Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions
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It looks like this covers Diocletian's monetary reforms, which is one of my absolute favorite parts of roman history - looking forward to it!
If you're talking about Mike Duncan's podcast, note that it ended in 2012 with the deposing of the final Western Emperor.
There is a spiritual successor by Robin Pierson called "The History of Byzantium" that picks up shortly after the end and is still ongoing after over 230 episodes.
Duncan's current podcast is "Revolutions", which covers a variety of historical revolutions. I've been listening for a bit now and am only on the third (French) of ten revolutions. Definitely recommend the show for people seeking a history podcast.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/SPQR-History-Ancient-Mary-Beard/dp/16...
The book also seemed like a survey that had chunks missing out of the map. The parts that were there were well done (excepting not giving any good reason for distrusting the ancient sources) and I definitely learned things. But I don't feel like I got a good feeling of the course of Roman history, more like little vignettes along the way.
I can't say I dislike the book, but I think it could be better. (Although, I'm a complete novice in Roman history, so that might influence my opinion. And maybe the book wasn't written for me, too.)
It isn't a perfect book, but it's very readable, informative, and seems to be well regarded. I was on a Rome kick at the time and didn't find anything that seemed to be completely out of left field.
[0]: e.g. Thucydides' History of the Pelopenesian war might be accurate, but honestly, why would it be? It's even worse when you have stuff like Caesar's writings.
However it was and still is enjoyable.
> While I am going at points to gesture to Gibbon’s thinking, we’re not going to debate him; he is the ‘old man’ of our title. Gibbon himself largely exists only in historiographical footnotes and intellectual histories; he is not at this point seriously defended nor seriously attacked but discussed as the venerable, but now out of date, origin point for all of this bickering.
Holding it in ill-regard would be punching down. It's an 18th work! If it were at all up to date, that would indicate serious stagnation in the academy. Of course, there has been a great amassing of new evidence since then, especially non-textual.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominate == USSR, basically. It's too editorialized to stand as a modern historical text, but it's great fun to read nonetheless!
One thing I've never quite understood from history books though: there was so much wealth, people with big palaces, large tracts of land, artwork (like statues), gold, from wealthy families, and so on. Where did all that wealth go in the end?
I'm thinking about long-lived dynasties, like the House of Yamato (1000+ years; Imperial House of Japan), or Bagrationi in Georgia, and so on.
Yet, from ancient Rome, not one of the powerful ancient families seems to have survived, and the same disappearing act happened with the rather massive wealth that was sloshing around back then. I mean that was a bit surprising to me.
I would have expected some wealthy modern "noble family" to be able to trace its roots to Rome and the wealth obtained when, say, some of their ancestors were Roman Senators, who decided to sail to a secluded location, assume control of lucrative trade routes, and so on.
Rome was never a monarchy, and even the imperial period was never as autocratic as it is sometimes painted. The Romans didn’t delineate between the republic and empire the way we do. It was still nominally the Res Publica, and still effectively in some ways a Republic. Hence, the emperor ruled with the tacit consent of, and relied on support of various factions - the army, the senate, and the plebs. Bad emperors would get overthrown and people would think nothing of it. Because the situation at the top was so fragile there weren’t really imperial dynasties that lasted more than a few generations.
Secondly, there was the ‘apocalypse’. Plague and warfare severely reduced the population of the Italian peninsula and the city of Rome (by about 95%). The countryside was overrun by various Germanic tribes who probably confiscated much of the wealth. People with money probably went elsewhere - Milan, Venice, and Constantinople for instance.
That doesn't sound too different from how monarchs would rule.
After the sack of Constantinople, much of that wealth, including the secret of silk-making was taken back to Italy, and the ERE would never recover from this.
For reference, the amount looted from Constantinople during its sack is meant to be around 900,000 silver marks -- enough to raise the entire Venetian navy almost 6 times over. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sack_of_Constantinople#sack_of...)
Of course, a huge amount of wealth remained in the west, even after Odoacer's conquest (see this mosaic of the palace of Theodoric: https://www.worldhistory.org/image/3090/palace-of-theodoric-... which is in undeniably Roman form). That said, the ERE would continue to be the center of wealth in Europe up until at least the sack.
I think it's important to note that Odoacer, in destroying the WRE was not considered by his contemporaries to have destroyed the Roman Empire. He immediately sent the imperial regalia to the Emperor in the east and declared himself a Viceroy of the eastern Roman emperor. In this way, I think the ERE thought it kind of convenient, as they now, at least on paper had full control of the whole Roman empire. The identity of 'Roman' in the West was not broken, so I've read until the ERE decided to 'reconquer' Rome and mainland Italy for being barbarian, which, as you can imagine would throw your personal identity for a bit of a loop.
Despite still being greatly dilapidated when Constantinople was finally invaded by the Ottomans 200 years after the sack, it was still famous for silk. Mehmed The Conqueror is attested to have said, upon wandering its ruins:
The spider is curtain-bearer in the palace of Chosroes,
The owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.I don't think this is quite right. The sequence of events is roughly as follows:
1054: Great Schism, Patriarchate of Constantinople diverges from Papacy in Rome.
1071: Battle of Manzikert, Seljuk (Turkish) Empire conquers most of Anatolia
[also 1071: Norman invasion of southern Italy and Sicily, final de facto eviction of Byzantines from Italy]
1095: First Crusade, Frankish armies storm the Levant and capture Nicaea and Jerusalem -- also the only Crusade that had any real success, others at most reversed previous losses.
It seems more than a little suspicious that all of this happens so quickly. It can't just be about Jerusalem, which had fallen to the Muslim conquests four centuries prior. Rather, after the Schism, there is a "switch" from formal (but usually ignored) ERE suzerainty over European kingdoms, with European military assistance under the banner of ERE armies, to European armies fighting as "equal partners" of the ERE. This second arrangement worked well at first, but it was less stable and less successful in the long run, ultimately leading to the disastrous Fourth Crusade and the Fall of Acre.
In fact, the ERE/Byzantines had already been making gains against the Arabs in the Levant up until the Schism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Antioch_(968%E2%80%93...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Byzantine_wars#By...
The Patriarch in Rome had been operating effectively independently for centuries before the schism.
The Romans made gains after the collapse of the Caliphate, retaking Anatolia, Crete, Bulgaria and Antioch and even Armenia and Georgia, but then they experienced a series of setbacks when the Turks appeared.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tarchaneiotes
I'm not an expert on the motivations of medieval generals, but if you've spent your whole life fighting for "God" and suddenly the people who are supposed to be close to God don't seem to have a clue what they're doing, don't you think that might impact your willingness to fight?
The Roman Empire had always centered on Italy, Greece and Anatolia. Until 1050 the ERE had always had a toehold in Italy and most of Anatolia. By 1100 they had lost all of Italy and most of Anatolia:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/Byzantin...
It's true that theological disputes accumulated gradually before the Schism and were interleaved with political disputes, but this doesn't really dispute the importance of the theological split and instead smears it over the previous two centuries (arguably beginning with the coronation of Charlemagne).
I find it somewhat hard understand, how the church managed to mobilise europe into a crusade, it is possible that the various competing establishments weren't very enthusiastic about the project, to begin with.
Without something like a stock exchange, wealth means having actual productivity under your control and that has zero inherent stability. It's well possible to build and expand over generations while the productivity goes on and the system facilitating that control (e.g. a rule of law) remains undisrupted, but when either of that stops being the case nothing remains. When there's no authority that enforces whatever letters of ownership or contracts you might have, they are as immaterial as ETF shares in a paperless bank account that has just disappeared some day.
What's confusing is that pre-decline Rome, on the face of it, seems pre-modern in many ways, but this is just a simulacrum, because there was none of the productivity increases that underpin the modern world.
Example:
19th century London: big in part because there are lots of factories there!
100 AD Rome: big because of years of taxation routing grain there!
Yes, there was trade. Yes, cities did do a lot of self rule. Yes, the early government was pretty minimal. See Rostovtzeff for some fun with this. But there wasn't really much self-sustaining about the cities.
So back to the original question, there is no "stock" of wealth. The buildings are the results of wealth, not (perhaps baring things like aqueducts) the source of wealth. Without the political control over the many agricultural laborers and their output, the wealth just dissipates.
There is a lot more 0-sum stuff going on than the modern world, where conversely the positive-sum nature of things is not well appreciated.
When you think about it, gold never changes over time, so calling it wealth is obviously absurd. The moment you have dug it out, you apparently have wealth. People like living in a parallel world I guess.
> ... when actually performing a regular census proved difficult, Constantine responded by mandating that coloni – the tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the empire – must stay on the land they had been farming so that their landlords would be able to pay the taxes, casually abrogating a traditional freedom of Roman citizens for millions of farmers out of administrative convenience.
Are the roots of serfdom traceable back to this mandate? It's tempting to imagine so, as serfs were not slaves per se, but tied to the land they worked.
Interestingly, those positions have reversed in the modern day, with the analogue of serfdom -- W2 employment -- heavily favored by the state, and the analogue of freeholding -- employment as a contractor -- preferable to employers (who mostly lack the power to implement it over the state's objection).
Corporations prefer contractors because they can use the power asymmetry to extract more value for lower pay.
Formal employment is favoured by a democratically elected state, as it works to restore the power balance to the voters through appropriate regulation (assuming of course you live in a modern well functioning democratic society - which I understand is not the case in many places).
There is probably also the added benefit that it's more difficult for employees to move into a position were they can compete with the corporations that pay for the politicians campaigns in democratically elected states.
"But here too, we have to be careful in defining what that governance meant, because the Roman Empire of August, 378 AD was not the Roman Empire of August, 14 AD."
"are we comparing [the decline of the fifth and sixth centuries] to the empire of Hadrian (r. 117-138) or the empire of Valentinian (r. 364-375)? Because most students are generally more familiar with the former (because it is was tends to be get focused on in teaching), there is a tendency to compare 476 directly with Rome under the Nervan-Antonines (96-192) without taking into account the events of the third and early fourth century."
The fall of Constantinople to Ottoman cannons in 1453 drew a line under the Roman polity, Politeia tōn Rhōmaiōn for good.
You can debate how Roman the empire was at that point, but it was still officially Basileía Rhōmaíōn, known informally as Rhōmania, and the people still called themselves Romaioi.
Historical labels are fun. The arguments mostly so when you're drinking.
I did once take this dumb argument to the end that the Roman Empire never actually ended, it just ended up on an island with a different flag and then unceremoniously transferred itself to North America later. Then I learned Asimov had already done it.
The Eastern Roman Empire is a historical fiction by western authors who have grown up in nations who had historically chosen to label the remaining territories of the Roman Empire as not the ‘real’ Rome for political purposes, and religious ones. It lent church and state an aura of legitimacy. Necessarily they had to deny that the inconveniently tenacious Rome in the east was really Rome.
Constantine moved his capital in AD 324. The Empire in the west had been declining, so the move east was hardly surprising. At that point, the Empire stretched from Britain to Egypt.
When the emperor Valens lost the battle of Adrianople in 378, along with his army and his life the empire effectively lost control of he situation in the west. But the Empire itself was not lost. At that point Rome still controlled the most populous and richest parts of the empire, including the capital the levant, and Egypt. They would continue to hold off, and hold on, for another thousand years.
Meanwhile Frankish and Gothic kings wanted the title of emperor for themselves to legitimise their rule and increase their standing. So too, the patriarch in Rome wanted to be the preeminence. Inconveniently, a Roman emperor still controlled the Roman capital and most of a wealthy and still powerful Empire. The pretenders needed to keep pretending, not only to the throne, but that the Empire didn’t exist.
Thus began the policy of calling the Roman Empire the ‘Empire of Constantinople’ or the ‘Empire of the East’, or the ‘Empire of the Greeks’. That way, Franks and Goths could claim to be the ‘real’ emperor, even when they only controlled the depopulated and impoverished remains of the west.
This isn't really true. The Roman Empire recovered substantially during the 4th century; economic output and population (at least as well as we can measure them) stabilized at levels below those of the first two centuries C.E., but significantly higher than during the crises of the third century. It wasn't until the late 4th century that things really started going downhill.
(At the other end of the scale there are people willing to argue that the Eastern Roman Empire was just an administrative reorganisation and consolidation so the Empire didn't really fall until 1453. Some people measure terminal declines from the peak, some people won't acknowledge falls until something finally ceases to exist)
But this isn't at all what happened with regards to the late Roman Empire. The Western Empire recovered substantially from the crisis of the second century. The administrative changes that were made weren't the root causes of what happened in the late 4th and 5th centuries; they were actually what allowed (most of) the 4th century to be such a success. It's also emphatically not true that the Roman Empire of, say, the 370s, "sat on the verge of succumbing to foreign invasion" (even if you accept the notion of "foreign," which doesn't really apply to Rome's military relationship with many of its "barbarian" neighbors).
Yes, the Roman emperorship claim was continually picked up, but there were differences (in the West especially) in the organization and reach of these regimes. The Church became more of a parallel branch of power and not a subordinate. Yes, literacy was not lost altogether and people of these periods preserved some books. But there was lots of stuff that would've been preserved by a more diverse culture, where intellectualism wasn't confined to Christian monasteries. There's a whole long story of how the West lost and then gradually recovered Plato and Aristotle, because for the long time they couldn't read Greek, the Ostrogothic king killed the early potential translator to Latin (Boethius) and then there were ages before these foundational texts were regained from Arabic and then Byzantine sources. Lots of philosophical and historical books (such as many parts of Livy's history of Rome itself) were preserved only as summaries, because apparently no one wanted/needed to even read them.
Myself, I would distinguish the (okay, gradual) fall of the empire as the political regime and the decline of the civilization. The former, I think, was actually a good thing, since I cannot imagine another road to the modern experience of personal and political freedom (however flawed and maybe fleeting) from the centralized and despotic culture of the late Empire. (I don't have strong convictions about the causes of the latter).
The previous post in the series argues convincingly that this simply wouldn't have happened - that "preserving stuff for posterity" just wasn't a norm in the Classical world, and that even the Musaeum and Library of Alexandria (a rather unique institution in the Classical world that would have been roughly comparable to a modern research university) did a pretty poor job of it by later standards. The monasteries really were unique.
We may have lost much of the mass culture that was closely linked to pagan religion, but we can get the gist of it from what Christianity and other later religions managed to pick up - and even that was soon after transformed and improved in refinement beyond all recognition. The stuff simply wasn't as interesting as we sometimes suppose.
Some of this would obviously be lost in a civilizational decline regardless of existence of extra-monastic science. But I mentioned books of Livy histories which would be preserved if people were actually interested in lay history of Rome, their supposed quintessential state. Today we cannot figure out many facets of Roman Republican system in like 1st century BCE and before. If Classical-style philology survived on a serious scale, we would get the second part of Aristotle's Poetics and more of the classic Greek tragedies and poetry. We have only scraps of Hellenistic philosophy (Stoic and even moreso Epicurean, Sceptic), and mostly only the Latin imitators, because again they stopped reading Greek and had to avoid these "suspicious" worldviews. The books on these topics, if you actually read them, have to largely rely on connecting scraps and conjecture. We cannot really say we "actually got their most esoteric and intellectually interesting stuff" with any certainty.
I think the point of monasteries monoculture stands, but it's really secondary. My main point is that cultural decline cannot be explained and nuanced away. Say, we wouldn't get the Arabic and Byzantine retransmission, and got only the things preserved in the West in 700 CE, would you also be so content?
And this is the non-obvious point that the first part of OP disagreed with. Preserving and copying texts on any sort of scale without anything like a printing press was hard, specialized work. And there were few or no institutions explicitly devoted to that task - to the best of our knowledge, anyway - prior to the Christian monasteries. The Musaion and Library of Alexandria is described as exceptional simply because it did engage in some primitive version of that work, and even that was not considered important enough to be kept functional for more than a few centuries.
Not disputing that it was an expensive luxury thing, but let's not take it to the extreme that the ancients were helpless in that regard. Clearly they were able to preserve a number of titles throughout centuries, there were many books commonly read and cited. (Until they disappeared toward the late first millennium.)
If some piece was really core and central to them, they generally managed not to lose it, just because of the need (again, not some abstract desire for preservation). If they stopped, it means that either they collectively lost interest in some swaths of intellectual activity, or lacked the means because of an economic and civilizational slump. In fact both those factors were likely at play here. The transition from scrolls to codices, that you are probably alluding to, was a force multiplier for this process.
Last year, I bought a small house in a development project in my city of birth, Ostrava, Czech Republic. It is not finished yet. But the development of 34 houses will be walled, presumably to isolate it from the nearby neighbourhood of block of flats, which isn't the best part of Ostrava, though not the worst either.
When I grew up there, there weren't any walled developments in the city. They have proliferated in last 10 years or so.
I wonder to what degree this is a real deterioration of security and to what degree it is perception. I do not feel unsafe in Ostrava, but some visitors do, and being a fairly fit strong man in his 40s, I am not a typical street crime victim; most people whom I know and who were victims of street crime, were smaller/older/frailer/female. So it might be my perception that is skewed, not theirs.
https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2011/12/chemistry-of-em...
Civilization is sustained by bursts of energy and confidence which generally comes from new ideas and a vision of themselves and the world which galvanizes people and has them build empires, institutions and cultural creations and structures.
A related question: how much longer can the ideas of the Enlightenment drive the current global civilization (created in the West), and are we seeing signs of the West losing confidence in itself?
Plenty of those around. I won't get into them because it gets treated as "doing politics" and usually attracts angry replies, even though the signs of degeneration can be seen uniformly on either side of the mainstream political debate.
Taxes.
I would conjecture pre-Roman when groups would sack a town they would kill all males and enslave the rest. Taxes changed the game. This created a concept of managing states. Instead of killing everyone in a village - you wanted them to work hard and pay taxes. This also had an unforeseen side affect: if you were a good tax payer you were protected. People wanted to be a Roman citizen. The Romans would destroy anyone taking their tax money. You could safely produce a crop or raise cattle. Other cultures pre-Roman had taxes but were always caught up in ethnic cleansing - thus destroying their tax base. Romans could care less: Spaniard, Syrian, Egyptian, didn't matter: just pay taxes.
If you inflate currencies to the point taxes mean nothing: doom.
https://acoup.blog/2021/06/11/collections-the-queens-latin-o...
The population of the Roman Empire decline due to plague, while the Gothic population and culture had grown with better agricultural technology. When the Huns pushed vast numbers of Goths into the weakened Roman empire in the west they further weakened it. Italy starved, and they lost the ability to raise effective armies. Rome itself eventually fell to siege and starvation.
The author also talked about that in another post [1], though it's not the focus of it (mostly in the 'Kicking, Gouging and Screaming' part).
[1] https://acoup.blog/2021/07/30/collections-the-queens-latin-o...
The reason for that military decline is simple - Rome's power always resided in its large population who believed in Roman society enough to fight and die for it. After patricians made Rome into an entirely slave based society after destroying the free Rome and what power free, working class Romans had in Roman society, and even going to the extent of privatizing the army to not pay for it in taxes, the manpower and logistical advantage of Rome was lost. Private armies paid by rich strongmen are incompatible with democracy (civil wars era, rich patricians vying for power with their privately-raised legions leading to triumvirate and ending with octavian), and the privately funded army of a hierarchical empire is prone to not preferring to die for the sake of their society and instead fighting for their pay and loot. So the rapid decline.
Rome went down crashing when it forfeited its people. It deserved its fall.