OT: Dachs: Well, as you describe it, it seems Rome was bound to fall.
Not really. It wasn't even "bound" to contract in territory and power. Gratianus' decision to move the capital back to Italy - the cause of the elite management crisis best documented in Halsall (2005) - was based on contingent factors - his tutor was Italian, he wanted to better manage the Gothic war, things like that - and was certainly not preordained. I can think of several ways to sustain the WRE beyond the fifth century.
strijder20 said:
Still, I don't completely understand how expansion could have no effect on it's stability; it would have given the people something to strive for and it would have given those elite communities a good opportunity to die and be replaced by more loyal feudal (as that is how it sounds in your description, Rome as a feudal system with the emperor on top but not really able to control his vassals)governors.
Giving the people something to strive for would be irrelevant. "The people" did not rule Rome. Furthermore, unifying the aristocracy around a single aggressive purpose is, to put it mildly, not plausible. Look, it's not like the Roman elites
wanted the Empire to die or anything. Up to about 471,
everybody, from the Vandals to the Goths to the Gallo-Romans to obviously the Italian notables and Emperor, was working within the Roman political and symbolic framework to secure better positions for themselves under the aegis of Rome.
"Feudal" is a pointless label when applied to Rome, and really oughtn't be used in a Western European context before the 900s or so when the ballyhooed "caging of the peasantry" happened. But if you mean that personal politics (instead of mass politics) was most important under the Empire, of course it was. It was most important under
literally every government in the history of the world until the end of the nineteenth century. Mass politics did not exist; you couldn't work with parties, you had to work with individuals and cajole them into doing stuff for you.
strijder20 said:
Am I wrong, or do you imply that ethnical division caused fracture? In that case, more Latinification would have been good too. Or moving people around a bit, like Stalin did. But that might have caused rebellion.
No. Ethnic differences were irrelevant; all of the aristocrats and military officers I'm talking about were essentially part of the same classical Ciceronian Latin-speaking and -reading and -writing elite. Aristocratic literary culture was ossified around a series of Latin (and sometimes Greek) classics from the late republic and early imperial periods that had very little to do with the proto-Romance tongues that real people on the streets and in the farms were actually speaking. When I say "Gallo-Roman", I mean "Romans who were living in Gaul". Arguably, you could get a better classical Latin literary education in the provinces than you could in Italy by the middle of the fourth century (something noted letter-writer of the time Symmachus resented considerably).
The fact that ethnicity was irrelevant does not mean that sectionalism was nonexistent. Simply put, the Gallo-Roman elite had different interests than Italy's aristocracy did, and enjoyed considerable privileges under the fourth century emperors. Once Gratianus removed many of those privileges, the Gallic notables lost a significant chunk of their stake in the state, and wanted to get it back - and so frequently sided with rebellious generals who wanted to take the throne, like Magnus Maximus and Constantinus "III".
strijder20 said:
Still, I think that although the Germans might not have been the cause of the fall of Rome, they did decide it's ultimate fate : both England and France were Germanized, and they were quite important in world's history. Imagine if the WRE would have just fallen apart - you would have squabbling, but still Roman kingdoms.
Post-Roman Britain is the exception to a few of the rules one can have about the demise of the WRE. In Gaul, Iberia, and Italy, no meaningful mass migration on a scale incommensurate with the migratory activity under the Empire (which was considerable, by the way) took place. In Britain, it did. While I would object to the characterization of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and so on as "Germans" (some of them may have spoken a language that is part of the Germanic language group, but so do Americans of the modern day, and we don't call
them "Germans") - it's clear that a bunch of people moved to Britain and their language eventually became the primary one spoken in most of the island.
France, though - I dunno what you're talking about there. The French speak a Romance language directly descended from the Gallo-Romance tongue that normal people were beginning to speak around 400. There was no major meaningful migratory activity into Gaul. The only real legacy of "external" groups there was, in fact, the name of the country, a derivative of "Frank" - but the "Franks" that grew to dominate northern Gaul in the fifth century were primarily Gallo-Romans from the field army on the Loire River who adopted a "Salian Frankish" identity after a Romanized Salian Frank won control of that army in a power struggle in the 480s.
