Did lead poisoning cause downfall of Roman Empire? The jury is still out
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The traditional answer of 476 is interesting for things that didn't happen in 476:
* The capital of the Roman Empire wasn't sacked, nor was the capital of the Western Roman Empire sacked.
* The last claimant of Augustus of the Western Roman Empire wasn't killed. (Although the imperial court in the Eastern Roman Empire didn't recognize his claim).
* No vestiges of Roman rule, such as the Roman Senate, ended.
* Contemporary political discussions didn't feel that a major event or break in history had happened.
* Archaeological evidence doesn't point to a major break in the economic conditions or the material record of the era (that would come later, with the Plague of Justinian).
Of course, many pedants will come out saying that the Roman Empire really fell in 1453, because that it is when the Ottomans sacked Constantinople. But again, why 1453?
* Why not 1204, when the Latin Empire sacked Constantinople and ruled from there for 60 years?
* Why not 1461, when the Empire of Trebizond (another rump state of the Byzantine Empire created by the sack in 1204) fell to the Ottomans?
* Or indeed, why not 1475, when the Principality of Theodoro, itself the rump state of the Empire of Trebizond, also gave in to the Ottomans?
* Or 1460, when the Despotate of Morea--the last part of the Byzantine Empire supposedly conquered by the Ottomans--was disestablished as a tributary state by the Ottomans?
* Indeed, it's worth pointing that the last Byzantine Empire had to have his accession to the throne confirmed by the Ottoman Emperor of the time (Murad II)--the Byzantine Empire by the 1440s was itself basically an unruly tributary state of the Ottoman Empire.
So going back to the article's question, if lead poisoning is supposedly one of the reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire, which fall of which Roman Empire are they talking about, and why didn't it contribute to the not-falling of the contemporary not-exactly-the-Roman-Empires running about?
If a new war lord storms in but just sets themselves on the throne with the machinery in place the empire staggers on culturally and bureaucratically.
A mongol like situation and the whole structure and culture is shattered.
Rome in 476 I think had a broken bureaucratic system and shattered culture.
The Byzantines kept that stuff in place until the final fall of Constantinople.
It's 'cease' but I can't imagine a more appropriate use of seize, as it's a wheel/gears metaphor!
The Mongols were more of the putting-themselves-on-the-top type of invader. Almost all conquerors are. (Though it's true that wasn't the Mongols' original intent -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yel%C3%BC_Chucai )
Where did they insert their own culture in the place of their subjects'?
Not recommended for beginners though (except the Ottomans).
I'm not an expert in Late Antiquity, but it should be recalled that when most people think of Rome and Roman innovations, we usually harken back to Classical Rome, that of say from 200 BC to 100 or so. If you think about Roman political figures you know, or Roman escapades you remember, or Roman authors you read, chances are you're going back to that time.
Of course, there is one very, very, very major cultural institution after the Crisis of the Third Century that Rome bequeathed to the world. But many--perhaps most--people would stridently object to considering it Roman. I am of course talking about Christianity.
If we see Christianity as a shift in focus rather than a break, that pushes the “downfall” back to 400 AD or later at the least.
You mean Roman Catholicism, the organisation both named after and headquartered in Rome?
The Roman empire had plenty of places to expand to (much of Africa, all of Russia/Asia). Yet they didn't manage that.
This explanation also strips agency from the various peoples who made their own decisions to setup autonomous Roman style rule, throw off Roman rule, or peel off Roman territory and traditions for their own pre-existing polity.
As you point out, a whole lot of the Empire's subjects had a very different take on the matter.
On the other hand, from what I understand, there is some evidence that there was a significant pick up in the rate of technological innovation after the fall of Rome. Not sure how that stacks up against the technologies lost in the early Middle Ages.
The focus on the decline of public works and art is fundamentally an elite view, since they were never coerced to labor for them or die in the fields protecting the empire. For the common man the empire was much worse, but the common man doesn’t write the history books.
Still, I have trouble imagining a decline in economies of scale / specialization that large scale trade brings wouldn't have harmed the quality of life of the common man.
Toxic heavy metal poisoning.
16-year old emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed, but his life was spared which is a better fate than Vercingetorix received at the hands of Caesar.
Odoacer installed himself as ruler and the seat of power moved to Ravenna. So basically all vestiges of Roman rule ended.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrarchy#Regions_and_capitals
Perhaps it fell in the 4th century, perhaps it fell in 1922.
But it wasn’t too long after then that Germany put the gang back together, later teaming up with the ottomans to have another crack at taking over the world.
Was the fall of the Third Reich final chapter of the Roman Empire?
Because it wasn’t too long after that event that another pan-European empire… sorry I mean Union emerged, politically dominated by the Holy Roman Empire… sorry I mean Germany.
The reality is that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire wasn't a sharply defined event and more of a process that took an awfully long time. The idea that lead poisoning contributed to that process is an interesting one but I'm not sure that the article answers any questions about that.
I think you are focusing too much on what happened inside Italy. Yes, the state in the location continued on without much change. But the Empire was over, no longer were Roman legions wandering all over Western Europe, and had been receding for the previous century.
Fast forward to modern times, and people in the area of Romagna, near Ravenna, Rimini, and Cesena, had long claimed with no evidence that a polluted little creek in the region was the actual Rubicon: though its specific identification had long been lost to time. Nonetheless they named it "Il Rubicone". The mouth of the river opens directly south of Cesenatico, a beach town on the Adriatic and the family home of my in-laws. See the bust of Caesar on this bridge over the mouth:
https://www.google.com/maps/@44.166995,12.440708,3a,75y,274....
Now Italians are famous for unnecessarily goosing local legends to make their neighborhoods more historically important than they are. (For example though Leonardo da Vinci did draw a small survey of Cesenatico's historic canal -- not related to the Rubicon -- for the Borgia Popes, that's not enough for the locals: the town has a local plaque saying he created the canal despite the fact that it preexisted him by hundreds of years.) But as it so happens, historical research culminating in the late '90s has verified the river's legend: the creek is in fact the actual Rubicon. In Italy, folk history goes way way back.
It's supposedly the commonly purchased trim level because it costs more, so Rubicon the word is used for wealth ostentation.
I've made a sport (a demented sport admittedly) out of asking folks with them what "Rubicon" means. I've not yet found a correct answer.
Did any of the "incorrect" answers include "it's named after an off-roading trail"? Because it's named after an off-roading trail used by Jeep as a testing/proving ground[0].
Most of their trail rated / trailhawk models contain some sort of nod to off roading trails. E.g., their "Renegade" contains maps of popular trails embossed into various bits of plastic.[1]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubicon_Trail
[1] https://www.autoguide.com/auto-news/2016/06/jeep-renegade-ea...
https://www.edcgov.us/Government/Rubicon/pages/Rubicon_Trail...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemnos#Modern_period
> On 8 October 1912, during the First Balkan War, Lemnos became part of Greece. The Greek navy under Rear Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis took it over without any casualties from the occupying Turkish Ottoman garrison, who were returned to Anatolia. Peter Charanis, born on the island in 1908 and later a professor of Byzantine history at Rutgers University recounts when the island was occupied and Greek soldiers were sent to the villages and stationed themselves in the public squares. Some of the children ran to see what Greek soldiers looked like. "What are you looking at?" one of them asked. "At Hellenes," the children replied. "Are you not Hellenes yourselves?" a soldier retorted. "No, we are Romans." the children replied.
If the early emperors ate a lot of lead, it's reasonable to expect many of the later ones continued doing so, which could have played a role in the downfall.
Although Rome, China, and (not mentioned earlier) Perisa managed to reconstitute themselves, the subsequent decline in trade both within and across empires had to have had an effect (although to what extent, I'm sure others on here know more about it tham I do).
I guess that strengthens the case for #121 (for now).
I read that a lot of the invading tribes were treated as liberators from the Romans for that very reason. Malthus was in full force in the era, so you had edge-of-starvation villages next to productive land that could be cultivated but wasn't due to taxes, and the barbarians rolling in meant you could do that now.
Edit: just realized technical debt is a software engineering term. I still think it's a great analogy for how large unmaintained codebases rot over time.
Romans studied lead poisoning to some extent. Their word for lead poisoning was saturnism [1]. Which makes me think they either didn't know any better, or they found out so late that they could not afford to replace their lead with a safer material.
[1] https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/lead-poisoning-historic...
The linked article, surprisingly, doesn't seem to give any support at all for either of those statements.
> Known as plumbism (or saturnism in Latin as a reference both to lead and plumb, but also to the god Saturn known to be mentally unbalanced and aggressive), this was a very well-known disease by ancient alchemists though it wasn’t really attributed to Roman emperors.
> The ancient Romans, who had few sweeteners besides honey, would boil must (grape juice) in lead pots to produce a reduced sugar syrup called defrutum, concentrated again into sapa
But the article about defrutum adds more context:
> However, the use of leaden cookware, though popular, was not the general standard of use. Copper cookware was used far more generally and no indication exists as to how often sapa was added or in what quantity. There is not, however, scholarly agreement on the circumstances and quantity of lead in these ancient Roman condiments.
The rise of the church always interests me in this story. As I understand it, Christianity was a kind of rebellious liberalizing movement which the state ultimately tried to coopt (Constantine). It’s pre-state adoption was a movement away from more brutal practices, such as crucifixion. Eventually it developed into a competing power structure.