Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Fall of the Roman Empire

Just a few notes based on what I have been picking up from reading and podcasts.  The information isn't new, but it had not fully penetrated my thinking until recently.  There is debate about how much the empire actually fell, as opposed to merely changing, and different times are assigned to different "falls." 476 AD is fine, it just relies on a number of assumptions, and people could and have picked earlier and later times. 

Because I am more interested in what occurred in northern Europe, particularly Romano-Britain, I find it clearest to look at the whole enterprise regionally. While we can legitimately claim that Rome itself kept its institutions and mostly just got a new set of rulers, in Britain there was an unquestionable collapse of empire. On the far frontier such as Hadrian's Wall, there was loss of money, then population in the market towns supporting the wall forts as the pay for the garrison soldiers became more irregular, and then in a very few years around the year 400 the forts themselves were abandoned, and no fresh money comes to the frontier at all. There might be over 1000 living in the fort, all requiring food, drink, clothing, animals and repairs - a solid market for the locals, and in a decade, nothing. One after another the garrisons were abandoned, beginning with the Antonine Wall long before in 150AD, the last expansion to the north and unwise from the start. 

Just a bit further east in the borders with the various Germans the collapse was similar, but much of this was because of the local tribes, which had invariably been described as fractious and undisciplined before this, learned to bad together at least temporarily and throw the Romans out. It highlights the difficulty of separating what is an internal cause and which is external.  The unity of the tribes against them looks like an entirely external force.  Yet they only grew up and grew together because so many of the tribes had members who had worked in the Roman military for part of their lives.  Individuals, clans, or whole tribes would hire themselves out to the Romans, who always needed a steady supply. While it is true that Rome still hoped to send new recruits to other regions to specifically avoid the conflict of interest and temptations of corruption and desertion, this became increasingly impractical. Some might still be sent to Palmyra or Spain, but others were temporary and never left the frontier.  They absorbed Roman discipline and practice and could therefore meld more easily with other tribes with similar experience. 

A second bit recently learned is that the earliest archaeology in England was often less concerned with learning what earlier peoples had been like than with simply exposing the ruins to view as much as possible.  This was a teaching tool so that everyone would have some idea what things looked like, and also something of a mood piece or decoration, an illustration of the past. Locales were proud of having their very own ruin to display. Because sites that were in agricultural settings had often been plowed over numerous times, there wouldn't be much to find, or even identify what had been there.  This gave primacy to more remote places where the agriculture was pastoral, disturbing the ruins less. Such remoteness also discouraged raiding the structures for usable stone over the centuries. The archaeology of Newcastle, just as an example, is under lots of other archaeology of Newcastle. Romantic hilltop views suitable for postcards are thus overrepresented, both in the landscape and in our imaginations.

3 comments:

  1. The government institutions of the Roman Empire had been moved to Constantinople in the early 4th Century AD. That was, after all, the economic, demographic, and geographic center of the Empire. While the German tribes took over the West (5th Century AD), and the Arabs took over North Africa and Spain (8th Century AD), the Empire held its capital and much of Anatolia and the Balkans until the Turks captured Constantinople in 1453.

    All told, the Roman government lasted without a break 2,200 years, from about 750 BC (maybe earlier) to 1453. Not even the Egyptian and Chinese dynasties lasted that long.

    The German takeover of the West was basically just another fratricidal war among Indo-European tribes, which had been going on in Europe for a few thousand years.

    The real invasion was that of the Indo-Europeans (Celts) into Britain, which resulted in about a 90% replacement of males. The Anatolian farmers, who had replaced the Western Hunter Gatherers, themselves were replaced, at least the men. As is standard practice in large-scale migrations, the women were kept.

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  2. "There might be over 1000 living in the fort, all requiring food, drink, clothing, animals and repairs - a solid market for the locals, and in a decade, nothing."

    It is a good point that loss of the forts cost the locals a secure market. But is that the whole story?

    The forts were originally there to protect the people living south of the wall from the depredations of their neighbors north of the wall. When the Roman soldiers left, were the people south of the wall driven further south by northern raiders? Or did they leave because they had lost their market?

    The other function of the wall apparently was to collect tariffs on products crossing either way. In a sense, the garrison of the wall was self-supporting from tariff income. Did the tariffs eventually kill the cross-border trade and thus undermine the sustainability of the garrison?

    So many questions that are tough to address at this remove from the events.

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  3. I remember being told in Geneva that one year the pay wagon never showed up, and the Roman garrison just left and took up farming. (I wonder how many were local recruits?)
    I suppose that for a few years this would have been reversible--they still had their gear and their skills, and could re-form in the face of a threat. Who knows--they might have tried to teach their sons, but it wouldn't have been the same. After a decade or two ...
    Does anybody know how much inter-province travel there was later in the western empire? If not as much, maybe going back to their old home was less attractive than a local lady and staying put.

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