Peter Heather

It took me longer than normal to get through this - there is a lot in this book - but I enjoyed it greatly. It draws themes from the post-Roman world and traces them through to the Carolingian era and the rise of the Papacy as a true pan-European force in medieval times; the great strength of the book, however, is in tracing why this was not some inevitable and seamless transition of power from Roman Empire to Roman Church. The anti-Whiggish tone is refreshing and thought-provoking, and show more Heather's writing style keeps you engaged even when the themes being explored are very complex and full of contingencies. show less

In 476 AD the last vestiges of imperial authority of the Western Roman Empire were cast aside, with there being few obvious reasons why Rome should become yet again a major political center. Flash forward about five hundred years and the Papacy of the Roman Catholic Church is effectively the font of authority in most of Europe. How this highly contingent development came to be is the subject of this book, as Peter Heather (best known as a historian of the barbarian kingdoms of the ‘Dark show more Ages’) examines the twists and turns of how this became the dominant outcome to the search for stability and security in Europe.

Heather first examines the processes by which Theodoric the Goth, Justinian of Byzantium and Charles the Great apparently pulled together the core of the old Western Roman Empire, only for events to overtake these empires. Sometimes this was a result of systems failure, sometimes this was a result of greater forces swamping the imperial initiative, but force and transitory personal ability were never enough to get the job done. The forces aligned at creating a new super power were just too great.

This brings us to the fourth part of Heather’s examination of the reestablishment of legitimate authority in the West, dealing with how the Imperial Papacy emerged from the Carolingian Renaissance, making for an empire based essentially on ideology. The interesting thing for Heather is that this empire was not really a creation of the Roman aristocracy that tended to control the Papacy; it was created by the Church intelligentsia as a response to the fragmentation of imperial authority and the efforts of local kings seeking to control Church resources.

Much of what makes this book a pleasure is that I suspect that Heather has become aware that there is a public readership with the appetite for an involved tale of personal intrigue in the face of tectonic forces, and while I might think that Heather is a little too casual in his language at some points, he does make clear the need for a bit of enlightened skepticism about received theories and ideologies does not mean that there isn’t a great deal to say about events that are often glossed over because the alleged documentation doesn’t exist; call it an example of a well-honed historical imagination in action. show less

The fall of the (western) Roman Empire has inspired a great deal of industriousness on the part of historians, with Gibbon's monumental The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire standing as the origin of modern historiography on the subject. Heather's motivation for penning another weighty tome (albeit much smaller than Gibbon's) on the topic is to argue, contra Gibbon and many others, that the principal cause was exogenous and not endogenous. The fifth-century western empire show more was, he argues, to me pretty convincingly, not appreciably more "decadent" than either its fourth-century self or its eastern contemporary. What was different was the barbarians beyond the Rhine-Danube frontier.

The Germanics, Dacians, and others of the early imperial period could occasionally inflict serious defeats on Roman armies, most famously in the Teutoburger Forest in AD 9, but lacked the economic, demographic, and organizational wherewithal to stand up the the Romans in the long run. The border between empire and barbaricum was eventually drawn not according to the barbarians' ability to resist but according to what the Romans thought profitable to conquer. Compared even to Gaul, Germania had little wealth to tax. But across the following centuries the the world beyond the frontier underwent a profound economic and demographic development which left the barbarian groups of the later fourth century much closer to parity with Roman military power than their ancestors had been a few centuries earlier - they could muster many more warriors, with better equipment, and this larger number of warriors was divided among a smaller number of therefore individually much stronger political units. Much of the impetus for this development, Heather says, ironically enough came from interaction, both military and commercial, with the Romans, who in a sense created their own Nemesis.

Then, from the 370s on, the arrival and rising power of the Huns gave these newly more powerful barbarian groups - mostly Germanic or at least Germanic-lead, but also including multiple groups of Iranian-speaking Alans - a very strong incentive to migrate west and south into Roman territory. The Roman armies failed to ever thoroughly subdue the original Gothic incursors of the 370s - who inflicted a famous defeat of the Romans at Adrianople in 378 - because repeated new incursions were set off by continued Hunnic activity, both by the rise and the fall of Attila's empire, whose fall sent new waves of warlike refugees across the Danube. By the 470s, the western empire had ceased to exist - the decisive point being the loss of the North African provinces to the Vandals and the failure of the efforts to regain them, because their rich tax revenues combined with their previously unthreatened position meant they were critical contributors to imperial finances - while the eastern empire survived because its principal tax bases in Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt lay beyond the invaders' reach.

Heather writes well and his arguments are mostly convincing - to me at any rate - but a good deal of the argument here was repeated in his later book Empires and Barbarians, which I read a few years ago, which means I enjoyed the book perhaps less than I ought. But it's warmly recommended to anyone coming more innocent to the subject, or who has read accounts stressing internal causes and wants a contrary argument to compare. show less

Historic orthodoxy dismisses barbarians and puts forward reasons like corruption, decline in agriculture, over-taxation, and religion in the center of what brought the empire down. To Peter Heather it was the barbarians who destroyed it.

Historians, while attributing fault to the barbarian forces, felt a power as great as Rome couldn't have been brought down by disparate hordes of illiterates. Rome had established a civilization -- it had central administration, weapons factories, schools of show more philosophy, forms of banking, experienced armies, trade was thriving -- so it feels that a cogent explanation would admit barbarians had something to do with empire's demise but they shouldn't have been the central acting force. All research is then wrongly focused on what fundamental weaknesses of imperial life did barbarians aim to exploit.

The historic narrative of Peter Heathers' book is as much a probe in imperial Roman life as it is an attempt to perceive what took place on the other side of the Empire's frontier in the development of two centuries of barbarian life.

Around the fourth century AD Rome reached the natural limit of its expansion. While there were always more territories to conquer the benefit of this had to be judged against the potential bounty and later on against the expense of maintaining standing armies to defend larger borders. After successfully taking over the land around the Mediterranean Sea, which in the face of all ancient civilizations (Greek, Egyptian) provided reach bounties, it found a diminishing return when faced with the challenge of fighting the primitive barbarians inhabiting less populated land of what is today Germany and Eastern Europe.

The life in the empire was marked by officials using power to enrich themselves and their associates. What we'd today define as "corruption" in ancient Rome it merely reflected the normal relationship between power and profit. Since this didn't impede the spectacular rise of the empire we shouldn't assign it too much fundamental significance in its downfall.

Ancient agriculture suffered from two limitations. First, the productivity of any piece of land was limited to the number of laborers that worked on it, and second, in absence of fertilizers ancient farmers were unable to significantly increase the output of foodstuff. During its entire time of existence Roman economy was not operating much above subsistence levels. To fend off Persia, Rome had to impose new taxes. Part of the historic orthodoxy was the notion that the land owning classes were over-taxed into oblivion. The evidence of which were documents about abandoned agricultural lands which, it is tempting to think, were uneconomical to work on.

Archaeological work has made it possible to test levels of rural settlement and agricultural activity over wide geographic spread and different points in time of the Roman period. They showed that the 3rd and the 4th century, when the new (more demanding) tax was introduced, saw unimpeded economical development -- field tests of what is today Greece, Spain, southern France, Syria, Tunisia and Libya demonstrated that prosperity didn't begin to decline until the 5th century.

Fourth-century sources mention taxation discontent and there was only one known major tax riot. Emperors knew that importance of consent in imposing taxation. Citizens were constantly reminded that taxes paid for the army, which was the defender of the Roman world.

With the conversion to Christianity in 312 emperor Constantine began the dismantling of the ideological structure of the ancient Roman world. According to the famous historian Edward Gibbon this was a key moment in the story of the collapse. He believed that Christianity pacified the society, that military spirit was subdued.

Christianity brought a cultural transformation, but it could hardly be claimed that it had deleterious effect upon the functioning of the Empire. Religion and Empire reached a balance. Roman imperialism claimed that it was divinely predestined to conquer and rule the world. After adoption of Christianity as religion of the state, the theology was quickly reworked and it was claimed that the Empire fulfilled God's will. While the Emperor could no longer be deified, state propaganda claimed that he was hand picked by God to rule with Him.

The central arch that this book follows in explaining the fall of the empire is by exploring the life of the barbarians, their progress in agriculture, the concomitant increase in their population density, and in the formation of more hierarchical societal structures.

Occasional raids grew into more permanent settlements. The western Empire at first lost insignificant territories. For a long time the tribes that moved in didn't dare challenge the central authority. Yet, damage inflicted by protracted warfare, combined with permanent loss of territory lead to massive decline of revenue for the central state.

While the numerous victories earned Attila fame the entire direct interaction with the Huns was only a sideshow to the dislocation of the tribes that were forced to cross the frontier. Attila never threatened alienation of huge chunks of western Empire's taxpayers. The groups that fled in 408 did precisely that.

Vandals, Alans and Suevi removed most of Spain from central imperial control. Worst, Vandals and Alans shifted operations to North Africa, seizing the richest provinces of the Roman west in 439. Reduced revenue lead to reduction in the capacity of military forces that Rome could maintain.

As the Roman state lost power the provincial land owning elites faced new reality. With their wealth defined by the land they stood on, they realized that they have to make accommodations for the new dominant forces in their respective provinces. Between 410 and 450, for example, they came to terms with Goths and Burgundians as autonomous elements of central Roman state, but the trajectory of the west was inescapably set towards fully independent Goth and Burgundian kingdoms.

Any of the conventional explanations fail in one important aspect. While, according to them, the western Empire collapsed, suffering the same downsides the eastern Empire not only survived but even thrived in the sixth century. If the reasons for the collapse were valid it should have disintegrated soon after the western part. While the east defended successfully its richest province, Egypt, the west lost Norther Africa, and that was the most central element of its undoing.

This book is insightful, comprehensive, and was delightful and educational to read. show less