Visiting Gaul, split between the imperial provinces that saw their capital as Arelate (Arles), and the Visigothic Kingdom centred on Toulouse, Traina finds a proto-medieval viewpoint in Salvian of Marseille, a radical critic of the empire who saw Roman civilization as reflecting a lackluster paganism and praised the barbarians for being uncontaminated by practices such as theatrical shows and circus games. He notes that for Christina monks, the Roman practice of regular bathing at public baths, was eld in contempt and condemned as a symptom of sin and lasciviousness.
Briefly hopping over the Britannia, Traina says the rapid changes on many sites there, which saw a trend towards simpler, more rudimentary lifestyles, may not have been caused by immiseration, but rather a conscious adoption of a more austere, frugal and Spartan way of life.
Having toured through Spain, North Africa and Egypt, Traina lands in Jerusalem at Easter, where we meet a fascinating family, Melania the Younger, her husband Pinianus, and her mother Albina, who had been living their since 417. After the death of their children these rich aristocrats had sold off their land. Imitating her grandmother, Melania the Elder, who in 372 left Rome for extreme monasticism, setting up a monastery on the Mount of Olives,, the site where her granddaughter also finally settled.
In her convent, Melania devoted herself to intellectual activities, such as the transcription and reading of sacred tests. This approach was typical of most aristocrats who found urban life indecorous and disreputable, and preferred to withdraw to country estates, as Melania did first – before taking her final decision. But as Andrea Giardina has pointed out, it was only isolation in a relative sense:
These religious communities of saintly women..were constantly under the scrutiny of the entire Christian world: under the eyes of the local people, of pilgrims, of the faithful who flocked to Palestine from all over the earth, and to whom these wonderful tales were told of aristocratic ladies who abandoned their gilded palaces for humble convents in the Holy Land.
After such austerity, Traina then finally ventures into eastern luxury, and military might, with the Sassinid monarch Bahram, celebrated as a great hunter, who had, legend has it any way, seven wives from “the seven continents of the world – India, Byzantium, Khwarezm (central Asia), the land of the Slavs, the “West” (Germanic kingdoms), China and Iran. Bahram was at this time contesting with the Huns for the great trade route we know as the Silk Road, which was in a state of flux, with the ancient splendor of Bactria in northern Afghanistan losing ground to a group of merchants from Sogdiana, in eastern Iran, who were to found Bukhara and Samarkhand in Central Asia before eventually merging with the Huns.
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