Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West 376-568
Guy Halsall
Number of quotes: 14
Book ID: 36 Page: 19
Section: 1A
Recently the idea of the ‘Fall of Rome’ and to some extent that of ‘the barbarian migrations’ have lost in importance as historians have developed the paradigm of the ‘transformation of the Roman world’.….
This development espouses a move away from traditional ideas of the end of the Roman Empire to look at slower processes of transformation and, especially, the ways in which elements of the Roman world survived beyond the traditional date of 476 to be taken up and modified in post-imperial Europe.
Quote ID: 728
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 36 Page: 20
Section: 1A
In some ways this continues a long-standing historiographical tradition. While historians had tended to agree that barbarians destroyed the Roman Empire but to disagree about whether this was a ‘Good’ or ‘Bad Thing’, a great nineteenth-century French historian, N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, argued that the invasions or migrations had actually had very little effect on the society and institutions of Gaul. {53}
Quote ID: 729
Time Periods: 1
Book ID: 36 Page: 20
Section: 1A
Pirenne’s famous ‘thesis’ was that the Roman world was an economic unity around the Mediterranean that survived the barbarian invasions with little change and only collapsed when the seventh-century Arab conquests ruptured the coherence of the Mediterranean, dividing Christian north from Islamic south.
Quote ID: 730
Time Periods: 16
Book ID: 36 Page: 22
Section: 1A
The power of the Western Rome Empire declined and, as a political institution, it fell. This is as close as one can get to a matter of neutral reportage in fifth-century history, and implies no moral judgement on the process. This volume presents the end of the Roman Empire and the barbarian migrations as a dramatic, bewildering, massively important and comparatively short-term sequence of events, whose results were all the more dramatic and bewildering for being unintended.
Quote ID: 731
Time Periods: 15
Book ID: 36 Page: 57
Section: 3D2
By the late Roman period the barbarian peoples had been neighbours of a mighty world power for three or four centuries. The Empire habitually interfered in their politics, setting up and knocking down kings, paying gifts and so on. {79} Not surprisingly, any ideas of power and prestige that we can perceive in barbaricum had by this time come to be entirely based upon the Roman Empire.
Quote ID: 732
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 36 Page: 58
Section: 3D2
Roman ideas of power, mediated through objects associated with the Empire, saturated barbarian life. {83}
Quote ID: 733
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 36 Page: 78
Section: 4B
As Averil Cameron has stated, ‘the fourth century witnessed the transformation of the old “orders”, still closely linked to birth and wealth, into a service aristocracy, in which rank depended on office... {49}
Quote ID: 734
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 36 Page: 99
Section: 1A
Two further Roman institutions require attention as both played crucial roles in helping people of the west to negotiate the change to the post-imperial world: the church and army. The Christian church in western Europe was a comparatively recent introduction.Pastor John’s Note: 2 pages on church, 9 pages on army
Quote ID: 735
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 36 Page: 99/100
Section: 3C
Constantine’s conversion had been decisive. {125} Whatever personal piety lay behind it, it cannot have been lost upon him that a well organised, exclusive monotheism provided the best religious underpinning for the new Empire’s totalitarian ideology. In that sense, Constantine’s conversion can, ironically, be seen as the logical extension of the pagan Diocletian’s reforms.
Quote ID: 736
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 36 Page: 100
Section: 3C,4B
The key to Christianity’s dramatic spread was the importance of imperial patronage. {126} As we have seen, imperial service was, in various ways, vital in local politics. As Constantine’s success grew it became apparent that to receive his patronage one would need to be Christian. There were, furthermore, dramatic illustrations of Constantine’s favours to converts. Conversion was, thus, drawn down through Roman society along the arteries of patronage.
Quote ID: 737
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 36 Page: 100
Section: 3A2
The church was organised around imperial administrative structures. With some exceptions, each civitas became a bishopric. The bishop of a province’s capital city became a metropolitan (renamed, long after our period, an archbishop) and, though his rights and privileges were yet to be securely established, had the right to ordain the other bishops within his province.
Quote ID: 738
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 36 Page: 101
Section: 3A2
The bishop was becoming a very powerful figure in local politics, and service in the church now provided an alternative route to the imperial presence.
Quote ID: 739
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 36 Page: 101
Section: 3A2
....it had come to be an institution as thoroughly Roman as bureaucracy.Pastor John’s Note: The Church
Quote ID: 740
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 36 Page: 101
Section: 2E2
Nevertheless, other currents in Christian thinking parted company with their pagan predecessors. These stressed the extremes of ascetic self-denial, virginity and renunciation of family ties. {129} This competitive approach to asceticism had little to do with the traditional Roman virtues of moderation and presented an alternative model of behaviour for men and women.
Quote ID: 741
Time Periods: 34
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