Fworld history was like a roller coaster ride for Ravenna. Rising from a small country town with an attached naval base to an imperial residence, the town on the Adriatic coast became the center of an empire for a century and a half. Thereafter, for more than two hundred years, it formed the center of an imperial province. Then, during the reign of Charlemagne, it withered away to become a provincial town.
The fact that it remained so for a thousand years, until the threshold of industrialization, is a gift for us, because its location away from the major military roads and battlefields – only once, in 1512, did the Spaniards and French fight at the gates – Ravenna became an open-air museum the late antiquity. Nowhere else are churches and chapels, mosaics and sarcophagi from the collapsing Roman Empire preserved in such abundance as here.
Since the six-part monograph by Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann, the last volume of which appeared in 1989, no major work on the history of Ravenna has been published in the German-speaking world. The book by the British Byzantine scholar Judith Herrin, which is based on the same sources, does not close a research gap, but it does close a reading gap.
In addition, it has the advantage of clarity compared to Deichmann’s bundle, even if almost five hundred text pages are not trifles. The fact that Herrin’s historical narrative only begins in the third century and breaks off around the year 800 is also no harm, because there is not much more to report about Ravenna’s role in European history – apart from the fact that Italy’s national poet Dante was in exile here in 1321 died and is also buried.
At that time, the Jordan was still a river god
Ravenna’s moment of glory came when the eighteen-year-old Western Roman Emperor Honorius moved his court from threatened Milan to the city on the southern Po Delta. Surrounded by swamps, the town was easier to defend and connected to international trade and military routes through its naval port of Classe. This was still the case ninety years later, when the Gothic king Theodoric wrested control of the western half of the empire, which had meanwhile shrunk considerably, from the army commander Odoacer.
While the last circus games were taking place in Rome and the popes tended the apostle’s tomb, Theodoric ruled from Ravenna with the help of Roman bureaucrats a Christian-Germanic kingdom in which his Arian-believing Goths were in the minority compared to the Catholic locals. In order to symbolically enhance the Gothic faith, he decorated his capital with new churches. Most of the buildings from that period have disappeared, but the Arian and Orthodox baptisteries have survived. In both, the Jordan is still depicted as a river god on the ceiling mosaic of Christ’s baptism. It is the last flash of pagan imagination at the end of antiquity.
Judith Herrin: “Ravenna”. Capital of the empire, melting pot of cultures.
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Image: wbg/Theiss Verlag
The first heyday of Ravenna ended with the capture of the city by the Byzantine general Belisar in 540. The Byzantines brought the Justinian plague and a devastating war of attrition, from the consequences of which Italy only recovered in the Middle Ages. But the most exciting part of Herrin’s book also begins with them. Because in the dark centuries that followed the annihilation of the Goths, the invasion of the Lombards and the collapse of the Roman infrastructure, Ravenna formed an island of ancient knowledge in an ocean of scriptlessness and unbounded violence. While most of Italy came under Lombard rule, a narrow strip between Naples and the Adriatic coast remained under Eastern Roman control. The exarch, who ruled this province on behalf of Constantinople, protected the spiritual center of Rome from his residence in Ravenna.