Why Rome had to fall (version 2)
I took a stab at this half a year ago, however, the post now seems to me to be barely readable. Let us start with the famous chart and the famous Seneca quote.
The chart:
The chart is basically accurate, particularly for Italy -what Italian ruins do you know of from between 550 and 1450, other than the Leonine walls? The “Christian dark ages”, are, of course, needless editorializing -it would be better called the “Germanic dark ages”.
The Seneca quote:
Who can be braver than the Germans? Who charge more boldly? Who have more love of arms, among which they are born and bred, for which alone they care, to the neglect of everything else? Who can be more hardened to undergo every hardship, since a large part of them have no store of clothing for the body, no shelter from the continual rigour of the climate: yet Spaniards and Gauls, and even the unwarlike races of Asia and Syria cut them down before the main legion comes within sight, nothing but their own irascibility exposing them to death. Give but intelligence to those minds, and discipline to those bodies of theirs, which now are ignorant of vicious refinements, luxury, and wealth, —to say nothing more, we should certainly be obliged to go back to the ancient Roman habits of life.
Simply put, the risk to the civilized northern regions was always greater than that to southerly ones when the northern barbarians became civilized enough to destroy their southern neighbors. The Angles and Saxons conquered Britain, the Franks conquered Gaul, the Ostrogoths and Lombards conquered Italy, the Visigoths conquered Spain, the Vandals conquered Tunisia, and the Slavs conquered the Balkans -but the Slav and Anglo-Saxon conquests left behind nothing of Roman civilization, while the Vandals and Ostrogoths left almost everything of importance intact. Gaul and Hispania were naturally in between and Lombard Italy fell closer to the Slavic example. Apparently movement in one large army rather than a human wave of ungoverned warbands insulated the southerly regions from civilizational collapse.
It was in the fifth century the Germans -and it was formerly settled Germans, largely from today’s southern Poland, eastern Slovakia, western Ukraine, and Romania/Moldova who are at issue here, not simply generic northern barbarians (e.g., Huns/Alans), after centuries of contact with the Roman world, became capable of consistently defeating Roman armies and, by extension, destroying Roman state and creative institutions. The barbarians are the key players here, as they were in the case of the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire in the seventh and eleventh centuries AD. Though both feudalism and aristocratic corruption were prominent in the Roman fourth century (on this, see Ramsay MacMullen’s Corruption and the Decline of Rome) local aristocrats could not organize viable armies without a collapse of Roman state institutions. This required a rise in barbarian capability.
The first way was due to cultural exchange -light in the third century, but heavy in the fourth- between Roman and Germanic territories. The second way was through Germanic armies numbering in the tens of thousands gaining massive capability after fifteen years’ or so settlement within the Roman Empire. Consider the Visigoths’ ascent between and 382 and 396, Tribigild’s Goths’ ascent between 386 and 399, and the Vandals’ between 406 and 421, and contrast them with Radagaisus’s war in 406. Though these chiefdoms were a small fraction of total Germanic immigration into the empire during the fourth century, they became extremely powerful -Athaulf’s mobile chiefdom overthrew a Roman usurper in eastern Gaul! By the year 500, Germanic kingdoms’ conquest of the Western Roman Empire was so total, only small bands of Moors, Basques, and Britons living on rocky soil remained to resist their rule.
What was necessary to get the old Western Roman Empire out of its dark age were two things: first, the gradual regrowth of cities (a phenomenon from Belgium and England to Tunisia and Morocco) following their destruction by both barbarian conquests and barbarian institutions, and, secondly, the transformation of people beyond the Rhine from a destructive force to a creative one. Once that centuries-long process was achieved, Europe’s progress could start again.