A broadly similar picture of disorder is presented by Provence, Aquitaine, and northern Spain. The attempts of Charlemagne to push back the Arabs in the area known as the Spanish March had little permanent result, and in the ninth century the Mediterranean coast of France was devastated by the raids of Muslim pirates. Marauding bands set up pirate nests, as at Fraxinetum on the Riviera, in order to prey on pilgrim and merchant traffic crossing the Alps. As elsewhere in the Carolingian Empire external pressure, combined with the disintegration of royal authority, created conditions in which local power accumulated in the hands of squabbling noble families.

Survivals and Disruption: the Case of City Life

The Byzantine and Islamic worlds have often been seen as preserving the political sophistication and urban life of the classical world, while the west suffered a complete break in continuity resulting from the invasions and the settlement of the Germans. The difficulties of such a sweeping approach are obvious. The institutions of the Roman world were undergoing major changes long before the settlement of the barbarians. In certain cases the effects of 'continuity' could be negative and those of 'discontinuity' positive. For example, the increasing domination of military élites evident in most areas of the Mediterranean led to more effective defensive arrangements, and the traditional culture of the civilian aristocracy which such a process undermined was in many respects rigid and sterile. Many factors were outside human control, including plague which remained endemic for at least two centuries after the first great outbreak of 542, and climatic deterioration, which depressed agricultural production between the fourth and the eighth centuries. Contemporaries sought desperately to identify themselves with past ages which they admired; the Ostrogoths sought to create for themselves a classicizing past in which the Amazons were represented as Gothic women, and the historian Agnellus of Ravenna saw no anomaly in writing of the 'Roman Empire' of Charlemagne.

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