The Fall of the Roman Empire (9 page)

. . . While merchants can recoup themselves by speculations, those for whom the work of their hands scarcely furnishes a livelihood are crushed beneath the burden. The lowest cobbler cannot escape from it. I have seen some who, raising their hands to heaven and holding up their shoe-knife, swore that they would pay nothing more. But their protests did not abate the greed of their cruel oppressors, who pursued them with shouts and seemed quite ready to devour them.

From the time of Constantine onwards, there had been similar reports, referring to the extraction of taxes by violence and torture, and of the methods adopted such as the forcing of children to testify against their parents, and the compulsion of wives to betray their husbands.

It was no use offering relief from land-tax, as Honorius did on several occasions, since the districts he exempted had already been so severely ravaged that they could not have paid anyway. In such cases, as one Imperial edict frankly admits, official insistence would only have meant even graver ruin for the taxpayer, without any compensatory benefit for the state. Cancellations of arrears, of which the most comprehensive came in an edict of Majorian, were not much use either, since they did little more than write off bad debts. And in any case, the debts were mainly those incurred not by the poor but by the rich, who made a fine art of delaying their repayments, bringing down, once again, the vain wrath of Imperial legislators.

A terrible dilemma had arisen. There was no doubt whatever that the state had to have the revenue if it was to survive; and indeed the insufficiency of such revenue was one of the reasons why Rome fell - because the Romans could no longer maintain their army. Yet the collection of this utterly necessary national income imposed frightful miseries.

Was that because the sums and contributions required were entirely beyond the capacity of the population to pay? If so, the equation was a hopeless one, and it was no use the Western Empire even attempting to defend itself, for there was no possibility of raising the funds needed to do so. But it appears more likely that the necessary sums
could
have been paid if the system for collecting them had been less oppressive - and, because less oppressive, less inefficient. As it was, the collectors were guilty of the gravest abuses, and in consequence tax-dodging was rampant.

When critics of the system pointed out that by far the worst sufferers were the rustic poor, what they said was no more than the truth. The state drew over ninety per cent of its revenue from tax levied upon the land, that is to say upon the agricultural population. And this tax was not progressive in its operation, so that it hit the poor proportionately much harder than it hit the rich - additional unfairness being caused by its failure to take quality of soil and size of yield into account. By 350, the sums exacted from this principal source had multiplied threefold within living memory, and thereafter, too, the land tax continued to weigh its victims down with ever increasing severity.

Furthermore, the most important tax in kind, utilized for many years to pay government employees, was once again agricultural: for it had to be paid in the form of grain, the principal food crop of the Roman Empire. But the supply of grain was often inadequate to fulfil the tax collectors' vast demands. This was scarcely surprising, since transportation was still primitive, and labour-saving devices were deficient. A slave economy did nothing to remedy this. Nor did the new Christian state, in which men like Eusebius and Ambrose pronounced science a vain labour - since it did not help a man to be saved.

Besides, manpower was short. The American historian A. E. R. Boak considered population decline a fatal cause of the fall of Rome. His detailed arguments have been contested, but some decrease there arguably was. Invasion, devastation and poverty had all made their dreadful contributions, for after rent and tax payments had been extorted there was often no money left to rear enough children to counter-balance the high death-rate. Another reason why the supply of free-born children diminished was because the poor sold their newborn infants into slavery. This had formerly been forbidden by Roman law, but from about 300 onwards the practice was officially tolerated; and in a terrible famine of 450 it became widespread. In vain had Valentinian in, ten years earlier, decreed tax remissions to stop rural depopulation. It had gone much too far to be reversed.

Lack of manpower meant the abandonment of cultivated soil; and the crushing load of taxation drove small farmers off their farms. The average shrinkage of utilized land, taking into account soil denudation and regional climatic changes, has been estimated at ten to fifteen per cent of the total area. Admittedly this abandoned soil was mainly marginal, so that the diminution of produce was percentually less. Nevertheless, it meant that the tax burden, which was based so overwhelmingly upon agriculture, became all the heavier for those whose fields still remained under cultivation.

When successive Emperors invited Germans into the provinces, it was the intention that these immigrants, like Roman frontier garrisons in their spare time, should serve not only as soldiers but as cultivators. But the continual, ineffective, remedial laws about abandoned lands show that the problem of reclamation was never solved, and was indeed scarcely touched. For a tax system which bore down so heavily and unfairly provided no incentive to get back on to the soil. The weak and badly handled Imperial economy had proved wholly insufficient to meet the demands that were being made on it.

In certain regions, such as Mauretania and the Middle Danube territories, slaves were numerous enough to provide a substantial contribution to the labour force. However, this did not have the desired effect of increasing the total number of workers available. For its only effect was to depress the 'free' poor still further, since they could not compete with this unpaid labour, and dropped out of the market altogether.

In most areas, however, there were at this epoch not enough slaves to make any appreciable difference. It is true that captures of prisoners of war, as well as the sale of infants and the downgrading of destitute citizens to servile status, may have made the supply of slaves slightly more abundant than it had been during the immediately preceding period. But since many of the war prisoners, instead of being relegated to slavery, were now taken on as Roman soldiers, too few of them became available on the land to counterbalance the shortage of agricultural labour.

During the military crises in the years just after 400, the Roman government took the desperate step of calling slaves to arms, for the first time for centuries. But the danger was that, instead of accepting such patriotic suggestions, they would prefer to side with the invaders, who were often their compatriots. Indeed, Marxist historians once argued that slavery collapsed at the end of the Roman Empire - thus inaugurating a new epoch in world history - because slaves and peasants alike made common cause with the foreign invaders.

This, however, was to overstate the case. There were, certainly, instances in which slaves helped the enemy. This happened, for example, before the Battle of Adrianople against the Visigoths, and when Alaric was at the gates of Rome. In about 415, too, certain slaves under the leadership of youthful noblemen were plundering round Bordeaux. But such instances were few and far between. The slaves occupied a relatively unimportant role in the history of this period.

So did the free poor of Rome. Ammianus says they divided their days among wine-bars, cook-shops, dice-tables, chariot-races and gladiatorial combats. But Ammianus was probably exaggerating, since he felt such a special contempt for the urban lower classes.

Nevertheless, it is true that a hundred and seventy-five days of the year were given up to public shows, as opposed to a mere hundred and thirty-five two centuries earlier; moreover the fabric of the Colosseum was restored as late as 438. It is also true that in the mid-fourth century 300,000 Romans held bread tickets which entitled them to draw free rations from the government; and even a century later, when the population of the city had greatly diminished, there were still 120,000 recipients of these free supplies. Certainly the population of Rome was largely parasitic. However, this city proletariat played little active part in guiding the course of events which brought the later Roman Empire to a halt.

It was, on the other hand, the 'free' poor of the rural countryside upon whom the government, struggling to raise money for the army, imposed the full rigours and terrors of taxation. Although technically still distinguishable from slaves, they were no better off and perhaps even worse off, since they often found themselves driven into total destitution. Between these rustic poor and the government, the relationship was that of oppressed and oppressor, of foe and foe.

This is perhaps the gravest of all the disunities that afflicted the Western Empire. The state and the unprivileged bulk of its rural subjects were set against each other in a destructive and suicidal disharmony, which played a very large and direct part in the downfall that followed. It was because of this rift that the taxes which were needed to pay for the army could not be raised. And because they could not be raised, the Empire failed to find defenders, and collapsed.

When the small farmers and agricultural labourers of the later Roman Empire were so overwhelmed by the weight of taxation that they could not make both ends meet any longer, they sought protection where they could best find it.

Whole villages, for example, formally declared local army officers to be their 'patrons'. Since such military men, for a consideration, were prepared to drive the Imperial tax officials away, this practice was at first declared illegal. In 415, however, in some provinces at least, it was allowed official tolerance, provided that the patron assumed responsibility for the total tax-collection from the villages in question.

More numerous villages - and this was particularly true in the West - chose local landowners rather than soldiers as their patrons. And not only villages did this, but countless individuals as well: small farmers for the most part, men reduced to destitution who abandoned their plots of land and fled within the walls of the nearest great estate, where they stayed for the rest of their lives. This massive transference of populations, brought about by the impossible demands of the state, became one of the most important social developments of the age.

Now these magnates were glad to have the displaced persons, since agricultural labour was so hard to get. That was why, declared Salvian, 'the poor surrender unconditionally to the rich'. And indeed, unconditional surrender it virtually was. The men may have already been heavily in debt to their new landlord before they arrived within his walls. In any case, they henceforward paid him a cash rent, or made a fixed payment in kind, or contributed a proportion of the crop they were permitted to grow on his land, or sometimes served him in person as labourers. Of security, stability, guarantee against arbitrary action they enjoyed less than the barest minimum. Worst of all, after their flight from their own holdings, the government actually insisted that they should pay the taxes on the plot they had left for ever.

Here their protective landlords were once again necessary, since, like the military patrons, these great men were often prepared to chase the tax-collector away from their gates - in exchange for total submission by the men who had put themselves at their mercy. But then the landlords came to an understanding with the government, and a deal was done: so that the refugees found themselves re-inscribed on the tax rolls in their new locations.

Diocletian, in order to simplify the collection of the vast taxes he needed, had tied all inhabitants of rural areas compulsorily to the places where they were registered, and from those places they were never intended to move again. And in keeping with this principle, what the landlords agreed to now was that they should not repel the tax-gatherer any longer, on the condition that the state enforced this same compulsion upon their tenants, including the families who had fled into their hands.

Thus Valentinian i duly forbade the tenants to uproot themselves without their landlords' consent; and Theodosius i was even more explicit:

... In order that it may not appear that licence has been given to tenants to be free from the tie of taxation and to wander and go off where they wish, they shall be bound by the rule of origin, and though they appear to be free-born by condition, shall nevertheless be considered like slaves of the land itself to which they are born, and shall have no right of going off where they like or of changing their place: but the landowner shall enjoy his right over them with the care of a parent and the power of a master.

Moreover, further edicts made it clear that any one of them who left the place he belonged to was considered to be committing a serious crime, an act of theft: 'he is stealing his own person'.

The laws frequently note tenants' acts of defiance against such regulations and their attempts to flee from the estates where they were tied down, followed by the concerted efforts of landlords and tax officials to bring them back. By the fifth century, they were not even allowed to go and join the army. The bonds were not yet quite those which linked ancient master and slave, or medieval master and serf: yet slaves or serfs were what, in fact, they had become. They were not even allowed to bring civil actions against their masters; and the compulsions to which they were subject were,- like so many compulsions of the age, hereditary.

Their only consolation was that the laws - as their repetitive tone reveals - were inefficiently enforced, so that loopholes of escape were not lacking. Besides, some small properties still managed to endure. But, on the whole, the picture of thousands of free farmers gradually sinking into total dependence represents the grim reality.

One Emperor at least made an attempt to help the poor. This was Valentinian I. Such a conclusion may seem surprising, since he had played such a large part in binding tenants firmly to the estates of the rich. But perhaps he had been acting from motives of plain realism: for there was one thing worse, he may well have reflected, than being frozen into one's occupation, and that was being frozen out of it - and had it not been for the landowners, these farmers and peasants would have been without jobs and food altogether.