Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  Conflict was endemic at every level. The new noblemen who had fled from the north feuded with older southern families; aristocrats of all stripes struggled against middling magnates; the rich and the middling elites both squeezed the peasantry; Chinese of all classes pushed natives back into the mountains and forests; and everyone resisted the embattled court at Jiankang. Despite all their heartbroken poetry about the lost lands of the north, the landlords of southern China were in no hurry to pay the taxes or surrender the powers that might have allowed a reconquest. The mandate of heaven had been lost.

  THE AWFUL REVOLUTION

  Unlike the crisis of the twelfth century BCE, the crisis triggered by the Old World Exchange was Eurasia-wide, and its Western component inspired what was arguably the first masterpiece of modern historical writing, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. His subject, Gibbon declared, was an “awful revolution,” one “which will ever be remembered, and is still [in the 1770s] felt by the nations of the earth.” He was right: only during his lifetime had Western social development regained the dizzy heights it had reached under the Roman Empire.

  The early Roman and Han emperors had faced similar problems but had tried different solutions. Terrified of civil war, Chinese rulers neutralized the army, but then had few weapons against powerful landlords; Roman rulers instead took over the army, putting relatives in command and filling its ranks with citizens. This made it harder for civilians to defy emperors, but easier for soldiers to do so.

  It took skill to manage this system, and since plenty of Rome’s rulers were unhinged, periodic crashes were unavoidable. Caligula’s orgies and decision to make his horse a consul were bad enough, but Nero’s fondness for forcing senators to sing in public and murdering anyone who annoyed him was too much. In 68 CE three different factions in the army proclaimed their own generals as emperor and it took a brutal civil war to sort matters out. “Now was revealed,” the historian Tacitus noted, “the secret of empire—that emperors could be made outside Rome.” Wherever there were soldiers, there could be a new emperor.

  The Roman solution did, however, preserve the frontiers (Figure 6.5). The Germans beyond the Rhine and Danube, like the Qiang along China’s western border, experienced population growth in the first centuries CE. They responded by fighting one another, trading with Roman towns, and slipping across the rivers into the empire. For all these activities, organizing into larger groups with stronger kings made sense. Like the Han, Rome responded to increasingly porous borders by building walls (most famously Hadrian’s across Britain), monitoring trade, and fighting back.

  Figure 6.5. Rome’s third-century crisis. The dotted areas show where Germanic, Gothic, and Persian raids were common.

  In 161 CE, when Marcus Aurelius Antoninus became emperor, Rome still seemed to be in sturdy health, and Marcus looked forward to following his passion—philosophy. Instead, he had to confront the Old World Exchange. The first serious epidemic broke out in army camps on China’s northwest frontier the year he ascended the throne, and the very same year a Parthian invasion of Syria forced Marcus to concentrate troops there. Their crowded camps provided the ideal host for disease to spread, and in 165 a pestilence (smallpox? measles? the literary accounts are, as ever, vague) devastated them. It reached Rome in 167, just as population movements far to the north and east were pushing new, powerful Germanic federations across the Danube. Marcus spent the rest of his life—thirteen years—fighting them.*

  Unlike China, Rome won its second-century frontier wars. Had it not, Rome—like the Han—might have lurched into crisis in the 180s. As it was, though, Marcus’ victories affected only the pace of change, not its results, which suggests that armies alone could not halt the collapse. The epidemics’ massive death toll had thrown the economy into chaos. Food prices and agricultural wages soared, which made the plagues a boon for the farmers who survived, who could abandon less-productive fields and concentrate on the best land; but as farming contracted and taxes and rents fell, the larger economy went into free fall. The number of shipwrecks in the Mediterranean declines sharply after 200, and pollution in ice cores, lake sediments, and bogs follows after 250 (Figure 6.6). By then everyone was feeling the pinch. Bones from cattle, pigs, and sheep become smaller and scarcer in settlements after 200, suggesting declining standards of living, and by the 220s wealthy city dwellers were putting up fewer grand buildings and inscriptions.

  Figure 6.6. Declining and falling: numbers of Mediterranean shipwrecks and levels of lead pollution in the lake bed at Penido Velho, Spain, across the first millennium CE. The downward slopes mirror the upward slopes in the first millennium BCE shown in Figure 6.2. As in Figure 6.2, numbers of wrecks and amounts of lead have been normalized so they can be compared on the same vertical scale, with the amounts of each in 1 CE being counted as 100.

  Fifty years after Marcus’ victories, Rome lost control of its frontiers anyway. Just as victories over the Xiongnu in the first century BCE had paradoxically made it harder for the Han to control their borders, a string of Roman successes undermined Parthia so badly that the regime collapsed before a Persian uprising in the 220s CE. The new Sassanid dynasty that emerged forged a much stronger army and in 244 defeated a Roman force and killed the emperor who led it.

  Rushing troops and money to prop up the collapsing eastern front left Rome unable to defend its Danube and Rhine frontiers properly. Instead of sneaking across in little gangs to steal cattle, war bands hundreds or thousands strong now pushed through the denuded lines, burning, looting, and carrying off slaves. The Goths, who had only recently migrated to the Balkans from the shores of the Baltic, raided as far as Greece and in 251 defeated and killed another Roman emperor. By then more epidemics had broken out, perhaps carried by these population movements. When Rome finally mustered another army against Persia, in 259, it hit a new low: the emperor Valerian was captured and thrown in a cage, where he remained for a year, dressed in slave’s rags and suffering ingeniously horrible torments. Romans insisted that Valerian’s fortitude impressed his captors, but the reality seems to be that the Persians, like the Xiongnu when they captured Chinese emperors, eventually got bored. They flayed Valerian and hung his skin on their capital’s walls.

  The Old World Exchange and the rise of Sassanid Persia transformed Rome’s position. At the very moment that population was falling and the economy stumbling, emperors needed more money and troops than ever before. Their first (not-so-bright) idea, paying for new armies with debased currency, simply made money worthless and accelerated economic collapse. Appalled by the failures of central government, armies took matters into their own hands, proclaiming new emperors with bewildering speed. In contrast to earlier emperors, these men had no whiff of divinity about them at all. Most were tough soldiers, and some were illiterate privates. Few lasted longer than two years, and all died by the sword.

  With army factions spending more time fighting one another than defending the provinces, local grandees followed the same path as their Chinese counterparts, turning the peasants into dependents and organizing them into militias. The Syrian trading city of Palmyra managed to throw the Persians back, theoretically on Rome’s behalf, but its warrior queen Zenobia (who led her troops in person and regularly attended city assemblies dressed in armor) then turned on Rome too, overrunning Egypt and Anatolia. At the other end of the empire a governor on the Rhine declared an independent “Kingdom of the Gauls,” taking Gaul (modern France), Britain, and Spain with him.

  By 270 Rome looked rather like China had done in 220, divided into three kingdoms. But despite all the turmoil, Rome’s situation was actually less dire. By taking on Persia and the Germans in the 260s, Palmyra and Gaul bought the empire a breathing space, and the cities around the Mediterranean—the empire’s fiscal backbone—remained largely secure. So long as goods kept moving by sea, money kept coming into the imperial coffers, and the new, hardheaded military men who sat on the throne could recover and rebuild. Trading
the philosophers’ beards and flowing locks of earlier emperors for shaved chins and crew cuts, they hiked taxes in the regions they still controlled, built a strike force around armored cavalry, then turned on their enemies. They smashed Palmyra in 272, Gaul in 274, and most of the Germanic war bands by 282. In 297 Rome even got some revenge for Valerian by capturing the Persian royal harem.

  The emperor Diocletian (reigned 284–305) exploited this turnaround with administrative, fiscal, and defensive reforms that adapted the empire to deal with the new world. The army more or less doubled in size. The frontiers never entirely settled down, but Rome was now winning more battles than it lost, blunting Germanic raids with defense in depth and wearing the Persians down in sieges. To handle all this activity Diocletian split his job into four parts, with one ruler and a deputy handling the western provinces and another ruler and deputy the eastern. Predictably, the empire’s multiple rulers fought two-, three-, or four-way civil wars as often as they fought external enemies, but compared to the twenty-seven-way civil war in China’s Jin Empire in the 290s, this was stability indeed.

  A new empire was taking shape. Rome itself ceased to be a capital city, as decision-making shifted in the western provinces to forward bases near the frontiers and in the eastern to a grand new city at Constantinople. But in the end, no amount of reorganization could solve the empire’s underlying problems. The economic integration built up over so many centuries had been shaken. The eastern provinces revived in the fourth century, with trade in grain, wine, and olive oil again spreading wealth far down the hierarchy, but the western provinces steadily drifted out of this circuit. Great landlords in western Europe held on to much of the power they had gained during the third century, tying “their” peasants to the land and shielding them from state taxation. As estates grew more self-sufficient, the cities around them dwindled and trade and industry declined further still; and the toughest problems were simply beyond any emperor’s ken. Temperatures and rainfall kept declining, whatever rulers said or did; epidemics kept killing; and peoples on the steppe kept moving.

  Sometime around 350, a group called the Huns moved west across Kazakhstan, sending dominos tumbling in every direction (Figure 6.7). Just why they inspired such fear is debated. Ancient writers blamed their sheer horribleness; modern scholars more often point to the powerful bows they used. Once again, we can only observe the consequences. Nomads fleeing the Huns broke into India and Iran or retreated west into modern Hungary. That made life difficult for the Goths, who had settled as farmers in what we now call Romania after their third-century raids on the empire. After heated internal debates, the Goths asked Rome for sanctuary inside the empire.

  There was nothing new in this. Rome had developed a policy rather like the Han “using barbarians to fight barbarians,” routinely admitting immigrants, dividing them into small groups, then enrolling them in the army, settling them on farms, or selling them as slaves. This simultaneously relieved pressure on the frontiers, raised troop numbers, and increased the taxable population. The immigrants, naturally, often had different ideas, preferring to settle as a group inside the empire and continue living as they had before. To prevent this, Rome needed always to have enough troops on hand to overawe the immigrants.

  The Goths’ arrival at the Danube in summer 376 was a tough call for Emperor Valens, who ruled the eastern provinces from Constantinople. On the one hand, there were too many Goths for comfort. On the other, the potential gains from accepting so many immigrants were enormous, and it might in any case be difficult to keep them out, especially since Valens’ best troops were away fighting Persia. He decided to admit the Goths, but almost as soon as they crossed the river his commanders on the ground, more interested in profiteering than in dispersing the immigrants, lost control. Half-starved Goths broke out, looting what is now Bulgaria and demanding a homeland within the empire. Playing hardball, Valens refused to negotiate. He disentangled his army from the Persian front and rushed back to the Balkans—only to make another bad decision, giving battle rather than waiting for his western co-emperor to bring more help.

  Figure 6.7. Scourges of God: the coming of the Huns and the collapse of the western Roman Empire, 376–476 CE. The map shows three major groups of invaders (Huns, solid lines; Goths, broken lines; Vandals, dotted lines) with the dates of their main movements. There were countless smaller migrations too.

  About fifteen thousand Romans (many of them Germanic immigrants) fought maybe twenty thousand Goths at Adrianople in August 378. Two-thirds of the Romans, including Valens, died in the rout that followed. Back in Augustus’ day, losing ten thousand troops would barely have registered; Rome would have called up more legions and taken terrible revenge. By 378, though, the empire was stretched so thin that these men could not be replaced. The Goths were inside the empire and out of control.

  A peculiar standoff developed. The Goths were not nomads like the Xiongnu, stealing things and then riding off to the steppes, nor were they imperialists like the Persians, come to annex provinces. They wanted to carve out their own enclave in the empire. But with no siege engines to storm cities and no administration to run them, they needed Roman cooperation; and when that was not forthcoming they rattled around the Balkans, trying to blackmail Constantinople into granting them their own kingdom. Lacking legions to expel them, the eastern emperor pleaded poverty, bribed the Goths, and skirmished with them, until, in 401, he persuaded them that they would get a better deal by migrating westward, whereupon they became his co-emperor’s problem.

  But all this clever diplomacy ceased to matter in 405 when the Huns resumed their western progress. More dominos fell and more Germanic tribes pressed against Rome’s frontiers. The legions, now chiefly made up of Germanic immigrants and led by a half-German general, wore them down in bloody campaigns, and diplomats wove yet more webs, but on New Year’s Eve, 406, Rome finally lost control when thousands of Germans poured across the frozen Rhine. There were no more armies to stop them. The immigrants fanned out, taking everything. The poet Sidonius, among the richest of the rich, described the indignities he had to endure when a band moved onto his estate in Gaul. “Why ask for a song to Venus,” he wrote to a correspondent living back in Rome, “when I’m stuck in the middle of a long-haired rabble, forced to listen to Germanic speech, keeping a straight face while I praise songs from a swinish Burgundian who spreads rancid butter in his hair? … You don’t have the stink of garlic and onions from ten breakfasts belched on you early every morning.” Plenty would have envied Sidonius, though. Another eyewitness put things more bluntly: “All Gaul is filled with the smoke of a single funeral pyre.”

  The army in Britain rebelled, taking charge of its own defense, and in 407 what remained of the Rhine armies joined it. By then everything was falling apart. Struggling to get the western Roman emperor’s attention amid so many disasters, the Goths invaded Italy in 408 and in 410 sacked Rome itself. They finally got their deal in 416, with the emperor agreeing that if the Goths helped him drive the Germans and assorted usurpers out of Gaul and Spain, they could keep part of the territory.

  Rome’s frontiers, like China’s, had become places where barbarians (as each empire called outsiders) settled and then took imperial pay to defend the empire against more barbarians trying to push their way in. It was a lose-lose situation for the emperors. When the Germanic Goths (now fighting on Rome’s side) defeated the Germanic Vandals (fighting against Rome) in Spain in 429, the Vandals crossed to North Africa. It may seem hard to believe, but what is today the Tunisian Sahara Desert was then Rome’s breadbasket, ten thousand square miles of irrigated fields, exporting half a million tons of grain to Italy each year. Without this food, the city of Rome would starve; without the taxes on it, Rome could not pay its own Germans to fight enemy Germans.

  For another ten years brilliant Roman generals and diplomats (themselves often of German stock) managed to keep the Vandals in check and parts of Gaul and Spain loyal, but in 439 it all came crashing down. The Va
ndals overran Carthage’s agricultural hinterland and Rome’s worst-case scenario abruptly materialized.

  Rulers in Constantinople were often quite happy to see their potential rivals in Rome struggling, but the prospect of the western parts of the empire actually breaking up alarmed the eastern emperor Theodosius II enough that he mustered a large force to help liberate what is now Tunisia. But as his troops gathered in 441, yet another blow fell. A new king of the Huns, Attila—the “Scourge of God,” as Roman authors called him—erupted into the Balkans, leading not just ferocious cavalry but also a modern siege train. (Refugees from Constantinople may have brought him this technology; an ambassador from Theodosius described meeting such an exile at Attila’s court in 449.)

  As his cities crumbled under the Huns’ battering rams, Theodosius canceled the attack on the Vandals. He saved Constantinople—just—but these were dark days for Rome. The city still had perhaps 800,000 residents around 400 CE; by 450 three-quarters had left. Tax revenues dried up and the army evaporated, and the worse things got, the more usurpers tried to seize the throne. Attila chose this moment to decide he had squeezed the Balkans dry, and turned west. The half-Gothic commander of Rome’s western armies managed to convince the Goths that Attila was their enemy too, and, leading an almost entirely Germanic force, he dealt Attila the only defeat of his career. Attila died before he could get revenge. Bursting a blood vessel during a drinking bout to celebrate his umpteenth wedding, the Scourge of God went to meet his maker.

  Without Attila the loose Hun Empire disintegrated, leaving the emperors in Constantinople free to try to put the western empire back together again, but not until 467 did all the requirements—money, ships, and a Roman strongman worth backing—fall into place. Emptying his treasury, the eastern emperor sent his admiral Basiliskos with a thousand ships to recapture North Africa and heal the western provinces’ fiscal backbone.