Thanas wrote:A few points here - up until 751, the Byzantines did have physical control over Rome. Which is a very long time, far longer than any medieval empire held Rome.
Exactly; that is what I meant by "options on (4)."
Second, papal coronation was not a legal concept used by the Romans at all. It is a purely medieval invention.
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.
As to your points regarding Roman culture, I fail to see why Christianity would change it into something un-Roman. Un-pagan, but Pagan =/= Rome and a lot of elements of christianity were and still are Roman in nature.
Hm. This is a bit difficult to explain.
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.
Christianity was not solely responsible for this change, but did play at least some role. That is what I was trying to say; does it make more sense now?
ray245 wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:(1) was... the catch is that the distinctively 'Roman' culture was in large part overwritten and transformed by Christianity. On even some fairly basic questions like the relation between the state and the gods, or the role of (or lack of) slaves in society, Christianity changed the ground rules. And the Roman Empire's explicit transition into a Christian state in the 4th and 5th centuries meant a new phase of cultural evolution that was almost bound to make any real revival of distinctively Roman culture impossible...
Without the institutional underpinnings and context that make a certain cultural structure sensible, you cannot revive that structure and expect it to work.
Like Thanas said, if you argue that Christianity is something that is non-Roman, then this would meant the late Roman empire is no longer Roman. Let's not forget the fact that Christianity is a religion that was created in the Roman Empire.
I think you have misunderstood me. My point is that Christianity (among other things, which I SHOULD have explicitly referenced) caused there to be a change in the way that people in Western Europe lived and thought.
If you take a man in 0 AD Italy, or for that matter 300-400 AD Italy, he, for lack of a better term,
was a Roman. He thought of himself as a subject of this large and powerful empire, he adhered to certain social structures and customs.
Look at that peasant's great-to-the-Nth-grandson in 1000 AD, and you see a difference. This man is, for lack of a better term,
not a Roman. Some of his social customs are unchanged since Roman times, but others are vastly changed. His relationships with social power structures have changed- he is more likely to owe allegiance to a warlord who acts as part of a feudal hierarchy. He is more tightly tied in to a single, all-encompassing Church, which is in turn predominant repository for knowledge, scholarship, and cultural wisdom.
Swap the Roman peasant and the medieval Italian peasant, and both men will feel significantly out of place in their respective societies. And the more they stick their heads up out of the field they're tending, and look at the broad aspects of how society is organized, the more disoriented they'll get... because as you note, their world changed and was no longer 'Roman' by 1000 AD or so.
Various factors, like barbarian invasions, changing patterns of commerce, Christianity causing certain social structures to be uprooted or at least reduced in importance, and the decline of Roman transportation networks can easily explain how these changes could take place.
However, my main issue here is trying to understand why did the Roman identity die out among the lesser nobles and the common people in France, Spain and Italy to an extend. Why didn't people there retain their Roman identity after the fall of the western Roman Empire when we have many other cases of people retaining their traditional culture despite being occupied by a foreign power.
There are many instances of occupied people launching rebellion against their occupiers decades after they were conquered. So why is there no such cases for the lands that were occupied by the Franks, Goths and Vandals ( I know the Vandals did have trouble ruling over their roman subjects)?
Speculatively:
-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.
-"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?"