Roman dynasties and early middle age nobility

[Barsoom]

If you all don't mind me systemizing this a little bit, it would seem that the chances of Roman noble families surviving would have been highest where power was still exercized by Romans or at least in the name of the Roman state. Obviously, that means the Byzantine Empire, although even there the periodic rise of military dynasties meant an influx of provincial nobility, often from the frontiers, whose Roman heritage isn't all that clear to me. In Western Europe, southern Italy and the later Papal territories would be obvious candidates, as already said. As for the Germanic kingdoms, the chances of Romans making it into the secular elites were probably low. Thanks all for the discussion on Visigothic Spain - but how about the Banu Qasi? They were supposedly descended from a count Cassius who converted to Islam shortly after the Arab invasion. The account may be legendary but I'd like to hear the experts on it.

Also, wouldn't post-Roman Britain also be a good candidate? Power might have reverted to Celtic tribal leaders but presumably they would have been somewhat romanized in the 300+ years that Rome ruled there and have been accorded the status of nobility by the Romans. (I guess this goes to a definitional question. Are we counting only families that originated in Rome? All Senatorial families, including romanized Gauls? All local nobility whose claim to status was recognized by the Empire?)

 

[Enravota]

Wouldn't it be better to at least claim descent from the winning, rather than losing, side though?

No, if your aim is to get reconquest rights.

 

[Calad]

Wouldn't it be better to at least claim descent from the winning, rather than losing, side though?

I dont know full story but good point :excl: However Romans made this up, not Europeans, maybe because they wanted to be connected into ancient Greek and not to be some upstart tribe in far west without history.

 

[Calad]

If you all don't mind me systemizing this a little bit, it would seem that the chances of Roman noble families surviving would have been highest where power was still exercized by Romans or at least in the name of the Roman state. Obviously, that means the Byzantine Empire, although even there the periodic rise of military dynasties meant an influx of provincial nobility, often from the frontiers, whose Roman heritage isn't all that clear to me. In Western Europe, southern Italy and the later Papal territories would be obvious candidates, as already said. As for the Germanic kingdoms, the chances of Romans making it into the secular elites were probably low. Thanks all for the discussion on Visigothic Spain - but how about the Banu Qasi? They were supposedly descended from a count Cassius who converted to Islam shortly after the Arab invasion. The account may be legendary but I'd like to hear the experts on it.

Also, wouldn't post-Roman Britain also be a good candidate? Power might have reverted to Celtic tribal leaders but presumably they would have been somewhat romanized in the 300+ years that Rome ruled there and have been accorded the status of nobility by the Romans. (I guess this goes to a definitional question. Are we counting only families that originated in Rome? All Senatorial families, including romanized Gauls? All local nobility whose claim to status was recognized by the Empire?)

It is a bit suprising that I am unable to find even a singe family that has a clear Roman ancestry in medieval times.

 

[trybald]

Apparently Gregory of Tours was a scion of a Gallo-Roman aristocratic family, born several decades after the Frankish conquest. This would suggest that at least some of Roman aristocrats managed to pass relatively unscathed through the period of expropriation that followed the barbarian conquests.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

Apparently Gregory of Tours was a scion of a Gallo-Roman aristocratic family, born several decades after the Frankish conquest. This would suggest that at least some of Roman aristocrats managed to pass relatively unscathed through the period of expropriation that followed the barbarian conquests.

He was a bishop. And he sounds rather scathed - his power rests on church property, not private property, and his whole account is an open letter of threat to the Frankish warlord elite, demanding they cease seizing Church lands, or be cursed by divine punishment.

If anything, he is a witness to the process of dispossession and land seizures going on around him. The period of expropriation was not instant. It took a little time.

 

[Semper Victor]

If you all don't mind me systemizing this a little bit, it would seem that the chances of Roman noble families surviving would have been highest where power was still exercized by Romans or at least in the name of the Roman state. Obviously, that means the Byzantine Empire, although even there the periodic rise of military dynasties meant an influx of provincial nobility, often from the frontiers, whose Roman heritage isn't all that clear to me. In Western Europe, southern Italy and the later Papal territories would be obvious candidates, as already said. As for the Germanic kingdoms, the chances of Romans making it into the secular elites were probably low. Thanks all for the discussion on Visigothic Spain - but how about the Banu Qasi? They were supposedly descended from a count Cassius who converted to Islam shortly after the Arab invasion. The account may be legendary but I'd like to hear the experts on it.

Also, wouldn't post-Roman Britain also be a good candidate? Power might have reverted to Celtic tribal leaders but presumably they would have been somewhat romanized in the 300+ years that Rome ruled there and have been accorded the status of nobility by the Romans. (I guess this goes to a definitional question. Are we counting only families that originated in Rome? All Senatorial families, including romanized Gauls? All local nobility whose claim to status was recognized by the Empire?)

There are quite serious doubts about the very existence of count Cassius and his son Fortunius. There's no proof of their existence other than the family traditions of the Banu Qasi as recorded by the Andalusian historians of the X century, and that makes the whole thing suspect, as it was a common practice among some muladi lineages (Muslim converts from Christianity) and also among some Arab families to invent family ties to real or imagined Hispano-Gothic characters in order to press forward their claims (usually related to land property and tax) against the Umayyad government. Another example of that is the claim of the Andalusian qadi and amateur historian Ibn al-Qutiyya ("the son of the Gothic woman" in Arabic) about his being the pressumptive descendant of a certain "Sarah" who would have been the granddaughter of the Gothic king Witiza. Al-Qutiyya had a clear personal interest in pushing forward this claim, as, according to his version of the conquest, Witiza's sons had helped the Muslims during their conquest of Al-Andalus and Musa ibn Nusayr had signed a pact with them, by which they would have received an immense landed patrimony in the Guadalquivir valley, under very favourable tax conditions. Obviously, the main point of al-Qutiyya's history was that due to that, his lands should also be subjected to such a privileged status in front of the tax collectors of the caliph more than two centuries later.

Those claims of Hispano-Gothic ancestry among the Andalusian elite are mostly of a similar kind to al-Qutiyya's, and so they should be examined with due suspicion.

 

[Amallric]

I dont know full story but good point :excl: However Romans made this up, not Europeans, maybe because they wanted to be connected into ancient Greek and not to be some upstart tribe in far west without history.

In fact it is exactly the other way around. They wanted to show that they were NOT Greek, and that they come from a lineage at least as ancient as Greece itself. Later West Europeans probably just claimed they descended from Troyans because Romans did the same. Difficult to say how seriously these claims were taken in, say, the XVIIIth century. Probably it was just seen as part of the Renaissance culture.

 

[Semper Victor]

Theudis was a remarkable example.* But not sure how common it would be. You can't overlook that Roman-Gothic inter-marriage was forbidden in the Visigothic law codes. It was a capital offense. Not sure how enforced that was, but they went through trouble of revoking the ban in 580s under Leovigild, and making it possible to inter-marry, upon receiving permission of the count. (and by this time, Byzantine Spania was already in place, where cross-border marriages would again be useful).

As for Romans taking Gothic names, well, I come more often across the other way around (esp. among clerics), so I'm not sure how convinced I am by that.

(* - Worth noting that the same passage (Procopius Lib. 5, Ch. 12) referring to Theudis & this Roman woman seems to describe it as an exception, and places it in the context of his men (Ostrogoths) taking up Visigothic wives and "merging" of those two races. But no such analogous passage or insinuation about Romans.)

We have very little historical evidence with which to work. As you've said, Theudis' case is exceptionally rare in historical sources. But prosopographic, ethimological and legal studies strongly hint towards a certain mix between both elites, in which the main character became Germanic (Visigothic noblemen were warlords, and there were some examples or warlike ecclesiastics too; the adoption of Germanic names and the conscious and deliberate use of Germanic roots suggests strongly to a retaining of at least some knowledge of the Gothic language among the higher nobility lineages), but adopting Roman law and Latin for almost all legal and everyday uses, except for onomastics (topographic places of Gothic origin are almost nonexisting in modern Spain and Portugal, and there are very few words of Gothic origin in modern Iberian Romanic languages). If the ruling elite had been totally displaced by the Germanic element, it's quite probable that the same thing would have happened as in Neustria and Burgundy, with the disparition of Roman law north of the Loire and a strong linguistic influence of the Germanic languages over the vulgar Latin spoken by the mass of the population. By the VII century, in Neustria Roman names disappeared even among the church hierarchy, and the only remnant of the old Roman culture was the language.

 

[Calad]

There are quite serious doubts about the very existence of count Cassius and his son Fortunius. There's no proof of their existence other than the family traditions of the Banu Qasi as recorded by the Andalusian historians of the X century, and that makes the whole thing suspect, as it was a common practice among some muladi lineages (Muslim converts from Christianity) and also among some Arab families to invent family ties to real or imagined Hispano-Gothic characters in order to press forward their claims (usually related to land property and tax) against the Umayyad government. Another example of that is the claim of the Andalusian qadi and amateur historian Ibn al-Qutiyya ("the son of the Gothic woman" in Arabic) about his being the pressumptive descendant of a certain "Sarah" who would have been the granddaughter of the Gothic king Witiza. Al-Qutiyya had a clear personal interest in pushing forward this claim, as, according to his version of the conquest, Witiza's sons had helped the Muslims during their conquest of Al-Andalus and Musa ibn Nusayr had signed a pact with them, by which they would have received an immense landed patrimony in the Guadalquivir valley, under very favourable tax conditions. Obviously, the main point of al-Qutiyya's history was that due to that, his lands should also be subjected to such a privileged status in front of the tax collectors of the caliph more than two centuries later.

Those claims of Hispano-Gothic ancestry among the Andalusian elite are mostly of a similar kind to al-Qutiyya's, and so they should be examined with due suspicion.

Uh-huh. Now you mentioned "Ibn al-Qutiyya ("the son of the Gothic woman" in Arabic)" I want to make up theory word Cordoba is actually Gothic word and originally Cordoba was Gothburg.

 

[Semper Victor]

Uh-huh. Now you mentioned "Ibn al-Qutiyya ("the son of the Gothic woman" in Arabic)" I want to make up theory word Cordoba is actually Gothic word and originally Cordoba was Gothburg.

Well, in that case it'd be hard to explain how it's more plausible than the accepted one about it deriving from the Latin name of the city "Corduba"

But human inventiveness knows no boundaries, so don't let the rules of logic stop you

 

[Buczkowski]

Uh-huh. Now you mentioned "Ibn al-Qutiyya ("the son of the Gothic woman" in Arabic)" I want to make up theory word Cordoba is actually Gothic word and originally Cordoba was Gothburg.

From Wikipedia:

The first historical mention of a settlement dates, however, to the Carthaginian expansion across the Guadalquivir, when the general Hamilcar Barca renamed it Kartuba, from Kart-Juba, meaning "the City of Juba", the latter being a Numidian commander who had died in a battle nearby.

 

[Calad]

Gothburg still sounds better