No Barbarians Necessary
nybooks.com
nybooks.com
The article does make an interesting point though that the decay was from the top. And I think this is largely true. Societies don't usually collapse because they get overrun, they get overrun because they're already weak.
Not sure why that is particularly strange. In the age of overt empire, Gibbon wrote an explicitly cautionary tale, like the momento mori that accompanied a triumph. But we aren't in that same age.
From a broader perspective, the nature of "structural" Rome, especially once Octavian (Augustus) took control, lead to sclerosis as the control and wealth and power overwhelmed other activities of state and society. For example the literature of the republic and early empire is greater than that of later periods not because people became dumber but because society, even if richer over all, could not afford it.
Arguably the empire continued, not just in the east but through what remains of Charlemagne's realm (more diffuse yet of greater scope): hundreds of millions of people speak a form of Latin (we call it Spanish or French or other names); many legal systems contain roman influences (though sometimes vestigial, with a legislative chamber called a "Senate"), and many cultural norms trace back to or through Roman times.
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You can see this today, writ small (I'll ignore the politics of the larger scope). The older megacorps (think US Chamber of Commerce members) are focused more on extraction (of rents or of re-mining the same seams) rather than customer benefit. The "newer" (only a few decades old) tech upstarts themselves have largely entered late middle age and are heading to the same fate. Google, once an admirable innovator, is regularly pilloried on this site for having lost its way; some companies required a near death experience (Apple) or spell of privation (Microsoft, IBM) which may help (MS) or may not (IBM). Even in the old guard, GE is haeding downward, and though they've been around for a while and have in the past been a force for good, will anyone mourn?
I've long believed there's a Hayflick limit for both companies and social systems. And as it is for humans, it's a good thing.
I think I agree with you about the Hayflick limit idea, but I also think it's useful to point out, as the parent does, that a sclerotic, moribund empire is probably a better place to live for the majority of people in it than not an empire, assuming there is trade and general stability.
Is it? It took a plague to launch a revolution in agriculture in Europe, leading to an increase in calories production, an expansion of human life span, and opening up an expansion in trade (which reflects an increased amount of consumption of goods beyond simple survival). The preceding periods of semi-stasis were ones of no expansion in human quality of life and punctured by the opposite when you happened to be in the wrong place during a struggle between elites.
In our concrete world: had Apple not been able to blow up the oligopoly where the phone carriers controlled what phones were available and what they could do, would we have the current explosion of software, tools, etc? In the US in particular the sclerotic phone oligopolies kept the mobile phone market at least a decade behind Europe and Japan.
This is exactly the issue I'm talking about. It's very plausible that the world got much better after the plague, and that the plague was an important catalyst. But it also seems obviously true that absolutely no one alive at the time would choose the plague in order to cause that improvement.
The stability of the roman empire was a marvel. After incessant war within the borders during the republic, violence moved to the borders of the empire. To be Roman, and citizenry became quite broadly spread, during those few centuries, was to be free and safe.
Fiction can often capture this truth better than any scholarship. In "Augustus", a portrait of the first roman Emperor, the author John Williams conjures a scene where Augustus, near the end of his life, contemplates his successes and failures on the deck of his cruise-ship. An Egyptian freighter pulls alongside, and the crew sings him a song, thanking him for the stability he brought, the captain recalling the pirates that used to terrorize the Mediterranean. Now, they could voyage safely.
That change, in just a generation, exemplified the stability of the roman empire. While adding color to this history is great, it often tends to cheapen this enormous achievement.
“ In modern English and other vernaculars, the term also commonly includes the inhabitants of Norse home communities during this period.”
> To be Roman, and citizenry became quite broadly spread, during those few centuries, was to be free and safe.
It's pretty plain here that the parent is arguing that Romans, not their slaves, were free and safe. Anyway, the idea that Rome is worse than its contemporaries because of slavery or some other failure to adhere to 20th (or 21st) century mores is silly (though fashionable) without making a case that said contemporaries performed better by those same standards.
However, I do think that by modern standards, all governments were terrible back then. Most of history is like that. It's mostly about cruelty and suffering.
I was only clarifying since you were responding to a comment comparing Rome to her contemporaries. No one argues that Rome was more enlightened or less brutal than modern first-world nations, but many do argue that Rome was relatively more backwards than her contemporaries on the basis that Romans practiced slavery and colonization (ignoring that her contemporaries did the same or would have done if they had the ability).
Elites got to define history (especially before the printing press). Of course they blamed "the Barbarians", but what's really true is that Roman society started eating itself.
The claim that the fall of Rome was a "good" thing, on the other hand, is simplistic beyond belief.
[1]https://smile.amazon.com/Decline-Empire-Volumes-Everymans-Li...
Do you have any citations? I was always told that the average level of nutrition often increased once the Romans were no longer in charge - since less tax was being levied.
I think the idea that the Roman Empire was bad for its citizens varies in persuasiveness depending on the era. The Roman Empire was very unstable and extremely prone to brutal civil wars, and when it wasn't in a state of active conflict, the maxim of Severus "Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, scorn all others" was pretty much the norm. Which isn't exactly great for everybody who isn't a soldier.
That all said, there were definitely times in which the Roman empire was stable and prosperous - but I think the system itself didn't encourage it.
And there were surprising details, such as that after the Arabic conquest of many areas, the conquerors pretty much kept relying on Roman era tax rolls and local organization.
Europe was too fragmented to be conquered by the Mongols. Their way would have been blocked by castles and town walls, each originally thrown up by one group in conflict with others—by a fractious nobility against its kings and against its own peasants, and by townsmen against them all. Above all, “there was no central government to offer surrender.”
In short they would have laid waste to Europe.
I think the long-range logistics of supporting an army thousands of miles away from your civilization centers was just too much to handle for Iron Age / Dark age civilizations.
Even if one leader (Genghis Khan) could successfully lead such an expedition, it was clear that his successors were unable to.
As such, once Genghis Khan died, the Mongol Empire could only sustain itself for a short time before collapsing. First into the four Khanites, then total collapse a few decades later. That's just too large a land-area, without any decent form of large-scale transportation (ie: boats) that could assist travel.
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The Roman Empire's expansion was primarily driven by the Mediterranean Sea. Going over the land-route through the Silk Road between Europe and Asia is... hard. Very hard.
Another part of the Roman Empire was that they were a bureaucracy: they spread their ways and very carefully organized their empire as it expanded. You didn't need once-in-a-thousand year leaders like Genghis Khan to do things, your standard Roman Magistrates were effectively trained to do the task. Even when Rome itself collapsed, the Byzantine empire (Eastern-half) continued to run itself for nearly a thousand years later, under largely Roman-inspired principles.
On the other hand, the Mongols were already in Europe and had already conquered their way into Russia and Asia Minor. There's really no reason to think long-range logistics should be the limiting factor in, say, Poland, the Hungarian plain, or Vienna when it wasn't for Baghdad or Kyiv.
Long-range invasions over thousands of miles aren't easy, but they have been done since the Achaemenids, done over the silk road well into Central Asia since the Han, and done several times by nomadic confederations who appear suddenly from the mongolian steppe and dominate settled peoples. The Mongols were just the latest and the best at it, and Genghis wasn't even alive during the western conquests that could have taken Europe.
My dream is a book/blog explaining historic processes with Ishikawa cause-and-effect fishbone diagrams.[1] For history, the main branches of the fishbone could be: Military, Economy, Society, Politics, and Nature. So a tentative diagram explaining the fall of the Western Roman Empire would have:
* Military: weakened army (increasing dependence on mercenaries), fights with the Germanic tribes (in turn, caused by the expansion of the Huns).
* Economy: inflation (debasement of currency), decline in the influx of slaves (end of expansion), lost taxation from some provinces (Germanic invasions), decline in maritime trade (Vandalic pirates), decline of agriculture (excessive taxes), drain of money (trade deficit with the Eastern Empire).
* Society: decline of civic virtue (expansion of Christianity), loss of ties with Rome in the provinces.
* Politics: political instability, overly powerful Praetorian Guard.
* Nature: population decline (Antonine Plague, Plague of Cyprian), soil erosion (deforestation, excessive grazing, soil salinization).
Improving the diagram and making similar diagrams explaining other events and processes is left as an exercise to the reader.
Does anyone know of any attempts at a "systems engineering" approach to teaching history?
So instead of a learning objective like "able to discuss the economic and political forces at work in the late Roman Empire", perhaps more like "has a feel for caloric restriction, starvation and famine in human history"? More human history as root causes analysis, than history as Trial Pursuit. And thus freed from the interminable obfuscating worry over just which particular measured mix of pervasive patterns of cause occurred in some trivially particular wherewhen. Fine for historians, but a distraction from introducing humanity as a system. More patterns of migration, than say Syrian migration in end Bronze Age collapse, or Mongols, or early 20th C, or early 21st, or etc. A more veterinary school approach to teaching history, focused on crosscutting patterns, because you've too many diverse critters to do old-style medical school's rote memorization of one critters's trivia. Any thoughts?
The core problem of the Roman Empire was immigration and the speculators that it has attracted. For example, when gold was discovered in Dacia (Provincia Dacia, nowadays Romania), they rushed to the Eastern Europe building colonies near the Danube, something similar to what happened in the time of the Gold Rush in USA. Since immigration in Rome was embraced, many nobels stopped paying good wages to peasants and they started to bring slaves and cheap labour from all over the empire. These peasants, left without work emigrated to other successful Roman colonies like Provincia Britannia and Provincia Dacia which were very powerful back then. Even some nobels themselves took everything and left.
Also, the invasion of the barbarians on the Rhine and Danube fronts (mostly Goths - Visigoths and Ostrogohths -) didn't help. So many people were coming south of Rhine and Danube that the empire could not self-sustain itself anymore. Many families leaving for Constantinople after 400 AD. The population of Rome decreased from something around 1 million down to a few thousands. Also, Mediterranean Sea stopped playing an important role and the next big thing was the commerce between Europe and Asia. Constantinople being at the cross.
Edit: As Neagu Djuvara said in his book, don't imagine that all barbarians were the same and their only aim was plundering, there are many sources which show that they actually got asimilated into Roman life and some of them offered their services as Merc Corps to defend the borders of the empire, keeping their own culture and traditions. Historians enamoured with Roman Empire history depict barbarians as being savages which was in fact not true. For example in the Romanian language, Gothic toponyms have been preserved to this day. Also the word "viteaz" which means courageous in Romanian is stemming from the word viking. Which clearly shows that these cultures intersected.
A short trip down wikipedia and wiktionary leads me to Proto Slavic word vitędzь https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/v...
And indeed, there it is: > Based on the ethnonym Proto-Germanic *wīkingaz (whence Old Norse víkingr (“bay's dweller”)).
I was a bit skeptical about your claim, but you were indeed right. Thanks for the little history and etymology lesson.
It was actually the third century that had the worst of the civil wars. By the fourth century, Diocletian and later Constantine had pretty much restored stability to the empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century
That being said, I think the thrust of the first book reviewed is correct, that it was the Roman Civil Wars more than the barbarian invasions that destroyed Rome.
The title Imperator in the days of the late republic was an honorific given to successful generals. This is is quite an apt title for the Roman political head during the Imperium. It was hard for the formally republican Romans of the early Empire to counter the precedent set by Julius and Augustus, who killed their way to the top. Normal stabilizing mechanisms like the divine right of kings were anaesthetized by Roman sensibilities. Conquerors did not face legitimacy issues like they might have in a political system with more ceremonial/spiritual backing.
But when the commander of forces on the Rhine was no longer a Roman General commanding Roman Legions but a German commanding his tribe that same process of conquering yourself a nice political office seems to have more political implications. Sure the Lombards kept the Senate but the lack of political union of the German tribes probably has something to do with break in political union of the Western Empire.
It's an absolutely massive work that even so scarcely indicates the complexity of Rome's decline. I hope to branch out and read some more modern takes afterwards. One interesting observation of the varied causes attributed is that they all exist in some form or another today, in the most powerful nations of the world, and they could come to a critical point once more, and it's not clear where that would take us.
You can however find something good in anything bad, and vice versa. That doesn't mean "bad" is necessary.