Italyin heearly Middle Ages

The Roman Empire was an international political system in which Italy was only a

part, though an important part. When the empire fell, a series of barbarian kingdoms
initially ruled the peninsula, but, after the Lombard invasion of 568–569, a network
of smaller political entities arose throughout Italy. How each of these developed—in
parallel with the others, out of the ruins of the Roman world—is one principal theme
of this section. The survival and development of the Roman city is another. The
urban focus of politics and economic life inherited from the Romans continued and
expanded in the early Middle Ages and was the unifying element in the development
of Italy’s regions.
The late Roman Empire and the Ostrogoths

mosaic

Diocletian

The military emperors of the late 3rd century, most notably Diocletian (284–305),

reformed the political structures of the Roman Empire. They restructured the army
after the disasters of the previous 50 years, extensively developed the
civil bureaucracy and the ceremonial rituals of imperial rule, and, above all,
reorganized and enlarged the tax system. The fiscal weight of the late Roman Empire
was heavy, given the resources of the period: its major support, the land tax,
collected by local city governments, took at least one-fifth, and probably one-third, of
the agricultural produce. On the other hand, the administration and the army that
the tax system paid for reestablished a measure of stability for the empire in the 4th
century. Central government was not always stable; there were several periods of
civil war in the 4th century, notably in the decade after Diocletian’s retirement and in
the years around 390. But succession disputes had been a normal part of imperial
politics since the Julio-Claudians in the 1st century CE; in general, self-confidence in
the 4th-century empire was fairly high. Aggressive emperors such as Valentinian
I (364–375) could not have imagined that within a century nearly all of the Western
Empire was to be under barbarian rule. Nor was this lack of a sense of doom a simple
delusion; after all, in the richer Eastern provinces the imperial system held firm for
many centuries, in the form of the Byzantine Empire.
Fifth-century political trends
The Germanic invasions of the years after 400 did not, then, strike at an enfeebled
political system. But in facing them, ultimately unsuccessfully, Roman emperors and
generals found themselves in a steadily weaker position, and much of
the coherence of the late Roman state dissolved in the environment of the continuous
emergencies of the 5th century. One of the tasks of the historian must be to assess the
extent of the survival of Roman institutions in each of the regions of the West
conquered by the Germans, for this varied greatly. It was considerable in the North
Africa of the Vandals, for example, as Africa was a rich and stable province and was
conquered relatively quickly (429–442); it was more limited in northern Gaul, a less
Romanized area to begin with, which experienced 80 years of war and confusion
(406–486) before it finally came under the control of the Franks. In Italy the 4th-
century system remained relatively unchanged for a long time. The government of
the Western Empire, which was permanently based at Ravenna after 402, became
progressively weaker but remained substantially intact. While the Germanic
king Odoacer ruled Italy after 476, the peninsula was not conquered by a Germanic
tribe until the Ostrogothic invasion in 489–493. Although the peninsula had faced
invasions, such as those of Alaric the Visigoth in 401–410, Italian politics continued
during the 5th century to be those of the Roman Empire. This meant, in
the context of the military crisis of the period, a continual struggle between civil and
military leaders, with the emperors themselves more or less pawns in the middle.

The careers of three of these leaders serve as examples of 5th-century political

trends. Aetius controlled the armies of the West between 429 and his murder in 454;
he was the last man to be active in both Italy and Gaul, as a Roman senatorial leader
of a barbarian army that was Germanic, Hunnic, or both. His career was typical of
those in the military tradition of Roman politics, and, had his life not been cut short,
he might well have become emperor. The makeup of his army was, however, already
significantly different from that of Diocletian or Valentinian, and its growing number
of non-Roman military detachments tended increasingly to have their own ethnic
leaders and to be organized according to their own rules. Ricimer (in power 456–
472, by this time only in Italy) was a Germanic tribesman, not a Roman. He was
culturally highly Romanized and, as such, was himself part of a tradition of Romano-
Germanic military leadership that went back to the 370s, but he could not, as a
“barbarian,” be emperor, and he made and unmade several emperors in a search for
a stable ruler who would not undermine his own power. Significantly, in 456–457
and 465–467 he ruled alone, subordinate only to the Eastern emperor in
Constantinople. Odoacer was militarily supreme from 476 to 493. In a coup in 476 he
replaced the last ethnic-Roman military commander, Orestes, and deposed Orestes’
son, Romulus Augustulus, the child emperor and the last of the Western emperors.
Odoacer pushed Ricimer’s politics to its logical conclusion and ruled without an
emperor except for the nominal recognition of Constantinople as supreme authority.
Odoacer, however, did not merely call himself patricius—local ruler for the Eastern
Empire—but also rex—king of his Germanic army of Sciri, Rugians, and Heruls. To
what extent he was a military commander of a Roman army as opposed to being a
German “tribal” leader was by now impossible to tell. Nonetheless, he, like Ricimer,
was an effective defender of Italy against invaders for a long time.