Did American volcanoes deal the final blow to the Roman Empire? | Hacker News Reader

Did American volcanoes deal the final blow to the Roman Empire?

telegraph.co.uk

27 pointsmml29 comments

All empires end. The cycle of all empires from birth to death is explained in this book by Sir John Glubb who commanded the Arab Legion many decades ago.

http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2014/092814_files/...

    (a) We do not learn from history because our studies are brief and prejudiced.
    (b) In a surprising manner, 250 years emerges as the average length of national 
    greatness.
    (c) This average has not varied for 3,000 years. Does it represent ten 
    generations?
    (d) The stages of the rise and fall of great nations seem to be:
    The Age of Pioneers (outburst) 
    The Age of Conquests
    The Age of Commerce
    The Age of Affluence
    The Age of Intellect
    The Age of Decadence.
    (e) Decadence is marked by:
    Defensiveness
    Pessimism
    Materialism
    Frivolity
    An influx of foreigners
    The Welfare State
    A weakening of religion.
    (f) Decadence is due to:
    Too long a period of wealth and power Selfishness
    Love of money
    The loss of a sense of duty.
    (g) The life histories of great states are
    amazingly similar, and are due to internal factors.
    (h) Their falls are diverse, because they are largely the result of external 
    causes.
    (i) History should be taught as the history of the human 
    race, though of course with emphasis on the history of the 
    student’s own country.

Those stages are quite interesting. I suppose the United States is somewhere between Intellect and Decadence? Commerce being the turn of the last century (Industrial revolution) and Affluence being post-WWII.

The eruptions happened in 563 AD? That is almost a century ~after~ what it regarded as the "Fall of Rome". Italy was being governed by Germans, at that point. What a clickbaity title. Maybe it made life harder for Constantinople, but the eastern empire was getting hammered on all sides just like the west, but managed to hang on.

FYI, I've really enjoyed the History of Rome and the History of Byzantium podcasts. http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/ http://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/

As with all speculations about the roman empire, it's complicated and the money really just moved east, while the west just turned into the catholic church and really struggled maintaining order for a few centuries.

Was it the volcanoes? Or maybe the barbarians? Maybe the communist-like christians? Maybe the corporation-like regions?

Talking about the fall of the roman empire is like talking about the rise of the PC: inevitable, and a mind-boggling number of variables were involved with the particulars.

One of the most disturbing things I ever read was from here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/10n/why_safety_is_not_safe/

>...The great civilizations of Europe and China were roughly on par, the former having almost caught up over the previous few centuries; yet Chinese oceangoing ships were arguably still better than anything Europe could build... Perhaps China might have reached the Americas before Europeans did, and the shape of the world might have been very different...

>...By the 16th century, the fleets had vanished...to this day there is no consensus on the underlying factors... Some writers have blamed flat terrain, which others have disputed; some have blamed rice agriculture and its need for irrigation systems. Likely there were factors nobody has yet understood; perhaps we never will.

>An entire future that might have been, was snuffed out by some terrible force compared to which war, plague and famine were mere pinpricks - and yet even with the benefit of hindsight, we still don't truly understand what it was.

>Nor is this an isolated case. From the collapse of classical Mediterranean civilization to the divergent fates of the US and Argentina, whose prospects looked so similar as recently as the early 20th century, we find more terrible than any war or ordinary disaster are forces which operate unseen in plain sight and are only dimly understood even after the fact.

>The saving grace has always been the outside: when one nation, one civilization, faltered, another picked up the torch and carried on; but with the march of globalization, there may soon be no more outside.

>...we react instantly to the lesser death that comes in blood and fire, but the greater death that comes in the dust of time, is to our minds invisible.

This isn't a new idea. David Keys wrote a book "Catastrophe" 15 years ago dealing with the same subject, although in his case he picked a different volcano as the probable cause.

He also looked at the effects on a world-wide basis, not just in Europe.

To quote from the book's marketing literature: "In AD 536, a volcanic eruption meant our planet was enveloped by a cloak of lethal dust which changed the climate for decades. The sun's rays grew dim and total darkness reigned for days. It was a catastrophe of unparalleled proportions."

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Catastrophe-Investigation-Origins-Mo...

Here they are listing 210 reasons/theories for the collapse of the Rome, would volcanoes make reason #211 ?

https://www.utexas.edu/courses/rome/210reasons.html

"The natural catastrophes led to widespread famine and was responsible for the Great Justinian Plague which wiped out one third of Europeans"

that's strange - the plague of Justinan was the same as the bubonic plague, what do volcano erruptions have in common with the black death?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_of_Justinian

That page says "The outbreak in Constantinople was thought to have been carried to the city by infected rats on grain boats arriving from Egypt.[7] To feed its citizens, the city and outlying communities imported massive amounts of grain—mostly from Egypt. Grain ships may have been the original source of contagion, as the rat (and flea) population in Egypt thrived on feeding from the large granaries maintained by the government."

The headline says trigger, but the article (and the subheading!) makes a case that a series of eruptions was a knock-out blow. I guess that's in keeping with Betteridge's law, so the answer to the headline's question can remain "no."

Ok, we replaced that bit with language from the subtitle.

I believe Mr. Betteridge has retired.

Makes even less sense than that. The Western Roman Empire finally fell in 476, these eruptions were in 535/6 and 539 and refer to events in the Eastern Roman Empire, which definitely did not suffer a knock-out blow at the time, or fall for another 900 years!

Added: linked article justifies this being about the Roman Empire with "Historians have variously dated the final collapse to the sack of Rome in AD410 by the Visigoth king Alaric, the deposing of the last Roman emperor by the German chieftain Odoacer in AD476 and the death of Justinian I, the last Roman emperor to try to reconquer the western half of the empire, in AD565."

It seems like we've showed that the blackout in the sky that occurred around that time was almost certainly due to a volcanic eruption in North America. Whether it was a significant factor in the fall of the empire is still up for debate.

Which volcanoes?

I was looking for this too, simply so I could share it with the caption "America so powerful it ended the Roman Empire."

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