The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

by Bryan Ward-Perkins

  Wider social unrest, such as that of the Bacaudae, was also almost certainly fanned by weakness in the imperial regime—as well as contributing further to it. The activity of the Bacaudae is documented in Gaul in the period between about 407 and 448, which, as we have seen, was a time of considerable military and political instability. This instability could have encouraged local leaders to opt out of central government control (particularly if the taxes they were paying bought no immediate local protection), and it may also have allowed simmering discontent amongst the oppressed to take an open and active form. Evidence from elsewhere in the empire does indeed suggest that invasion and civil war could temporarily weaken social control. We are told that during Alaric’s siege of Rome in the winter of 408–9 ‘almost all the slaves who were in Rome, poured out of the city to join the barbarians’; and a few years later, during a similar siege, a slave revolt on a smaller scale occurred in the south Gaulish town of Bazas.24 These slaves had little to lose, and some of them, in happier times, may have been warriors from beyond the frontiers—it is not surprising that they took advantage of Roman weakness to try and join the invading armies. In Rome and Bazas, order was rapidly re-established once the immediate military emergency had passed. But in northern Gaul and Spain, decades of political and military uncertainty created conditions in which the Bacaudae could be active over a prolonged period of time. However, they too disappear from the record when a degree of peace returned to these regions in the second half of the fifth century. The Bacaudae and other social dissenters seem to have been a product, as well as a cause, of turbulent times.

  By contrast with the West, the eastern empire was relatively untroubled by civil wars and internal unrest during the period of the invasions, and this greater domestic stability was undoubtedly a very important factor in its survival.25 If the eastern empire had faced internal distractions in the years immediately following the Gothic victory at Hadrianopolis in 378, similar to those that the West faced in the period following the 406–7 barbarian crossing of the Rhine, it might well have gone under. There is no very obvious reason for this greater stability in the East, beyond good luck and good management. In particular, through the dangerous and difficult years after Hadrianopolis, the eastern empire had the good fortune to be ruled by a competent and well-tried military figure, Theodosius (emperor 379–95), who was specifically chosen and appointed from outside the ranks of the imperial family to deal with the crisis. By contrast, the ruler of the West during the years of crisis that followed the Gothic entry into Italy in 401 and the great crossing of the Rhine in 406 was the young Honorius, who came to the throne only through the chance of blood and succession, and who never earned any esteem as a military or a political leader (Fig. 3.4). Whereas the figure of Theodosius encouraged a healthy respect for the imperial person, that of Honorius, dominated as he was by his military commanders, probably encouraged civil war.

  3.4 The emperor Honorius trying to look like a military leader, on an ivory plaque of AD 406. In elaborate armour, he holds an orb surmounted by a Victory, and a standard with the words ‘In the name of Christ, may you always be victorious’. Reality was less glorious—Honorius himself never took the field; and his armies triumphed over very few enemies other than usurpers.

  It is unlikely that the East was innately and structurally much more cohesive than the West. If only briefly, it was, for instance, very seriously rocked by the revolt of two Germanic generals in East Roman service, Tribigild and Gainas, in 399–400. Their revolt devastated many of the provinces of the empire, and threatened Constantinople itself. Victory over these rebels was thought significant enough to merit the building of a great spiral column, similar in size and design to Trajan’s column in Rome, which dominated the skyline of the eastern capital until its demolition in the early eighteenth century. Violent social unrest too was not a western monopoly; in the right circumstances it could also erupt in the East. During the rebellion of Tribigild, his army marched through some of the provinces of Asia Minor, modern Turkey. Although this was an area of the empire that had long been at peace, and that seems to have been prospering in the years around 400, we are told that Tribigild’s force was soon swelled by ‘such a mass of slaves and outcasts that the whole of Asia was in grave danger, while Lydia was in utter confusion, with almost everyone fleeing to the coast and sailing across to the islands or elsewhere with their whole families.’26 The East was not immune from internal problems; but, for reasons we shall explore towards the end of this chapter, it was lucky enough to be largely protected from the external invasions that often served as a trigger for civil war and social strife.

  The Failure of Self-Help

  As we have seen, the revolts by the Bacaudae in the West can partly be understood as an attempt by desperate provincials to defend themselves, after the central government had failed to protect them. Roman civilians had to relearn the arts of war in this period, and slowly they did so. As early as 407/8 two wealthy landowners in Spain raised a force of slaves from their own estates, in support of their relative the emperor Honorius. But it would, of course, take time to convert a disarmed and demilitarized population into an effective fighting force; our two Spanish landowners may indeed have chosen to arm slaves rather than peasants, because some of them were recently captured barbarians with experience of war before their enslavement. In Italy it was only in 440, in the face of a new seaborne threat from the Vandals, that the emperor Valentinian III formally revoked the law that banned Roman civilians from bearing arms. Once armed and habituated to war, local forces could achieve success: by the 470s one Gallic aristocrat was leading local resistance against the Gothic besiegers of Clermont; and a decade later another had emerged as the independent ruler of Soissons in the north. But for most of the West the remilitarization of society came too late.27

  Interestingly, the most successful resistance to Germanic invasion was in fact offered by the least romanized areas of the empire: the Basque country; Brittany; and western Britain. Brittany and the Basque country were only ever half pacified by the invaders, while north Wales can lay claim to being the very last part of the Roman empire to fall to the barbarians—when it fell to the English under Edward I in 1282. It seems that it was in these ‘backward’ parts of the empire that people found it easiest to re-establish tribal structures and effective military resistance. This is a point of some interest, because it parallels a phenomenon we shall meet in Chapter 6, when looking at the economy. Sophistication and specialization, characteristic of most of the Roman world, were fine, as long as they worked: Romans bought their pots from professional potters, and bought their defence from professional soldiers. From both they got a quality product—much better than if they had had to do their soldiering and potting themselves. However, when disaster struck and there were no more trained soldiers and no more expert potters around, the general population lacked the skills and structures needed to create alternative military and economic systems. In these circumstances, it was in fact better to be a little ‘backward’.

  Were the Germanic Tribes Getting Stronger?

  Unlike the Romans, who relied for their military strength on a professional army (and therefore on tax), freeborn Germanic males looked on fighting as a duty, a mark of status, and, perhaps, even a pleasure. As a result, large numbers of them were practised in warfare—a very much higher proportion of the population than amongst the Romans. Within reach of the Rhine and Danube frontiers lived tens of thousands of men who had been brought up to think of war as a glorious and manly pursuit, and who had the physique and basic training to put these ideals into practice. Fortunately for the Romans, their innate bellicosity was, however, to a large extent counterbalanced by another, closely related, feature of tribal societies—disunity, caused by fierce feuds, both between tribes and within them. At the end of the first century, the historian and commentator Tacitus fully appreciated the importance for the Romans of Germanic disunity. He hoped ‘that it may last and persist amongst the barbarian
s, that if they can not love us, at least they should hate themselves … for Fortune can give us no better gift than discord amongst our enemies’. Similarly, at a slightly earlier date, the philosopher Seneca remarked on the exceptional valour and love of warfare of the barbarians, and pointed to the great danger that there would be for Rome if these strengths were ever joined by reason (ratio) and discipline (disciplina).28

  For the Germanic peoples, unity or disunity was the crucial variable in military strength; while for the Romans, as we have seen, it was the abundance or shortage of cash. Already, before the later fourth century, there had been a tendency for the small Germanic tribes of early imperial times to coalesce into larger political and military groupings. But events at the end of this century and the beginning of the next unquestionably accelerated and consolidated the trend. In 376 a disparate and very large number of Goths were forced by the Huns to seek refuge across the Danube and inside the empire. By 378 they had been compelled by Roman hostility to unite into the formidable army that defeated Valens at Hadrianopolis. At the very end of 406 substantial numbers of Vandals, Alans, and Sueves crossed the Rhine into Gaul. All these groups entered a still functioning empire, and, therefore, a very hostile environment. In this world, survival depended on staying together in large numbers. Furthermore, invading armies were able to pick up and assimilate other adventurers, ready to seek a better life in the service of a successful war band. We have already met the soldiers of the dead Stilicho and the slaves of Rome, who joined the Goths in Italy in 408; but even as early as 376–8 discontents and fortune-seekers were swelling Gothic ranks, soon after they had crossed into the empire—the historian Ammianus Marcellinus tells us that their numbers were increased significantly, not only by fleeing Gothic slaves, but also by miners escaping the harsh conditions of the state’s gold mines and by people oppressed by the burden of imperial taxation.29

  The invaders had no sense of pan-Germanic solidarity, and were happy, when it was to their own advantage, to fight other Germanic peoples in the name of Rome.30 But they also seem to have been well aware that to fall back into the small groups that were characteristic of their life beyond the Rhine and Danube would quite simply be military and political suicide. This is not to say that Roman diplomacy could never divide an invading group. In around 414 the Roman defenders of Bazas in southern Gaul were able to detach a group of Alans (under their own king) from the Gothic besiegers, persuading them instead to join the defence of the city:

  The boundaries of the city are walled about by Alan soldiery,

  With pledges given and accepted, ready to fight

  For us, whom they so recently were besieging as an enemy.31

  However, within the fifth-century West, evidence of invading groups coalescing is commoner than evidence of them splitting apart. In 418 a powerful Alan force was crushingly defeated in Spain by the Visigoths. The few survivors, we are told, fled and, ‘forgetting their previous independence, subjected themselves to the rule of Gunderic, king of the Vandals’.32

  These Alans knew that in their weakened state they could not survive in Spain alone; while the Vandals were equally well aware of the additional fighting power that some fierce Alan warriors could offer. The alliance of Vandals and Alans that followed survived for over 100 years, and was one of the mainstays of the Germanic conquest of Africa, even though in this case the two peoples apparently never fully merged. Right up to the fall of his African kingdom in 533, the Vandal ruler styled himself ‘King of the Vandals and Alans’—presumably, either the Alans wished to retain an independent identity, or the dominant Vandals were reluctant to adopt them fully as their own.33

  Groupings and alliances of this kind were encouraged by the dangerous circumstances of life within the fifth-century West. They were also greatly facilitated by the possibilities of rich pickings; a large army had much more chance of gaining booty and conquests than a small one. When the Vandals left Spain in 429, for their great adventure in Africa, the Alans were with them, and so too were others—a whole unnamed ‘Gothic tribe’, as well as ‘persons from other tribes’.34 Both need and greed encouraged the formation of large armies. This was not good news for the Romans.

  The Limits of Germanic Strength

  Individual Germanic groups gained greater unity in the fourth and fifth centuries, and hence greater strength. But it is also important to put the unity of these single groups in the context of broader Germanic disunity. Some accounts of the invasions, and a map like Fig. 1.2 (on p. 6), seem to be describing successive campaigns in a single war, with the systematic and progressive seizure of territory by the various armies of a united Germanic coalition. If this had really been the case, the West would almost certainly have fallen definitively in the very early fifth century, and far less of the structures of imperial times would have survived into the post-Roman period. The reality was very much more messy and confused, leaving considerable space for Roman survival. The different groups of incomers were never united, and fought each other, sometimes bitterly, as often as they fought the ‘Romans’—just as the Roman side often gave civil strife priority over warfare against the invaders.35 When looked at in detail, the ‘Germanic invasions’ of the fifth century break down into a complex mosaic of different groups, some imperial, some local, and some Germanic, each jockeying for position against or in alliance with the others, with the Germanic groups eventually coming out on top.

  Some incursions, such as the long migration of a Gothic army through the Balkans, Italy, Gaul, and Spain between 376 and 419 (Fig. 3.5), were indeed quite unlike the systematic annexations of neighbouring territory that we expect of a true ‘invasion’. These Goths on entering the empire left their homelands for good. They were, according to circumstance (and often concurrently), refugees, immigrants, allies, and conquerors, moving within the heart of an empire that in the early fifth century was still very powerful. Recent historians have been quite correct to emphasize the desire of these Goths to be settled officially and securely by the Roman authorities. What the Goths sought was not the destruction of the empire, but a share of its wealth and a safe home within it, and many of their violent acts began as efforts to persuade the imperial authorities to improve the terms of agreement between them.36

  The experience of the Goths also underlines the crucial fact that a degree of accommodation between Germanic incomers and Roman natives was often possible. The incoming peoples were not ideologically opposed to Rome—they wanted to enjoy a slice of the empire rather than to destroy the whole thing. Emperors and provincials could, and often did, come to agreements with the invaders. For instance, even the Vandals, the traditional ‘bad boys’ of this period, were very happy to negotiate treaty arrangements, once they were in a strong enough negotiating position.37 Indeed it is a striking but true fact, that emperors found it easier to make treaties with invading Germanic armies—who would be content with grants of money or land—than with rivals in civil wars—who were normally after their heads.

  3.5 The long migration of the Goths between 376 and 419 (shown here in highly simplified form)—sometimes retreating (whether before Huns or imperial troops), sometimes advancing triumphantly, and sometimes settled as allies of the empire.

  Selling out the Provincials

  Because the military position of the imperial government in the fifth century was weak, and because the Germanic invaders could be appeased, the Romans on occasion made treaties with particular groups, formally granting them territory on which to settle in return for their alliance. Four such agreements are recorded in fifth-century Gaul: with the Visigoths, who were given part of Aquitaine, centred on the valley of the Garonne, in 419; with the Burgundians, settled on the upper Rhône near Lake Geneva in about 443; with a group of Alans, granted ‘empty lands’ around Valence in about 440; and with another Alan group some two years later, settled in an unspecified part of northern Gaul (Fig. 3.6).38

  In recent scholarship these treaties have received a disproportionate amount of atten
tion, and have been paraded as evidence of a new-found spirit of cooperation between incoming Germanic peoples and the Romans, both those at the centre of power and those in the provinces. But is it really likely that Roman provincials were cheered by the arrival on their doorsteps of large numbers of heavily armed barbarians under the command of their own king? To understand these treaties, we need to appreciate the circumstances of the time, and to distinguish between the needs and desires of the local provincials, who actually had to host the settlers, and those of a distant imperial government that made the arrangements.

  I doubt very much that the inhabitants of the Garonne valley in 419 were happy to have the Visigothic army settled amongst them; but the government in Italy, which was under considerable military and financial pressure, might well have agreed this settlement, as a temporary solution to a number of pressing problems. It bought an important alliance at a time when the imperial finances were in a parlous condition. At the same time it removed a roving and powerful army from the Mediterranean heartlands of the empire, converting it into a settled ally on the fringes of a reduced imperial core. Siting these allies in Aquitaine meant that they could be called upon to fight other invaders, in both Spain and Gaul. They could also help contain the revolt of the Bacaudae, which had recently erupted to the north, in the region of the Loire. It is even possible that the settlement of these Germanic troops was in part a punishment on the aristocracy of Aquitaine, for recent disloyalty to the emperor. Some or all of these considerations may have weighed with the imperial government when settling the Visigoths in Aquitaine, particularly if the arrangement was envisaged as only temporary—until the Roman military position improved. The 419 settlement was almost certainly modelled on earlier arrangements made with Gothic armies in the Balkans, none of which had proved permanent.39