The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower by Adrian Goldsworthy

Adrian Goldsworthy, The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower    (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009) 531 pages Verdict?: 4/5 A compelling contribution in a closely-contested field.

 Those of us interested in the fall of the Roman Empire have had a surfeit of riches over the last five years.  In 2005 we had both Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization.  Then last year we got James J. O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History (reviewed here) and Christopher Kelly's The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome. So just when we could be forgiven for thinking that no more good books on the subject are likely to appear for a while, Roman history heavyweight Adrian Goldsworthy enters the ring with a 500+ page tome that goes the distance with all of the above.

Goldsworthy's book not only draws on the work of the other scholars mentioned, particularly Ward-Perkins, but it is also a counter and response to them as well, and he has Peter Heather in his sights in particular.  Heather's book was the first major narrative history of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire seen for many years.  The story he tells has all the elements of a ripping yarn - wars, court intrigues, barbarian invasions, battles, plots, assassinations - and, as an unabashed Germanicist myself, I could not help but be compelled by his emphasis on the centrality of the barbarian invasions in the whole affair even while never quite being convinced by his argument.  Because Heather's version of the story, simply put, says the Empire did not crumble from within but was crushed from without.  According to Heather, the Empire in the late Fourth Century was essentially strong, the Army large and highly effective and things were generally stable.  But then the arrival of the Huns triggered a cascade of events that sent large, highly-militarised Germanic peoples crashing into the borders of the Empire.  The Eastern half coped largely by diverting these people westward and so the West was eventually overwhelmed and collapsed.

Goldsworthy, however, is having none of this.  Noting both Bryan Ward-Perkins and Heather's recent books he writes:

Each of these books is extremely good in its own way, but both are restricted in what was possible to cover.  Neither makes much effort to link the empire of the fourth century to the earlier empire.  Yet this connection needs to be made if we are to understand more fully what the Roman Empire was like and discern why it did eventually fall. (Goldsworthy, p.21)

He then spends the best part of the first half of his book making precisely this connection and, in the process, calling into serious question the basis of Heather's argument: that the Empire of the Fourth Century was essentially stable, solid and secure.

The Calamitous Third Century or "Who's Emperor Now?"

One of the reasons Heather is able to present the Fourth Century as comparatively stable, solid and secure is that the Third Century was anything but.  While Heather and Ward-Perkins both begin their accounts in the late Fourth Century, on the eve of the epoch-changing Battle of Adrianople, Goldsworthy takes his story all the way back to the death of Marcus Aurelius in AD 180.  The accession of his feckless and, ultimately, disastrous son Commodus marked the end of the long period of peace and stability of the Antonine Dynasty and the beginning of almost one hundred years of civil war, usurpers, rebellions, fragmentation, and multiple emperors known as "the Crisis of the Third Century" or, more succinctly, "the Military Anarchy".  Goldsworthy argues persuasively that what happened to the Western Empire in the Fifth Century can only be understood in the context of the turmoil of 200 years earlier.

And he tells the story of the turmoil well, while at the same time carefully laying the analytical foundations of the argument of the second half of his book.  Things were already on a downward slide when Alexander Severus succeeded his bizarre, possibly insane and ultimately assassinated cousin Elagabalus in AD 222.  But they went from bad to worse when he was challenged for the throne by Maximinus Thrax and then unceremoniously murdered in AD 235.  What followed was pure chaos.  In the next 20 years the Roman Empire was to have no less than 20 and possibly as many as 25 different emperors in rapid succession  - often several at a time, which is why it is hard to pin down the actual number.  In fact, this section of Goldsworthy's book becomes something of a bewildering succession of rising and falling emperors, with sometimes two or three succeeding to the purple only to be assassinated by the Praetorian Guard within a single paragraph.

By AD 258 the chaos had got to the point where the Roman Empire had broken into three independent pieces: the provinces of Gaul, Spain and Britain split from the Empire in the west while the provinces of Syria, Palestine and Egypt formed the "Palmyrene Kingdom" in the east, with the rump of Rome between the two.  Aurelian managed to pull things back together during his five year reign before he too was assassinated.  He was followed by no less than six more emperors in nine years before some measure of real stability was finally imposed by Diocletian.

As interesting as this rapid cavalcade of emperors, usurpers and assassinations is, Goldsworthy uses it to make pertinent points about the two centuries which followed and which led to the fall of the Empire.  Firstly, he notes how barbarian invasions are a symptom of Roman weakness and instability, not a cause of it.   Over and over again during the Third Century renewed bouts of Roman civil strife invited larger and deeper raids by barbarians over the Rhine and Danube.  This culminated in the massive land and seaborne raids on the eastern Empire by large Gothic and Herulian warbands in the AD 260s that was only finally brought to an end by Claudius II Gothicus in AD 269.  That this barbarian reaction to Roman weakness - the Empire was at the lowest ebb of the Third Century crisis at the time - is a clear prefigurement of the later barbarian incursions and settlements in the west in the Fifth Century is a point that Goldsworthy makes very clearly.

Secondly, he notes that the "reforms" which are often said to have stabilised the Empire and brought the "Military Anarchy" to an end actually weakened it in the long run.  He points out that the Empire was and had always been a military dictatorship.  Augustus had created it out of years of civil war by winning the struggle for military supremacy.  But what he created was what Goldsworthy refers to as "a veiled monarchy".  Though he was a military dictator who won control by force of arms, Augustus and his First and Second Century successors created a facade whereby they (and everyone else) pretended they ruled by consent, particularly by the consent of the Senate and the Senatorial class.  In return, trusted Senators could receive relatively powerful (and rich) provincial governorships and other honours.  The whole arrangement worked well and was in some ways inherently stable.  The small number of Senators with any real power - ie ones who controlled rich provinces with large armies - could be carefully chosen and the remainder stayed in Rome where they could be carefully watched.  The only major instability was the fact that while everyone was pretending that the emperors were not really kings, the whole idea of the succession to the throne-that-was-not-meant-to-be-a-throne was a murky one.  Despite this, civil wars were rare in the first two centuries of the Empire and the whole system worked.

But when it broke down in the Third Century the veil was torn off and the Imperial system was exposed as the military dictatorship it had always been.  So now it became clear that any Senator who could win the support of enough of the Army or, failing that, who could simply bribe the increasingly mercenary and predatory Praetorian Guard, could become emperor, albeit (in most cases) very briefly.  All it took was a reverse in a foreign war against the resurgent Sassanid Persians or the increasingly bold Germanic barbarians and a usurper would appear or the Army or the Guard would mount an assassination and the whole process would repeat itself, seemingly on a shorter and shorter cycle of usurpation, civil war and anarchy.

This cycle became so intense that the primary goal of a Roman emperor was no longer wise rule and stability but mere survival.  As the Third Century progressed changes were put in place - changes that were aimed solely at reducing the threat of usurpation.  Senators were gradually excluded from military commands, since a Senator with a sizeable portion of the Army at his back was a usurper in waiting.  But by giving more and more commands to the lower, equestrian order the emperors simply pushed the opportunity for usurpation down the Roman food chain and actually broadened the numbers of those who took it into their heads to jostle for the purple.  The size, and therefore the garrisons, of the provinces were steadily reduced, since this left a governor of any given province with fewer troops with which to mount a challenge.  But this in turn weakened the Empire militarily and strategically, since a governor no longer had the military force to deal with serious local threats himself.  Incursions over the frontiers by barbarians increased in size and number and only the Emperor had the capacity to deal with them.  Cities which had been unfortified for centuries began building walls for protection, both against barbarians and against the next cycle of civil wars.

So while these and similar changes - often called "reforms" - brought the Crisis to an end, Goldsworthy makes a strong case that in the longer run the Empire was weakened and that the seeds of the collapse of the Fifth Century were sown in the chaos of the Third.

 The Fourth Century - Recovery?

Thus the greater stability of the Fourth Century, from the long reign of Diocletian onwards, is according to Goldsworthy, something of an illusion.  The cycle of constant usurpation and assassination slowed, but it did not stop.  The concentration of military power in the hands of the emperor meant civil wars were fewer, but the sheer size of the Empire meant there was always going to be a subordinate somewhere with sufficient troops to mount a challenge.  Diocletian recognised that no emperor could protect himself by concentrating power in his hands and still rule a territory as large as Rome's effectively, so he created the tetrachy - four subordinate rulers to whom he could delegate authority and military power.  While this seemed fine in theory, in practice the tetrarchs were soon at each others' throats and Diocletian had to come back from cultivating cabbages in retirement to restore order.  Constantine solved that problem by eliminating his brother emperors and ruling alone, but his successors showed that it took a powerful and utterly ruthless individual to do this and before long the informal division of the Empire into eastern and western halves became increasingly formal and, eventually, permanent.  By the end of the Fourth Century the Eastern and Western Empire were increasingly going their separate ways and this was always going to be bad news for the poorer and less populous West.

Goldsworthy is very cautious about making claims about things for which we have scanty evidence.  Grandiose claims have been made about the economy of the later Roman Empire, for example.  But he is careful to note that we simply do not have the data to draw any clear conclusions about the role of the economy in the collapse of the West because we simply do not have enough information.   That said, it is clear that a divided Empire, however much more  manageable it was in the short term, was always going to be less powerful and stable in the long run.  And it was always likely that the less prosperous and less populated Western half was going to have the harder time bearing the burdens of a large army and expensive defences against external threats.

But Goldsworthy also makes it clear that the seeds of the final Fall were sown way back in the Third Century, took root in the supposed "recovery" of the less chaotic Fourth Century and bloomed into inevitable disaster in the calamitous Fifth Century.  Because the reaction of the emperors of the Fourth Century to the upheaval of the previous era was to centre their rule around one thing: survival.  The army was reorganised not simply to defend against invaders and to operate against the Persians, but also to do so without giving generals or provincial subordinates sufficient individual military power to mount a challenge for the purple.  Likewise provinces became smaller not with a view to administrative efficiency (they vastly increased the local bureaucracies in fact), but to decrease the power of their administrators.  So paranoid were Fourth Century emperors about usurpations that a mere hint of disloyalty could spark purges of whole families, informers and spies thrived on rumours and a good way to get rid of someone you disliked was to imply they had designs on the Imperial throne.  Owning anything that so much as looked like Imperial regalia could get you killed, which led to some comical scenes where actual usurpers had to be robed in a cloak of patched-together purple military pennons or crowned with a lady's necklace because having the real items to hand would be too dangerous.

The other way the emperors insulated themselves from the threat of usurpation and assassination was by retreating physically.  This not only meant emperors became increasingly remote figures in inaccessible courts, shielded by layers of courtiers, functionaries and court ceremonial and ritual, but also that by the early Fifth Century the Western Emperor had withdrawn to the well-defended but remote city of Ravenna and ran his dwindling Empire through powerful chamberlains and commanders-in-chief.  It was only a matter of time before the Western Emperor increasingly became little more than a symbol and figurehead and the powers behind the throne became the real players. 

Not with a Bang, But a Whimper

The final third of Goldsworthy's book tells the story of the end - the last 76 years of the Western Roman Empire when things began to unravel and then spiralled increasingly out of control until total collapse was inevitable.  The narrative elements are familiar enough from other treatments of the story from Hodgkin to Heather - the irruption of the Vandals, Alans and Sueves over the frozen Rhine in the beginning of the century, the Visigoths and Burgundians going from settled federates to rebels to political players in their own right, the last desperate defence against Attila's raids, the abandonment of Britain and the loss of Africa and, finally, the deposition of little Romulus Augustulus.  The strength of Goldsworthy's treatment lies in how he ties this accelerating spiral of loss of control to the trends that had their roots in the "Military Anarchy" of the Third Century.

With the Western Emperor now so insulated from potential usurpation that he was effectively politically marginalised, court functionaries and supreme commanders - the Magister Militae - battled for real power.  That is, when they were not fending off the claims of a new wave of usurpers, who appeared to challenge for the dwindling power of a shrinking Western Empire.  At several key points the West was too busy fighting civil wars to defend itself and all too often warbands of invaders - themselves usually fairly small - moved into territory unopposed.  Some provinces were deliberately or effectively abandoned by the military, such as Britain and northern Gaul.  In other cases warbands, such as that of Alaric, were preserved rather than crushed so as to use them as a cheap source of trained troops.  Either way, the effect was slow but accelerating loss of territory which, once Africa was lost to a (small) band of Vandals, became impossible to reverse.

Goldsworthy also has some scorn for the idea that the later Western Roman Army was as large as some modern writers make out.  He has little time for those who take the units listed in the famous Notitia Dignitatum at face value, arguing that this was simply an idealised listing of units that, by that stage, largely existed on paper.  Here Goldsworthy the primarily military historian is worth paying some attention to:

At times, when reading descriptions by modern historians of warfare in this period, it is difficult to avoid the image of Hitler in his last days, planning grand offensives on a map with divisions that had long since ceased to exist. (Goldsworthy, pp. 289-90)

He notes that territories which, according to the Notitia, should have been garrisoned with powerful elite units of comitatenses, such as Spain, are crossed and recrossed by barbarian warbands seemingly at will.  The internal struggles of the Western Empire took up what real troops remained, as effective as they were, and the paper units of the Notitia could not defend Britain or retake Africa.

In the end the distractions of civil war and usurpation meant that an already weaker and poorer Western Empire was nibbled at its edges and then from within by barbarians, who had always taken advantage of Roman weakness.  Finally the loss of territory meant there was no money and no army to hold even what was left together.  The emperorship became so debased that the last puppets who held the title were barely worth deposing.  Even the once coveted supreme military title of magister utriusquae militiae became not worth keeping - the Burgundian prince Gundobad rose to this rank, but gave it up to pursue royal power amongst his tribe instead.  When the last emperor, the teenager Romulus Augustulus, was finally deposed he was considered so worthless and harmless that he was not even seen as worth killing.  He was given a pension and sent to live with his relatives in the country.  The once great Empire of the Romans no longer existed because no-one saw it as worth maintaining.

This is an excellent book and one, even though it comes after a succession of excellent books on the subject, that will be hard to top for some time to come.  Leaving aside the fact that it is a fine narrative history, Goldworthy brings an outsider's eye to the period, coming to it without the assumptions of a Late Antiquity specialist.  But as more of a specialist in the beginnings of the Empire, he brings an interesting perspective to its end.  This book is both a reply and, at the same time an equal counterweight to Peter Heather's equally excellent work and I would encourage anyone who read, enjoyed and was convinced by either one to read the other.  I think they would profit from the exercise.

The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages by Chris Wickham

Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

(Viking: 2009) 672 pages
Verdict?: Sprawling, interesting but diffuse 4/5.

Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford Chris Wickham's new addition to the Penguin History of Europe series is published in the non-American English speaking world under the rather blander title The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000. Apart from sounding stodgier, this version of the subtitle is actually slightly misleading, because Wickham does not focus purely or even mainly on Europe at all. He gives almost equal footing in his 650+ page volume to all three of the civilisations that can be said to have inherited from Rome: western Europe, the Byzantine Empire and the Ummayad and 'Abbasid Caliphates. So apart from making the book sound a little more enticing (and perhaps slightly more exciting than it actually is), the American subtitle, "Illuminating the Dark Ages", is also rather more accurate.

The book follows and parallels Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 and tackles many of the same themes in much the same way. James J O'Donnell was heavily influenced by Wickham's analysis when writing his The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History, to the extent that he states in the chapter that introduces the third part of his book "I follow and explore [Wickham's] interpretation" (p. 405, n. 1). His praise is quite fulsome in his "Further Reading" section at the end of his study:

The reader with more patience for detail and less need for narrative should read Chris Wickham, Framing the Middle Ages (2005), a masterpiece of learning and judgement. A provost sometimes meets well-wishers who venture to doubt that humanists are engaged in what can truly be called research. I hand them Wickham's book.
(O'Donnell, p. 409)

This is high praise and, if the newer work is anything to go by, it seems well-deserved. Wickham is certainly very much a researcher and a careful practitioner of the difficult art of distilling useful conclusions from a broad swathe of disparate and often fragmentary points of data. Something of his method can be gleaned from the way he presents his conclusions: slowly, carefully, painstakingly and, as O'Donnell says, with rather more detail than narrative. I can see why O'Donnell admires Wickham and I share his admiration. True, Wickham is certainly no O'Donnell when it comes to telling a lively story. But when it comes to presenting a wide canvas picture of of a period in which it is all too easy to fall into generalisations rather than solid conclusions, Wickham is, as O'Donnell acknowledges, the master.


Continuity or Catastrophe? - Take 2

Given the temporal parameters of the book, AD 400-1000, it is inevitable that Wickham presents his take on the vexed question of the Fall of the Western Empire and plants a flag somewhere in the "continuity vs catastrophe" debate. The theme of "the inheritance of Rome" could seem to indicate an inclination towards the "continuity" side, but Wickham's view is long and so his position is nuanced.

In discussing the collapse and fragmentation of the Western Empire, Wickham acknowledges that the traditional catastrophist view of an ailing Empire falling to the overwhelming military strength of barbarian savages is clearly wrong and fully accepts that the "barbarians" were, in many important respects, actually very "Roman". But he notes:

This does not lessen the simple point that the Roman empire in the west was replaced by a set of independent kingdoms which did not make claims to imperial legitimacy ... it does force us to ask why each of these kingdoms could not have just reproduced the Roman state in miniature, maintaining structural continuities that could, in principle, have been reunited later, by Justinian, for example. For the fact is that most of them did not do so.
(Wickham, p. 95)

He goes on to note the archaeological evidence of decline; evidence of more localised exchange, simpler buildings and a corresponding simplification of judicial and fiscal systems. This is marked north of the Loire as early as the first half of the Fifth Century and across the northern Mediterranean as well by the Sixth Century. Of course, O'Donnell would attribute the latter to Justinian's wasteful and destructive wars of "reconquest" but Wickham takes a broader and far more economic perspective and attributes the changes substantially to two themes that will repeat themselves through his long book over and over again - taxes and land.

Death and Taxes. And Land.

In the amusing and slightly catty final chapter to his The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins notes ruefully that it is hard to get history students to study economic history at all, despite its vital importance to this period. "In Oxford, at least," he laments, "the word 'economy' is the kiss of death to an undergraduate history course" (Ward-Perkins, p. 179). Economic history is, however, front and centre in Wickham's work and the reader needs to pay close attention to his analysis, often over many pages or whole chapters. This is because land and taxes provide the key to understanding how and why we get from the Rome of the early Fifth Century - spanning from Britain to the Fertile Crescent with a network of political and economic structures - to the three worlds of the early Eleventh Century, Muslim, Byzantine and Feudal European, that Wickham details.

The story he tells is of three kinds of fragmentation playing out in three different ways. In the Byzantine world the Roman taxation structure survives, though it goes into a severe decline in the Ninth Century only to to recover, if in a slightly more localised form. In the process the Byzantine Empire undergoes a degree of the militarisation of the aristocracy and ruling strata that we see in the West, but without the same degree of political fragmentation and localisation of power. In the Muslim world the Arab conquerors inherit Roman and Persian taxation infrastructures intact and make good use of them. These taxes sustain army garrisons across the Caliphate and, to a large extent, keep the military and the civil administration fairly separate for most of our period. Fragmentation, when it comes, is along sectarian and ethnic-cultural lines and the largely tax-based systems survive it more or less intact.

Western Europe, however, is different. There the Roman tax system declined rapidly as the source of economic security and therefore power increasingly became the ownership of land:

As noted earlier, the 'barbarian' armies that took over provinces had different aims from the Roman armies that seized power for their generals in previous centuries. They wanted to settle back on the land, as their ancestors had done, before the generation or so of intermittent movement and conquest. .... Beginning in the Fifth Century, there was a steady trend away from supporting armies by public taxation and towards supporting them by rents from private landowning.
(Wickham, p. 102)

So the drift from a tax-based military system to a land-sustained one had begun long before the fall of Rome; probably driven by the Western Empire's relative poverty and a need to maintain a very large and expensive army. This drift escalated with the domination of the 'barbarian' rulers and their military elites, for whom land-ownership was a key aim. Wickham then details a process by which this trend began to escalate and dominate. Our records of the Ostrogothic and Visigothic kingdoms contain many references to disputes over land and records of citizens objecting to land being appropriated by Gothic lords and their private armed retinues, often by force. Theodoric the Great worked to restrain some of his powerful lords in this respect, but the trend was clear: those who had land had power and those who had power had the means to appropriate more land. As Wickham notes, by the late Merovingian Period this trend meant that the great counts of the now sprawling Frankish kingdom were the largest landowners in Europe since the height of the Empire.

But this trend also saw the breakdown of the Roman taxation system in Europe, in a way that it did not totally collapse in Byzantium or the Caliphate. With it went the networks and systems of collection and administration and so also the sinews of long-distance commerce. Production became increasingly localised, the shared knowledge of the engineering and construction of large scale buildings declined and Europe saw a simplification of its material culture generally. Traditionalists have seen this simply as "barbarism", attributed it to a "coarsening of the human spirit" and various other simplistic causes (corruption, the Church, "savagery") and lamented it as evidence of "a Dark Age". Wickham shows that it was simply, as with the parallel though differing changes in Byzantium and the Caliphate, a response to a series of economic and military changes.

One of the most marked of the changes in question is the militarisation of the aristocracy and the system of civil administration. Roman government and the Roman aristocracy had been fundamentally civilian. A Roman politician usually did his time in the army as part of the cursus honorum, but the civil administration was for the most part divorced from the military. This included the important networks of aristocratic patronage, generous private donations of time and money for the public good and sponsorship of the arts, architecture and religion. The military played its role in politics and this was an increasingly assertive role as time went on, but it never wholly dominated the aristocracy and civil administration.


Scholars of the Sword

With the shift from a tax-based military to a land-based one in the Fifth to Seventh Centuries, this changed completely. Now the aristocrats who owned the land derived power directly from the military retinues they could sustain from it. The military - the great land-owning lords who came together to form the martial strength of the kingdom - were also the aristocrats who ruled the kingdom itself. Rulership, land-ownership and military strength all became entwined. Aristocrats were still administrators and local rulers, with a dominant aristocrat to whom they paid varying degrees of due respect (eg the Frankish king/emperor or the local Anglo-Saxon overlord), but they were also warlords and leaders of an increasingly elite and aristocratic army. Whereas Roman aristocrats vied with each other in accomplishments in the arts or sponsorship of fine buildings, post-Roman aristocrats vied with each other in the appropriation of land to support their military power and the exercise of that power in the chess game of supremacy.

By the Carolingian Period the great counts of Frankia dominated and tightly administered a territory almost the size of the old Western Empire. And this was no gaggle of grunting barbarian warlords - these men were intelligent, literate, versed in law and politics and capable of ruling huge swathes of often widely separated units of land. But the game they played required them to be fluent in cavalry tactics and swordplay rather than Virgil and their textual literacy (which they clearly maintained, unlike most of their feudal successors) was turned to the administration of the Empire of Charlemagne and, to a lesser extent, contemplation of the afterlife.

This system of land-based civil and military power had great strengths, as the rise of the Franks and the coalescence of England shows. But it had attendant weaknesses. When the dominant aristocrat's power slipped, the chess game for supremacy became more intense and the localisation of power accelerated. Counts who could dominate large territories before now had to reward state service by gifts of land; something which eventually became buying loyalty. This process led to a corresponding fragmentation of power and an increasing localisation of dominance. By the end of Wickham's period we see this localisation taking on various forms but with consistent results: a militarisation of the landscape in the face of external threats (eg Vikings) and an increasing imposition of duties on the formerly autonomous peasantry to sustain local defence, castle-building and petty wars. The result was the "feudal revolution", which can be said to mark the real end of the "inheritance of Rome" and the beginning of a new world in Europe.

Wickham's thesis is strong and well supported and it strikes an interesting stance in the catastrophe vs continuity debate. There clearly was great continuity, but similarly great change as well. By contrasting the Caliphate, Byzantium and the (largely Frankish) West, he shows that these changes were driven by a nexus of economic and politico-military factors. The breadth of the scope of his book is therefore its key strength - it would be impossible to make his case and make it in any kind of detail without careful examination of the ways the "inheritance of Rome" played out elsewhere in this period or without tracing these dynamics over six long and tumultuous centuries.

Narrative and Detail

In a sense, however, this same breadth is also the book's weakness. Tracing these complex inter-relations of economics, political structures, administrative structures and external pressures over six hundred years in a book of over six hundred pages is a massive undertaking. And Wickham does it well, with a measured, methodical, careful pace, hedged with appropriate caveats and cautions about the nature of our sources and so on. But six hundred pages of detail-rich sentences and caution, presented at a methodical pace can make for hard work for the reader.

The Times Literary Supplement said of his earlier work "there is hardly a page of Framing the Early Middle Ages which a newcomer to the period would not find accessible, indeed warmly welcoming". The same claim could be made of this book - it is generally accessible - but the newcomer in question would definitely need some stamina and would need their wits about them as well. Wickham is an writer who can pile on detailed evidence for five, ten or fifteen pages at a stretch before finally turning back to delineate a (cautious) answer to a question he may have asked the reader to ponder three-quarters of a chapter earlier. Accessible, yes - but only for a newcomer who is prepared to work. I suspect that as a lecturer Wickham does not suffer slackers and crammers gladly.

Earlier I quoted O'Donnell describe Wickham's writing as suited to "the reader with more patience for detail and less need for narrative". He was not damning Wickham with faint praise. But the sheer scale of his undertaking means that Wickham has to skate past some very tantalising potential narrative to avoid missing some of the more important detail. Which led me to feel at times that there was the potential for about five other, very different and much more vivid books in Wickham's work. As good as his book is, it did seem a pity that he could not pause to give us more of some of the stories he touches on, such as the Ummayad vizier who ended up dying in an elaborate torture machine of his own devising or the Frankish princess accused of incest, sodomy and infanticide (of the baby born, rather improbably, as the result of incestuous sodomy, no less!) Coming after reading O'Donnell's rather American racy story-telling with its provocatively bold conclusions, Wickham's methodical caution came across as very English by contrast.

This is, however, a fine book and one which should stand as a foundational textbook for this period for some time to come. It might be nice if one day Mr Wickham could let his hair down a little and write something a bit more like the anecdotal vignettes with which he begins each chapter. I suspect he has some good narrative history in him as well, though I am grateful for the books he has written so far.

The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History by James J. O'Donnell

James J. O'Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire: A New History
(Ecco: 2008) 448 pages
Verdict?: Provocative, stimulating and entertaining 5/5.


It is rare for a book to give a well-worn topic a new perspective and rarer for one which does so to be as accessible and entertaining as this. Or as provocative. Following in the wake of other excellent recent books on the "Fall of the Roman Empire", notably Peter Heather's weighty The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, O'Donnell takes the reader on a lively and colourful tour of the world of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Centuries and the people who can give us an insight into the end of Classical civilisation and the beginning of the Middle Ages. In the process, he examines some old ideas from some new and sometimes controversial angles and seems to deliberately and rather gleefully couch things in ways that will raise some hackles. All that makes for a roller-coaster of a read on what could strike some as a fairly dusty subject.

The essence of O'Donnell's thesis, and his provocation, can be summed up in his book's subtitle: "The Emperor who brought it down, the barbarians who could have saved it". The idea that the Empire was brought down by a Roman Emperor (he's referring to Justinian I) and could have been "saved" by barbarians would strike traditionalist Classicists as both heretical and absurd, but the subtitle is a deliberate teaser for what is actually a nuanced and well-argued position, even if it is not always a wholly convincing one on every point.

Essentially, O'Donnell argues that the traditional date for the "Fall" - September 4th AD 476 - is only one of several dates which could be taken as the "end" of the Empire and gives good evidence that it was not seen as the "end" at the time as widely or as fully as modern writers tend to assume. He argues that in many respects, though clearly not all, the "Empire" continued in form, many functions and even in name under Odovacar, Theodoric the Great, the Visigothic kings and the Vandals. What destroyed this post-Imperial "Empire"-without-an-Emperor was Justinian's ill-considered attempts at reconquest, which plunged Italy into decades of destructive war, wrecked the surviving institutions of the Empire and left the west open to barbarians who were far less Romanised and civilised than the Goths and Vandals.

Continuity or Catastrophe?



The old Nineteenth Century idea of the barbarians who entered the Empire in the Fourth to Sixth Centuries as wolfskin-wearing savages from the primeval forests and the steppe has been abandoned long ago. Even the more "barbaric" of the invaders, such as the Angles, Saxons and Frisians who invaded Britain, were from frontier regions which had been heavily influenced by Rome for centuries. And the main players were more Romanised still - by 476 some of them had been living inside the Empire for almost a century and the Goths Theodoric led into Italy or the Vandals Gaiseric led across the Straits of Gibraltar were largely Christian, substantially Latin-speaking or at least bilingual or multilingual and armed, dressed and equipped more or less like the Romans they came to dominate. Theodoric' s men had been soldiers of the Empire for a generation, even if they were sometimes soldiers in various forms of revolt:

If there were any primeval forest dwellers in those communities, they were the ones their smarter, more acquisitive and more ambitious cousins left behind … by the time people like Theoderic’s followers find themselves in Italy, they were there not as barbarians but as Roman soldiers, bearers of the distinctive frontier culture of the north, to be sure, with styles of dress, religion, and speech that differentiated them from the settled southerners, but that made them nonetheless part of the same imperial community.
(O'Donnell, p. 121)

But here is where O'Donnell gets pointedly provocative. He deliberately emphasises this point to a high degree. When introducing Theodoric, for example, he writes of him as a young man from the edge of the Empire who was educated and raised at the Imperial court until the age of 18 and who then took up military roles in the Balkans pretty much like many of the other ambitious Roman soldiers and generals O'Donnell has already mentioned. He manages to describe the career of this canny Imperial player for about a dozen pages without once using words like "tribe" or "warband" or even "Goth". Of course, he knows precisely what he's doing and, at the end of this summary turns to the reader and draws attention to what he has just done and why. Doing this certainly does change the way the reader, who may have read other more traditional versions of Theodoric's story, looks at who he was and how he fitted in with the Imperial system.

And it is not like it is really unusual for a writer to do this about a "barbarian". Many traditional histories of the period write about people like the Emperor Zeno without so much as a hint that his original name was Tarasicodissa and that he was an Isaurian warrior from Armenia. Or that the Emperor Leo I was a member of the Bessian tribe of Thrace. The idea that these men were less "barbarians" than Theodoric and his men does not really make much sense, yet the traditional view means that Theodoric still gets presented as an "Ostrogoth" while Zeno and Leo rarely get presented in the same way.

The first section of the book, therefore, presents a vivid overview of the post-Imperial "Empire" viewed with this "continuity" perspective. It is important to note here, however, that O'Donnell is not plumping for some wholesale "continualist" position and arguing that "the Empire never fell" and that the whole business of the collapse of the Western Empire was a bloodless and pleasant transition from one type of ruler to another. He specifically points to Bryan Ward-Perkins' eloquent counter to that idea and cautions that, in some ways and some places at least, the end of the Empire was every bit as violent, bloody and destructive as the traditional picture would suggest. In Britain, northern Gaul and parts of inland Spain, in particular, this was very much the case from the mid-Fifth Century onwards.

That said, his emphasis on continuity is backed by good evidence. Under Odovacar, Theodoric, Gaiseric and others, traditional offices continued to be filled, poems written, elegant dinner parties attended, games held, ceremonial observed and so on, pretty much as if nothing much of note had happened in AD 476. One example of this is an inscription to Theodoric found by the Appian Way near Rome which begins:

Our Lord the most glorious and celebrated King Theodoric, victor in triumph, ever Augustus, born for the good of the state, guardian of freedom and propagator of the Roman name, who has tamed the nations ...
(O'Donnell, p. 145)

The noteworthy thing here is not simply the act of putting up a dedicatory inscription to commemorate some building work sponsored by a ruler or the traditional formulas being applied to an "Ostrogoth" rather than a Roman, but the use of the formula "ever Augustus" for the Gothic king. Clearly he is not being called an Emperor - he is specifically called "King" - but he has equally clearly slotted fairly neatly into the role of an Emperor nonetheless. And there are many similar examples of how, as O'Donnell argues it, the new rulers of Italy, Spain, Gaul and Africa were restructuring the Roman west in some ways but leaving things much as they were in most others.

In some respects, however, O'Donnell does push this too far. It is true that anyone who combs through the evidence of Ostrogothic Italy looking for elements that are uniquely "Gothic" or even Germanic usually comes up with very little. But O'Donnell de-emphasises the little that can be found to the point of it being virtually invisible in his narrative. As Romanised as the Goths in Theodoric's regime were, they still spoke at least some Gothic or spoke Gothic some of the time. They were still distinctive enough in dress and accoutrements to be identifiable as "Goths" (regardless of whether they actually had any Germanic ancestry at all). And they were still Arians while their Roman neighbours were Catholics.

O'Donnell goes so far as to argue that Theodoric constructed a purely ethnically Gothic identity and history for himself and his Amaling clan only towards the end of his life, when he was frustrated by increasing Eastern Imperial refusal to accept or accommodate his new world order in the west. He never presents any evidence for this interpretation however. All regimes certainly have a tendency to paint a romantic picture of their origins and to shape their image of themselves, but the idea that Theodoric's Germanic roots were largely a "construction" and only emerged at the end of his career does not seem to be based on any clear evidence that I know of. Indeed, Herwig Wolfram - the scholar who, literally, wrote the book on Germanic "ethnogenesis", the fluidity of Germanic tribal identity and the near total obscurity of any of the prehistory of the Germanic groups of this period - still attributes some aspects of Theodoric's reign to distinctively Germanic cultural elements. He pursued some wars against the Rugians, for example, that don't seem to have made much sense in terms of grand strategy but seem to have been driven more by the Germanic rules of blood feud than the chess game of post-Roman relations.

Overall, however, O'Donnell makes his case well enough - prior to Justinian's wars of reconquest things in the West were in battered shape in most places and in total collapse in many. But in Ostrogothic Italy, Vandal Africa and Visigothic Gaul and Spain, at least, the old structures either survived, were patched up or were rejigged and adapted to a new basis for the old civilisation. Not the Empire, of course, but close enough to it to raise an inscription to a Germanic king who had repaired a Roman road calling him "ever Augustus". Then along came Justinian ...

Enter Justinian

Justinian has generally not been treated kindly by many modern historians and O'Donnell is no exception. The picture he paints is fairly typical: Justinian and his uncle and predecessor Justin took the stable and prosperous Empire they inherited from Anastasius and, through a combination of pride, ideological fanaticism and religious intolerance, left it financially bankrupt, religiously polarised and militarily broken. He saw the Germanic rulers of the West simply as heretics and alien usurpers and struck out at them as enemies of Roman civilisation and, in the process, did far more to wreck what was left of that civilisation than the Romanised barbarians had ever done; leaving the West shattered and open to other, far more barbaric barbarians.

Again, there is a lot of merit to this view and overall O'Donnell substantiates it well and with a certain acidic vividness of language, such as when he says of Justinian "as a religious monarch [he] resembles Stalin and as a political monarch he favours Milosevic" or writes:

Hamlet would have made a terrible king. Justinian, intellectually arrogant, priggish, not as well educated as he thought he was and alternating between indecisiveness and rashness, shows us how Hamlet would have turned out.
(O'Donnell, p. 224)

In O'Donnell's view, Justinian failed on several fronts. Firstly, he was an arch-conservative and reactionary who saw all deviation from his views as dangerous dissent to be crushed. He championed the Chalcedonian position on the nature of Christ to a fanatical degree, alienating the Monophysites who made up the majority in his Empire. He also pursued a policy of crushing remnants of pagan culture, driving many intellectuals into exile in Persia, to the benefit of Persian and, later, Arabic intellectual culture. Secondly, he pursued policies against Persia and in the Balkans that were to have dire consequences for his successors. Finally, his policy in the West was quixotic, wrong-headed and wasteful and it ultimately destroyed the very things he thought he was trying to restore, "mistaking Rome for civilization and the opponents of Rome for opponents of civilization", he destroyed both.

Again, some of these views have dissenters - for example, Chris Wickham has recently argued in his The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 (to be reviewed here soon) that "[Justinian's] Italian war would have been less of a mess if Justinian had put more, not less, money into it" (Wickham, p. 94). The fact remains, however, that Justinian did spend an estimated 21.5 million solidi on the Italian campaign against the Goths and, with it, bought himself a fractured wasteland. And this is in the context of an Empire which, in a good year, brought in just 5 million solidi in tax revenue and consumed most of that in administration. His "victory" in Italy was ultimately a political and financial disaster for which his successors had to pay.

The Ruin of Rome

The final part of the book focuses on the man O'Donnell calls "the last consul of Rome" and who history knows as Pope Gregory the Great. Gregory is depicted vividly as a figure straddling the Roman past and the early Medieval future; a man living - quite literally - in the ruins of the world that Justinian's disastrous policies created. Here is a man who was a vastly wealthy landowner and a member of the old Senatorial class that was now, in the post-Justinian world, finally fading to nothingness. And Rome - long since abandoned as a capital and strangled of the status, the taxes and grain that once artificially inflated its population - has become a city of ruins and the scars of Justinian's wars, with its remnant population clustered around the churches on its outskirts, its centre abandoned and the Forum on its way to becoming a cow pasture. The grim apocalyptic world of Gregory is vividly depicted as both the mournful consequence of Justinian's wrong-headedness, a shadow of what might have been and a hint of new beginnings still some centuries off.

Vividness is the lasting impression O'Donnell's excellent work leaves the reader. Throughout the book he manages to not simply explain complexities such as the convoluted theological disputes of the period or motivations behind Gregory's Moralia on Job, but he succeeds brilliantly in bringing the period to life. Vignettes such as the Emperor appearing on his balcony over the Hippodrome to engage in dialogue with the powerful chariot racing factions of Constantinople or Theodoric's stately and dignified visit to Rome in AD 500, to be greeted with ceremonies and acclamations fit for an Emperor make the characters in O'Donnell's story live and illustrate his themes in a lively manner.

O'Donnell aids this by his conversational and almost chatty tone and some subtle humour. Many of his chapters' subtitles have amusing modern cultural references in them: "Northern Exposures" or "A Country for Old Men". And there are references to current affairs tucked into his descriptions of ancient events. Cosmas Indicopleustes' abortive attempt at establishing a Biblically-inspired flat earth geography is said to have been motivated by his belief that the universe is "intelligently designed". Justinian's doctrinaire and reactionary advisers are called his "neo-conservatives". And O'Donnell draws attention to Julian's campaigns in what is now Iraq, which began with quick victories and ended in disaster thanks to his lack of an "exit strategy.

Overall, the book is a thought-provoking, vivid and dazzling read. True, some of his provocative arguments are a little overstated and the sections of "what if" counterfactual history about Justinian's lost opportunities and their potential implications for our time are a bit high flown. But this is a solid, erudite and remarkable contribution to a topic which has been well-served by other excellent books in recent years. Highly recommended.