The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (15 page)

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 misse
d 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,
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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 so
me 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 rule
rs 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.
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Second, cavalry became the major means of fighting wars, but Rome had been built and maintained by infantry.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 cons
ider 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 ba
rbarian 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.
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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.
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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.
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