Eharding on the fall of the Roman Empire, Part I/XII: Why study the fall?
This post was first published on my Against Jebel al-Lawz WordPress blog, but, due to its excessive length, I have decided to split it up, edit and republish it here.
The Empire of the Romans became a Mediterranean hyperpower from 30 BC to 44 AD. This glorious phase lasted until 395/439, with the rebellion of Alaric and Gaiseric’s capture of Carthage. The Empire then became a Mediterranean superpower from 395/439-602/640. As a result of the Persian war and the Arab Conquest, it shrunk into a Mediterranean great power from 602/640 to 1071. After the army collapsed after Manzikert, the Empire became as an Aegean regional power from 1071 to 1326/1349, and, last and least, as a result of Turkish and Serb conquests, it became merely Constantinople and Morea from 1326/1349 to 1453.
The Roman Empire (and, yes, the Greek speakers of the time after the withdrawal from the city of Rome in 751 continued to call themselves Romans) had eight major imperial crises: those of the late first, mid-third, early to late fifth, early to late seventh, early ninth, mid to late eleventh, early thirteenth, and mid-fourteenth centuries. There is a certain periodicity to these crises. I am not sure to what extent this periodicity is due to chance.
The Roman Empire also had eight major periods of territorial recovery: in the late third (Odaenathus, Roman-Persian peace of 298), early to mid-fifth (Constantius III, post-Attila Eastern gains), mid-to-late sixth (Justinian, Maurice), early to mid-seventh (Heraclius), tenth (Macedonian dynasty), first three quarters of the twelfth (Komnenian restoration), thirteenth (Nikaian Empire), and early fifteenth (Treaty of Gallipoli) centuries.
All in all, the Empire reached its military, economic, and territorial height between 117 and 238 and declined thereafter. Its fifth century imperial crisis- its transition from Mediterranean hyperpower to Mediterranean superpower- though basically similar in nature to all its other seven crises, remains one of the subjects of greatest discussion among all the events of ancient history due precisely to its terrible consequences for the peoples of the Blue Banana, as well as because this was the crisis when the Roman polity withdrew from the most land and people in absolute numbers. I decided, then, to read a bit about it starting at the very beginning of 2020.
At the beginning of 405, most of England South of Hadrian’s wall, all the region between the Rhine and the Atlantic, all Italy, almost all the fertile Maghreb, all Switzerland, western Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, the region of Munich, and most of Austria were under the control of the Ravenna government of the emperor Honorius and the general Stilicho. The cities of the Balkans from Tergeste to Constanta were home to a thriving elite, whether ruled by the Emperor of Rome or Constantinople. In less than five years, virtually entire territory of the Western Roman Empire had become a warzone. By 486, the territory of the Western Roman Empire had been entirely split between the Germanic-ruled Italian, Vandal, Visigothic, Burgundian, Frankish, and Suevic kingdoms, various Anglo-Saxon chiefdoms, and various chiefdoms of the Basques, Britons, and Moors. The Balkans north of Thermopylae had become a vast wasteland, only a few militarized cities remaining to rule the devastated countryside.
The Western Empire had experienced only one major period of invasion in 400-409 which involved six Germanic mobile chiefdoms. Only two of these (Radagaisus’s Goths in 406 and the Siling Vandals in 416-18) were ever permanently defeated. The Western Empire had also experienced four major periods of civil war (407-413, 423-433, and 461-468, and 468-476). The sole parts of Roman Europe that remained as prosperous in 475 as 375 were Greece and the region of Constantinople, more due to the influx of Balkan refugees than anything else. Five hundred years after the Roman Empire’s founding, its power base had thoroughly shifted thoroughly toward Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt. The short fifth century had experienced a European tragedy beyond all future or past proportion outside Greece and Italy, which would get their turn to suffer later.
This would only be the first part of the collapse of the Empire of the Romans. More than half a century after death of the last Western Roman emperor, the Roman Empire under Justinian destroyed the vast majority of the remnants of Roman civilization in Italy during a brutal reconquest, which was quickly followed by the fall of most of Italy to (at the time) completely unromanized barbarians. During the seventh century, the Late Roman collapse would move East, with the loss of Egypt to the Persians in 619 and its conquest by the Arabs in 640, thus resulting in economic collapse in the urban Aegean and the fall of the Balkans to Slavs wandering out of what was, prior to the late fourth century, the heartland of the Goths.
The Middle Ages would be a lengthy period of recovery from these three periods of disaster which destroyed postclassical Roman civilization. It isn’t really appreciated by most that the Roman Empire held the City of Rome for anywhere between 48% and 53% of its existence, with the Odoacer/Ostrogothic period providing the margin of error, or that the Council of Nikaia in 325 was as chronologically distant from the final imperial abandonment of the City of Rome in 751 as it was from the victory at Aquae Sextiae against the Teutones in 102 BC, or that there were as many years (five hundred) from Macrinus to Leo the Isaurian as there were from Machiavelli to the present day.
Nevertheless, in the following posts, I primarily focus on the first part of the collapse -the fall of Western Roman power outside of Italy starting with the British usurpation and the Crossing of the Rhine in 406 and ending with the Empire’s withdrawal from Arles in 476, a process which coincided with the gradual transfer of power from 383 to 493 in Italy itself away from men born in Hispania and former Yugoslavia and toward men of Germanic origin.
Civilization tends to advance slowly. The most advanced areas of the world five thousand years ago were Iraq and Egypt. Two thousand years later, the most advanced areas of the world were… Iraq, Egypt, and Lebanon. In the eighth century BC, the height of world civilization moved to Greater Greece, where it again stayed for some two thousand years, excluding temporary politically-based triumphs by the Romans and Arabs. The height of civilization then moved to the Low Countries, where it stayed for about half a millennium. In the eighteenth century, it moved from the Low Countries to America, though this appears to be shifting East. The height of civilization had passed between just five to eight locales in five thousand years.
Though the Roman Empire in the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean was much more a product than a cause of the prosperity there, it was the Roman High Empire that brought the fruits of the highest form of Mediterranean civilization to the people of Core Europe, also known as the Blue Banana- the presently densely populated region running from Emilia-Romagna to Lancanshire. The decay of the Roman Empire under the usurpers of the third and fourth centuries coming precisely from the field army-heavy zone of the Blue Banana and Tunisia and the fall of the Western Empire in the fifth thus sticks in the mind of present day Westerners. Russia will always feel close links to the Medieval East Romans, Turkey to the Ottomans and Seljuks, Poland to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. But the people of Western Europe and their descendants in the rest of the world will always feel an inflexible bond to the High Empire.
An empire with so few settlers from the core to the occupied territories lifting a large group of people from savagery to the heights of civilization is something with absolutely no precedent or repetition in the history of the world. New Kingdom Egypt, Achaemenid Persia, Tiglath-Pileser III’s Assyria, Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon, the Caliphate (perhaps excluding Southern Hispania), Cortez’s Spain -even Britain and Japan- all tended to have a negative effect on the regions they conquered. The accomplishments of no Empire other than the Early and High Roman can remotely compare. Nor did any place that developed under empire -not even North Korea, Ukraine, or the less developed parts of Sub-Saharan Africa- enter such a dark age after their relevant empire’s collapse as Core Europe did after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The reinvention of the state in Western Europe following Late Antiquity would take many centuries. That is why Rome in general and the High Empire in particular remains remembered in Core Europe and its outposts.
However, despite the prominence of the retreat of the Western Roman Empire from its northern and Western provinces in the historical memory of the Western imperialists, the names of the men who led to it- Stilicho, Constantine III, Gaiseric, Euric- don’t exactly echo throughout history. Tucker Carlson says Nero was the most famous Roman Emperor (really? not Octavius?) because he “abandoned his nation in a time of crisis”. But who remembers Honorius, Constantine III, Theodosius II, Petronius Maximus?
Similarly, the fact the third to fifth century Empire’s highly Machiavellian political system -get used to reading a lot of “civil war followed by a coup”- was substantially more prone to disaster than that of the typical banana republic tends to go underappreciated. I don’t exaggerate here at all. “Killed outside Aquileia” almost becomes a running joke throughout the history of the Late Empire. Though certainly civilized, especially in its core regions, politically, the Late Roman Empire was only modestly more than a large-scale South Vietnam (and, in its late stage, only modestly more than a large scale present-day Libya). At least the Huns who pushed the Germanic migrants formerly settled in Eastern Europe out of their homelands and the decay of the Rhine frontier get some attention in the educated man’s mind. But the severe lack of focus on the men who led the Western Empire to doom does suggest a certain lack of seriousness in perceptions of the retreat of the Roman Empire among nonspecialists.
I freely admit to having known nothing of Stilicho, or of Constantine III, or of Gaiseric, or even of Euric before I began writing this work. Greek and Roman history has always been something of a blind spot in my reading, partly due to the poor preservation of ancient documents often resulting in us knowing substantially less about the Romans than about the preclassical Ancient Near East. The key contributions to our understanding of the Later Roman Empire have not primarily come from archaeology or finds of ancient texts (though revelations from both have been made from time to time), but from better synthesis of the ancient sources available to the Middle Moderns into a firmer, more evidence-based understanding of Later Roman administration, economy, and society. The political history has, due to a severe paucity of sources, scarcely been changed. Our understanding of the non-migrating barbarians is, at least, substantially better.
One can view the the fall of the Western Empire in two different ways: firstly, as the Hun-forced migration of two large Germanic warbands, led in both cases by intelligent and determined men, through the course of the Western Empire, establishing powerful kingdoms in southern Gaul and in Tunisia respectively (the Visigoths and the Vandals). The second way to view the Western Empire is as already a half-dying beast, its border defenses and field armies crippled by the challenges of Constantine II, Magnentius, Maximus, Eugenius, Constantine III, Heraclian, John, Aetius, and Aegidius, with the weak incumbent emperors of the time- Constans, Gratian, Valentinian II, Honorius, Theodosius II, Valentinian III, and Libius Severus- being able to do very little about the damage these challengers caused.
If there are two things I have learned from writing this, it is the lack of precedent for Asiatic steppe nomads causing crises in Europe and the genuinely impressive inherent stability and economic success of the imperial system outside its political instability, instability which caused crises which continued well into the times of the Medieval East Romans and played no small part in helping to bring about the decline and fall of their storied empire, to which we owe the vast majority of our texts of the classics. Had the Roman Empire a political system less fitting for the bottom of the barrel of today’s third world, one can easily see a Roman Mediterranean from Hadrian’s Wall to the Euphrates continuing well into the Middle Ages, making deeper and deeper inroads into today’s Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Scotland, and Ireland, at an even faster speed than those lands were converted to the religion of the Romans in reality, turning the Roman Empire into a truly European Empire rather than the merely 50% European Empire it really was.
I read and skimmed a number of histories of the retreat of the Western Empire while creating this. Peter Heather’s is the one I started on first. Heather is a capable historian, but one with certain obsessions (Goths, Roman bureaucracy, Huns), certain weaknesses (narrative history) and certain unhelpful biases (underrating the extent of the Empire’s decline before its fall). Heather very much focuses on the first part of the story of the Empire’s decline and fall, and is thus, uniquely among modern historians, very careful to note developments within Eastern Greater Germany, something quite right and fitting for this period. Adrian Goldsworthy’s book (which I’ve skimmed) has the opposite problems Heather’s does- too broad, not enough flavor, unjustified neglect of happenings in Greater Germany, as well as the opposite advantages Heather’s book has. If you wish to read a single one-volume book on this topic and no other books, it’s Guy Halsall’s Barbarian Migrations and the Late Roman West (get the second edition when it comes out). Cambridge consistently has the best academic books on ancient history, due to its good editors; Oxford lets authors take more leeway, generally to negative effect.
The Cambridge Ancient History volumes 14 and 13 thus provide a very good overview of the period, though these volumes are rather long and multi-authored. I didn’t read these volumes all the way through, but I have used both extensively as references. Halsall, however, due to his own personal linguistic knowledge, focuses very strongly on the Empire’s internal processes (making the best possible case for the Visigoths and Vandals not being the prime movers of the retreat of the Western Empire in the process) and concentrates rather excessively on the rather pitiful barbarians of Western Greater Germany (Saxons, Franks, Alamans, etc.), whom nobody blames for the fall of the Western Empire (at least, not directly).
Kulikowski’s fall of Rome book, Imperial Tragedy, is also recommended for the high quality of its narrative history, though one should often be skeptical of its interpretations. Of all modern histories, it makes the greatest attempt to cover as much narrative history as appropriate to an equal or greater extent Gibbon managed. Gibbon’s famous history (Volumes 5 and 6 in the link are where he covers the fall of the West) is, while written in an annoying and pompous style and is somewhat out of date, not bad. Gibbon truly went the extra mile to focus his eye on events in both the Roman Empire and Eastern Greater Germany, going so far as to boldly speculate on the origins of the movements of the Huns based on the Chinese sources. His focus on the weakness and character defects of the reigning emperors of the fourth and fifth centuries is, while not today common, not wrong, and fairly refreshing relative to today’s histories.
Thomas Samuel Burns is also a great historian and his book “Barbarians within the Gates of Rome” is essential reading for its synthesis of archaeology and history on the subject. On the Huns, Maenchen-Helfen’s World of the Huns remains the standard work on the subject. The single most depressing “fall of Rome” book, however, isn’t about the Fall of the Western Empire, but about the Empire’s simpler, quicker, and much more astonishing eleventh century crisis. On this, Kaldellis’s Streams of Blood, Rivers of Gold, though apologetic, is quite informative. For the period between 470 and 700, I have relied on Peter Sarris’s decent overview Empires of Faith. Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages and A.H.M. Jones’s The Later Roman Empire are both absolutely essential reading for understanding the post-Roman (Wickham) and Late Great Imperial (Jones) administrations, economies, and societies, but both are theory-informed surveys of evidence; neither are histories, though Jones’s Later Roman Empire does have a pretty good 300-page historical section at the beginning of the first volume. MacMullen’s “Corruption and the Decline of Rome” is essential reading on the decay of Roman institutions during the fourth century. “The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine” is likewise the best general introduction to the society and economics of the Roman fourth century.
The most fascinating books I’ve read while writing this, so fascinating I actually read them all the way through, were the Kaldellis trilogy on Roman and Romano-Greek identity (“Hellenism in Byzantium”, “The Byzantine Republic”, and “Romanland”), but, despite their vast significance, they only tangentially relate to the subject of this account. Pirenne’s short, but captivating Mohammed and Charlemagne is also very, very good at defending the concepts of Central and Terminal Late Antiquity for the former Western Empire, formulating a theory of its end, and defending the concept of the Early Middle Ages for the Carolingian era, though, again, it is tangential to the topic of the post. Much of the material he covered would be more thoroughly elaborated on and reevaluated by Wickham in Framing the Early Middle Ages. There remains to be written a book called “The Roman Empire region, 235-751 (or, if one wants to cut it off short, 305 and 642): a survey of the material evidence”, which covers matters of art history, numismatics, architecture, pottery, clothing, weapons, languages, scripts, settlement types, agriculture, etc. from the days of Severus Alexander to the fall of the Umayyad Caliphate and the imperial pullout from the City of Rome (or, if one wanted to cut things off short, the resignation of Diocletian and the imperial pullout from Alexandria), from the citadel of Braga to that of Mefa’a, and from the Battle at the Harzhorn to the battles of Arab Palestine, in the manner of A.H.M. Jones’s dissection of the Late Roman economy, society, and administration. Inclusion of the areas abandoned during the Crisis of the Third Century would be optional, but recommended. Though such a book does not exist, there’s more than enough material to write it, and it would become an instant classic if written.
I also strongly recommend reading translations of the primary sources (I will provide a convenient list at the beginning of each section), as well as the archaeological literature for the Romans, both West and East, and their neighbors (for this, search Google Books and Academia.edu; the material is rather scattered).
This website is also a useful resource for the general events of the period.
The study of any complex society is always insanely complicated, involving several different branches of history (environmental, social, institutional, demographic, political, economic, architectural, art, church, literary, military, numismatic, etc.). I try to incorporate a fairly diverse array of branches into this post, but certainly admit I might not be entirely successful in every case. I do this to give the reader a “feel for the times”; something which is easy to miss for the ignorant.