The truth about the fall of the Roman empire
- Thread starter Gangor
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This thread is a contemptible abortion of late antique history. Maybe I'll make a better post about this later and specifically address some of the most egregious history lolfailures. It's partially my own fault, because I never finished the history article on the fall of Rome that I've always wanted to write. Not that most of you would read it anyway.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
I look forward to it, both the corrections and the article!
Ajidica
High Quality Person
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I hope my history isn't too far off. I was trying to remember what you had wrote about the subject.
I'd read it. I read you German WWI article and liked it.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Me and all. Your Home Rule Crisis article was great.
The implication being that, somewhere, there is a correspondingly laudable abortion?
Amerindians and Mexico...?
ParkCungHee
Deity
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A quick one.Me and all. Your Home Rule Crisis article was great.
The implication being that, somewhere, there is a correspondingly laudable abortion?
The US bought the land we conquered after the Mexican-American war, I think they gave Mexico 40 million dollars in the peace treaty, to pay there war debts and cover the cost of the land. 
The Indian War's occurred mostly in land we bought from the French, and I believe the Oregon territory was bought from the British.
Andrew Jackson invaded Spanish Florida, mainly to quell raiders who were attacking from there, and the Spanish then succeeded the territory to the US instead of fight over it. There empire was in ruins by then and they couldn't control it anyway.
The independent Republic of Texas joined freely, under the pretext that they could succeed at any time, didn't work out for them during the Civil war.
The US conquered Hawaii.
Alaska was bought from the Russians.
The Indian War's occurred mostly in land we bought from the French, and I believe the Oregon territory was bought from the British.
Andrew Jackson invaded Spanish Florida, mainly to quell raiders who were attacking from there, and the Spanish then succeeded the territory to the US instead of fight over it. There empire was in ruins by then and they couldn't control it anyway.
The independent Republic of Texas joined freely, under the pretext that they could succeed at any time, didn't work out for them during the Civil war.
The US conquered Hawaii.
Alaska was bought from the Russians.
Actually, I was being unduly mean. Several people have made excellent posts here, most notably Ajidica, but innon, yourself, Owen, tk, PCH, Traitorfish, gangleri, and Karalysia have all made themselves look pretty damn good.
I am embarrassed for you! Posts like these are an excellent reason for me to stick around:
My baby's all growed up!
As Ajidica already intimated, the army's effectiveness was not really reduced at all, and even if it had been, that would have nothing to do with a "more leisure focused people". What is more striking is less that the army was bad at fighting - it wasn't - but more that the army spent a great deal of time fighting itself. On army effectiveness, the best study is Elton (1996).
"The Romans" here having the meaning of "the city of Rome", then yes. Most of the production in the African agricultural provinces was actually olive oil, which does not seem to have "agriculturally devastated" the productive land. What did more to "devastate" said land was the near-constant warfare that obtained there for two and a half centuries after the 420s: Romans against Vandals, Vandals against Mauri, Byzantines against Vandals, Byzantines against Mauri, Byzantines against Byzantines, and eventually the Umayyads against Byzantines.
This list is bad, though.
There was essentially no religious crisis that affected the western empire's existence in the late WRE. Arianism was arguably a rallying point if it mattered at all (it didn't tend to).
Rampant inflation was a problem, but it had nothing to do with the third-century inflation, which had been more or less stabilized by the monetary reforms that kicked off the fourth century, and more to do with heavy minting by usurpers/participants in civil wars and, in the later period, by putative state-builders like the Burgundiones and Suebi ("later period" here meaning like the 460s, before which one can't really talk about state-building at all). I would say that inflation was problematic, it hurt the central government, but it was symptomatic and not causative. Inflation could be kept under control by political and military success, and that political and military success was lacking.
"Hostile nations" is interesting. There were few inter-state wars in the relevant period, and most of them were wars featuring the Eastern Empire (against the Sasanians briefly in the 420s, and more famously against the Huns in the 440s). While the Hunnic episode certainly weakened the WRE temporarily, I would tend to think that their dramatic intervention was of only a very limited importance. But certain groups obviously were taking advantage of problems at Rome. Migrations did happen, although the extent to which these were external migrations is deeply unclear.
I cannot see attempts to paint a decline in military technology as relevant. The previously mentioned study by Elton does not indicate any particular weakness by the Roman army, and generally accords it superiority over external opponents. The Alamanni were defeated by Iulianus and by Valentinianus I. The Tervingi and Greuthungi were defeated - a bloody defeat, a delayed defeat, but a defeat - by Theodosius I. On the occasions when the Vandals, Alans, and Suebi did engage Roman army forces of anything near comparable size, they were defeated. The Burgundiones were nearly wiped out in the 430s. Roman military effectiveness - much less an extremely technical issue like technology of arms and armor - wasn't particularly relevant. What was relevant were the ways in which that effectiveness was employed.
Problems of underpopulation and food supply are problematic. The closest we can come to anything like archaeological consensus on things like this is that the regional picture was varied; some places were doing fairly well, and some were doing poorly. Underpopulation was probably only relevant in northern Gaul, which may not have been occupied by regular Roman military units at all between the 380s and the invasion of Attila and which seems to have been rather on the back foot since the third century crisis. How important the issue of northern Gaul is - and northern Gaul is more or less a black hole of written history for most of this period, so these are all just really good guesses - well, it doesn't seem to have been particularly important at all.
Food supply is of dubious relevance. There are very few occasions when issues of food supply - much less systemic problems with same, as you insinuated - are attested in the sources. It would seem to be most relevant for the city of Rome itself, which was itself only kind of important for the empire's ability to defend itself.Objections to this thesis have already been made, but I would like to point out that drawing a straight line between the Teutoberger Wald battle and the retirement of Romulus Augustulus is silly. It changes the entire line of Roman history. Perhaps earlier interaction with Boii, Lugiones, and Marcomanni would have caused the Roman state even more of a military problem than did easily-managed groups like the Chatti and Cherusci. Perhaps it wouldn't have. You roll the dice with something like that, you can't trace causation, and ultimately you end up right back where you started. Now it's fair to call the battle in the Teutoberger Wald the "battle that stopped Rome" (as Peter Wells recently has), because it did prevent a relatively lackluster colonization effort by the Roman state. That does not mean that stopping Rome at that particular juncture in that particular way in that particular location made the demise of the Roman state inevitable.
Even if you think that migratory groups were a key factor in the demise of the Roman state - and I don't really, for various reasons - virtually none of the migratory groups attested came from between Elbe and Danube anyway according to the standard migratory models of guys like Peter Heather. Only the 406 Rhine invaders even hung out in that area at all, and they were just passing through on their way from the middle Danube. (Again, according to standard migratory models. I do not particularly agree with these all that much.)
Onto the actual article. I scanned it briefly - OP really should have put in a link at least to the BBC article, ideally to the Science abstract as well. I'm pretty unhappy with their methodology, actually. Their tree-ring samples came from northern France and eastern Germany. Now, I'm not entirely sure how eastern German tree-ring samples indicate deforestation linked to the Roman economy, since Rome did not control eastern Germany. But whatever. The key parts of the article text seem to me to be here:
The reasoning seems to be quite a bit of a leap. They're connecting the deforestation directly with political-military events; essentially, they are violating the standby of correlation != causation. Also problematically, the data make no sense given what we know about the economics of the Roman empire in the relevant region in the relevant period. They link increased precipitation and "healthier" tree-ring samples to the dynasties of Constantinus and Valentinianus. But during that period, the empire was undergoing sustained economic growth, almost certainly inducing increased logging and deforestation, especially in northern France and western Germany, which were the power-base of the Western Roman regime until the 380s. The relevant regions underwent a construction boom, backed by imperial patronage and an increase in the number of troops on the ground. This is documented in sources as various as the famous poem Mosella to the letters of the senator Symmachus to archaeology in places like Augusta Treverorum (Trier, one of the residencies for Roman emperors). Why does this economic boom not show up in the tree-rings, and instead show up as decreased deforestation as compared with an apparent maximum in 250 (when the Roman Empire actually lost direct control of northern France and its German territories to the usurpers of what is sometimes termed the "Gallic Empire")?article said:
Furthermore, during the relevant years (around 400 or so), the scientists have a sample size one-seventh of the mean sample size (44 series instead of the mean 286). Isn't that a little sketchy to be going around making general claims like this on? Too, their methodology of corroboration with precipitation as recorded in medieval sources seems awfully sketchy too: essentially they took about eighty reports of precipitation extremes (of dubious quality and reliability; these are ancient chroniclers, after all, and they're as liable to poorly estimating temperature as they are sizes of armies or personal fortunes), and corroborated thirty precipitation extremes to those found in the chronicles, with sixteen contradictory reports. And none of those chronicles were Roman-era; all were after 1000 AD.
Now, to be entirely fair, the scientists in the report don't seem to be making the Rome-centered claim that that one-shot BBC article did. But I'm extremely uncomfortable with their whole methodology nonetheless. Essentially, they did something very interesting and useful - took a look at the tree-ring chronology going back two and a half millennia - and then corroborated precipitation data extracted from those rings to the usually sketchy reports of medieval chroniclers to look at matches. All well and good; what is less well and good is that they seem to have drawn lines directly from precipitation and deforestation to a high-school narrative of history, ignoring economic-historical reasons for deforestation and simply connecting all of it to political/military power of states in the general vicinity of the tree-ring data. They seem to have cited a grand total of two texts on late antique history (one general economic-history text on the medieval period and one on Late Roman history), and used them chiefly in extremely general terms; "economic instability" and "dislocation" seem to be the only terms in which they deal with such things, and there is precisely zero speculation on causative links. Possibly decent science; terrible, terrible history.
What is most damning about the report, in my opinion, is the last sentence of the abstract:
Agenda, agenda, agenda. Look, I don't care about climate change politics one way or another. If people say that anthropogenic climate change is happening and we need to do something about it, okay, whatever. Not really my problem. Or if it is, fine, but I'm pretty carbon-neutral one way or the other, so I doubt I can do much that will matter anyway. But bad history is what happens when you attempt to draw any sort of parallels between situations that, uh, lack clear parallels. What I think happened is that they did their tree-ring analysis, did an undergraduate-caliber reading of European history to try to draw some scary correlations between the "decline of Rome" and this deforestation and climatological variability implied through the tree-ring data, and put it up as a Warning To Those Who Would Not Learn From History. Con-friggin-temptible.article abstract said:
By the way, if anybody is looking for a tl;dr reason the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist, it can be summed up in one word: pleurisy.
Fifteen million, actually, same as the Louisiana Purchase (though the $15 million in 1803 was worth rather more than in 1848).
1. Giving away land you don't actually own is cheating.
2. The Thirteen Colonies were also founded on conquest of Amerindian lands.
Technically the Republic of Hawaii was annexed willingly. No matter that its President and his entire cabinet were all White.
Yes. That's a great deal less stupid, although to a very large extent the whole plague of Justinian thing is a bit of a house of cards with very little direct supporting evidence and a great deal of hypothesizing. I'm still not sure what I think about the whole thing. Fortunately, I don't have to get that involved in it, because I don't plan on being a classicist or a medievalist.
I wouldn't really call it conquest, considering that Wikipedia gives the definition of conquest as "the act of military subjugation of an enemy by force of arms", which doesn't really apply to the English settling of the Eastern Seaboard. The settlers didn't really come in and "conquer" the lands, subjugating the Native Americans, but rather, settled, and kind of pushed them out of the way.
Yeah, it does. There was settlement and land purchase; there were also episodes like the war with Metacomet, one of the bloodiest (as a ratio of population) in American history.
Interesting; thanks for the clarification.
gangleri2001
Garbage day!!!
Finally Dachs came to save the day.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Figuratively or literally? I figure you can be literally referring to the death of Flavius Constantinius, or figuratively referring to the rubbing of pleural layers which causes immense pain every time one breathes.
Sure there were individual episodes, but does that really count overall as conquest? When I think conquest, I think more of the Spanish expeditions into the Americas, where their goal was to actually conquer land; rather than a bunch of English settlers, who either came for economic or religious reasons, sometimes having to duke it out with the natives already living there.
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