A word of caution should be issued about thinking that a ‘Golden Age’ of scientific discovery could have been assisted by the survival of the information contained in the Great Library of Alexandria. Certainly, Alexandria itself would have survived as a major Mediterranean port, unless its harbours had silted up without clearance, and not declined into a backwater. Scientists could have settled in the major cities of the Eastern Mediterranean rather than emerging in the new mercantile economies of north western Europe. But it is debateable whether the Great Library still existed in the late Roman period, let alone being intact for use by scholars. The story of Caliph Omar feeding the contents to the city’s baths-furnaces as being un-Islamic appears to be a late myth, though equally the warehouse of manuscripts burnt during Julius Caesar’s war in the city in 48BC was probably only an ‘over-flow’.30–31 The date of the ending of the library’s existence is still debated, but the two major occurrences of destruction in the city in the third century, Caracalla’s sack and the revolt against Diocletian, or the destruction of the ‘Serapeum’ by militant Catholic monks in 391 probably accounted for most of the premises. Many useful classical manuscripts would have survived to a Renaissance in unsacked libraries across the Empire, but much would still have been lost to neglect since the third century.
The actual term of ‘Renaissance’ – not a contemporary but a later one – for any revival of enthusiasm for classical art would have been unlikely, as there would have been no break in political continuity. The practical implications of less physical destruction would have preserved for more ancient manuscripts, on both art and science, to be consulted. Individual secular families’ collections would have survived, in great houses in cities and countryside, and some of the civic libraries in Rome itself. The capital had been a destination for literary loot for centuries, especially from Hellenistic libraries such as Pergamum; these would have survived unless burnt in accidental fires.
In scientific matters, works by Archimedes or Hero of Alexandria would have aided inventors; in artistic matters, looted paintings and statues would still have adorned Rome. But neglect or Christian zeal would have wrecked some examples; not all the classical statuary taken to Constantinople by Constantine survived to the sack in 1204. Memorably, the great statue of Athena from the Parthonon was smashed then by a superstitious crowd.32 Would pious Romans or Iconoclast clerics have acted similarly in the West? The surviving examples of pagan temples in the ‘civilized’ Roman East in the sixth xentury were shunned by the superstitious peasants and nobles alike, as seen in the ‘life’ of St Daniel the Stylite.
Chapter 6
The Eastern Empire, Effects of the Survival of
the Western Empire
The sixth and seventh centuries, a far stronger reaction to the Avars, Persia, and the Arabs?
The Northern frontier, less of a tribal threat to the Balkans?
The survival of the Western Empire would also have had major effects on the East, which would have had an ally able to send troops in major crises but also a strategic bonus in the upper and middle Danube area. It is possible that the survival of a militarily powerful West through the third and fourth centuries, and perhaps its preservation in the fifth, would have involved a scenario where the Empire held onto or regained Dacia. Apparently evacuated at a time of military crisis in the mid-third century, probably by Gallienus or Aurelian, it might have been preserved as a province had the Empire’s rulers had the will to follow through Marcus Aurelius’ occupation of the Czech lands to the Carpathians in the 180s. Due to lack of firm evidence we cannot say for definite that Marcus had a grand plan of strategy in mind to advance the frontier permanently to the Carpathians, but the discovery of Roman military structures in Bohemia would indicate that a long-term occupation was planned. Lacking a determined resistance from the occupied tribes with outside assistance, the factor which led to the similar advances in Scotland in the 80s and 140s and in Iraq in 114–17 being aborted, there would have been no logical reason for a later Emperor to withdraw in the later second or third centuries.
Thus Rome would have been been defending the Carpathians not the Danube as the frontier against the German tribes through the third century; a limited number of mountain passes and gaps in the Carpathian ridges were easier to defend than a river which was crossable for all its length and needed more troops. This more viable frontier would then have been defendable through the third century, barring major defeats like that of Decius by Kniva’s Goths in 251, even with the Empire’s troop numbers reduced due to the serious outbreak of plague in the early 250s.
Alternatively, Dacia might have been abandoned due to reduced troop levels and the number of attacks from neighbouring tribes, if not in the third century, then under pressure from the Goths as they retreated from the expanding Hunnic empire on the steppes around 376. Roman-held Dacia would then have been an obvious destination for their refugees rather than the south bank of the Danube as in real life. Dacia might have been lost to the Huns themselves in the 430s, or fallen under the weight of attacks by tribal refugees from Attila at a time when the Western Empire could not manage a military response, maybe after the death of Constantius III in 421, in the succession crisis before Galla Placidia secured the throne for her son Valentinian III in 425. In this scenario of a surviving Western Empire, the Rhine would not have been crossed by a permanent Germanic presence in 406, and thus armed bands of warriors from 406 and refugees from the 430s–440s would not have been settling in Gaul, Spain, and Africa. The pressure of westward tribal movements on Dacia and any Roman territories in Bohemia would have been acute, leading to the same sort of demands for admission that the refugee Goths made on the lower Danube in 376. Refusing them admission to the Empire would have run the risk of defiance, armed confrontation, and a Roman defeat such as the Goths carried out in 376–8. Constantius III, who handled the Gothic problem in Spain and Gaul successfully in 411–18 and allowed them a vassal kingdom, and Aetius had the military and diplomatic skill to handle such a Romano-German crisis successfully. Valentinian III, Aetius’ jealous sovereign who assassinated him in 454 and precipitated the West’s fatal collapse, did not.
Even if Dacia and/or the Czech lands had been lost to the German tribes in the early fifth century, this might not have been permanent. Had the West retained a strong comitatus and control of enough provinces to fund it, its commanders had a military edge over disunited invaders. Once Attila’s empire collapsed, there was a potential window of opportunity for reoccupation, or at least securing a peace with tribal leaders on terms favourable to Roman interests. Following precedent, the Empire was likeliest to require some sort of federate vassal status from the local tribal kings, the terms which Theodosius had reached with the Goths still holding out in Thrace in 381, and which kept their commanders under technical Roman command until Alaric’s revolt in 395. Dacia and perhaps the Czech lands could have been reoccupied by Aetius and his armies of Romans and German allies on the death of Attila in 453, or at least secured by Aetius for a group of allied tribes who had won independence from the Huns in the revolt that the latter’s subjects mounted in 454.
In order to secure Roman control of Dacia and the other lands threatening the Eastern Empire’s North-West frontier, source of the major Avar threat frothe 560s, the two Empires would have had to construct a system of alliances with local tribal leaders in the power vacuum after Attila’s empire collapsed. The history of the area after the anti-Hunnic revolt of 454 is obscure, but it would appear that the Huns under Attila’s sons managed to hold onto a domain based around the Ukraine plains and that nomadic peoples from this Western part of the steppes were a continuing threat to the Empire. In the 490s Anastasius found it necessary to construct a massive wall across the Thracian isthmus, about thirty miles west of Constantinople, against repeated raiding from across the Danube.1
Indeed, this threat revived in the 540s and 550s with massive raids on the Balkans by the Kutrigur Bulgars, starting with a two pronged raid in
to Greece, as far as Thermopylae, and Thrace, as far as the Long Wall of Anastasius, in 540 and culminating in a massive three pronged attack on Thessaly, the Chersonese around Gallipoli, and Thrace, breaching the Long Wall, by Khan Zebergan in 559. The Empire had probably lost immense numbers of current and future soldiers, and farmers, supplying their food, and taxpayers to fund them, in the plague of 542, when Procopius estimated that half the capital’s population died, and its armies were tied down in Italy, Spain, North Africa, and Armenia.
The extra threat to the Balkans from 540 strained its capacities to the limit, and during the 559 attacks the Emperor had to call Belisarius out of retirement and send him to tackle the invaders in Thrace with a hastily raised force of around 500 bucellarii (bodyguards), its size a testimony to the lack of troops available. Luckily, his reputation among the steppe nomads was such that after his initial victories in minor clashes they retreated.2 But the extra dimension of a new nomad threat to the Balkans and the lack of troops to meet it meant that much ravaging went unchecked, undermining the prosperity, and ability to supply soldiers, food, and taxes, of the Balkans. Had the Western Empire still been in existence through the fifth and into the sixth centuries, with or without Dacia, the Kutrigur menace would have been unchanged, the raiders came from the steppes via the lowland corridor of Wallachia, and would still have crossed the lower Danube. Justinian might still have sent his armies to reconquer a schismatic, probably Arian-led Western Empire or intervened in a civil war, and so been unable to protect the Balkan heartland from which he himself came. But if he had not been fighting in the West and had turned his formidable energies on Persia, which the East had been fighting in the late 520s before the opportunity to regain the West arose, he should have had more men available despite the plague and so put up a greater resistance to the raiding from 540.
The second major threat from the steppes in the mid-sixth century, the Avars, arrived in the Ukrainian region some time in the 560s. Their epic move west from central Asia developed as a result of factors out of the Empire’s control, as their first steppe empire was broken up in 552 by a revolt by their Turkish vassals and they had to flee their homeland.3 Ultimately, this tribal revolt had the consequence of destroying the Roman Empire nine hundred years later, the rise to independent political action of the Turkic peoples touched off the migrations that led the Seljuks to Manzikert in 1071 and the Ottomans to Constantinople in 1453. With or without a victorious Western Empire, preserved by Theodosius I, Stilicho, Constantius III, and Aetius from Germans and Huns, occupying Dacia and overaweing the German tribes, the Avars would still have arrived on the steppes facing the Danube. Their threat to the East would have duly developed, with a repeat of fifth century Hunnic history as the incumbent local tribal kingdom facing the Roman Illyrian and middle Danube zone (the Gepids) was destroyed (567) and the threatened Lombards moved West towards Italy. Justinian and, sporadically, Justin II paid off the Avars with subsidies, as Theodosius II had done the Huns in the 440s, but ultimately the price of blackmail rose, 80,000 nomismata per annum as of 574, and the Avars turned on the Empire, probably assisted by the threat of a Roman-Turkish alliance against them.4 In 579 they attacked Sirmium, key to the middle Danube, while the Lombards who had fled ahead of them were invading Italy from 568 and destroying what remained of an economy and society shattered by eighteen years of war between Justinian’s troops and the Goths.5
If the Western Empire had still been in existence, either independent or fully reunited with Justinian’s realm, as of the 560s, the Lombard invasion would have fallen on their frontiers in Dacia or the middle Danube and been met by a substantial military force in long garrisoned, unruined fortresses rather than the war ravaged Italy of real-life 568. Barring excessive losses due to the 542 plague and its successors, it should have been containable but would have prevented major Western military aid to the East against the Avar threat, or against the less centralised but no less dangerous infiltration of Slav settlers into the ravaged Balkans in the 570s and 580s. The latter ultimately lost the Empire this invaluable centre of troops, supplies, and taxrevenue and thus made it dangerously weak to face the Persian threat after 602 and the Arab threat after 634.
If the Lombards had been contained, the Western Empire should have been able to send Tiberius II and Maurice valuable troops in the 580s to deal with the Avar threat and the Slav settlers, though these smaller groups of invaders would have been more difficult to corner. Crucial fortresses such as Sirmium (lost in 582) and Singidunum (lost in 583) would have been saved, and the middle Danube line been held against major penetration. This would not have prevented the major Avar raids into Thrace from the lower Danube, which had already reached Anchialus in 583 and the ‘Long Wall’ in 584 and led to years of inconclusive Roman campaigns, and increasingly to worrying mutinies by the East’s Balkan armies against their unpopular generals.6
Western military help would not have prevented a multiplicity of raids and the resultant insecurity, flight from the land, and threat to agriculture in the Balkans. But if the West, as overlord of the German tribes who had escaped from Attila’s sons’ control in 454, such as perhaps the Lombards and Gepids, had occupied or dominated Dacia their army would have been able to cross the Carpathian passes and take the Avars in the rear. A nomad people could easily abandon their threatened homeland and retreat across the plains with their horse-drawn waggons, outstripping their lumbering pursuers, as Darius the Great had found in this area in 512BC. Constantine the Great had had more luck in a massive campaign North of the Danube in AD332, aided by local allies, but lost his nerve in 334.7 But a joint Western and Eastern advance on the Avar homeland would have served to keep the raiders on the defensive rather than perpetually raiding Thrace while their Slav allies overran the inland Balkans, and would probably have forced a temporary treaty out of their ‘Khagan’ until he was confident enough to resume the war.
A lesser Balkan threat, no Eastern Roman collapse after 602?
Arguably, the assistance to Maurice’s forces by a Western army –meaning less pressure on the Eastern troops – would have meant less mutinies by the latter, who in real life revolted in 593, 595, and, fatally for Maurice, 602. Generals had to be replaced, the money saving Emperor’s attempts to pay his men in supplies not coin had to be rescinded, and the attempt to winter north of the Danube in Avar territory was defied successfully twice. The strain on the East’s finances was obviously one cause of Maurice’s careful fiscal measures, though his troops preferred to call him stingy, and after he refused to ransom the Avars’ captives, who were massacred, and made a second order to winter north of the Danube, a final revolt led to his overthrow.
The resulting tyranny of the troops’ nominee as Emperor, the centurion Phocas, and civil wars led to Persian intervention and the disasters of the 600s and 610s.8 But it is possible that a less financially stringent Emperor than Maurice would not have been as hated by the troops, or faced a violent uprising in Constantinople in their support when they marched on the capital.
How much of the disastrous success of the 602 mutiny, leading to civil war as various provincial armies challenged Phocas, was due to the brusque, unpopular Emperor? What if his predecessor Tiberius II had not selected him as his chosen son-in-law and heir in 582? Maurice had been an experienced and successful general in the Persian wars before then, but he seems to have been a failure in keeping his troops’ loyalty as shown by repeated mutinies in the 590s. Indeed, the chain of dubiously competent Eastern leadership can be traced back through the profiligate Tiberius II to the previous ruler, Justin II, nephew and successor of Justinian. An irascible and haughty man, his refusal to continue a subsidy to the Avars is supposed to have caused their first attack on the Empire, though such a steppe empire was likely to raid the East at some point. His surprise descent into permanent mental instability in 574 led to his powerful wife Sophia (niece of Theodora and just as ruthless) taking charge of the government and choosing a senior Court regimental commander, Tiber
ius, as her Caesar and the next ruler. The choice of Justin as Justinian’s heir was doubtful, as the old Emperor died suddenly on 14 November 565 with only his eunuch chamberlain Callinicus’ word for it that he had named Justin at all. The latter was the preferred choice of the two most powerful Imperial female kin, Sophia, and Justin’s mother Vigilantia (Justinian’s sister). They duly hurried him to the Palace to be crowned by Patriarch John before his rivals knew Justinian was dead.9Without this coup, there is a chance that Justinian or his ministers would have preferred another Imperial nephew called Justin, the militarily experienced son of the late Germanus, who in November 565 was away commanding troops in Bithynia. He was sent off to Alexandria as governor and later murdered, probably at Sophia’s orders. Would this other Justin have proved a better Emperor than his namesake, passed the throne on to his heirs, and thus reduced the possibility of a disastrous civil war after 602?
If Rome Hadn't Fallen Page 19