have just posted the same question on the Medieval list but I will ask the same of this group. But has anyone on this list read "The Fall of the West" by Goldsworthy? I'm just finishing it and it seems to bea good read but I will take some time thinking about his conclusions. Goldsworthy does seem to draw conclusions about ther continuities of Roman classical traditions and the imposition of Germanic ones witht the lat classical period or is that the early mediaeval period? he also draws attention to the simularitiies of this period to our own Western society. Any thoughts by anyone else on this list?

As a post script it seems to me that it might even be worth while that there might be reason to establish a separate group jst fo the period between the years 300 - 800(?) Any opinion on this thought would be appreciated as well.

We discussed something along these lines in this thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/61208#... in the "History at 30.000 Feet" group.

As for starting a new group dedicated to late antiquity / early middle ages - if you like. But I don't mind following both Ancient and Medieval history groups.

There already is a Late Roman group, which doesn't get much traffic. Depending how you define, that could go be considered as 300-700 anyway, even if 800 is a bit of a stretch for most people (though some people could manage it!).

It's all a matter of perspective. Since I've developed an interest in pre-dynastic Egypt I think of everything Graeco-Roman (including the Minoan / Mycenaean stuff) as "late" ;-)

Message edited by its author, Oct 11, 2009, 9:51am.

Sort of like how I tell friends who study classical Greeks that they were rustic primitives :)

2> Your points are well taken. It was just a thought that a transitional period would be wee worth exploring in it own right. I am somewhat interested in the process o decline and fall throughout history. For example what caused the Assyrians to so completely disappear after being around for roughly two millennium? Anyway there does seem to be a run of books covering the period under consideration. I have Peter Heather's new work waiting patiently on my to be read pile.

Actually, the end of the Assyrians is not much of a mystery. They were the Nazi Mordor Dark Lords of the Iron Age and after committing every ancient human rights violation known to man for hundreds of years, an unexpected alliance between the Medes and the Babylonians crushed them for good in 612 BCE. Nobody ever missed them.

Dude have you read the Anabasis? Some of my favourite bits are when the 10,000 are going through the ruins of Assyria and asking the locals who built these gigantic freaking walls and stuff....and nobody knew! Even though it was only like 2 centuries later and stuff. It makes me think sometimes about if the shit had hit the fan in the '60s if there would be people in 100 years on the Potomac who don't know who built the Whitehouse and whatnot...

I always found the transition to be of profound interest. Have you read Goffart and Thompson, Duby, Heather, and that lot?

There's been an astonishing recent influx on materials dealing with Late Antiquity. In addition to those Pam listed I can't recommend Wickham's Framing the Early Middle Ages or McCormick's Origins of the European Economy strongly enough. In addition, Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West is pretty essential right now. I'm about 75 pages into Edward James' Europe's Barbarians and based on what I've read so far, I believe that I'll end up being impressed. I wouldn't bother with either Wells' Barbarians to Angels or Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. IMO those two are at opposite very distant extremes and neither is particularly useful.

Goffart's interesting - wild ideas that stretch the evidence and nobody really believes but you gotta read him to stay current with the discussion.

I also have Noble's From Roman Provinces to Medieval Kingdoms and Innes' Introduction to Early Medieval Europe, 300-900 The Sword, the Plough and the Book but haven't read either yet. Innes wouldn't touchstone for some reason.

Julia Smith's Europe After Rome: A New Cultural History is OK, but no more. Fairly general, broad & thematic and I don't see where she breaks any new ground. OTOH, not full of horrible errors either. Probably not bad for a first read after getting through a narrative of the period.

Amazing that Thomas Burns in Rome and the Barbarians, 100 B.C - A.D. 400 (also a good book) could write that there had been no comprehensive historical narrative of Western Europe in Late Antiquity that was comparable to Averil Cameron's The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity coverage of the East. At the time he wrote Burns was right - and that book was published in 2003. It's not true now.

Message edited by its author, Oct 13, 2009, 10:17pm.

Just curious about what you didn't like about Wells' book; I thought it was pretty interesting (though admittedly, I'm a fan) ;-D

I'd have to look for the specific quotes but more than once he said something was evidence that life didn't decline at all post-Roman. That's pretty hard to justify as an overall statement - there are regions, such as Central and N Gaul and interior Spain where you can make that argument, and I think you can say that for Joe Peasant things may have actually improved in most places initially but overall? The wealthy were the drivers of trade and economic complexity and I can't see any way to argue that the elites in the post-Roman period were nearly as wealthy or as involved in the sheer magnitude of trade networks as during the Empire.

It's the reverse problem I have with Ward-Perkins saying standards fell to below prehistoric levels. Both are not supportable statements from what I've read - certainly not overall though for specific regions and periods they may be true.

I'll look for the specific quotes later if you like - too late right now. The other thing I don't like is not footnoting but just referring to consulted works by chapter. That bugs me.

Ah alright, fair enough. Thing is, I agree with his statement about life not being too much different for the average person after "the fall." Certainly for the wealthy elite life would have taken a nose dive; there's lots of evidence that the new "overlords" took over their homes, with the former either fleeing their advance or being killed outright. But when it comes to the average Joe in the countryside, I can't disagree with Wells' assertion that life wouldn't have changed to any great degree. I believe it would have been simply a matter of replacing one overlord with another, and in many regions the evidence of the transition from "Roman" to "barbarian" is really hard to track because apparently the transition wasn't nearly as jarring as we've been led to believe.

The cities, on the other hand are a separate matter, and while I don't recall Wells stating the same in their case, if he did, then I agree he is probably wrong :-)

I happen to concur with the opinion (Thomson/Wallace-Hadrill) that the barbarians wanted to be part of the Roman 'scene'.

However, we all know how well that works if you aren't actually enculturated in the system you're joining.

Yeah - it's pretty obvious to me that the fall of Rome was a failed incorporation of newcomers, not (with the possible exception of the Vandals) because the Barbarians wanted to do the Empire harm. Most of the successor kingdoms originated by Rome ceding them the various provinces as federates - this was the case with the Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Franks & Visigoths. The role of Justinian in damaging Western Europe gets overlooked quite a bit too.

Feicht -- I loved The Anabasis & yeah I remember that.

As far as the decline of Rome, I think I'm already on record and profoundly disagreeing with the current accepted historical dogma that it was more of a transition than a fall. It looks like a fall to me, as profound as the one where the Bronze Age came crashing down. We just don't know enough about the latter to dissect it categorically the way we can with the dissolution of the Roman Empire in the west. And yes -- before anyone says it out loud -- i know all about the Byzantine Empire in the east. . .

Is there really such a thing as “dogma” in the study of history? One needs only look at the various treatments cited above on the subject of Roman decline. The study of history involves shifting interpretations; dogma cannot be enforced. The debate among historians is not whether Rome fell, but what happened after the end of Roman hegemony in western Europe.

But Garp! Byzantium! 1453! ZOMGZZ havent u HERD!1!??!

:-D

Nah really, I know we've talked about this on here before so I won't lay out my whole playbook again, but suffice to say I think it depends where you're "looking" in society for the "fall." Po' folks in the boonies= no big difference. Wealthy Roman elite? I'd say most (over 50%, anyway) were screwed.

Garp, to me a "Fall" implies a line in the sand. You know, coming in, tearing down structures, salting the earth. Carthage...Now that's a fall! Too many institutions persisted, imo, for a 'fall' to be applicable. Gregory of Tours is indicative of this. Not to mention continuing wine trade.

Message edited by its author, Oct 15, 2009, 6:37am.

Pam --Well I understand this perspective yet I reject it. Carthage & Assyria are indeed "falls" but a fall can be more subtle and impactful for a group of nations, such as that at the conclusion of the Bronze Age. That probably took a century or so to manifest, yet it was indeed a fall, not a transition.

Trelaw -- I say dogma because the established "correct" way to teach the decline of Rome today is as a transition, not a fall.

I'm with Pam - unless you believe that aliens showed up, depopulated Western Europe and replaced them with completely new people, then Fall is a complete and absolute misnomer - it was a transition or transformation.

Now you can argue whether that transformation was mild or radical but what happened is somewhere in the transformation scale. The key is figuring out where.

There's a lot we know. Frex, we know that the successor kingdoms, except in England, where we don't know that much, were all literate, formulated written, enforceable law codes, developed some sort of legalized transition of wealth from the individual to the state, either had or were developing a stratified society including heritable rulership, and were able to raise and deploy military forces. With the exception of the last, none of these were characteristic of any of the peoples in charge of the successor states as little as a century before.

We know that a literate elite survived from the Roman to Early Medieval Period, the literacy of this elite was in Latin and that this elite was prodigious in its output of written materials. Of course the Roman literate elite were called rhetors and had gone to a school of rhetoric and studied under someone while in the Early Medieval period they were called monks or clerics and had gone to a monastic or church school. However quite often an early medieval cleric came from a family where a great grandfather might have been a Roman rhetor or high official.

We know that the old Roman roads remained in use for trade and that provisions for their repair are mentioned in the sources. We know that fairly complex trade networks remained with, for example, goods from India showing up in Tintagel.

OTOH, we think we know that the early 5th century northern and eastern "frontier zone" was virtually abandoned before being resettled. We know that while most urban centers remained inhabited their populations declined, sometimes precipitously - though there's a lot of evidence that rural populations at least remained stable and very possibly increased. We know that while complex and busy trade networks remained, they were neither as complex or as busy as they had been during the Roman period. We know the elite were nowhere near as elite as they had then but that the servile class was probably not quite AS servile as they had been during the empire (though they were becoming more servile). We know that the literate elite were not as skilled in literature as the Romans had been - at least judging by the quality of the Latin. We know that while there were administrative features and bureaucracy, these were neither as large, stable or complex as during the empire (not sure if that's good or bad).

When I say "know" above, I mean by that the current state of knowledge btw - new discoveries will continue. I also mean "know" in a broad, general sense. We can only attempt to quantify much of it - but this attempt at quantification has been and continues to be an extremely interesting process.

IMO it was definitely a transition. The interesting question, and one for which the answer is in a very interesting state of flux right now, is how radical was the transition - just how much continuity was there? How Roman were the Barbarians? How much was lost? How much was deliberately set aside? To me these are very interesting questions. Garp, I'm sorry you think that we can categorically dissect all this and that we have the answers. IMO the recent flush of literature and the vigorous academic discussions over issues such as internal/external causality, barbarian ethnogenesis and continuity/discontinuity shows that we are very far from having the answers and that, in fact, we've just recently begun to really study the issue in any sort of methodical, scholarly way. It's a very fun time to be following this.

Message edited by its author, Oct 15, 2009, 7:12am.

Well I don't have the strength to re-state my position here, but by way of a single example the sewage system in Rome before "the fall" was better than anything that came after it until the late 18th century in Europe. Literacy dropped precipitously. Science almost slipped off the map. Superstition (i.e. Christianity) dominated everything. All the arts went backward. If you toured the empire during Hadrian's time and then repeated this 500 years later you would think a nuclear war had hit. There is no law mandating that you call this a "fall." But I call it a fall.

Sure, you can call it a fall, or a transition, or even a continuation (as in peace being the continuation of war by other means). Much of this is a.) a matter of focus - as already indicated by feicht, and b.) a matter of semantics.

But you are sort of cheating by beginning with the Rome of Hadrian. Okay, but in that case much, maybe even most, of this "fall" was achieved by Romans themselves between Hadrian and Constantine.

I guess I remain amazed that it has become so important for historians to refute the fall and call it something else. Yet no one attempts this with the Bronze Age collapse.

No one says: well Egypt didn't fall, and civilization continued in Mesopotamia, and people still spoke Greek even if they forgot how to write it. The collapse of Myceanean and Hittite and other major centers of civilization from the 13th century were just a transition . . .

21
Well-done elucidation of the historiography.

24
How did the Bronze Age collapse get to be an analog of the decline of Rome? I don't see it.

It is the only other time in Western Civilization that the term "fall" has been used. 100 years ago both of these were considered falls, now Rome is a transition

>24:
I'm not going to comment on the Roman instance because I'm too close to it, but in regard to the Bronze Age there are plenty of people who discuss it in terms of transition, although probably not a lot of this has filtered through to the popular literature yet. It doesn't sell as well because it doesn't sound as dramatic.

Are you talking about governments? Populations? Cultures? Economic institutions? Governments collapse. They do this a lot, really. Populations may suffer, but they rarely disappear in the way that governments do. Cultures change, but that happens all the time. Economies grow and they contract. Sometimes lots of things happen around the same time - government collapses, population suffers, culture changes in ways that involve simplifications and reductions, the economy recedes. Whether that is a transition or not is, as BarkingMatt said, largely a matter of focus and semantics.

well again I am amazed at the reluctance of people to use the word "fall". At the geologic K-T boundry, most archosaurs and many other species went extinct subsequent to the collision with earth of a giant adteroid in the Yucatan Peninsula. Geologists do not call this event a transition. Of course life went on, but there are significant dividing lines.

I remain unconvinced that the fall of Rome was anything other than a catastrophic shift in western civilization. I don't see why we need to sugar coat this with other terms. Civilization was set back a full 1000 years with global implications. The modern world could have begun hundreds of years sooner if not for this collapse. Call it what you will but I call it a fall.

As you learn more about both Roman and medieval culture, you may come to feel differently.

The starting point was a ubiquitous perception of a fall, as in Gibbon's eponymous book. I think it's not so much an unwillingness to use that extreme term, but a reaction to its previous overuse and to an earlier accepted standard that lacked nuance. That reevaluation led to considerable scholarship, and now much more is known about that "transitional" period than was available when the term was widely accepted without question.

The modern world could have begun hundreds of years sooner if not for this collapse.

I really don't think there's any evidence for that. As I see it Rome was mainly interested in maintaining as much of the status quo as it could. They would never have developed the rest of Europe - even the parts within their realm - because that would have been against their interests. And why, for instance, improve technology if that only means making life easier for your slave-population? Nah, I don't buy it.

Plus: Byzantium, which did get another 1000 years, never showed any signs of developing towards modernity.

Pretty good point with Byzantium, Matt. I often sort of tongue-in-cheek use the 1453 date to remind people that the "Roman Empire" lasted at least until then (and hundreds of years more if you count the "Holy Roman Empire" of the German lands, which in many ways had just as accurate a claim in being "Roman"). But you're right, I think what we see in the Byzantines is the same sort of reluctance to adapt that the "real" Romans had, except that eventually their adopted religion tended to bar them from using slave labour (technically this was just slave Christian labour, but as more and more people were Christian, slaves became a bit harder to come by). Not that this was a hard and fast rule by any means, but it helps explain the diminishing power of the "Romans" in the face of other technological advances. Don't forget it was the Turks' use of gunpowder that really began to bite chunks out of the Byzantines' Anatolian heartland.

I think the Turks had asteroids, too.

you toured the empire during Hadrian's time and then repeated this 500 years later you would think a nuclear war had hit.

There's no factual basis for this statement. It might hold true if you said, "If you toured the city of Rome ..."

If you toured the rural countryside you would very likely marvel at the number of artisans, craft shops, local smithies, etc., sprinkled throughout all of Western Europe - a number and variety that didn't exist in rural areas during the empire. You'd be amazed at the number of mills and the waterwheel technology used to power all kinds of things. You'd see that the roads weren't as good except right around towns but you'd certainly be able to get around. You'd be stunned at the concept of a fair where thousands of people show up for a few days to buy and sell goods. You'd notice that in both Gaul and Germany the population was much greater than it had been during the days of the empire.

In modern economic terms, the giant Wal-Mart went out of business and small businesses reappeared. Rather than having everything shipped from giant distributorships across the country people made products locally and bought and sold goods within a relatively small geographic area with some exceptions for specialty products purchased by elites.

Garp is making a moral point. Cemanuel et al are making historiographical ones.

Interesting point with the Walmart comparison, Cemanuel. This is very likely what happened.The roads fell into disrepair and the monuments sprinkled here and there essentially became quarries. But that doesn't mean the people were rolling around in the mud and throwing cow dung at each other (okay maybe the kids...and village idiots). After all, they may not have cared about that triumphal arch down the street, but they were nevertheless using its stone to build other buildings.

All in all, I totally understand the argument for a "fall" due to the absence after about 350 CE of any unified political hegemony over western Europe. But like I say, all this would have meant for "the locals" is that now they were paying their taxes to someone else, and maybe serving in someone else's army. I think of it in similar terms to how the Native Americans might have felt in 1890 if the British, French and Spaniards all decided to come over and level Washington DC and divide the country up amongst themselves. Would the Natives have cared? Probably not. They might even be happy about it. It's not a perfect analogy obviously, but I think it makes a point about how "Roman" the provincials would ever have felt in the first place. Again, with the obvious exception of the cities, which tended to be populated by the elites, both Roman and "Roman".

Message edited by its author, Oct 15, 2009, 3:55pm.

The Fall:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8fS9_Cpu...

#30 -- Stellar you put it quite well and perhaps that is a better perspective.

As for the rest, I really don't want to argue about it. I will never be persuaded that precipitous decline is really transition and its ok.

As far as the develpment of the modern world goes, that was fueled by innovation and there was plenty of innovation in the ancient world (albeit slower) -- espercially prior to the Christian period --before the collapse. You don't see the likes of Archimedes again for another mellennium or so.

I don't think Byzantium can be a good example of anything because they spent the better part of a thousand years under a real or perceived siege.

For nearly a hundred years American historians proclaimed loudly that the Civil War wasn't really about slavery. Now only a handful of historians would make that claim, and all of them live in the former Confederate states. I expect that fifty years from now the concept of a definite fall will be restored to historiography. For now, I'll sit in my lonely cave and read. LOL

PS Just so there's no mistake, I am not especially an admirer of Rome or the Roman Empire, but I am admirer of the sum of ancient civilization which I believe to be vastly superior to the medievil one that succeeded it after "the transition."

"I will never be persuaded"
__________________________________________

DOGMATIC:
Stubbornly adhering to insufficiently proven beliefs; inflexible, rigid.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dogmatic

LOL

Message edited by its author, Oct 15, 2009, 8:10pm.

So it looks from a sensible person's standpoint that Garp's position is not dogmatic. That's good to know.

Robert

Hey Garp... I'm not sure what to say about the Civil War point. If you're talking about the southern point of view, you're correct. If northern, I disagree :-D I think it's obvious the north didn't care about slavery so much as keeping the Union together (well, when I say "north" I really mean "Lincoln", since I can't imagine the average dirtfarmer in CT really gave a shit). As for the south, I think the reverse was true (as you say). The livelihood of their aristocracy (and self-image of their free poor, for that matter) depended on slavery's continued existence as an institution. As I say, I think you're right that the southerners who deny this these days are the same ones saying they have no idea why anyone associates the Confederate flag with racism...

On both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, for the better part of a century we were taught that slavery was just a sideline issue, that the war was about states rights and northern industrialism vs. southern agrarian economies. As it turns out, these were actually the side issues. The south provoked the war based upon the right not only to preserve slavery as an institution (which was really not threatened) but primarily to reinforce the right to take slave property anywhere, especially to the newly acquired territories that were the spoils of the Mexican War. After the Civil War, southern leaders wrote huge, unreadable magisterial histories that omitted all the slave rhetoric they themselves utilized in the days leading to the war.

RE: dogmatic (WOOF-WOOF) I knew right after I wrote "never be persuaded" I should have qualified it but dinner was ready, the beer was cold, my dogmatic ate my notes, etc. Seriously, what I meant to say is that I would never be persuaded by the current historiographic arguments. Certainly evidence to the contrary -- like the discovery of some major scientific advance in the medieval period (between Archimedes & optics, for instance) that didn't involve the plow -- could potentially change my mind.

I don't see it as a decline because the Romans were sort of stagnant. They had water and wind power knowledge, but never used it to do anything. It took a different mindset to use that power. Romans didn't invent universities either. Again, it took a different mindset.

I'm afraid I'm all for the 12th Century Renaissance and the revitalizations that led up to it.

That's interesting, Garp. I always thought the modern diminishing of the importance of slavery as an issue had more to do with reaction against the dogma (there's that word again) that we ripped our country in half over the "noble pursuit" of ending slavery. Hence the Simpsons episode where Apu is taking his citizenship test and gives this long drawn out answer to the question "What caused the Civil War", mentioning economic concerns, states rights, etc, and the test giver interrupts him mid-sentence saying "Just say slavery."

:-D

Well of course it wasn't just slavery & I didn't mean to imply that. But if you read the literature of the 1850's and the other antebellum documentation you come away firmly convinced that slavery -- as a protected constitutional right, privilage and in a way duty -- was the central underlying issue that other topics simply wrapped their way around. The Republicans in Lincoln were not abolishinists, but they were free soil and to the Southern aristocracy that was the same thing.

I highly recommend Stampp's America in 1857 for just one thin perspective on the country leading up to the conflict.

It is interesting that a smal slice of slave-owning elite convinced the larger population of poor white dirt farmers that slavery was their god-given right & the damn Yankees would take this away from them if they didn't rise up. It was ludicrous, but perhaps no more ludicrous than the current right-wing frightening the population with the demon Obama come to steal their freedoms.

Slavery is the both the "simple" answer to the war's causes as well as a component of the multiple complex forces that raged behind the scenes. But i think most modern historians of the war would agree that if you plucjed slavery out of the picture there would be no possibility of armed conflict or seccession, regardless of how important issues of states rights and agrarian republic's vs northern industrialism, etc.

You have to recall that churches in the south split from northern branches and actually preached on Sunday that slavery was a good thing given from god for the betterment of both blacks and whites. Also despite freedom of the press any Northern journal that countered this view could not be mailed in the south. The whole story of the war and the centrality of slavery is an amazing tale.

Message edited by its author, Oct 16, 2009, 8:46am.

I'd entirely agree with Garp's comments on this. Stampp's book is a great read on the topic, and the two volumes of Freehling's The Road to Disunion are also very good.

Another point about it is that there's a difference between motivations and causes. I don't think most of the white participants in the American Civil War (on either side) were personally motivated to risk their lives over slavery, but even so, through a complex chain of events, the situation where they found themselves getting shot by each other in a war was largely brought into being by a political rift over slavery.

E59F -- well said. The vast majority of people on both sides were racist. Very, very few people were abolitionists at he start of the war. Many Northerners actually resented the slavery issue and fought to preserve the union only.

I will have to look into the Freehling books.

I haven't studied the American Civil War and won't comment on it except to say that in contrast, the recent revision of opinion of post-Roman society hasn't come from an adjustment of dogma but from historical discovery.

Primarily these have been archaeological finds indicating that the society of the successor states, while it generally wasn't on the level of Roman society, remained complex, integrated with other parts of the world and under the control of an organized, hierarchical government. This has particularly been true of the rural areas which didn't become the utter cultural and societal backwater that historians from Gibbon to Bury asserted they were.

Supplementing the archaeology has been additional texts - there are lots of untranslated Early Medieval documents laying around. For decades everyone wanted to translate classical documents or High and Late Medieval ones - there's a lot of catching up to do.

My point is a simple one. The reason this opinion has changed isn't due to dogma. It's due to evidence. That appears to be in contrast to opinions about the American Civil War.

cemanuel,
I like your insisitence.
(and you have a nice collection of books on late antiquity/early medieval)

Evidence doesn't seem to carry the day. Those with a fetish for antiquity will continue to prefer the ancients. Historiography does "progress"--but there is a certain lag time before new understandings are accepted.

Well I suppose part of it is emotional. If you asked me if I wanted to be an elite in Rome in 117 CE or 517 CE I would certainly picked the former!

Well that goes without saying. But it still kind of fits in with my theory :-D

Actually in 517 Theodoric was still in power so in the actual city itself you might not have noticed much difference. The city was smaller but probably still had over 100,000 and possibly as much as a quarter-million. There were still games, all kinds of festivals, etc. Post-Justinian that obviously changed.

Now if you were outside of Italy, if you wanted to be an elite in 517 you carried a sword, not a book - unless you were a member of the religious elite.

A great "what if" question (to me anyway) runs like this: What if, after Amalasuntha died, Justinian had tried a slow, gradual re-incorporation of Western Europe instead of war? The Goths controlled Italy and a good chunk of territory around it and the Visigoths amounted to a subject kingdom. In essence, they had all of the Western Empire at its height except N Gaul and Britain.

But no - Justinian wanted to bash in heads.

Interesting, cemanuel ....

I suppose it's inevitable that impatient sorts claw their way to the top more quickly than reasonable people can climb.

Interesting counterfactual scenario. You could even posit that Justinian in effect was THE final nail in the Roman coffin. Sure the Turks weren't in charge of Constantinople until 1453, but the damage done to the Empire's coffers by Justinian's misguided reconquest campaigns was enormous. People became overtaxed, and disenchanted that their money was going to conquering foreign lands they couldn't find on a map rather than things that would have helped them at home (sound familiar?). I was just reading something from the 500s where people were saying Constantinople basically stopped importing grain for a time because they couldn't afford it.

Message edited by its author, Oct 17, 2009, 11:14am.

Yeah - this image shows how large the Gothic kingdom was: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

Obviously that's a bit simplistic but they dominated the Visigoths and controlled a region of Southern France including Arles and Marseilles as well as a good chunk of the Balkans. Plus Theodoric deliberately retained many Roman institutions, including administrative ones. This could have possibly evolved into a true Romano-Germanic successor state - or been re-incorporated into the Eastern Empire without the devastation Justinian brought. Instead Justinian brought us the Lombards.

Yup. I'm currently studying the Byzantines and I find it baffling that Justinian would have wanted to upset the applecart, as it were. The majority of the "barbarian" kingdoms in former Roman lands wanted so much to consider themselves Roman, they essentially carried on this fiction that the empire in the west still existed, only that they were in charge of parts now instead. Many even paid taxes to Constantinople as if they were true constituents of the emperor.

Feicht #55

Shikari would be a better person to comment on this if he's reading this thread but the decline and re-making of the Eastern Empire is a very interesting topic. As early as the Persian War of 502-506 the residents of the region around Edessa were upset that they had to supply bread for some 17,000 Roman soldiers billeted there, rather than receiving it from Egypt as was customary.

It's tough to say how much impact the Justinian treasury drain had on the inability to fight off the Muslim conquest. Heraclius was able to defeat the Persians nearly a century later and it appears that poor generalship and a lack of foresight, not dollars, paved the way for the Muslim victories. That was the true disaster - losing N Africa and Egypt devasted their resources.

After that it's only habit that kept the East being called an empire. But they re-made themselves, more than once, and were certainly a force to be reckoned with. The East showed surprising resilience from the 7th century on - but its resemblance to the 4th-6th centuries wasn't much stronger than the resemblance between the Franks and the Western Empire. They had become very medieval - the pronoia system had a lot of similarities with Western Fiefs.

Message edited by its author, Oct 17, 2009, 12:07pm.

LOL! Threlew (#49)

My prof, a medievalist, never did come to understand my love of the barbarians. She'd shake her head in disgust when we got into the bloody inter-family politics of the Franks. (she was kinda "girlie" ;)

Cemanuel, nice map. (I've come to really love a good map)

I think the chief indication of radical change comes from the laws. The crimes that are listed in Lombard and Burgundian codes are nothing if not awe inspiringly different from classic Roman law.

Thou shalt not tie bundles of noisy things (forget the actual term) to a horse's tale.

Thou shalt not cut a woman's hair in her own garden. ((I thought this was particularly unclear. Was this against her will? With her permission. wth?))

Message edited by its author, Oct 17, 2009, 4:54pm.

Recent scholarship seems to suggest disease -- by way of the plague -- as the most significant cause of "the fall/the transition." What is interesting about this is that it has been posited that the vast trading networks of the day brought the plague on a two-way street to Han China and was responsible its "the fall/the transition." As with the Bronze Age generalized collapse, it is likely that there were multiple causes but something like disease (or ecological disaster)could have played a decisive role. We know that Rome didn't fall to a barbarian leaping over the wall with a torch in one hand and a sword in the other, but something happanned, and whether you want to call it a fall or a transition it was impactful and it does connotate some kind of diving line for historical studies.

Rome didn't fall to disease either. The plague showed up in 541. Western Europe was well past Rome by then.

It has been proposed as having a big impact in the Eastern Empire - I have Little's Plague and the End of Antiquity but haven't read it yet. Sarris in Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian believes the number one problem was overcentralization and the accumulation of too much wealth in too few hands who paid too little in taxes. He thinks the Plague had an impact, but wasn't the major cause of Justinian running out of money.

Message edited by its author, Oct 17, 2009, 6:09pm.

To a certain extent I'm not sure it matters what was REALLY the cause of Justinian's (effective) bankruptcy. It seems like the people thought it was because of the ill-omened reconquest attempts, which may make all the difference.

referring to the Plague of Justinian. I was referring to a series of plagues that began in the mid-to-late second century AD. David Christian discusses these here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=VUqZl7R...

And why would you say disease might be the most significant cause of the end of the Western Empire?

I have never seen that proposed as a causal factor.

Message edited by its author, Oct 17, 2009, 8:10pm.

The Big History methodology almost has to rely on something like "plague" or "ecological catastrophe," otherwise it's just not Big, is it? The problem with that approach is that all Falls look alike.

#67 - Yeah - I was figuring there was evidence of some kind - mass graves showing evidence of disease, abandonment and fleeing of cities, even some textual source I'm not aware of.

The Roman pagans sure spent enough time saying that the Barbarian invasions were because Rome had abandoned her Gods. If there was massive disease you'd think they might have mentioned it. McNeill kind of throws it out there in Plagues and Peoples but doesn't provide any real evidence - plus that was written in 1977 so it sure can't be called recent scholarship. I think disease has pretty much been put on the same shelf as lead poisoning.

Christian's Big History is not new scholarship, research or evidence. He's just pulling back and looking at things from far, far away.

>68:
I presume you're familiar with the usual primary sources on the epidemics under Marcus Aurelius and Decius and consider them unsatisfactory? Did you read the exchange in Journal of Roman Archaeology several years ago between Scheidel and Bagnall, or the earlier article by Duncan-Jones?

Message edited by its author, Oct 17, 2009, 9:46pm.

Somehow my earlier post got cut off but I meant to say that I was not talking about Justinian's Plague but a series of other plagues starting mid 2nd century which traveled on the trade corridor as far as China.

Trelaw, with all due respect I do not believe you understand what Big History is all about. Big History observes facts from a larger perspective but it does not "rely upon" anything. Ecological disaster, for instance, turns out to be the prima facie cause for multiple collapses across the globe, based upon current scholarship. That is not a theory looking for substance, simply an interpretation that is based upon what we do know and extrapolated out to a greater geographic mural.

Malthusian cycles in pre-industrial societies often saw innovation spawn population growth only to later see resources fall short to support that growth. This makes a society fragile, tenuous, and susceptible to catastrophe when climate conditions change for the worse for an extended period, land is over-farmed, fauna hunted to extinction or critical fauna (such as trees on Easter Island) are decimated.

We can't determine what specifically led to the fall of Rome -- indeed in this thread and elsewhere we cannot even agree there was a fall -- but at the very least we can point to decline and we can ask what were the factors. Gibbon blames Christianity. I have to say that makes a lot of sense based upon my views of Christianity but there is no real evidence to support this. Whether the gods were classical, cultic or Christian, they all seemed in fine working order.

So was it plague or population or too many wars or what? We can't say for sure. What Big History can tell us, which may have nothing to do with this, is that factors which affected Rome may also have affected China, and the decline of Rome and Han China at similar periods may very well not coincidental.

Plague certainly shouldn't be dismissed. Disease played an important part in the downfall of Indian nations in America. Microorganisms are powerful vendors of change.

I'm trying to remember where I read that the first time Europeans enjoyed a livable wage was after the Great Plague. Does that ring a bell with anybody?

#70 There have been plenty of epidemics. We're talking about something on such a scale during the 5th century to cause the collapse of the Empire.

How is there causality for something happening in the 2nd century to cause a societal collapse in the 5th?

I guess you could make a case for cascading depopulation. This would be something which might not get a ton of mention if it was restricted largely to the countryside. The counterpoint would be that you'd imagine it would have hit the cities too, so who knows. But who knows? It seems like a long time, but who knows the long term effects on population destabilization. It's got to be a lot easier to move into an area and ostensibly take over if there aren't as many people living there anymore.

>73:
I don't believe disease is "the answer" either, but surely the relevance of second- and third-century demography to the spatial economic structures of the fourth and fifth centuries should be apparent? (Even though it doesn't explain the spatial disparities.)

I must say that I'm convinced there was a fall. A fall is a relative thing, but the collapse of the tax system and therefore of the bureaucracy and civic organization, and the complete transformation of the economic systems and power structures in the West (at least outside Italy) which I seem to remember Chris Wickham clearly demonstrating sounds to me like a disasterous fall, by which I mean a civilizational collapse. And Brian Ward-Perkins, whose The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization I think cemanuel is a bit too dismissive about, demonstrates clearly the utter economic and technological collapse in parts of the empire (Britain forgot the use of the potter's wheel, for goodness sake!). The continuation of East Rome doesn't negate the fall of West Rome, and nor do the many continuities beyond Late Antiquity.

Message edited by its author, Oct 18, 2009, 8:46am.

Collapse of the western Roman Empire (the end of bureaucratic and administrative organization that enabled economic and juridical unity) looks more like regional and not civilizational collapse.

#76,

Shikari, I don't know if Britain is good example when discussing the demise of the Roman Empire, being that it was always on the fringe.

But I do agree that probably one of the best approaches to understanding this question (fall/transition) is economics. Changes in currency arise from some cause. I always thought, for example, that it was perfectly clear that before and during Charlemagne's reign that there was massive devaluation in the price of goods. Many historians have written this off as an inability to make proper coinage; but the use of silver instead of gold says something about an economic downturn.

As for 'technological' collapse, I would like to hear more. It's not something I've ever focused on, so perhaps they were doing more than was evident to the casual reader.

#76 I'm dismissive of Ward-Perkins due to a selective use of sources, including archaeological, in using only ones which support his theory and ignoring those that don't. At one point in time I only criticized him for invoking emotive hyperbole (you can see my review on LT for that) but then I found out a bit more about the archaeology. In fact, since you've evidently read Wickham and he directly contradicts Ward-Perkins' conclusions in many places I'm curious how you reconcile this?

I'm not going to get into Britain since I think the evidence indicates it's one of the areas that DID become pretty much a backwater, along with some others such as coastal Spain and post-Justinian Italy. What I've always been opposed to is overgeneralizing for all of Western Europe based on a single region. Areas of W. Europe were devastated with a corresponding decline in what we'd call civilization. Other areas, such as Gaul, not only didn't decline but may actually have improved standards of living in the immediate post-Roman period. Generalizing what may have happened over all of Western Europe, which comprised numerous successor kingdoms with varying levels of administrative, social, economic and cultural continuity and complexity is flatly wrong IMO - and this is exactly what Ward-Perkins does.

#75 - There is no "THE" answer anyway - I think we both understand this. But pre-modern societies suffer plagues. Are you saying you think that Rome was so fragile that it was incapable of recovering from a 2nd century plague? A century after the Black Death European economies had recovered enough to invest the resources needed to begin The Age of Exploration. The same plague that hit the Eastern Empire impacted the West in the 6th and 7th centuries (though it's hard to get a handle on the true impact) and by the 8th century the Carolingians were able to put together the resources to take over most of Western Europe in addition to funding a fairly vigorous (not on Roman scale certainly) building program.

If I wanted to discuss the reasons for flawed 4th/5th century Western Roman Economic systems I'd look at the following discussion points (not in order - I'd have a hard time ordering them): a) Diocletian; b) Civil Wars; c) The 395 Division of the Empire; before I'd want to point to plague, which was endemic to the pre-modern world - at least without someone going into far greater detail about exactly why the most powerful society and economy in the Western World was incapable of recovering from it 200 years later.

PS - this is a good thread.

Message edited by its author, Oct 18, 2009, 10:34am.

71
I agree that Big History is prima facie, but History “at first glance” is not very satisfying for me. If by “current scholarship” you mean “written recently,” then ok (i.e. Christian, Diamond), but Big History as methodology is not new. William McNeill Plagues and People (1977), Alfred Crosby Ecological Imperialism (1986), Clive Gamble Timewalkers (1993), I.G. Simmons Changing the Face of the Earth (1989), Vaclav Smil Energy in World History (1994), and Fred Spier The Structure of Big History (1996) have trod there previously.

>80
There are people who are more interested in a specific time and place, and others who gravitate to broad general patterns. I'm not sure I understand what relevance "Big History as methodology is not new" has. Is that meant as some sort of dismissal or as confirmation of an established historiographical approach?

From what I can see, Big History is an established methodology, but that approach has limited explanatory power if we look too closely at particular cases. Whether one prefers that approach over another is a historiographical question.

I'd argue that in order to understand historic events it is necessary to immerse oneself in all of the fine detail in the big picture. The problem is that we impose modern prejudices that distort and conceal events and detail from the past. We give greater weight to written records, we pay more attention to our 'ancestor' cultures than to others and we have trouble deciphering the motives of individuals in the past. In respect of this last point we mistakenly assume folk in 'older times' were less sophisticated and less politically aware than we are now.

It seems to me that there are - in addition to all of the other factors mentioned here - two key issues that haven't been sufficiently canvassed. The first is that folk seldom 'get on the move' unless something drives them out of their ancestral land. The lure of plunder or economic opportunity might impel a few individuals, but the bulk of folk have a strong attachment to 'their land' and are reluctant to leave it. The US it could be argued wouldn't have been settled unless folk in Europe had been suffering religious persecution and economic disadvantage. We focus on the locale of Rome when we talk about the 'fall' of the Western Roman Empire, but perhaps pay insufficient attention to Northern and Eastern Europe in the same era.

The Second issue relates to Constantine's decision to 'decamp' to Byzantium. One might argue that this fatally weakened the Western Roman Empire. It's usually passed of as a personal whim of Constantine, perhaps reflecting his mother's eastern origins. Some argue that he wanted to set up a Capital a long way from the politics of the Roman Senate (and a strongly anti-Christian lobby in Rome). I'd argue that there was a strong economic consideration in the decision, that Anatolia and the East were more promising areas of tax income. It has been suggested that 'grants' of land to Roman families had alienated large chunks of taxable land, and hence eroded tax income. It is also my contention that the location of Byzantium was primarily chosen for it's position on the trade routes rather than its military significance. I'm not sure if we have enough information on tax revenues in Constantine's time to test this argument.

yvonne -- very well articulated points of view. I don't know enough about Roman history to discuss the second point in fine detail, but the first point is brilliantly stated. Some individuals or small groups may always be off in search of adventure, exploration, and opportunity, but mass movements of peoples typically occur because of environmental stress, lack of resources, climate change, political oppression, economic exploitation -- often a combination of factors so complex and intertwined that it is difficult to look back to these ancient times and identify the true root causes with any kind of clarity.

I think its interersting that Augustus can have an army of 40 odd legions under his command AFTER the serious blood letting of the civil wars, yet the later roman empire couldnt raise an army without much use of barbarian mercenaries. Did the plagues depopulate the empire, did christianity make a military life less appealing, did Caracall's giving of the roman citiizenship to everyone fatally weaken the empire by removing one reason why non-citizens WITHIN the empire joined up? I have to say i am a believer in a fall of civilsation, a fall that maybe wasnt sudden in the 5th and 6th centuries but did led to a huge loss in the knowledge and liuterature of the ancient world by the start of the medieval period c 7-800AD. I have read both wickham and ward-perkins and dont find them to be too far apart. wickham looks at the successful parts, Francia, where the political structures were strong, but ward-perkins does emphasise the loss in skills and in trading routes. so what if some small item from india was found at tintagel? what about the huge trading webs criss crossing the mediterranean world which were progressively lost from the time of the vandals onwards?

#85 Ward-Perkins is going to be front-and-center in an NEH summer seminar focusing on the causes of the end of Rome next summer. He's being called a "Neo-Gibbonian" for that project. I don't think he's going to come off too well. Unfortunate and I don't see the point of the label but writing something that's beginning to be considered ridiculous tends to open one to ridicule. That's what happens when you engage in selective use of sources and go into hysterical rants.

I'd be interested in knowing what you consider to be the huge loss in knowledge and literature evident by the 8th century. Things were pretty stagnant in those areas but you could say that for any period between around 100 to 1200 AD.

As for the trade routes - they've been in use continuously from the Phoenicians to today and there's never been a cessation. Obviously, trade was reduced during the Medieval period from the days of the Empire when the entire region was under one rule but the Mediterranean was still pretty active. Not that a vigorous slave trade is particularly appealing but it's still trade.

Message edited by its author, Nov 5, 2009, 8:36pm.

I never heard of Ward-Perkins but I can't understand how anyone can seriously look at the Roman West in the period circa 300 BCE to 300 CE for instance and not see a huge and amazing and outrageous difference that translates into utter decline 500 years later in 800 CE. Deny all you like, but this was a very different and most inferior world by almost any measure. We can play Socrates of course and go back and forth and ask "what do you mean by decline" by this seems to me like nothing but semantics.

I can cite things like art, architecture, literature, science and sewage systems and you can say things like "are these really important indicators of civilization" and I would say emphatically: YES!!!!

Message edited by its author, Nov 5, 2009, 8:47pm.

What looks to some like mere semantics is actually the pursuit of precision and more complete understanding in historical studies. To insist that we already know all that we need to know is a mark of the fundamentalist mindset. Some people will always be uncomfortable when challenged by new interpretations of the past. When we stop asking questions, we stop learning.

The end of Roman administration and hegemony in western Europe should not be confused with “the collapse of civilization.” Something was surely lost: why not ask what, how, and when? These are fascinating and complex questions, and historians are still trying to answer them.

Also, one cannot simultaneously claim that western civilization has roots in the ancient past AND that the end of the Roman Empire in the west was utter and complete. One is an argument for continuity, the other is an argument for rupture.

I can cite things like art, architecture, literature, science and sewage systems and you can say things like "are these really important indicators of civilization" and I would say emphatically: YES!!!!

You can't cite any of those things completely. Not and be accurate.

I'm not going to argue that the standard of living was equivalent - especially for the elites. Or that societal or exchange systems were nearly as complex. They absolutely weren't and the level of wealth available throughout society was much less, though the lowest classes were likely less low.

However every statement in the line I quoted fails. Art? They had it. They didn't make monuments (not massive ones anyway), they put mosaics on walls, traded decorative metalwork and produced illustrated manuscripts.

Architecture? Check out Charlemagne's Palace Complex at Aachen. The vaulted ceiling was an early medieval discovery as far as we know. Aachen was complete with marble walls, floors, bronze doors and Roman-style baths. Had sewers too. The medievals didn't have the money for the massive buildings the Romans did but it's not like they couldn't build.

Literature? Certainly. Different style and purpose though the folks Charlemagne brought into his Palace School and complex wrote some pretty varied works including some apparently influenced by Homer, Virgil, Ovid and Horace. The last of the good Roman poets IMO were from the 2nd century - I'd put Theodulf, Walafrid or Alcuin against anyone who came later.

Science? Neither culture had much of what we'd consider science. But it's not like the medievals forgot everything either. You can look at Isidore or Alcuin to see that. Neither did much in the way of new discoveries in learning - in the early medieval period the emphasis was on understanding the Church fathers or writing commentaries on the Bible while in the Roman period advanced training as a Rhetor meant you were to gain as much understanding of long-dead authors as possible, with "new" thinking discouraged.

Sewage? Not on a city-wide basis because the cities weren't that big but the elites didn't like living in that stuff any more than the Roman elites did and while neither understood gravity in a technical sense they both knew what direction stuff flowed and that water would flush it out. Plenty of sewers in larger buildings.

There were certainly declines but these were not huge, nor outrageous nor amazing. Neither did the ending of what had become a pretty stagnant culture result in an utter decline or an inferior world. Different but a vibrant society that increased literary output, fostered exchange networks and, by the Carolingian period, favored poetic dialogue as a form of argument.

Of course then things dropped off again before picking back up, dropping back off, picking back up ...

79: But pre-modern societies suffer plagues. Are you saying you think that Rome was so fragile that it was incapable of recovering from a 2nd century plague?

Well, if you take the western provinces, the southern provinces (Africa from eastern Algeria to Cyrenaica plus Sicily), and the eastern provinces separately, it looks like the west suffered severe demographic decline and reduction of trade between 150 and 300, while the south grew and the east stagnated at best during the same period. After 300, the east grew rapidly, while the south and west did not. So clearly, the fact that in 400 there was a tax base to support a strong army in the east but not in the west is very directly related to the demographic and economic collapse of 150 to 300. Most places in the western provinces didn't reach the population level of the mid-second century again until the thirteenth century.

Edited to fix sloppy wording.

Message edited by its author, Nov 6, 2009, 6:09am.

I really love reading history books.

> 91: Then you've come to the right place. Welcome to LT.

> 87: I think we're talking about this Ward-Perkins: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Ward-... (personally I'm more familiar with his father http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bryan_... but since he's been dead for nearly three decades...).

In many ways you're right of course. There were huge differences in life stile between Rome of c. 150 CE and "barbarian" Europe of c. 600 CE - especially for the elite. But you're pushing the "fall" well back into the Roman period itself.

If you would care to examine late Roman art and architecture - especially that from the provinces - and judge it by the norms put forward by "classical" Greco-Roman culture, you would probably be largely unimpressed as well. This doesn't mean, however, that people were by definition shoddy workmen or less ingenious.

The point being, that late Roman very gradually gave way to medieval and that the demise of the western empire isn't as much of a watershed moment as it was thought of by earlier generations.

(edited to correct faulty link)

Message edited by its author, Nov 6, 2009, 8:10am.

RE #88 " To insist that we already know all that we need to know is a mark of the fundamentalist mindset. Some people will always be uncomfortable when challenged by new interpretations of the past. When we stop asking questions, we stop learning."

I don't think anyone, especially me, ever stated or implied this.

"The end of Roman administration and hegemony in western Europe should not be confused with “the collapse of civilization.” Something was surely lost: why not ask what, how, and when? These are fascinating and complex questions, and historians are still trying to answer them."

I think that's what we are doing.

RE#89 - These are good points you make but I simply remain unconvinced. I am no admirer of the Romans, but like them or not to say that a great, literate civilization did not devolve into something far lesser seems like a kind of denial. Of course it wasn't the end of civilization, but I would argue that the one that preceded the medievil one was far superior and on a much higher plane. Charlemagne couldn't even write for Chrissakes ..

Charlemagne couldn't even write for Chrissakes ..

And neither could about 80% of Roman population at the time of Augustus - or so I've been lead to believe.

94
"I don't think anyone, especially me, ever stated or implied this."
____________________________________________

In #87 above, you say that when we ask 'what do you mean by decline?' were are engaging in semantics. I took that to mean that you don’t like questions that challenge your preconceptions. Further above, you are repeatedly “amazed” that historians have revised the story of “The Fall of Rome,” but that’s what historians do.:-)

#94 Trelew -- I follow you. But I do think the critical issue here is how do we define "decline" and that is where I see us going in circles ... I do expect historians to constantly revise their interpretations of the past based upon evidence and analysis, I'm just not sure the current histriography has it any more correct than the diametrically opposed Gibbon point of view.

#95 Matt -- there is a vast difference between illiteracy in the population (which was the norm in much of the pre-modern world and after) and the inability of the guys in charge to make their letters.

> 97 : Agreed, certainly. And I'm sure Augustus would have been both amazed and appalled at his fellow emperor ;-)

I can think of more recent leaders who had a difficult time "making their letters." And saying them.
So, are we still declining? ;-

99: Alas, that's a distinct possibility.

(Or rather, I often have the feeling we're declining again.)

Message edited by its author, Nov 6, 2009, 10:57am.

There was the guy with Reader's Digest in his bathroom, and the one who couldn't put together a sentence without embarrassing an entire nation. Or half of it.

>Charlemagne's illiteracy

If we look a few centuries before Charlemagne, Chilperic (you know, the guy that Gregorius of Tours hated and painted as a generally awful guy) apparently wrote poetry and wanted to reform the Frankish alphabet. From that perspective, he seems to have been a fair degree more culturally inclined than your average Roman emperor. It's evident that the greatest point in Western civilization came in the 6th century, and that it's been a rather steady decline since;-)

Yup - Chilperic (the 2nd, not Clovis' Daddy) represents the pinnacle of Human evolution! ;)

I remember reading Einhard the first time and wondering, "If he could read, how hard would it be to learn to write?" Then you start thinking about the fine motor functions and how early we teach kids to write here - and before they write they color. Anyway, Charlemagne was raised with a sword in his hand, not a wax tablet. Amalsuintha (sp?) - Theodoric's widow - got in all kinds of trouble when she wanted to raise T's grandson in "The Roman Way." The Goths insisted on him growing up as a Warrior, and they got their way.

Though while most Emperors were likely taught how to write I wonder how many actually did - most used scribes. Marcus Aurelius is likely an exception but how many others?

BTW - I don't have a problem with the "Decline" part of the end of Rome discussion myself. By most standards by which we define society, things did decline. However I do consider it extremely poor form to use the four-letter F-word in public. To me that takes things too far and ignores just how much of Roman society survived.

OK I agree never to use the F-word ... at least "that" F-word ...

When I think of Einhard I can't help thinking how cruel it was to call him "Einhard the Stammerer" and then I immediately start thinking about the dungeon guards in Monty Python's "Life of Brian" discussing Euclid out of earshot of the soldiers and I just fall ... err, I mean ... decline apart all over myself ... LOL

Anyway I love you guys even as I agree to disagree with some of the interpretation ... I mean imagine how few people are out there (who are instead following the story of Octomom, Jon & Kate and Dancing with the Stars) actually having a spirited discussion about Rome (in decline or ascendancy) at all. For that I salute the whole board!

#90 I can attribute a population stagnation in the 3rd century much more simply than talking about plague by talking about Civil Wars, Bagaudae, having an extra empire in Gaul, etc.

However, why do you say the West couldn't field a strong army in 400? Stilicho was able to defeat Radagaisus in 406 by mobilizing an army of 15,000. It's impossible to say if he would have taken care of the Vandals, Burgundians and Suevi but if he hadn't been executed he might have.

The 420 Notitia Dignitatum shows both the strength and weakness of the West. The Western Army had 181 regiments, actually larger than it had been in 395. So the West obviously had the means to raise revenue to pay them. But nearly half were entirely new units - not mentioned in 395. So they had been devastated. However I don't buy into the idea that they didn't have the cash to raise large armies - not until after about 440. The division of the Empire and loss of Illyricum in 395 absolutely didn't help - and neither did Constantine focusing everything East 60 years earlier - but the big blow they couldn't recover from was losing North Africa to the Vandals.

Once that was gone they'd lost their breadbasket and a huge chunk of their revenues. It's from that point forward where, outside of Italy itself, Western Armies were primarily made up of whatever Federates could be recruited, then sent home - the era of a huge standing army was gone.

Anyway, to go back to the original point, the 2nd century plague wasn't one that kept reappearing like the 6th-8th century plague did. And up to at least 420 there's a lot of evidence that the West could still fund a large standing army. Rome remained a massive urban center, even after Constantine moved everything East. I remain unconvinced, without someone pointing out evidentiary causation - some sort of trail we can follow - that a 2nd century plague left Rome defenseless in the 5th.

Though I should warn you - even if you point it out I won't be convinced until I've read the book (if the argument is persuasive).

Message edited by its author, Nov 6, 2009, 7:00pm.

Actually it was Notker (Notkar?) who was called "The Stammerer."

And I love Terry Jones. In a lot of ways, Monty Python and the Holy Grail may just be the most factual movie about the Middle Ages in the last 30 years. Yeah - he pokes fun at everything, but everything he pokes fun at has some basis in fact. It can't be as bad as Kingdom of Heaven or Braveheart.

And for my warm fuzzy moment - hopefully nobody thinks I'm mad or anything. I like to argue. My GF can't get over that, "How can you argue when you're not mad?" I think arguing is a lot of fun - as long as we argue about what's being said, not the person saying it. I prefer to call it spirited debate anyway. And I always learn something.

cemanuel -- yes, yes & yes!

Sorry on the Einhard & Notker slip ...

Re The Holy Grail -- I love the Python stuff -- I recently bartered with a client to obtain a dozen 12" Holy Grail & Life of Brian action figures, new and in display boxes. When I came home with them my wife once again called me "The Fifty Year Old Virgin", but these kind of collectibles are irresistable (as well as valuable for re-sale). The Black Knight & the Bring out Your Dead Guy are especially wonderful to own:

http://www.bigkidcollectables.com/servle...

EDIT:

also

http://www.toymania.com/columns/spotligh...

http://www.toymania.com/columns/spotligh...

HA HA Gotta love those Python boyz

Message edited by its author, Nov 6, 2009, 9:31pm.

Garp83: Charlemagne couldn't even write for Chrissakes ..

BarkingMatt: And neither could about 80% of Roman population at the time of Augustus - or so I've been lead to believe.

The differences are twofold. First, in the age of Augustus right up to the fifth century the élite were fully literate. OK, there might be some exceptions - perhaps some successful freedmen like Petronius' Trimalchio, but generally élite education was thorough. Later this seems to fall off - we rather tend to take the huge investment we make in education for granted, but that's what it is, a huge investment, and when the edifice begins to crumble, the educated sub-élite from whom the γραμματικοι came are likely to be the first to be unable to continue. I'm not a historian of the West, however, and the Eastern schools of rhetoric continued without a pause right up to the Persian invasions in the reign of Phocias and no doubt continued in Constantinople, Athens and Africa.

Second I must ask what literacy for Charlemagne meant. What did he speak? Frankish or proto-French? Not Classical Latin, I'm sure: illiteracy had become more than an inability to write the spoken language (or its literary form) but an inability to use a learned dialect that had become significantly distinct from the spoken but which had continued as the language of educated discourse throughout Late Antiquity, and given the emphasis on performance in Antique literate culture, this was doubtless still a spoken dialect too, classical Latin and proto-Romance probably being in a diglossia. (I must warn you again that I know much more about the Greek situation than the Latin, though). Literacy, as throughout the early Middle Ages in Romance-speaking countries, was in what had become an alien dialect. Outside the Romance-speaking region, the investment was even more marked, though there writing in the vernacular was at least an option.

Charlemagne read and spoke Latin and could read and understand, but did not speak, Greek. He brought a mathematician in from Italy to his Palace school as well as grammarians. He studied rhetoric, math, dialectic and astronomy.

His General Admonition of 789 established schools in Churches which appeared to be open to anybody who wanted to attend (boys anyway). The Carolingians also created several scripts, including Carolingian minuscule which forms the basis for modern typesetting - interestingly when it was rediscovered in the 15th and 16th centuries and adopted for early printing presses it was assumed to be from the early Empire because, of course, nobody in the Middle Ages could have been smart enough to have anything to do with it.

A great deal of the classical literature that survives to this day is because the Carolingians engaged in a massive translation/copying effort. There are more than 3 times as many Latin manuscripts dating from the 9th century alone as from all years prior to 800 (over 7,000 compared with 2,000). Ammianus' Histories and Tacitus' Germania survive to this day because of a single 9th century copy found preserved in Carolingian libraries.

I could go on including talking about debates between, frex, Alcuin and Theodulf that were carried on by each author writing poetry and dialogues, and then reading them at the Aachen Palace (they weren't the only ones involved in this - there's a LOT of Carolingian poetry), or admonitions by Charlemagne related to the quality of written works because Latin had become of such poor quality under the Merovingians. But I have to get to work.

EDIT: - Several spelling errors in this but I don't have time to fix 'em - sorry.

EDIT II: I did, however have time to change C from studying Astrology to Astronomy (sort of a key difference, especially back then)

Message edited by its author, Nov 9, 2009, 8:51am.

Carolingian minuscule which forms the basis for modern typesetting

Lower case mostly. But yes, you're right. I was unaware that renaissance scholars took these to be Imperial Roman - but at any rate that was the script they became familiar with because so many ancient texts were available to them as earliest editions in Carolingian manuscripts. And yes, many did seek a break with "gothic" script - though that remained in use as "black letter" too (in Germany well into the 20th century).

I was unaware that renaissance scholars took these to be Imperial Roman

Yeah - IIRC (trying to remember where I read that - might've been McKitterick but I'm at work and my books are at home) they attributed it either directly to Cicero or to his period.

Couldn't have been Medieval - you know how THOSE people were - they forgot how to read, write, or bathe. And when they did take a bath they might lose their babies in the bathwater. ;)

I must admit was a little surprised to hear Charlemagne couldn't read Latin, given his role in the Carolingian literary renaissance, and pleased to hear he had the education I would have expected him to have had.

I want to "decline" to fight the "decline" battle once more, but it goes to my point. The "Carolingian literary renaissance" marks a step forward from "deep decline" and with all of the celebration of this flowering of the arts the number one guy couldn't make his letters. And this so-called renaissance produces nothing than can compare favorably with 5th century BCE Athens literature or 2nd century CE Roman.

Charlemagne was not illiterate. A good source on the scholarship pertaining to the political, liturgical, historical and literary output of the Carolingian Renaissance is Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity by Rosamund McKitterick.

And this so-called renaissance produces nothing than can compare favorably with 5th century BCE Athens literature or 2nd century CE Roman.

I'll gladly grant Greece - I don't think we reached that depth of thought for at least another 2000 years and in some ways I'm not sure we've reached it today.

I'd even grant 1st century BC Rome - the 9th Century didn't have anyone with the eloquence of Cicero.

But take away Marcus Aurelius' Meditations (which are mainly notable due to being written by an Emperor, not for the work itself) and the 9th century compares very favorably with the 2nd - in many ways it surpasses it. There isn't nearly the amount of quality literature from 2nd century Rome as from 9th century Francia. And I'm not aware of anything substantially superior to the writings of Alcuin or Paulinus.

Hmmm. Tacitus, Lucian, Apuleius, Arrian, Suetonius, the younger Pliny too, for goodness sake! Galen and Ptolemy in scientific fields (and Galen's no mean prose writer or student of philosophy). And I'm going to guess that Gellius and Pausanius are more polished writers than most in the ninth century. I'm very fond of Curtius' Alexander book. Whereas Greek secular historiography and even secular poetry collapse between the Sixth century and the Tenth centuries. There's some theological prose, some religious verse and music, true, and Theophanes' chronicle, which isn't really at a par with Theophylact Simocatta, let alone the earlier historians. So much for the Greek East. Who were the Latin writers of the Ninth century, btw?

Message edited by its author, Nov 15, 2009, 6:20am.

Well, first I'll mention that I'm embarrassed that I missed Galen because, alone of all you've listed (all 2nd century Roman literature) he is unique. Everyone else either wrote a history, made commentary on current events or, such as Ptolemy, compiled what was already known. But Galen's far superior to them, or to any 9th century writer.

I've mentioned several of these but Alcuin, Einhard, Columbanus, Nithard, Notker, Regino (some of what he wrote was early 10th), Hincmar, Theodulf, Walahfrid Strabo, Paulinus of Aquilea, Angelbert, etc. - you have poems, homilies, treatises on music, histories, hagiography, commentaries on various books of the bible, etc. You also have items never intended for publication written by laity such as Dhuoda's book for her son. And then there are anonymous works - the Life of Louis the Pius written by someone called "The Astronomer," Annals of Lorsch and Fulda and so on.

I'll throw in just a couple of examples. Any list of Carolingian authors has to have Alcuin toward the top. He wrote poetry and engaged in court debates with Theodulf through poetry. He wrote dialogues. He wrote instructional manuals on Grammar, Rhetoric, Math and Dialectics. He also wrote some theological treatises and we have a bunch of his letters.

Walahfrid Strabo wrote several poetical vitae, his Vita Sancti Galli is probably the most important. His Hortulus is a poem about his garden including a discussion of medicinal uses of herbs. He wrote several major religious works including expositions on psalms and ecclesiastical rituals and institutions.

So, with apologies to Galen who is absolutely a cut above everyone else from either period, IMO choosing between 2nd century and 9th century literature is pretty much a matter of taste. If you want to read history, deciding between Tacitus, Plutarch, Suetonius, Einhard, Nithard, Notker or hagiography is a matter of what you're interested in. All of these authors wrote for reasons beyond pure history and they all have political/social leanings which influence them. The same goes for poetry or choosing between Roman satire and Carolingian dialogues as commentary on current events.

The best book on this that I'm aware of is Rosamond McKitterick's The Carolingians and the Written Word though any decent book on Carolingian culture has to talk about literacy and writing. It was a culture that was beginning to become anal about wanting everything to be written down - it's why we have so much "stuff" from the period. And anyone can always consult the MGH, http://bsbdmgh.bsb.lrz-muenchen.de/dmgh_....

Message edited by its author, Nov 15, 2009, 8:56am.

**Who were the Latin writers of the Ninth century, btw?**

Shikari, #116, you bring up an interesting question. How important is it that Latin is used, or not used, by authors of the middle ages.

If one asserts that any break from the past -ie., the use of classical Latin spellings and grammar- is part and parcel of a 'fall' then I think everyone would have to agree that fall it did.

My own take would be that Latin with it rigorous structure was becoming obsolete in lieu of the easier Teutonic languages.

===========

Fatuously, I must note that using this definition we must say that France is falling, and probably the US as well. Foreign words are creeping into the vernacular at a wonderful pace, and well... grammar is a failing art in the days of Twitter.

Other 9th C notables:

Alfred's legal reform
Johannes Scotus (Eriugena)
Joseph Scottus (or John that Scotch dude)
Paul da Deacon (?maybe?)

Message edited by its author, Nov 15, 2009, 9:38am.

hmmm. I inadvertantly inserted symbols that made my previous post 'invisible'. I've fixed that.

Message edited by its author, Nov 15, 2009, 9:39am.

#118 - OTOH, the literature of the time was still written in Latin. Medieval Latin, not classical Latin which is why they needed new Latin grammars. I'm not into philology but because most literacy (certainly not all when the wife of a mid-level noble like Dhuoda can write her handbook) was vested in the Church the language of writing continued to be Latin for quite some time, even as the Church was stressing the use of the vernacular for sermons.

However I also think that, overall, the Carolingian literary revival is less a case of continuity with classical culture and more of a rediscovery initiated largely at the top with the fostering of court culture, the gathering together of the best minds and the concerted effort to find and preserve every classical manuscript they could get their hands on.

There are areas where you can make a much stronger case for Roman-Carolingian continuity. A good example is with administrative structures where, for example, the Merovingians inherited and used Roman administrative structures before gradually setting them aside in favor of structures more suited to their society - frex, substituting a reduction in taxation for Roman Villas for Grants of Immunity from service or tax requirements to Medieval landholders, particularly religious institutions. You can track from Roman to Carolingian administrative structures and processes through this. But I think that is less evident for literacy (though there is SOME continuity since the literate elite of Rome became the religious elite of the Medievals).

EDIT: When people get sick of me saying this, just say so. My disagreement with use of the term "fall" has never had much to do with what we'd call "standards of living." It's because the term implies first, that the move from Roman to Medieval took place very quickly and second, that virtually nothing of Roman culture and society survived. Neither is true.

How far society declined is a matter of much debate. I happen to go with Wickham - in some areas the decline was severe, in some fairly mild. However you can have continuity and severe decline and just because the decline was severe doesn't mean it was quick. I find that people want to connect severity with degree of continuity as well as rapidity of transformation and that's not always the case - the three aspects can be examined separately (though in any large synthesis correlations among these aspects should also be looked at).

I always leave Britain out of this because things appear to have happened relatively quickly there with much more of a break, though several recent works are arguing for more continuity than has previously been thought.

Message edited by its author, Nov 15, 2009, 10:55am.

Thanks, cemanuel, for the brief overview of Carolingian literature. Theological writings were certainly less developed in the second century than the ninth - I never did finish the Shepherd of Hermias - but what about Tertullian? And by the fourth century, they're firmly linked to élite culture as pagan literature. But the problem with the literature of second and third centuries, surely, is that like Alexandrian Greek literature it was not absorbed into the educational curriculum. Indeed, one of the more 'important' second century literary text is arguably 'Dictys' Ephemeris belli Troiani, as it later filled in in its 4th century Latin translation for the Iliad as Greek slipped from the Western curriculum during the fourth century. Is that a sign of decline or of changing educational goals? I must read more on Latin education in Late Antiquity.

Thanks for the Rosamond McKitterick reference - I'll look out for it.

Message edited by its author, Nov 15, 2009, 5:50pm.

I just posted something quite germane to this thread on a new thread:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/78460&...

Message edited by its author, Dec 5, 2009, 5:58pm.