If Rome Hadn't Fallen

by Timothy Venning

  The overall amount of Germanic looting and pillaging has also probably been played up by rumour and apocalyptic exaggeration by Christian writers, to whom the catastrophic collapse of the Christian Empire was a sign of God’s disfavour and portended the Last Days foretold in Revelation. In 395–6 the Goths ranged at will across the major sites of ancient Greece, sacking Eleusis, Sparta, and Olympia and blackmailing Athens into paying ransom, a major psychological blow to the Empire.5

  In 402 Alaric attacked the Western capital at Milan by surprise, forcing the court to take refuge permanently in the inaccessible marshes of Ravenna, hardly the situation of a militarily confident government. 6 Thereafter Alaric returned to an uneasy role as a ‘federate’ ally based on the Illyrian border of East and West, playing them off against each other. An independent leader, Radagaisus, invaded Italy on his own in 405 and was defeated. Although our account of the attack (by Zosimus) is garbled it seems that he had nothing to do with Alaric’s Goths but crossed the upper Danube from Bohemia. The West was thus starting to attract copycat opportunistic invasions, and on 31 December 406 a multi-ethnic German coalition crossed the Rhine. Led by the Vandals and also including the Alans and Suevi, they rampaged at will across Gaul and produced apocalyptic comments about the end of civilization from local writers (e.g. Prosper); the lack of Roman Imperial military re-action led to the commander in Britain, Constantine (III), taking action unilaterally and claiming the throne. A revolt against his authority by his general Gerontius then enabled the Germans to move on into Spain, which was divided between them without any need to consult the Empire.

  In 408 the murder of Stilicho left the West open to another invasion of Italy and threats to pillage Rome. Alaric shamelessly raised the stakes of protection money for leaving, and eventually lost patience. The Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410 was a relatively disciplined and organised affair, with the Christian, albeit heretic Arian, Goths treating the churches and the Papacy with some respect. Indeed it was a result of Alaric’s blackmail of the government in Ravenna failing to extort the pay-off he expected, not a longterm plan.7 If the Western military high command had not been decimated by the anti-Stilicho purge in 408 he would have been unlikely to reach Rome at all. He had after all simply been attempting to secure power within the Roman ‘system’ as commander-in-chief to his own new puppet-emperor, Attalus. But the psychological effect was immense, with St. Jerome in distant Bethlehem summing it up as symbolising the destruction of the world.

  In reply to the pagan reaction that it was the gods’ revenge on the Empire for abandoning them, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote ‘De Civitate Dei’ arguing that the real ‘City of God’ was the new, spiritual Christian world not an earthly city. This was not a new reaction to the difficulty of fitting in the spiritual world of Christianity to a state that had initially persecuted it, and abandonment of the ungodly secular society was a desirable course for the virtuous Christian long before 410. But the sack of Rome gave Augustine an opportunity to establish a theological basis for the separation of the aims of Christianity and of the state, and to place the former as infinitely preferable. This fed into the claims of the Papacy to religious authority and prestige in place of the Emperor as lord of Rome, although Constantine had already given the Popes supreme jurisdiction over their ecclesiastical subordinates in the Western part of the Empire, effectively as ‘Patriarchs of the West’.

  The Vandals’ sack in 455 was more brutal and secured a far greater haul of loot, but also opportunistic, and unlike Alaric, Gaiseric was not likely to be bought off before his forces attacked the city.8 Like Attila in 451, he used the excuse of wanting the implementation of a promise (this time in a formal treaty) of an Imperial heiress, Valentinian III’s daughter Eudocia, destined for his son Hunneric but unlikely to be delivered willingly to a barbarian. In political terms, it was extremely implausible that Gaiseric would have secured the Imperial succession for Hunneric. Even if the son-less Emperor had been forced to marry his elder daughter to Hunneric to avoid war, or after the murder of Valentinian his successor Petronius Maximus had done so, the succession would not have passed to Hunneric. The main political aim of Gaiseric in 455 was probably to forestall Petronius’ planned alliance with the Goths (via Avitus’ embassy), which could lead to a Romano-Gothic attack on the Vandals in North Africa. Had the alliance been implemented and Gaiseric not reacted, the Vandals would probably have faced the same dangerous level of attack from north, east, and west as they had in 441–2 with the Eastern Empire able to join in with greater German participation than earlier thanks to Attila’s death.

  The written evidence suggests that what came to be known to much later centuries as the eponymous ‘vandalism’ by the Vandals in Rome and elsewhere, systematic and deliberate destruction, was an occasional rather than a commonplace occurrence. At most, Gaiseric collected all the valuable moveables he could and stripped the roofs from temples in Rome to carry off the precious metals. Most damage to the fabric of the Empire’s cities and towns was done gradually, not by concentrated barbarian assault. Across the West, buildings collapsed over decades for lack of maintenance rather than being pulled down by German attackers, and it is now suggested that the evidence of fires in excavated villas (e.g. in Britain) is not necessarily due to arson by passing Germans. Nor did hordes of Goths storm the walls of Rome in 410; the gates were opened for them by runaway slaves. In 455 Petronius Maximus fled the city and Pope Leo surrendered sooner than face a massacre.

  There was widespread insecurity and anarchy, at least in some areas where governmental authority had collapsed, e.g. the mid-fifth century middle Danube written about by the local St. Severinus9. The decline in building standards of what little new works were undertaken, and the use of wood not stone, in the fifth and sixth centuries West suggests an inability to find adequate craftsmen or materials10. If this is not physical ‘decline’ into an atomised society, what is? But it should be remembered that in less affected areas such as mid- and southern Gaul, the local Romanised aristocracy were still in existence as a cultured, Latin-speaking elite and running the Church throughout the sixth century. The world of the 590s historian Bishop Gregory of Tours was post-Roman politically, but not culturally, and the Church remained a strong bond with the city of Rome. Even in seventh century Anglo-Saxon England the international links of the Catholic Church, restored to the Germanic kingdoms there from the time of St. Augustine’s mission in 597, could allow for the imposition of Theodore, a Greek, as Archbishop of Canterbury, who came from distant Tarsus in Cilicia in 669.11

  The fall of the Western Empire was not the end of the international world of a Mediterranean-centred Church. Indeed, the concept of ‘Roma Aeterna’ as the centre of the civilised world now applied to spiritual rather than political leadership, and was played up by Pope Gregory the Great, who was from an old Senatorial family but with a monastery established in his ancestral mansion. The collapse of the central institution of the Senate did not occur in 476, as it was still functioning and given practical autonomy in Rome by the Romanophile Gothic king Theodoric from 493. It only went into eclipse after the disruption of the wars between Eastern Empire and Goths over Italy in 537–54, when Rome was captured several times and Gothic leader Totila once evicted its declining population.12

  The thesis of a weaker Western army open to greater recruitment from unreliable German troops and Germanic supreme commanders has also been suggested as damaging to the West; the West had a Germanic supreme infantry and cavalry commander (‘magister utiusque militiae’) and effective regent, Stilicho, in 395–408 and eventually fell victim to more German generals after 455. But the East’s army also relied on extensive Germanic recruitment, as in 331 (Goths) and 359 (Sarmatians). The East’s senior German officers included one man who briefly held supreme military power in the capital (Gainas in 399–400) and one who served as military commander and chief minister (Aspar, 450–467). Both were murdered and their partisans massacred, as was Stilicho; but after Stilicho’s fall
the powerless Western court was at the Germans’ mercy in 408–10. The East, however, fought off its Germanic challengers after their similar coups in 400 and 467. After Gainas and Aspar were killed their surviving troops were left at large in Thrace but could only plunder the countryside. Did the West face a more concentrated and resource sapping Germanic challenge than the East? Did its geography make attack easier and its containment more difficult?

  Problems of state structure and control. Religion, governance, and failings in the structure of the bureaucracy

  Much has been written about the top-heavy bureaucracy and court, and the vast armies imposed on the Empire by Diocletian at the end of the third century13. A new governmental system was set up after he took power in 284 (East) and 285 (West). He ruled for twenty years in a rare period of stability, though it is unclear how much was entirely his work as opposed to further innovation in the early fourth century. This was a time when Roman taxpayers’ ability to fund this had been weakened by decades of insecurity and disastrous losses of manpower to the plague in the early 250s. Greater centralization was a logical reply to the multiplicity of revolts by provincial military commanders in the 250s and 260s. The Empire also faced a much more organised and determined military threat in the East than before, from the time that the aggressive Sassanid regime and its armies replaced the decentralised Parthian government in Mesopotamia and Persia in the mid-220s.

  A small household Imperial entourage in the early Roman Empire had become a large, Persianised staff with a strict hierarchy and protocol, reflecting the religious overtones of a semi-divine Emperor, living in a Sacred Palace surrounded by quasi-religious ritual, who came to be associated with the cults of ‘saviour’ gods. Initially the old Romano-Greek pantheon was preferred, with Diocletian identifying himself and his colleague Maximian with Jupiter and the monster-destroying hero Hercules. An alternative version linked the Emperor to the cult of the sun god, ‘Sol Invictus’, to whom Aurelian, restorer of unity and conqueror of autonomous regimes in Gaul and Syria in the 270s, built a massive temple in Rome14. This identification of the Emperor with the state’s protective gods later transferred to Christianity under Constantine the Great, with the Emperor as the ‘thirteenth Apostle’ and his court as the reflection of Heaven.15 As a result, the Church was co-opted into the State bureaucracy, with a hierarchy of bishops under district metropolitans and supreme Patriarchs reflecting the civil bureaucracy. The government also set the correct form of worship and the only legal form of Christian doctrine, as shown by Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in 325. The doctrine established there is still the basis of Catholic and Orthodox theology. Constantine enjoyed debating and pronouncing on theology, as approved by his Church panegyricist Bishop Eusebius. This was a new move for a Roman ruler, as the traditional Roman cults were rituals lacking in doctrine.

  As a result, the mid and later fourth century and the fifth century saw Emperors changing the state Church’s doctrine to fit in with their personal beliefs, and enforcing their subjects’ adherence. Constantius II backed Arianism in the 340s and Valens did likewise in the East in the 360s. In the 440s Theodosius II backed Monophysitism. Success for one particular doctrine depended on its promoters having the Emperor’s ear; the Arian Bishop Valens was a major influence on Constantius II and in the 420s Theodosius II had to be dissuaded from imposing the controversial Christology of his new Patriarch Nestorius. Defeated at the Church Synod of Ephesus thanks to the forcefulness of the ultra-Catholic Egyptian bishops, Nestorius was banished to Syria and his sect flourished only outside the Empire, especially in Sassanid Persia. (It later developed an offshoot in China.) In the later 440s, Theodosius became a convert to the mainly Syrian and Egyptian Monophysite doctrine and attempted to impose it on his capital. In the manner of Henry VIII (or later Stalin and Chairman Mao), if the ruler changed his doctrinal beliefs everyone was required to follow suit.

  On all such occasions, the death of the Emperor responsible saw an orthodox Emperor restoring Catholicism, his bishops denouncing the defeated doctrine as heresy and banning it. The triumph of Christianity in attracting State backing under Constantine opened up opportunities for rival interpreters of doctrine to win over Imperial support and lobbying by clerics at Court, and those who lost out could be portrayed as traitors to their Emperor. Such treason was a matter of dates and luck. The long career of Catholic champion St. Athanasius, Patriarch of Alexandria 328–73, saw him alternately in favour under Catholic rulers like Constantine and exiled under the Arian Constantius II and the pagan Julian. Arianism (called after the Alexandrian theologian Arius) only triumphed with those German tribal polities that had adopted it outside Roman borders in the fourth century, when Bishop Ulfilas had been able to proselytize North of the Danube. Constantius II backed Ulfilas’ mission, and re-settled him and some of his Gothic converts when they were driven out by the Tervingi leadership in 348. These tribes (principally Goths and Vandals) kept to this doctrine after they moved into the Empire, and this caused difficulty when they took over Catholic provinces.16 Some persecuted the locals (most notably the Vandals in Africa), though this could be linked to fears of the Catholics’ political intrigues with the Eastern Empire rather than heresyhunting intolerance.

  It is a plausible theory that the Arian beliefs of the Goths ruling southwestern Gaul (and later Spain) helped to alienate them from the local Catholics and to keep them at arms’ length from the latter’s clergy and townbased bishoprics. Greater unity with the local population followed their conversion in the 580s. In contrast, historians have seen the choice of Catholic baptism by Frankish conqueror Clovis as inaugurating centuries of co-operation between Frankish rulers and their Church. The reconquest of Arian-ruled Vandal Africa by Justinian in 533 could be played up as a righteous liberation from heresy. But did the different faiths of Germanic conquerors and local ex-Roman subjects really exacerbate their mutual alienation to a dangerous extent? Or is this just a modern assumption based on the swift collapse of the Arian-led German states in Italy and Africa in the face of Eastern invasion?17 Would the conversion of the Goths and Vandals to Catholicism by a different set of missionaries in the fourth century have produced stronger post-Roman German kingdoms? The Papacy in Rome had more autonomy under the Arian Theodoric, living in distant Ravenna, than when it was supervised after 537 by Justinian and Theodora.

  The failure of the religion of peace and love to tolerate its own dissidents, about which St. Athanasius was unapologetic, was duly ridiculed by the apostate Emperor Julian.18 ‘Paganism’ (a term from ‘pagus’ meaning ‘countryside’, i.e. the rural remnants of ancient Romano-Greek religious cults), was initially the persecutor of ‘unpatriotic’ Christians under Decius, Valerian, and Diocletian but from the 380s was exposed to legal bans on its public practice and seizure of temple property by Theodosius. This led to alienation between the aristocratic practicers of the ancient cults in Rome and the government in Milan and Ravenna. The Roman nobility, however, had been disconnected from court life and service since the Emperors moved out of the city in the mid-third century anyway. If there was any disastrous loss of competent manpower to governments from the end of allowing senators to serve as provincial governors, this was a mid-third century law by Valerian’s son Gallienus not a result of pagan alienation from a Christian Empire. Constantine re-employed the aristocrats. The reason for Gallienus’ measure seems to have been state fear of well-connected, rich aristocrats using their provincial armies to stage revolts. The Late Empire created a table of ranks with honorifics dependant on service, like Peter the Great in Russia.

  Arguably the failure of the State to tolerate any dissident religious sects alienated many potential supporters and led to unnecessary diversion of time and resources to persecution, as well as to the flight into hiding or exile of the defeated. But was this only temporary and played up by the polemical partisans of the victims, such as the senior Catholic clergy under Constantius and Valens? Did most people quietly conform, as they had done during t
he Diocletianic persecutions? It has also been argued that the emergence of monasticism led to many religious people dropping out of state service (or paying taxes) to live a holy life in the wilderness and save their souls not the state. St. Martin of Tours, a soldier turned monk turned bishop, was one famous example; and the persecutions of Christians in the early 300s saw thousands of dissidents fleeing to live as monks in the Egyptian deserts.19

  How much this factor mattered in the less monasticised West is uncertain. The peasant flight from the land due to oppressive taxes, demands for supplies to the army, and legal semi-serfdom as tied tenants (‘coloni’) was more of a long-term problem. The high profile wealthy who rejected their secular lifestyle to set up monasteries, live as hermits, or go on pilgrimage to the Holy Places, e.g. Paulinus of Nola, ex-Empress Laeta, and the heiress Melania, were played up by approving supporters like St. Jerome, but were numerically few. There were not many clerics, exempt from tax, and not contributing to civic society according to critics from Gibbon onwards, compared to the state bureaucracy. Did they really make a difference to the state?

  In political terms, the new order did pose one major problem. The Emperor was now a much more remote and semi-divine figure than the first citizen of the early Empire or even the rough-and-ready military Emperors of the mid-third century, when a brutal survival of the fittest and frequent revolts meant that only the most competent (or luckiest) rulers survived long. The men who saved the Empire in the 260s, 270s, and 280s, such as Claudius II, Aurelian, Probus, Diocletian, Maximian, and Constantius I, were usually experienced soldiers of humble birth. But once order was restored, the Emperors were more often immobile in their capitals than fighting in the field, with limited knowledge of the world beyond their court, though this did not apply to the autocratic Constantine the Great, Valentinian I, or Theodosius. They had their own failings: Valentinian seems to have been over-suspicious and persecuted alleged plotters, and Constantine and Theodosius gave full support to brutal and corrupt ministers such as Ablabius and Rufinus. This was not new, as shown by the activities of Sejanus under Tiberius, Tigellinus under Nero, and Cleander and Perennis under Commodus, and in all cases the misrule of individual favourites at Court did not affect the lives of ordinary citizens. But now the State was under greater threat and needed competent officials to advise a Palace-bound ruler. The danger of all the ritual acclamations at public ceremonies (even the Games) and obsequious language from courtiers to the sacred Emperor was that the latter would confuse the image of harmony at Court with the reality of life in his Empire.