[Here, for your comments and reactions and to help me get back into it, is the current draft of the opening to my book of the Transformations of the Year 600 - or whatever I decide to call it in the end. As with other recent posts, it was mostly written over a year ago]
Spectres stalked western Europe
in the decades around 600. The Western
Roman Empire was dead. In the last
decades of the sixth century surely no one could any longer be in any doubt
about that. The last legitimate western
emperor had been murdered in 480 but, even so, the body of the pars occidentis (Western Part) had
remained, like a body that no one was quite sure had breathed its last. For a good half-century, western European
politics had carried on as though the Western Empire still lived, encircling
its still-warm carcass as though it might at any moment sit back up. At certain times it seemed that someone –
Theoderic the Ostrogoth or Clovis the Frank – might yet even be able to breathe
life back into its lungs.
But the most obvious attempt to
do so – by the eastern Emperor Justinian – had put it beyond doubt that the
West was no more. It was an ex-Empire.
It had ceased to be. It is difficult to
see how things could be otherwise. After
all, Justinian’s had self-consciously been an attempt not to revive a comatose
body but to reanimate a corpse. It had
begun by pronouncing the Western Empire dead and specifying the cause of
death. It had, said Justinian, been
murdered and, indeed, the murderers were the very people who at that moment
were wondering whether there remained any life in the old body, the ‘barbarian’
kings of the West. Justinian’s ultimate
failure to bring the Western Empire back to life as a territory directly
administered by an emperor left ’Rome’ as something that henceforth could have
only a spectral existence in the West.
It had lived and it had died; it might return but only as a ghost. And that not yet. In the century or so after the traumas of the
Western Empire’s death agony in Justinian’s wars, it seems that Rome was simply
dead. And gone.
There was, however, another, much
more important ghostly presence haunting Western Europe around 600, the
ultimate revenant expected any time soon: the Messiah, Christ himself. The demise of the Western Empire was but one
of a number of signs and portents that seemed to announce the Second
Coming. For several hundred years,
Christians had lived with the idea that the Roman Empire was commensurate with
the Sixth Age of the World. Had Christ
not been born during the reign of the Empire’s founder, Augustus? Now that the Empire no longer existed, surely
now was the time for the Kingdom of Christ to come.
In the writings of the period
there is a very clear sense of living in time ‘out of joint’. The present is a fleeting, spectral moment
which no one can grasp, an ever moving threshold between what is coming and
what has gone. For those alive around
600, it was as though that fleeting moment had opened up to encompass a whole
epoch out of time. Events were seen not
as elements in a continuous sequential narrative or chain but as reappearances
of stories told in the scriptures.
Individuals and actions stood as repetitions of types. The characters of the Old Testament, in
spirit, walked the earth again. In a
time out of time cause and effect stood not in relation to contingency or as
responses to previous events, not – in other words – in a linear, horizontal
sequence but in a vertical relationship between man and God. Any action had its forerunner in the tales of
the Bible and its consequence could be seen accordingly as direct punishment or
reward. This, after all, was a world in
which the not only the tombs of the saints but also their relics operated as
timeless points of contact between the earthly and the celestial. Holy men did not live particular lives but
shared, said one contemporary, a single life,
regardless of time or place. In this
world the past had gone and yet endured.
Figures long dead inhabited the actions of living men and women. All deeds and all persons could be seen as
further reapparitions of these ghostly forerunners. But as time seemed to stand still all
appeared to herald a future long predicted, an end of worldly time. The world of 600 was haunted by spectres of
the remote past and by the expectation of a messianic future.
One might even get a sense of
this by leaving the world of the learned men, churchmen most often, who
narrated, insofar as they could
narrate, this ghostly time out of joint – or perhaps within the joint of past
and future – and entered (where better?) the cemeteries wherein ordinary folk
laid their kin to (as they hoped) rest.
Here too there was a sense of timelessness – perhaps there always is in
graveyards. The rites for the dead were
transient, leaving little by way of visible monument. Across much of western Europe north of the
Loire, the dead were interred in a ritual that was played out for an audience,
often seemingly a large audience of local people, that conveyed much about the
deceased and his or her family and how they wished to be seen. That involved gift-giving and feasting among
the living and dead and the corpse was accompanied into the tomb by objects
deemed appropriate. It is these and the
skeletal remains of the dead that permit an insight into society at a local
level, such as frequently eludes the attention of the authors of the written
sources. The deposition of grave-goods
was, however, governed by rules, albeit ones which changed in detail at least
from one area to another. Those rules or
norms determined what sorts and numbers of objects were appropriate for people
of a particular age and sex. The effect
of this ritual was frequently to telescope the time that had lapsed between
this and the last interment of a person of the same category. This surely worked in a way to normalise
quite abnormal and traumatic events, reassuring the bereaved but at the same
time the very sameness of time, the taking of the specific out of the normal
temporal sequence, meant the haunting of the ceremony by the ghosts of
previously departed people of the same age and sex. In many ways the funerals of north-western
Europe operated in a fashion that was as typological as the writings of
hagiographers and theologians.
And yet, although there was a
clear similarity between the thinking of these people at quite different
levels, which surely emanated in some way from their shared milieu, there were
important differences. The transience of
community ritual in the earlier sixth century, which finds parallels in rites
and ceremonies unconnected with death and mourning, appears to originate in the
world of uncertainty that surrounded the first death of the Western Roman
Empire. Had the Empire gone, or
not? The fifth-century crisis had
undermined centuries-old social hierarchies in the provinces north of the Loire. Social and economic stress and competition
meant that a position in local society was likely to be transient, within a
lifetime and could be projected into the future, from one generation to the
next, only with difficulty. The funerary
rites just mentioned were one means by which people attempted to deal with the
crises in local society which death brought about. The future was uncertain and there seemed
little point in investing in it. An
irony came in that, around the end of the sixth century this fluidity of social
structure in the former provinces of the north-west (and beyond the former limes too) was beginning to settle down
into a more stable social organisation.
One might begin to project a family’s status into the future with some
confidence. Yet, especially if one took part in the sorts of Christian
commemoration that were becoming fashionable among a newly-emerging
aristocracy, one might well do so in the knowledge that such a future might be
very short. The idea of permanence might
be tempered by an awareness that the days of tribulation were upon us. Or nearly so.
These developments themselves
raised ghosts. An élite only just
establishing itself, whether as a noble caste in some areas, or as a royal one,
perhaps, in others felt the want of a direct pedigree. Again the typological, the vertical link to
God, would stand in for the linear, the sequential or the horizontal. And so, again, the spirits of the biblical
past came to possess the living.
The apocalypse was expected, and
soon, but quite when no one knew. In
this strangely still time, out of time, the present was part of the past and
part of the future, part – indeed – of the end.
The horizon formed by that end was, therefore, not fixed. It remained open, fleeting, moved towards, a
future that was ever-present, spectral in itself. It was with a gaze fixed upon that ghostly
open horizon that the people of western Europe passed from the Roman world and
into that which, with the passage of centuries, would come to be called the
medieval.