Canary Islands, all knowledge of them disappears in the Middle Ages until a Portuguese expedition under the command of the Italian Lanzarotto Malocello ‘re- discovered’ them in 1336. Italian charts of the XIVth century begin progressively to show the Canaries, Madeira, Porto Santo and the Azores, but all aligned along a N/S axis without any appreciation of the relative distances between them or how far they lay from the European shore. The first written evidence of the Portuguese ‘discovery’ of the islands of Madeira and Porto Santo appears in 1419–20 and of the Azores in 1427, about the same time as they began to be colonised under the aegis of Prince Henry of Portugal, called the ‘Navigator’. The difficulties of returning to them on regular voyages was to motivate the Portuguese to develop methods of measurement using the Pole Star as a navigational aid and this led, not only to a greater accuracy in placing the islands on the charts, but also to a greater precision in the charting of the west African coastline which they were progressively exploring during the second half of the XVth century.Claims that Portuguese nautical astronomy originated in Aragon and was transmitted from there to Portugal or was introduced into Portugal from Germany by Regiomontanus and Martin Behaim have long ago been shown to be baseless.

scholarly journals Wroxeter and the end of Roman Britain

Antiquity ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 88 (340) ◽  
pp. 501-515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Lane
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Urban Centre ◽  
The West ◽  
Roman Britain ◽  
Urban Activity ◽  
Late Roman

When and how did urban life in Roman Britain end? The excavations conducted by Philip Barker at Wroxeter from 1966–1990 produced evidence suggesting a post-Roman phase of urban activity that continued into the sixth or seventh century AD, up to 200 years beyond the traditionally accepted chronology. Careful re-examination of the evidence, however, throws doubt on these claims. More recent work on Late Roman Britain coupled with new discoveries in Wales and the west challenges the evidence for the post-Roman survival of Wroxeter as an urban centre and suggests that it may have been largely abandoned, along with other Roman towns, in the late fourth or early fifth century AD.

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