Staying Roman Conant, Jonathan
04/2012, Volume:
v.Series Number 82
eBook
What did it mean to be Roman once the Roman Empire had collapsed in the West? Staying Roman examines Roman identities in the region of modern Tunisia and Algeria between the fifth-century Vandal ...conquest and the seventh-century Islamic invasions. Using historical, archaeological and epigraphic evidence, this study argues that the fracturing of the empire's political unity also led to a fracturing of Roman identity along political, cultural and religious lines, as individuals who continued to feel 'Roman' but who were no longer living under imperial rule sought to redefine what it was that connected them to their fellow Romans elsewhere. The resulting definitions of Romanness could overlap, but were not always mutually reinforcing. Significantly, in late antiquity Romanness had a practical value, and could be used in remarkably flexible ways to foster a sense of similarity or difference over space, time and ethnicity, in a wide variety of circumstances.
In his rich and multilayered new biographical study, Johannes Fried traces the entire arc of the life of the legendary Frankish ruler Charlemagne (c. 748–814) from what little can be reconstructed of ...his boyhood, through his reign as king, his coronation in Rome on Christmas Day 800 as the first emperor in western Europe in over three centuries, and his subsequent passage into the realm of memory and myth.The judgement of subsequent generations has not always been kind to Charlemagne but Fried makes a strong case both for his significance to the culture and intellectual tradition of western Europe, and for the importance of trying to understand the king as far as possible within his own historical context.The resulting insights are frequently arresting: the deep effect that the death of his two-year-old brother Pepin had on the young Charlemagne; the profound political implications of his entry as king of the Franks into the city of Rome in 774, something no secular ruler, let alone a foreign one, had done for over a hundred years; the great delight that he took in the competition between his courtiers; his untroubled acceptance not only of his unmarried daughters' sexual liaisons but also of his son Charles's involvement in an open homoerotic relationship at court; the king's fascination with astronomy and the calculation of time; and perhaps above all, the ways in which early medieval apocalypticism, centred around the year 800, shaped both the construction of the palatine chapel at Aachen and Charlemagne's concerns in reviving the imperial title in the West.
When the southern Iberian city of Mérida revolted against Umayyad control, the Carolingian emperor Louis the Pious (814–40) sought to gain recognition there of his own political authority, probably ...in early 830. Motivated by a desire to project Frankish power after Umayyad intervention in Catalonia, the move was also in keeping with larger patterns of Carolingian expansion in the Iberian frontier zone. The incident is further revealing of Louis the Pious's wider imperial ambitions in the 820s, which early medieval conceptions of space allowed to be expressed over surprisingly long distances, well beyond the frontiers of the Frankish kingdoms.
The Italo-Byzantine sources for Aghlabid Ifrīqiya present a vision of Muslim-Christian relations in the region that is often darkly violent, and that contrasts with the image of this time and place ...found not only in the Arabic accounts, but even in most contemporary Latin Christian ones. Critically, however, the Byzantine texts most concerned with violence in the Aghlabid amirate comprise a small but important collection of hagiographic narratives about Sicilian and southern Italian Christians carried off into slavery by North African raiders. Indeed, in the third/ninth century, the Byzantine central Mediterranean was particularly hard-hit by raiding staged from lands under Muslim control, and Ifrīqiya appears to have been the market of choice for slaves captured in expeditions of this sort. North African society was doubtless characterised by some degree of interfaith tension in the Aghlabid period; but far more central to the violent vision of the Byzantine sources is the fact that hagiography provided a narrative space within which authors and audiences alike could grapple with anxieties about the possibility of capture and its physical and spiritual consequences.
Shortly after the Vandals took Carthage in 439, the city's Catholic bishop, Quodvultdeus, and a large number of his clergy were said to have been placed “naked and despoiled on broken ships” and put ...to sea, banished from Africa. By God's mercy, the exiles made their way safely to Naples, where Quodvultdeus quickly came to be regarded as a saint: a fifth-century mosaic from the catacombs of St. Januarius (San Gennaro) in Capodimonte seems to depict the African bishop, and by the middle of the ninth century his feast day was celebrated in the local liturgical calendar. A similar story could be told of Gaudiosus of Abitina, another fifth-century African bishop who was said to have fled the Vandals and who also achieved sainthood in Campania. The flight of refugees like Quodvultdeus and Gaudiosus from the political turmoil that wracked North Africa between the fifth and the eighth centuries, however, has long been seen as having a far greater significance than the reinvention of exiled African bishops as southern Italian holy men. In late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the cults of numerous saints who had been martyred in Africa and whose cults had originally developed there spread beyond the shores of the southern Mediterranean to the rest of the Christian world. In seeking to explain the diffusion of these cults, historians have long focused on the movements of refugees—and, above all, those who fled the Vandals' conquest of Africa and their subsequent persecution of the region's Catholic population—as displaced Africans such as Quodvultdeus are thought to have brought the relics of their local saints with them into foreign exile.
Reviews "The end of the pagan city : religion, economy, and urbanism in late antique North Africa," by Anna Leone (Oxford University Press, 2013). At the end of antiquity, an urban landscape largely ...defined by its pagan monuments gave way to one that was instead characterized by Christian churches and activity. Though this process has attracted considerable attention, scholars have for the most part explored the transition from paganism to Christianity through the written sources rather than through archaeology. Leone's new monograph focuses instead on how the physical cityscape was reshaped in late antiquity and above all on the extent to which changes in the urban fabric were "driven by religious and symbolic motivations and contrasts, or were stimulated purely by economic issues." The study concentrates on the old Roman province of Africa (roughly the territory of modern Tunisia, Algeria, and western Libya) in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries C. E., with a particular emphasis on the Late Roman and Byzantine periods. Revised Publication Abstract
