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I will quote something another historian, Alessandro Barbero (who is getting quite popular in Italy), often likes to point out when asked about similar "unanswered questions".

For any historian, even just determining what happened in the past requires a lot of work already. Finding primary sources that clearly describe facts, are reliable, and not too biased is hard, and reconciling contradictory sources is even harder.

Explaining why these things happened, or what would have happened if something else happened differently is much harder still, because you must use this incomplete information to establish causality or (even worse) simulate an actual alternate reality.

Just try for a second to ask yourself what would 2021 look like had 9/11 never happened. It's a daunting task, even though we have a massive amount of information about that time period (having literally lived through it). Doing the same with remote history with historical rigour is essentially out of reach.

It's hard, sure, but it's also the whole job. Just knowing what happened is meaningless in itself.

I'm in the midst of reading Rome is Burning, Anthony A. Barrett's new book (https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172316/ro...) about the Great Fire of Rome in 64AD (the one where Nero fiddled). I'm a relative novice to the field of Roman history (studied early modern history in university, never touched ancient history). The key thing to know about the fire is that it is very unclear basic facts like 1) how long did the fire last? Some sources say 6 days, some 9, 2) which buildings burnt down? 3) how far did the fire reach? 4) how many people died? There are lots of ancient references to it but when you get down to the details it's actually quite vague.

> The invasion of the Huns was pretty traumatic for the Western Roman Empire

"Traumatic" is quite the understatement. The huns and the hunnic empire destroyed the roman empire by ending roman primacy in western/northern europe. And the power balance shifted forever from the south to the north. It was the huns victory over the romans that ultimately allowed the northern germanic tribes to move south and westward. Whereas for a thousand years it was the romans who were pushing north and westward. Without the huns, the anglo-saxons wouldn't be able to invade the british isles and we wouldn't have england. No england, no america. No america, no internet. Oh dear.

> and it is possible that if it did not happen, or if the Huns met defeat early, the empire could have limped along for next thousand years, just like the Eastern Empire did.

Or maybe it would have galvanized the romans to expand into northern europe once and for all. And we'd have a roman western/northern europe rather than the germanic western/northern europe.

It's one of those interesting "what ifs" of history.

I think the big issue was not that the foederati were specifically outside the normal Roman political and military world. A German general or nobleman who took over a fragment of the empire would not have caused a major change to the political order and their territory would be easier to re-incorporate into the empire.

What I'm getting at was why were the Franks taking over Gaul different from the Gallic Empire. My impression is that the difference is that there was a German political/military order that replaced the top layer of the Roman political order (although the bottom layers which included the city administrations and the Church continued to function), which included fragmentation of authority after the first few rulers, and that meant that the old administration could not be reincorporated into a renewed Roman Empire in one go. (Of course, this re-incorporation of a German breakaway kingdom did happen in the case of Italy which was briefly reunited with the Byzantines, my explanation doesn't really account for that, it would be interesting to examine how difficult or easy it was for imperial administration to resume (ie, was it treated as a military frontier province or did the old Italian administration get reconstituted))

And I think this is because the foederati system helped preserve a separate German political order even after the tribes were fighting for the empire and living within the empire. The alternative I can think of was if the king of the Germanic tribes settled in the empire was given a formal governor position, or some other position within the Roman hierarchy. My understanding is that that generally did not happen, although I could be wrong.

> Austria, and later Austria-Hungary, a hodgepodge of nations of unequal standing, was able to survive for many centuries before disintegrating in 1918 because it lost a major war so thoroughly that the civilian population was struck by long famine.

The national movements were the thing of the late 18 century. They haven't thought about themselves as nations all that much before, they were kingdoms. The unequal standing got bigger and language oppression and such got bigger in that late period.

It is more complicated than that. The German speaking court in Vienna tried to elevate the German language above the others, if only to simplify record keeping and everyday executive functions. This was pretty obvious in the 17th century already, with formerly important Czech language being pushed aside long before any modern national movements. Multiethnic empires generally need a single language for their internal functionality, as few people are able to master languages as different as German, Czech, Polish and Hungarian on an adequate level.

Austria-Hungary in 1914 was a peaceful, growing and sort-of prosperous nation. The nationalist squabbling was incessant, but did not prevent a fairly fast growth of living standards and businesses of the old empire were tighly interconnected all over the map.

The war proved too destructive to handle, though. Even the most prominent nations of the empire (Germans, Hungarians) lost interest in anything but feeding their hungry families at the end of it.

It wasn't really peaceful or prosperous. The Austrians had to cut the Hungarians in on the empire, as otherwise it would have collapsed, and even then it was pretty unpopular and ineffectual. It was a pretty stodgy, autocratic relic of the past.

Austria-Hungary limped along because the varying ethnic minorities were used to the regime and were more worried about who came after the Austrians. But the whole enterprise was running on borrowed time as nationalism was going to dismember the empire at some point.

"It wasn't really peaceful or prosperous."

With the exception of Bosnia, A-H territories haven't seen any fighting or civil war between 1866 and 1914. People utterly forgot what war even meant.

As for prosperity, there were huge differences between individual regions and Cisleithania (Austrian lands) was quite a lot more industrial than Hungarian lands, but the living standards were improving fast, as was literacy, healthcare, public infrastructure etc.

It is not entirely clear what would have happened without war. Nationalisms were strong, but so were innumerable ties holding the country together. For example, Spain is still a country, even though its regional nationalisms are very strong.

For nationalist movements to succeed, they need to convince a lot of individuals that they will be better out than in, which, for any of the smaller nations of the empire, was questionable. Even Hungarians would think twice about secession, given that their part of the monarchy was mostly rural and needed industrial output of the other part.

The Grossdeutschland movement, seeking to unite all German speaking peoples under Berlin, had more of a chance to succeed, because in their case, it would not mean independence but rather transfer of sovereignty to an already powerful nation (imperial Germany). A-H authorities generally considered pan-German nationalists to be the most structurally dangerous element.