Alternate History Thread IV: The Sequel

[das]

the central government was unable to take care of barbarian pressure

There you have it.

But North King's explanation is even better, though I wouldn't say it was necessarily falling to pieces culturally (rather, it was always in pieces). It's economy failed, therefore it's demographics failed (the ultimate empire-killer, as Mesopotamia, Yucatan and the Indus Valley, and hell, the modern European colonial empires as well teach us) and that latter event had several effects that worked to undermine the Roman defense systems and to allow the barbarians to overrun the empire (furthermore, it made it's further long-term survival - at least in the West - practically dependant on said barbarians, which was a recipe for disaster).

 

[Disenfrancised]

A stable Germanica would then send Germanic tribes fleeing in an eastward migration that would, in time displace all the proto-Slavs and send them scattering towards the Black Sea and the Urals. Obviously all of this will buy time for Rome to create a more stable (and smaller) frontier.

But a stable frontier might not help Rome that much; their economy is set up for growth via military expansion and the taxation system was too weak (except against small farmers pushing them into proto-serfdom) and the mechanisms for internal development are lacking for anything else...and Rome ran out of regions that were rich enough to offer a return on the effort of conquering them.

 

[das]

However, Rome all but stopped stopped military expansion in Europe after Teutoburger anyway - a stable border won't stop that much, though I still doubt it would be all that stable (securing it properly would eat a lot of resources, especially if the flight of the local tribes and the existance of nearby civilisation would result in an early Scandinavian awakening with consequences).

 

[Symphony D.]

Mostly because it was afraid of losing whole Legions again. Rome's economy was based on expansion. Stop the expansion, stop the economy. If it had kept on going, and not become too paranoid to continue as it had, the possibility exists at some point that more thorough economic reform would have come about, particularly as it would have controlled most of Germany at that point, and if it had pressed into Poland could have shortened its border tremendously between the Baltic and Black Seas. And hey, look, all kinds of farmland over there in the Ukraine...

Mayan civilization is also wholly different in its decline, and stringing it together along with the rest (even stringing them all together) is rather silly, as most of the economic decline (particularly in the colonial powers) was a direct product of war debt and strain, or of natural disaster. An ultimate killer cannot be merely a symptom of something else.

 

[North King]

Mayan civilization is also wholly different in its decline, and stringing it together along with the rest (even stringing them all together) is rather silly, as most of the economic decline (particularly in the colonial powers) was a direct product of war debt and strain, or of natural disaster. An ultimate killer cannot be merely a symptom of something else.

Yes, this is very true. The Mayan civilization is one of the more peculiar in this world, in that it was no built on what we think of as inhabitable land. It was built in the middle of a swamp, whose waters were salty enough to be toxic to plant life. In fact, this is one of the exemplary cases for civilization evolving before or concurrently with domestication, as civilized people had to be around in order to render the land habitable: by spreading crushed limestone into the swampy pools, burying the salt and making the water drinkable. This created small isles of habitability throughout the Yucatan, with immensely fertile milpas, but the whole edifice was exceptionally fragile.

When Teotihuacan installed a puppet ruler on the throne of Mutal, this triggered war with Kaan. Kaan encircled Mutal in a ring of allied city states, and the wars, raging for over a hundred years, utterly demolished the Maya heartland. The land was no longer maintained, and it became uninhabitable; this was probably aggravated by drought; the only places Mayan civilization survived was to the north and south. The heartland utterly collapsed.

The Indus is again different, as legends and evidence suggests that widespread flooding may well have contributed to the demise of this civilization. Another environmental catastrophe, but also aggravated by the fact that other civilizations were encountering problems as well, and trade, which was the life-blood of Harappa, was declining. Thus, it was not so much a matter of Aryan invasion as that the Harappans fell apart, and their people intermixed with incoming Aryans who superimposed their beliefs on Harappan beliefs and formed the basis of Indian culture.

But I do think that you can string a common thread through most civilization collapses. Civilizations can always be restored after some collapse: look at China. Invaded by the Mongols; restored. Half the population lost to Black Death; restored. Manchu invasion; restored. This is not due to some inherent quality of the Chinese beyond that the people identified themselves as Chinese. This allowed them to maintain a longterm empire, where others didn't. In the end, what did in Rome was that people no longer really cared who ruled them. They accepted barbarian rule easily; it wasn't that important to them anymore. Chinese people have never identified as anything but Chinese, however. The conquests of Alexander may have Hellenized millions, but they still didn't consider themselves Greeks, so it fell apart. This also explains the easy rise and fall of steppe empires. Very few actually identified permanently with one group or another; the Mongols were able to absorb multiple other hordes into their own ranks. This is also why nation-states usually have such great stability: they are built on a single cultural unit. Since 1700, France still exists, despite trauma after trauma. The fall of the Ottomans meant the foundation of Turkey. The loss of successive German reichs only meant a new German republic each time. Russia, despite being shot, stabbed, poisoned, bludgeoned, and drowned to death, managed to survive repeated trips to the afterlife, much like Rasputin.

The point being that a nation only stops existing when people believe it stops existing... because what is a nation beyond a deceptive facade where people obey a ruler because they believe he has power?


EDIT: If the above seems incoherent, I'm busy with my NES and rather flubbled at staying up far later than my brain cells function for.

 

[Lord_Iggy]

I thought it was a very interesting post, and coherent enough.

I've recently read 'A Brief History of Progress' by Ronald Wright, which speaks a lot of declining civilizations, using examples of both the Mayans and Romans, as well as a few others, plus some survivor nations.

 

[Thlayli]

Rome was truly a victim of its own expansion, in that it no longer had a sturdy Italic citizenry that could be relied upon in a pinch for legions. Though their culture diffused immensely, their manpower did as well. I agree with NK, in that the survival of a strong ethnic base is necessary to the survival of a political entity.

I guess if you really want Rome to survive, you have to limit its expansion early on.

The Punic Wars trace the development of the Roman consciousness from an "agricultural republican" to a "interventionist Imperial" mindset. Though they got into the Punic Wars to protect the Mamertines, and uphold the tradition of saving the foederati, they ended it with the specific goal of eliminating a rival.

If you could have Rome defeated by Carthage in the First Punic War, limited to Italy and locked out of the southern and western mediterranean, you might actually manage to make them more long-lived and stable internally.

Even so, Rome had a remarkably long life for any state, ancient or modern.

 

[das]

True enough. The creation of a great empire is a two-edged sword. I would say however that much of Rome's expansion was more or less natural and inevitable; the Romans eliminated all threats to their city in Latium, then all threats to Latium in Italy, then all threats to Italy in the Mediterranean and so forth. So after the expansion stopped, stagnation naturally set in, allowing all kinds of problems to pile up and eventually bring down the empire. So yes, any kind of stable border is death for the Roman Empire as we know it. Now, for a more stable empire, you would want to base it in the Hellenised eastern sections, with their resources, population, cities and suchlike; though that would likely result in the loss of some or most of the further European regions - but these were already beginning to decline.

Actually, an earlier eastwards transfer of the Roman capital may be nice; perhaps this could be done with Julius Caesar, or Marcus Antonius, or even Nero. Breathe some new life into both the Hellenistic culture and the Roman Empire; and if said capital ends up in Alexandria, then there are plenty of opportunities to go about in the Red Sea - and beyond. Like building a colonial empire in India to protect the trade outposts and irritate silver2039.

EDIT: I am no Mayanologist at all, but as for Harappa, its demise had a lot to do with the drying of Sarasvati. The people there ran out of water resources and were forced to abandon their cities, fleeing eastwards. So it was the opposite of flooding. Aryans indeed came later.

 

[Disenfrancised]

And hey, look, all kinds of farmland over there in the Ukraine...

The Romans were centuries or more away from having the crop strains and the agricultural expertise to exploit the Ukraine, plus they would now be fighting on the horse barbarians homeground...

And the problem would be IMO if it had continued expanding then it wouldn't reform economically - what would be the point since eveything is going well? Settign up for an even bigger fall. Also economic change would have required huge changes elsewhere - Rome lacked the information handling capabilites to tax in currency, forcing a grain tax and bad internal tariffs that created urban depopulation, overly powerful patrican families taking money out of the taxible economy, and running out of precious metals to base their currency on.

On Rome vs China; Rome's barbarian invaders were proportionaly more numerious than the horse barbarians invading china, and they kept their own identity and settled down rather than merging into the Roman one, plus China's ethnic unity (the Han being a greater proportion of their empire than the italians were, and the Han forcing out other ethnic groups) and agricultural style (intensive rice cultivating giving high population densities and forcing cohesive units around irrigation systems rather than the independent european farmer) really helped maintain unity.

 

[Symphony D.]

The Romans were centuries or more away from having the crop strains and the agricultural expertise to exploit the Ukraine, plus they would now be fighting on the horse barbarians homeground...

Please. Barley has been around for millennia. Where do you think the Scythians got surplus agricultural production from to supplement herding? And then Rome is forced to evolve its forces, acknowledge the superiority of cavalry, and gain a strong equestrian arm enabling it to continue on.

And the problem would be IMO if it had continued expanding then it wouldn't reform economically - what would be the point since eveything is going well? Settign up for an even bigger fall.

Problem of scale requires an eventual reform because it becomes impossible to manage without doing something, and if you do that you'll probably realize in the process that "Hrm, our system is crap, lets fix it." It doesn't take a visionary or genius to realize a system is rotten, or one to knock it down and put up something better; just somebody ambitious, and Rome had plenty of people meeting that qualification.

 

[das]

However, most Caesars had better things to do than ensure the long-term prosperity or even survival of their empire. Plus those of them who would try to launch a social revolution would end up dead within minutes. There are many parallels to be drawn between the Ottoman Empire and the Roman one in their later days.

 

[Symphony D.]

Well, as any real PoD letting Rome survive requires at the very least going back to Teutoberg one can likely easily arrange things such that a revolutionary situation becomes possible later on. Civil Wars are great for that sort of shaking-up-the-established-order type of thing. The main utility of keeping Rome alive though (for our purposes) is letting it get even larger than it did in reality, lingering around for awhile, Romanizing its citizenry, and then collapsing on a bigger scale, mucking up all sorts of things that occurred in real life.

Given Dachs would appear to be angling toward this with his questions, and that he is one of the resident experts on the Romans around here, I suspect this is sort of what the conversation was supposed to lead to.

 

[das]

Actually, extending the Ottoman parallel, the "janissaries" of the Praetorian guard could be countered with timariots ("Horsemen don't mutiny!") - i.e. your aforementioned equestrian arm, the "Bosporan Legions" so to speak, which would naturally be the most progressive-minded in this case. So an emperor coming from there, if he wins, might indeed be both willing and able to institute such reforms. It'd be a bit of a stretch, but not inconceivable.

Hmm, alternatively we might have a powerful and progressive Roman successor state based in Ukraine, holding the assorted steppe peoples at bay. That too would be pretty nice.

 

[Azale]

How?

Less and less Romans in the army. They were basically conscripting barbarians to fight other barbarians. Thlayli explained it better than me, but basically it lost a little bit of its luster over time until it was just not able to hold against the incredible flood of tribes from Asia.

@das, wasn't the end of Rome as an influential city when Constantine moved the capital to Constantinople? I'm not sure how much the Romans would appreciate a move to a Hellenic capital in Alexandria. Wouldn't it just accelerate a schism between a Latin Rome and a Hellenic Alexandria?

 

[das]

So it would. That's the whole bloody purpose, you know, to get rid of the ruinous Roman influence in the Roman Empire. Compare with how Peter the Great moved capital to St. Petersburg to greatly decrease the influence of the conservative Muscovite boyar factions, as well as of the old court intrigues and such. Likewise, our ruler here would be getting rid of Rome - Rome stuffed with degenerating patricians, conspiring senators and so forth - and would move to Alexandria with his court of like-minded reformers.

Note how all three suggested rulers had strong Hellenophile sympathies and, at least later in their lives, had much more support amongst the Greeks than amongst the Romans anyway (which was part of the reason why Caesar was killed, Antonius lost a civil war and Nero got couped as well). They won't have all that much to lose, really, and everything to gain - an empire of their own and not a one of the unsympathetic old Roman factions.

 

[Disenfrancised]

Rome stuffed with degenerating patricians

Actually the patricians were doing quite well - part of the problem really .

Where do you think the Scythians got surplus agricultural production from to supplement herding?

Oppressing the agricultural populations about the rivers , which wouldn't have really been spreadable to the whole expanses without dryland farming technology. Besides the romans had that grain - the Scythians were exporting it already and the Romans already had breadbaskets in Egypt and North Africa. Rome really needed precious metals/some other valuble and portable trade good to shore up their currency so they no longer have to base their taxation system on grain (unweildy, hard to keep track of, and perishible), not more grain. In fact if they did gain an agricultural Scythia it would a) make western agriculture more improverished, b) without new currency inflation will create problems in cities getting the new food even if Rome had it, and c) strengthen the Eastern empire (who the produce would flow through).

So conquering the ukraine would probably create a strong semi-fuedal romanized state there, but wouldn't have much effect on the Western Empires problems.

 

[das]

Actually the patricians were doing quite well - part of the problem really .

More or less my point; I never said that they were weakening, but rather that they were degenerating, what's with all the lead poisoning, inbreeding and suchlike.

 

[silver 2039]

Didn't Augustus try to do something about their decadence? He attempted to ban affairs if I recall punishable by exile or something....

 

[Dachs]

Ugh, I've been talking about this with NK, and neither of us is getting anywhere.

However, Rome all but stopped stopped military expansion in Europe after Teutoburger anyway

Nope. Britannia, Agri Decumates, Dacia...but those were exceptions, the first being because Claudius needed to make himself look good - or better - and the last two were for security more than anything else. Rome only stopped expanding because it wasn't cost-effective to do so. Gaul was bad enough, but North African surpluses could cover the costs of that until it was sufficiently Romanized.

Less and less Romans in the army. They were basically conscripting barbarians to fight other barbarians.

Not at all. Rome included from its very beginnings the alae, which were non-Roman supplements to the regular Latin forces; after Italy was given citizenship, barbarians were incorporated as "auxilia" units until the Constantinian reforms, which merely gave them a different name. There is no indication that the foederati made up a larger proportion of Roman forces than actual Gallic, Spanish, or Italian Romans, especially according to the best source on the later military, the Notitia Dignitatum. There wasn't really a degeneration of Roman military virtue either; that impression was given by Vegetius' De Re Militari, which was written by a man with virtually no military experience and a guy who wanted to earn some money by getting hired to reform the military himself, or at least to make a buck by writing some alarmist lit, which always sells. Roman troops were consistently able to defeat barbarians with the same rate as usual even after "disasters" such as Adrianople and the crises of the early fifth century (Radagaisus, the massive Germanic influx, etc.). The problem was that the state didn't have enough money after the elimination of its tax base and its earlier beef-up to meet demands from Sassanid Persia to keep these men on the payroll, or even raise replacements. The reason they couldn't amp up taxes was that the Roman economy was running at higher levels than ever before, but they were hitting a plateau in the fourth and fifth centuries; agricultural taxation only gets you so far, after all, and that's what the vast majority of imperial revenues came from. That was also a large part of the barbarian issue; when the odd Gothic tribe came across the frontier, they were often able to ravage some farmland before being forced to withdraw; that combined with the barbarian supergroups such as Alaric's Goths, Radagaisus' Germanics, the Amal Goths, and especially Attila's Huns was enough to deprive the Roman state of more money, allowing further barbarian incursions, etc. This was compounded by the Vandal seizure of North Africa (the most productive and lucrative provinces) during a period of relative political anarchy in Rome itself following the death of Flavius Constantius and before Aetius' arrival on the scene.

In short, the Romans didn't have enough bloody money to deal with the Huns and the Persians together, and population mobilization without pay such as that during the time of the Republic was made nearly impossible by Diocletian's "wonderful" reform of introducing serfdom.

Dis did a pretty good job of description a few posts back. If only that gold mine in Anatolia had been discovered earlier instead of during the reign of Michael II...

 

[Thlayli]

Now that you mention it, stalemate between Augustus and Mark Antony could make a great "Rome survives" PoD. And you'll eventually have three Roman Empires, a Western, Eastern, and Southern based in Alexandria. Though the Southern will become much more Greco-Egyptian over time.

Of course, the drawback of this would be an early collapse for the Western Empire (into civil war) if Augustus can't manage to impose an effective transition from Republic to Empire as he did in OTL.