07 The fall of Rome and its aftermath

From the time of the Renaissance, if not earlier, scholars looked back at the fall of Rome as a great discontinuity in Western civilization, marking the triumph of barbarism and the beginning of what became known as the “Dark Ages.” But the collapse of Roman power was neither so sudden nor so universal as this picture paints it.

The eastern Roman empire, based in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), continued for another thousand years in the form of the Byzantine empire. In the west a number of kingdoms inherited the mantle of Roman power, while the Church of Rome kept both faith and scholarship alive.

For centuries, writers would use the fall of Rome to point a moral or adorn a tale. In the eyes of some, the Romans and their increasingly tyrannical emperors became decadent and effete, indulging in luxury and neglecting the simple military virtues. For others—notably Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88)—the rot set in when the Romans abandoned the secular, enlightened values they had inherited from the ancient Greeks and embraced the superstitious, intolerant, irrational cult of Christianity. But the consensus today is that the reasons for Roman decline were not internal, but external: as one modern historian has put it, “The Roman empire did not fall—it was pushed.”

The barbarians at the gates The empire had reached its greatest extent by AD 200. From the middle of the 3rd century, the frontiers along the Rhine and Danube came under increasing pressure by groups of Germanic tribes such as the Franks, the Alemanni and the Goths. These tribes were referred to by the Romans as “barbarians,” but were in fact at least partly Romanized, enjoying trading relationships with the empire and increasingly serving as mercenaries in the Roman army. Their territorial incursions into the Roman provinces were not so much a result of expansionist ambition as a response to pressure from warlike nomadic horsemen from the steppes to the east, such as the Huns.

When the financial demands of defending the empire could not be met by the Roman taxpayer, the authorities responded by debasing the coinage, bringing the economy close to collapse. The disruption to trade and agriculture resulted in famine and lawlessness, while emperor succeeded emperor in a succession of revolts, civil wars and assassinations. Some degree of stability was restored from the late 3rd century under the Emperor Diocletian, and then in the early 4th century under Constantine. Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the empire, and moved his capital from Rome to the old Greek city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople. Thereafter there were separate emperors in the east and west.

“When I heard that the bright light of all the world was quenched … then indeed, ‘I became dumb and humbled myself and kept silence from good words.’”

St. Jerome, “Preface to Ezekiel,” recalling his reaction on hearing of the sack of Rome in 410

At the beginning of the 5th century the Germanic tribes poured over the frontiers and overran Gaul (modern France), Spain, North Africa and Italy, setting up kingdoms and obliging the western emperor to recognize them as allies. The emperor’s new allies were restless, however: the city of Rome itself—untouched by foreign invasion for some eight centuries—was sacked by the Visigoths under Alaric in 410, and in 476 the last western Roman emperor was ousted by the Germanic general Odoacer, who made himself king of Italy.

Christianity: from Jewish cult to imperial religion

Christianity was just one of a number of messianic Jewish sects that arose during the Roman occupation of Israel, partly as a form of spiritual resistance to the foreign oppressor. At first, only Jews could become Christians, until St. Paul began to proselytize to the Gentiles in Cyprus, Asia Minor, Greece and elsewhere. Paul not only turned the teachings of Jesus into a set of theological doctrines, he also began the work of establishing a universal church, with a strong, centralized organization.

Christianity, with its appeal for the poor and the oppressed, spread rapidly around the Roman empire, but also met with considerable antipathy among those who regarded the refusal of Christians to worship the “official” Roman gods as a treason against the state. The Emperor Nero used the Christian community as a scapegoat for the fire of Rome in AD 64, putting many to death in a variety of unpleasant ways; but most of the early persecutions were unsanctioned outbreaks of mob violence. The pressures that began to build up on the fringes of the empire through the 3rd century, however, led to a series of severe official persecutions, most notably that under Diocletian at the beginning of the 4th century. By creating so many martyrs, these persecutions served only to recruit more converts.

It was the Emperor Constantine who recognized that Christianity, with its hierarchical organization and hold over people’s loyalties, could provide a useful means of wielding power, and in 313 he issued an edict of religious toleration. From his time on Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire, and the church an extension of the state.

How dark were the Dark Ages? The “barbarian” tribes who established kingdoms in what had been the western Roman empire—Visigoths in Spain, Vandals in North Africa, Ostrogoths in Italy and Franks in Gaul and western Germany—largely abandoned their old gods and adopted Christianity, in one form or another. However, as contact was lost with the great cultural centers of the eastern Mediterranean, such as Alexandria, literacy and learning declined, preserved only in the monasteries.

In the west the Franks, via force of arms, rose to be the dominant power, and under their most famous king, Charlemagne, they carved out an empire that covered not only France, but also Italy and much of Germany. On Christmas Day in the year 800 Charlemagne was crowned “emperor of the west” by the pope in Rome. His capital at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) became a great center of learning, and he and his successors did much to preserve the legacy of the Greeks and Romans, in art, literature and scholarship.

“Under the authority of God we conduct war victoriously, make peace with honour and uphold the condition of the state.”

The Emperor Justinian I, c.530, claims divine sanction for his earthly powers

In the east, the Byzantine empire experienced a great revival in the 6th century under the Emperor Justinian, who reconquered Italy and parts of Spain and North Africa. But this success was short-lived, and in the following centuries the Byzantine empire was gradually whittled away, first by the Arabs, and then by the Turks. And yet through all the long centuries of decline, the Byzantines, though speaking Greek, regarded themselves as the true inheritors of the mantle of Rome.

the condensed idea

The legacy of Rome survived its fall