If Rome Hadn't Fallen

by Timothy Venning

  Most probably, the Eastern Empire would have retained Antioch and the fortresses of upper Iraq for some decades from circa 640 but faced a Caliphate that had taken over all the Iraqi plains and all of Persia and could throw the manpower of the latter and of Arabia against it. The threat would have been more acute than that of Persia, with the prestige of ‘jihad’ encouraging each Caliph to wage war on Rome rather than the Persian Great Kings who were only sporadically aggressive. It is unclear but possible that some of the Arabs living on the Syrian Desert frontier who joined in the invasions were former auxiliaries in the Roman army, which regularly used Arabs, who knew the area well and coveted its land for their herds. An apocryphal story has it that Arab tribes who were normally paid off to avoid raiding Syria by the Roman authorities were refused money by the cashstrapped government and so joined the attack.16 Persistent Arab pressure from a united state keen to win lands and loot is probable.

  For the moment, any Roman military success and the frustration of Caliphal plans to settle Arab tribesmen in Syria and Palestine, later in Africa, would have resulted in a heavier settlement by them within conquered Persia. Their military energy, used against each other if there was no external enemy to attack, as seen in successive civil wars in the late 650s and 680s, would still have needed a focus. The new post-civil-war regime of Mu’awiya in the 660s was particularly aggressive in ranging across Asia Minor in real life. Accordingly, Caliphs concerned to direct their troops against an external foe would have had reason to launch them against their Eastern neighbours at times of truce with the Romans. Would this have led to an earlier conquest of Transoxiana and the Indus valley, or even a concerted attack on the Indian sub-continent far earlier than the real-life efforts of Mahmud of Ghazni in the early eleventh century and the Ghaznavids in the later twelfth century? The military adventures of probing and, if successful, conquering Spain and the Indus valley in the early 700s were taken on by local commanders in North Africa and Iran with minimal direction from the Caliph in Damascus, logically to keep their restless troops occupied in the same manner as Attila constantly sought new targets in the mid-fifth century.17 With stronger Roman-led resistance in the Mediterranean, military adventurers could have concentrated on the East.

  After the seventh century

  More or less permanent Romano-Arab war would follow, on a far more regular basis than Roman-Persian conflict, and duly undermine the Empire’s military and economic capacity. But the Empire would have possession of the Balkans and, usually, Western military aid, and it would be in a better position to resist, and to hold onto Asia Minor and Armenia without major raiding, than the real-life Empire of the later seventh and eighth centuries. It could also take the offensive more easily when the Caliphate began to decline and break up, and if it had held onto Egypt or Tripolitania to block an Arab advance westwards the main area of conflict would have beeen Syria.

  Indeed, arguably the successful defence of the Balkans from the Avars and a Western military presence in Illyria and Dacia might have enabled the Eastern Empire to hold the Danube against the Bulgars in the later seventh century. Previous large-scale crossings had been held back by a powerful Eastern army, or at least contained in Thrace, as would have happened with the Goths in 376–8 had Valens not tackled them so precipitously but waited for Western reinforcements. Aided by Western attacks on the Bulgars in the rear from Dacia, Constantine IV might have managed to push out the newcomers in the initial clash of 680. In real life, the Bulgars established a permanent base in the lower Danube valley and threatened the rest of the Balkans. Had the Arabs distracted the Eastern armies from a Balkan war in 680, a stronger Empire could still have blocked the Sredna Gore and Haemus ranges’ passes to more than occasional Bulgar raids. Constantine V’s long campaigns against the Bulgars in the mid-eighth century might then have been successful in evicting them.

  Disasters such as Nicephorus I’s defeat and death in a mountain pass trap in 811 would have been less likely in a better-resourced Empire, if still possible in cases of incompetent command. In real life the disaster of 811 brought Bulgar Khan Krum’s armies to the walls of Constantinople and lost most of Thrace and the inner Balkans, a valuable source of Eastern military manpower; a similar Bulgarian domination of the peninsula followed under Czar Simeon in the 920s. Had the East held onto the peninsula, or contained the newcomers north of the Great Balkan range in the Danube plain, it would have had extra resources of manpower and supplies, although arguably not taxes, given that this rural area was not then a monetary economy. It was however likely that large-scale and disruptive raids south would have continued to undermine the economy, send farmers fleeing, and reduce the viability of isolated towns. This had occurred during the sixth century at the hands of Kutrigur Huns and Avars despite all the Empire’s armies. All this would aid the Slav settlement that occurred in the devastated Balkan vacuum in the real-life later sixth and seventh centuries. But logically a more powerful Imperial army would have had the means to coerce these divided and poorlyled settlers into supplying valuable troops to the Empire as Justinian II did in Thrace in the 680s and Irene and Nicephorus I did in Greece around 800.

  The Eastern Empire might still have faced a depopulated Balkans. But it would lack the distraction of successive Bulgarian wars as it regained the military initiative during the early to mid-tenth century. The Arabs would have held only a part of the south and east Mediterranean coasts, and been less likely to have had the disruptive advantage of naval power had the Empire held onto Egypt, with Alexandria, or the Syrian coastal ports or both. Crucially, the new Arab fleets which threatened Constantinople in the later seventh century used the forests of south-western Asia Minor and Cyprus for timber; a more powerful Empire holding most of the Levantine ports would have prevented this. The Arabs would not have conquered Sicily and Crete from the 820s, thus releasing the Empire from another military distraction during the following centuries. Even if Egypt, vulnerable to raiding of the Nile valley from the deserts, had eventually been occupied, possibly by a dynamic Caliph with armies from Persia, the Western army would have been able to assist the defence of provinces further west, delaying any advance to Carthage.

  Much would depend on whether the East was distracted by a civil war at a time of Arab unity, e.g. under the first Abbasids from around 750 to the 809–13 civil war, and if the restive Berber tribes of the north-western African interior chose to attack a weakened Imperial defensive system. The extent of Roman losses of manpower to the plague, rural disorder or both in the African provinces would have been crucial; it is probable that the cities of this area were in steep decline before the Arab invaders arrived. Carthage, the regional administrative capital, was already shrinking in size before its conquest in 698. The Abbasid polity of Al-Mansur or Harun al-Rashid would have been as great a military threat to the Empire as was the Sassanid Persia of Chosroes II two centuries earlier, but once the Caliphal state was in decline and its outlying provinces were breaking away their military advantage would have ended.

  It is not unreasonable to speculate that a competent Eastern military leadership in the tenth century, perhaps Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimisces, as in real life, would have had the time and resources to reconquer Syria more easily in the 960s and move on against Jerusalem or Baghdad. The Empire was in real life far inferior to the Caliphate in manpower and other resources through the later seventh century into the ninth and had to conduct a holding operation in Asia Minor. It only achieved local military superiority when the Islamic Middle East had broken up into rival states. The enemies who tenth century generals and Emperors, most notably Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimisces in around 955–76, routed to reconquer Cilicia and Syria were the small if militant Hamdanid emirate of Aleppo, backed up by its allies in Mosul, not a major Caliph-led Iraqi state. Even then, they were distracted by successive Bulgarian wars and the Russian incursion into Bulgaria after 968.

  An Empire with full possession of the Balkans, and its menfolk as recruits for its a
rmies from the seventh to the tenth centuries, would have been in a better military position. The Emperors could even have met large Caliphal armies in the field at the time of a united Caliphate without such humiliating defeats as that which Theophilus suffered at the hands of Al-Mutasim in 838. By the mid-tenth century, they would have been able to launch reconquest without Balkan distractions, except perhaps the Russian invasion of the late 960s, launched from an area far beyond Imperial control. It is possible that the remorseless aggression of Basil II, not distracted by the Bulgarians as in real life, would have turned him to Eastern conquest and taken him to advance on the weak regimes now ruling Baghdad. The latter’s Caliphs were under the military control of the aggressive, but usually disunited, new state of the Buyid family, Zagros mountain warlords ruling Western Persia, from the 960s, and hence a new Roman-Persian confrontation over Iraq was likely. The Empire would have had the edge in terms of manpower, but faced serious military difficulties if it had managed to take and hold the Iraqi cities and plains, a familiar problem for Western aggressors from Trajan to George Bush.

  The Eastern Empire versus the Turks in the C11th – any difference from reality?

  Backed by Western troops and ‘federate’ Russian and steppe nomad allies, the Empire could have advanced its Eastern frontier between 960 and 1025 to conquer all the Levant and Iraq. It would come up against the Turks on the Iranian plateau, the new local nomad power as the Buyid confederacy declined, and face the same military threat there around 1050 as it did in real life further west in the following decade. The Turkish nomad cavalry archers would have been a menace to Roman infantry, in the tradition of desert and steppe opponents since the time of Crassus’ defeat at Carrhae (53 BC). Had the Empire not taken the risk of overrunning Moslem territory beyond its old frontier and restricted its reconquest to Syria and Palestine in the tenth century, then the Turkish advance would have taken the same course as in real life. The Seljuk dynasty, rallying Turkish nomad military resources as the new power on the Iranian plateau and controlling the powerless urban centres, took over control of the Caliphate in Baghdad around 1055, with their ruler as the first Sultan, technically ‘slave of the commander of the faithful’. In reality they reached Armenia and Syria around 1060–70, and this was the probable time-scale for a military confrontation with the Empire had this not occurred earlier over Baghdad.

  The Empire would have had more resources than it did in reality, but still been at risk of a major defeat by the Turks’ nomad horsemen, the same type of foe which they had been routed by at Carrhae. It would also have had the same problem in military confrontation as in real life faced Emperor Romanus IV in 1068–71, namely a large, lumbering Roman army, moving at the pace of its baggage-train, endeavouring to deal with small groups of mobile cavalry. Both Byzantines and Crusaders had cavalry in real life, but were seriously harassed by the more manoeuvrable Turkish steppe ponies and by long-range archery. This problem would have faced a hypothetical Eastern Roman army from a larger Empire too, unless a skilled Imperial commander had used his finances to recruit a rival force of nomads such as Magyars or Pechenegs from the Empire’s allies on the Ukrainian steppes. In real life, the Empire did attempt to recruit such troops to face the Turks in the 1050s but they lacked military discipline and often deserted, a probable scenario in any event.

  The Eastern and the Western Empires confront the Mongols

  As with the Mongol descent via Russia on the West in 1237–41, the sheer numbers involved in the Mongol assault would have made it more formidable than the Turkish invasions and the invaders would also have had Chinese military technology. The latter included siege engines and gunpowder projectiles, which had a psychological as well as physical impact. Even stone walled towns were vulnerable to outright storming or prolonged blockade, as faced by the Moslem frontier towns on the Oxus in 1220 and Baghdad in 1258. The Great Khan, unlike Attila, was interested in submission rather than in being bought off, whether or not his interest in world conquest can be attested reliably. The Empire would have been a prime target although it would have been more unified and better resourced than his real-life victims, the disunited Moslem states of Persia and the Christians of Russia and then eastern Europe. There was also a possibility of this latest incursion of steppe conquerors driving its victims to flee into or attack Roman lands, as the Goths had done ahead of the Huns in the 370s. The Mongol conquest of their first Moslem foe, the Shahdom of Khwarezm in Iran and Transoxania, in the early 1220s drove Shah Mohammed’s son and his armies into seeking new lands in the Levant and Georgia, and any such flight of Moslem forces would have posed a threat to the Empire.

  The real-life timing of the Mongol attacks would suggest that the first major Mongol ‘probe’ would come in 1227, with the campaign across Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. Even if the Empire had not been in possession of the former, any attack on its Christian allies in Georgia would have been likely to lead to an attempt to intercept or punish the attackers. A clash was more probable with the Mongol assault on Asia Minor (1243 in real life) or the Baghdad campaign in 1256–8. At the latest, the Mongol move on Syria in 1259–60 would have brought confrontation, with the need of Persian Ilkhan Hulagu to keep his huge armies occupied making long-term co-existence unlikely.

  Assuming that the Western Roman Empire had aided the East to defeat the invaders, the Empire would have been freed of its neighbouring Moslem rival with the fall of Baghdad but faced an aggressive new neighbour in the Mongol Ilkhanate in Persia. In real life the Mongols required Christian as well as Moslem rulers, e.g. the kings of Georgia and the Emperors of Trebizond, to become vassals but sought a Christian alliance against the remaining Moslem power, Mameluke Egypt, after their check by the latter at Ain Jalut in Palestine in 1260.

  Had the Empire held onto Egypt or regained it before the eleventh century, there would have been no Sultanate in Egypt at war with the Ilkhanate and the probable remaining Moslem power after 1258 would have been centred in Arabia, an even more distant and risky target for a Mongol army. But the danger posed by the aggressively expansionist Mongols to the Roman state would have made the Mongol successor states a major source of anxiety to the Eastern and Western Empires even when the main attacks westwards had ceased around 1260 and the rival Khanates were at odds with each other. A placatory trading mission could have been sent to the remote Great Khan Kubilai in China in the 1260s to establish more friendly relations, and even have involved traders with experience of the Silk Route such as the Polos. But ultimately it is possible that the shock Rome had experienced from the Mongol attacks, a threat of overwhelming force by uncouth barbarians comparable to the assault of the Gauls in 390/87 BC or the Cimbri and Teutones in the 100s BC, would have impressed itself on the Roman imagination as much as the appropriately-named Tatars did on medieval Europe, and produced an argument to take over a declining Persia after circa 1300 to prevent a recurrence.

  The past traditions of Roman military action, at least at a time of strong resources, suggest that a pre-emptive attack on a recently hostile polity was logical. This had been seen in the time of Roman pre-eminence, with past attacks on the Gauls in the 50s BC, British (including Caledonian) tribes beyond the current frontier in the first to early third centuries, Dacia in the 100s, and Parthia whenever an Emperor found glory to be politically desirable. The temptation for an ambitious or insecure ruler to prove his military prowess was another factor in recurrent Roman aggression, and the likelihood is that the Empire would not have rested content had the Mongol push westwards been halted with a major battle around 1227 in Iraq or the Caucasus, 1258 in Iraq, or 1260 in Palestine. Co-existence with the Great Khan, the Ilkhan or both by a formal treaty was advisable while they remained militarily strong, as the heirs of the Sassanid state, a military power virtually equal to Rome after around 230. The mutual mistrust of the Mongol states in Persia and the Volga steppes in the later thirteenth century would have made any co-operation between them to fight the Empire unlikely. Luckily for any neighbou
rs, the Golden Horde state on the lower Volga never resumed its aggression against the West of 1237–40 after the death of Great Khan Ogodai in 1241 called its leader Batu back to the steppe to deal with the election of a successor.

  But the disunity of the Mongol successor states and decline of the Ilkhanate after around 1300 would have posed a temptation to take over Persian military resources and deny them to another hostile state. Militarily, the declining Mongol state in Persia under Abu Said lacked the leadership to defy its Western neighbour, or any hope of aid from China, and would have fallen, though the Empire might have preferred to rely on local Moslem dynasts as its proxies to expensive outright conquest.

  Much would depend on the ambitions of the current Emperor, and the lure of repeating the legendary feats of the conquering Alexander the Great in Persia. But if the frontier was moved eastwards to the Oxus or the Hindu Kush it would pose the problem of how a state based in Constantinople could control lands so distant long-term in an era before telegraph or rail travel, the indispensible aids of the British in their equivalent rule of a farflung Asian land empire. Might the Empire resort to the expedient proposed for Eastern conquests by Constantine the Great, who had also had a large number of male relatives to provide for? In the early 330s he had proposed to hand over conquests from Persia, like Armenia, to his nephew Hannibalianus as one of a number of junior Emperors (‘Caesars’) subject to the overall authority of the supreme ‘Augustus’ in Constantinople. If local dynasts, the real-life Mongol successors in the 1330s such as the Jalyirids and Karts, were not to be made client kings of Persia, an Imperial prince could be enthroned as junior Emperor for the region. The Empire could thus have expanded into Asia on land, and portrayed itself as completing the work of Trajan and Alexander. The size of the Mongol attack could justify ‘pre-emptive’ war.