Re: Why is there no Roman state in western Europe?
Posted: 2013-08-09 04:36pm
But this argument of Charlemagne is only to serve as a counterpoint to the only legitimate Roman state there was in his day, not an attempt to rebuild the Empire in itself. He wanted to claim kinship to Rome as a political tool to distance himself from East Rome, not to rebuilt something he cared for.Simon_Jester wrote:You are correct, but that does not contradict my statements. My point is that any state which we might call a "Roman" state needs an argument for why it is a Roman state, one that people will take seriously. No Roman of 400 would take "crowned by the bishop of Rome" as justification for calling a man the Roman Emperor. But a Frank of 800 AD might very well have seen that as legitimate. And if that attempt to build legitimacy were accompanied by a serious attempt to rebuild all that Rome was, including institutions and so on... we might well call that a 'return of Rome.'
In practice, Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire was not something most people would call a 'return of Rome' in Western Europe. It was quite different. But it at least had some kind of vaguely coherent claim; it had an argument in favor of being a Roman successor state, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for actually being one.
You are once again overestimating the role of christianity in the changing of the empire. By all serious accounts it played a very limited rule in forcing social change. By focusing on christianity as if it were the catalyst or something like that you ignore that christianity was only picked up as a result of change and did not cause that change by itself.It's not as simple as "Christianity destroyed Roman culture." It's more like "the shift to Christianity altered Roman culture in certain fundamental ways, and acted as a catalyst for continuous, ongoing change in other ways. By the time this ongoing change had been underway for several hundred years, there was no real way to go back and say "let's recreate a recognizably Roman society." You couldn't do it even if you wanted to. Medieval Christians were not Roman citizens of five hundred years earlier, so there was essentially no chance of creating a culture identical to that of Christian late-imperial Rome, let alone the earlier pagan Rome.
Such as?Christianity causing certain social structures to be uprooted or at least reduced in importance
I agree with those.In many cases, the occupiers borrowed liberally from the legal customs of the Romans, so former Roman citizens who now lived under the barbarians may have felt that they were still being treated justly.
-In many cases, the 'occupiers' were seen as a protection against other barbarian groups, and the generally violent and unsettled times associated with the fall of Rome. When your city has been burnt down around your ears by Attila the Hun a few decades ago, and Theodoric the Goth is the new man on the block who is beating the Huns soundly, you're not going to complain that he 'isn't Roman enough.' Especially since he certainly aspired to the same kind of stable, peaceful civilization they had, and let Roman citizens live under the Roman legal code.
Well, we do have Romans rebelling against the Gothic invaders with the help of the Byzantines, so there is that. But these revolts happened in Italy and coincided with massive help from Justinian. If similar help had been provided, to, say, the Spanish nobles this might have happened as well, but Justinian didn't get to that. However, rebellions certainly helped the Byzantines reconquer Italy and North Africa.-"Roman" identity was not a uniform quasi-ethnic nationality stretching across Europe; to be a "Roman" was to be a citizen of the empire, and if the empire was now an irrelevant concept, how could you rebel against a Germanic king in the name of "being a Roman?"