Sixteen hundred years ago, in the summer of 410, Rome was taken and sacked by the Goths. The event is regarded as the beginning of the final downfall of the Roman Empire. In recent decades, however, there has been a lively historiographical debate about this. The question is:did the Roman Empire fall?
Shortly after his decisive victory over the Goths in 507, the Frankish king Clovis received happy news from Constantinople that the emperor had made him consul. “There he was,” says Clovis's biographer, “dressed in a purple tunic and cloak, and with a diadem on his head. Then he mounted his horse and with his own hand generously scattered gold and silver coins among the crowd that had gathered, all the way from the gate of the vestibule of the church of Martin to the cathedral of Tours. From that day on he was regularly addressed as consul or Augustus!' Not only was Clovis addressed as emperor, he behaved that way. Sprinkling money was one of the many ways in which Roman emperors tried to gain and maintain popular favour.
His colleague and contemporary Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths in Italy, resided in Ravenna, the former capital of the Western Roman Empire. The entire administration of the new kingdom remained, as of old, in the hands of the Roman aristocracy, including Cassiodorus and the philosopher Boethius, supplemented at most here and there by a Gothic nobleman. And although the king himself was an Arian Christian, he held in high esteem the Orthodox Church so as not to offend his Roman subjects. In 500 he visited the city of Rome, where he first pilgrimaged to Peter's tomb in St. Peter's, and then from the old Imperial Palace on Palatine Hill, watched the games the city had organized on the occasion of his visit. His Roman contemporaries were pleased to note that the barbarian monarch had done everything to restore ancient Roman traditions, and they were grateful to him.
More continuity than break
Stories like these have made historians think about our familiar picture of the fall of Rome. Somewhere in our heads we all have two reasons why Rome fell. The first is that the Romans gave up fighting and surrendered to luxury and decadence, to bread and games. In order to pay for these extravagances, the farmers were increasingly exploited until the border was reached and the economy collapsed. An anticlerical variant of this statement is that after the Christianization of the empire young people no longer became soldiers but priests or, worse, monks.
The second, external, reason for the fall would have been that the empire was plunged into misfortune after 400 by a flood of mustachioed barbarians – Romans didn't wear a moustache! – who put a bloody end to everything that resembled culture and civilization. The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon spoke of the 'triumph of barbarism and religion'.
Some thirty years ago, however, the English classicist Peter Brown showed that late Antiquity was not a period of decline, but a peak in the development of classical civilization. For example, in a biography from 1967 that has now become classic, he described Augustine as a thinker who was head and shoulders above all the philosophers of the Roman past. Moreover, the grandiose manner in which the empire had fend off the simultaneous onslaught of Persians and Germans in the 3rd century, testified to an abiding will for reform and adaptation that indicated strength, not weakness. In short, in 400 Rome was very much alive and the empire was not at all on the brink of ruin.
At the same time, more and more questions were raised about the concept of 'Migration'. Had the invasion of the Germans been so sudden and devastating? New research found that Germanic tribes had been allowed into the empire for centuries, usually by enlisting them as auxiliaries. The recruitment of Germans increased sharply after 400, but was nothing new. Moreover, there was growing evidence that the numbers of Germans who entered the empire in the 5th century were actually very small, no more than groups of soldiers who could be easily assimilated.
And, as the examples of Clovis and Theodoric show, those Germans were not at all unwashed barbarians who wanted to smash everything in their way. On the contrary, they wanted to be included in the life of Rome and share in the blessings of Roman civilization, first of all by becoming Christians, but also by learning Latin and respecting the authority of the emperor. Hadn't Odoacer, the barbarian king who deposed the last Roman emperor in the West in 476, sent the Imperial regalia back to Constantinople to underline that Italy was now back under the Emperor of the East? To describe the 5th century, historians increasingly used conciliatory words such as accommodation and transformation, and henceforth avoided terms such as crisis and confrontation. This naturally led to the key question:could we still speak of the fall of Rome? Yes, a lot changed around 500, but there was no real break with the past. In a recently published history of the early Middle Ages, this period is therefore characterized as 'the inheritance of Rome' (Chris Wickham, The inheritance of Rome, 2009). In short, the early Middle Ages were not very different from late Antiquity.
Fault of the Huns
There has always been reason to be somewhat suspicious of this new interpretation of the 'fall of Rome'. Historians of the early Middle Ages, in particular, are eager to show that those times were not at all as obscure and chaotic as has always been assumed, and they struggle to demonstrate this. Of course they are quite right in trying to dismantle blunt prejudices about the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were not barbaric (at least not more barbaric than other times, such as the 20th century), they were made barbaric by humanists like Erasmus, who were mesmerized by classical and Christian antiquity and who treated all history afterwards as a black hole. That does not alter the fact that in the years around 500 too much changed to simply speak of a transformation. Certainly if the development of the economy is taken into account, we can indeed speak of a break. But the invasion of the Germans is also wrongly presented as a peaceful wave of immigration that hardly affected the resident population. Over the past five years, more and more articles and books have been published that reject the theory of transformation and argue that a disaster did indeed occur in the 500s that brought about the demise of a civilization. But in doing so, this latest generation of historians does not return to the traditional thesis that the empire was in moral or economic decline and therefore could no longer withstand the pressures from outside. With Brown, they maintain that there was nothing wrong with the empire internally. In the 4th and 5th centuries, the economy flourished, the reformed army was up to its task, and the acceptance of Christianity reinforced the sense that the Romans were God's chosen ones. The big blow came from outside.
The main culprits were the Huns. That doesn't seem surprising, because everyone has heard of Attila, the Scourge of God. But Attila was not all that dangerous, as evidenced by the crushing defeat inflicted on the Catalaunian fields by the Roman general Aetius in 451. The real danger of the Huns lay much earlier, in the years 350-400, when their march westward from the Asian steppes upset all the Germanic tribes between the Volga and the Rhine. The Germans fled and sought the protection of Rome. If they were not allowed to enter the empire, they came anyway, in the hope that they could later come to an agreement with the emperor. And this was not about small groups of soldiers, as the followers of the transformation theory claimed, but about complete tribes that crossed the Rhine and the Danube from 376 onwards with their entire possessions.
Economic network collapse
Yet the Roman army could have brought these groups under control had it not been for one of those tribes, the Vandals, to have crossed into Africa in 430 and occupied the wealthiest province in the west. In one fell swoop Rome lost its cash cow and was therefore unable to keep a large army on its feet at a crucial moment. Twice more times the Roman army tried to retake Africa, in 440 and in 468. Had they succeeded, the empire in the west would probably have survived, but the defeat in 468 meant that the empire had lost its income for good and thus his soldiers too. It could no longer offer protection and lost its reason for existence. From now on, anyone who wanted safety could better understand the kings of the Goths, the Vandals and the Franks.
Those kings, as the cited examples of Clovis and Theodoric indicate, had no intention of destroying the empire at all, but they could not prevent the military collapse in the west from also leading to economic catastrophe. Security was the greatest economic stimulus the empire had ever given. This created a huge economic free trade area that made it possible to transport products cheaply over long distances. This led to an economic development not dissimilar to today's globalization, and with the same consequences:good quality products at moderate prices were available throughout the empire. Products from cheap England were offered in the markets of expensive Syria and Egypt. The many remains of beautifully crafted ceramics and solid roof tiles speak volumes in this regard.
After 500, this complex economic network collapsed, with the consequences:rising prices, declining quality, relapse into a primitive barter economy. Houses with roof tiles were only built for the very rich, the rest had to make do with straw huts again. Agricultural production fell dramatically, famine and plague became everyday occurrences.
From individual to group
Western Europe fell into a primitive society in the centuries between 500 and 1000. The Roman elite distinguished itself mainly by its literacy, after 500 it was dexterity with the weapons that separated lords and serfs. Reading and writing became the prerogative of the clergy. There were hardly any larger connections, people lived on a local level. Trade flows largely dried up, especially those of mass-produced goods. There was only trade in luxury goods, everything else was produced for own consumption. One crop failure led directly to hunger and disease.
In such a harsh environment, solid friendships and close family were prerequisites for survival. Relations between them were maintained with a flow of gifts and gifts, creating and maintaining solidarity. Whereas Roman law always assumed the legal capacity of the individual, Celtic law regarded the kinship group as the basic form of social organization. This was a world fundamentally different from ancient Rome.
The city of Rome itself was only a shadow of its former glory, the palaces on the Palatine Hill stood empty, cows grazed in the Forum, what remained of life moved to the outskirts of the city, to the Vatican and the Lateran. At that time, Rome became the city of the Pope rather than that of the Emperor. But the prestige of the city remained enormous. Romulus and Remus fell into oblivion, but pilgrims flocked from all corners of Europe to the tombs of Peter and Paul and of martyrs like Laurentius, Agnes, and Sebastian. Successful kings liked to adorn themselves with the title of emperor. The most successful of all, Charlemagne, was even crowned emperor in 800. What we see as a new beginning, they saw as recovery. Where we see discontinuity, they saw continuity. That is what makes the debate about the fall of Rome so difficult. Historians should take seriously the people they write about. If they do, they have to match the people's experience when essentially not much had changed and so use words like transformation and accommodation. But one look at the economy shows that there was indeed a collapse and a new beginning. The dilemma this creates is unsolvable but manageable as long as we realize it is our 'fall of Rome' we are talking about and not theirs.