[Prev Page][Contents][Next Page]

Late Antiquity

Western Provinces: Britain, Spain, Africa

I'll turn next to the provinces of the western empire, where the retreat of imperial authority was perhaps most noticeable.

Britain

Britain in 400 AD (to pick a year) was a thoroughly Romanized province, or at least the southern portions were. There were beautiful public baths, estates, even bookstores. The Roman legions had brought peace and prosperity, at least most of the time.

But the troubles of the late 4th century caused the legions of the outlying provinces to be recalled. The last Roman legion left in 407. Across the North Sea, new Germanic tribes were settling: Angles, Jutes, Saxons. By the later 400s, they were crossing over to England, unopposed by Roman forces, and driving the Britons back into Cornwall and Wales.

The King Arthur legends preserve some memory of this. If there was an Arthur, he probably lived in the early 500s, just when the Celtic Britons were making their last stands against the Saxons. Perhaps Arthur somehow represented a memory of the days when Roman troops kept the peace, Roman law kept order, and Roman merchants brought wealth. As in the legends, in the end the Britons lost, and Britain was by 600 on its way to acquiring its new name: England, the land of the Angles.

Spain

The story was quite different here. The Visigoths moved across Europe in the later 300s, after their victory at Adrianople, coming to settle finally in Spain in the early 400s. There they set up a kingdom that retained much of the old Roman administrative system.

In fact, Visigothic Spain was a haven of order in a chaotic world. They retained Roman titles and Roman practices. We have some modest literary works from here, most notably that of Isidore of Seville. This kingdom lasted until the arrival of the Muslims at the beginning of the 700s, after which the Goths disappear from Spain.

Africa

North Africa had long been the granary of Italy, highly civilized and highly Romanized, and it continued in this role until the Vandals swept through in the 5th century. They thoroughly disrupted the Roman administrative systems and the grain vanished so abruptly that it caused famine more than once in Rome. The Vandals had a reputation for destructiveness that was well-earned.

The Vandals were defeated by the Byzantines during Justinian's reign (early 500s) and enjoyed a late though modest prosperity in the later 6th and early 7th centuries. But this Roman backwater vanished forever with the coming of Islamic armies in the later 7th century.