- Location
- Canada
The third century was a time of natural climate change that caused Egypt and the surrounding area to become much drier. Blaming the drop of the local water table on Roman agriculture alone like this is disingenuous.
Controversial Historical Opinions You Have
- Thread starter EricD
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Azrubêl
Hellene Psycho
- Location
- Greece
Yes, if we cherrypick sources well enough, we are able to paint black as white.
The very passage of Ammianus that you cite does not in fact say that things are going well. What he does is argue against people who think that the Republic had not seen such misfortune in ages past. The events, to paraphrase Marcellinus remain melancholy. It's telling also that Marcellinus' history ends on the grim note of the commander Julius arranging the massacre of Goths across the empire in retaliation for their attacks, a patriotic act that the historian praises. This was a pattern that would repeat itself many times over.
This is again, not a case of a writer (who died long before the West started falling apart, much like Vegetius) saying that things are fine, but rather that to catastrophize about the Gothic attacks as unprecedented is going too far.
This seems to be another instance of people trying to make an argument from silence in what is a very poorly documented period, which doesn't really work. Much like how Orosius (whom you cited) is trying to make a defense of Christianity against pagan attacks which asserted that Christianity's supremacy led to the sack by Alaric, you had clerics embroiled in the Chalcedon controversy arguing that the fall of Rome to the barbarians was punishment for Pope Leo's opinions on the matter.
If 476 was inconsequential, it's not because nothing fundamentally changed and the 5th century was alright, but rather because the Roman polity survived in the East, and the West was moribund even before Odoacer decided to do away with its imperial court.
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- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
Yeah, I think that's relevant.
There's a huge difference between saying "the Western Roman Empire was not a truly moribund institution in 400 AD, or 425 AD, or even 455 AD after Atilla died" and saying "when the Western Roman Empire's governance actually did fall apart, resulting in major political and demographic shifts across Western Europe and adjacent regions, that was on net, within the timescale of those centuries, a bad thing."
BalerionTheDrake
Pacta sunt servanda
Roman urban populations, for all their substantial level, only amounted to 10% of the Roman Empire's population. We wouldn't notice a substantial population increase in rural areas because demographic estimates at this time are so vague that they generally have larger margins of error than 10%, let alone attempting to document rural populations (which is still a struggle for modern censuses today). That's not to mention the Antonine and Cyprian plagues would have hit cities harder due to density and poor public health, meaning there were less people to emigrate in the first place.
A series of natural disasters and plague epidemics happened, which would have happened anyways even in the Roman Empire did not collapse (or be even worse; the extensive trade networks and the large urban areas continuing to grow would have likely made the Plague of Justinian even worse, and cities would have faced higher death tolls in natural disasters if they continued to be heavily populated).
We have records of significant plagues lasting all the way to the 8th century, after which they begin to decline. Citing Russell's estimates again, by 1,000 CE, the population had already recovered to 50% above the level in 500 CE and more than twice the estimated population in 650 CE. Comparing with the Black Death (admittedly a much worse plague, but also a time period with significantly more advanced agriculture and better healthcare) that took a century for affected areas to recover from, and a population rebound followed by a 50% increase in 3-4 centuries does not seem to indicate a low equilibrium or a particularly slow recovery for a time period with high infant mortality rates (and infanticide too, which was not seriously criminalized until the 14th century).
The issue with the parasitism of Roman urban cities wasn't that 600 senators were eating a lot or being excessively decadent; it was that the entire system was parasitic and set up to exploit rural areas to benefit the urban areas, with substantial overhead that went to sustaining the system.
The most straightforward examples of this are the massive urban populations meant that much of the population was underemployed or unemployed, but they still required food imports and doles to mitigate unrest in the areas. These populations provided little benefit to the agricultural area, so the majority of the urban population at the highest and lowest ends of the spectrum were in all likelihood net drains that did not provide any sort of beneficial labor to the rural population.
However, even employed people are not necessarily beneficial to the rural areas. In Division of labor, specialization and diversity in the ancient Roman cities: A quantitative approach to Latin epigraphy, Kaše et. al. (2022) compiled a database of the professional epigraphs that have survived. This should be noted that this isn't a survey of all professions, just highly valued specialists whose titles were worth recording. Nonetheless, we see that a quarter of recorded urban epigraphs were managerial professions of some type. The most recorded profession was curator, a managerial position, with nearly twice the recorded inscriptions (1062) compared to the next most recorded profession, faber (a catch-all title for wood, metal, and stone workers, with 566 inscriptions). The predominance of managers over professions with more tangible benefit to rural settlements (like metal-workers or transport workers) suggests both a level of exploitation and excessive complexity created by the Roman system. The latter of which isn't unequivocally a bad thing, but only if there are extensive state apparatuses to directly benefit everybody and offset the costs of sustaining the additional bureaucracy, which most pre-industrial governments lacked.
Of course, there is also the matter of sustaining the Roman military, which had levels of militarization not seen for a millennium after its fall. While a military is certainly required for defense and safety, the Roman military went far beyond that, between additional imperial conquests, extensive civil warfare (even at Rome's height), and suppression of civil unrest. The vastly increased army also meant a vast population to support it, between more administration (especially when the army recruited from across the empire and had to deploy to the remote frontiers), camp followers (although the legions could detach from them during campaigns), and the specialists to manufacture military equipment.
Paul Erdkamp's 2001 article Beyond the Limits of the 'Consumer City'. A Model of the Urban and Rural Economy in the Roman World also makes several points that make the benefits of anything the urban environment offers to the rural areas even less tangible. Erdkamp posits three mechanisms for either reciprocal or one-way exchange between the city and the hinterlands: market exchanges, externalization of labor, and political and social entitlement. Regarding market exchange, the main issue is that Roman urban production was largely internal to the cities themselves. The lower classes that comprised the majority of food consumption received their food from elites in exchange for goods and services, and those elites received much of their agricultural surplus through nonreciprocal methods such as taxation and rent. Thus, urban manufacturing and other services mostly went to benefit the upper classes. Since long-distance imports and exports were largely city-to-city, those networks largely involved the redistribution of agricultural surplus between cities (with profits taken by transport middlemen who were also predominately urban), not necessarily benefitting the rural areas. Externalization of labor involves the fact that the seasonal nature of smaller farms created a large labor surplus during the off-season. This labor surplus would then go to functions such as transportation and rural industry, providing a substitution for urban goods and services (and the local goods would be cheaper and more suited for thanks to not catering to an upper urban class and reduced transportation costs because of closer. Meanwhile, much of the tax and rent is one directional as well, barring what Erdkamp says are "vague ideas of reciprocity" with regards to the nebulous benefits the army and government can bring. As such, the relationship between the city and the countryside becomes mostly nonreciprocal.
And yes, elites continued exist in Late Antiquity and the Medieval Era, but at a much reduced level. For all the concentration into cities, Roman elites also existed at a local level as well, as centralization and communication simply wasn't good enough to micromanage regions from afar. These local officials were granted broad authority to meet the quotas imposed by a central government, creating extensive opportunities for corruption as well as a notable disconnect between the imperial governments that assessed and controlled the tax rate and the regions they were actually taxing. The collapse in central authority eliminated an entire layer of elites to sustain, not to mention unifying tax collection and assessment under local authority, which would help mitigate some excesses of taxation (since a local lord would be the one directly facing the brunt of the unrest if he extracted too much from his subjects).
The Fayum depression was artificially connected to the Nile since the time of Egypt and has remained consistently below the elevation of the Nile river. While that doesn't make it immune to climate shocks, it does provide a degree of insulation against them.
From Blanchet et. al. (2024). Blue lines indicate the number of strong flood events, orange lines indicate the number of weak flood events. Pink line is the filtered log-transformed record of high Nile flood levels. X-axis is years (CE in the top figure, BCE in the bottom figure [the bottom is irrelevant for the purposes of discussion the Roman and post-Roman environmental effects]).
This above figure indicates that while the 2nd-3rd centuries did see a severe drought, that time period also encompassed a period of major Nile flood events that would have increased the water levels of Lake Moeris too. Depending on what the period "2nd to 3rd century" entails (100-200 AD? 150-250 AD? 199-299 AD?), there's a good chance that the measurement period where the lake levels decline may mostly comprise of the "wet period" and only include the very beginning of the dry period, but there's no way to specify the time period conclusively either way.
In addition, an event of a similar magnitude occurred in the 13th and 14th century, of which we have little record of desertification or Lake Moeris levels receding despite extensive Islamic records regarding the Nile.
I never said things were going well, I said that the contemporary literature doesn't depict a catastrophic collapse that worse than even other times of trouble. And that is borne out in Marcellinus' account. Sure, he believes that the apex of the empire was better than the present, but he held an optimism in the system itself and always portrayed the Empire as going to survive once the moral failings of individuals were repaired. Marcellinus' writings is chock-full of this optimism despite the record of the challenges being faced by Rome. Every breakthrough of barbarian invaders is matched by a heroic account of how the emperors and their stout legionnaires halted the invasion. He depicts the authority of the Roman emperors as absolute and as beacons of the "Old Rome" arrayed against the moral failings he believes are responsible for the temporary troubles.
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Azrubêl
Hellene Psycho
- Location
- Greece
Unsurprising, because Marcellinus also didn't live in a time of total collapse. He likely died at some point in the closing years of the fourth century, many decades before the West collapsed. It's disingenuous to claim that things weren't going badly because Marcellinus was on the whole, optimistic. That Rome would endure despite current hardships is a common theme in Roman literature. They were not even wrong, considering the endurance of the Roman polity - but that belief is not evidence of things going well or badly, it is rather evidence of people's faith in the Roman state and its ability to weather troubles.
You also seem to have totally misinterpreted what I meant by 'grim note'. It is not about what Marcellinus believed (he thought it was a praiseworthy act of patriotism) but rather that from our perspective, the systematic massacre of Goths across Roman cities is a pretty grim thing, and one that would be repeated across the coming century as the Romans repeatedly struggled to neutralize the barbarian elements in their polity, failing in the West and succeeding in the East.
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My understanding is that Roman cities were parasites to the rural population is one that isn't universally accepted by academics.
While the unequal nature of Roman economy meant villa, plantations and farms were exploited to garner the richest for the elites, by the time of Empire, increased manufactures in ceramics, manufactures like wine,garum, the fashion industry be it cosmetics or clothing all filtered it's way into Rural regions.
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk
Granted, some of these are images taken from Roman citizens living in English towns rather than the villages but for Gaul, we know post fall of WRE, lifespan, the disappearence of bathhouses and changes in architecture all suggest that the living standards of rural peasants has fallen.
Of course, much of this may be because of the Roman trade route or the insecurity but well.... It's presumably why academics are still debating this ?
While the unequal nature of Roman economy meant villa, plantations and farms were exploited to garner the richest for the elites, by the time of Empire, increased manufactures in ceramics, manufactures like wine,garum, the fashion industry be it cosmetics or clothing all filtered it's way into Rural regions.
Living with the Romans
This was the first ever exhibition to reveal what life was like for people in Liverpool and the North West during the Roman period.
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk
Granted, some of these are images taken from Roman citizens living in English towns rather than the villages but for Gaul, we know post fall of WRE, lifespan, the disappearence of bathhouses and changes in architecture all suggest that the living standards of rural peasants has fallen.
Of course, much of this may be because of the Roman trade route or the insecurity but well.... It's presumably why academics are still debating this ?
bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
Late Rome is interesting because you do have like the building of actual actual empire stuff as a durable social and material phenomena, broadening out a pan-imperial elite that actually touches on the provincial notables and makes them Roman too, buuut very much at the cost of monopolizing the civil life of even small local towns (while they are also yoked to the networks of the cities), with widespread levelling and standardization also meaning that of coloni and all sorts of old smallholder niches being reduced to serfs. The massive massive rise in anakhoresis, of coloni fleeing their fields to go up into the mountains or like into the rugged forests of Amorica or whatever, indicates a fundamentally unhealthy social and economic order in the Roman backcountry.
The reproduction of empire and imperial cultural and economic practices with literacy and urban infrastructure and etc... were really damaged and pewtered out as they could not recover from back to back plagues and earthquake-fires and etc.... into the post-Roman political fragmentation and with the eventual response of the Eastern empire being the Gothic Wars finishing the job and breaking the Roman Senate under the Goths and etc...
Buuuuut how many of like Flavius Odoacer's "barbarian" soldiers had aunts and grandfathers and so on as escaped serfs moving into the fortress-towns and adopting their "barbarized" martial identity?
The reproduction of empire and imperial cultural and economic practices with literacy and urban infrastructure and etc... were really damaged and pewtered out as they could not recover from back to back plagues and earthquake-fires and etc.... into the post-Roman political fragmentation and with the eventual response of the Eastern empire being the Gothic Wars finishing the job and breaking the Roman Senate under the Goths and etc...
Buuuuut how many of like Flavius Odoacer's "barbarian" soldiers had aunts and grandfathers and so on as escaped serfs moving into the fortress-towns and adopting their "barbarized" martial identity?
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The thing is, Rome was militaristic as fuck, but the production of iron tools, weapons, the increased sale of common jewelry.... The prevalence of a monetised economy, the Roman army purchasing grain and food supplies means that the peasant farmers must also be using the coin. Taxation in coin may well represent a significant use of the coins but we see trade to said rural regions, be it amphora, pots, jewellery...
We can compare this to Han Dynasty China or Ming China. The agrarian economy of West Han Vs the more mercantile economy of East Han and what that means with regards to urbanisation and the peasant economy. And China was under industrialised when compared to total Rome output of metals.
Early Han villages were mostly self sufficient, with luxury good trade but as the economy monetised, they bought more goods and services. The flip side of that is that they also became more indebted and vulnerable to rich landlords.... But that's a result of the mercentile class being weakened.
Hell, the whole Salt and Iron tax debate was based off commoners having become increasingly reliant on buying salt, as a result of the monetary economy.
It's hard to see how the Romans could have a monetary economy and not have the vast part of their empire not partake in it, consuming basic consumer goods and etc.
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bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
@PainRack
I'm pretty sure the problem wasn't that there was no participation yes (after all plenty of these places from Gaul to Scythia were already using coin before Rome came), but that the penetration of the imperial monetary economy led to basically a two-track system of more and more inequality with the debasement of the debasement of the debasement of the bronze/copper currency reducing the value of and access to cash for each individual fieldhand, beyond what can be explained as just the abstract rise in population, while the sinews of empire meant that the Vir Illustris dealt in basically an entirely different world built around gold up to entirely notional units of value, hyperconcentrated around frontier military spending and then urban capitals and imperial courts.
I'm pretty sure the problem wasn't that there was no participation yes (after all plenty of these places from Gaul to Scythia were already using coin before Rome came), but that the penetration of the imperial monetary economy led to basically a two-track system of more and more inequality with the debasement of the debasement of the debasement of the bronze/copper currency reducing the value of and access to cash for each individual fieldhand, beyond what can be explained as just the abstract rise in population, while the sinews of empire meant that the Vir Illustris dealt in basically an entirely different world built around gold up to entirely notional units of value, hyperconcentrated around frontier military spending and then urban capitals and imperial courts.
I think we need better definition of parasitic cities then.
Or the regional effects. It's hard to argue that Imperialism didn't benefit Rome Britain rural villages, but that may not be true elsewhere.
The same adage applies to generalising data we gleaned from Egypt to elsewhere in the Empire.
Elvish Trickery
Cynical Fashionista and Ancient History Aficionado
- Location
- Agri Decumates
Something that I always miss in discussions of this sort about the impact of the 'Fall of Rome' and which IMO makes them kind of fruitless that there is never much engagement with the enormous regional and temporal differences involved in the reduction of the Roman Empire AD 400-700 to the Aegean and Anatolian core. The Roman Empire included a vast collection of geographically and historically enormously variegated territories. Their sociocultural conditions prior to becoming Roman possessions, the mode of their (Roman) conquest and their historical developments during the Later Empire differed to a massive extent. Like, yeah, the Later Roman Empire was a powerful unifying and integrating force. But it couldn't (and didn't seek to) eliminate all regional differences within its vast jurisdiction. There's certain large-scale trends that can be followed from Britain to Anatolia across Late Antiquity. But the overall differences in terms of their historical trajectory are far more pronounced.
There's also usually no real attempt to operationalize what is meant by a decline. What do we even mean by a decline? Artistic? Economic? Social? Cultural? Standards of living for elites? Material conditions for ordinary people? Decline in security, trade, wealth, literary production, education, administration, taxation, demography, technological advancement?
This very thread already demonstrates that deurbanization for instance can be seen as a good thing by some, a bad by others. But deurbanization was emphatically not confined to the post-Roman world: the process can be observed already in the fourth century and reached its completion in various places at various times. By 500, there were no cities left in post-Roman Britain. But the poleis of the Peloponnese, which was still firmly in Roman hands, had also turned into agricultural production centers straddling the line between 'urban' and 'rural' (e.g. Messene, Olympia or Nemea). On the other hand, it took until the High Middle Ages for Anatolia to become truly deurbanized. The cities of the Levant and Egypt rejoiced in unabated prosperity in defiance of all transformations and kept their importance beyond the Islamic Conquests. Conversely, the rural prosperity that some like to bring up as a feature of post-imperial Europe is very much evident in the Late Roman world, from marginal lands being brought into increased cultivation in 5th-century Africa to Cilician rural villages adopting 'urban' features such as bath-houses, tetrapyla and fortifications and the flourishing of the oil-producing stone villages of the Syrian Limestone Massif. So are these processes truly an inextricable epiphenomenon of the 'Fall of Rome' or maybe not? Perhaps it was just accelerated in certain regions by imperial collapse.
The disappearance of Roman imperial authority was brought about in different provinces at very different times (again, with a divergence of up to three centuries), under widely varying conditions. In some, the overall dissolution of existing socio-economic structures was almost total, the transition more abrupt and accompanied by warfare and instability, while in many others, such as (but not exclusively) those conquered by the Arabs, the transition was far smoother, and it is only in the longue durée that significant changes emerge. The process was mostly too slow and too big to be noticed by individuals: they could only notice the 'shock moments', such as the military retreating from their region, their city being sieged, or a prominent ancient structure crumbling due to lack of maintenance.
While northern Gaul was going up in flames after 400, in Italy itself the classical structures persisted with little change for another one and a half centuries. By the time Arab hosts advanced into the remains of the Exarchate of Africa at the tail end of the 7th century, regions such as northern Gaul had already been part of an entirely different world for more than two centuries, a world that while undeniably materially poorer, lacking a centralized administration, a standing army, a tax system and large-scale building works, had developed its own stable and sophisticated modes of socio-economic and political organization and was on the trajectory to dominate Europe. Ultimately, it was not the regions which retained the most features of 'Romanness' which would rise to prominence in medieval Europe. I think a generalized 'good/bad'-verdict is moot - Europe's history cannot be conceived without the 'Fall of Rome'. Instead, I think it's much more helpful to look in detail at what changed and what didn't, and try to understand these threads of change and continuity. Often, that can result in quite surprising answers. As someone with a great fondness for the ancient world, it's easy to look back at the Roman world with melancholy, but many features of that ancient world were already lost or in terminal decline in 400, while others would endure beyond Roman rule. If there's any particular general feature of antiquity that I think really was irrevocably lost in the period of 400-700, it's the inward-looking unity of the Mediterranean. From then on, North Africa and the Levant would look to Damascus and Baghdad, the Aegean Coasts to Constantinople, southern Gaul to the north and Italy and Spain to themselves. Well and truly the end of an epoch.
There's also usually no real attempt to operationalize what is meant by a decline. What do we even mean by a decline? Artistic? Economic? Social? Cultural? Standards of living for elites? Material conditions for ordinary people? Decline in security, trade, wealth, literary production, education, administration, taxation, demography, technological advancement?
This very thread already demonstrates that deurbanization for instance can be seen as a good thing by some, a bad by others. But deurbanization was emphatically not confined to the post-Roman world: the process can be observed already in the fourth century and reached its completion in various places at various times. By 500, there were no cities left in post-Roman Britain. But the poleis of the Peloponnese, which was still firmly in Roman hands, had also turned into agricultural production centers straddling the line between 'urban' and 'rural' (e.g. Messene, Olympia or Nemea). On the other hand, it took until the High Middle Ages for Anatolia to become truly deurbanized. The cities of the Levant and Egypt rejoiced in unabated prosperity in defiance of all transformations and kept their importance beyond the Islamic Conquests. Conversely, the rural prosperity that some like to bring up as a feature of post-imperial Europe is very much evident in the Late Roman world, from marginal lands being brought into increased cultivation in 5th-century Africa to Cilician rural villages adopting 'urban' features such as bath-houses, tetrapyla and fortifications and the flourishing of the oil-producing stone villages of the Syrian Limestone Massif. So are these processes truly an inextricable epiphenomenon of the 'Fall of Rome' or maybe not? Perhaps it was just accelerated in certain regions by imperial collapse.
The disappearance of Roman imperial authority was brought about in different provinces at very different times (again, with a divergence of up to three centuries), under widely varying conditions. In some, the overall dissolution of existing socio-economic structures was almost total, the transition more abrupt and accompanied by warfare and instability, while in many others, such as (but not exclusively) those conquered by the Arabs, the transition was far smoother, and it is only in the longue durée that significant changes emerge. The process was mostly too slow and too big to be noticed by individuals: they could only notice the 'shock moments', such as the military retreating from their region, their city being sieged, or a prominent ancient structure crumbling due to lack of maintenance.
While northern Gaul was going up in flames after 400, in Italy itself the classical structures persisted with little change for another one and a half centuries. By the time Arab hosts advanced into the remains of the Exarchate of Africa at the tail end of the 7th century, regions such as northern Gaul had already been part of an entirely different world for more than two centuries, a world that while undeniably materially poorer, lacking a centralized administration, a standing army, a tax system and large-scale building works, had developed its own stable and sophisticated modes of socio-economic and political organization and was on the trajectory to dominate Europe. Ultimately, it was not the regions which retained the most features of 'Romanness' which would rise to prominence in medieval Europe. I think a generalized 'good/bad'-verdict is moot - Europe's history cannot be conceived without the 'Fall of Rome'. Instead, I think it's much more helpful to look in detail at what changed and what didn't, and try to understand these threads of change and continuity. Often, that can result in quite surprising answers. As someone with a great fondness for the ancient world, it's easy to look back at the Roman world with melancholy, but many features of that ancient world were already lost or in terminal decline in 400, while others would endure beyond Roman rule. If there's any particular general feature of antiquity that I think really was irrevocably lost in the period of 400-700, it's the inward-looking unity of the Mediterranean. From then on, North Africa and the Levant would look to Damascus and Baghdad, the Aegean Coasts to Constantinople, southern Gaul to the north and Italy and Spain to themselves. Well and truly the end of an epoch.