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FALL OF THE WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE

Death toll: 7 million¹

Rank: 19

Type: failed state

Broad dividing line: Rome vs. the barbarians

Time frame: 395–455 CE

Location: western Europe

Major state participants: Eastern Roman Empire, Western Roman Empire

Major non-state participants: Alans, Angles, Burgundians, Franks, Heruli, Huns, Ostrogoths, Saxons, Vandals, Visigoths

Who usually gets the most blame: decadent Romans, barbarous Germans, Attila the Hun

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE IS THE ARCHETYPE OF EVERY collapse in human history. It is the giant metaphorical mirror we hold up to whichever era we live in. If we can find some parallel, no matter how superficial, between Rome and today, then we can predict and pontificate about whatever dangerous road we are traveling. If we point out only the similarities between, say, the Iraq War and the Spanish-American War, then a few history buffs might nod in recognition and turn the page, but if we find similarities between the Iraq War and the fall of Rome, then we can easily spread panic and alarm throughout the population, thereby earning our hefty pundit salaries.

A Really, Really Short History of the Roman Empire before the Fall

The Roman Republic became the Roman Empire with the accession of Augustus in 14 BCE. For the next few centuries the imperial apparatus muddled along, surviving every threat. The emperors ran the gamut from the criminally insane to the honest and sensible in an almost predictable pattern. A few decades of decent emperors would be interrupted when the succession fell to a dangerous psychotic. After a brief reign of terror, he would be assassinated, and a short, sharp civil war would sort out all of the claimants. Then a new string of reasonably competent emperors would restore calm. Sure, it’s messier than the television attack ads and colorful sex scandals that determine who gets to run the typical modern democracy, but it worked well enough for generations.

After several centuries of this, the Roman Empire was very different from the Rome of popular imagination, where Julius Caesar raced a chariot against Pontius Pilate, and Caligula was smothered at Pompeii, while Spartacus seduced Cleopatra.^a The newer empire was Christian, and it no longer had much to do with the city of Rome. Emperors came from the Romanized populations of the provinces rather than the city itself. In fact, the empire’s ethnicity was becoming blended and homogenized. Latin had replaced the indigenous languages across much of western Europe, and every free man in the empire was legally a citizen, subject to a uniform set of laws. These new Romans even wore trousers on occasion rather than togas. They were turning medieval.

For administrative convenience, the empire was usually split into two autonomous halves—the Western Roman Empire headquartered in Milan, and the Eastern Roman Empire headquartered in Constantinople. The system in place near the end made sense on paper but never worked. The emperor of each half (titled Caesar) selected and groomed his preferred successor (titled Augustus), and the succession was supposed to pass peacefully from one to the other without interruption. In practice, however, the death of an emperor often created a power vacuum, a civil war, and a usurper, with the throne eventually passing to the most audacious. Often the Caesar of the other half had practical approval of the choice since he was the one with armies at his command when the throne became available. This kept the two halves linked rather than drifting apart. It was common for close kinsmen to rule both halves at the same time, such as the brothers Valens and Valentinian, who became East and West Caesar in 364.

Goths Arrive

When a dangerous new breed of barbarian, the Huns, appeared on the northeastern horizon of the civilized world in the late 300s, all of the Germanic tribes in their path fled or surrendered. The Visigoths escaped across the Danube River, the northern border of the Roman Empire, and begged Eastern Emperor Valens to save them. He allowed them to settle along the south bank as federates, a kind of subordinate vassal living in an autonomous enclave. The Visigoths placed the emphasis on autonomous, while the local Roman officials preferred to stress the subordinate part of the equation. Pretty soon, disagreements turned into open revolt.

In 378, Valens marched the Roman army against the Visigoths, who were approaching the Roman city of Adrianople and planning a pillage. Valens arrived with 40,000 troops, camped for the night, and then advanced against the Gothic infantry, who had drawn up in a circle of wagons. Valens attacked in proper legionary order, but the laager held until Gothic cavalry arrived and enveloped his army. The encircled Romans were squeezed, crushed, and annihilated, resulting in the worst Roman defeat in recent memory. They never even found the emperor’s body. It was somewhere in the pile, just one anonymous corpse amid the tens of thousands.

Peace Returns to Constantinople

Although it’s customary to treat the Battle of Adrianople as the beginning of the end for Rome, nothing else happened for a generation. The Western emperor (Valentinian’s son Gratian) gave the Eastern Empire and his sister to one of the few high generals of good Roman family, Theodosius, who ruled competently for twenty years.

Theodosius was a bit of a thug. He once massacred seven thousand inhabitants of Thessalonica because a mob there lynched one of his generals for imprisoning a popular charioteer, but it’s worth noting that the empire was not swirling irrevocably down the drain at this point. The Romans were still capable of producing a strong emperor who would be remembered for what he did rather than for what was done to him.

Theodosius contained the Visigoths and settled them back into their little enclave. The Battle of Adrianople had shown the tactical superiority of the Gothic method of combat (armored cavalry fighting with lances) over the traditional Roman legion, so Theodosius began a massive recruiting of barbarians into the Roman army.

His reign is more notable for religious rather than political events. A firm Christian, Theodosius outlawed paganism and transferred the title of supreme pontiff (high priest) from the emperor to the bishop of Rome. He put a stop to pagan rituals like the Olympic Games and allowed Christian mobs to destroy ancient shrines such as the Serapeum, which was part of the library complex in Alexandria. The sacred flame of the Vestal Virgins in Rome was extinguished after a thousand years of careful tending. Pagans warned that this would anger the gods and bring nothing but trouble. Apparently they were right.

Despite ominous portents, Roman civilization was still thriving intellectually at this point. Saint Augustine, the theologian who stands second only to Saint Paul in creating the Christianity we know today, came to prominence during this era. Augustine had spent his youth enjoying the pleasures of the flesh; then he grew up, got religion in 386 CE, and ruined it for everyone else. He worked over the problem of free will, developed original sin, damned unbaptized babies, outlawed sex, and turned Christianity from a popular movement into a postgraduate philosophy course. Whenever your eyes glaze over while studying religion, or whenever you find yourself wondering where Jesus said that, that’s Saint Augustine at work.

Christianity was well established throughout the Roman sphere by this time. All of the Germanic tribes lined up along the border had converted long ago, but unfortunately the empire had declared their version, Arianism, a heresy for disagreeing over the Trinity. Arians believed that the Son didn’t exist until the Father created him, unlike the Catholics of the Roman Empire, who believed that Father and Son coexisted eternally. It doesn’t really matter except that people will fight about anything.

Politics in Milan

Meanwhile, the Western Roman Empire was torn by internal disputes. Twice recently, ambitious generals had assassinated the Western emperor and Theodosius had to intervene to remove the usurper. The first time, when Gratian was killed in 383, Theodosius restored the line of the legitimate family (Valentinian II), but the second time, in 394, he kept the Western Empire for himself. For one year—and for the last time—a single emperor ruled a unified empire from Britain to Arabia.

When Theodosius died in 395, the empire was divided between his two sons. His eleven-year-old son, Honorius, got the Western Empire, while the slightly older Arcadius got the Eastern. Honorius would rule for the next three decades, until 423, during which the important collapsing began, so let’s blame it all on him, even if he was only eleven years old.

The man who really ran the Western Empire was the general and regent, Stilicho. He is usually described as a Vandal general in Roman service, but he was born and raised a Roman. Although his father was a Vandal chieftain commanding auxiliaries in the Roman army, Stilicho’s mother was pure Roman. In any case, Stilicho’s background was not unusual. Most high army commanders by this time were only a generation or so removed from barbarian mercenary ancestors.

All Hell Breaks Loose

In the Eastern Empire, before Theodosius was cold, the Visigoths under Alaric decided to move. Like most savages, the Goths were rather vague on the concept of institutions, but they believed strongly in personal bonds. With Theodosius dead, they considered themselves freed from their agreement to settle down peacefully. They pulled up stakes and began marauding up and down the Balkans against light, ineffective Roman resistance. By 402 the Visigoths had broken through to Italy. With an enemy army on the civilized side of the Alps for the first time in six hundred years, Honorius (now eighteen) removed the court from Milan, which was dangerously exposed on a wide plain, to Ravenna, on the coast behind impassible swamps. Stilicho beat the Visigoths, who pulled back to reconsider their options.

With so much of the Roman army in Italy chasing Visigoths, the northern frontier was lightly defended, so in 406, a big barbarian horde—mostly the Germanic Vandals and Suebi, along with the Iranian Alans—crossed the frozen Rhine River at Mainz without opposition. They rampaged across Gaul, burning, killing, and raping, until they crossed the Pyrenees into Spain. The poet Orientius, bishop of Auch, described it a few years later:

Some lay as food for dogs; for many a burning roof

Both took their soul, and cremated their corpse.

Through the villages and villas, through the countryside and market-place,

Through all the regions, on all the roads, in this place and that, there was Death, Misery, Destruction, Burning, and Mourning.

The whole of Gaul smoked on a single funeral pyre. ²

Stopping the invasion was not the highest priority at court. Honorius was more worried that Stilicho was becoming too powerful, so he had him assassinated in 408.

Seeing the chaos unfold on the continent, Constantine, the commander of the Roman army in Britain, declared himself emperor of the Western Empire. He crossed into Gaul to assert his claim, leaving the Britons to fend for themselves under an independence they didn’t want.

With loyal troops so scarce, Honorius was in no position to fight Constantine. Instead, he was forced to accept him as co-emperor, but before Emperor Constantine III could settle in and enjoy himself, one of his own generals rebelled and raised a third emperor. After this, it gets even more complicated. Other garrisons took sides and pretty soon all of the Romans in northwest Europe were fighting each other. Eventually, however, all of the Roman usurpers and their families were safely dead. Severed heads were hoisted triumphantly on poles all across the land—Constantine’s among them.

Safe for the moment, Honorius now had to promote Constantius, a loyal general who had saved his skin in the recent conflict, to co-emperor. Meanwhile, two other tribes had slipped into the unguarded Roman provinces behind the Vandals. The Franks, who had earlier settled as federates in the Rhine delta, now spread deeper into the land that would eventually be named after them (France). The Burgundians did likewise, ending up in Burgundy. Local Roman officials were forced to pay tribute to these tribes until someone could come and chase them away. It would take longer than anyone suspected.

Although the continent still remained under (nominal) Roman control, Emperor Honorius sent a letter to the Britons declaring them officially on their own. There was nothing he could do for them. Over the next few decades, tribe after tribe of barbarians— Picts, Scots, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—from several directions—Ireland, Scotland, and Denmark—took advantage of the opportunity and plunged Britain into a violent, unchronicled age. With no real defender riding to their rescue, the helpless Britons had to dream one, and the legend of King Arthur was born.

The Sack of Rome

Meanwhile Alaric returned with his Visigoths and extorted a massive ransom from the city of Rome in 409. When he presented his demands at the gates of the city, the Romans were shocked. What had he left for them to keep? “Your lives,” he answered.

This kept Alaric financed for about a year, but then he returned, seized the city, and looted for several days in 410. Although Rome wasn’t the capital anymore and the looting was more robbery than wanton destruction, the fall of Rome shocked the civilized world. Clearly whatever was happening was more than just another dynastic dispute.

The Roman Empire is like the dinosaurs. Both are more famous for being gone than for having survived all those centuries; however, the city of Rome had remained unpillaged by foreigners for eight hundred years (390 BCE–410 CE). This is extraordinary, even by modern standards. For a sense of perspective, consider some other capital cities that foreign troops have occupied at one time or another in the past four hundred years—only half the number of years Rome remained unconquered:

Addis Ababa (1936), Athens (1826, 1941), Baghdad (1623, 1638, 1917, 2003), Beijing (1644, 1860, 1900, 1937, 1945), Berlin (1760, 1806, 1945), Brussels (1914, 1940), Buenos Aires (1806), Cairo (1799, 1882), Copenhagen (1807, 1940), Delhi (1761, 1783, 1803, 1857), Havana (1762, 1898), Kabul (1738, 1839, 1879, 1979, 2001), London (1688), Madrid (1706, 1710, 1808), Manila (1762, 1898, 1942), Mexico City (1845, 1863), Moscow (1605, 1610, 1812), Nanjing (1937), Paris (1814, 1871, 1940), Philadelphia (1777), Pretoria (1900), Rome (1798, 1808, 1849, 1943, 1944), Seoul (1910, 1945, 1950, 1951), Tehran (1941), Tokyo (1945), Vienna (1805, 1809, 1938, 1945), Washington (1814)

Unraveling

By now, trouble was so thick that individual problems had to wait in line for the chance to come crashing down on the empire. Compared to the other choices hanging over Rome, the Visigoths didn’t look so bad after all. Sure, they looted Rome and killed Emperor Valens, but at least they weren’t the Huns or the Vandals. From this point on, the Visigoths played the role of Rome’s friendly barbarians.

Among the booty carried off from Rome was Emperor Honorius’s twenty-year-old sister, Galla Placidia, and to solidify the growing alliance between the empire and the Visigoths, they were allowed to keep her. She married Athaulf, the new king who had succeeded Alaric, and the tribe was resettled in southern Gaul and given generous rights to tax local Roman citizens.

Eventually Athaulf was murdered by a servant in a coup, and the widow Placidia was bound and paraded through town in humiliation.³ When a new Visigothic king put down the uprising, Placidia made her way back to Ravenna, where Honorius married her to his co-emperor Constantius, who didn’t live very long either.

After Honorius died in 423, a usurper, Johannes, took over until the Eastern emperor’s army arrived to place Valentinian, the six-year-old nephew of Honorius and son of Constantius, on the throne in 425. Valentinian III would be the last Roman emperor to spend any length of time on the Western throne, although he never quite became the actual master of the empire. His mother, Galla Placidia, ruled as regent, and she was eminently qualified. After all, she was the daughter, wife, mother, sister, granddaughter, aunt, and niece of emperors, so at least she knew her way around the palace. As the years progressed, however, the general Flavius Aetius came to exercise more and more power.

By now, the barbarians had divided Spain among themselves and broken the local Roman army, so the empire called in a favor from the Visigoths, who rode to Spain and wiped out the Asding tribe of Vandals, leaving only the Siling tribe to carry on the proud Vandal name.

Meanwhile, the Roman commander in North Africa, Boniface, was up to something. Galla Placidia wasn’t sure what he was planning, but he seemed to be consolidating more power than a provincial could be allowed, so she summoned him back to Italy to explain. When Boniface stayed put, she sent a Roman army to insist, so Boniface offered half of North Africa to the Siling Vandals in exchange for their help. Still under pressure from the Visigoths, the Vandals gladly abandoned Spain and crossed the Strait of Gibraltar in 429. Suddenly faced with two enemies in Africa, Placidia reconciled with Boniface, who promptly turned against the Vandals.

The Vandals, however, easily routed every Roman army sent against them and began the systematic conquest of North Africa, city by city. One Vandal siege trapped Saint Augustine in the city of Hippo, where he died in 430 still besieged. In 439, the Vandals finally took the provincial capital, Carthage. This gave them control of the grain supply that fed Rome at this point in history. By now, they had built a fleet with which to raid up and down the Mediterranean coast, attacking peaceful seaside communities that hadn’t seen a pirate fleet in five hundred years.⁴

Attila

By this time, the Huns had arrived at the river frontiers of the Roman Empire and began to strike into the Balkans. An ecclesiastical chronicler described it: “There were so many murders and blood-lettings that the dead could not be numbered. Ay, for they took captive the churches and monasteries and slew the monks and maidens in great quantities.”⁵ The Eastern emperor, Theodosius II, surrendered the south bank of the Danube to Hun control and paid a huge ransom for the Huns to not come any closer, but the Western emperor had too many other priorities and not enough cash to protect his half. The Huns camped across the Danube and raided into Roman Pannonia (western Hungary) for a quick pillage now and then to keep in practice.

Back in Italy, the empire’s attention was diverted by one of the most destructive episodes of sibling rivalry in history. Valentinian’s sister Honoria became romantically involved with the manager of her estates, which was politically dangerous, so they conspired to overthrow her brother before he found out. Unfortunately they were too late; he already knew. Valentinian beheaded her lover and would have done the same to his sister except that Placidia intervened. The imperial family then tried to force Honoria into marriage with an aged and safe senator, but she adamantly refused. Finally everyone agreed that Honoria would be packed off to Constantinople for safe keeping.

Having lost the first round, Honoria secretly wrote to Attila, king of the Huns, to propose a marriage alliance, entrusting her eunuch to take the letter to Attila, along with her ring to guarantee authenticity. When this new plot was discovered, the Eastern emperor Theodosius II quickly dumped the problem back on Ravenna, shipping Honoria home with the advice that his cousin Valentinian should agree to the marriage for political expediency. Placidia agreed, but Valentinian was furious. It took all of Placidia’s influence just to talk him out of killing his sister for the trouble she had caused; however, both Placidia and Theodosius II died about this time, which left the final decision to Valentinian, who would have nothing to do with any such union. Honoria was married to a minor Roman and exiled; she disappears from history after this.⁶

Unfortunately Attila was not so easy to remove. He had been promised an imperial bride, and dammit, someone had better pay up. He rode against the empire to claim Honoria, along with an expected dowry of half the empire. Attacking over the Rhine, Attila swept across the north of Gaul, leaving behind a reputation for destructiveness that would last over a thousand years. A chronicler described the opening gambit: “The Huns, issuing from Pannonia, reached the town of Metz on the vigil of the feast of Easter, devastating the whole country. They gave the city to the flames and slew the people with the edge of the sword, and did to death the priests of the Lord before the holy altars.”⁷

The Huns advanced as far as Orleans, which withstood their siege, so they rode off to find an easier target. Soon the combined army of Romans and Visigoths under the command of Aetius caught up with the Huns and beat them at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in 451. This was the last victory ever achieved by the Western Roman army, and we know almost nothing about it. Not only have archaeologists never found the site, but also they don’t even know where to start looking. In the histories that have come down to us, the sizes of the armies and the mountains of dead have been exaggerated beyond recognition.⁸

After a retreat and regroup, Attila crossed the Alps into Italy, destroying the city of Aquileia and driving the survivors into hiding in the marshes of a nearby lagoon, where they would build a new city, Venice. As the Huns headed deeper into Italy, another looting of Rome looked likely, but Attila changed his mind after meeting with local notables, such as Pope Leo. No one knows why Attila turned back and went home, but candidates include everything from the miraculous appearance of Saints Peter and Paul, to an outbreak of plague, to the realization that he had overstretched his resources, to a simple payoff.

Back in Barbarianland in 453, Attila died drunk in bed on his wedding night after a great effusion of blood from his nose. Within a year, all of the Germanic vassals had thrown off the yoke of the Huns, who quickly retreated to the Ukrainian steppe.⁹

By this time, General Aetius had become too powerful and a threat to Valentinian. One day in 454, when Aetius was delivering a financial report to the emperor, Valentinian leapt off the throne, sword in hand, and cut his general down then and there. Aetius was avenged six months later when soldiers loyal to him assassinated Valentinian.

Soon afterward, King Gaiseric of the Vandals landed an army at Ostia and attacked up the Tiber River, capturing Rome. The Vandals gave it a much more thorough shakedown than the Visigoths had, attaching their name to the whole concept of aimless destruction. When they sailed back to Carthage after a fourteen-day pillage, they carried off centuries’ worth of collected treasures, such as the gold candlestick looted from Jerusalem, and thousands of prisoners, including Valentinian’s widow and daughters. The lesser prisoners went straight into the slave markets, while the imperial family remained hostages.¹⁰

Closing Time

For all practical purposes, that was the end of the Western Roman Empire. The name would linger for another generation, but the nation ceased being a viable entity in 455 with the extinction of the Theodosian dynasty and the Vandal sack of Rome. There was no kernel of safe, productive territory from which to recruit and finance a new army. Over the next few decades, the German conquerors assembled small kingdoms out of the pieces of the empire. There would be many more battles, assassinations, betrayals, sieges, and massacres before the process was complete, but you don’t have to know them. All that matters is that Rome was gone, and armies were looting places that hadn’t been looted for hundreds of years.

With the death of Attila, a couple of German tribes that had been vassals of the Huns—the Ostrogoths and the Heruli—now had the chance to act as independent players in the ruins of the empire. Having been subordinate for so long, they almost missed the chance to get a piece of the carcass, but with all of the other tribes pushed westward by the Romans and Huns into Gaul and Spain, the Heruli and Ostrogoths had free rein to move in and take Italy itself.

The Roman Empire had been so important for so long that no one could imagine a world without it. For the next twenty-one years, the conquerors kept up the pretense of a Roman Empire, when, in fact, quarreling generals ran the show behind a string of puppet front men known as the Phantom Emperors. Eventually the rising German strongman in Italy, a Herul named Odovacer, consolidated his hold over the peninsula. In 476, Odovacer retired the current emperor, a thirteen-year-old nonentity named Romulus Augustus,^b to his country estates, leaving the office of Caesar empty.

And that was that.

Why Did Rome Fall?

The best way to understand the fall of Rome is to skip the first half of any book on the subject. Yes, background and long-term trends are important, but some historians go so far back looking for the cause that they make it sound like Rome was tumbling toward its inevitable fall right from the start. When I first started researching this chapter, I read the literature and dutifully took notes about Valerian, Marcus Aurelius, and Diocletian before I realized that these people predate the fall by as much as two centuries. That’s like finding the cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union in something that Catherine the Great did.

Let’s start by setting some commonsense rules:

A proper explanation should apply to the fifth century rather than the first, so paganism, gladiators, and Nero’s fiddling are clearly out of the question. Because the empire had long ago stopped being run from its eponymous city, any cause that is too closely tied to Rome—such as lead poisoning in the city’s water supply or malaria in the swamps of southern Italy—would also be doubtful. Likewise, saying that the empire was too big is not very convincing because it was no bigger in the fifth century than it was in the first.

A hundred years ago, racial theories of Rome’s collapse were popular—mongrelization weakened the race, and so on—but that’s just projecting the worries of one era back onto another. Nowadays you might hear explanations based on climate change, tropical diseases, or killer asteroids because those are the things we worry about.

Anything having to do with reduced fertility or general degradation of the ruling class is doubtful because the Roman Empire was not a strict monarchy that was passed from father to son to grandson. It was more of a military dictatorship in which power was passed from a dead emperor to an experienced relative or respected colleague. Nor was Rome especially snobby. When the empire ran low on Italian patricians to run the show, provincial commoners filled in.

As with the whole dinosaurs-became-birds crowd, some claim that Rome never “fell”; it merely became something else. The eastern half survived another thousand years as the Byzantine Empire, and rulers calling themselves Caesars existed into the twentieth century, albeit as kaisers and czars. And let’s not forget that the most powerful spiritual leader in the world still supervises his hundreds of millions of followers from Rome.

No, Really. Why Did Rome Fall?

You may find it disappointing to learn that most historians avoid grand, cosmic explanations for the fall of Rome and instead offer narrowly specific—almost petty—causes, either one at a time or in various combinations:

The most popular explanation blames a failure of leadership. Rome never developed a smooth system for passing the imperium from one emperor to the next, which stirred up a small civil war almost every time an emperor died. Emperors lacked any legitimacy other than having commanded the biggest army, and ambitious generals had little personal loyalty to their sovereign. Thus, when the crisis hit, Rome got an unfortunate series of usurpers, children, and lightweights on the throne who were more afraid of their own armies than of the barbarians.¹¹

Second, cavalry became the major means of fighting wars, but Rome had been built and maintained by infantry.^c Because the Romans responded to these new cavalry tactics by hiring alien mercenaries rather than training native Romans to fight this way, the army became less and less committed to the survival of the empire. The Roman army had always had a certain selfish opportunism that led to countless coups and mutinies, but as long as the army was mostly Roman, the soldiers hesitated leaving the door open for an unopposed barbarian invasion. Hunnish and Gothic mercenaries had no such qualms.¹²

Third, moving the primary capital to Constantinople tightened Roman control of the East, but it also marginalized the West. Armies that were conveniently placed to protect the new capital weren’t very helpful in protecting the West. During the peak of Roman strength, the armies guarding the long river frontiers in central Europe were supported by taxes from the sophisticated urban economy of the eastern Mediterranean. When the empire was split into eastern and western halves, the East inherited the cash cow and a shorter frontier, while the West inherited the expense of guarding a long border with proceeds from a more primitive economy.¹³ Eventually, the West simply couldn’t afford to defend itself.

Fourth, the conversion to Christianity (after 313) created internal divisions and alienated pagan traditionalists. When the position of high priest became separate from the position of emperor, it diluted popular support for the government. The emperor lost half of his legitimacy. The people were less inclined to render unto Caesar once he stopped being a living god. This also helps to explain why China—where the emperor kept his divinity—was eventually reconstituted as a unified nation.¹⁴

The Big Picture

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus [96–180 CE]. The vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom. The armies were restrained by the firm but gentle hand of four successive emperors, whose characters and authority commanded involuntary respect. The forms of the civil administration were carefully preserved by Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, who delighted in the image of liberty, and were pleased with considering themselves as the accountable ministers of the laws. Such princes deserved the honor of restoring the republic, had the Romans of their days been capable of enjoying a rational freedom.

—Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is widely considered the greatest history book ever written in English. This annoys modern historians because (1) they know a lot more about history today than Gibbon did, and (2) they’re jealous. Some have criticized Gibbon for praising Rome so highly, since the Romans had war, illiteracy, hunger, disease, slavery, and repressed women. Well, so did the era in which Gibbon wrote (1776–88), so shut up; he’s right. Many fields of human activity didn’t return to Roman-era levels until the nineteenth century.

The empire created real peace across a huge area for hundreds of years. My one hundred bloodiest events include seven conflicts fought in the Mediterranean region in the four centuries before Augustus, but only one during the four centuries after him.

Historians used to consider the fall of Rome a sharp fault line that split the ancient and medieval worlds, but since the 1970s, academia has been experimenting with a new viewpoint. Nowadays, the whole span from 200 to 800 CE is considered a single transitional period called Late Antiquity. As part of this, there is also a tendency to downplay the violence associated with the barbarian invasions—as well as frowning on calling them barbarians. In fact, some scholars argue that the whole fall of the Western Roman Empire is overrated as a milestone, and that the changes sweeping Europe were mostly the peaceful immigration of wandering tribes, who imposed a new ruling class but were culturally assimilated in a couple of generations.¹⁵

This view is especially popular among the English, Americans, and Germans since they are the descendants of the aforementioned barbarians, who would now seem less barbaric. In the larger sense, it’s just another one of those shifts in historiography in which former savages (Vandals, Mongols, Zulus, Vikings) are rehabilitated while former paragons of civilization (Romans, British) are denigrated. Every now and then scholars grow bored with overrated golden ages, and they gain a renewed interest in former dark ages. It happens all the time. It’s never permanent, and we shouldn’t take it too seriously.

Under this new paradigm, there is also a tendency not to differentiate between each storm front that pounded away at Mediterranean civilization. Whether Huns, Goths, Avars, Vikings, Magyars, or Arabs, it’s all part of the same megatrend. While this helps to keep the whole matter in context, it obscures the fact that the fall of Rome in the fifth century was the hurricane.

The fall of Rome is arguably the most important geopolitical event in Western history. Without the shattering of the empire, the Romanized populations of western Europe would not have evolved separate identities. Instead of French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, there would be only Romans in these lands (speaking something very similar to Italian). This neo-Roman homeland would also have included Britain, North Africa, and the south bank of the Danube, whose Romanized populations were later absorbed, assimilated, and replaced by Anglo-Saxon, Arab, and Slavic invaders. Imagine a single ethnic group filling all of the lands from Liverpool to Libya with a two-thousand-year history of unity. It would have rivaled China as the most ancient, most populous country on earth.

How Many People Died?

The numbers are pure speculation, but almost every archaeological site across Europe shows a steep decline in the number of artifacts discovered in fifth-century layers. Copper coins, broken tiles, rusty tools, nails, broken glass, cobblestones, graffiti, cracked bricks, tombstones, and pottery shards are found in countless ruins, foundations, mounds, middens, and dumps from the Roman era all across western Europe. Then in layers dating to after the arrival of the Saxons, Franks, and Goths, archaeologists find fewer new deposits. In some cases, the sites dry up altogether, and regions that formerly had a lot of little towns, villas, and villages appear reduced to a handful of fortified strongholds.

When archaeologists find less stuff, it generally means one of four things:

1.	Fewer people.
2.	The same number of people but less stuff per person.
3.	The same quantity of both people and stuff, but the stuff is less durable.
4.	Everything was the same, but we’re looking in the wrong places.

Of these four possibilities, the simplest is the first, and that is usually considered the default position unless special evidence points to one of the other three possibilities. On the other hand, these four explanations are not mutually exclusive. The reduced number of people might be greatly impoverished, leaving behind even fewer artifacts per person. As these sites leave less debris, it becomes harder to find them for study.¹⁶

Most demographers believe that the population of the Roman provinces in Europe reached a peak of 30 or 40 million in 200 CE, and then fell by one-third, or even one-half, during the entire period of decline, bottoming out at 20 million or so in 600 CE. The loss at the core of this period, during the fifth century, is sometimes estimated as one-fourth or one-fifth of the population. Most of this decline would not be the direct result of violence, but rather the result of famine and disease spread by the disruption of society.¹⁷