Decline and fall? How much has it been exaggerated, and
was it inevitable?
The basic argument is that the fall of the Western Empire
was not inevitable, despite its comparative structural weaknesses that made it
more vulnerable than the Eastern Empire. The latter survived in various,
increasingly Graecicised forms until 1453 under a continuous line of Emperors:
so why did the West collapse? Was it the long Western Empire frontier with the
Germanic tribes to the north, open to penetration as soon as the Rhine and
upper Danube were crossed? The East only had a shorter frontier on the lower
Danube, and marauding tribes could be stopped at the Bosphorus and Hellespont.
The East’s Gothic invasions from 376 saw the East’s army severely damaged at
the Battle of Adrianople, yet the enemy were contained in the Balkans. The
massive raids by Attila and his Hunnic-led empire in the 440s were similarly
confined to the Balkans, as were the rampant Ostro[East]goths in the 470s and
480s. The mid-sixth century raids by the Kutrigur and Utrigur Bulgars reached
the walls of Constantinople at a time when Justinian had secured control of
Italy and part of Spain; this Balkan-born Emperor could not preserve his
homeland from widespread ravaging despite an exhaustive programme of
fortification testified to by Procopius. New arrivals in the Hungarian basin, the
Avars, engaged in semi-permanent warfare with the Empire over the Danube valley
and then Thrace from 568. We know little of how this endemic insecurity damaged
agriculture and reduced the availability of peasant soldiers for the army, but
it must have been a serious problem, and by the 580s the ravaged Balkans were
being settled permanently by the Slavs. None of these attacks by a locally
powerful foe ranged right across the East to its permanent disruption; and Asia
Minor remained secure apart from one bout of Hunnic raiding south from the
Caucasus, which even reached Syria, around 400.
But in the West three major Germanic tribes’ crossing of the
Rhine in 406 led to permanent barbarian settlement in Gaul and Spain and in due
course North Africa. This was not the case in the East, despite the mass
movement of the Tervingi and Geuthungi Gothic peoples into the empire in 376–8
that was similarly militarily successful. The initial Gothic autonomous
‘federate’ tribal state in the Balkans, conceded to them by the East in 382 as
they were too powerful to be evicted, was not a permanent solution, as seen on
both sides. A Roman revival was hoped for by the Eastern orator Themistius in
his up-beat propagandist account of the treaty to their Senate, where the Goths
were portrayed as defeated and as turning into peaceful farmers; and a desire
within the Gothic leadership for further pressure on the Empire was shown by
the next Gothic leader, Alaric, in his aggressive behaviour in 395.
But had the Goths’ joint leadership of the 370s or a
friendly Gothic ruler like Fritigern been in place, would this attack have
occurred at all? After the mid-390s Alaric shifted his activities West, and
Gainas, an over-powerful Gothic general who did secure supreme military command
in Constantinople, was soon killed. The same Eastern ability at containment
applies to the next two Gothic tribal states, both ruled by a Theodoric, in the
Balkans in the 470s and 480s, as Emperor Zeno induced their unifier Theodoric
the Amal to invade Italy in 490. But in the West, the Goths followed their
wanderings across Italy, southern Gaul, and Spain by securing a ‘federate’
state in Aquitaine in 418, and other parts of Gaul and Spain fell away too.
Britain was abandoned to its own devices in 410, and the Vandals (part of the
406 Rhine coalition) moved on from Spain into North Africa in 428 and secured
its capital, Carthage, in 439.
Losses in the West were thus permanent, and each one
weakened the state’s revenues, and ability to field an army, further. In turn,
this encouraged further attacks. It was true, however, that the decline of
Western power was not a smooth downward curve but came in sharp bursts. Each
was precipitated by a specific political crisis. Due to personal charisma and
military power, the Western supreme commander Aetius (in power 433–54) was able
to call on the semi-independent Germans of Gaul to aid him against the invading
Attila in 451, and central and northern Gaul were ruled by a mixture of Roman
and German authorities until his murder in 454 saw the Goths turning on the
fatally weakened Empire and extending their domains. Arguably, Aetius’
influence over his allies in Gaul was personal, not institutional, and he had a
valuable past knowledge of Germans and Huns alike that aided his success. He
had been an exile in the Hunnic state in the early 430s and used them as allies
to regain power in the Empire. His vigorous campaigns against Germans and
peasant brigand rebels (‘bacaudae’) gave him the respect of individual leaders,
in an era when personal ties were crucial to such warlords.
Independence or autonomy for German polities in the Western
Empire thus did not mean an end to Roman power or influence, with successive
generations of Gothic leaders hankering after adopting Roman lifestyles or
gaining Roman political influence. The Romanised social behaviour of Gothic
king Theodoric II (reign 453–66) was praised by his Roman clientemperor Avitus’
son-in-law Sidonius Apollinaris, a contemporary Gallic poet-aristocrat who
scrupulously aped classical literary culture. Indeed, the piratical Vandals in
North Africa after Gaiseric’s time (post-477) adopted a sybaritic Roman
lifestyle, to which their military decline after the 460s was to be attributed.
In central and southern Gaul the Goths seem to have lived separately from the
Romans, shunning the towns, and to have preserved their own culture and
traditions, as described by Sidonius Apollinaris. The Franks mainly settled in
less urbanised northern Gaul, and the only semi- Romanised sybarite ruler with
cultural pretensions (as seen by Gregory of Tours) was Chilperic of Soissons,
who died in 584. Landed estates in at least two ceded Roman areas, Gothic
Aquitaine in 418 and Italy in 476, were formally divided between the two
peoples.
In 408 the rebellious Alaric the Goth initially sought his
late foe Stilicho’s supreme Roman commandership-in-chief from the supine
Western Empire, and set up Attalus as his own puppet Emperor; the sack of Rome
only followed the failure of his plans. He was seeking blackmail money to pay
off his armies, not the destruction of the Empire, and made huge but manageable
demands for gold and silver from the weak government of Emperor Honorius, then
sought to replace it. His brother-in-law Athaulf spoke of wanting to fuse Roman
and Gothic peoples into one state according to a story which reached the
historian Orosius, and married Honorius’ kidnapped half-sister Galla Placidia.
His murder in a private feud ended this attempt to set up a German-Roman state
based at Narbonne, and his successors were driven west into Aquitaine in 418.
After the disasters of 454–5, the Goths of Toulouse used
their military supremacy in Gaul to impose their own nominee, Avitus, as the
new Emperor in leaderless Rome, thus seeking to influence the state rather than
revolt against it. Avitus was a former supreme civilian official in Gaul so he
knew the Gothic leadership, and had been sent to seek their alliance by the new
Emperor Petronius Maximus after the latter had his predecessor Valentinian III
murdered. This plan was forestalled by the Vandal attack on Rome. With
Petronius in flight and killed, and Rome sacked by their rivals, the Goths then
installed Avitus in his place. But the point is that now (455) it was the weakening
Empire seeking Gothic military help, which it had firmly resisted when it was
Alaric attempting to force his military assistance on the Empire in 408–10. In
416–18 Constantius III had been insistent on containing the Goths in far-away
Aquitaine and recovering Princess Galla Placidia for himself, but after 454–5
the Goths, and then German generals in the Western army, were the senior
partner in any Romano-German alliance.
Attila also sought to blackmail the Eastern Empire into
sending him huge subsidies and gifts rather than conquering it in the 440s,
though he did annex the middle and lower Danube valley from it too. He was
aided prodigiously by sheer luck. His attacks and advantageous treaty with the
East in 441–2 followed the departure of part of their army to fight Gaiseric in
North Africa, and in 447 the walls of Constantinople and other cities were
damaged by a massive earthquake. His open aggression towards the West in 451
followed an appeal from the disgruntled Princess Honoria for his hand in
marriage which the government disowned, an excuse for a politically logical
attack, but still useful to him. The flattering servility and massive bribes
offered by the latest Eastern embassy to him, led by the supreme civilian
official, ‘Master of Offices’ Nomus, had bought the East a temporary reprieve.
Allegedly he had grudges against a Western banker for keeping plate promised to
him or maybe was also bribed by Gaiseric the Vandal. He had already considered
attacking Persia instead, according to Eastern envoy Priscus, but the geography
was prohibitive as he would have to cross the Caucasus. His choice of Gaul, not
Italy where Honoria could be found, shows practicality; it was easier to cross
the Rhine than the Alps. The nature of this steppe-based state was clearly
based on warfare by restless nomads, unlike the relatively settled German lands
bordering on the Danube and Rhine frontiers, where farming not pastoral herding
predominated and the Germans had long been semi-integrated into the Roman world
as mercenary-supplying vassals.
A leader like Attila needed constant success and loot to
keep his followers contented, and the Empire was the richest source of both.
Indeed, as of the Romano-Hun negotiations of 411 there had been several Hunnic
kings; the sole rule of Attila was a novelty. This meant that Attila’s power
depended partly on his success in imposing unity as a war-leader, and partly in
his role as the sole conduit of loot (or Roman bribes) to his warriors. War was
more useful to him than peace and the Empire had far more gold than his German
neighbours, though if they extorted huge Roman subsidies he could channel these
as sole negotiator with the Empire. Buying him off permanently was an unlikely
result of Roman appeasement diplomacy, given the way he shamelessly raised his
demands year by year. Possibly the East paid, rather than fighting, in 442 and
447 due to temporary strategic weakness, not out of fear or military
incompetence. Its army was occupied elsewhere on the first occasion, and the earthquake
had struck on the second. Had Attila been satisfied with the results of
blackmail on East and West alike he would still have needed targets to conquer,
and we have seen that he considered Persia.
Botched plans by Eastern chief minister Chrysaphius to
assassinate him in 449 and the apparent appeal to him by Honoria exacerbated
tensions, but any wiser Western submission would have left Attila with a
problem of keeping his warriors occupied. He would probably have sought other
excuses for aggression and the East could hardly afford to pay him any more;
his demands had already risen ten-fold in a decade. But his court included
Romans as well as Germans and Huns, with his secretary being the Roman Count
Orestes who was later to become father of the West’s last Emperor. It is too
simplistic to present a notion of an irrevocable ‘Romans vs. Germans and Huns’
estrangement leading to the latter all pursuing a settled policy of seizing
Roman territory. Rather, the more aggressive Germanic and Hunnic leaders made
use of the opportunities that presented themselves in the decades after the
first Danubian crossing in 376. The nature of newly established dynastic sole
rulers, first Alaric, then Attila, in peoples used to no or multiple kingship
encouraged the successful warlords to wage war and secure success and loot
which benefited them personally.
It should be remarked here that the allegedly irrevocable,
hostile Gothic crossing of the Danube by the Tervingi and Gaethungi in 376 was
a refugee problem, a response to the loss of their steppe lands to the Huns,
not anti- Roman aggression. The contemporary historian Ammianus claimed that
Emperor Valens was pleased with their arrival as providing thousands of useful
Gothic military recruits, at a time of rising tension with Persia (he was at
Antioch in Syria preparing for war). He had previously negotiated successfully
with these peoples as dependant allies at the end of a three-year war in 369,
albeit probably forced to moderate his terms by the need to relocate east to a
Persian war over Armenia. The Romans had been using their Danube neighbours for
this purpose, and admitting thousands of agriculturalists to boost their
denuded farming communities, for centuries. Constantine secured large numbers
of recruits from the Goths in 331, and his son Constantius II did the same with
the Sarmatians in 358–9. In recent years, one leading Gothic king (Athanaric of
the Tervingi) had tried to limit, not extend, Gothic dependency on and supplies
of troops to the Empire in the 369 treaty; the Hunnic attack forced a re-think
as the Goths now needed sanctuary. The mass immigration in 376 was not a new
phenomenon, either; the Empire had admitted thousands of Carpi from the Danube
in 300. The main difference with the 376 phenomenon was that on the latter
occasion the Goths obstinately stayed under the direct control of their own
war-leaders; the Romans usually hastened to split bodies of armed immigrants up
into manageable numbers under Roman command. Presumably this normal practice
was Valens’ intention for 376–7 too, but was hampered by circumstances such as
the sheer number of the Goths and probably the lack of Roman troops to
supervise them at a time of war with Persia.
As of 376–7 the Goths were interested in land and food, not
attack; the situation only turned ugly after they were moved on South to local
Roman commander Lupicinus’ base at Marcianopolis and the Gaethungi crossed the
Danube unilaterally to join the Tervingi. Lupicinus and other officials seem to
have been operating a ‘black market’ in food-supplies and their extortion bred
resentment. Valens should have sent reliable officials to avoid this in such a
delicate situation. Lupicinus then panicked and tried to murder the Gothic
leaders at a banquet, a logical move to decapitate the threat and hopefully
force the leaderless Goths to obey Roman orders. Instead the targets escaped
and war resulted, with Valens hundreds of miles away and unable to react
quickly. The attempted strike at the enemy leadership was to be repeated,
equally unsuccessfully, by chief minister Chrysaphius attempting to murder
Attila in 449.
When Valens did arrive and march into Thrace in July 378, he
seems to have expected to meet only around 10,000 Goths who he outnumbered, but
faced at least twice or thrice that; possibly he had not heard that the
Geuthungi had now linked up with his initial foes, the Tervingi. The size of
the Gothic cavalry charge onto his army as it attacked the Gothic camp near
Adrianople on 9 August then precipitated disaster. Was his defeat therefore due
to over-confidence or faulty scouting? It is arguable that what distinguished
the disaster of 376–8 from successful Roman management of mass-immigration in
331 and 358–9 was that on the first two occasions the Emperor had been on the
Danube with an army to supervise the process; in 376–8 Valens was in Syria and
left it to under-resourced and corrupt military officials. The resulting damage
to the Empire was permanent, but it was not an unavoidable invasion of the
Empire by hostile barbarians.
The overall amount of Germanic looting and pillaging has
also probably been played up by rumour and apocalyptic exaggeration by
Christian writers, to whom the catastrophic collapse of the Christian Empire
was a sign of God’s disfavour and portended the Last Days foretold in
Revelation. In 395–6 the Goths ranged at will across the major sites of ancient
Greece, sacking Eleusis, Sparta, and Olympia and blackmailing Athens into
paying ransom, a major psychological blow to the Empire.
In 402 Alaric attacked the Western capital at Milan by
surprise, forcing the court to take refuge permanently in the inaccessible
marshes of Ravenna, hardly the situation of a militarily confident government. Thereafter
Alaric returned to an uneasy role as a ‘federate’ ally based on the Illyrian
border of East and West, playing them off against each other. An independent
leader, Radagaisus, invaded Italy on his own in 405 and was defeated. Although
our account of the attack (by Zosimus) is garbled it seems that he had nothing
to do with Alaric’s Goths but crossed the upper Danube from Bohemia. The West was
thus starting to attract copycat opportunistic invasions, and on 31 December
406 a multi-ethnic German coalition crossed the Rhine. Led by the Vandals and
also including the Alans and Suevi, they rampaged at will across Gaul and
produced apocalyptic comments about the end of civilization from local writers
(e.g. Prosper); the lack of Roman Imperial military re-action led to the
commander in Britain, Constantine (III), taking action unilaterally and
claiming the throne. A revolt against his authority by his general Gerontius
then enabled the Germans to move on into Spain, which was divided between them
without any need to consult the Empire.
In 408 the murder of Stilicho left the West open to another
invasion of Italy and threats to pillage Rome. Alaric shamelessly raised the
stakes of protection money for leaving, and eventually lost patience. The
Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410 was a relatively disciplined and organised
affair, with the Christian, albeit heretic Arian, Goths treating the churches
and the Papacy with some respect. Indeed it was a result of Alaric’s blackmail
of the government in Ravenna failing to extort the pay-off he expected, not a long-term
plan. If the Western military high command had not been decimated by the
anti-Stilicho purge in 408 he would have been unlikely to reach Rome at all. He
had after all simply been attempting to secure power within the Roman ‘system’
as commander-in-chief to his own new puppet-emperor, Attalus. But the
psychological effect was immense, with St. Jerome in distant Bethlehem summing
it up as symbolising the destruction of the world.
In reply to the pagan reaction that it was the gods’ revenge
on the Empire for abandoning them, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote ‘De Civitate
Dei’ arguing that the real ‘City of God’ was the new, spiritual Christian world
not an earthly city. This was not a new reaction to the difficulty of fitting
in the spiritual world of Christianity to a state that had initially persecuted
it, and abandonment of the ungodly secular society was a desirable course for
the virtuous Christian long before 410. But the sack of Rome gave Augustine an
opportunity to establish a theological basis for the separation of the aims of
Christianity and of the state, and to place the former as infinitely preferable.
This fed into the claims of the Papacy to religious authority and prestige in
place of the Emperor as lord of Rome, although Constantine had already given
the Popes supreme jurisdiction over their ecclesiastical subordinates in the
Western part of the Empire, effectively as ‘Patriarchs of the West’.
The Vandals’ sack in 455 was more brutal and secured a far
greater haul of loot, but also opportunistic, and unlike Alaric, Gaiseric was
not likely to be bought off before his forces attacked the city. Like Attila in
451, he used the excuse of wanting the implementation of a promise (this time
in a formal treaty) of an Imperial heiress, Valentinian III’s daughter Eudocia,
destined for his son Hunneric but unlikely to be delivered willingly to a
barbarian. In political terms, it was extremely implausible that Gaiseric would
have secured the Imperial succession for Hunneric. Even if the son-less Emperor
had been forced to marry his elder daughter to Hunneric to avoid war, or after
the murder of Valentinian his successor Petronius Maximus had done so, the
succession would not have passed to Hunneric. The main political aim of
Gaiseric in 455 was probably to forestall Petronius’ planned alliance with the
Goths (via Avitus’ embassy), which could lead to a Romano-Gothic attack on the
Vandals in North Africa. Had the alliance been implemented and Gaiseric not
reacted, the Vandals would probably have faced the same dangerous level of
attack from north, east, and west as they had in 441–2 with the Eastern Empire
able to join in with greater German participation than earlier thanks to
Attila’s death.
The written evidence suggests that what came to be known to
much later centuries as the eponymous ‘vandalism’ by the Vandals in Rome and
elsewhere, systematic and deliberate destruction, was an occasional rather than
a commonplace occurrence. At most, Gaiseric collected all the valuable
moveables he could and stripped the roofs from temples in Rome to carry off the
precious metals. Most damage to the fabric of the Empire’s cities and towns was
done gradually, not by concentrated barbarian assault. Across the West,
buildings collapsed over decades for lack of maintenance rather than being
pulled down by German attackers, and it is now suggested that the evidence of
fires in excavated villas (e.g. in Britain) is not necessarily due to arson by
passing Germans. Nor did hordes of Goths storm the walls of Rome in 410; the
gates were opened for them by runaway slaves. In 455 Petronius Maximus fled the
city and Pope Leo surrendered sooner than face a massacre.
There was widespread insecurity and anarchy, at least in
some areas where governmental authority had collapsed, e.g. the mid-fifth
century middle Danube written about by the local St. Severinus9. The decline in
building standards of what little new works were undertaken, and the use of
wood not stone, in the fifth and sixth centuries West suggests an inability to
find adequate craftsmen or materials10. If this is not physical ‘decline’ into
an atomised society, what is? But it should be remembered that in less affected
areas such as mid- and southern Gaul, the local Romanised aristocracy were
still in existence as a cultured, Latin-speaking elite and running the Church
throughout the sixth century. The world of the 590s historian Bishop Gregory of
Tours was post-Roman politically, but not culturally, and the Church remained a
strong bond with the city of Rome. Even in seventh century Anglo-Saxon England
the international links of the Catholic Church, restored to the Germanic kingdoms
there from the time of St. Augustine’s mission in 597, could allow for the
imposition of Theodore, a Greek, as Archbishop of Canterbury, who came from
distant Tarsus in Cilicia in 669.
The fall of the Western Empire was not the end of the
international world of a Mediterranean-centred Church. Indeed, the concept of
‘Roma Aeterna’ as the centre of the civilised world now applied to spiritual
rather than political leadership, and was played up by Pope Gregory the Great,
who was from an old Senatorial family but with a monastery established in his
ancestral mansion. The collapse of the central institution of the Senate did
not occur in 476, as it was still functioning and given practical autonomy in
Rome by the Romanophile Gothic king Theodoric from 493. It only went into
eclipse after the disruption of the wars between Eastern Empire and Goths over
Italy in 537–54, when Rome was captured several times and Gothic leader Totila
once evicted its declining population.
The thesis of a weaker Western army open to greater
recruitment from unreliable German troops and Germanic supreme commanders has
also been suggested as damaging to the West; the West had a Germanic supreme
infantry and cavalry commander (‘magister utiusque militiae’) and effective
regent, Stilicho, in 395–408 and eventually fell victim to more German generals
after 455. But the East’s army also relied on extensive Germanic recruitment,
as in 331 (Goths) and 359 (Sarmatians). The East’s senior German officers
included one man who briefly held supreme military power in the capital (Gainas
in 399–400) and one who served as military commander and chief minister (Aspar,
450–467). Both were murdered and their partisans massacred, as was Stilicho;
but after Stilicho’s fall the powerless Western court was at the Germans’ mercy
in 408–10. The East, however, fought off its Germanic challengers after their
similar coups in 400 and 467. After Gainas and Aspar were killed their
surviving troops were left at large in Thrace but could only plunder the countryside.
Did the West face a more concentrated and resource sapping Germanic challenge
than the East? Did its geography make attack easier and its containment more
difficult?
