The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (13 page)

Reshuffle

When Cao Cao died in 220, he was still technically a subject of the Han emperor; however, his son Cao Pi (pronounced sort of like “soppy”) deposed Emperor Xian in favor of himself. This made the Wei Kingdom’s break with the old days official. It also provoked Liu Bei into declaring Shu a sovereign kingdom. Not to be left out, Sun Quan declared Wu an independent kingdom. In due time, these kingdoms were passed to their offspring.

The dominant personality of this phase of history was General Zhuge Liang of Shu, one of the architects of the victory at Red Cliffs. Folklore credits his sorcery in calling up the wind which spread the fire that destroyed Cao Cao’s fleet. The Chinese remember Zhuge as a master tactician and the legendary inventor of many clever gadgets, such as a repeating crossbow, the box kite, the sky lantern, the dumpling, and a couple of things called the wooden ox and the gliding horse, which were traditionally pictured as gravity-driven walking machines but nowadays are assumed to have been two kinds of wheelbarrows.
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He is anachronistically credited with being the first general to use gunpowder, which he supposedly learned from a wandering Taoist sage—even though gunpowder didn’t appear until almost a millennium in the future. Basically, Zhuge gets the credit for every novelty that appeared in China during Late Antiquity.

Over the next decade, General Zhuge attacked northward against the Kingdom of Wei, year after year. He attacked five times and was beaten back five times. Why does his complete failure to accomplish anything concern us? Because fighting off Zhuge Liang brought General Sima Yi of Wei to prominence as the savior of the kingdom.

Now that the Kingdom of Wei owed its survival to a war hero in the Sima family, the Sima star was rising while the Cao star was setting. As the throne passed along from one Cao offspring to another, the emperors became less and less impressive, with shorter reigns, and the kingdom depended more and more on the grizzled General Sima Yi to keep things going. Finally, in 251, during the reign of the fifth Cao, Sima Yi declared himself emperor of the new Jin dynasty and executed all of the Caos he could find on charges of treason. Sima Yi died within a year, but his legacy survived under his grandson. Over the next fifteen years Sima’s Jin dynasty conquered southern China, bringing an end to the Three Kingdoms Era.

The empire, long united, must divide; long divided, must unite. Thus it has ever been . . .

—penultimate lines of
Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Warning: Math Ahead

During the century of peace and prosperity under the later Han dynasty, the Chinese population grew magnificently, but when that peace dissolved, the population crashed. The Han census of 140 CE counted 9.7 million households and almost 50 million individuals living in the empire. When the Jin dynasty counted the inhabitants in the reunified empire in 280 CE, after a century of civil war, their census found only 2.5 million households and 16 million individuals.
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The 34 million missing people were probably not all dead, but how do we turn this lone solid statistic into a credible death toll? Usually, if I have a lot of different estimates for a death toll, I prefer to average them out using the median, but in this case, there is only the one number—take it or leave it. On the other hand, I’ve discovered a rough shortcut that sometimes produces a sensible middle ground out of wildly differing estimates: the geometric mean of the upper and lower limits of plausibility often approximates the average of many more mundane estimates.
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In this case, the absolute maximum plausible death toll is obvious: maybe all those 34 million missing people actually died in the collapse of Han civilization. Now, what’s the absolute minimum who could have died? For a population drop to be this noticeable, a half million at the very least must have died. That would come to 1 percent of China’s population, and only about 6,500 a year. The geometric mean of these two numbers is around 4.1 million, which is the death toll I’ve used to rank this event.

FALL OF THE WESTERN ROMAN EMPIRE

Death toll:
7 million
¹

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 ch
ariot against Pontius Pilate, and Caligula was smothered at Pompeii, while Spartacus seduced Cleopatra.
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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 arm
ies 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 m
ob 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, c
ame 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.