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saavedra77Director Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur rode into theaters last week as a gritty, Gladiator-like reboot of Arthurian legend. Rather than the supernatural tales of T.H. White or the medieval chivalric romance of Thomas Malory, this would be an older story, of barbarians at the gates, of a Romanized Celtic culture’s last stand against invading hordes of Germanic Angles and Saxons.
In fact, Fuqua’s King Arthur assembles a collection of facts and suppositions about three hundred years British and European history into a new myth, King-Arthur-shaped collage that confuses pagans with Christians, Romans with Italians, popes with emperors, and a second-century Roman cavalry commander with a fifth-century Romanized British warrior.
The film’s titular hero bears the full name of the second-century Roman cavalry commander Lucius Artorius Castus. This Artorius is known to historians as the commander of 5,500 Sarmatian cavalry sent to defend Roman Britain’s northern border around the years 169 – 180 CE. Formidable but defeated enemies from the Empire’s Danubian border, these Sarmatians had been forcibly enrolled in the Roman military machine for use against other imperial enemies on another border: in this case, northern Britons called “Cruithni” or “Picti” (Latin for “painted,” supposedly because of the blue body paint they wore; or, some now argue, a corruption of “Pretani,” the name of a native British tribe). This is the grain of historical truth in the earlier part of Fuqua’s “King Arthur,” with its transplanted Black Sea horsemen fighting blue-tattooed British natives (see Peter Salway’s Roman Britain, pp. 207-208, 213).
On the other hand, the film’s main events belong not to Artorius Castus’ second century but the collapsing Roman world of the fourth and fifth centuries: Significantly, Fuqua’s Roman Empire is no longer pagan, but has adopted a form of Christianity as its new ruling ideology--something that didn’t actually happen until the 300s CE. (The Roman Emperor Constantine's 313 CE Edict of Milan transformed Christianity from a persecuted sect into an approved and regulated imperial faith. The Emperor Theodosius proclaimed Christianity the Empire’s single, official state religion in 380.)
Interestingly, though, the film does take on the conflict between the late Roman Empire's "approved, official" Christianity and its "heretical" alternatives, as embodied in the film by two certifiably hisotorical figures: the British theologian Pelagius and the orthodox Bishop, St. Germanus of Auxerre. Although Pelagius didn't champion anything like the modern social and political "freedoms" Fuqua attributes to him, his controversial doctrine of salvation through "free choice" was outlawed as heresy by the Emperor Honorius in 418 (see Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason, pp. 291 - 292). And Bishop Germanus of Auxerre did indeed travel to Britain in 429 to combat Pelagius' ideas. During that visit, Germanus reportedly also rallied Christian troops to victory over a force of Picts & Saxons-—perhaps inspiring Fuqua’s somewhat surprising portrayal of the bishop, sword in hand, helping fight off a band of raiding "Woads" (i.e., Picti, Picts) (see Christopher Snyder, An Age of Tyrants: Britain & the Britons, A.D. 300 – 600, pp. 38 - 39; Salway, pp. 462 – 470).
But screenwriter David Franzoni’s story really hinges on the Roman decision to abandon the former British province as indefensible, decreed by the Emperor Honorius in 410. This imperial kiss-off was communicated via the famous "Rescript of Honorius," a letter advising Brtiain's remaining civil authorities that they had better learn to get by without Roman military help (see Snyder, pp. 24 – 25; Salway, pp. 442 – 443). Curiously, Franzoni makes no mention of Honorius or any other emperor, instead attributing the Roman pullout to a command from "the Pope," despite the fact that the Bishop of Rome had no such title or power in 410. (In fact, Rome's Bishop didn't assume the emperor’s former role as the church’s final authority on doctrine until the time of Gregory the Great, over a century after the western Roman Empire had actually ceased to exist! Gregory's successors gained exclusive right to the title "Pope" even later, in 1073. So, in fact, no "Pope" was ever in a position to order send Roman legions to or from Britain. See Freeman, pp. 313 – 314).
Deprived of imperial protection, Britain is left at the mercy of invading barbarians--as indeed history records it was, during the 400s: by marauding armies of Picts, Irish, and Saxons. British leaders responded by hiring one enemy--the Saxons--as mercenaries to fight the others. Unfortunately, this only contributed to the Saxon takeover and settlement of the British southeast and the displacement of large numbers of Britons either westward into what is now Wales or across the Channel to Brittany (see Snyder, pp. 102, 106, 229.; Salway, pp. 468 - 476).
In Fuqua's version, however, the Roman officer Artorius refuses to abandon his post. Instead, "Arthur" makes a bargain with his ferocious former enemies, the "Woads" in a desperate defense of their shared homeland against the Saxons, leading to the climactic (and at least loosely historical) Battle of Badon Hill.
According to the sixth-century British clergyman Gildas, the Britons did halt the Saxon advance at the Battle of Badon Hill. Gildas remembers the hero of that fight as "the last of the Romans," a man who may or may not have borne the Latin name Ambrosius Aurelianus (see Snyder, pp. 43 – 45; Salway, pp. 483 – 484). Interestingly, "Arthur" would become a popular name for British kings and princes during the century after Badon Hill. Subsequent Welsh and Breton poetic traditions would come to celebrate a single legendary "Arthur" as exemplary huntsman and warlord. And then early medieval Welsh histories such as the Historia Brittonum and Annales Cambrie would name the victorious British leader at Badon Hill "Arthur." These sources supplied the nucleus of the Arthurian myth as we have come to know it, which romantic writers--Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory, Cretién de Troyes, T.H. White, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and their successors--have embellished with perfect knights, magical swords, doomed love, and so on.
And who knows? Later romantic and fantastic embellishments aside, perhaps those early medieval bards did preserve dimly-recollected accounts actual participants in the Battle of Badon Hill, of "the last of the Romans," of Ambrosius Aurelianus or whatever his name was, or even dimmer recollections of a second-century cavalry commander who defended a different Britain in a still more remote century.
At any rate, for Fuqua and Franzoni, the second-century Roman cavalry commander Artorius shades into the mysterious fifth-century hero of Badon Hill. The filmmakers are undeniably playing very fast and loose with "history" here (any story about a supposed "King Arthur" inevitably does). But we can give them credit for delving more deeply into the sources, into some of the oldest versions of Arthurian legend.
If King Arthur predictably fails as a history lesson about Dark Ages Britain, Fuqua's film does perhaps breathe new life into a much older version of Arthurian myth, one that's at least rooted in that little-understood era and its all-but-forgotten Romano-Celtic society.
