Why Did Rome Fall? It's Time for New Answers
by Peter Heather
Mr. Heather is professor at Worcester College, University of Oxford,
and the author of The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome
and the Barbarians (Oxford University Press).
The Roman Empire stretched from Hadrian’s Wall to northern Iraq, and
from the mouth of the Rhine to the Atlas Mountains of North Africa. It
was the largest state that western Eurasia has ever seen. It was also
extremely long-lived. Roman power prevailed over most of these domains
for five hundred years -- and all this in a period where the speed of
bureaucratic functioning and of military response rattled along at 45
kilometres a day, something like one tenth of modern counterparts.
Measured in terms of how long it took real people to get places, the
Roman Empire was arguably ten times as big as it appears from the map.
The
epic scale of the Empire’s existence has always sharpened interest in
its collapse, particularly that of the west, which ceased to exist on
the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476. Since Gibbon -- while some
role has always been allocated to outside invaders -- explanation has
tended to focus on a range of internal transformations and problems as
the prime movers in the processes of Roman imperial collapse. By the
mid-twentieth century, causation commonly concentrated upon preceding
economic collapse.
This entire vision of late Roman economic
collapse was based, however, on assorted references to hyper-inflation
in the third century and to various problems associated with the raising
of taxation in the fourth. It has been overturned since the 1970s,
when archaeologists developed, for the first time, a method for sampling
general levels of rural productivity. Modern ploughing bites deep into
long-submerged stratigraphic layers, bringing to the surface much
ancient pottery. Long-term regional survey projects spent long summers
collecting every fragment in the target zones, and every winter
analyzing the results. Once Roman pottery sequences became so
well-known that many pots could be dated to within ten to twenty years,
and excavations established what surface density of pottery was likely
to reflect the existence of a settlement underneath, two things became
possible. Dense pottery assemblages made it possible to estimate the
number of Roman settlements in any region, and the dating patterns of
those assemblages then made it possible to know when precisely any
particular settlement had been occupied. Against all expectation, the
fourth century – immediately prior to fifth century collapse - has
emerged as the period of maximum agricultural activity, not the
minimum as the old views supposed, for the vast majority of the
Empire. Total rural output, and hence total GIP – gross imperial
product – was clearly higher in the later Roman period, than ever
before. It is now no longer possible to explain fifth-century political
collapse in terms of preceding economic crisis.
What the hyper-inflation was all about, in fact, was minting enough
silver coins to pay an army which was increasing in size out of all
proportion to the metalwork stock of silver available. And this,
straightforwardly, was the product of exogenous shock. From the 230s
onwards, the Sassanian dynasty reorganized a huge region of the Near
East - Iraq and Iran in modern terms - to create a superpower rival to
the Roman Empire. The new power announced itself with three massive
victories over different Roman Emperors, the last of whom, Valerian, was
first captured, then skinned and tanned after his death. The Persian
threat was eventually countered by the end of the third century, but it
took fifty years of military and fiscal adjustment to mobilize the
necessary resources. This narrower vision of third-century crisis makes
much more sense of the overwhelming archaeological evidence for
fourth-century prosperity, and, of the brute fact that, even after the
fall of the west in the fifth century, the eastern half of the Empire –
operating with the same institutions – carried on successfully for
centuries. It also poses Gibbon’s question again. If there is no sign
of major dislocation within the late Roman imperial system of the fourth
century, why did its western half collapse in the fifth?
Early in
the third century, the traditional cast of small, largely Germanic
groupings which had long confronted Roman power across its European
frontiers was replaced by a smaller number of larger entities. This
refashioning prevailed all along Rome’s European frontiers, from the new
Frankish coalition at the mouth of the Rhine, to the Black Sea where
Goths emerged as the new power in the land. As another large body of
archaeological evidence has now shown, much more was afoot here than
mere changes of name. In the course of the Roman period – broadly the
first four centuries AD – central and northern Europe saw its own
economic revolution. There was a massive increase in agricultural
production, fuelled by an intensification of farming regimes,
accompanied by unmistakable signs of increasing differentials in wealth
and status between different sections of society, with an ever greater
prominence being assumed by a militarized segment of the male
population. It is these broader transformations which underlay the
appearance of the new names on the other side of Rome’s frontiers, and
most had been stimulated by economic, political and even cultural
interactions with the Roman Empire. These new entities proved much more
formidable than those they replaced, operating as only semi-subdued
clients of the Empire. They did contribute to imperial armies on
occasion, but also required regular Roman military campaigning and
targeted foreign aid to willing kings to keep them in line. The balance
of power in its favor, which had allowed the Roman Empire to come into
existence, was being eroded not just by the Sassanians, but also by the
new structures of non-Roman Europe.
Some important contingent
sequences of events also contributed to the fall of the western Empire.
From c.370, the nomadic Huns suddenly exploded to prominence on the
eastern fringes of Europe, generating two major pulses of migration into
the Roman world, one 376-80, the other 405-8. By 440, their different
original components – more than half a dozen in total - had coalesced
into two major groupings, each much larger than any of the groups which
had existed beyond the frontier in the fourth century: the Visigoths in
southern Gaul, the Vandals in North Africa, both representing
amalgamations of three separate immigrant groups of 10,000 warriors
plus. The immigrants had in the process inflicted great damage on west
Roman state structures, by first mincing its armies and then preventing
their proper replacement either by ravaging or annexing key areas of its
tax base. This in turn allowed Anglo-Saxons and Franks to take over
former Roman territories in Britain and north-eastern Gaul, weakening
the state still further. The immigrants also acted as alternative
sources of political magnetism for local Roman elites. Given that Roman
elites were all landowners, and could not therefore move their assets
to more desirable locales, they were faced with little choice but to
come to terms with immigrants as they became locally dominant, or risk
losing their wealth. In this way, the west Roman state eventually
withered to extinction, if not without vigorous martial efforts to
restore its fortunes, as its revenues fell away and it could no longer
put effective forces in the field.
Without the contingent impact
of the Huns, the two main pulses of migration would never have occurred
in short enough order to prevent the Roman authorities from dealing with
the migrants, which had each group arrived separately, they certainly
could. The important contribution of internal Roman limitations is also
clear, not least in the state’s inability to increase agricultural
production still further beyond fourth-century levels as crisis began to
bite after 400. The ability of the immigrants to detach Roman
landowners politically from their allegiance also reflects the naturally
loose levels of control exercised locally by such a geographically vast
state encumbered with such primitive modes of communication. But even
giving these points their due weight, external factors – in the persons
of the immigrants of 376-80 and 405-8 – were the prime mover behind
western imperial collapse. The Empire’s internal limitations only came
into play because the immigrants put pressure on its structures, and
there is no sign that, by themselves, these limitations – none of them
new - would have been enough to bring the Empire down, any more than
they had been over the preceding half a millennium.
The more
contingent aspects of the crisis could not have had the same cumulative
effect, likewise, without the preceding transformation of Germanic
society. Had the Huns arrived in the second century, the Germanic
groups that might then have been set on the march would not have been
large enough to survive their initial brush with Roman power. By the
same token, the processes of political amalgamation required to generate
warrior groupings of a few tens of thousands, on the scale of the
fifth-century Visigoths or Vandals, would have been so complex,
involving so many small contingents, that they could not have been
completed successfully before the individual groups were destroyed by a
Roman Empire, which prior to the rise of Persia, still had plenty of
fiscal/military slack in its systems. There is a strong sense,
therefore, in which imperial Roman power and wealth created its own
nemesis, by generating opposing forces which were powerful enough to
match its military might. And here, if nowhere else, the fall of Rome
might still have lessons which modern Empires would do well to ponder.
The answer to this treasonous perversion is really quite simple:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That
to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed, -That whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of
the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and
Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long
established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and
accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to
suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by
abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train
of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a
design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it
is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards
for their future security....--Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.
Our forebears threw off the tyrannical yoke that was attempted to be fashioned, and bind them down in slavery. Will we, their posterity, follow the brave example they set down for us?
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