The great myth of empire collapse
aeon.co
aeon.co
If anyone is interested in the rise and fall of empires, I strongly recommend the 'Fall of civilizations' podcast. It is a masterpiece of podcasting.
On the other hand if your quality of life depends a huge, complex - dare I say modern - international system of trade.. empire collapse is a big deal.
There is no doubt that urban centres basically disappeared after collapse of the Western Roman Empire, and that population density went significantly down. Once the city-based specialists were gone, so was any ability of rural folk to buy anything that could not be produced by primitive methods in their own community. And without an efficient trade network, there was no way to import food if local crops failed. Hence, famines, which the previous empire was mostly able to hold in check by moving food over the sea at big distances.
A major problem of the Early Middle Ages was diminished security - all those Viking, Avar, Hun and Pecheneg raids were absolutely real, and their targets weren't "the 1%". Of course loot from the rich would be taken, but so would poor young women for sex and their children into slavery, and their meagre food reserves for the raiders to eat. That is what happens to settled people without an efficient defense of their borders.
We have had two big imperial collapses right in Europe within living memory - the Nazi Reich (by war) and the Soviet Union (economic). Ask the survivors if they "noticed". They absolutely did. I would even say that the working class "noticed" the most, as they usually had fewest reserves to survive the subsequent chaos.
It wasn't that different in the past.
Rome was able to field huge armies by the 3rd century BC already, originally sourced from the Italian peninsula alone. In contrast, when the Eastern Roman forces finally defeated the Goths in the 540s, they were unable to hold Italy against a relatively minor Langobard invasion in 568, which is estimated to some 20 000 warriors. Why? For the lack of soldiers. They just couldn't put together the necessary garrisons and feed them from local sources.
That would have been unthinkable in 168. Anyone who would seriously want to conquer Italy at that time would have to field at least ten times as many soldiers.
In contrast, the Eastern Roman Empire at home was still able to field massive armies and even send some expeditions overseas, because the more developed civilizational structure was still present there, and with it, much higher population density.
That's true, but the contrast to other contemporary states is not felt to be one of population size. Rather, the Romans were able to mobilize a much larger share of their subject population into the army.
Basically, yes, but also no. There is a huge difference between being able to mobilize a large portion of your population for a short time vs. keeping the standing army indefinitely. With the latter, various intrinsic economic limitations will bite. Rome started with the "big temporary armies" model, but slowly transitioned into "big permanent armies" model, which required a lot of support from civilians.
Professional soldiers are economically unproductive; they have to be fed, clothed and provided with weapons. Just the necessary smelting of iron in order to equip a single legion would be a lot of work for blacksmiths, miners and lumberjacks who produced the necessary wood for charcoal. If a premodern empire can field tens of thousands of iron-clad professional soldiers indefinitely, it must have a lot of civilian workers supporting that army. Literally millions.
The precipitous drop in the size of field armies in the Early Middle Ages is a good indication of the precipitous drop of the entire economy which would prop them up.
Or it must continually conquer new territories to plunder and tax. And that was the Roman model. But finally the empire got too big to manage with the technology of the day. They weren't able to conquer new territories and that meant they could not afford the huge professiomal army. Which led to the collapse of the empire in the west. Or you could argue that it just morphed into the Roman catholic church.
(Not a historian, just been reading a bit about this recently)
Britain was considered Claudius' vanity project and probably was, on the net, an economic loss. Dacia was abandoned quite early precisely because it wasn't interesting enough to defend.
The legions remained pretty big long (centuries) after the expansion phase ceased.
The Romans spent centuries after that trying to conquer the Persians (Parthians/Sassanids).
> Britain was considered Claudius' vanity project and probably was, on the net, an economic loss.
Apparently there were 3 legions in Britain, which was (per conquered person) more than any other Roman territory. Certainly a lot for a damp island with some tin. ;0)
That is the point, though. An interesting neighbour to conquer is one which looks wealthy enough (no sense in conquering cold northern marshes full of mosquitos), and is weak enough so that you may actually conquer him and hold the territory without overextending yourself.
Most Roman neighbours by 1 AD would not pass the first test. The Persians would absolutely ace the first test, but they were equals to the Romans when it came to military prowess, and a danger to be reckoned with. As a result, the Eastern border was, overall, a source of weakness rather than profit.
Modern MBAs would probably call the Roman-Persian border a "cost center".
Germany under Hitler had a big army, it now has a small one. It's not because they population or economy collapsed. See also modern Russia where they are cranking up the army in spite of declining population and an iffy economy. It seems more about having a dictator who wants to do wars.
In ancient Europe, if you had some lucrative territory and not enough military force to defend it, you would be raided and invaded by your neighbours with absolute certainty. Maybe not the same summer, but quite soon. People had different understanding of morality and wars of conquest were glorified. Plus, quite a lot of the pre-state societies didn't have any centralization of power and a hot-headed noble could absolutely start a war just with his retinue, dragging his entire tribe into it.
This is just not the model on which the current EU works, although the Russo-Ukrainian war was a rude awakening in this regard.
What does that have to do with what they were doing in the 3rd century BC?
The Nazi Reich was very short lived (12ish years) and after its collapse, Western Germany was in a better place. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a bigger deal, as people had lived a few generations under the communist system and had to adapt rather suddenly to market economics and new governance. No doubt there was a shock period, but by and large people's lives got better. This is largely because of how globalized we are in modern day.
The Dark Ages lasted for hundreds of years and were a regression in quality of life for vast majority of western europe.
Due to a somewhat historically anomalous generosity of the winners, who (from a mixture of humanity and economic motives) decided to invest into its rebuilding.
In earlier times, debellatio of an enemy state after a long, vicious existential war would end in a way similar to what the Romans did to Carthage.
And some 75 per cent of that industry was in Allied hands. It made strategic sense to rebuild the country in face of a Soviet threat and make it a factory for the Allies (notably, the German army was only reconstituted much later, in 1955) instead of destroying it.
Yes, definitely. The USA wanted as many allies as it could get against the USSR, even former enemies.
>German factories were, on average, equipped with more modern machines than British ones.
Thankfully the Germans wasted amounts of resources on not very useful weapons, such as the V2 rocket (technologically brilliant, strategically pretty useless) and the King Tiger (unreliable and IIRC cost somewhere around 20 times as much to make as a typical allied tank).
The Romans used their professional army to destroy many of the cultures unfortunate enough to be within their reach (Dacia, Carthage etc). They then wrote the history to make themselves look good and the 'barbarians' look bad. Consequently the fall of the Roman empire is seen as a disaster. But the Romans were a brutal bunch. They used to watch people being mauled by wild animals and gladiators hacking each other to death as entertainment, after all. Many of the people that the Romans conquered must have been glad to see the back of them.
By the time of Western Roman Empire collapsing, the realm was Christian for two centuries and gladiator games et al. were banned for so long that no one alive would remember them happening. Most of the local languages were also gone and the previously conquered people considered themselves Romans and spoke Latin. They didn't have any Wikipedia or nationalist schooling system to teach them that they were once Celts or Illyrs, 400 years ago.
(Even in our modern world where history is taught and movies and books are abundant, few people have any idea of who conquered whom in 1620 AD and what were the consequences for their distant ancestors. This is a domain of history geeks. No modern German loses their sleep over whether his city was once plundered by the Palatinate forces or burnt to the ground by a Saxon army, and would not dismantle modern Germany just because such atrocities once took place.)
Also, the Roman empire did not dissolve into a vacuum, with the previous provinces simply declaring their long desired independence. It was conquered from the outside, and the attackers would not necessarily treat the subdued population any better. They might, or they might not.
I bet most people in the US could tell you in broad strokes who used to live in North America and who conquered them.
But the Roman situation was more akin to "what precisely happened during the Thirty Years War". I really like history, but I wouldn't be able to tell you if Münster or Würzburg sided with those or these.
Unlike the conquest of North America, which usually resulted in physical destruction of the Indian tribes and their displacement by the colonists, Roman conquests tended to absorb the conquered polity, often with the basic social structure still intact, so the nobility would remain in local control, the priests would remain priests of that particular local god etc. This tends to take the edge off and make assimilation easier.
Among the remaining tribes and the decimated numbers, many did in fact eventually integrate with Spanish, French, or English settlers, particularly the tribes that allied with them against another rival tribe, such as the Tlaxcalans who aided the Spanish in conquering the Aztecs, and subsequently integrated.
We hear the most and remember the most the tribes which warred the most fiercely (ie Commanche, Apache, Sioux, etc), however, we scarcely remember the tribes they themselves slaughtered, enslaved, and scalped, such as the Crow and Pawnee (who would ally with the US Army) . And some like the Iroquois were generally peaceful and continue to this day.
We don't know as much about who conquered whom in pre-Colombian America, other than standout examples like the Incans, Mayans, and Aztecs. Oral histories fade rather quickly especially when decimated by war, famine, or disease. But even when conquered and absorbed into a society, how quickly would the descendents forget if properly integrated? A few generations is all it would take. We speak English because there was a society known as the Angles that I know almost nothing about. Are there any pure blood Angles still around? Who knows? They were conquered by the Saxons and no one can today tell you the difference. I'd reckon that the Anglo or Saxon distinction went away rather quickly.
That is a fair point. But I believe the Romans were still a pretty brutal and repressive regime right up the the end. And also levied high taxes. Whether the regional powers that replaced them were any better, was a matter of luck I suppose.
But at nearly the same time, the Goths absolutely destroyed Milan.
History is rarely straightforward.
This is just wrong, people are typically very well aware of the history of the area they grew up in. If you ask people in Sweden if Denmark once ruled Sweden, I'd bet around 99% of Swedish people would say yes. That ended 1523, they probably wouldn't know that exact date but they would know it happened for sure, people joke about that all the time. If you ask people in Finland if they were once ruled by Sweden, I'd bet 100% would say yes. If you asked exactly what periods people will be shaky, but they will know Sweden once ruled them and then Russia did rule them.
I think everyone goes into detail about their home area in the 9 years you study history in school, at least what happened the past 1000 years since that is recent and well documented, studying every single recorded war and rebellion for the area you live in is normal.
And the consequences? You can see them all over the places, you see the language changing, you see cultural connections everywhere with the conquerors etc, even hundreds of years later. Even today you have remnants from Mexico owning Texas like Cathedral of San Fernando, people wouldn't think USA built that with such a name.
Even USA does this, although its history doesn't stretch 1000 years back but the wars USA was in I think are well known by most Americans. And this goes for states as well, I'd doubt you would find many who grew up in Texas that doesn't know it was once a Mexican province and was conquered by USA. People in New York might be more shaky about that, but that's because the war didn't really affect their area.
Many areas of the world existed outside the bounds of extensive record keeping. Thousands of tribal identities and city-states were absorbed into the modern day nation state. Even Germany did not exist as a country until 1871. At one point there was 300 principalities in the region now known as Germany.
The Cathedral of San Fernando was built by the Spanish in 1738, not Mexico. Mexico didn't exist as a nation state until the establishment of the First Mexican Empire in 1821. Meanwhile the Republic of Texas was founded in 1835, just 14 years later, as it broke off from a Mexican dictatorship. The Texans were wise to keep around beautiful and historic works from the Spanish and even retain the names of many Spanish established cities (although they might pronounce them differently as in Amarillo).
Texas wasn't conquered by the U.S., it was a sovereign republic for 10 years before the Texans voted to join the U.S.
Either way history is extremely complex and even as we know so much there is a lot that went undocumented and is lost to the ether. There are many cases where entire cultures were assimilated away, by the Romans and otherwise.
We were all happy to escape the Russian yoke, but the transformation was really challenging, not to mention the potential threat of wars as various ancient ethnic hatreds, suppressed by the defunct empire, reappeared.
A lot of people lost their jobs, a lot of currencies collapsed and took people's life savings with them... There was a wave of crime and various oligarchs tried to lift themselves above the law.
And your healthcare quip is way off. In many places further East, basic healthcare structure collapsed, and diseases like tuberculosis or HIV either returned or spread anew massively.
The situation began improving by re-attachment of the newly free countries to another, more benign empire, which was the EU.
I suspect the fact that I spent the entire time with ethnic Russians played a role in this, as it sounded like the Latvians had been second-class citizens in their own country.
So I'm not sure that "the death toll wasn't that high" should be casually interpreted as "it wasn't that bad for regular people". Yes, most of them lived. That doesn't make it benign.
(Hmm, I seem to have used a lot of dashes in the first paragraph. No, I'm not an AI.)
The Syrian situation is not directly comparable. With modern logistics, it is way, way easier to feed even big masses of displaced people. We can produce food efficiently and we can move it over long distances before it spoils. If you run away from active fighting, chances are that you actually survive, even though the refugee camps are miserable.
Neither was true in the Early Middle Ages and if an invader displaced tens of thousands of people from somewhere, they would just die of hunger. The capacity to take care of sudden crowds of refugees just wasn't there.
Today being imprecise with language to smear one’s political opponents is in fashion; a lot of talk about “empire” and “regime” etc. is just propaganda.
The fall of a government will leave a power vacuum and people will rush to fill it; violence might be part of the fall but will almost certainly be part of the competition to be the replacement. We have dozens of examples in the last hundred years.
During all those times, people have to live their lives; things go on pretty much as normal for most people not involved in the struggle for power. However there are disruptions to utilities and financial systems; many people lose their life savings and sometimes feeding people is hard, let alone doing business like manufacturing.
The only thing that is “apocalyptic” about the fall of a government and its replacement with a new one, is when the new government is full of radical ideologues that use the force of government, and ultimately violence, against their political opponents, such as in the Russian Revolution, the Nazi rise to power, and Mao’s rise to power.
This is not a foregone conclusion; we didn’t see intentional mass starvation or genocide in Iran, for example, although there were thousands of executions as the new regime purged its opponents.