[0:14]Rome began to fall in the early 400s. And it's proper to say that Rome fell in a number of stages. In 405, December 31st, Rome experienced its first major defeat just along the Rhine River. On that evening, on one side of the river, there was a host of barbarian tribes, Vandals and Alamani and a number of others. And on the other side of the river were the Romans. And the Rhine River was the limits for the division between the northern barbarian Germanic tribes in the Roman Empire. And on this night, as the barbarians sought to cross the river to come into the Roman territories, without the aid of soldiers and an army behind it. Those on the other side of the river only had the river itself as protection from these barbarian tribes. Only on this night, the river froze. And so, during the night, thousands upon thousands of Germanic barbarians, we think fleeing from the Huns behind them, crossed into the Roman territory and began to wreak havoc throughout the areas of Gaul. This was the first falling.
[1:28]Just five years later, up in Britain, there was an uprising. Britain had long been part of the Roman territories.
[1:38]Only the locals believed that there was weakness, that the Roman armies were too far away and too preoccupied with battles to the south to raise an army to come and put down any rebellion. And so the pagan natives of Britain rebelled, and they overthrew the Roman rulers of the region and they established themselves as the new rulers of Britain. Now, the Romans of Britain appealed for help, and one famous letter, it was said, that the barbarians push us to the sea, the sea to the barbarians, and we either die or drown. But the response from the Romans was that no help would come. That the armies were too taxed and they could not reach Britain to re-establish the Roman colonies. Over time, parts of Africa were lost and other regions of the once glorious Roman Empire. And then finally, in 476, Odoacer, one of the barbarian tribesmen and leaders of the invading armies, finally deposed the final Roman Emperor Romulus, and established himself as king over Italy. And so 476, by most historians, is considered to be the final fall of Rome. Now, in your average textbook, 476 is going to be described as the fall of Rome, as if it were one fell swoop, one immediate collapse of the entire Roman army and system of government. But the fall of Rome was both a process and an immediate event. It happened over a period of time and yet the speed with which it happened and the finality of 476 with Odoacer establishing himself now as the pagan ruler, the barbarian Germanic ruler of the Roman Empire, is the final calamity in the Roman world itself and now the glories of Rome going back centuries, was ended. And while that story is very common, and while every textbook on the history of the Roman Empire will generally end here on 476, the fact of the matter is, Rome didn't really fall, at least not in its entirety. For most students of history, particularly those just beginning to study history, it might be a surprise to know that Rome technically didn't fall for nearly another millennia. And that is because the only part of Rome to fall in 476 was the western half of the Roman Empire. Out in the east, in the area known as Byzantium by modern historians, Rome continued. And despite the fact that historians in the 1700s referred to the Byzantine world, the Byzantine world as somehow different, somehow un-Roman, and they preferred to see the fall of Rome as 476 and as a fixed date. If you were to go back in time and you were to set foot in the city of Constantinople in 477, just the year after Odoacer took over in Italy. And if you were to ask the citizens of Constantinople, who are you? The answer they would give is, we are Romans. This is the Roman Empire. And so in this lecture and in the next lecture, we're going to take some time and look out east. Not at the western half of the Christian empire, that will come later. But we're going to look out east at the Empire of Byzantium or of the continued Eastern Roman Empire that never fell, that continued on again for hundreds of years. In this lecture, we're going to be looking at at the Eastern Roman Empire, and we're going to look at the successors of Constantine and the struggles of the church and paganism out east. And we're going to take notice of the curious ways that the Roman world, the ancient world, continued long after the fall of Rome in the west. Okay, so let's take a step back before the fall of Rome itself in the west and look at the successors of Constantine. Constantine himself, of course, ruled and he established the Christian church as first one of the licit churches of the Roman Empire. And then increasingly he began to favor the Christian church. And Constantine died in 337. And to understand what happens in the Byzantine world after Constantine, on into the Middle Ages, you have to remember that this is the context of the Tetrarchy, the rule of four. And that Rome, since Diocletian, had gotten very comfortable with splitting the empire between East and West. And then in the East and West, splitting the empire again between the Augustuses, those who were at the highest level, the emperors. And a sort of Augustus in training, or a Caesar. Well, after Constantine's death, it is Constantine's sons who take over this East-West split. Constantine had three sons, Constantius, Constans and Constantine II. And the three brothers essentially divide the empire in half again, almost along the same lines that Diocletian had done back in the early fourth century. And in the East, you have Constantius ruling almost single-handedly for a while at least, the entirety of the Eastern half of the empire. In the Western half of the empire, though, Constans and Constantine II attempt to rule the empire together. Now, the great challenge for both the East and the Western halves of the empire, is going to be the ongoing struggle with Arianism. After Constantine had presided over the Council of Nicea, and after Nicea had taken a hard stance against the Arian faith, and had offered no real compromise with Arians. Constantine himself took a rather moderating tone with Arianism. Now, it's often said that Constantine was somehow an Arian himself. This is actually a dramatic overstatement. What Constantine does not want is for the Christian world to tear itself apart. And while Constantine himself is not a great lover of Arian, and while he supports those who are generally opposed to Arianism. What Constantine over and over again refuses to do is to take a hard stance against Arianism. He doesn't depose Arian bishops. He doesn't exile them. He doesn't put them under the ban. None of these things happen under Constantine. And the Nicean faith, in general, comes home to roost in particular in the West in a very strong way. The Papacy or the bishop of Rome, and many of those in the West were strong supporters of an undiluted Nicene faith. They wanted nothing to do with Arianism, they wanted no compromise whatsoever in the West. In the East, however, and you see this again and again with the emperors. In the East, the bishops really do have a bit of a moderating tone with Arianism. There is a position that historians today call semi-Arianism. In which they describe the Son's relationship with the Father as being similar. Now, you'll recall in our discussion of Arianism in our last lecture under Constantine, that perhaps the best way to understand Arianism is to draw this line and call it the creator-creature distinction. And on the one side you have God and on the other you have everything else, frankly. And of course, Arianism puts Christ, puts the Son on the creature side, that the Son is somehow created. That even if he's exalted, even if he is Godlike, he is still not fully God, not in the sense that the Father is fully God. Well, that's full Arianism. Semi-Arianism tried to come up with a compromise in the sense that they wanted to preserve the uniqueness of the Father as the source of the Trinity. And so they like to describe the Son's relationship with the Father as being similar. And people of this moderating position believed that they could kind of have both at the same time. That they could believe that the Son was exalted, that he was on the divine side, that whatever he was in his essence, was similar to the Father. But they also felt that that preserved something unique about the Father himself. Now, of course, the Nicean faith had rejected this entirely. But in the East, repeatedly, the emperors of what would become the Byzantine Empire, again and again, support semi-Arian positions or a moderating Arian position. In Constantius, out in the East, is this type of emperor. He himself is not Arian. Again, some of the textbooks will call him an Arian emperor as if he was some persecutor of the Nicean faith. But Constantius takes the same position of his father, Constantine, and that he doesn't want to exclude Christians or have them divide one another in this harsh way, and what he wants instead is some kind of compromise. Constantius himself was a committed Christian. He actually took a step further than his father, Constantine, and he banned sacrifices of paganism. He closed numerous pagan temples, and he increased the support of the Empire for the Christian church. Still, Constantius attempted to recruit a number of theologians, whom he thought would support a moderate tone that would bring both sides together. On two occasions, in fact, he called a council in the attempt to somehow enforce or impose semi-Arianism. One was in the city of Remini, and one was in the city of Seleuca. Now, this is not a push for Arianism. Again, these are not Arian councils. Rather, these are attempts to moderate. These are attempts to bring together, frankly, two irreconcilable positions with some kind of compromise position in the middle. Now, the problem with this is this drove the West crazy. These were not ecumenical councils. These were specific councils called by Constantius himself, and they were, in many ways, attempts to force a semi-Arianism on much of the Roman world. Constans himself, in fact, opposed his brother very profoundly on this, and supported officially and vehemently, the Nicean faith. And in the end, Constantius's position, this moderating position of Arianism, never ends up taking on any type of serious tone within the Roman Empire as a whole. The theologians, the bishops, the churchmen themselves, realize and again and again, enforce and stress that there is simply no capacity to make Arianism, which has Christ on the creature side, and the Nicean faith, which sees the son as equal with the Father, there's no way to bring these two together. And so history has remembered Constantius as a bit of a daft fool for attempting to bring these sides together and for his attempt to use political might to do so. In the end, both sides agreed, the East and the West, that whoever is emperor, has the right to support a perspective on his own authority. Now, that's problematic, of course. It it's signals some of the changes that Constantine had brought to the faith. That here we have two emperors, two Augustuses on either side of the East and the West, essentially deciding that they're going to choose whatever they want. If one wants to support the Nicean faith, he may do so. If one wants to support a semi-Arian moderating position, he may do so. In 350, though, Constans in the West died, leaving Constantius the sole ruler of both the East and the West. And faithfully, Constantius attempts to appoint a Caesar or a co-ruler with him. He first appoints one of his cousins, and the cousin is eventually deposed and removed for corruption and for being violent and being temperamental, and for essentially using the office to get his will and to abuse his power. And so instead, Constantius reaches for another cousin, Julius. Later known as Julian the Apostate. And Constantius appoints Julian to be a Caesar, to be a co-ruler, to be sort of the emperor in training underneath him.
[14:26]And Julian the Apostate, as he would come to be known, is a vital figure for the Roman Empire as a whole. Again, this is before the West has fallen.
[14:38]Julian was part of the Constantinian line. He was part of the family. He was a nephew to Constantine himself. And at some point during Julian's training, when he was being raised by tutors and educated in the classics. The tutors seemed to have had some sort of influence on him and seemed to have convinced him to convert to paganism again. To come back to the faith of old Rome and to reject the faith of his patriarch, Constantine and the faith that all of those in his family and his extended family had embraced. Now, Julian kept these views to himself. And so when he's actually raised to the Caesarshipp, and when Constantius appoints him to be the heir, no one seems to be aware of the fact that Julian has actually left the faith, that he has reverted to paganism.
[15:35]Well, the first thing Julian does is he is sent off to Gaul, to modern day France, to put down a number of rebellions and barbarian tribes that had arisen out there in the West. And Julian does a remarkable job at this. He seems to have had some great success, some great insight in a battle. In 357, in fact, he actually conquers a significant force that had outnumbered him by a significant margin. And Julian seems to have really won the respect of the soldiers and of the generals of the Roman army. And that respect and that power and that authority seems to have rubbed Constantius the wrong way a little bit. He seems to have been a little bit concerned at this young upstart. And so Constantius actually recalls Julian and the armies. He asks them to come back. Under some excuse that the Persians were beginning to rise up, really, though, with the goal of keeping an eye on Julian. But Julian doesn't seem to have wanted to do this. He didn't want to be at the beck and call of Constantius. And the sources are a bit unclear, but it does seem to be the case that Julian fermented a bit of a rebellion amongst the generals. And we've seen this a number of times in our lectures. The generals, the army, doesn't like what an emperor or an Augustus has declared. And so they issue a civil war and they declare someone of their ranks to be the new emperor. And that's exactly what they do. In 360, in the city of Paris, Julian is proclaimed to be the Augustus of the East and the West, and now there is a civil war. And Constantius mounts an army and begins to proceed to meet Julian on the battlefield. And Julian takes his armies and he proceeds to move to the east. And as they come together, and as they are about to clash in a civil war in the area of the Balkans today. As it turns out, Constantius simply dies of natural causes. And one of the last things Constantius does is he concedes to Julian and he appoints him to be the rightful heir to the throne. And so Julian comes to the throne, not by war, though he attempted to do so, but actually by the rightful succession. And what is interesting is it is at this point in 360, that Julian finally comes out as a full pagan. He announces that he is not a Christian, that he will not continue the policies of his fathers or of his cousins, and that he is now about the idea of restoring Rome to its pagan glories.
[18:44]Now, the personality of Julian is actually a pretty interesting case study. His ideas of paganism were really idiosyncratic. Julian was actually significantly intellectual. He was something of a neo-Platonist. He had lots of philosophical ideas. He actually liked to think of himself as a philosopher king. One of the more interesting things he does is he grows this great big philosophical beard. He attempts to sort of put himself out there as some kind of philosopher. And of course, for a long time, if you were an emperor of Rome, you either had a clean shaven face as the ancient Roman rulers did, or you had a close cropped beard. You kept it tight. Well, Julian grew apparently this nice monstrous beard. And as it turns out, he had a lot of people who criticized him for this. Generally for his sort of arrogant tone of being this philosopher. And so actually, one of the more interesting things Julian does is he writes a book defending his choice of a beard. The book is called The Beard Hater. And uh it's Julian defending himself, kind of poking fun at those who have raised some issue with him growing this beard. And really setting an epitome of what he is attempting to be as a philosopher king. And Julian does more than this, though. He begins to re-establish the pagan sacrifices in the Roman Empire. At one point, in fact, he actually leaves Constantinople and moves to the city of Antioch. Antioch was still a pretty strong bastion of paganism. There were still major temples there, one to Apollo, one to Daphne. And Julian seems to have been quite sick of the overt Christian faith of Constantinople, and so he moves to Antioch. And Julian rolls back a number of other features for the Christian church. He withdraws state support for churches and for buildings and for the salaries of the priests and the bishops. In a few cases, he takes land that had been formerly pagan, that had been given to a Christian church or to a Christian bishop, and he restores it to the pagan world. And whenever the bishops complain, Julian's response is that he didn't think the church needed all these things, that he was actually quite surprised that those who follow a humble servant of Nazareth seemed to be ill-equipped to deal with the life of poverty.
[21:54]And Julian does other things as well to support paganism and to reject Christianity. At this time, there was actually a great deal of fighting and rioting between pagans and Christians. And Julian took the unique tactic of whenever a pagan mob rioted and killed a number of Christians, that he simply gave them a reprimand or he simply told them that they ought to not do this next time and no real prosecution would occur. However, if Christians rioted, or if Christians did anything suspicious, if a pagan temple went a blaze, even if it went a blaze for natural causes, then the Christians would come under intense scrutiny. And Julian would attempt to sort of fair it out who had done any of this, even if no one was really to blame. And so Julian was at least to the Christians, very unpopular. What is surprising though, is that Julian was really unpopular with everybody. The pagans themselves didn't really seem to like him. And there are a number of reasons for this. One of the principal reasons why Julian is unloved by the pagans is that Julian is unwilling to take on the glorified, the exalted status of the emperors that had gone before him. That he refused to be glorified and separated, that he himself, for example, on a number of occasions would perform animal sacrifices as a pagan. This, most pagans thought was demeaning to the emperor. And more importantly, Julian's faith is really that of a prodigal, of a black sheep, you might say. Julian's attempt to restore paganism was not based so much on the fact that he was inherently pagan from his youth. But rather he's a pagan by conversion. And again and again, Julian's tone, in the way he snarks, in the way he engages with the Christian church. And the ways that he supports paganism in these idiosyncratic ways, well, perhaps genuine, always seem to have a tone of not really being from a pagan side of him, but rather being from an anti-Christian side of his personality. He seems to want to kind of stick it to his family, to stick it to those who had raised him Christian. He seems, for example, to really know a great deal about Christianity and he seems to know exactly how to attack it. He knows its weak points. For example, one of the things Julian does that from an attack standpoint is actually a bit of a master stroke. Is that Julian lifts the, at least on paper, Nicean faith as the prerequisite for understanding the Christian faith. And he actually decrees that all versions of the Christian faith need to be given equal footing and need to be allowed to thrive and to have their own churches and their own bishops right alongside the Nicean bishops. And what he's doing here is he's attempting to get the Christian church to tear itself apart by just sort of taking the restrictions off and just letting them go at it against one another. In the end, Julian, though, ruled only for about two years. In 363, the Sassanid Empire again rose up, and Julian mounted an army and moved east to attack them. And the battle seemed to be going well, but during one of the retreats, they had to flee in haste. And Julian was wearing light armor, and at one point a spear drove him through the midsection, and after a couple of days of intense pain, he perished.
[26:13]Now, what's interesting about this story is one, it brings to an end the last ever Roman pagan emperor. From this point on, any emperor of both the East and the West, but after the West falls, in particular the Byzantine Empire, there will never again be a pagan ruler over the Roman world. Julian is the last. But even more importantly, is who threw the spear? This seems to be some sort of conspiracy here, because initially it was believed that the Sassanids had gotten close enough to Julian to throw a spear that took his life. But within a couple of years, it was blamed on the Christians. That some Christian in the army had turned around during the retreat and had stabbed him through the spear and therefore it was the Christians who were to blame for killing the last pagan emperor. And interestingly enough, the Christians actually don't deny this. Now, there's no evidence for this, but the Christians actually kind of take some glory in this. They say, yeah, we killed him. We took him out, we took this pagan out, this last emperor.
[27:31]And there's even an apocryphal story of St. Mercurius, who had actually lived long before during the Decian persecutions. And the story is, is that one of the bishops was praying before a statue to Mercurius, and he was praying to God asking that Julian would not be allowed to come back. And according to the legend, the statue, which had Mercurius holding a spear, because he was a saint who had at times served in the army of Rome back a century before, that the statue disappeared on the day that Julian died. And then during the prayers, the statue reappeared with a bloody tip on it, indicating that the saint had somehow materialized out in the East and had stabbed the emperor and then re-materialized the statue. These kinds of things. And it doesn't seem to be the case that the Christians did do this, but it does show the extent to which Christians were hostile to Julian. That when the rumors began to spread that the Christians were to blame, they didn't deny it and for a while, they kind of gloried in it. They thought that they had slain a tyrant in keeping with how some of the Old Testament Jews had slain a tyrant over Israel. But in this way, the last pagan ruler of Rome dies.
