Eharding on the fall of the Roman Empire, Part III/XII: the High Empire and Crisis of the Third Century
SOURCES: Herodian, Cassius Dio
The idea that it should matter when various elderly people die is absolutely a sign of a bad system.
During the first two thirds of the second century, the Empire seemed to go effortlessly from triumph to triumph. The last of the Roman client kingdoms, Nabatea, was annexed by Trajan and a Roman vexillation base was placed at Humayma to secure the perimeter. The city of Dura Europos was captured from the Parthians in 166 under the expert generalship of Avidus Cassius. The City of Rome and the entire rest of the Empire was being inundated with new civic monuments. Coinage was limited to the City of Rome, as there was only one imperial claimant, and he had to be approved by the urban Senate to achieve legitimacy.
It is during the reign of Marcus Aurelius when we start to see all three of the factors that would lead to the decline and fall of the Empire. The wars of the Marcomanns seems rather quaint when comparing the devastating Germanic incursions of the mid-third, late fourth, early fifth, and mid-sixth centuries. The usurpation of Avidus Cassius seems rather quaint when given the devastating civil wars of the third, fourth, fifth (in the West), seventh, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. The elevation of Commodus, needless to say, reads almost like a parody of the evils of hereditary monarchy, but his sordid reign would be utterly quaint when compared to the incompetence of a Caracalla or Gratian or, worse still, the impotence of an Elagabalus, Severus Alexander, Gordian III, Valentinian II, Honorius, Arcadius, Valentinian III, and Theodosius II.
The Empire had four primary methods of imperial succession: intended non-hereditary succession, coup, intended hereditary succession, and unintended succession (in the event of an Emperor’s unexpected natural death). As a rule, only the first and last could be considered legitimate by both the military and landed aristocracy. Attempts in the late second century to change the normal mode of the origin of emperors to hereditary succession backfired tremendously. Prior to the third century, the landed aristocracy was the sole legitimate source of emperors. During the third century, the sole legitimate source of emperors became the military. After preliminary beginnings under Constantine and Theodosius in the fourth century, the sixth century at last saw a return to reasonably stable politics with Anastasius and Justinian. Indeed, the sixth century saw something like a postclassical repeat of the Five Good Emperors, allowing the Eastern Romans space to take back the City of Rome, Ravenna, Sardinia, and Sicily from the Ostrogoths, the southern Hispanic coast from the Visigoths, and Tunisia, the Baleares and Sardinia from the Vandals, as well as many cities in Armenia from the Persians.
One weak link in the chain of imperial succession could spiral out into a permanent, irreversible crisis. The first time hereditary succession was attempted in the Empire, in the year 79, didn’t lead to much damage since the chosen heir was nearly forty years old at the time, happened to be reasonably adequate as a ruler, and died of illness after two years of rule. The second time it was attempted, by Marcus Aurelius in 177, born in the City of Rome and the last of the Five Good Emperors, it had clearly unsatisfactory results. His son and chosen sucessor, Commodus, born in Lanuvium, Italy, was widely disliked for his vanity and was killed in 192, chronologically midway between the beginning of the Principate and Alaric’s sack of Rome.
The resulting series of insurrections led to the rise of the first emperor in over a hundred twenty years to win his position through a civil war -also the first Roman Emperor to be born of a non-Italian father, the first Roman Emperor to seriously favor the military over the Senate, and the first Roman Emperor to declare his son Emperor before the age of ten. In short, Septimius Severus, born in Leptis Magna, Libya, was the first Middle Roman Emperor, though I count his dynasty, due to it continuing the Antonine legacy of frontier defenses and investment in civic monuments, to still be a part of the High Empire. Severus, with the third attempt to impose hereditary monarchy upon the empire, began the practice of prepubescent emperors by appointing his son, Caracalla, born in today’s Lyon, full co-emperor at age nine in 198. He also made major devaluations to the Roman denarius, likely in response to major declines in silver mining possibly resulting from the Antonine Plague, while simultaneously moving away from the minting of base metal coinage and towards the minting of denarii. A progressive debasement of the silver percentage of the denarius had already been ongoing since the reign of Antoninus Pius, but Septimius Severus’s sudden debasement was something extremely novel. Due to the military becoming an increasingly inopportune occupation for natives of the Empire, Severus also greatly increased military pay and launched a major drive to recruit men from Greater Germany into the Roman army, a pattern that would become increasingly prominent over the next three centuries. Severus also expanded the size of the Roman army by two legions, increased garrison forces on the Arabian frontier, sacked the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon in an attempt to expand the borders of the Empire to the East, resulting in the Empire’s gaining a new Province of Mesopotamia around Nisibis and beginning of the collapse of the Parthian dynasty, and, in an attempt to expand the borders of the Empire South, built a chain of fortifications in the Libyan desert that would last for about three quarters of a century. The forty years between 198 and 238 would thus be the period of the Roman Empire’s greatest territorial extent other than its brief foray into southern Iraq, cut short by the Kitos War, under Trajan in 116-117.
Caracalla, aged 22, came to power with the death of Severus from natural causes in 211. In 212, in the final step in the expansion of rights once held only by the upper class of the City of Rome, all free men in the Empire were given the status of Roman citizen in order to increase inheritance tax revenue for Caracalla’s building projects and for increases in military pay and size, as only Roman citizens could serve in the legions. Caracalla’s edict was, however, little noted by commentators of the day because it was simply a natural step in the process of the Empire of the City of Rome’s transformation into an Empire of the Romans (meaning Mediterranids, and, later, meaning Greeks and those under Papal rule), much like the Chinese Empire was an Empire of the Chinese and the Empire of Japan an Empire of the Japanese. In an imperialistic republic, the maintenance of the privilege of citizenship to a select people is simply a practical necessity. A Briton is not an Indian, and a Japanese is not a Chinese. In a territorially stable hereditary monarchy, on the other hand, there is no reason for citizenship to be a meaningful construct except to distinguish subjects from foreigners. The American equivalent to the Edict was the expansion of citizenship rights to the Indians and Puerto Ricans.
Caracalla was killed by the military in 217, chronologically midway between the triumph of Octavius and the defeat of Majorian. His sucessor, Macrinus, a member of the Praetorian Guard born of equisterian origin in today’s Cherchell, Algeria, was the first Roman Emperor to come from completely outside the senatorial class. He lasted for one year before being overthrown by the military for having lost Caracalla’s Parthian war. His successor, Elagabalus, was only fourteen when he became Emperor, was widely derided as unfit for the job due to his outright bizarre behavior (evident from coins) and was killed by the military in 222. His successor, Severus Alexander, born in Arqa, Lebanon, came to the throne at the age of fourteen and was widely praised in later accounts as a decent, if relatively weak ruler. It was under him that gold coinage became increasingly unstandardized in weight.
SOURCES: Herodian, Aurelius Victor
The soldiers were therefore ready for a change of emperors. They had additional reasons for discontent: they considered the current reign burdensome because of its long duration; they thought it profitless for them now that all rivalry had been eliminated; and they hoped that the reign which they intended to institute would be advantageous to them and that the empire would be much coveted and highly valued by a man who received it unexpectedly. They plotted now to kill Alexander and proclaim Maximinus emperor and Augustus, since he was their fellow soldier and messmate and seemed, because of his experience and courage, to be the right man to take charge of the present war.
Some demanded for execution the commanding general of the army and Alexander’s associates, pretending that they were responsible for the revolt. Others condemned the emperor’s greedy mother for cutting off their money, and despised Alexander for his pettiness and stinginess in the matter of gifts. For a time they did nothing but shout this barrage of charges. When the army of Maximinus came into view, the clamoring recruits called upon Alexander’s soldiers to desert the miserly woman and the timid, mother-dominated youth; at the same time they urged his soldiers to join them in supporting a brave and intelligent man, a fellow soldier who was always under arms and busy with military matters. Convinced, Alexander’s troops deserted him for Maximinus, who was then proclaimed emperor by all.
Alexander was killed and replaced by the military in 235. At this point, the Roman army numbered (according to Treadgold, Byzantium and its Army, basing his estimates of MacMullen) 385,000. Maximinus Thrax, a capable and courageous general of Thracian peasant birth who had risen into the equisterian rank, rose to power and conducted many highly impressive military campaigns and infrastructure restorations, but was loathed by the Senate due to his extreme partiality toward the military and against those with property. He was killed during the Year of the Six Emperors by his own men while engaging in a siege of Aquileia as Pupienus, proclaimed emperor by the Senate on 22 April, was marching on him. Both Pupienus and his co-emperor, Balbinus, were killed by the Praetorian Guard on 29 July 238. The final third century experiment in child emperors came with Gordian III from 238 to 244, who died during a campaign against the Persians. After his death, the idea of child emperors was abandoned for nearly a century, with most of the Roman emperors being mere military dictators. By this point, as demonstrated from my naming the birth places of the emperors, the officer corps was dominated by men originating in the Balkans, especially the regions today constituting Croatia and Serbia (during the High Empire, the army seems to have recruited more from Moors and Levantines). Their progeny are the reason for why the Romance languages are spoken in what used to be Transdanubian Dacia, then became Southwestern Gothia, then became the homeland of the West and South Slavs, and is now called, fittingly, Romania. The Roman Empire would never again be free of civil war for any period longer than a decade until the days of Anastasius, born in Dyrrhachium in Albania, under whom there was peace between 497 and 513.
The killing of Severus Alexander began the Crisis of the Third Century -a half-century long series of coups, civil wars, rebellions, relentless currency debasement, massive military triumphs by the Persians, now under a new and more aggressive dynasty of Ardashir I, and massive military triumphs by the Goths, a Germanic ethnicity that had expanded into western Ukraine by the end of the second century and were first historically recorded as being in the Empire in a Greek inscription from Imtan, Syria dating to 208. The Pax Romana and all its products -the Second Sophistic, high quality mass-produced art, widespread secular urban public building, a thriving Roman Belgium, southwestern Germany, and southern Netherlands- died during that crisis. The crisis in Gaul was the most severe of any part of the Empire. According to the Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine (p. 230), “A. Grenier first surveyed the surface areas of cities in Gaul during the high and later empire and established that the average surface area for seven cities in the high empire (Autun, Nimes, Cologne, Avenches, Lyon, Vienne, and Saintes) was 168 hectares and that this figure diminished by almost 90 percent in the later empire.” Even normal trade with the Germans was temporarily broken off -as Thomas Burns writes in his Rome and the Barbarians (p. 287),
The normal importation of Roman coinage brought about by regular economic, diplomatic, and ceremonial exchange apparently ceased around A.D. 250 and did not resume until the reign of Constantine I (306–37), although this varied slightly from area to area… the influx of coinage from sources such as payments for service as allies and tribute seems to have followed by a few years the breakdown of regular exchange, suggesting that a factor in the eagerness of these most distant allies to serve Rome was their need to renew their supplies of prestige goods.
The northern Rhine frontier moved from the Rhine to an approximate line from Neuss to Odenburg as a result of the reconquest of the Gallic Empire, an usurper regime in Gaul that arose in 260 and was finally destroyed in 274 by the emperor Aurelian, the single most energetic emperor in all Roman history, likely responsible for destroying what remained of the Library of Alexandria during his reconquest of the usurper Palmyrene regime, the man who gave his name to Orleans, and the first Emperor to title himself “DEO ET DOMINO“, born somewhere in today’s Serbia. It is no coincidence that it was Aurelian, in a stunning display of the mid-third century decline of Roman defensive strategy, who built the City of Rome’s famous walls, confining the Eternal City to an area of 4.9 square American miles. The devastating effect of the Roman reconquest of the Gallic Empire was felt throughout the rest of Gaul, as well, especially in Armorica. At the beginning of the Crisis, the Roman Empire had been capable of launching large-scale attacks right into the center of modern Germany. After it, Levefanum, Noviomagus, and Mannaricum are the only Roman forts in the Netherlands to show even minor signs of fourth century reuse (Esmonde-Cleary, The Roman West, p. 48). Every single major unsucessful insurrection (Gallic Empire, Magnentius, Maximus, Constantine III, Aegidius) out of Britain and Gaul would result in irreversible archaeologically visible decline for their region. However, the territorial losses the Roman Empire during the Crisis of the Third Century experienced were, in comparison to those of the fifth and seventh centuries, minor to the extreme for the Empire, though of enormous benefit to the Goths, Alamans, Franks, and Moors. Only portions of the Netherlands, Belgium, southewestern Germany, Morocco, Libya, Romania, and Russia were abandoned- in all, under 5% of the Empire’s population. The great cities of the Rhine -Cologne, Bonn, Andernach, Koblenz, Boppard, Mainz, Worms, Speyer, Strasbourg, Basel, Kaiseraugst, Konstanz, Chur – and of the Danube – Regensburg, Vienna, Budapest, Beograd, Drmno, Drobeta, Archar, Cartier Celei, Svishtov, Capidava, Isaccea -still firmly remained under imperial control. However, the Empire’s population had surely declined by more than 5% due to its constant wars and epidemics. This reduction in both food demand and labor supply, combined with the soil depletion and poor land maintenance that had become an increasing issue of concern since the late second century, had turned the Roman polity’s rapidly expanding cultivation and high unemployment during the Late Republic and Early Empire into an outright labor shortage and a severe problem with deserted land by the end of the third century.
SOURCES: John the Lydian, Lactantius, Aurelius Victor, Edict on Maximum Prices, Aphrodisias Currency Revaluation edict, the Twelve Latin Panegyrics, Antonine Itinerary, Chester Beatty papyri, Justinian Code
Luckily for the Romans, unlike during the fourth (for both Eastern and Western empires) and fifth (for the West) centuries, their military capability did not greatly decline from the beginning of the third century to its end. The losses of the 230s (Year of the Six Emperors, Ardashir’s capture of Nisibis, Harran, and Dura-Europos), 240s (Gordian III, Philip the Arab), 250s (Decius, Valerian), and 270s (Aurelian’s withdrawal from Dacia Traiana and the Agri Decumates) seem to have been largely made up by the gains of the 260s (Odaenathus, Claudius Gothicus), 280s (Probus, Carus, Diocletian), and especially 290s (Constantius, Diocletian, Galerius). This was accomplished by redirecting expenditure from the civilian sector. Local government revenue was diverted to the central government, crippling local public building construction and officially sponsored sculpture. Widespread manufacture of statue replicas ended around 260. Due to economic weakness, Italy, including the City of Rome, increasingly became less cosmopolitan, a fact very long recognized. Italy’s cultural localization coincided with political decentralization. As a means of better organizing the defense of the homeland and regime, the Roman Empire was federalized into Eastern and Western halves for the first time by Valerian, born in the senatorial rank, between himself and his son, Gallienus, in 253. This arrangement ended with Valerian’s capture by the Persians in 260, but was restored by Carus, who divided the empire between his sons. The arrangement was kept by Diocletian, born in the vicinity of Salona, Croatia and one of the very few emperors to desire a restoration of non-hereditary succession. The year 286, when Diocletian permitted his friend Maximian, born near the Middle Danube frontier, to proclaim himself Emperor of the West in response to the usurpation of Carausius, less than one year after Diocletian’s coming to power through his defeat of Carinus in today’s Serbia and chronologically midway between Octavius’s triumph at Actium and the killing of Maurice, is considered by many the start of the Later Roman Empire.
The geography of Diocletian’s East and Maximian’s West was in most respects remarkably similar. The mean geographic center of the whole Empire, of course, (considering seas the same as land) was near the village of Korce in Albania, and the mean center of population could not have been too different (the median center, of course, was substantially to the West and slightly to the North; i.e., in Southern Italy). Both contained similar populations (20-30 million for the East, 22-36 million for the West). Both contained a core/capital zone in the northern Mediterranean (Italy for the West, Anatolia for the East) protected by high and lengthy mountain ranges (the Alps for the West, the Taurus for the East), a frontier zone for the defense of the core (the upper Danube frontier for the West, the Persian front for the East), a frontier zone bordering Greater Germany (Gaul for the West, the Balkans for the East), a vital food producing region in the South (Tunisia for the West, Egypt for the East), and coasts bounding the eastern and western sides of the Mediterranean (Hispania for the West, the Levant for the East), as well as additional, less important African territories to the West of their main food-producing areas (Morocco and Algeria for the West, Cyrenaica for the East). The primary distinction between the geography of the Eastern and Western Empires was that over 80% of the Western Empire’s population was located on the European continent, while less than 20% of the Eastern Empire’s population was. The Eastern Empire’s crossing point between continents was also located directly between its frontier zone bordering Greater Germany and its core, while the West’s was located a month’s journey away from its core. The core region of the Eastern Empire also contained a substantially greater portion of its population (30-40%) than the core region of the Western Empire (20-30%). This would become an important part in explaining why it would be the West that would be the first to be finally confined to its core, while the East would have to wait until the Arab conquest to experience the same.
Odaenathus, who broke the back of the Persians and was assassinated in Anatolia in 267, Claudius, whose armies defeated the Goths at Nessos and began the reconquest of the Gallic Empire and who died after an illness in 270, Aurelian, who ended Gothic attempts to settle the lands South of the Danube, ended the raids of the Alamans into Italy, reconquered the Palmyrene and Gallic Empires, and was killed by the military in 275, Probus, born in Sirmium, Serbia, who restored the Rhine frontier against the Franks, Lugii, and Burgundians and was killed by the military in 282, Carus, born in Narbonne, who defeated the Persians on the Tigris and died under mysterious circumstances in 283, and Diocletian, who resigned in 305 undefeated, would go down in history as the men who restored pagan Rome. So great was the success of Maximian and Diocletian that in 298/9, Maximian even found time to visit the City of Rome and begin the construction of the the largest public baths in Rome’s history. Diocletian and Maximian finally both found time to visit the caput mundi in 303, Diocletian possibly for the first time in his life. They had every reason to celebrate. Together, they had ended the Crisis of the Third Century.