Once the mature empire of the early monarchy had been consolidated, with its European portions extending from Britain to the eastern Carpathians, the only remaining question was how long this edifice would remain intact. As the mass mobilization system of the core eroded, the Roman empire turned into a more traditional imperial formation burdened by the autonomy of local elites and fission within the professional army. Together with slow-moving secondary state formation at the frontiers and environmental change, these processes played an important role in determining the overall duration of hegemonic empire: but what matters in the present context is only that it was very large for a very long time.22
ONLY ROME
Rome’s record in empire-building was unique in more ways than one. No other state would ever again rule four out of every five inhabitants of Europe. No other state would ever again control all of the Mediterranean basin as well as the entire population of its coastal regions. No other empire in world history that had arisen at considerable remove from the great Eurasian steppe belt was anywhere near as large or durable as imperium Romanum.23
This uniqueness was rooted in the similarly unique circumstances of Rome’s rise to power. Military mass mobilization—and political republicanism—on the scale practiced by the ascendant Roman state and its principal allies did not return to Europe until the early modern age, at a time when competitive polycentrism had already hardened into an immovably stable state system. In no small part thanks to centuries of Roman campaigning, stateless peripheries had retreated to the northern and eastern margins of Europe. As a result, no later state in the temperate zone of Europe would ever again enjoy the privilege of being able to scale up its resources and military capabilities without having to worry about outside interference.
Never again were geopolitical conditions so favorable for the creation of naval hegemony, of the Roman mare nostrum—“our sea”: by 241 BCE, two friendly powers, Rome and the Ptolemaic empire, had come to share effective control over most of the Mediterranean Sea, and the latter declined too fast, and soon became too dependent on the former for any serious rivalries to emerge between them. This unlikely sequence of events remained without parallel. Once the Vandals and then the Arabs had ended Rome’s naval monopoly, the Mediterranean became and remained an arena for competing states and buccaneers. Not until the days of Admiral Nelson did any one power rival Rome’s position of maritime supremacy. And never again would the surpluses of the well-taxed Levant be harnessed for state-building in Europe.
In short, Rome’s manifold advantages, even insofar as it would have been possible to replicate them at all, were so unusual that they were unlikely to occur again later—and in fact they never did. This, in turn, helps us understand why nothing like the Roman empire ever returned.
PART III
Why Only Rome?
CHAPTER 5
From Justinian to Frederick
AFTER ROME
THAT NO LATER state ever again achieved a level of dominance within Europe comparable to that enjoyed by the Roman empire marks a double divergence: between Europe before and after the fall of Rome, and between post-Roman Europe and other parts of the Old World that had continued to produce huge empires. This part of my book deals with the first of these sharp discontinuities, and Part IV with the latter.
I trace the divergence within European history by identifying and analyzing, in chronological sequence, a number of junctures or sometimes more extended periods when renewed imperial state formation on a very large scale might have seemed possible: the restorationist campaigns of the eastern Roman empire in the mid-sixth century; the conquests of the Umayyad caliphate in the early eighth century; the ascent of the Frankish empire under Charlemagne; repeated efforts by rulers of the German empire from the tenth through the thirteenth centuries; the Mongol irruption into Central Europe in the mid-thirteenth century; the policies of the Habsburg monarchs Charles V and Philip II in the sixteenth century; the expansion of the Ottoman empire in the same period; and France’s struggle for hegemony from Louis XIV to Napoleon Bonaparte.1
In keeping with my overall objective of relating Europe’s eventual breakthrough to modernity to much earlier developments, I focus not so much on the totality of the areas once held by the Romans as on the prospect of hegemonic empire in Europe itself. My question is straightforward: Which polities, if any, might conceivably have had the potential to approach Rome’s record of ruling four out of every five Europeans, and why did they fail to do so?
My discussion of these junctures revolves around key factors that militated against state formation beyond a certain scale: the weakening of centralized state authority and state capabilities that prevented scaling-up in the Middle Ages, and the ways in which growing state power and stability in the early modern period were contained by an increasingly extensive and resilient state system that balanced against potential hegemons. I thus move from an analysis of the roots of Rome’s success in building a very large empire out of (southern) Europe to a discussion of later polities’ inability to follow suit.
This approach deliberately gives short shrift to a much-debated event that occurred in between these two phases: the disintegration of the Roman empire in the fifth century. Somewhat paradoxically, the question of why Rome fell is both over- and underresearched. Overresearched, because when in 1984 the German ancient historian Alexander Demandt published a massive historiographical survey of all the various explanations for the demise of the Roman empire that had been put forward from late antiquity to the present, he was able to enumerate no fewer than 210 different causes that had by then been proposed. This figure alone leaves no doubt that our understanding of this event would surely benefit from a healthy dose of self-critical reflection and interpretive restraint.2
At the same time, this event nevertheless remains underresearched because it has never been properly contextualized. After all, most empires in history that did not eventually morph into stable nation-states “fell” at some point. Even the patron saint of modern students of Rome’s decline and fall, Edward Gibbon, had already suggested that “instead of inquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long”: after all, it was only a matter of time until “the stupendous fabric yielded to its own weight.” From a global perspective, the fact that a particular empire crumbled when it did is not nearly as intriguing as it might seem if we focus only on that one case.3
A much more interesting question is whether there are patterns to be discovered and variables to be identified to help us establish a more general analytical taxonomy that can be used to frame our investigations of the end of any one empire. Yet the same academic industry that is responsible for many of the 210 putative reasons for the fall of Rome has so far neglected to invest even a tiny fraction of the energy that has been absorbed by this endless quest into a genuinely comparative assessment of how empires founder and fail. Thanks to this remarkable intellectual pathology, single-case studies continue to dominate the record, and even more broadly based cross-cultural studies tend to be fairly selective in their coverage.4
This is not the place to remedy that deficit, which would require a separate book—albeit one very much worth writing. For now, the deficit ought to deter us from accepting particular elements of an explanation without weighing them in the context of recurrent patterns. That said, the most basic outlines of the narrative of Rome’s fall from power are not particularly controversial. The debate has traditionally revolved around the relative significance of internal versus external factors: flawed institutions, domestic power struggles over political position and surplus extraction, corruption, and economic weaknesses on the one hand, pressure from beyond the frontiers and shifting responses to it on the other. The latter category is now increasingly being augmented by the inclusion of detrimental environmental inputs from plagues to climate change.5
In the end, of course, the distinction between internal and external forces is rather artificia
l because they were so closely intertwined: “barbarian” challenges could boost military usurpations while the latter opened up space for the former; the costly expansion of administrative capacity in late antiquity did not merely seek to shore up imperial power against outsiders but was also a response to earlier centrifugal tendencies and fiscal constraints. Though ever-tempting, chicken-or-egg questions may well prove to be a dead end.6
Several long-term trends that undermined the integrity of the Roman empire are reasonably well discernible in the record. Local elites, on whose cooperation the central government critically relied, obstructed attempts to increase state revenue. Military capabilities as proxied by mobilization intensity declined. Geographical divisions deepened and became more formalized. Secondary state formation at the frontiers commenced wherever the Roman advance had finally run out of steam (or rather, incentives): what had once been a highly fragmented tribal periphery steadily accumulated organizational and technological knowledge. Scaling-up progressed far enough to challenge Rome’s military supremacy but not enough to create suitable targets for counterattack, let alone sustainable conquest.
The spatial, social, and ethnic peripherization of military service—a feature common to many maturing empires—not only raised the profile of frontier forces but also drew in manpower from beyond. The resultant hybridization prolonged the life of the empire but became harder to manage once key revenue flows dried up. The system was highly vulnerable to the loss of regions that functioned as net exporters of the tax revenue required to secure poorer but more exposed areas: once the effective division of the empire into eastern and western halves had cut off westward transfers, protected zones such as North Africa and the Iberian peninsula assumed special importance, and their eventual loss to competitors was fiscally fatal.
Once the delicate balance between military powerholders, the semiprivate wealth elite, and tax-exporting and -importing provinces began to unravel, as happened in the western half of the empire in the early fifth century, centralized control became ever harder to maintain. Burdened by revenue losses and infighting, rulers were compelled to make compromises with competing groups, a process that in turn encouraged local elites to reorient themselves toward new leaders as the traditional center receded from view. Ultimately, the empire was dismantled by nonstate actors that had formed at its margins, attracted by the resources the empire had to offer and sometimes also pushed by forces from farther away, most famously the Huns. By encroaching on the imperial tax base, they whittled away at the center’s ability to confront or bribe them as needed. Their takeover of territory and population was gradual but inexorable.7
For the purposes of this study, it does not really matter which specific configuration of circumstances caused the western half of the empire to disintegrate as and when it did: the only thing that matters is that it fell apart. Whereas in the year 395, four in five Europeans had been ruled by a single imperial power, eighty years later they were not.
But how deep was Rome’s fall? Across premodern history, many empires splintered only to be more or less swiftly restored under new management. Yet with the very partial exception of the East Roman restoration efforts of the sixth century, nothing like that ever happened in Europe. As we will see in this and in later chapters, the gradual but extremely thorough erosion of Roman-era institutions played a leading role in preventing imperial revival. It is almost as if Gibbon had it backward: in Europe, at least, the Roman empire fell when its long decline had barely begun.
I seek to capture this process of erosion in two complementary ways. In Part IV, I juxtapose developments in Europe with those in other parts of the Old World where empires continued to rise and fall well into the medieval and modern periods. This comparison shows that for a variety of reasons, empire-bearing structures were more potent and robust outside Europe (except for its eastern fringe).
An alternative path, taken in this and chapter 6, leads us to particular junctures in the history of post-Roman European state formation, and to the question of how conditions had evolved in ways that obstructed renewed imperiogenesis. This approach once again requires explicit consideration of counterfactuals: Can we identify any minimal or at least defensible rewrites of history that could have produced significantly different outcomes—in the form of renewed hegemonic empire—or were structural constraints so pervasive that this option never realistically presented itself? Assessing eight potential junctures from the sixth to the early nineteenth century, I argue that the latter was consistently the case. History would need to be rewritten on a grand scale to move European state formation back onto a Roman-style trajectory.8
THE SIXTH CENTURY: THE EAST ROMAN RESTORATION
At the end of the fifth century, a few successor states ruled by Germanic elites controlled most of what used to be the western half of the Roman empire: the Ostrogoths in Italy and Dalmatia, the Visigoths in the Iberian peninsula and Aquitaine, the Franks and Burgundians in Gaul, and the Vandals in North Africa and Sicily. Only peripheral areas such as Britain, Brittany, northwestern Spain, the Alps, and the western Maghreb had fissioned more intensely into smaller-scale polities (figure 5.1).
Thus, the overwhelming majority of the population of the former western provinces was claimed by no more than five powers. Because of this, and also because the new regimes heavily relied on Roman institutions to govern their territories, it is fair to say that beneath the current political divisions, much of the original empire still existed in some form. It was at this early stage of relatively modest fragmentation and limited overall change that reunification might have been achieved without having to clear any forbiddingly high hurdles.
FIGURE 5.1 The Mediterranean, c. 500 CE.
The fact that the eastern half of the empire, home to close to 40 percent of its original population, had survived the storms of the fifth century fully intact made this objective seem even more attainable. Even the Lower Danube basin, briefly overrun by Huns midcentury, had been reclaimed. Simply put, the eastern empire had thrived at the expense of its neighbors. As its western counterpart entered a death spiral of declining resources, internal rifts, and growing external challenges, mobile competitors were drawn into this area and thus by default away from the eastern empire, whose European borders were relatively short.
Moreover, its principal competitor, the Sasanian empire in Mesopotamia and Iran, had undergone a prolonged period of weakness. Between the 380s and the 520s, hostilities between the two empires remained rare—a striking departure from the previous one and a half centuries of repeated large-scale conflict. Alongside power struggles between rulers and the aristocracy, threats from the steppe were responsible for this hiatus. Over the course of the fifth century, steppe federations—the Red and especially the White Huns—put growing pressure on the northeastern frontier of the Sasanian empire. In 484, this conflict culminated in the defeat and battlefield death of a Sasanian king that was soon followed by the temporary overthrow of another one in response to anti-aristocratic reforms. The latter’s subsequent restoration to the throne, courtesy of the White Huns, reflects the depth of Sasanian weakness at the time.9
This double meltdown beyond its borders made the eastern Roman empire look stronger than it was. In the fifth century, it had experienced episodes of political instability and armed conflict among rival elite and military groups. Doctrinal streamlining, exemplified by the assertion of orthodoxy at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, was bitterly resented and resisted by different Christian constituencies in Syria and Egypt. Ongoing expansion of elite landholdings curbed public revenue, especially after well-connected large landlords were put in charge of collecting taxes from tenants and employees on behalf of the state. That favorable geopolitical conditions helped sustain this fragile imperial edifice makes the daunting scale of its later troubles less difficult to understand.10
FIGURE 5.2 The Roman empire, c. 555 CE.
As it was, peace dividends allowed the eastern empire to accumulate lar
ge reserves that could be applied to war-making. In a short campaign in 533–534, its forces overthrew the Vandal regime that was centered on what is now Tunisia. Between 535 and 540 much of Ostrogothic Italy was conquered as well. At that point only two major Germanic powers remained, the Visigoths in the Iberian peninsula and the Franks (which had by then absorbed the Burgundians) in Gaul. If the initial pace of this advance was anything to go by, more comprehensive restoration might have seemed within reach (figure 5.2).11
But this project quickly ran aground as several countervailing forces converged against it. One was renewed Ostrogothic resistance in Italy in the 540s and 550s, which absorbed troops and treasure. An intervention against the Visigoths in the 550s did not proceed beyond narrow strips of Iberian coastland. From the late 550s onward, a new front opened up in the Balkans as Slavs and Avars stepped up incursions and autonomous settlement: within two generations, much of the region had been lost. Around 570, the Lombards overran much of Italy, canceling earlier hard-earned gains. And in the early seventh century, the Visigoths ejected the Roman garrisons from Spain.12
This pushback in the west and north coincided with a strong resurgence of the Sasanian empire in the east. Once Hunnic power had declined and the Iranian aristocracy had been tamed by reform, centralized tax collection and a more permanent army enhanced state capabilities. From the 530s onward, driven by the objective of extorting resources through plunder and unequal truces, a series of Sasanian rulers periodically waged war against the Roman empire.
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