Eharding on the fall of the Roman Empire, Part XII/XII: from the killing of Aetius to the Arab Conquest
SOURCES: Sidonius, Theodosian Code (Novels), Victor of Vita, Priscus (fragments), Justinian Code, Marius of Avenches, Hydatius, Cassiodorus, Eugeppius
The twenty year freedom of the Western Roman Empire from coups was finally ended when Aetius was killed by the nominal emperor Valentinian III in September 454, one thousand years prior to the printing of the first bible. Valentinian III had been ruling since the age of five with barely a hint of real power and had been consistently resident in the City of Rome since 450. Relations with Gaiseric continued their improvement; a trinitarian bishop was ordained in Carthage in October. Naturally, Valentinian III was killed less than half a year after his autogolpe. His replacement, who was not recognized by the Eastern Empire, lasted on the imperial throne in Rome for an impressively long two months, which was more than enough time for Gaiseric to declare war on the Western Empire to avenge the coup, which had obstructed his plans to unify Carthage and Rome by marriage alliance. Valentinian III’s replacement, Petronius Maximus, was killed just before Gaiseric began his attack on the city while attempting to flee, leaving Rome without an emperor. Half a century after the Goths of Radagaisus, reeling from Hunnic attacks across the Carpathians, began their journey into Italy, Rome was sacked and thoroughly plundered by the kingdom of Carthage in June of 455. Valentinian III’s widow and daughters were taken to Carthage.
The next twenty-two years would, as Guy Halsall describes, be a lengthy struggle for de facto power in Italy between Gallic aristocrats, Italian aristocrats, the Balkan elements of the Roman army, the Visigoths, the Vandals, the Eastern Empire, the Germanic elements of the Roman army, and possibly even the Burgundians. The strategic situation of the Western Empire was in every way worse than in 410. Unlike in 410, Rome had no emperor. It was not in control of Tunisia. The Vandals, rather than wandering around Hispania, were in control of the Western Mediterranean’s largest navy. The Western Empire was not in any position to receive any military aid from the East.
The Sueves broke their treaty and attacked northeastern Hispania. Prominent Gallic aristocrat and Roman military leader Avitus, who had been negotiating a treaty of alliance between the Roman Empire and the Visigoths, was proclaimed Emperor by the Gallic army with the approval of the Visigoths in July and was recognized by the Roman Senate (though not the Eastern Empire) in August. After campaigning in present-day Austria, he entered Rome in September. Gaiseric began making alliances with Moors in order to prevent the Western Roman Empire from rising again. He also began capturing ports in Roman North Africa. Agrigento was attacked by the Vandals in 456, but they were defeated by the Western Roman general Ricimer, who had stationed himself there. The Vandals were also defeated in Corsica by Western Roman forces that year, possibly those commanded by Majorian. One year after his entry into Rome, Avitus was overthrown in a military coup by Ricimer and Majorian in September of 456, who took advantage of Visigothic preparations for a military campaign to defeat the Sueves. The month following this, the Visigoths, allied with the Burgundians and Franks, destroyed the Suevic kingdom. Rechiar, the Suevic king, was killed by the Visigoths in December. The Visigoths, however, had neither the will nor the ability to place garrison forces in Hispania.
The period 456-476, much like the similarly chaotic period 395-415, is definitely not an easy one to understand. Much like for the exceedingly complex series of events surrounding the rise and fall of Stilicho, I am here forced to rely on another Ian Hughes book. This time, it’s Patricians and Emperors: The Last Rulers of the Western Roman Empire.
Marcian died in January of 457. Leo the Thracian became the new Eastern Emperor. The decades following the death of Marcian would be a pre-medieval peak of gold inflows into present-day Poland. Marcian’s planned campaign against the Vandals was cancelled. After a victory against the Alamans in northern Italy by Burco, who was under Majorian, Majorian was proclaimed Emperor by the army outside Ravenna in April 457. The situation devolved to 407-13 levels. Majorian was not recognized by the Burgundians or the Visigoths, or, for that matter, the Romans of southern Gaul, who, recognized Leo as Emperor. The Franks also captured Trier and Cologne in the aftermath of the Visigothic and Burgundian rebellion. Most of the Roman military’s focus in 457 remained on the Vandals. Gaiseric attacked southern Italy soon after Majorian came to power, but Gaiseric’s forces were once again defeated by Ricimer. After this defeat, Gaiseric temporarily ended large-scale attacks on Italy, focusing instead on taking the rest of Roman North Africa and the Baleares. The Visigoths once again broke the back of the Sueves in Hispania in June 457, fighting the Hispanic Romans as well as the Sueves (Kulikowski, Late Roman Spain and its Cities, p. 201). Majorian, confirmed by the Senate as Emperor in December 457, was forced to hike taxes to prepare for a military expansion to help defeat the Vandals by way of Spain. He also once again returned to the citizenry the right to bear arms in order to combat the barbarians. Majorian sent the general and Gallic aristograt Aegidius to subdue the Romans of southern Gaul, who were led by Marcellus and Paeonius in Narbonne, which had been briefly besieged by the Visigoths, who had desired to expand their kingdom. Aegdius then defeated both the locals and the Burgundians in order to quell the rebellion in Lyon, then restored Arles to the Empire, then succeeded in persuading the citizens of Narbonne to return to central authority. The Visigoths then besieged Arles. Majorian finally arrived in Gaul from Ravenna in late 458 after a brief war in his own army against Huns who had joined it and engaged in unlicensed looting, breaking the Visigoth siege of Arles. A treaty of alliance was made with the Visigoths against the Sueves.
In 459, the Ostrogoths invaded Dalmatia in response to Leo ending payments of tribute to the Germanic tribes of the former Hunnic Empire, resulting in them being bought off with 21,600 solidi (not an extraordinary rate; probably one per fighter). Most of 459 in the Western Empire was spent with Gallic affairs, dealing with the Sueves in Hispania, and preparing for the reconquest of Tunisia. In 460, the military leader Marcellinus moved from Dalmatia to Sicily to aid in the defense of the Empire from the Vandals. The new Roman fleet intended for the crossing into North Africa moved to Santa Pola, Spain. However, the new ships the Romans had prepared were either destroyed or captured by a Vandal surprise attack from the Baleares. The five year long war between Rome and Carthage was over. Carthage, as in the 439-41 war, had won. Majorian went back to Arles and was forced to sign a treaty in late 460 permitting the Kingdom of Carthage to keep all the territories it had captured in the war (Tipasa, Caesarea, Cuicul, the Baleares, etc.). The new Vandal conquests did not stretch very far inland. In the provinces the Romans abandoned in Morocco, the Roman provincial era dating system would continue to be used right down to the mid-seventh century (see Framing the Early Middle Ages, p. 336).
SOURCES: Sidonius, Jordanes, Theodosian Code (Novels), Victor of Vita, Justinian Code, Hydatius, Gregory of Tours
In any case, the consequences for Majorian for this disaster were clear: he was overthrown in a military coup led by Ricimer when he came back to Italy in August of 461. Ricimer became the fourth of the major Late Roman warlords to dominate Italian politics during the fifth century. As one might expect, the situation instantly devolved to 409-11 levels, this time, permanently. Carthage declared its third war against the Empire. In response to the overthrow of Majorian, Aegidius in Gaul, Nepotianus in Hispania, and Marcellinus in Dalmatia all rebelled against the new government. The Dalmatian entity would continue until its conquest by the sucessor regime to the Western Empire in 480. The Gallic entity, known as the Domain of Soissons, would stick around until its conquest by the Franks in 486. The Visigoths would be the ones to decide whether the Italian or the Hispanic regime would survive. Libius Severus became the new Italian emperor in November with the support of Ricimer. Soon after, Leo, the Eastern Emperor, finally ended his war with the Ostrogoths by agreeing to pay them tribute and taking Theodoric, the future Ostrogothic King of Italy, as hostage.
In 462, the Italian regime negotiated an alliance with the Visigoths in exchange for Hispania and Narbonne, thus resulting in the disappearance of the Hispanic entity led by Nepotianus sometime between 462 and 465. Since the Roman army in Gaul was under the control of Aegidius, the Italian regime made Gundioc, King of the Burgundians(!!!) their master of the Gallic military. In 463, Aegidius won a strong battlefield victory against the Visigoths in the Battle of Orleans with the help of Franks loyal to the king Childeric I, ensuring the survival of the Domain of Soissons for the next two decades. Gaiseric also expanded his raids on the lands held by the Italian regime this year. Marcellinus, meanwhile, was strictly warned by the Eastern Empire against taking any military effort against the Italian regime, presumably in exchange for Eastern promises of non-interference in Dalmatia. Marcellinus complied. In 464, an army of Alans led by a certain Beorgor was defeated by Ricimer after they had attempted to invade northern Italy, while the Visigoths defeated the Sueves. Gaiseric’s attacks in the lands held by the Italian regime continued to grow bolder. 464 also resulted in Childeric I helping Aegidius capture Paris. Aegidius also recaptured Trier and Cologne and sent an embassy to Gaiseric this year. In 465, Gaiseric expanded his attacks to territory under the responsibility of the Visigoths. Cologne and Trier were once again taken by Franks (presumably not Childeric’s) in 465, this time, likely permanently. The Gallic northern frontier was moved South for the third time in the Roman Empire’s history, as was the case with both previous times, during a civil war. Aegidius probably died this year; his son Syagrius, succeeded him, resulting in the rebellion of Saxons formerly serving under Aegidius. The Visigoths, however, could not exploit this death adequately as they were (again) combating the Sueves in Hispania. Marcellinus was sent to Sicily, presumably on request of the Eastern Empire, and expelled the Vandals who had been raiding that island. Libius Severus also issued a law stating that offspring of unions between slaves and free men remained slaves in this year, but he then died in November.
The Eastern Empire began the following year by defeating a large Hunnic attack in today’s Bulgaria led by Hormidac. The imperial offensive was led by the general Anthemius, grandson of the praetorian prefect who had been in power in the East from 404 to 414. Anthemius had previously fought the Ostrogoths in the Balkans during the 459-61 war. As the year went on, Gaiseric, presumably under the perception Marcellinus’s Sicilian adventure was sponsored by Constantinople, began attacking the Balkans. The Eastern Empire finally had a reason to make preparations for the destruction of the Vandal kingdom. The year 466 also resulted in the coming to power of the man who at last finished off the carcass of the Western Empire: Euric the Visigoth.
The Eastern Empire, with the agreement of Ricimer, sent Anthemius to be Western Emperor early in the Spring of 467 with forces provided by Marcellinus. Anthemius was declared emperor near Rome on April 12, 467, and would be consistently resident in the city throughout his reign. At this point, the wars with the Vandals and the Domain of Soissons, the second of which at least swiftly recognized the new emperor, were taking their toll. Famine and disease were becoming increasingly widespread in urban Italy. Anthemius’s task was, first and foremost, to defeat the Vandals. Ricimer was sent to fight the Ostrogoths raiding present-day Austria. Marcellinus was to protect Sicily. An attempt by Anthemius to launch a surprise attack on Tunisia in 467, while most of the Vandal ships were still on raids against the Empire, was aborted due to bad weather.
In 468, the East at last sent 1113 ships laden with seventy thousand men to recapture Tunisia in three army groups, one focused on Sardinia and led by Marcellinus, another force being sent from Egypt, and the primary force, led by Basilicus, who would in seven years lead a coup against the Emperor Zeno, being sent from Sicily. The first army group was rapidly successful in capturing Sardinia, resulting in Marcellinus moving to Sicily. The second army group was successful in capturing Tripoli and began to march on Carthage. The third and largest army group docked at Cap Bon near Carthage.
Fearing a decisive Roman victory, Gaiseric sent envoys to Basilicus’s army group asking him to delay his attack for five days for the Vandals to reconsider their decisions. The Romans accepted, and the Vandals launched a surprise naval attack which destroyed the Roman fleet at Cape Bon. Four years’ worth of Eastern revenue – 64,000 pounds of gold and 700,000 pounds of silver- went up in flames. The Romans ended all further attempts to recapture Tunisia for more than sixty years. Marcellinus was killed by one of his men soon after the defeat, resulting in Julius Nepos taking power in Dalmatia. Relations between Ricimer and Athemius rapidly deteriorated.
SOURCES: Sidonius, Victor of Vita, Gregory of Tours, Jordanes, Malalas, Paul the Deacon, Chronicle of Saragossa, Isidore of Seville, John of Antioch, Procopius, Eugippius
The same year, Euric decisively defeated the Sueves. He returned to Gaul late in 468. In 469, while both the Eastern and Western Empires were distracted by political conflict between their respective emperors and most important generals, he decided to expand his domains in Gaul, with the Romans not being able to do anything whatsoever about it. At the same time, according to Eugippius’s Life of St. Severinus, the Alamannic king Gibuldus began to attack present-day Austria. In 471, Anthemiolus, Anthemius’s son, was killed fighting against the Visigoths and all those Romans Anthemius sent to fight against the Visigoths were defeated, resulting in a resurgence in the conflict between Ricimer and Anthemius. In 472, Leo sent Olybrius, the Vandal-favored candidate for emperor, to the West to negotiate between Anthemius and Ricimer; Olybrius instead became Western emperor due to the choice of Ricimer. Olybrius died the same year; Anthemius was killed by Gundobad with the support of Ricimer in a civil war earlier in the year, but Ricimer himself died just over a month after Anthemius’s death. The king of the Burgundians and military master, Gundobad, appointed Glycerius Western Emperor in March 473. He was not recognized by Leo, who supported the Dalmatian ruler Julius Nepos to be Western Emperor in 474, resulting in Glycerius being forced out of power on 24 June 474 by Nepos’s landing at Ostia. Glycerius at that point had only the Burgundians as allies due to the loss of Arles and Marseille and the near-loss of Clermont-Ferrand in 473. It is around this time (Heather, “The Huns and the End of the Roman Empire in Western Europe”, p. 36) that the Eastern Empire, according to Malchus, at last made peace with the Vandals. In 475, Nepos achieved a promise from Euric that the Italian regime would get back Arles and Marseille in exchange for the Visigoths being ceded the entirety of the rest of South Gaul, including Clermont-Ferrand, which had been at last captured during Nepos’s short reign. With Nepos’s downfall and flight first to Ravenna (from Rome), then, on 28 August 475, to Dalmatia as a result of Orestes’s coup, Euric broke the agreement, taking both cities in 476. By the sixth century, Arles, Gaul’s little Rome of the fourth century, was a dead city.
It is in this obscure era we find a certain Riothamus, king of the Britons, mentioned by Jordanes as fighting the Visigoths on the side of the Domain of Soissons in 469, presumably (from Gregory of Tours) at Bourges. The Britons had settled Armorica from Cornwall, and it is likely to these Britons Riothamus was king over. Despite the growing darkness of the formerly most Romanized parts of Roman Britain due to the Saxon conquest, is also around this time that Wales and Cornwall, the least Romanized parts of Roman Britain, had started to climb out of the darkness. At least among the latter, trade with the Roman Empire and Latin writing had resumed to a minor extent by the late fifth century. North Wales thus gained the dubious distinction of being the first portion of the original Byzantine Empire to gain its liberty and the last portion of the original Byzantine Empire to experience a barbarian takeover.
Despite Italy continuing to be the greatest power in the Western Mediterranean, the Western Roman Empire was finally dead. Economically, Britain had suffered most, followed by northern Gaul, the closer to the frontier, the greater the suffering. Tunisia had suffered least, followed by Sicily. Despite the disasters in northern Italy, substantial pockets of prosperity remained in the South which would expand over the succeeding three decades, and Italy as a whole had suffered only modestly more than in the Crisis of the Third Century. As a rule of thumb, the further South the region, the less it had suffered during the period 401-476 (the main exception was southern Gaul suffering less than even southern Hispania). Ironically, the areas of the Western Roman Empire region that had experienced by far the most population decline in the fifth century were precisely not those taken by the most genuinely powerful threats to the Empire -the Visigoths and Vandals- but those that saw frequent raiding by relatively weak roving bandits, such as the Saxons, Sueves, and especially Franks. It is ironic that the barbarians who had the worst demographic impact on the fifth century Western Roman world were precisely those that were so weak as to be unable to conquer the last vestige of Western Roman rule until 486, and yet, founded the only barbarian kingdom of the fifth century to survive into the Middle Ages. The extent of the Franks’ genetic contribution to the population of former northern Gaul is something of an understudied question, and is surely much more interesting than the question of how much the Anglo-Saxons contributed to the genomes of the present-day British.
In contrast, in the world beyond the Bosporus, the fifth century was a happy time, with increasing settlement and perfect peace outside Anatolia and a few skirmishes on the Persian frontier. The Empire founded by Diocletian and Constantine had to them been a great benefit, with the emperor now being closer to home and adopting a culture a great deal closer to theirs. The horrendous wars and barbarian attacks experienced in the country beyond Hadrianopolis must have struck them with horror, much as the perils of Moscow and New York in 2020 struck the inhabitants of Seoul and Hong Kong.
SOURCES: Sidonius, Ennodius, Eugippius, Malchus, Gregory of Tours
Nepos was overthrown in a military coup which installed Orestes’s son, Romulus Augustulus, the first child emperor of the West since Valentinian III and the last Western Roman Emperor in Italy. He was overthrown by military coup (you surprised?) in 476. At this point, the Senate of the Western Empire, seeing that the population of the Western Empire was down to less than half that of the Eastern, gave indication to Constantinople that one Roman Emperor was, at this point, sufficient. Zeno, who certainly was not about to make the commitment to restore direct rule by the Empire of the second Rome in Italy or send troops to restore Nepos, gave an ambiguous reply, leaving the coup leader, the general Odoacer, in legal limbo. Zeno and Odoacer continued to recognize Nepos (who continued to have de facto control only over Dalmatia) as de jure Western Emperor. Nepos was killed under unclear circumstances in 480 while planning a campaign to restore his de facto authority, thus resulting in Zeno formally abolishing the Western Empire, leaving himself behind as sole emperor. The logical outcome of the promotion of Gratian, Honorius, and Valentinian III to the imperial throne -the institution of Western emperor finally gone and the emperor’s institutional powers and duties being fully taken by the military- was finally reality. Odoacer recognized Zeno as the sole Roman Emperor and himself as a de jure dependent king within the Roman Empire. Due to the Western Empire being abolished, Odoacer annexed Dalmatia to his kingdom. He also got Gaiseric to cede Sicily to Italy in exchange for tribute. After more than forty-seven years of ruling the Vandals, Gaiseric at last died in 477. The Papacy and the Empire entered into a schism in 484, two years after Zeno and the Patriarch of Constantinople attempted to placate the Monophysites in Alexandria with the issuance of the Henotikon. The schism would only be resolved three and a half decades later, after the death of the Emperor Anastasius resulted in the Emperor Justin taking the side of the Bishop of Rome and the Chalcedonians. The Domain of Soissons, having, as with the East, recognized Nepos and refused to recognize Odoacer when he seized power, was conquered by the Franks in 486.
For reasons not entirely clear, Zeno sent Theodoric to take over Odoacer’s position in 489.
SOURCES: Ennodius, Procopius, Anonymous Valesiani, Jordanes, Boethius, Cassiodorus
Theoderic duly obeyed Zeno’s commands after a three-year series of battles in 493, thus establishing the de jure dependent autonomous Arian Christian Kingdom of Italy within the Roman Empire that would rule Rome for 42 years. Much like the YPG in today’s Syria, the Ostrogothic kingdom would never claim its own independence, though, after reconciliation with Constantinople had become impossible, its kings would eventually come close to claiming themselves legitimate Emperors within the regions they ruled. The culmination of incorporating ever more unassimilated Germanic men for the defense of Rome and its territories -an ethnically based Ostrogothic de facto independent kingdom on Italian soil- was finally reality. The population of the City of Rome had fallen to some hundred thousand people- behind Constantinople, Alexandria, Carthage, and Antioch. In the East, Anthemius, born in Dyrrachium, Albania, managed a sucessful restoration of Roman political stability beginning in 491, beating back the Isaurians after a war lasting several years.
SOURCES: Gildas, Procopius, John the Lydian, Hierocles, Gregory of Tours, Agathias
The Eastern Empire remained a superpower until 602/640, while Ostrogothic Italy remained a great power until 535. Potentially, had the Empire not struck back under Justinian, the Kingdom of Italy could, in the manner of the Sui Dynasty’s conquest of the Northern Zhou, have reconquered the rest of the Western Empire region during the later sixth century. As Pirenne pointed out in 1935, in the sixth and seventh centuries, Western Europe was, if barbarizing, certainly not Germanizing, as the barbarian kings remained imitative, not innovative. At the time of the death of the last Western Emperor all the Germanic kingdoms of Western Europe were either nontrinitarian Christian or pagan, but continued minting pseudo-imperial coinage rather than coins with their own kings’ faces. Though no part of Western Europe North of the Alps would ever be recovered by the Roman government or by any Caliphate, the Empire (not counting Italy) after 480 remained the single largest state in the Mediterranean, in complete control of an area stretching from Russia to Sudan and with a population similar to that of today’s North Korea. It would, as it stopped seeing itself as a mere greater and Eastern part of the Roman Empire (“Byzantium”) and began seeing itself as the only legitimately administered totality of the Roman Empire, recapture Carthage in 533 and the City of Rome itself in 536, resulting in the thorough destruction of their economies due to war, neglect, and overtaxation. The Empire Justinian built in the West gradually collapsed between the mid-sixth and mid-tenth centuries, with the Empire first losing much of Italy, Hispania, then Tunisia, then lastly Sicily. Though Britain, Gaul, the region of Munich, and Hispania were hit much harder during the fifth century than in the sixth, southern Italy and Tunisia, both more prosperous and less degraded than northwestern Europe, were hit much harder during the sixth century than the fifth. If you’re looking for the “fall of Rome” in terms of street fighting between Romans and Germans destroying it as a city of any secular importance, you’ll have to wait until the bloodiest and most destructive civil war in Roman history- the Empire’s Ostrogothic war of 535-554. By the time of the final Ostrogothic capture of Rome in 550 and the completion of the imperial reconquest in 562, the city had become almost uninhabited. If you’re looking for truly unromanized German marauders invading Italy and establishing a barbarian kingdom that (eventually) forces the Empire out of Italy, you’ll have to wait until the Lombards arrive in 568. Much unlike the sixth century Sui reconquest of northern China (Chinese and Roman history tend to parallel each other very closely, though Chinese history tends to occur earlier; third century crisis==Three Kingdoms era, Diocletianic restoration==Jin Dynasty, War of the Eight Princes==War of the Eight Princes) the sixth century attempted imperial reconquest of the Roman Empire region failed due to overtaxation of Italy and Tunisia, the stretching out of the Italian war into a quarter century long devastating struggle, and the arrival of the Avars and Lombards from the North. It is, thus, with the arrival of the Avars, who pushed the Lombards into Italy, that some mark the end of Late Antiquity -that is, the end of the dream of a united Mediterranean- and the beginning of the Middle Ages.
SOURCES: Gregory the Great, Gregory of Tours, Isidore of Seville, Menander Protector, the Strategikon
The late sixth century at last saw a deimperialization and localization of the gold coinage of the Franks and Visigoths, possibly under the influence of the economic breakdown of Italy and Tunisia combined with the plague that begun in 541 discouraging trade. Even the Empire in the Western Mediterranean began to mint its coinage to local, rather than imperial standards. The last quasi-imperial coinage of Provence ends in 613. Even so, the rise of localist sentiment among the Franks, Visigoths, and Lombards coincided with their growing adoption of the ecumenical and Catholic Roman Christian religion. The Franks began communion with Rome in 496, the Sueves in the 550s, the Visigoths in 586, the Angles and Saxons in the first half of the seventh century, the Lombards, due to them being late arrivals, in 671. Despite all the disasters of the sixth century, the Bishop of Rome and the Roman Emperor remained allies in matters of politics, much unlike what we would see during the mid-eighth century. By the year 600, despite the Eastern Mediterranean’s continuing prosperity, Italy was a plague-infested smoking ruin split between the Lombards and Romans, Tunisia was something of a backwater, and the City of Rome had less inhabitants than Palestinian Jerusalem. Unlike in the modern world, shattered premodern economies did not just recover within five years, nor did their populations recover within a decade. Former Roman Europe was divided among the various Anglian and Saxon kingdoms, the Franks, the Visigoths, the Lombards, the Romans, and assorted Britons, Moors, and Basques. The most developed area of the Western Mediterranean was Sicily. The Balkans, Aegean, and Anatolia would be next to see their economies destroyed.
SOURCES: Fragment on the Arab Conquests, Sophronius, Theophanes, Baladhuri, Chronicon Paschale, Theophylact Simocatta, John of Nikiu, Doctrina Iacobi, Armenian History
Further disasters fell upon the Empire with the revolt of Phocas and his march on Constantinople in 602, Narses’s revolt in 603, Heraclius’s civil war with Phocas in 608-10, the decisive Persian triumph at Antioch in 613, the capture of Jerusalem by the Persians one thousand years following Brennus’s sack of Rome, Slavic raids deep into Greece in 615-17, the demographic collapse of the Balkans, and, more importantly, the conquest of Egypt by the Persians, aided by the Jews, in 619, causing the Aegean economy to go into severe contraction. The Persians burned Ephesus in 615; the Empire pulled out of southern Hispania, which it had occupied seventy two years prior, in 624; Constantinople was besieged by the Persians and Avars in 626. Heraclius himself was captured by the Avars in 622, but escaped to personally launch an expedition into Roman Armenia. Though Heraclius would, in the manner of Aurelian and Carus three and a half centuries before, end up winning the Persian war in 628 and expelling the Persians from Egypt in 629, the Empire would be permanently crippled. In 630, the old Senate building in the City of Rome was turned into a church, presumably due to the disappearance of any secular institution, last mentioned in the time of Phocas, for it to house. And yet, the return of the True Cross to Jerusalem that year presented a false hope to the Empire. Just half a decade following the Empire’s victory against the Persians, it was attacked by the Arabs. Following victories along the Euphrates in Persian Iraq over the prior year, the Caliph Abu Bakr began the Arab conquest of Roman Syria and Palestine in 634. After Abu Bakr’s death, the Caliph Umar, in the manner of Alexander nine and two thirds centuries before, annexed Damascus to his realm in 634, Palestine in 635, Homs and Latakia in 636, Aleppo, Antioch, and Persian Iraq in 637, Malatya in 638, Egypt in 640, and Cyrenaica in 643 with virtually no archaeologically visible trace of civilian casualties. Caesarea, holding seven thousand or so regular troops, held out the longest of any city in Palestine, falling in May 641, and is one of the few cities to see archaeologically visible traces of warfare during the time. In a sense, as Russia gained its independence from the rest of the Soviet Union, so did the Anatolian-Tunisian-Italian-Greek rump state gain its independence from the rest of the Empire.
The remarkable speed of both the Persian and Arab conquests of the Levant and Egypt is easy enough to explain, and has nothing to do with religious rivalries, as only the Jews actually fought against the Empire. In order to save money to fight his Italian war, Justinian had ended the practice common from Trajan to the first Theodosius of paying extensive garrison forces, making defense in depth impossible, and making elastic defense the Empire’s only option against invaders.
The Roman Emperors in earlier times stationed a very great multitude of soldiers at all points of the Empire’s frontier in order to guard the boundaries of the Roman domain, particularly in the eastern portion, thus checking the inroads of the Persians and the Saracens; these troops they used to call limitanei. These the Emperor Justinian at first treated so casually and so meanly that their paymasters were four or five years behind in their payments to them, and whenever peace was made between the Romans and the Persians, these wretches were compelled, on the supposition that they too would profit by the blessings of peace, to make a present to the Treasury of the pay which was owing to them for a specified period. And later on, for no good reason, he took away from them the very name of regular troops. Thereafter the frontiers of the Roman Empire remained destitute of guards and the soldiers suddenly found themselves obliged to look to the hands of those accustomed to works of piety.
As a result, single decisive battles by state actors -Antioch during the Persian war, Yarmouk during the Arab- could wipe out easily more than a tenth of the Empire’s whole field army, numbering some hundred fifty thousand (according to Agathias) under Justinian. Unguarded by either depleted field forces wisely (as the case of Umar’s war on Persia shows) conserved for future battles or nonexistent garrison forces, during the first half of the seventh century, whole Roman dioceses could do nothing but surrender to the enemy. Justinian’s move to eliminate garrison forces also did nothing to prevent further field army losses resulting from civil wars -Heraclius’s revolt was, as with that of Boniface, caused by a rogue Tunisian field army.
In any case, the consequences of Umar’s wars were clear. As a result of the Arabs’ conquest of the ancient civilizational centers of Iraq and Egypt, for the first time since the age of Hannibal, Rome was no longer the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. Of the five great cities of the fourth century Roman Empire -Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Carthage, and Antioch- only Alexandria was left with the same prosperity and population in 650 as it possessed in 400. In the entire history of the fall of the Roman Empire, the Emperor Heraclius and the Caliph Umar go down as more heroic, impressive, and important than any of the Western Empire’s warlords, which is why, I presume, the story of Heraclius and Umar is better known than that of the fall of the Western Empire, where such heroism is, outside the acts of Gaiseric, Alaric, and Constantius III, somewhere between negligible and nonexistent.
The new, smaller Roman polity, which had halved in population in seven years, was similar in population to the Roman Republic of 146 BC, though had a much smaller economy. The new, more compact Romania could not compare to the great Mediterranean Romania that had existed during the time of Maurice. The urban Aegean collapsed to the point of famine. Urban abandonement became much more severe than it ever was in Italy (Wickham, p. 654). Haldon goes so far as to say “late Roman culture, the culture of urbanized elites and the network of literary and political capital they maintained, disappeared” (Haldon, The Empire that would not die, p. 61). The political and economic center of Christendom shifted sharply to the North and to the West. In 641, a new Roman mint opened in Syracuse while, due to the increasing disuse of Latin, Greek inscriptions started to appear on imperial Roman coins for the first time. For the first time in centuries, the Empire was forced to fight actual naval battles. Western Mediterranean export manufacturing was crippled. The population of Constantinople fell by over 80% since its peak in the early sixth century. Large-scale Roman imperial coin minting ended in 658 (Wickham, p. 127) due to changes in military compensation. Rural settlement, at least, trudged on. The situation in the urban Aegean grew so bad that the Emperor Constans II moved to less famished Syracuse in 663, where he was killed in 668. In 685, the Arabs began minting the first openly Islamic coins. The millennium of Graeco-Roman cultural dominance had ended. At the same time the Empire of the Romans was rapidly shrinking, so was Roman self-identification in Lombard and Visigothic territories, as well as the Frankish territories north of the Loire. By the time of the Arab Conquest of Hispania, everybody in the Visigothic kingdom was a Goth (Roger Collins, Visigothic Spain, p. 243), typically with a Gothic name, everyone North of the Loire was a Frank, and the vast majority of those in Lombard-held territory were Lombards.