Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed
friedkielbasa.substack.com
friedkielbasa.substack.com
I suspect there's a bit of bias in this, as you don't hear as much about the nations that come to the point of collapse and then somehow immediately recover, you hear more about those that disintegrate into decades of chaos and disorganization.
The essay also points to something else on my mind a lot lately, which is, when does that continuation of the status quo stop, and why? At what point did these societies start to see themselves as something else, and why? Is it always due to some fundamental breaking down of some governmental or military covenant?
There are many situations in history when people on one side back down right before shit hits the fan. Another good example of that was British subjugation of India. Doesn't matter how much hot gas Churchill would emit about keeping India forever British, when push came to shove, Clement was sympathetic to India's desire for freedom, and did not choose to plunge the empire into colonial war.
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[1] Which was up the steps to a guillotine, by order of the National Convention.
Focused on democratic turnarounds so its adjacent to your curiosity - but a great, enlightening read.
Also, the Roman Empire had terrible civil wars and recovered. Until it didn’t.
The crisis of the third century could easily have been the doom of Rome, with its crumbling splinter states infighting until they broke apart completely. Instead, the succession of Aurelian, Diocletian, and Constantine were able to build it back into a single unified state, if not so prosperous or dominant as the previous version had been.
The same chaos that took the west might well have claimed the east as well under different circumstances, but over time they were able to restabilize, recover, and start to grow again. If not for the Justinian Plague, the reconquest of Italy might have been an actual success instead of the phyrric one it turned into. If nothing else, they at least managed to hold onto fully half the empire until centuries later when the Arabic conquests began.
And speaking of those early conquests, there was absolutely no guarantee that those wars were something they would survive. The Empire was still recovering from a brutal, generations long war against Persia, which itself did not survive as an independent state. The sieges of Constantinople were harsh and brutal, and could have gone differently, but they held on and slowly regained control of what they could, until the Macedonian dynasty was at least the foremost power in the region once again.
But then they screwed it up, spent some years in decline from a succession of bad rulers culminating in a few key defeats to the Turkish invaders caused in large part by infighting from wealthy elites. After this, they spent most of a generation with various elites selling off bits of the remaining empire to secure a throne whose value continued dropping with each betrayal. This too could easily have been the end, but eventually things stabilized. One of these grasping leaders actually managed to hold onto power and slowly rebuild. Then one lucky crusade later, they actually have much of their pre-Turkish territory back.
Except oops, a grasping member of the imperial family seizes control and drives it into the ground. After that we get a succession of weak emperors unable to deal with the harsh realities of their situation, followed by a series of coups that results in one of the displaced heirs inviting the fourth crusade into empire, which eventually results in the capital being sacked and the empire shattering into tiny city states.
That really ought to have been the end. Except that one of these states managed to regain control, rebuild to a fraction of their old strength, and at least hold most of Greece and Western Anatolia. It was a tiny, tiny fraction of the pre-crusade empire, much less Rome at its height, but they were still able to carve another century or two of stability when all hope had seemed lost.
They didn’t entirely “reverse course”, the society changed and evolved at each point, but it remained recognizably Roman. And that’s just the western empire.
But also, pre-imperial Rome, a number of times. The Conflicts of the Orders, the entire late-Republican period from the Gracchi to the final demise of the Republic under Augustus.
And then the Eastern Empire had to reinvent itself multiple times. The near-collapse to the Caliphate. The Norman invasions of the Balkans and the First Crusade. The Fourth Crusade and its aftermath.
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Then in the West, you have a couple brief periods where Rome isn't subject to Eastern Imperial overlordship. Justinian fully reconquers it in the late 500s, and Rome stays nominally part of the Eastern Empire until its brief loss to the Lombards in the 750s. But Charlemange's father, Pepin the Short, reconquered Rome and confirmed the Pope's authority over it. A couple decades later, Charlemagne is crowned Emperor of the Romans. And Rome exists under a constantly shifting balance of authority between Popes and Emperors until the Italian Unification in the late 1800s.
It should also be noted that even before the end of the Western Imperial line in 476, Rome rarely served as the actual home of the emperors since the late 200s.
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So there's an interesting question of whether Rome ever did really fall, before the modern period. I would say "yes", in the sense that after the mid-400s, you never again have a sense of authority over the Mediterranean basin eminating from Rome (or the northern half of Italy). That's what people think of when they think of Rome. There are only brief periods of anything like that, and you never again have multi-generational, institutional authority.
But in other ways, there really is a continual reinvention of political systems that trace their lineage and cultural power to Rome. In that sense, it's kind of like China, which is similarly not really a continuous institution.
The thing is, though, they had help recovering, and help stepping back from the brink. Help won't be coming this time. Just as there are no George Marshalls in today's Republican party, and no room for any, there is no one outside the US who will come to our own rescue.
you're not creating a new society from whole cloth, you're taking already battered Big Dogs and getting them back to being Big again (minus the, you know, Nazis and bad actors).
but they were already societies that had cutting edge tech and made serious end-runs at taking over the world.
South Korea would be the only real example of where you took the poor agrarian area and eventually grew it into an asian tiger.
The major rupture is the Protestant Reformation, where the split between Protestant and Catholic Christianity proves irreconcilable, and results in the end of the notional idea of a unified Christendom. This is also when you start to see an end towards the practice of writing in the literate language of Christendom (i.e., Latin) and instead move towards working in the vernacular, especially in endeavors like scientific research.
[1] The major exception is Britain, where the end of Roman rule is very abruptly realized, and there is a distinct clear horizon between sub-Roman Britannia and Anglo-Saxon Britain. But the British experience is largely the exception, not the rule.
The Christendom ceased to be unified a whole lot earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism
(And also note that the latest Byzantine Emperors repeatedly tried to mend the schism to secure Western aid in stabilizing their empire.)
Armenia became a Christian state before the Roman Empire did, and Ethiopia not long after Rome did. (Both churches now part of Oriental Orthodoxy. Another state church around the area of Sudan emerged, too, the last of whom disappeared only in the 1600-1700s.)
The growth of Christianity in the Persian Empire created a major source of friction between the Roman and Persian Empires (the latter was nominally Zoroastrian, at that time also a proselytizing religion), creating space for the emergence of Islam, which would later lead to the end of both empires and the conversion of millions of Christians and Zoroastrians.
Christianity was never coterminous with the Roman Empire. It just seemed that way from the perspective of European history and culture. European Christianity eventually forgot about those other Christians (I'm not sure if the reverse was true, though). Relative to modern Protestantism, all of these churches have near identical theology, Roman Catholicism included. Which perhaps bolsters the point about Protestantism representing a significant break in the European historical narrative.
My headcanon is that while the elites of the empire found more value in controlling the reins of power rather than carving out their own fief — that's what prevented collapse.
Which religion brings those thoughts to mind? As an American I often find myself combining a handful of the American denominations into one, but I’m interested to hear what an outsider sees projected.
See for example the Mayflower: they left England due to prosecution, moved to The Netherlands, then left for the USA because there was too much freedom for them and they wanted to impose stricter rules.
There's of course the obvious heritage in the sense that the Reformation started in Germany, but movements like the Mennonites have never really caught on there or in The Netherlands.
They only took off once they landed in the USA, so I wouldn't call that a change of seat.
> Except for the religion, which seems to come from The Netherlands and Germany.
This underestimates how Germanic, Irish, Italian, and Hispanic America is.
For example - Hot dogs, Hamburgers, Budweiser, Chrysler, Rockefeller, Disney, the New York Times, Christmas Trees, Lutheran congregations, Mennonite congregations, etc are all German.
And having stayed in the UK for extended periods for work, it is significantly different culturally speaking than much of the US.
> Walt Disney was born on December 5, 1901, at 1249 Tripp Avenue in the Hermosa neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States. He was the fourth son of Elias Disney, who was born in the Province of Canada to Anglo-Irish parents, and Flora (née Call), an American of German and English descent
in concert there was the Great Revival and a whole new emergence of new world evangelicalism, a far cry from the Church of England.
Then Napoleon proceeds to kick them out of Europe, and the British re-establish themselves in North America and emerge as the pre-eminent superpower.
It took a couple of hundred years after that before Charlemagne and law and civilization again.
Modern fantasy picks up this trope, where the most powerful magic and the greatest structures etc are always in the past, only being rediscovered by people in the now.
The parallels are unmistakeable.
Sam Altman’s $27 Million House Burns: This Is How An Empire Dies https://youtu.be/OONViaKRs1k
Today we have taxation around 30 to 70 percent. Imagine if taxes would be at 10% and we would not have to sponsor all sort of "adventures".
I'm not sure why you got down voted. Maybe people are perceiving some subtext that I'm not.
Probably because the vast majority of politicians who attack taxation do so specifically to destroy social programs and quality of life multipliers, instead of the war machine or any other area of bearucratic waste, inefficiency, or corruption.
For example "No new wars" becomes "No, new wars!" and all the people who screamed about government spending clap as the military spend doubles, or feign disgust but fall in line eventually because "the other guy would've done the same" as admitting they were wrong or conned is inconceivable.
Also, literally nobody is paying a 70% effective tax rate anywhere. I'd be surprised if you could find anyone paying more than 50% without misinformation. Even when taxes were 90% for a short period of time, for an extreme minority, there were loopholes that meant none of them ever paid anything close to 90%.
Because he questioned taxes and the weekend crowd thinks that's heretical and won't even entertain the discussion of why things are that way let alone whether they're good or bad.
To say "Rome fell and nobody noticed", you have to have a different definition of Rome - or maybe we should say, assert a different essence of Rome - than the people who lived at the time.
I'm mostly arguing that people overindex on the political changes and don't see the ground level continuity. Map color changed != they're not Roman any more.
Regardless, I do enjoy asking "what made Rome Rome?" — I like the idea of the Byzantines being Roman in 1453 even though at that point it was tenuous.