Macarius discovered in Jerusalem

The original great relic was the “true cross” that the bishop Macarius discovered in Jerusalem in the fourth century, excavating it at the behest of the emperor Constantine. It proved a friable discovery, for the first sighting of a relic from the cross in another land dates from as early as 359, in the north African city of Sitifis (now Setif). In 540, another piece of the cross protected the city of Apamea against a Persian invader, so successfully that the story was told far and wide and soon Justin II had the relic transferred to Constantinople. The emperor Maurice used a golden lance containing a fragment of the cross when he went campaigning in the Balkans in the 590s, and Heraclius did likewise when he went out to fight the Persians in 622, as part of a campaign to recapture the remains found in Jerusalem of the one and only true cross. Down to the present day in the Roman church, the consecrated altar of any church is required to have a saint’s relic embedded in it.

Earliest Christianity

The buildings and rites of Christianity were traditionally Roman as well. Earliest Christianity is reported to us as a thing of people and common meals, with leaders but not clergy and homes but not architecture. Rituals and the priests to manage them emerged early enough for Tertullian (c. 200) to have to defend Christianity against salacious rumors of cannibalism and sexual orgies carried on behind closed doors. (One story had it that the Christians tied dogs to the candlesticks, then startled them into knocking over the candlesticks, thus dousing the lights and providing a cover of darkness in which brother was expected to fornicate with sister.) Architecture emerged later, with respectability, and the buildings of Christianity departed from their models, the ancient temples, in several ways. But a religion of priests, rites, and looming handsome buildings is something that Jesus practiced in moderation and criticized firmly, occasionally without moderation. He would have recognized the Christianities of 500 and 600 for what they were, and perhaps not disowned them.

Those puritanical bishops who emerged in the fifth and sixth centuries, men like Martin of Braga, who kept trying to water down or eradicate customs they knew were marked by the old religious ways, represented something genuinely new, a wave of the future that could still, with some difficulty, connect itself to the message of Jesus and the distinctly Christian past. They were the true men of the book, joined in their textual obsessions by the men of monasteries, whose numbers now began to explode personal tours bulgaria.

Ambrose and Augustine

As late as 400, most bishops and churchmen were of modest social and educational background, from the periphery of imperial culture. At that time, figures such as Ambrose and Augustine already foretold the future, in which the textual practices of the imperial bureaucracy became the order of the day within established Christianity. There would be more copies of scripture and more readers, but that meant there were also more books written about scripture, and the library of the writings of the venerated “fathers of the church” began to hedge the Christian past with contemporary authoritative interpretation. Knowing scripture alone was no longer enough.

The Christian library of theology would be accompanied by the Christian bureaucracy of ecclesiastical administration, and never more so than in the oldest home of bureaucracy, Rome itself. By the time of Pope Gregory I, the administration of the papal household and office had aligned itself almost perfectly to the hierarchical structure of Roman imperial government. A complete bureaucratic structure of offices and documents grew up and flourished. The simple Christian bishop had once spoken to an audience within the sound of his own voice, but now the powerful Christian patriarch in Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, or Alexandria wrote to an audience far beyond his ken, and expected his words to be taken seriously.

We can even see the textualization of charisma in the church building itself, when someone like Augustine would have stenographers trained as the Roman government had trained them sitting by his side to take down every word of his sermons, and would send authorized copies to selected friends. In the fifth century we have the story of Sidonius as bishop in Clermont going into church one day only to have the libellus (a small folded piece of writing) on which he had written the prayers for the day snatched from his hand by a prankster.14 The account praises the bishop for carrying off the ceremonies as if nothing had happened, thereby indirectly con-firming that premeditation and a prepared text were by now the expected supplements for divine inspiration. A century later, great bishops celebrating the Mass were surrounded by books, probably four in all, handled by different minor clergy: one for scriptural readings, one for prayers, one for songs, and one for stage directions for managing the comings and goings around the altar.

THE MAN OF THE HOUR

The real history of this time, however, is the story of Aetius. His talent, energy, and ability to seize the moment defined Roman success and opportunities in the Latin west from the 430s to the 450s. He was indispensable—always a bad thing in a general, for generals die, and the most important thing they can give their employers is reasonable confidence in a viable succession. Aetius managed everything but that.

Aetius was a typical Roman general of his time; that is to say, his ancestry was mixed. He was born far to the east of Rome, in Moesia, in a place called Durostorum (modern Silistra, in Bulgaria), the last important crossing of the Danube, just where it turns north from the Bulgarian border to divide into a long stretch of delta that eventually opens into the Black Sea. His mother was Roman and his father barbarian. In his youth, he spent some time among Alaric’s people, and more time living outside the Roman borders in the camps of Rugila, king of the Huns. It would be hard not to call him a barbarian, pure and simple.

Aetius made his important military debut as the leader of an army said to consist of 60,000 Huns who entered Italy to support Johannes’s claim to the imperial throne. Arriving in Ravenna a few days late and finding Galla Placidia, Valentinian, and their forces in control, he turned coat in a twinkling, declaring his allegiance to the new regime, and he was rewarded with an appointment as master of the horse for the provinces of Gaul. He flourished in Roman high politics by remaining constantly and astutely aware of the possibilities and threats of the Huns he had known so well when young. And so the worst of the barbarians became the real power base for one of the best Roman generals.20

In a sequence of campaigns, usually with Hunnish mercenaries at his disposal—that is to say, Huns learning to be Romans in the way new arrivals traditionally learned to be Roman—Aetius introduced order and regularity to various frontiers that had been challenged in recent years. He made good judgments, and also questionable ones.

Africa he had written off to the Vandals, who were left in command at Boniface’s departure. Whether Rome could have more firmly defended Africa against the Vandals is an open question. The closer the African provinces were to Carthage, the more thickly populated and defended they were, and Rome had organized the main defensive force in the provinces to manage southern frontiers while controlling relations with backcountry Berbers and Saharan nomads. Farther west, toward and somewhat west of modern Algiers, the Roman presence thinned out and kept its defense focused on protecting the southern border. No one ever thought that a significant threat could come from the west, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar. Then the Vandals appeared.

Limited Roman garrisons

Once established in Africa, once able to draw on local restlessness while very likely enlisting some rootless border rats along the way, the Vandals could outwait and on occasion outfight the limited Roman garrisons. When the emperors proved reluctant to send reinforcements and when some of the local forces left Africa to go with Boniface, there was not much to do except wait for the inevitable. Even so, the inevitable can take a while. The Vandals crossed to Africa in 429, they besieged Hippo in 430, and they had the upper hand in the whole series of provinces west of Carthage by 435. They did not actually take Carthage itself until 439, but then their regime remained in control for almost a prosperous century balkan tours 2023. Constantinople at first resisted the new regime and opposed it, but by the 470s made peace. What followed over the next half century was a sharp upturn in commerce between Constantinople and Carthage. Some people say wars are good for business, but apparently, in this case, so was peace.

Vandals and Visigoths were faithful to the borderland Arian Christianity that had crossed the frontier with them. They followed their fathers’ tradition, which they could truthfully say descended directly from the apostles: a very old and deeply Roman religion. The Vandals, under the extraordinary Gaiseric, who ruled them from 428 to 477 (and thus can scarcely have remembered any life outside Rome’s borders), exercised iron- fisted church management in favor of the orthodoxy the Vandals brought with them, to the disadvantage of the Christian factions they found already there. Many African Christians were still resentful of the forced unification of churches in 411, when the Caecilianist faction won the support of the emperor against the majority Donatist faction.21 With Augustine and a few of his longtime collaborators gone from the scene at the end of the 420s, the imperfectly unified African church was without strong leaders. Some natives welcomed the Vandals and attended their churches, while others resisted fiercely. The Vandals’ suppression of dissent was effective but not total, and the imperial church survived to reappear when the Vandals were ejected. In all this, the Vandals appear to have been the most intolerant, that is to say the most modern, of the Arians who took power in western provinces in the fifth and sixth centuries. All the others—Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Lombards—were more inclined to make peace with the other versions Christianity they encountered.