In the post-Roman west, however, elite career patterns began to change. The new set-up saw military service for one’s king, rather than a foot on the bureaucratic ladder, as the main path to advancement for most secular elites, even in areas where Roman landowners survived 476 and a southern Gallic model prevailed. As a result, an expensive literary education ceased to be a necessity. The descendants of both Roman and immigrant elites in fact continued to revere the old traditions. The odd Frankish and Visigothic king has gone down in the cultural annals for his Latin poetry. When a ‘proper’ Latin poet called Venantius Fortunatus turned up at court from Italy, he delighted equally both Roman- and Frankish-descended grandees present. This individual made a career out of singing for his supper, his party piece being elegant couplets in praise of the dessert. Despite this, neither kind of grandee bothered any more with a full Latin education. They did teach their children to read and write, but their aims were more limited. As a result, by about 600, writing was confined to clerics, while secular elites tended to be content just to be able to read, especially their Bibles; they no longer saw writing as an essential part of their identity. It was the Roman state which, again not very deliberately, had created and maintained the context in which widespread secular literacy was an essential component of eliteness, and with the passing of that state, new patterns of literacy evolved.12
A similar point can be made about Christianity. The Christianization of first the Mediterranean world, then of the broader reaches of central, eastern and northern Europe in the first millennium, is sometimes seen as a transformation entirely unaffected by the collapse of Rome. There is some truth to this notion, but it can also mislead. The Christian religion has always evolved, certainly institutionally, according to contemporary contexts. As we saw in Chapter 3, the Romanization of Christianity was as important an historical phenomenon as the Christianization of the Empire. Thanks to the emperor Constantine and his successors, imperially funded meetings of Christian leaders were able to define most of the religion’s doctrines from the early fourth century onwards. The Church also developed a very particular hierarchy of bishops, archbishops and patriarchs whose geographical locations largely reflected the Empire’s administrative structure of local and regional capitals. Nor did Christian Roman emperors step back one iota from the claim made by their pagan predecessors that they had been appointed by the Divinity – they simply re-identified that Divinity as the Christian God. So they had every right, as they saw it, to involve themselves in the operation of the Church at all levels. And they duly did so, calling councils, making laws, and interfering in senior appointments.
Christianity as it evolved within the structures of the Empire was thus very different from what it had been before Constantine’s conversion, and the disappearance of the Roman state profoundly changed it yet again. For one thing, the boundaries of the new kingdoms failed in some cases to respect the hierarchies of late Roman administration. Bishops thus sometimes found themselves in one kingdom, and their archbishops in another. Successive archbishops of Arles, which was part of the Visigothic kingdom but whose metropolitan control extended into the Burgundian, fell foul of their kings who, suspicious of their cross-border contacts, removed them from their posts. There was change, too, of an intellectual kind. In the Roman world, leading laymen – who were as well if not better educated than the clergy – often contributed to religious debate. But with the disappearance of widespread literacy, laymen soon ceased to be able to do so, and the intellectual world of the early medieval Church became a solidly clerical one. This would not have happened, had laymen remained as educated as clerics. Equally important, post-Roman kings inherited from their predecessors the claim to religious authority, and took it upon themselves to appoint bishops and call councils. As a result, Christianity operated at this time in what Peter Brown has called ‘Christian microcosms’. There was no single, unified Church; rather, the boundaries of post-Roman kingdoms defined working regional subgroupings, and these Church communities within the different kingdoms had relatively little to do with one another.13
Above all, the rise of the medieval papacy as an overarching authority for the whole of western Christendom is inconceivable without the collapse of the Roman Empire. In the Middle Ages, popes came to play many of the roles within the Church that Christian Roman emperors had appropriated to themselves – making laws, calling councils, making or influencing important appointments. Had western emperors of the Roman type still existed, it is inconceivable that popes would have been able to carve out for themselves a position of such independence. In the east, where emperors still ruled, successive Patriarchs of Constantinople, whose legal and administrative position was modelled on that of the Roman papacy, found it impossible to act other than as imperial yes-men. Appointed by the emperors at will, they tended to be ex imperial bureaucrats highly receptive to imperial orders.14
The Components of Collapse
IN PRESENTING my own take on the reasons for the collapse of the west Roman Empire, I find myself lined up against one of the oldest historical traditions of all – in English writing, certainly. Famously, Edward Gibbon emphasized internal factors:
The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight.
Gibbon’s analysis picked up from where the Greek writer Polybius left off. Polybius, like most ancient historians, saw individual moral virtue or vice as the main moving force behind historical causation. The Roman Republic rose to greatness because of the self-discipline of its leaders, went his argument, and started to fall from grace when the excesses produced by success fed through to corrupt their descendants. Polybius was writing in the second century BC, long before the Empire reached its full extent, let alone started to shed territories. Picking up his general line of argument, Gibbon, addressing the subject of Christianity, saw it as contributing massively to the tale of woe. For him, the new religion sowed internal division within the Empire through its doctrinal disputes, encouraged social leaders to drop out of political participation by becoming monks, and, by advocating a ‘turn-the-other-cheek’ policy, helped undermine the Roman war machine.15
There may be something to be said for this way of thinking but there is one counter-argument that relegates it to no more than a footnote in the debate. Any account of the fall of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century must take full stock of the fact that the eastern Empire not only survived, but actually prospered in the sixth. All the evils identified in the western system applied equally, if not more, to the eastern. If anything, the Roman east was more Christian, and more given to doctrinal argument. Also, it operated the same kind of governmental system over the same kind of economy. Yet the east survived, when the west fell. This alone makes it difficult to argue that there was something so inherently wrong with the late imperial system that it was bound to collapse under its own weight. And if you start looking for differences between east and west that might explain their different fates, accidents of geography are what come most immediately to mind. The richest provinces of the east, the band stretching from Asia Minor to Egypt, were well protected by Constantinople against invaders from the north and east, whereas the western Empire had most of the Rhine and Danube frontier line to protect, and we have seen what hazards that threw up.
Both of these points were made by two earlier commentators, N. H. Baynes and A. H. M. Jones;16 but since Jones was writing – forty years ago – it has become more necessary, I would argue, in any account of the collapse of the Roman west, to shine the spotlight on the barbarian-immigrant issue. This is for two reasons. First, the only factor that Jones saw as playing any real role in the different fates of east and west was their relative prosperity. In his view, overtaxation crippled the late Roman economy. Peasants wer
e not being left with a large enough share of their yearly produce to feed themselves and their families, so that both population and output saw steady, if unspectacular, decline. This, he believed, was especially true in the west.17 Jones’s view of the late Roman economy was entirely based, however, on written, above all legal, sources. As he wrote, the French archaeologist Georges Tchalenko was publishing the account of his revolutionary trove of prosperous late Roman villages in the limestone hills behind Antioch (see pp. 112-13); and since Jones wrote, rural surveys, as we saw in Chapter 3, have completely recast our view of the late Roman economy. We know that in the fourth century, taxes were certainly not high enough to undermine peasant subsistence. In the west as well as the east, the late Empire was a period of agricultural boom, with no sign of an overall population decline. The east may still have been richer, of course, but there was no major internal economic crisis at play in the Roman world before the fifth century. Equally important, understanding that both moments of frontier crisis, 376–80 and 405–8, had the same non-Roman cause, and reconstructing the detailed narrative of subsequent imperial collapse from 405 to 476, underline the central role played by outside immigrants in the story of western collapse.
All this said, there is no serious historian who thinks that the western Empire fell entirely because of internal problems, or entirely because of exogenous shock. The emphasis of this book has been primarily on the latter, because in my view the growth of Hunnic power in Europe has been misunderstood and, with it, the intimate link between the arrival of the Huns and the deposition of Romulus Augustulus. To explore more fully the interaction of the Hun-generated invasions with the nature of the Roman imperial system, however, let’s start by taking another look at the invaders.
THE INVADERS OF the late fourth and fifth centuries came in pretty large numbers. Ancient sources being what they are, the entire hundred years’ worth of writings, from 376 to 476, offers us no precise figures for any of the barbarian groups involved in the action, let alone an appreciation of the global threat they posed. Some scholars would argue that the sources are so feeble on this front that it is pointless even trying to estimate their size. This is a justifiable stance, but some of the better sources do offer us plausible-looking figures, which suggest at least an order of magnitude for some of the invading groups and, occasionally, indirect ways of estimating their size. From these indications, my best guesses would be along the following lines.
The Tervingi and Greuthungi who appeared on the northern bank of the Danube in 376 could probably each put about 10,000 fighting men into the field. Radagaisus’ force which invaded Italy in 405/6 was probably larger than these groups individually – maybe 20,000 fighting men. Taken together, these figures are broadly in line with other indications that, when he had united all three, Alaric could muster over 30,000 fighters.18 When they crossed to North Africa, the military capacity of the united Vandals and Alans was seemingly in the region of 15–20,000, but that was after hard fighting and takes no account of the Suevi. In total, therefore, the Rhine invaders of 406 may, again, have numbered 30,000-plus fighting men. The Burgundians who converged on the Rhine in 410 are still harder to gauge. Compared with the Visigoths of the mid-450s, they only ever rated as a second-rank power, so their military capacity must have been lower, perhaps in the region of 15,000-plus fighters, but this was after their traumatic defeat at the hands of the Huns in the 430s.19 Beyond this, we simply don’t know how many Sciri, Rugi and Herules moved over with Odovacar to the Roman army of Italy as the Hunnic Empire collapsed in the 460s. They certainly numbered thousands, up to 10,000, perhaps. Roughly, therefore, the main invaders of the west might have amounted to 40,000 Goths (in the two waves of 376 and 405/6), 30,000 Rhine invaders, maybe 15,000 Burgundians, and another 10,000 refugees from Attila’s collapsing empire. To this figure of 95,000 fighting men we would need to add whatever might be represented by various smaller groups, especially the Alans who didn’t follow Geiseric to Africa, and, above all, the Frankish forces who from the mid-460s played an increasingly prominent role in Gallic politics. Although after 476 the Franks quickly became powerful enough to rival the Visigoths for dominance in Gaul, in the events leading up to the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, probably no more than 10–15,000 Franks were active. Overall, this suggests that around 110–120,000 armed outsiders played some part in bringing down the western Empire.20
On the one hand, narrative reconstruction leaves no room for doubt that the centrifugal forces generated by the intruders from outside fragmented the western Roman Empire into the new kingdoms of the late fifth century. On the other, these groups each weighed in at a few tens, not hundreds, of thousands of fighting men. This does not amount, at first sight, to an overwhelming level of force, especially when you remember that even the most conservative estimates would reckon the Roman army in AD 375 at 300,000 men, and some at double that figure. In a way, the narrative sequence confirms the point. The western Empire was not blown away in one moment of conquest, as for instance the Chinese Empire would be later at the hands of the Mongols. Initially, the immigrants had just enough military power to establish their enclaves, but the further expansion that created the independent kingdoms was a drawn-out process, taking two to three generations fully to erode the power of the Roman state. Another way of putting this is that, even in aggregate, the fifth-century invaders were not numerous enough to bring down just any Empire that we might imagine in control of the human and other resources of all the territory from Hadrian’s Wall to the Atlas Mountains. They were able to push the western Empire from a state of relative health into non-existence only because they interacted in specific ways with the inherent military, economic and political limitations of the Roman system as it stood after half a millennium of evolution.
Considering the Empire’s military capacity first of all, the invasions generated by the Huns have to be seen in relation to the rise of Sasanian Persia to superpower status in the third century AD. As we saw in Chapter 2, Persia was eventually contained. However, containment did not remove the Persian Empire’s power. Even after stability was restored to the eastern frontier by about the year 300, the military effort there could never be allowed to slacken, and upwards of 40 per cent of the eastern Empire’s armies (20–25 per cent of the total east and west Roman military force) had always to be pointed at the Persians. The late fourth-century crisis on the Empire’s European frontiers thus applied unwelcome pressure on a military structure that had already been subject to heavy strain.
A large proportion of the rest of the Roman army also consisted of garrison forces (limitanei), whose remit was essentially to deal with immediate, low-grade threats to frontier security. All had other duties and some may have lacked the training and equipment to make them of much use against the concentrated forces now generated by the Huns. Overall, then, the military capacity of the invaders needs to be measured not against the total armed forces of the Empire as a whole, for many units were fully committed to other tasks, but against the field armies of the west. These were grouped together largely in Gaul, Italy and western Illyricum, and amounted, in 420, to 181 units: on paper, upwards of 90,000 men. (At the onset of the crisis, the western field army probably numbered no more than 160 units, or 80,000-plus men.) Compared with this force, the number of intrusive barbarians starts to loom much larger, and it is easier to appreciate why they were eventually able to prevail. Far from being outnumbered, they probably enjoyed – between them – a not insignificant numerical advantage over imperial forces. This was hidden, initially, by the invaders’ lack of unity, but numbers slowly told as the fifth century progressed.
If the incoming barbarians were sufficiently numerous eventually to overcome that section of the Roman army that could be pointed in their direction, why didn’t the Empire simply raise more troops? The answer to this question lies in the limitations of its economy. As we have seen, late Roman agriculture was, if anything, booming in the fourth century, but there was no obvious means
of quickly or substantially increasing output. In many provinces, the economy was operating at maximal levels of output. It is unlikely, therefore, that there was much extra slack left by the year 400 to fund still larger armies after the major increases in tax extracted a century earlier to fund the new armies required on the Persian front. The Empire’s tax-take was also slightly limited by its bureaucratic capacity and the willingness of local elites to pay, but there is little sign that it was having much trouble with taxpayers before the 440s, when Aetius had to rein in tax privileges after the loss of North Africa. The most significant limitation on taxation would appear to be the buoyant but plateaued economy.
Political limitations, on the other hand, are directly relevant in another way to the story of western collapse. A relatively simple political deal, as we saw earlier, bound together Roman centre and locality. In return for tax payments, the machinery of the state, military and legal, protected a relatively small landowning class from both outside enemies and internal ones. Because their dominance was based on landowning, these people were vulnerable. They could not up sticks should the imperial centre cease to be able to guarantee their security, so it is hardly surprising that they tended to ingratiate themselves with the rising barbarian powers. This limitation within the system played a considerable role in shaping the nature of imperial collapse in the old Roman heartlands of central and southern Gaul and Spain.
Another political limitation relates to the operation of high politics. By virtue of the Empire’s massive size and its previous success in Romanizing provincial elites, late Roman ruling regimes faced constant pressure from local interest groups, all pulling in different directions. By the fourth century power thus needed to be shared between more than one emperor, but there was no tried and trusted recipe for doing this successfully; all regimes were in this sense improvisations. At the centre, power could be distributed in various ways, such as between two emperors or more; or by means of puppet emperors whose strings were pulled by powerful men such as Aetius or Stilicho. Moments, even a decade or two, of political stability could ensue, but would tend to be punctuated by periods of brutal infighting, often ending in civil war. And instability at the centre gave the immigrants precious opportunities to advance their own interests.
The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History Page 54