The growth of private domains. The development of vast private estates at the expense of the public and imperial domains was another prominent characteristic of the times. This was the result of the failure of the state to check the spread of waste lands, in spite of its attempt to develop the system of hereditary leaseholds to small farmers. To maintain the level of production the government opened the way for the great proprietors to take over all deserted lands under various forms of heritable lease or in freehold tenure. The system of attaching waste lands to those of the neighboring landholders and making the latter responsible for their cultivation was an added cause of the growth of large estates. The result of this development was that the state tenants became coloni of the great landlords, and the latter were responsible for the taxes and other obligations of their coloni to the state. The weight of these obligations rested as before upon the coloni, and led to their continued flight and a further increase in waste land. Like the curiales and corporati, the coloni tried to exchange their status by entering the public service or attaining admission to some other social class. But, in like manner also, they found themselves excluded from all other occupations and classes. Only the fugitive colonus who had managed to remain undetected for [pg 349]thirty years (in the case of women twenty years) could escape being handed back to the land which he had deserted.
The power of the landed nobility. The immunities of the senatorial order and the power of the high officials tended to give an almost feudal character to the position of the great landed proprietors. These had inherited the judicial powers of the procurators on the imperial estates and transferred this authority to their own domains. Over their slaves and coloni they exercised the powers of police and jurisdiction. As they were not subject to the municipal authorities, and, during the greater part of the fourth century, were also exempt from the jurisdiction of the provincial governors they assumed a very independent position, and did not hesitate to defy the municipal magistrates and even the minor agents of the imperial government. Their power made their protection extremely valuable, and led to a new type of patronage. Individuals and village communities, desirous of escaping from the exactions to which they were subject in their municipal districts, placed themselves under the patronage of some senatorial landholder and became his tenants. And he did not hesitate to afford them an illegal protection against the local authorities. Complaints by the latter to higher officials secured little redress for they were themselves proprietors and sided with those of their own class. The power of the state was thus nullified by its chief servants and the landed aristocracy became the heirs of the empire.
Resumé. The transformation which society underwent during the empire may be aptly described as the transition from a régime of individual initiative to a régime of status, that is, from one in which the position of an individual in society was mainly determined by his own volition to one in which this was fixed by the accident of his birth. The population of the empire was divided into a number of sharply defined castes, each of which was compelled to play a definite rôle in the life of the state. The sons of senators, soldiers, curiales, corporati, and coloni had to follow in their fathers’ walks of life, and each sought to escape from the tasks to which he was born. In the eyes of the government collegiati, curiales, and coloni existed solely to pay taxes for the support of the bureaucracy and the army. The consequence was the attempted flight of the population to the army, civil service, the church or the wilderness. Private industry lan[pg 350]guished, commerce declined, the fields lay untilled; a general feeling of hopelessness paralyzed all initiative. And when the barbarians began to occupy the provinces they encountered no national resistance; rather were they looked upon as deliverers from the burdensome yoke of Rome.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE GERMANIC OCCUPATION OF ITALY AND THE WESTERN PROVINCES: 395–493 A. D.
I. General Characteristics of the Period
The partition of the empire. With the death of Theodosius the Great the empire passed to his sons, Arcadius a youth of eighteen, whom he had left in Constantinople, and Honorius a boy of eleven, whom he had designated as the Augustus for the West. However, in the East the government was really in the hands of Rufinus, the pretorian prefect of Illyricum, while an even greater influence was exercised in the West by Stilicho, the Vandal master of the soldiers, whom Theodosius had selected as regent for the young Honorius. The rivalry of these two ambitious men, and the attempt of Stilicho to secure for Honorius the restoration of eastern Illyricum, which had been attached by Gratian to the sphere of the eastern emperor, were the immediate causes of the complete and formal division of the empire into an eastern and a western half, a condition which had been foreshadowed by the division of the imperial power throughout the greater part of the fourth century.