The Early Middle Ages - Open Yale Courses: Notes from Classes part 1 (Classes 1 to 6).

• Roman Empire - 3th Century AD (Anno Domini)

• How does a rich, literate society come to be destroyed by a more primitive one?

• Rome was an imperial power, and it was an extraordinarily tolerant one - They were very tolerant with regard to religion, for example.

• The Roman Empire lasted for an incredibly long time. In the year 410 the Visigoths sacked, plundered Rome, this was the first time this had happened in the city of Rome in something on the order of 800 years. The Empire itself, by this time, was nearly 400 years old.

• The Mediterranean was its center, referred to often as Mare Nostrum, “Our Sea".

• But, however tolerant, of course, Rome drew the line at Christianity - It is still, historically, quite unusual that the Empire should have permitted all of these other religions.

• It is an urban civilization, with an elite that is urban, it was a cosmopolitan way of life.

• There's a sort of a mental picture of what a city looks like, from one end of the empire to the
• other.

• The third century crisis- A crisis of the Roman Empire that preceded the accession of Diocletian, from 235 to 284.

• The immediate problems that explode in the third century are invasions and succession.

• Invasions by, first of all, Persia. The dynasty that controls Persia and that is more aggressive than its predecessor are the Sassanids. The second invasion is across the Danube-Rhine frontier.

• The major problem besides the invasions was succession.  There are at least 30 emperors between 235 and 285. Many of them ruling for months; most of them being killed. They're assassinated by their own troops.

• Sometimes the next emperor was chosen by his predecessor. Another possibility is some guy is powerful and uses his troops to take over. And that's what we see in the third century.

• Just as in some countries with unstable political structures, the military is able to make and unmake rulers. Rome in the third century is ruled, if one can call it that, by a succession of generals. Not members of an upper class elite, but men who have come from the provinces

• One of the reasons that the troops both raised up generals and then killed them, was that they tended to get a kind of reward from the new emperor - a thing called a donative. A donative is money that you get when there's a new emperor.

• The one that might have affected more people than the instability is inflation. The need to reward the army with those donatives, and the dislocations of the invasions led to tremendous government expenditures.

• So how does a government deal with problems like this if it can't borrow money? It does what is called debasing the coinage.

• The coins say they're worth a unit, but they're actually, in terms of precious metal value, worth a half. when most people go to buy stuff, they are going to find that the stuff is 50% more expensive.

• The governments tend to do this gradually, hoping the people don't notice in the first place.

• But bad money drives out good (people spent the bad one first and hide the good). - Fierce inflation (prices go up).

• And a final problem is the ruin of the local elite, partly because of this economic chaos, partly from deeper causes. the Empire could not be held together, really, by the government, It required the cooperation of wealthy people with ties to their native city. It was these people who sponsored games, civic improvements, maintained the temples, and kept a kind of local order.

• This elite is undermined by the militarization of society. They are, to some extent, ruined by taxation and increased taxation.

• Under Diocletian (general - 284 to 305)  severe guidance, the Empire was reformed, it was, in effect, militarized. Building society around the army in order to protect it.

• A more efficient, and ultimately, burdensome form of taxation.

• He has three goals. One, solving this problem of the imperial succession. Two, stabilizing the economy. Three, protecting the frontiers. Of these three, he's actually only really successful in the third--protecting the frontiers.

• The figure of the emperor becomes more sacred and more powerful in terms of images as well as administration.

• The first bureaucratic task was just to have a lot of people who could value things, who could come into a territory and say ok, this farm is worth so much, and it has these many people.

• A new postal sistem, more efective, (riders, horses, communications) and more punishment for things like tax evasion.

• Not only that if I don't pay my taxes, I get punished, but if you and I live in the same village, and you don't pay your taxes, I get punished.

• But the most important change in government is the establishment of what's called the Tetrarchy. The Tetrarchy is the rule of four rulers.

• These four emperors would not cooperate. They would tend to be rivals.

• Diocletian divides the Empire, first in two: East, West. A very significant move that will have consequences for the next 1,200 years. He then appoints a co-emperor to rule in the West, while he rules in the East. And they each appoint a helper, number three and number four.

• The two emperors are called Augusti, emperors, and the two helpers are Caesars.

• It's a statement that the Empire is too big for one man to rule.

• Diocletian issued a so-called Edict on Prices. The Edict on Prices attempted to set a fixed price for goods.

• The state started getting in more resources, less was being withheld by private people, and so the state could actually pay for its administrative and military costs.

• However the Edict on Prices had to be abandoned; the Tetrarchy did not work; and Diocletian failed in trying to suppress Christianity.

• He saved the Roman Empire for 100 years.

• The Roman Empire is thought to have collapsed in the West in the late fifth century. In the East, however, arguably, Diocletian's reforms last for more on the order of 1,200 years. The Eastern Empire, the Byzantine Empire would fall in 1453. And to its last day, it was modeled on Diocletianic administrative and military forms.

• Out of the chaos between 306 and 312 (failure of the thetrarchy) emerges Constantine.

• It represents the beginning of the Christianization of the Roman Empire, a very unexpected result. Because not only had Christianity been illegal in the prior history of the empire, that is to say, for over 250 years, but of course, the god-man Jesus had been put to death by the forces of the Roman Empire.

• Constantine emerged from the chaos following Diocletian's abdication, he was the son of one of the caesars.

• The city of Constantinopla - an eastern capital - For strategic reasons having to do with the movement of the armies and the protection of the frontier. For economic reasons having to do with taxation and administration. - creating a new Rome, a new capital in the former fortress of Byzantium.

• He starts promulgating laws against married men having concubines-- ineffective, or punishing rape by burning, all orientation towards sexual crimes that shows a more Christian horror.

• Constantine favors the church, enacts legislation recommended by the church.

• Now who is the designated leader of the church is not clear yet. Certainly, it's not yet the pope in the 320s. It is the collectivity of bishops.

• In resume, Constantine continued Diocletian's military and administrative structure. Like Diocletian, in order to do this, he had to rely on very heavy taxation.

• If anything, his taxation had to be greater because he had exempted the Church and its clergy, and someone was going to have to make up the difference.

• But Diocletian had persecuted the Catholic church, whereas Constantine would favor it.

• Under Diocletian, the emperor was a god. The emperor was a distantly glimpsed figure.

• Constantine, too, had a ceremonial, distant, he couldn't be worshipped as a god, to be sure, but he was something a bit more than merely a follower of Christianity.

• Constantine ended the Tetrarchy, but he really set the seal on the division of the Empire east and west.

• Constantine was a little more successful economically.

• The Empire was now stable. It was clear who the emperor was. The barbarians had been pushed back behind the frontiers. Trade, culture, civilization seemingly flourished.

• People in the fourth century at the time of Constantine were optimistic.

• Much of what was preserved from the debacle of 476 and successive problems of the preservation of civilization would be preserved through the action of the Church.

• People fought over doctrine and they invoked the emperor's intervention.

• Period of inequality among the rich and poor and social mobility. There are a lot of paths open to barbarians, even in this period, barbarians become important figures in the Roman army.

• We're in a transitional period ushered in by Diocletian when the Empire is sometimes divided and sometimes not. With the death of Theodosius in 395, the third-to-last of those emperors on the list, he had been sole emperor for three years. With his death and the division of the Empire between his son Honorius, ruling from Ravenna - the Western capital now, in what's now northern Italy --and Arcadius, ruling from Constantinople.

• Constantine was succeeded by his sons. After two of the sons died, Constantius ruled alone. Constantius assured that he would rule alone by massacring most of his family. Julian was one of only two that he allowed to surviv e, and he shouldn't have, because Julian overthrew him.

• Julian the Apostate (unfaithful) - 360 to 363: he was born as a Christian but tried to restore the traditional Roman religion, and failed.

• The decree of the Emperor Theodosius of 393 proclaiming Christianity the only legal religion, except for a small space allowed for Judaism, did not really mean that every body in the Empire was a practicing Christian. A very large number of people would either continue their traditional polytheistic local worship of local gods or assimilate that worship to Christianity.

• The chief preoccupations of these rulers of the fourth century were the same as when we started out: the Persian threat on the eastern frontier, the barbarian threat on the Rhine-Danube frontier. But there are also other problems that the third-century emperors had not faced, and these are religious problems (heresies):

• Arianism:  Arian with an "i" is a follower of Arius, who was a priest from Alexandria influenced by ideas from Plato about the absolute and unknowable nature of God. Any religion, but Christianity in particular, has a problem: If y ou make God too absolute and unapproachable, then why does he care about us? If you make Him too approachable, then how is he powerful enough to transcend the world? Arianism says that Christ is essentially different from God the Father in some fundamental way , that Christ was created by God as a way of interacting with the world. They subordinate Christ to God.

• Donatism: if y our priest is bad, is your baby baptized? And Donatism answers, no. No. It depends on the virtue of the officiate. Donatism lends itself to "sectarianism." It does not lend itself to a church that is universal, big, massive. And it also doubts that the church itself has the power to overcome the defects of its members.

• Manicheanism: A teaching about good and evil that can be applied to other religions besides Christianity . Manicheanism basically say s that good and evil have a real existence. There is a war in the universe between a good god and an evil one. And this may be applied outside of Christianity or within Christianity.

• So the fourth century is a time of ideas circulating around as Christianity starts to define itself.

• Heresy is important because of its impact in shaping the church through controversy and because it fell to the emperor to try to resolve heresy . And thus marks the beginning of a merger of church and state in away that would become characteristic of the entire Middle Ages.

• The other thing to remark is that the emperor did not hav e a lot of success with this, almost ever. It's very frustrating for an emperor who can get someone killed immediately . All he's got to do is say, "You dropped that lark's tongue pie.Take him away and kill him." But he can't seem to do this with heretics, partly because heretics love persecution.

• The emperor intervenes in those matters because he is afraid of upsetting God. If the church starts dissolving into quarreling factions, God is going to be angry, and His favor will cease.

• But he couldn't get rid of it. He couldn't get rid of it, and now, instead of appointing judges, he summoned a council of the bishops of the Empire, what later would be called an ecumenical council -"ecumenical" meaning worldwide--a universal council, which met in the city of Nicaea, more or less in the western part of Asia Minor. And it met in 325.

• This first ecumenical council was summoned by the emperor, and it came up with a formula, a definition of the creed, what every Christian must believe, saying that God and Christ are of the same essence, but different persons. God and Christ and the HolyGhost. Christ was begotten by the Father, but not made by Him.

• Arius gave a kind of equivocal acceptance of this arrangement, but the Bishop of Alexandria refusedto accept Arius back into communion. In other words, the  Nicene Creed defined orthodoxy , but ighting raged for about 50 years over the relationship between Christ and God the Father.

• Constantine kept on changing his mind. He died more or less an Arian. He came to believe that the Arian moderate position was the best. This is partly because of the absolute intransigence of the Archbishop of Alexandria, Athanasius. Athanasius would then later be a saint, considered the upholder of the orthodox line.

• St. Augustine’s Confessions - His father is a pagan. His mother is a Christian. He is first a Platonist, sort of, then a Manichean, then a Christian Platonist, and then a more fervent Christian.

• He both admires the Platonists, feels that they saved him from the Manicheans, but ultimately comes to doubt them.

• In Platonism, evil is a falling away , or a turning of your vision, to evoke the cave metaphor. It is a misperception, and it's the result of poor education. If y ou educate people to the superiority of the spiritual, they will throw off their evil ways. The reason people misbehave, kill each other, oppress each other, is that they don't know any better, and if y ou teach them, they 'll reform.

• What bothers him is, why does a good and omnipotent god allow evil to flourish? And also the Bible seems awfully crude to him, compared to the works of the Greek writers and philosophers.

• The Old Testament god is temperamental.

• So these two anxieties put Augustine in the camp of the Manicheans who believe that the solution to the problem of evil is that God is not omnipotent. God is trying, but there's another evil god who is opposing Him.

• The three things that he is teaching that are implicit in the Confessions and that he is important for in terms of his intellectual impact are his opposition to perfectionism, his exaltation of grace, and the notion of sin as indelible, not solvable.

• Augustine stands behind the medieval Catholic Church, which is a political body , a body of doctrine, a structure ruled by princes, and a structure that has a missionary impact on the rest of the world.

• From 410 to 480, the Western Roman Empire disintegrated. It was dismembered by barbarian groups.

• The Western Empire had, in 476, become a collection of barbarian kingdoms.

• The world of the late Roman historians is divided, roughly speaking, between catastrophists and continuists.

• The Roman political order may have collapsed in terms of staffing by lay people and military people, but the bishops were now the rulers of the city.

• The bishops would now do things like ensure the food supply, rally the local population against barbarian invasions, educate the populace. And the barbarian kings themselves try, with some success, to perpetuate the Roman order.

http://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-210