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Comment by curt | Hacker News Reader

At the end of the Western Roman Empire in 300AD they became monotheistic. The interesting piece is, what if they had been able to eliminate all the civil wars? In that case their would have been a unified force to resist the rise and spread of Islam. Islam filled a void left by the collapse of the Roman Empire even though the Western Empire still existed.

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Not exactly. When the Western Empire fell, the Eastern Empire retained Constantinople as its capital, from which it engaged in a protracted series of increasingly expensive wars with the Sassanid Empire (modern-day Iran). These conflicts peaked in the early 7th century, at which point the Sassanids suffered an astonishing implosion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassanid_Empire

That was the vacuum that Islam (then nascent) filled. Only after seizing the remnants of Persia (and, critically, control of the silk routes running through it) could the first Caliphate move into territory once controlled by Constantinople. By the time the second Caliphate had extended Islam's control into Spain, more than four centuries had passed since the abandonment of Rome as a capital city (330 CE), after which the city persevered for another century before being sacked entirely. However the Western Empire was long gone by the time Islam appeared in the territory it once controlled.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_expansion_of_Caliph...

The thing is that a lot of what we associate today with Islamism is really a property of monotheistic zealotry in general.

In fact, the very word "Zealot" originally referred to a particular religio-political movement that sometimes dabbled in what we might in today's terms call "terrorism".

I'm not sure that would have helped that much really. The Eastern Empire had been propping up the West for years with trade and money. By splitting off, the East was able to keep all that funding for itself. However, internal/external struggles, the Forth Crusade[1] and political intrigue ended up being the downfalls. I do think there is some "what if?" factor in all that. Such as what if the unified empire had not wasted all those resources on the civil wars.

In some ways, the Western Empire was sort of doomed from the time of Augustus onward when their embedded fear of the German tribes was established[0]. The defeat at Teutoburg Forest and the loss of around 20,000 Roman legionaries stopped all expansion into Germany and most likely lead the the eventual confrontation with the Goths. There's also a "what if" due to the Huns and pushing the Goths across the Danube, but if it were not the Huns, it could have been other factors as well (famines or another barbarian tribe).

The Eastern Empire almost reconquered the Western half in the 6th century under Justinian[2] and Belisarius[3]. However, internal bickering and mistrust led to squandering much of the gains that were won.

The Islamic forces were also able to capitalize on the chaos brought on by the perpetual wars between the Eastern Empire and the Sassanids[4] as well as the various barbarian tribes (such as the Bulgars and the various Gothic tribes that filled the vacuum of the former Western Empire) that still preyed on the Constantinople and other areas. There was just too many fires to contain them all at once and when one was put out, another was started in another region.

Honestly, I think it was for the best the Roman Empire ended for the sake of renewal (as much as I love Roman History). It had started to stagnate by the forth century and the more Greek side in the Eastern Empire was far from being the intellectual and cultural epicenter that it was during Classical Greek times. Sure, they built great things such as the Hippodrome and the Hagia Sofia, but those were just reincarnations of similar things done under the unified empire.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Crusade

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisarius

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinian

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassanid_Empire

One thing that's a bit confusing about "The Roman Empire" is that it bifurcates into the Western and Eastern empires, which were two wildly different polities with a shared name.

If you thought the gcc/egcs fork was a big deal ...

Yeah, very true. The Germanic Tribes were probably as much, if not more Roman by the 6th Century than the Eastern Empire (Byzantines) were. From my understanding, the Germanic tribes did not exactly want to destroy the empire, they just wanted to be a part of the Roman Empire and share in its protection--to be Roman and share in their luxuries and technology. However, the Romans were too distrusting of them and treated them as second or third class citizens and isolating them on worthless lands far away from the core empire[1]. It was also business as usual for the Romans and how they treated many of the civilizations they saw as inferior--sucker them out of whatever you can and assume they're too dumb to know. They even traded the Goths dog meat in return for their children[1]. However, the Germans were smarter than the Romans gave them credit for and realized what was going on. When the Germanic tribes saw how weak the Romans were and after years of mistreatment, they decided they had enough.

Byzantines with a more Greek Culture (and spoken language) and different religious practices in some ways, despite being part of the same Catholic Church. I'd imagine that many in the West by the time of Justinian viewed them as invaders as much as any of the other groups.

Mistrust of foreign cultures still plagues us today in most countries throughout the world. It's too bad we do not learn from the mistakes of the past, such as those of the Romans and Gothic tribes. Isolating your fellow man because he speaks a different language or has a different culture/religion ends up making a country less safe instead of more safe.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_War_(376-382)#Outbreak

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