This frenetic fighting and maneuvering in the East made matters significantly simpler for Anthemius II in Ravenna. For the first few years of the 490s, all he really had to deal with was the constant, but easily checked, Mauri pressure in Africa, and with watching his back against the Visigoths. Iberia was once again the focus. Anthemius II had learned the right lessons from his father’s problems against Phylarchus, and quickly kicked Hermianus upstairs to the post of
magister utriusque militiæ in 491 as soon as fighting against the Visigoths died down again. Syagrius, in northern Gaul, was less of a problem to manage, since he wasn’t particularly powerful by himself. He was also occupied with fighting Franks, Alamanni, and Burgundiones and had little time to spare on plotting to seize the throne or any similar nonsense. Anyway, under various different commanders, the Roman reassertion of control over Iberia proceeded slowly, but steadily. A Suebic attempt to interfere in 495 was smashed at Pallantia, which more or less sealed off Tarraconensis for the Roman government. Slightly over half the peninsula was in Roman control after nearly two decades of concerted action, improving the solvency of the Roman exchequer tremendously.
Visigothic weakness bred weakness. After 497, when Evareiks died, internal squabbles started between supporters of the Roman
foedus and its opponents, which reduced Visigothic combat power even further. Fresh raiding by the Vascones into southern Aquitania exacerbated the problem even further. Despite the
foedus, which was still formally extant, in 499 Anthemius began amassing an army under his personal command to take advantage of this temporary Gothic weakness, which marched in the spring of 500. It ended up being diverted from the Visigoths by the Burgundiones, who had temporarily managed to coalesce under a single ruler (one Godomar) to launch a surprisingly effective invasion of Roman Arelate. Godomar’s invaders were driven back through able campaigning on the part of the Romans, who then inflicted a heavy defeat on them on the Isara River during the winter of 500-501. In exchange for some of the Burgundiones’ territory, a formal agreement on Burgundian coinage rights (more on that later) and a
foedus codifying Burgundian military obligations to the Empire, Anthemius made Godomar a
dux and provided him military support and legitimacy against his internal enemies, who had reared their heads after the defeat on the Isara.
By the time Burgundian matters were cleared up, it was already 503. A fresh Visigothic leader, Sigereiks II, had assumed control in Aquitania, proved his military power by temporarily halting raids from Vasconia, and was busily prosecuting a campaign against the whipping-boy Saxons of Portus Namnetum in hopes of enlisting defeated Saxons into his army. Even though he had been the head of the Visigothic party opposed to the Roman
foedus, Sigereiks was not stupid; by now he could probably not hope to win a war against the Romans, with their Iberian resources and their Burgundian shock-troops. At the same time, he knew that many of his supporters would drift away if something were not done about the Romans’ power. An apocryphal story goes that Sigereiks thus treated with the Thuringii and Gepida, inviting them to make war on the Empire; this is unlikely to have been within the scope of his diplomatic contacts. Besides, both of these powers had other reasons to attack Roman territory. The Romans had been somewhat delinquent in their maintenance of their eastern frontiers, what with the concentration of Iberia and Gaul. The Gepid king Trasereiks – the first of them to actually assume the title of
rex – needed to recoup prestige from defeats against the Lombards in Moesia, and Rome seemed like the perfect target.
So in 504, Anthemius II’s field army was forced to make tracks east to shore up suddenly-failing eastern defenses against Thuringian and Gepid raids. Rome’s difficulties were magnified by the defeat of a Burgundian army by the suddenly-protagonistic Alamanni during that summer. Syagrius assumed command of Godomar’s weakened troops, but it was all he could do to defend Roman territory, much less take the offensive. By next year, the pressure became so intense that troops were detached from the Iberian army under the command of one Verinianus to stem the tide in Gaul. Anthemius’ personal field army drew a major battle with the Gepida at the ruins of Iulia Æmona in 506, and the
magister militum per Illyricum, Flavius Eventius, was killed in the same year fighting off an (unsuccessful) raid on Salona.
Eventually, though, the nature of the enemies against whom Anthemius was fighting helped the Romans overcome the problem. In 507, Trasereiks’ Gepida were the first to pull out, spurred by pressure on their southern and eastern frontiers from Lombards and Antes. Later that year, Anthemius’ personal field army defeated the Thuringii in a surprise winter attack on a Thuringian encampment near Ovilva in Noricum. With the costs of war too high to safely continue, the Thuringii headed back over the Danube, busying themselves with easier pickings from the Alamanni. Only the Visigoths remained, and they quickly attempted to make a settlement for themselves, realizing their peril. Verinianus, on Anthemius’ orders, rejected their terms, and annihilated Sigereiks’ retinue in 509 near Campus Vogladensis, in temporary alliance with the Saxons. With Sigereiks and most of his anti-
foedus followers gone, saner heads prevailed among the Visigoths, who raised Thiudes as their leader and asked for terms. The Romans granted them, confining the Goths to parts of Aquitania II, along with other sundry terms to be included in the
foedus.
By Anthemius II’s death of dysentery in 512, Rome’s situation had been transformed. The emperors at Ravenna effectively controlled most of Iberia, much of Gaul, Africa, and Illyricum, and Italy was been more or less peaceful and undisturbed by raids for decades. Fiscally, the Roman government was nearly back on the footing on which it had been a century prior. It was clearly stronger than all its neighbors and in fact dominated most of them. Militarily, the crisis of the fifth century had passed. Economically, though, the Empire was still having problems. Though the grain conduit from Africa had been restored, improving the situation in Italy drastically, the currency of the Empire was still in a state of hyperinflation. The gold
solidus had more or less retained its value, but the bronze and copper coins that most Romans used in their daily transactions, the
folles and the
nummi, had been coined at disastrously high rates by not only the Roman emperors, but also the various semi-independent groups that had taken control of parts of Roman territory – the Suebi, Visigoths, and Burgundiones in particular.
Anthemius II had had no sons, but his sister Alypia had. It will be remembered that Alypia had been married to the
patricius Ricimerus in the 460s, but the union had been barren before Ricimerus’ death in civil war in the 470s. Alypia was promptly married off again to a Gallic aristocrat, one Apollinaris, son of a certain
præfectus urbi, and produced several children, the eldest of which bore the name Procopius. This Procopius peacefully ascended to the throne on his uncle’s death, and after the usual months spent establishing contacts and ensuring loyalty among the armies, embarked on a series of reforms to fix the fiscal and bureaucratic problems left over from the fifth century. In this he was aided by his superlative
magister officiorum, the similarly-aged An. Manlius Severinus Boethius, son of a fairly illustrious Italian family.
With the frontiers still relatively quiet, Procopius put his fiscal ideas into implementation first. His uncle had already begun to alleviate the problem somewhat by limiting the rights of the Roman
foederati to coin money in his treaties with them during the 500s. The new emperor followed up by installing Roman mint officials in the territory of these
foederati to enforce these limitations and keep the number of Gothic or Burgundian coins in line with the imperial ones. Though Procopius probably was unaware of the actual monetary reasons behind his reforms, and treated the whole problem as a matter of internal security, asserting central power over the
foederati, and propaganda, the effort helped tremendously. The weights of the
folles,
nummi, and the silver
miliarenses were standardized again, and although Procopius’ decrees formally codifying the exchange rate between the
solidi and the other coins (punishable by death) had less effect than he would have expected, the rate stayed more or less stable anyway because the coins weren’t debased. Inflation leveled off dramatically in the decade following the 513 coinage reforms as the Roman currency regained confidence, and lower-level exchange in the provinces was slowly remonetized.
Of course, a coinage reform was well and good, but it had to be combined with some other measures to be really effective. Fortunately, there was scope for that as well. For some time, Anthemius II had been able to build up something of a reserve, as conquered territories brought in more money than they required for defense. (This was especially true of much of Iberia.) By 516, the reserve had increased in size to 14 million
solidi, enough for Procopius to consider a new expedient. Two hundred years prior, the Emperor Diocletianus had introduced a series of tax reforms that demonetized the Roman military’s compensation system to a great extent. Diocletianus had created state warehouses that supplied arms and armor to soldiers to justify reducing soldiers’ cash pay, and had converted many taxes from in-cash to in-kind payments. Procopius put a price on soldiers’ arms and armor again, but raised cash payments more than enough to compensate for the new expenses. He converted many in-kind tax assessments back to cash ones, save in areas close to major army bases and in Africa. And for good measure, he repealed a hated quinquennial tax on commerce, a relatively minor source of revenue, which endeared him to the merchantry.
Finally, Procopius’ government undertook sweeping bureaucratic reforms, more widespread than the usual half-assed crackdowns on corruption that most rulers like to play up. Essentially, Boethius introduced a new series of offices, the
vindices, which amounted to somewhat controlled tax-farmers, situated chiefly in cities. This didn’t eliminate corruption by any stretch, and in fact encouraged its existence to an extent, but overall the measure seems to have reduced revenue loss. What probably increased tax revenues more than the anticorruption measures was a combination of the recovery of large swathes of territory over the past several decades, plus a minor population boom connected in part to the reestablishment of the African trade spine.
All in all, Procopius and his advisors put the Roman government on the firmest fiscal footing it had had since the 370s. Militarily, too, the Empire was doing much better. Syagrius’ replacement as
magister equitum per Gallias, Verinianus, continued to expand imperial territory in the north. Between 513 and 517 he fought a series of campaigns against the Saxons of Portus Namnetum that ended in the Saxons’ destruction as an effective political and military unit. His counterpart in Iberia, Marinus, gained the epithet
Germanicus maximus by finally annihilating the troublesome Suebi under their leader, Malareiks, at the 514 Battle of Lucus Augusti. Tactically, Lucus Augusti was fairly uninspired, but it broke the back of the fighting forces still loyal to non-imperial authorities, and economically it ended the last major non-imperial minting operation on Roman soil, a significant boost to the Roman economy and the Roman propaganda machine. The major downside of these years was the catastrophic defeat of the pro-Roman Mauri ruler Masuna, who died in battle against a coalition of other Mauri kings near Lambæsis. This set back Roman progress in Africa some years, though it did not seriously endanger the major economic production regions of Byzacena and Zeugitana.
While the Roman Empire was experiencing an economic revival, the eastern states finally began to settle into a kind of equilibrium for the time being. Unichis, Tato’s brother, who succeeded him in 508, drove Egyptian armies out of the Peloponnese in two years of fighting, aided no doubt by a renewed Syrian advance in the east. Even more remarkably, Egypt’s distractions allowed Unichis to seize control of Gothia in central Anatolia during a power-struggle in 511-2. To fob off the Ostrogoths themselves, Unichis established an Ostrogothic viceroy, but it was he who manipulated the proceedings from Constantinople himself. Unichis’ reign rapidly developed into a semblance of golden age for the Aegean littoral, which he controlled, more or less. He accentuated the Roman-era distinctions between army and society, as well, creating a semi-official distinction between the army – which was the province of “Lombards” – and the civilian administration, which was staffed by “Romans”. Even though Lombards and other Germanic soldiers themselves made up less than half of the actual troop numbers, the Romans who made up the remainder had inured themselves to the “barbarian” topos that exemplified the Roman army’s self-image from the fourth century onward. He also did the usual nonsense, issued a fresh law code, and acted with general benevolence such that his reign would be romanticized to a near-ridiculous degree by later historians.
Antiochos of Egypt had finally reached the throne in 511, using the regency’s military failures in Greece and Syria to effectively oust Dioskouros and confine Vigilantia to the women’s quarters in the new Alexandrian palatial complex. He came to a formal agreement with the Syrian ruler Sergios three years later, the terms of which gave the Phoinikeian coastline to the Egyptians, but saw Cyprus and Libanensis (the Greek region of Syria Koile) confirmed in Syrian possession. Both rulers called each other
basileis in the actual treaty, but each coined in his own territories as
autokratōr after 519, following in Unichis’ lead. After the military failures of the regency, Antiochos generally initiated a rollback on military spending, instead focusing chiefly on relations with his pet archbishops of Alexandria and Jerusalem and intra-Christian relations.
This was a thorny topic, to say the least. The see of Jerusalem was heavily Chalkedōnian, which impeded efforts to impose a common religious policy on all Egyptian territory. Efforts to replace the Chalkedōnian Archbishop Elias with the Miaphysite Anastasios II in 520 went badly almost right off the bat, with riots erupting in several cities across Palæstina. Next year, Elias was quietly reinstated, which provoked an attempted coup by several Miaphysite admirals in Alexandria. Antiochos managed to put the mutineers down, but his lack of military credentials showed rather glaringly. He attempted to alleviate the problem by launching some semi-useless punitive expeditions to the south, to harass the Blemmyes of the Erythraian coast, but it was a poor replacement for military success to legitimize his regime.
Balāš, šāh-an-šāh of Iran and Aniran, had remained relatively quiet and inactive until his end in 509. His son and successor, Yazdgard III, was almost immediately faced with greater problems. Balāš had relied on the power of the great Kārin family, but personal ties bound Yazdgard more closely to their rivals the Mihrāns and the Ispahbudhān. A relatively bloodless coup availed Yazdgard’s allies of many of the great offices of state. His close ally Vistāhm of the Ispahbudhān became
ērān-spāhbed of the West, and it appeared clear that Yazdgard was planning on a 513 campaign against his wayward Syrian “puppets”, to bring them into line.
What broke this plan into pieces was the flare-up of a major upheaval in Sāsānian society, the revolt of Mazdak. Mazdak, a priest espousing a somewhat heretical variant of Zoroastrianism, had gained significant popularity in the decade or so prior to the ascension of Yazdgard to the throne. His ideas are generally considered to be “communist” in the most literal sense, i.e. of wanting to establish communes and to share all resources communally. (Applying this tenet to women, of which Mazdak apparently also approved, led to a proliferation of lurid stories, especially in the Roman East.) He also apparently wasn’t too keen on the nobility. Can’t imagine why. Mazdak’s ideas apparently got quite popular at the court of Balāš, and only spread further when Yazdgard ascended to the throne. In 512 or thereabouts, Yazdgard apparently decided that enough was enough, and launched an offensive against this enemy of the established social order, ordering that Mazdakis be rounded up and their leaders executed.
Possibly Yazdgard wanted to make his domestic situation less dangerous before starting out in his western war, but he miscalculated colossally. The diffused Mazdaki movement was too hard to kill at a single stroke, and rapidly hit back. Waves of stereotypical oppressed peasant types flooded into the countryside, plundering estates and killing stray notables. All hope of any Western offensive was dropped as Yazdgard scrambled to find an effective military solution to the violence. More problematically, the Hayāṭila opportunistically picked this time to start raiding widely in the northeast again, sacking Tūs in 514. Yazdgard’s erstwhile ally Vistāhm turned on him in 517 in the midst of his failure to deal with the Mazdaki problem, executing him and replacing him with his cousin Hormizd IV, a mere child. In 518, Mazdak himself was captured and publically executed to erase any possibility of crypto-Mazdakism, but the movement itself continued to sputter on until 520, when it was finally suppressed, albeit with the side consequence of badly weakening the aristocracy. Hormizd himself then managed to drive back the Hayāṭila in a climactic 521 battle near Abaršahr, and spent the next few years cleaning house in his administration.
By 523, it was clear that Procopius was planning
something. Iberia was basically back in Roman hands, and Africa was as quiet as it was going to get. Pointedly, Procopius’ regime had engaged in very little to no obvious diplomacy in the East, refusing to recognize any of the would-be
autokratōres and their pretensions. Only one military confrontation of note had occurred, with the Lombards over the city of Sirmion in 521. The
magister militum per Illyricum, one Vitalianus, had briefly made a play for the city, but withdrew in the face of Lombard reinforcements, despite having superior numbers and probably superior troop quality. Apparently, this was per imperial orders, as Vitalianus was not only
not sacked, but would remain at his post for some time. At more or less the same time, more flotsam arrived in Armorica, in the form of several thousand Britannic soldiers, some of whom were enrolled in the Gallic field army, others of which were settled along the northern Armorican coast. Shipbuilding activities also accelerated in Aquitanian and Armorican ports.
So it’s probably just as well that we end our little survey of the post-Roman world here, before things
really start to change.
OOC: More Easter eggs abound! Again, constructive comments/criticism almost
required.
p) and very readable (unfortunately uncommon in our genre) I will eagerly follow the next installments.
It is a rut, yeah. Shouldn't last that much longer, though.
