The Evolution of States. J. M. Robertson
no less a prudent than a benevolent motive that led Julian to reduce to £2,000,000 the revenue of £7,000,000 extorted by Constantine and Constantius.[224] The greater the depression in the sources of income, and the greater the costs of the frontier wars, the harder became the pressure of the fiscal system, till the burdens laid on the upper citizens who formed the curia[225] put them out of all heart for patriotic action, and drove many to flight, to slavery, or the cloister. Towards the end, indeed, there was set up a rapid process of economic change which substituted for slaves a class of serfs, coloni, adscriptitii, and so on, who though tied to the land paid a rent for it and could keep any surplus; but under this system agriculture was thus far no more a source of revenue than before. Latterly the very wine of Italy grew worthless, and its olives decayed;[226] so that in once fruitful Campania, "the orchard of the south," Honorius in the year 395 had to strike from the fiscal registers, as worthless, more than three hundred thousand acres of land[227]—an eighth of the whole province. After the ruinous invasions of Rhadagast and Alaric, fresh remissions of taxation had to be given, so that as the danger neared the defence weakened.[228] In the east, again, there was no impulse to succour the falling west; and indeed there was not the ability. The fiscal power of the Emperor was inelastic; his revenues, extorted by cruel pressure, needed careful husbanding; his own world needed all his attention; and the eastern upper class of clerics and officials were not the people to strain themselves for the mere military retention of Britain or Gaul or Italy, as Rome would have done in the republican period, or as the emperors would have done before the period of decentralisation. For the rich agricultural provinces of Africa they did strive with success when Belisarius overthrew the Vandals; and in that age, when Italy had once more become revenue-yielding through the revival of her agriculture, it was worth the while of the east to reconquer Italy also; but the old spirit of resolute dominion and aggression was gone. Armies could still be enrolled and generalled if there was pay for them; but the pay failed, not because bullion was lacking, but because the will and power to supply and apply it in the old fashion was lacking. The new age, after Theodosius, looked at these matters in a different light—the light of commercial self-interest and Christian or eastern disregard for Roman tradition and prestige. The new religion, Christianity, was a direct solvent of imperial patriotism in the old sense, transferring as it did the concern of serious men from this world to the next, and from political theory to theological. In Italy, besides, the priesthood could count on making rather more docile Christians of the invaders than it had done of the previous inhabitants; so that Christian Rome, once overrun, must needs remain so.
[Finlay (ed. cited i, 294) suggests that "probably the knowledge which the Emperor Justin and his cabinet must have possessed of the impossibility of deriving any revenue from the agricultural districts of Italy offers the simplest explanation of the indifference manifested at Constantinople to the Lombard invasion." But he had already noted (p. 236, note) that a great revival of agriculture took place in the reign of Theodoric. Then it could only be through the exhaustion of the subsequent wars that Italy was incapable of yielding a revenue. The true explanation of Justin's inaction is probably not indifference but impotence, the Empire's resources being then drained.
After the invasion of the Lombards the clergy and Senate of Rome had to send a large sum in bullion to induce the Emperor Maurice to listen to their prayers for help. Still the help could not be given, though, save in the case of the coast towns (see below, p. 188), tribute was paid to Byzantium till the final breach between Rome and Leo the Iconoclast. (Gibbon, Bohn ed. v, 114.)
Guizot (Histoire de la Civilisation en France, 13e éd. i, 75, 76) notes the fundamental difference in the attitude of the Church under the old and eastern emperors and under the Teutonic rule. Symonds (Renaissance in Italy, 2nd ed. i, 43) thinks this was a result of Theodoric's not having made Rome his headquarters, and his having treated it with special respect. But the clergy of Gaul at once gained an ascendency over the Frankish kings, and the popes would probably have done as well with resident emperors as with absentees. Their great resource was that of playing one Christian monarch against another—a plan not open to the patriarch of Constantinople.]
That the Empire could still at a push raise armies and find for them generals who could beat back the barbarians was sufficiently shown in the careers of Stilicho and Aetius and Belisarius; but the extreme parsimony with which Justinian supported his great commander in Italy is some proof of the economic difficulty of keeping up, even in a period of prudent administration,[229] a paid force along the vast frontiers of what had been Hadrian's realm. Only as ruled by one central system, inspired by an ideal of European empire, and using the finance and force of the whole for the defence of any part, could that realm have been preserved; and when Diocletian, while holding mechanically by the ideal of empire, began the disintegration of its executive, he began the ending of the ideal. The creation of an eastern capital was now inevitable; and when once the halving of the Empire had become a matter of course, the west, hollow at the core, was fated to fall. We should thus not be finally wrong in saying that "the Roman idea" died out before the Western Empire could fall; provided only that we recognise the economic and other sociological causation of the process.
It remains to note, finally, that the process cannot possibly be explained by the theory that the Eastern Empire was successfully unified by Christianity, and that the Western remained divided by reason of the obstinate adherence of the Roman aristocracy to Paganism. The framer of this theory confutes it by affirming that in Greece "the popular element … by its alliance with Christianity, infused into society the energy which saved the Eastern Empire," while admitting that in Italy also the "great body of the [city] population" had embraced Christianity. Surely the popular Christian element ought to have saved Italy also if it were the saving force. Italy was essentially Christian in the age of Belisarius: if there was any special element of disunion it was the mutual hatred of Arians and Athanasians and other sects, which had abundantly existed also in the east, where it finally furthered the Saracen conquest of the Asiatic provinces and Egypt,[230] but as regarded the central part of the Empire was periodically got rid of by the suppression of all heresy.[231] Eastern unification, such as it was, had thus been the work, not of "Christianity," or of any sudden spirit of unity among the Greeks, but of the Imperial Government, which in the East had sufficient command of, and needed for its own sake to use, the resources that we have seen lost to Italy.[232] As for the established religion, it was the insoluble conflict of doctrine as to images that finally, in the reign of Leo the Iconoclast, arrayed the Papacy against the Christian Emperor, and completed the sunderance of Greek and Latin Christendom; while in the East the patriarch of Jerusalem became the minister of the Moslem conquerors in the seventh century, as did the patriarch of Constantinople in the fifteenth.
FOOTNOTES:
[160] The phrase of Professor Thorold Rogers, whose application of the principle, however, does not carry us far.
[161] Dr. Cunningham overlooks this form of gain-getting by war, when he says that the early Romans had no direct profit from it (Western Civilisation, i, 154), but mentions it later (p. 157). Prof. Ferrero likewise overlooks it when (Eng. tr. i, 4) he specifies "timber for shipbuilding and salt" as practically the whole of the exportable products of the early Romans. Once more, who consumed their cattle?