The Roman conquests in the western Mediterranean saw the arrival of Roman coins, but in the east the local coinages at first remained and were manipulated.

Chapter 7 is focused on conversions in a family context, collecting and comparing evidence from Gaul, Hispania, and Italy. The starting point is an examination of the secular and ecclesiastical rules governing interdenominational marriages and the differences in church loyalty between parents and children. Then the conclusions drawn from the normative sources are connected with what we know about the social reality of ‘mixed’ families. Given the nature of our evidence, the chapter focuses primarily on marriages and conversions in royal contexts. It analyses the examples from the ruling house of Suevi, marriages in the Burgundian family of Gibichungs, and marriages between the Visigothic and Frankish ruling families.

Chapter 6 analyses how the re-emergence of Homoianism among the Visigoths, Vandals, and Suevi was interpreted in the Nicene church in Gaul and Spain and what this reception reveals about Nicene–Homoian relations in the region in the fifth century. It also examines the evidence for the development of the Homoian Church and the increase in the number of Homoians.

Chapter 8 is devoted to the ways in which some Nicene bishops attempted to persuade kings to convert, illustrated by the examples of Avitus of Vienne and Leander of Seville, and to conversion as a political project and as a theme of the ideology and theology of kingship in late sixth-century Visigothic Hispania. Conversion and royal rule in Gaul and Hispania were also linked to another important phenomenon: the cult of saints. Thus, in this chapter three cults that played an important role in Nicene–Homoian relations are analysed: the cults of the apostle Peter in Burgundy, of Martin of Tours in Gaul, and of Eulalia of Mérida in Visigothic Hispania.

Chapter 9 focuses on the processes of transition from a state of schism to Christian unity in Gaul and Hispania. The comparison of two councils, that of Orléans in 511 and Épaone in 517, show the lack of a uniform pattern to the organisation and enforcement of this change. The second part of the chapter is devoted to the transformation of the Visigothic kingdom begun in 589 and interpreted as a huge project, developed in close collaboration between the king and the secular and ecclesiastical elites, which laid the foundation for Christian culture in seventh-century Hispania and demonstrated the transformative power of conversion ideas in the early medieval West.

Hugeburc, an Anglo-Saxon nun who moved to Germany and became abbess of Heidenheim, undertook a biography of Willibald, who with his brother Wynnebald had travelled from England with his father on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Willibald eventually became bishop of Eichstätt in Bavaria. The heart of Hugeburc’s biography is concerned with Willibald’s experiences in the Holy Land, where he visited many sites mentioned in the Bible: he told Hugeburc of his adventures and she recorded them in a kind of diary form, which contrasts with the more elaborate style of the Latin she uses in the non-dictated sections.

Caesar’s conquest of Gaul makes for a fascinating study in mass-violence in the ancient world. Caesar’s own narrative of his conquest, the Bellum Gallcium, provides us with one of our few first-hand accounts of conquest. Caesar’s keen political eye means that the narrative must be one he considered would resonate with a significant proportion of Romans. As such, it provides perhaps one of our best guides not so much as to what happened, but as to the place of mass violence within Roman thinking. Within the text, Caesar clearly states what can be regarded as a genocidal’ desire, namely that the ‘the stock and name of the tribe’ (stirps ac nomen civitatis) of the Germanic Eburones might be destroyed for their role in ambushing Caesar’s forces (Bellum Gallicum 6.34), as well as narratives of other acts of mass-killing. In addition, Caesar narrates several instances of mass-enslavement – an action that, although not readily caught by modern legal definitions of genocide, would have the same effect by dispersing a people, and causing the cessation of that people’s existence as a distinct group of people. However, Caesar’s text also shows a concern to portray such events as justified as within a retributive framework of wrongs done to Rome.

This chapter examines the changes in agricultural practices and the dispersal of new plants in the Iberian Peninsula and in the Gallic provinces after their incorporation into the Roman empire. It investigates the effects colonization may have had on agricultural practices. The provinces chosen as case studies were the object of large colonization programmes organized by Caesar and Augustus.Although the available archaeobotanical data for these regions is uneven, it is possible to detect in these provincial territories similar trends to those observed for Roman Italy: an increase, in the late first century BC, with notable peaks in the early first century AD, in the number and variety of horticultural produce available. The evidence from northern and northeastern France and the western Netherlands suggests a connection between the presence of the army and the import of new plant foods first, and the local cultivation of some of these new plants later. Such evidence offers a compelling picture for the diffusion of cultivation techniques and dietary changes that took place in the early empire.

Chapter 8 discusses the archaeological evidence for cultivation choices made on provincial estates, trying to establish when large-scale arboriculture was a viable and appealing choice for growers. The case study of two farms in southern France suggests that even for modest colonial famers cultivating the grapevine and making wine for the market were attractive commercial choices. The fact that these cultivated a combination of wild and cultivated vines might be indicative of the limited opportunities they had in accessing plant cuttings and young vines from nurseries. The chapter concludes by comparing the Iberian and Gallic evidence with that available for Roman Britain, a region for which rich archaeobotanical datasets exists. The Roman era increased the range of plant foods consumed and allowed the acclimatization of certain plants into Britain; here, large-scale fruit cultivation seems to have occurred on larger estates, whose proprietors had access to capital, technical knowledge and markets with sufficient aggregate demand. Roman Britain shows quite clearly that the overall pattern in the distant provinces was not so different from the heartland of Roman agriculture.

The question of Visigothic slavery has generally been treated in the context of larger studies on the Visigoths or of the Mediterranean economy rather than studies devoted to slavery. Even when it has been examined as a thing unto itself, it has tended to get folded into larger narratives of the development of social relations in the early Middle Ages. Marxist historians, such as Abilio Barbero, Marcelo Vigil, and Chris Wickham, have attempted to fit the evidence into a historical materialist narrative that posits a decline of slavery and slaveholding in the post-Roman world as states contracted and serfs or peasants replaced slaves as the primary agricultural producers. This narrative has been countered by French social historians, especially Georges Duby and Pierre Bonnassie, who argued that slavery continued to predominate in the early medieval West, giving way to serfdom only in the tenth century.

This chapter surveys the archaeological evidence for the period of the settlement of Brittany from Britain. The absorption of the Armorican peninsula into the land-based Roman Empire in the first century BC ended its long-standing role in prehistory as an important bridge for trade and cultural communication between the Atlantic Archipelago and the Continent. It was further marginalised by the concentration of resources in frontier zones under the late Empire. However, the political and economic decline of late-Roman Armorica was apparently gradual, in contrast with the sudden disruption of the relatively prosperous lowland zone of Britain in the early fifth century. Differences such as these may partly explain the absence of direct archaeological evidence for migration. The absence from Brittany of the high-status material culture seen in Britain outside the zone of English settlement in the fifth to seventh centuries (hill-forts, decorated metalwork, imported pottery) may reflect Brittany’s relative poverty but also the extreme diffusion of political power there, and a lesser degree of conflict. More modest, newly discovered archaeological evidence indicates Brittany’s continued connections to the wider world of north-western Europe in more basic developments in agriculture and rural settlement forms.

Caesar’s tumultuous first consulship in 59 is often regarded as the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. Yet scholars have been too impressed with Bibulus’s and Cato’s obstructionist tactics, and too ready to concede that they were "correct" from a traditional republican perspective. A common modern perception of the year 59 is that by rejecting Bibulus’s attempted obstruction, Caesar demolished the constitutional constraints on executive and popular power that defined the Republic. But far from representing an established republican constitutional tradition, Bibulus, Cato, and those who followed their lead had pushed the obstructive devices available to them far beyond their customary limits. The notion that Caesar simply imposed his will in the assemblies through violence is also overly simplistic. Nor was the Senate reduced to a "rump" of Caesarian or Pompeian partisans. Caesar’s acta of 59 remained formally valid even while some senators, such as Bibulus himself, continued to try to cast doubt on their legitimacy.

Before c.600, Western European military forces were recognisably descended from the last western Roman armies, as can quickly be demonstrated. Late Roman troops had sometimes been paid via the delegation of fiscal revenues and, as earlier, received allotments of land on retirement.1 Their hereditary service,2 furthermore, exempted them from certain taxes. In the fourth and fifth centuries a series of military identities evolved, based around oppositions to traditional civic Roman ideals. These turned on ideas of barbarism, enhanced by possibly increased recruitment beyond the frontiers and greater opportunities for non-Roman soldiers to rise to higher command.3 As the territory effectively governed from Ravenna, the imperial capital, shrank during the fifth century, and with it the available taxation and recruiting bases, the enlistment, and political pre-eminence, of warriors from outside the empire grew further.4

Building on the themes of regionality in Chapter 4, and of empire in Chapter 3, this chapter focuses on Aquae Sulis’s place in the social, religious, and artistic networks of Britain, Gaul, and Germany specifically, and on how to put the site’s locally specific practices in dialogue with broader trends. It explores the significance of artistic connections seen in smaller iconographic works such as the ‘altar’ blocks, which can be linked to Viergöttersteine from the Rhineland, and the relief of Mercury with a local goddess, which is part of a regional cluster centred on Gloucester, and uses a series of case studies, in particular the ‘curse tablets’, to delineate the ways in which provincial religious knowledge may be characterized as a series of increasingly localized concentric circles of practice.

Command hierarchy is as much in evidence as status hierarchy in this first age of papal decretals, though the two structures do not map tidily on to each other. By the end of the fourth century a complex chain of command with many levels had developed in the Christian Church. The bishop in his city played a pivotal role, but below bishops were large communities of clerics, sometimes running their own churches, and between an ordinary bishop and the bishop of Rome there might be two layers in the hierarchy of authority. This hierarchy of power regulated elections to bishoprics. It went with an increasingly precise geographical division of the Christian world into dioceses. Could a cleric move from one diocese to another? This was the kind of practical problem that arose.