Late antiquity

Based on Wikipedia: Late antiquity

Imagine standing in Rome around the year 400. The empire that built the Colosseum still exists—technically. But something fundamental has shifted. The old gods are fading. A new religion from the eastern provinces has captured the emperor himself. Tribes from beyond the Rhine are no longer just enemies to be fought; they're settling inside the borders, sometimes as allies, sometimes as conquerors. The world your grandparents knew is dissolving, and whatever comes next hasn't quite taken shape.

This is late antiquity.

The term describes roughly five centuries, from about 250 to 750 of the common era. It's the bridge between two worlds we think we understand—classical Rome on one side, medieval Europe on the other—but the bridge itself remains strangely unfamiliar to most people. Which is odd, because almost everything that shapes Western civilization crystallized during these centuries: Christianity became dominant, the Bible took its final form, Islam emerged, and the political map of Europe was redrawn by Germanic kingdoms that would eventually become France, Spain, and Italy.

Why "Late Antiquity" Matters

For centuries, historians called this period the Dark Ages. The name stuck because Europe's population crashed, cities emptied, literacy declined, and written records became scarce. If you were trying to research what happened in Britain between 410 and 600, you'd find almost nothing to work with. The darkness referred to our ignorance as much as any actual decline.

But the label also carried a judgment. It suggested that after Rome fell, Europe simply collapsed into barbarism until the medieval kingdoms clawed their way back to civilization. This story—of decline, fall, and eventual recovery—dominated historical thinking for over a thousand years, from Renaissance scholars who idealized classical Rome to Edward Gibbon, whose massive Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire published in the 1770s became the definitive account.

Then came a revolution in thinking.

German historians in the early twentieth century began using the term Spätantike—literally "late antiquity"—to describe this period. Rather than seeing it as mere decay, they recognized it as a distinct era with its own character. The Irish-born historian Peter Brown brought this perspective to English readers in 1971 with his book The World of Late Antiquity. Brown didn't see a stale, dying civilization. He saw transformation: a "vibrant time of renewals and beginnings."

The difference matters enormously. Call something "dark ages" and you dismiss it. Call it "late antiquity" and you're forced to take it seriously—to understand how Christianity evolved from persecuted sect to state religion, how Germanic warriors became Roman administrators, how the seeds of both European and Islamic civilization were planted in the same soil.

The World in 250

To understand late antiquity, start with what it was transforming from. In the year 250, the Roman Empire still stretched from Scotland to Iraq, from the Sahara to the Danube. But it was already under severe strain.

The eastern frontier had become genuinely dangerous. For centuries, Rome's main rival in the region had been the Parthian Empire, a relatively decentralized power that the legions could usually handle. But in 224, a new dynasty called the Sasanians overthrew the Parthians and created something more formidable: a centralized Persian state with ambitions to match Rome's own. The Sasanians would remain Rome's great enemy for the next four centuries, fighting wars that exhausted both empires and left them vulnerable to what came next.

Inside the empire, the third century brought chaos. Between 235 and 284, Rome cycled through more than twenty emperors, most of them killed by their own soldiers. Plague swept through the provinces. The currency collapsed. Entire regions broke away temporarily. Modern historians call this the "Crisis of the Third Century," and it nearly destroyed Roman civilization entirely.

It didn't. An emperor named Diocletian, who rose to power in 284, reorganized the empire so thoroughly that it survived another two centuries in the West and over a millennium in the East. Diocletian's reforms created what historians sometimes call the "Later Roman Empire" or the "Dominate"—a more authoritarian, more bureaucratic, more militarized state than the earlier "Principate" established by Augustus.

One of Diocletian's innovations was the tetrarchy, a system of four co-emperors designed to prevent the succession crises that had plagued the previous decades. It didn't work for long—within a generation, ambitious generals were fighting each other again—but it reflected the empire's new reality: it had grown too large and too threatened for one man to govern alone.

Constantine's Revolution

Everything changed with Constantine.

In 312, Constantine marched on Rome to overthrow a rival emperor. Before the crucial battle at the Milvian Bridge, he reportedly saw a vision—accounts vary on whether it was a cross, the Greek letters chi and rho (the first two letters of "Christ" in Greek), or something else entirely. Whatever he saw, Constantine won the battle and credited the Christian God with his victory.

The following year, Constantine and his remaining co-emperor Licinius issued the Edict of Milan, which legalized Christianity throughout the empire. This was revolutionary. For two and a half centuries, Christians had faced periodic persecution, sometimes intensely violent. Diocletian's persecution in the early 300s had been particularly brutal, with churches destroyed, scriptures burned, and Christians forced to sacrifice to the old gods or face execution.

Now, suddenly, Christianity was legal. More than legal—it was favored. Constantine showered the church with money and privileges. He built magnificent churches, including the original Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, constructed over what was believed to be Christ's tomb. He involved himself in church disputes, convening the first ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325 to settle questions about the nature of Christ that were dividing Christians into bitter factions.

Was Constantine sincerely converted? Historians still argue about this. He wasn't baptized until he was on his deathbed, though this was common practice at the time—baptism was thought to wash away all sins, so many Christians delayed it as long as possible. He continued using pagan imagery on his coins and held the title Pontifex Maximus, chief priest of Rome's traditional religion. But whatever his personal beliefs, his political support for Christianity transformed the faith from a minority religion into the dominant force in Mediterranean civilization.

The End of the Old Gods

Christianity's rise meant paganism's fall, though the process took generations.

Constantine's successors were mostly Christian, with one dramatic exception: Julian, who reigned from 361 to 363. Raised Christian, Julian rejected the faith as an adult and attempted to restore traditional Greco-Roman religion. He reduced Christian privileges, reopened pagan temples, and tried to create an organized pagan church that could compete with Christianity's institutional strength. Christians called him "Julian the Apostate"—the turncoat.

Julian died fighting the Persians, just two years into his reign. With him died the last serious attempt to reverse Christianity's advance.

By the 390s, Emperor Theodosius I was issuing edicts against paganism. He made Nicene Christianity—the version that affirmed the full divinity of Christ and the Holy Spirit—the official state religion. Pagan sacrifices were banned. Temples were closed, sometimes destroyed. The eternal flame of the goddess Vesta, which had burned in Rome for over a thousand years, was extinguished. The Olympic Games, with their honors to Zeus, were abolished.

Yet paganism didn't vanish overnight. In the countryside—the pagus, from which we get the word "pagan"—old practices persisted for centuries. Educated aristocrats in Rome and Athens continued to honor the old gods privately. Syncretic philosophies like Neoplatonism, which tried to reconcile Greek philosophy with religious mysticism, attracted followers who might nominally be Christian but whose worldview remained deeply shaped by classical thought.

The historian Peter Brown described the late antique world as "rustling with the presence of many divine spirits." Christianity might have won the official contest, but the spiritual landscape remained crowded and contested.

Monasticism: A New Way of Life

Among the most consequential developments of late antiquity was Christian monasticism—the emergence of men and women who withdrew from ordinary society to pursue lives of prayer, asceticism, and spiritual discipline.

The movement began in Egypt in the late third century. Anthony, later Saint Anthony, was a young man who heard the Gospel passage "sell all you have and give to the poor" and took it literally. He gave away his inheritance, moved into the desert, and spent decades in solitary prayer and combat with demons. His biography, written by Athanasius of Alexandria, became a sensation, inspiring thousands to follow his example.

Desert monasticism took many forms. Some monks lived alone as hermits. Others gathered in communities with shared rules. Some pursued extreme asceticism: the stylites, for instance, lived atop pillars for years at a time. Simeon Stylites spent thirty-seven years on a pillar near Aleppo, becoming so famous that crowds gathered to hear his pronouncements and emperors sought his counsel.

This might sound like escapism, but monasteries became centers of learning, charity, and influence. Monks copied manuscripts, preserving classical literature that would otherwise have been lost. They established hospitals and hostels for travelers. Their prayers were thought to benefit the entire community, making monasteries spiritually essential institutions.

By the sixth century, Benedict of Nursia had written his famous Rule, establishing the model for Western monasticism that would dominate for the next thousand years. Monasteries became the intellectual and spiritual backbone of medieval Europe, but their origins lay in the transformed world of late antiquity.

The Barbarian Kingdoms

While Christianity was reshaping spiritual life, political geography was being redrawn by peoples the Romans called "barbarians."

The word needs unpacking. In Greek, barbaros originally just meant someone who didn't speak Greek—their speech sounded like "bar-bar-bar" to Greek ears. Romans adopted the term for anyone outside their civilization. It didn't necessarily mean savage or uncivilized; it meant foreign.

The Migration Period—roughly the fourth through sixth centuries—saw massive movements of Germanic, Hunnic, and Slavic peoples into Roman territory. Some came as invaders, some as refugees fleeing the Huns, some as soldiers recruited to defend the very borders they'd once threatened. The line between Roman and barbarian grew increasingly blurred.

In 410, Visigoths under Alaric sacked Rome. The city hadn't been taken by a foreign enemy in eight hundred years. The shock reverberated throughout the empire. Saint Augustine began writing The City of God partly to explain how God could allow such a catastrophe.

In 455, Vandals from North Africa sacked Rome again, more thoroughly. And in 476, a Germanic general named Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman emperor, a teenager named Romulus Augustulus. The symbolism was almost too neat: the empire founded by Romulus and Augustus ended with a boy bearing a diminutive form of both names.

But "fall" may be the wrong word. The Germanic kingdoms that replaced direct Roman rule in the West didn't see themselves as destroyers of Rome. The Ostrogoths who ruled Italy from Ravenna preserved Roman law, patronized Roman learning, and maintained Roman infrastructure. The Visigoths who controlled Spain and southern France styled themselves as continuators of Roman civilization. Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic king of Italy, employed the Roman philosopher Boethius and the scholar Cassiodorus in his administration.

These kingdoms were hybrid creations: Germanic warriors ruling Roman populations, using Roman administrative structures, speaking Latin in official documents, but maintaining their own legal traditions for their own people. From this fusion emerged what would eventually become medieval Europe.

Constantinople: The Surviving Empire

While the West fragmented, the East endured.

Constantine had founded a new capital in 330 on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium, naming it Constantinople after himself. For the next eleven centuries, Constantinople would be one of the world's greatest cities—center of an empire we call Byzantine, though its inhabitants always called themselves Romans.

In 500, Constantinople was growing while Rome was shrinking. By Justinian's reign in the sixth century, the Eastern capital's population may have reached half a million, making it the world's largest city. The Hagia Sophia—the Church of Holy Wisdom—completed in 537, remained the largest enclosed space in the world for nearly a thousand years. Its dome, seemingly floating on light from a ring of windows, represented a triumph of engineering and artistry.

Justinian dreamed of restoring the united empire. His generals Belisarius and Narses reconquered North Africa from the Vandals and Italy from the Ostrogoths. For a few decades, the Mediterranean was again largely Roman. But the conquests proved impossible to hold. The Lombards invaded Italy in 568, leaving Byzantium with only fragments of the peninsula. The Western reconquest had exhausted the empire's resources without securing lasting results.

More devastating than any military setback was the plague. In 541, a catastrophic epidemic struck Constantinople and spread throughout the Mediterranean world. This was the first recorded outbreak of bubonic plague in the West—the same disease that would return as the Black Death eight centuries later. The Plague of Justinian, as it's called, killed perhaps a quarter of the Mediterranean's population over the following two centuries of recurrent outbreaks.

Combined with volcanic climate disruptions in 536, which caused crop failures across the Northern Hemisphere, the sixth century's second half was apocalyptic in the literal sense: many people thought the end of the world was at hand.

The Birth of Islam

Into this weakened world came something entirely new.

In the early seventh century, a merchant from the Arabian city of Mecca named Muhammad began receiving revelations that he believed came from the one God—the same God worshipped by Jews and Christians. By his death in 632, he had united most of Arabia under the new faith of Islam.

What happened next was astonishing. Within a decade, Arab armies had conquered the entire Persian Empire and stripped Byzantium of its richest provinces: Syria, Palestine, Egypt. Cities that had been Roman for seven centuries—Damascus, Jerusalem, Alexandria—were now under Arab rule. By 711, Muslim armies had crossed into Spain, ending the Visigothic kingdom and reaching the Pyrenees.

How did this happen so fast? The Byzantine and Sasanian empires had just finished fighting each other to exhaustion in a war that lasted from 602 to 628. Both were weakened, their treasuries drained, their populations depleted by war and plague. The Arab warriors who swept out of the desert were united by a powerful new faith that promised paradise to those who died fighting for God.

But there's another way to understand Islam's emergence: not as an alien irruption but as a product of late antiquity itself. Muhammad knew about Christianity and Judaism; the Quran engages with both traditions extensively. Arabia wasn't isolated from the wider world—it was connected by trade routes to both great empires. The religious ferment of late antiquity, the apocalyptic expectations, the debates about monotheism and prophecy, the circulation of ideas along the Silk Road and across the Mediterranean—all of this formed the context in which Islam arose.

Scholars debate which view is more accurate. The traditional narrative, sometimes called the "out of Arabia" thesis, emphasizes Islam's novelty and the dramatic break it represented. The revisionist view, associated with Peter Brown and his students, sees Islam as deeply shaped by the late antique world from which it emerged. The truth likely involves both: Islam was genuinely new, but it was new in ways that only made sense against the background of late antiquity.

The Transformation of Cities

One of the clearest measures of change in late antiquity is what happened to cities.

Classical cities were built around public spaces: forums, theaters, baths, temples. They were designed for civic life—for citizens gathering, debating, watching spectacles, conducting business in open colonnades. The city was where Roman identity was performed and displayed.

Late antique cities looked increasingly different. Grand public buildings were subdivided into smaller units. Shops encroached on colonnades, transforming open thoroughfares into what would eventually become the covered marketplaces called souks. Burials, which Roman law had strictly prohibited within city walls, began appearing inside urban areas, clustered around the shrines of saints and martyrs.

Rome itself shrank catastrophically. At its peak in the second century, the city held perhaps a million people. By 600, the population had collapsed to around thirty thousand—a decline of ninety-seven percent. The aqueducts that had supplied Rome's baths and fountains were cut during the Gothic Wars of the sixth century; without them, the hills became uninhabitable and the population clustered near the Tiber.

The vast monuments of imperial Rome—forums, baths, temples, amphitheaters—became quarries for later construction or were slowly buried by accumulated debris. The Colosseum was used as a fortress, a workshop, a housing complex. The Forum, heart of Roman public life for a thousand years, became a cow pasture called the Campo Vaccino.

Constantinople bucked this trend, growing even as Rome collapsed, until the Plague of Justinian reversed its expansion. The Greek East remained more urban than the Latin West throughout late antiquity; cities like Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople retained populations in the hundreds of thousands when Western Europe's largest settlements rarely exceeded ten thousand.

A New World Takes Shape

By 750, the world looked radically different from how it had appeared in 250.

The Roman Empire had split in two and the Western half had dissolved entirely, replaced by a patchwork of Germanic kingdoms that were slowly becoming recognizable as France, Spain, Italy, England. These kingdoms were Christian—often passionately so—and the Church provided what unity Western Europe possessed, with the Bishop of Rome increasingly claiming supremacy as Pope.

The Eastern Roman Empire survived, though dramatically reduced. It had lost its wealthiest provinces to Islam and was now centered on Anatolia, the Balkans, and a shrinking strip of Italy around Ravenna and Rome. The Byzantines would endure for another seven centuries, preserving Greek learning and Roman law, but they would never again dominate the Mediterranean.

The greatest power in the former Roman world was now the Caliphate—first the Umayyads ruling from Damascus, then the Abbasids from Baghdad. The Islamic world stretched from Spain to Central Asia, united by religion, Arabic language, and remarkably efficient administration. For the next several centuries, the most advanced science, philosophy, and medicine would be produced in Arabic, not Latin or Greek.

Judaism had transformed too. The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 of the common era had already forced Judaism to reimagine itself around text rather than sacrifice. During late antiquity, the rabbis compiled the Talmud, the vast collection of commentary and law that would define Jewish life for the next millennium. Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and Islam—the three Abrahamic faiths that between them claim half the world's population today—all took their essential shapes during these centuries.

Why Late Antiquity Matters Now

Understanding late antiquity matters because it shows us how civilizations transform.

The old Gibbon narrative of decline and fall suggested that civilizations simply collapse when they grow decadent or weak. But late antiquity shows something more complicated: transformation, adaptation, continuity amid rupture. The Germanic kingdoms that replaced Rome didn't destroy classical culture; they preserved what they valued and adapted it to new circumstances. Christianity didn't simply replace paganism; it absorbed, transformed, and transmitted classical learning. Islam didn't arise in isolation; it emerged from the same late antique world of religious ferment and philosophical debate.

There's something almost comforting in this view. It suggests that even the most dramatic historical changes involve more continuity than we might expect, that the apocalyptic transitions we fear may be more gradual and creative than we imagine.

But there's also a sobering lesson. The population of late antique Europe really did collapse. Cities really did empty out. Skills really were lost—concrete, for instance, wasn't matched in quality for a thousand years. The people living through those centuries experienced genuine catastrophe, not just "transformation." Plague, climate disaster, war, and social breakdown brought real suffering to real people.

Late antiquity reminds us that both things can be true at once: that historical change involves tremendous loss and tremendous creativity, that civilizations can die and give birth at the same moment, that the seeds of what comes next are always present in what's passing away. The men and women who lived through these five centuries didn't know they were building the foundations of medieval Europe and the Islamic Golden Age. They were just trying to survive in a world that was changing faster than anyone could comprehend.

In that, at least, we might recognize something of ourselves.