Ancient World Review

Currency & The Collapse Of The Roman Empire

Comment: This is an interesting lecture. I don't necessarily agree with all of it, but there's no doubt that "coin debasement and inflation helped lead to the demise of the western Roman empire," to quote from The Money Project. Rome's economic problems led to the debasement of its currency and the resulting inflation led to shortages, decreased trade, increased taxation, widespread poverty and the depopulation of once productive parts of the empire in the west. These problems, in turn, seriously weakened the frontier which was eventually overrun by Germanic tribes.

If nothing else, the history of inflation in ancient Rome proves that any unit of exchange can be debased. These days, a lot of people think we could solve our monetary problems by switching to a gold and silver based currency. According to this view, precious metals have "intrinsic value" which makes them immune or at least resistant to inflation. Unfortunately, the idea that gold and silver currencies hold their value as opposed to fiat currencies is flat-out wrong. You can see this by looking at historical gold and silver prices, then comparing them to a chart of the historical value of the dollar. The "value" of gold and silver varies over time just like the value of our fiat currency, so where is the "intrinsic value" in these metals?

The main problem with the Roman monetary system is that it was controlled by the emperors themselves. Faced with finite gold and silver reserves, they turned to "clipping" or reducing the metal content of their coins in order to pay the army and fund all their other projects:

"By decreasing the purity of their coinage, [emperors] were able to make more 'silver' coins with the same face value. With more coins in circulation, the government could spend more. And so, the content of silver dropped over the years." -- "Currency and the Collapse of the Roman Empire," The Money Project.

The Money Project has an interesting series of graphics illustrating the correlation between the deaths of Roman emperors and the debasement of the coinage. The record shows a steady decline in the silver content of Roman coins over the centuries until there wasn't much left except "a negligible coating of silver" by around 300 AD. This correlation doesn't imply that the debasement of the coinage had any direct bearing on the deaths of all these emperors or vice versa, but it does show the steady economic decline of the empire as its leaders desperately tried to cope with the problem:

"By the time of Marcus Aurelius, the denarius was only about 75% silver. Caracalla tried a different method of debasement. He introduced the 'double denarius', which was worth 2x the denarius in face value. However, it had only the weight of 1.5 denarii. By the time of Gallienus, the coins had barely 5% silver. Each coin was a bronze core with a thin coating of silver. The shine quickly wore off to reveal the poor quality underneath."

Gallienus (218-268 AD) ruled during The Crisis of the Third Century, "a period in which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under the combined pressures of invasion, civil war, plague, and economic depression," according to Wikipedia. Rome never developed a stable political  system or a stable economic system and the shine was wearing off the empire as well as the denarius.

Related: Taxes Brought Down The Roman Empire, And They'll Do The Same To America. This is an interesting article, but taxes alone didn't bring down the empire.

Christianity Is Becoming A Third-World Religion (Updated)

1,707 years after Galerius's Edict of Toleration ended the persecution of Christians which started under Diocletian, the religion that once exercised absolute dominion over the West is rapidly disappearing from Europe. That's not very surprising, though. Even the United States is becoming less religious and Christianity as an institution has been in decline for a very long time now.

The history of Christianity has been one of schisms and fragmentation, a long process of disintegration caused by theological disputes, administrative squabbles and church corruption. When the Catholic church lost its monopoly during the Protestant Reformation, Christianity as a unified institution (1) ceased to exist. Protestantism itself went through a long chain-reaction of schisms with the result that there are now hundreds of Christian denominations in the world.

(1) Early Christianity wasn't a single movement with a unified belief system -- just the opposite, in fact -- but this gradually changed after Catholicism became the official religion of Rome and the church began its centuries-long process of stamping out "heretical movements." Very roughly speaking, and taking into consideration the fact that the eastern and western churches of the time had distinct differences, Christianity survived as a near-monolithic religious institution for about a thousand years before it started to fall apart.

Video from 2016.

The rise of science and the spread of secularism accelerated the decline of Christianity in the West. Some denominations have attempted to "adapt to the times" by dropping or "reinterpreting" their theology and transforming themselves into little more than progressive social-work institutions, but these congregations are in rapid decline. Conservative churches which preach a defiant fundamentalism are thriving in the United States and Christianity is apparently exploding in the Third World.

According to Chuck Colson, "the percentage of the world's population that is, at least by name [emphasis added], Christian will be roughly the same in 2050 as it was in 1900. By the middle of this century, there will be three billion Christians in the world -- one and a half times the number of Muslims. In fact, by 2050 there will be nearly as many Pentecostal Christians in the world as there are Muslims today.

"But at that point, only one-fifth of the worlds Christians will be non-Hispanic whites. The typical Christian will be a woman living in a Nigerian village or in a Brazilian shantytown."

After almost 2,000 years, the historical trajectory of the rise and fall of Christianity is becoming clear. The religion originated in the Near East, spread into the Roman empire, rose to the height of its power in medieval Europe, then began to fragment and decline. This decline has been a long, complex process that started centuries ago and it has accelerated dramatically during the last hundred years or so in the western, developed world:

"The decline of Christianity is a widespread, ongoing phenomenon that has affected the Western world, developed countries and denominations in the post-World War II era, which have shifted towards a post-Christian, secular, globalized, multicultural, and multireligious society. Infant baptism has declined in many nations. Thousands of churches have had to close or merge and mainline Protestant denominations in the United States lost many members of their congregations." (Wikipedia)

Christianity has been struggling to survive the transition to the so-called postmodern world, itself a symptom of the overall decline of the West. The religion has been under attack for a long time now, but the biggest problem is that religion in general is no longer believable to most educated people. In Europe, even the church's own leaders don't seem to believe its teachings anymore, a sure sign that the religion is in its last stages in countries like Britain, where many churches are being closed, turned into historical museums or converted into mosques. As a result, Christianity is dying off in the West and thriving in the Third World. It will survive in the form of die-hard fundamentalist sects and the various syncretic mixtures of Christianity and native religions now spreading through places like South America, Asia and Africa.

Video from 2010.

Christianity is finished in Europe and declining in the United States, but it will continue to thrive in its original form as a prescientific, preliterate religion in the Third World. "In 1900, 80 percent of Christians lived in Europe and North America. In 2000, 60 percent lived in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with many in developing countries." (Facts and Details) By 2050, if present trends continue, "four out of every 10 Christians in the world will live in sub-Saharan Africa" and "the number of Muslims will nearly equal the number of Christians around the world." (Pew Research Center (2015))

Related:

Why There Is No Way Back For Religion In The West.

Is Religion Dying Out?

Where Churches Have Become Temples of Cheese, Fitness and Eroticism

What Happened On Easter Island?

Anakena - One of the sites used in this study.

"Analysis of remains found on Rapa Nui, Chile (Easter Island) provides evidence contrary to the widely-held belief that the ancient civilization recklessly destroyed its environment [see below], according to new research co-conducted by faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York." Source: Science Daily (2017).

Next video has some good views of Ahu Tepeu on Easter Island, another site used in this study, but the voice-over is inaudible.

Analyzing "human, faunal and botanical remains from the archaeological sites Anakena and Ahu Tepeu on Rapa Nui, dating from c. 1400 AD to the historic period, and modern reference material," the team determined that the Easter Islanders "had extensive knowledge of how to overcome poor soil fertility, improve environmental conditions, and create a sustainable food supply. These activities demonstrate considerable adaptation and resilience to environmental challenges -- a finding that is inconsistent with an 'ecocide' narrative."

The Easter Island ecocide theory.

Comment: According to the ecocide theory, the population on Easter Island collapsed because deforestation (1) led to the erosion of fertile soil which in turn led to starvation, warfare and cannibalism. If this new research is accurate, however, it would appear that the Easter Islanders had a plentiful marine food supply and a system for sustainable agriculture even after the loss of their trees.

(1) According to Wikipedia, "By that time [the arrival of the Dutch in 1722], 21 species of trees and all species of land birds became extinct through some combination of overharvesting/overhunting, rat predation, and climate change. The island was largely deforested, and it did not have any trees more than 3 metres (10 feet) tall. Loss of large trees meant that residents were no longer able to build seaworthy vessels, significantly diminishing their fishing abilities."

The collapse of the Easter Island population is central to all of these different theories about what happened. According to the traditional story, their population declined from somewhere around 20,000 to the few thousand who were still living there when the Dutch arrived. Some believe that the islanders were decimated by diseases brought by the Europeans, which may have happened but doesn't explain the population loss before the European arrival. Others argue that "[t]he downfall of Easter Island may have had more to do with preexisting environmental conditions than degradation by humans." (Live Science (2015).

Just to complicate matters, it's possible that the population collapse never occurred at all. According to Ars Technica (2016), "new evidence from archaeological investigations has overturned a popular myth about the demise of the Rapa Nui civilization on the island. For centuries, observers believed that the Rapa Nui suffered a catastrophic population crash. But there is no scientific evidence to support this idea, say a group of researchers in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity. That story about environmental collapse and warfare you read about in Jared Diamond's bestseller Collapse? Totally wrong."

At this point, I'm not sure what to believe. According to this new study, the people of Rapa Nui were better at managing their environment than previously believed, but as far as I can tell no one is disputing the fact that they deforested their island. Chopping down all their trees to build canoes and rollers for their giant stone heads doesn't seem to fit with the claim that they "had extensive knowledge of how to overcome poor soil fertility, improve environmental conditions, and create a sustainable food supply." On the other hand, it's probably unrealistic to expect that they had any knowledge of soil erosion and forest management.

I'm no expert on the history of Easter Island, but the "facts" about what happened seem to be all over the place. Did the population actually collapse? Who knows? The estimates I've found for the size of the original population range from 10,000 to 20,000 and I'm not sure what they're based on. If the population didn't collapse, then all these theories about why it collapsed are rendered instantly moot.

Life on Rapa Nui wasn't a peaceful utopia, at least during certain periods. That seems clear enough. The toppled stone heads are cited as evidence that warfare occurred on the island, but the idea that the islanders destroyed themselves by warfare has been called into question and one source I've found even claims that they deliberately made sure their weapons were nonlethal. That seems kind of unlikely, but it doesn't really matter. One way or another, the real history is still obscure.

Easter Island is one of the most isolated islands in the world. It only covers about 64 square miles and even at its height (assuming the estimates are correct) it was home to only around 20,000 people. For all practical purposes, it was a closed system with limited resources. A culture like this would have been extremely vulnerable to climate changes such as low rainfall or anything that would effect fishing or the availability of other food sources. Periods of abundance would lead to population growth which would in turn put increased strain on available resources, leading to inevitable internecine conflict and population decline. Even under the best of circumstances, I would expect a population in this situation to stagnate and decline over time. Perhaps the question isn't why (or if) the culture on Easter Island collapsed, but how it managed to survive at all.

Related: Easter Island statues "walking theory" challenges ecocide story.

Plague Of Justinian Same As Black Death?

Video from the great Voices of the Past primary-sources channel.

"Researchers have compared medieval and modern plague pathogens. In a comparison of more than 300 contemporary strains of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague, with ancient bacterial DNA isolated from victims of the Black Death (1347 -- 1351), a team led by researchers at University of Tuebingen obtained evidence suggestive of a bubonic plague outbreak in the late antique period (8th to 10th centuries AD). The study raises strong suspicions that the plague of Justinian, a massive pandemic that is thought to be in part responsible for the collapse of the East Roman Empire, may have been caused by the same bacterium implicated in the Black Death." Source: Science Daily (2012).

Comment: History is a lot more contingent than we like to believe. For instance, Justinian might have been able to complete his reconquest of the western Roman empire if the east hadn't been ravaged by the plague that "devastated and depopulated the Roman Empire [Byzantine Empire]," (Wikipedia).  There were other factors involved -- the outbreak of the so-called Roman-Persian War and the incompetence and infighting of various generals in Italy -- but the plague put an end to Justinian's ambitions in the west and probably played a large role in the eventual collapse of the Byzantine Empire and its conquest by the Ottoman Turks.

Constantinople, once the eastern capital of the Roman Empire and later the capital of the Byzantine Empire, is now Istanbul, a primarily Muslim city. If Justinian had been able to reconquer the west, a reunited Roman Empire would have changed the course of European history in unpredictable ways. Ironically, the plague later intervened again when the Black Death devastated Europe, but this time its net effect was beneficial, leading to the collapse of the feudal system, weakening the grip of the church, and playing a large role in the birth of the Renaissance. It's unnerving, to say the least, that all these major historical events were influenced by a bacterium invisible to the naked eye which no one even knew existed at the time.

Related: Bacteria In Ancient Flea May Be Ancestor Of Black Death

The Battle Of Tours & The Modern Islamification Of Europe

Charles Martel's victory over the Moors/Saracens at the Battle of Tours, one of the most critical battles in the history of the West, "rescued our ancestors of Britain and our neighbors of Gaul from the civil and religious yoke of the Koran," according to Gibbon. The importance of this battle can't be overestimated.

"Few battles are remembered over 1000 years after they are fought, but an exception is the battle of Poitiers [another name for the battle of Tours] in 732, where Charles Martel turned back a Muslim raid that, had it been allowed to continue, might have led to the conquest of Gaul." -- Fighting Techniques of the Medieval World, p. 19. 

Note: this battle of Poitiers shouldn't be confused with the battle of Poitiers that took place during the Hundred Years' War.

The battle of Tours checked the Muslims' advances into western Europe after they had carried out a long series of destructive incursions into north Africa, Spain, the Near East, and eastern Europe. In 719 AD, the forces of al-Hurr al-Thaqafi captured the southern French city of Narbonne, but were subsequently defeated by Duke Eudo of Aquitaine:

"The Muslims withdrew only to return in two years with a far larger army, which defeated Eudo and pursued him as far as Tours, the major religious center. In 732, between the towns of Tours and Poitiers, the two armies [the western forces now under the command of Charles Martel] faced one another for seven days without fighting," according to A History of the Middle Ages, by John M. Riddle (p. 147). The Muslims ran out of patience and attacked first, but "could not penetrate the Franks' lines." By nightfall, the Muslims withdrew.

If Martel hadn't defeated the Moors, western Europe would probably be Muslim today, but everything that goes around comes around and it's starting to look like the sacrifices those Frankish soldiers made were all in vain. Europe has degenerated to the point where its corrupt leaders are now welcoming the Muslims with open arms and European liberals are cheering them as they pour into their countries.

Video from 2015.

I wonder what Martel would have said if he'd known that huge crowds of Muslims would be praying in the streets of modern Paris, blocking traffic in a passive statement of political power with the full cooperation of the authorities? Would he have bothered to fight the Saracens if he'd known that modern Europeans would simply invite the Muslims into their countries, all in the name of "diversity" and "multiculturalism?"

Video from 2010.

1,283 years after the battle of Tours, the Muslims are achieving through immigration what they couldn't achieve through warfare in the Middle Ages. The Islamification of Europe is happening at an incredible rate. It was already well advanced before the latest "refugee crisis," which may turn out to have been the modern equivalent of the Germanic tribes pouring into the Roman Empire.

Video from 2015.

The "barbarians" who overran Rome had a lot in common with the Romans, however. Islam is a foreign and hostile religion, totally incompatible with western civilization. If something doesn't happen soon, Europe is finished, assuming that it isn't too late already. Betrayed by their own leaders, demoralized by the poison of Cultural Marxism, the decaying welfare states of western Europe seem to be committing cultural suicide. Are we witnessing the birth of the future state of Eurabia? Don't think it can't happen, because it is happening.

Charles Martel had it easy. He only had to stop a military invasion. The current crisis is something completely different.

Was The Byzantine Empire Roman?

Documentary from 2014.

"The Byzantine Empire was the continuation of the Roman Empire [see comment]  in the Greek-speaking, eastern part of the Mediterranean. Christian in nature, it was perennially at war with the Muslims, Flourishing during the reign of the Macedonian emperors, its demise was the consequence of attacks by Seljuk Turks, Crusaders, and Ottoman Turks." Source: Ancient History Encyclopedia.

Comment: The Byzantine Empire is usually referred to as the "Roman empire in the East," but I've never thought there was anything particularly Roman about the Byzantines. Romans weren't Greek-speaking Christians; they were pagans who spoke Latin. If you ask me, the real Roman empire had already ceased to exist for all practical purposes by the time Italy and the western provinces were overrun by Germanic tribes in the fifth century AD. The Byzantines retained Roman institutions, but they were essentially an Oriental kingdom, a kind of hybrid of western and eastern traditions.

According to this view the Roman Empire collapsed as a culture long before it was conquered militarily. When Rome fell in the West, that was the end of it. Parts of its territory still remained, however, most of it in the East, but it's hard to see these surviving territories as Roman.

The picture is very complicated, naturally. There were similarities and differences beween the Roman and Byzantine empires. It would be surprising if nothing had carried over from the old world. As a general rule, civilizations aren't suddenly obliterated, leaving no trace behind. Collapse doesn't work that way. Kingdoms and empires rise and fall and evolve into new political systems, usually after a period of chaos and warfare. Zombie civilizations are common in history -- nations that still exist long after their cultures have died or changed out of all recognition. Christian Rome and the Roman Byzantine Empire are both good examples, I think, of zombie empires.

The Byzantine empire was a "continuation" of the Roman Empire in the sense that it was once part of the Roman empire with all of its legal and political institutions, but it was Roman in name only. The main difference, I think, was religious. Paganism had been outlawed and driven underground, replaced by Christianity, an essentially Oriental religion.

Here's a modern analogy. Let's say that the United States becomes a Muslim caliphate, but keeps all of its current institutions in place. There's a White House, a Congress, a Supreme Court, and so on. People still vote, but all the candidates are Muslims. The county courthouse still looks the same, but Christianity is illegal and the courts enforce Shariah Law. Then the western half of the country is invaded and overrun by savage barbarians who settle down and take over the existing legislative machinery. The eastern half of the country still survives as an independent nation, but is it American? The answer is obvious.

Related: Continuity and change in the Byzantine Empire.

The St. Cuthbert Gospel, The Digital Dark Age & The Spread Of Illiteracy

Video from 2012. Closed-captions helpful.

"The Gospel, which is a manuscript copy of the Gospel of St John, is the earliest intact European book and is intimately associated with Cuthbert, one of Britain's foremost saints. It was created in the late 7th century in the north-east of England and placed in St Cuthbert's coffin, apparently in 698. It was discovered when the coffin was opened in Durham Cathedral in 1104 on the occasion of the removal of Cuthbert's body to a new shrine. The Gospel has a beautifully-worked, original, red leather binding in excellent condition, and is the only surviving high-status manuscript from this crucial period in British history to retain its original appearance, both inside and out." Source: British Library.

Next video: CT scan of the gospel:

According to Caroline Petit (Medicine, Ancient and Modern), "[f]or me, the real star of the Lindisfarne Gospel exhibition [where the gospel was displayed in 2013] was another manuscript: the St Cuthbert Gospel .., a tiny, modest book with a simple leather binding containing Saint John’s gospel. From a historical and codicological point of view, it is a most remarkable artefact. Allegedly found in Cuthbert’s coffin in 1104 among other precious relics, the book is thought to have been made at Wearmouth-Jarrow [a monastery located in the medieval Kingdom of Northumbria] shortly before 700, and to ‘have been the very copy that SS. Cuthbert and Boisil had read together at Melrose when the latter was on his deathbed..."

St. Cuthbert was a hermit and missionary known for his asceticism and generosity to the poor. A politically important figure later in life, he was thought to be a wonder worker and became the center of a cult. "After Cuthbert's death, numerous miracles were attributed to his intercession and to intercessory prayer near his remains," according to Wikipedia, a classic example of the early church's superstitious belief in holy relics and the way Christians transformed their saints into demigods with miraculous powers.

This fantastic old book was taken from Cuthbert's coffin, turned into a relic and apparently ended up in the hands of collectors after Henry VIII shut down the Catholic monasteries in the mid-1500s. It was then given to a college operated by the Jesuits, who loaned it to the British Library and eventually sold it to them in 2012 for a tidy profit of around nine million pounds (almost 13 million dollars).  Business is business, after all. The book is in good hands now, at least until the Muslims take over Britain. If that happens, the Jihadis won't think twice about burning this incredible artifact.

Note: "With a page size of only 138 by 92 millimetres (5.4 in × 3.6 in), the St Cuthbert Gospel is one of the smallest surviving Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. The essentially undecorated text is the Gospel of John in Latin, written in a script that has been regarded as a model of elegant simplicity." (Wikipedia)

Comment: This fantastic book is over 1300 years old, but it's still perfectly clear and legible. Compare that to the average lifespan of digital documents, which can probably be measured in a few decades at most.

Preserving digital files is a labor-intensive process. According to the Digital Preservation Coalition, the longevity of these documents can be extended with periodic refreshing (moving a file from one physical storage medium to another), migration (changing them from one format to another) and emulation (creating software that can read a variety of formats), but only a small percentage of the digital material being produced today will ever get this kind of archival treatment.

Physical books, on the other hand, will last for centuries, if not millennia, if they're kept in relatively dry, shaded and -- as in the case of the St. Cuthbert Gospel -- airtight spaces. And they frequently don't need any specialized handling at all to survive for thousands of years. For instance, look at all the ancient papyri scrolls that have been discovered which are still readable even though they were just stuffed into amphorae and buried in the sand. When it comes to longevity, the old technologies are still the best and this includes things like photographs recorded on film rather than digital media:

"We know that photographic negatives, transparencies and prints last a long time. They are reliable forms of storing data. Recently the Royal Geographic Society reprinted Frank Hurley's pictures from the 1913 Antarctic Exhibition - from his original glass negatives, nearly 100 years old. An example of how robust the storage medium was - remember these negatives had been in sub-zero conditions and transported across an ocean in a tiny lifeboat!" (Digital Preservation Coalition)

The digital revolution that was supposed to make us all smarter has not only shortened the lifespan of written material but has actually caused a general decline in reading and writing. The number of people who read for pleasure has been going down for decades now. The deterioration in writing skills is obvious all over the western world, and cursive handwriting is no longer being taught in many schools. One of the bizarre consequences of this is that "toddler's’ excessive use of touchscreens is leaving the muscles in their hands so weak they cannot grip a pencil," according to the Sunday Express.

What does this have to do with the Cuthbert Gospel? Nothing directly, I guess, but look at what the Gospel represents. What we have here is an approximately 1,300-year-old book which has survived into an age when print is dying in favor of digital media with an average lifespan of less than 20 years. The Cuthbert Gospel was written by hand -- a skill that most people don't learn or use anymore -- in a language that most people can't understand -- that came down to us from a period that most people don't know anything about (they don't know the most basic facts about their own history, never mind the Middle Ages).

I wouldn't call this progress. The Cuthbert Gospel, among other things, is a reminder of how much the West has deteriorated.

Note: The entire Cuthbert Gospel can be viewed online in the British Museum's digitized manuscripts collection. Scanning the book makes it available to people who can't visit the museum, but I have to wonder if the digitized version will last anywhere near as long as the original.

Time-To-Death Of Roman Emperors Followed A Distinct Pattern

"Roman emperors faced a high risk of violent death in their first year of rule, but the risk slowly declined over the next seven years, according to an article published in the open access journal Palgrave Communications. When statistically modeled, the length of time from the beginning of their reign until their death followed a set pattern, similar to that seen in reliability engineering, interdisciplinary research by Dr. Joseph Saleh, an Aerospace Engineer from the Georgia Institute of Technology, US suggests." Source: Archaeology News Network.

According to Saleh, gladiators had a better chance of surviving a fight than Roman emperors had of avoiding a violent death:

"...of the 69 rulers of the unified Roman Empire, from Augustus (d. 14 CE) to Theodosius (d. 395 CE), 43 emperors suffered violent death, that is 62%, either by assassination, the most common mode of death, suicide, or during combat with a foreign enemy of Rome.

Saleh writes that "It's interesting that a seemingly random process as unconventional and perilous as the violent death of a Roman emperor—over a four-century period and across a vastly changed world—appears to have a systematic structure remarkably well captured by a statistical model widely used in engineering. Although they may appear as random events when taken singularly, these results indicate that there may have been underlying processes governing the length of each rule until death."

Comment: There's no mystery about this. The underlying process here was the Roman political system itself. Indirectly, Saleh has identified the fundamental issue that caused the decline and fall of the empire -- the instability of its form of government. Politics in Rome was always based on violence and conspiracy. Once the Roman army figured out that it could make or break emperors, powerful military commanders began to "go for the purple," using violence to take control. Many of them assassinated their predecessors only to be assassinated themselves, sometimes reigning for only a few weeks or months, so it's not surprising that gladiators had a better chance of survival. Highly-trained gladiators had value, but most emperors, especially during the final centuries of Rome, were a dime a dozen. The first years of their reigns were the most critical. If they couldn't consolidate their power -- and many of them couldn't -- they didn't last very long, a fact that shows up clearly in Saleh's statistics.

Book Review: The Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire by Michael Grant

The fall of Rome proves beyond doubt that one thing always leads to another, usually in unexpected ways. For example, when the Romans gave up the idea of conquering Germany and switched to a defensive strategy along the Rhine and Danube frontier, they succeeded in blocking the German advance into their territory, but they had no idea that they were starting a long chain of events which would eventually lead to the collapse of the western empire.

The Germanic tribes needed living space. Stymied in their attempts to spread west into Roman Gaul, the various tribes started to move to the east in the Second Century AD and ran into big trouble about a century later. In 372, according to The New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, "the eastward expansion of the Ostrogoths provoked an explosive reaction from the Huns of the Volga Steppe." When the Ostrogoths intruded into their territory, the Huns drove all the German tribes back towards the Danube like a giant hammer, pounding them against the Roman frontier.

"...the Huns rolled forward to the Danube, crushing the Visigoths and enslaving the Gepids, who had the misfortune to occupy the Hungarian steppe. There the Huns settled down with their flocks, lords of a pasture that stretched back to the Caspian. In three years they had obliterated a century of German expansion." New Penguin Atlas of Medieval History, page 10.

Over the next century, the Franks, Frisians, Suevi, Vandals, Alemanni and Visigoths crossed the frontier into Roman Gaul, but they didn't stop there. Driven by hunger, the need for land and their leader's private ambitions, the Visigoths sacked Rome and spread as far as Spain, establishing the Kingdom of the Visigoths in 418. Rome in the west, heart of the strongest and most successful empire the world has ever seen, no longer existed.

The story of the fall of the western empire is more complicated than this, of course, but the main question is why Rome couldn't defend its frontier. What had changed? One part of the answer is given by the famous classical historian Michael Grant in his short and relatively obscure book "The Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire." Briefly, Rome had been so weakened by two centuries of political instability, corruption, civil wars, military disasters and financial problems that it was no longer able to defend itself. In fact, according to Grant, the western empire should have collapsed in the Third Century, but managed to recover thanks to the efforts of a series of strong emperors who instituted much needed reforms.

"The fact that the Roman empire did not collapse in the 260s or 270s AD is one of the miracles of history." Grant, Collapse and Recovery of the Roman Empire, Introduction, xvii.

In my opinion, the origins of Rome's political instability can be traced all the way back to Julius Caesar, at least. When the legions figured out that they could make or break emperors at will, they became the ultimate power brokers and this eventually developed into a state of constant chaos and civil war as ambitious military leaders bribed and murdered their way into power, only to be murdered themselves, sometimes after a reign of only a few days. The turnover in the Roman government between 235 and 284 AD was mind-boggling:

"In the age of the soldier-emperors, between the assassination of Alexander Severus, the last of the Severans, in 235 A.D. and the beginning of Diocletian's reign in 284, at least sixteen men bore the title of emperor: Maximinus (r. 235–38 A.D.), Gordian I and II, Pupienus and Balbinus (r. 238 A.D.), Gordian III (r. 238–44 A.D.), Philip the Arab (r. 244–49 A.D.), the Illyrian Decius (r. 249–51 A.D.), Trebonianus Gallus (r. 251–53 A.D.), Aemilianus (r. 253 A.D.), Valerian (r. 253–60 A.D.), Gallienus (r. 253–68 A.D.), Claudius Gothicus (r. 268–70 A.D.), Aurelian (r. 270–75 A.D.), Tacitus (r. 275–76 A.D.), Probus (r. 276–82 A.D.), Carus (r. 282–83 A.D.), Carinus (r. 283–84 A.D.), and Numerianus (r. 283–84 A.D.). Most were fierce military men and none could hold the reins of power without the support of the army. Almost all, having taken power upon the murder of the preceding emperor, came to a premature and violent end. Social life declined in Roman towns and instead flourished among the country aristocracy, whose secure lifestyle in large fortified estates foreshadowed medieval feudalism." (Source: Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History)

Michael Grant's short book, actually a monograph of 68 pages with an appendix and notes, provides a good overview of the chaotic succession of emperors and the constantly changing state of Roman relations with the Germans and Persians at the time. In Part Two, he discusses the military, financial and religious reforms instituted by the "strong emperors" such as Diocletian and Constantine who emerged at just the right time and managed to pull the empire back from the brink--for a while. Grant's book gives one of the most coherent explanations available for why the western empire collapsed after the Ostrogoth's fatal encounter with the Huns on the Volga Steppe. The lesson is clear enough. A series of bad or ineffective leaders can destroy a civilization.

Sound familiar?

The Accidental Suicide Of The Roman Empire

Video from 2012.