The Romans of the Middle Ages were the provincial populations of the former western empire who went on living by Roman law, holding Roman offices and speaking Latin under Gothic, Frankish, Visigothic and Lombard kings.
In 476 Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustulus and sent the western imperial regalia to Constantinople. No population moved, no language changed and no court closed. The Senate went on meeting, the consuls went on being appointed, the tax registers went on being kept, and the men who did all of this went on calling themselves Romani.
What had ended was the western emperor, not the Romans. For the next three centuries the people of Italy, Gaul, Spain and Africa lived under kings who were Goths, Franks, Visigoths, Vandals or Lombards, and who ruled them through Roman law and Roman officials because there was no other machinery available.
This article is about those people rather than about the empire they had lost. Rome the city and the Western Roman Empire are separate subjects; so are the eastern Romans, who kept the name until 1453 and whom this archive files under Byzantines.
Romanus was not a nationality in the modern sense. It was a legal status and a cultural claim, and in the successor kingdoms it became something close to an ethnic label because the law made it one: a man was judged as a Roman or as a Goth, and the courts needed to know which.
The compounds this article uses — Gallo-Roman, Hispano-Roman, Italo-Roman — are modern scholarly conveniences and nobody in the sixth century used them. A bishop in Clermont and a landowner near Seville both wrote Romanus of themselves, with no regional qualifier, and would not have recognised the hyphens.
Their Germanic neighbours had their own word. Speakers of Germanic languages called a Latin-speaker walh, a term that has left Welsh in Britain, Wallonia in the Low Countries, Vlach in the Balkans and Wales itself: an outsider's name for Romans that long outlived the insiders' name for themselves. The Roman world as a whole was Romania, and the shard of it that Byzantine Ravenna held against the Lombards is still called the Romagna.
The awkward part is that the eastern empire never surrendered the word. Its inhabitants called themselves Rhomaioi, and when Liutprand of Cremona arrived at Constantinople in 968 as Otto I's ambassador, the emperor Nikephoros II Phokas told the westerners to their faces that they were not Romans but Lombards. Two populations claimed one name, and this archive keeps them apart as Romans and Byzantines while insisting that both claims were sincere.
The successor kingdoms ran on the personality of law: the law that applied to you depended on who you were, not on where you stood. A Goth in Italy was judged by Gothic custom and a Roman by Roman law, in the same town on the same day.
The kings therefore had to publish Roman law for their Roman subjects. Alaric II issued the Breviary of Alaric in 506, an abridgement of the Theodosian Code for the Romans of the Visigothic kingdom, and it remained the working Roman law of southern Gaul and Spain for centuries. The Burgundians produced a Lex Romana Burgundionum for the same purpose.
Being a Roman also carried a price. Salic law valued a free Frank at two hundred solidi and a Roman landowner at one hundred: the Roman was protected, counted and worth precisely half. That single figure says more about the status of the conquered population than any chronicle does.
The division ended at different times in different places. Recceswinth's Liber Iudiciorum of 654 abolished it in Spain by making one law territorial for Goth and Roman alike, while in Italy men were still declaring in charters which law they lived by into the eleventh century.
Theoderic ruled Italy from 493 to 526 through an explicit division of labour: Goths were the army, Romans were the administration. The great senatorial houses of Rome staffed the praetorian prefecture, the courts and the city offices, and were paid in the currency they cared about, which was rank.
Three men show how the arrangement worked and how it failed. Quintus Aurelius Memmius Symmachus was the senior figure of the Roman aristocracy and consul in 485. His son-in-law Boethius, consul in 510, translated Aristotle, wrote on music and arithmetic, and rose to be master of the offices. Cassiodorus served as quaestor and praetorian prefect and published the Variae, a collection of the official letters he had drafted in the king's name, which remains the best surviving view of how the kingdom actually administered anything.
It ended badly. Boethius defended a senator accused of treasonable correspondence with Constantinople, was charged himself, and was executed at Pavia around 524; Symmachus followed him to the block shortly afterwards. Boethius wrote the Consolation of Philosophy in prison awaiting death, and it became one of the most widely read books of the Middle Ages. The executions poisoned the relationship between the Gothic court and the Roman elite whose cooperation the kingdom depended on.
Cassiodorus outlived the kingdom he had served. He retired to his estates at Squillace in Calabria and founded the monastery of Vivarium around the middle of the century, where he set monks to copying classical and Christian texts — turning a senatorial library into a scriptorium, which is roughly how much of Latin literature survived at all.
The Roman Senate continued to meet in the Curia for more than a century after the last western emperor. Its members repaired public buildings, staged games, corresponded with Constantinople and quarrelled over papal elections, and Theoderic treated its approval as worth having.
The consulship survived too, and the consular diptych that leads this article is what it looked like from the outside: a man of rank gave the games, distributed money, and had his name carved in ivory and sent to his peers. The office had no power left and enormous prestige, which is why it was worth bankrupting a family for. The last consul appointed in the west took office in 534, and the last anywhere in 541, after which Justinian let the office lapse into an imperial title.
The Senate faded rather than fell. Its last recorded collective act came in the early seventh century, and by 630 the Curia itself had been converted into the church of Sant'Adriano. The building survived because it was consecrated, which is a fair summary of how most Roman institutions made it through the period.
As the lay institutions thinned, the church absorbed their functions and their personnel. Senatorial families that had supplied consuls began supplying bishops, and the career that had run through the prefecture now ran through the episcopate.
Gregory the Great, pope from 590 to 604, is the clearest case: a Roman of senatorial family who had served as prefect of the city before becoming a monk, and who as pope fed Rome from the papal estates, negotiated with the Lombards over the heads of the imperial officials at Ravenna, and organised the mission that converted the English. He administered Rome because the emperor's men could not.
The older civic religion had already gone. Pope Gelasius was still writing against the Lupercalia in 494, which tells us both that the old February festival was still being kept in Rome at the end of the fifth century and that it was by then a matter for argument rather than assumption.