David Womersley

Best narrative history ever written. Gibbon had so many fewer sources and tools than we have today, but his basic conclusions from the late 18th century information he had are still largely correct today.

A weakened military and political state that relied heavily on barbarian mercenary soldiers for defense was doomed. The different internal barbarian factions just served to divide the military and political and religious structures to a point to where they were easy pickin's from both inside show more and outside the empire. The western empire falling first while the eastern (Greek) Byzantine empire, under less external pressure, survives much longer. (Until their Roman Christian Crusader brothers came to sack them.)

Gibbons details the whole ugly mess down to minute detail and doesn't leave anything out, from incest to slaughter. His narrative is lively and opinionated, full of both shock and humor.

Read the whole damned thing, footnotes and all, not some abridged abomination. This is a literary work as much as an historical work.

Anyone who needs an abject lesson on how the modern western world is going to go, should read these books. We're already in the age of bread and circuses. show less

An 18th century exploration into the events surrounding the Roman Empire and its territories from ca. 180 until the 15th century.

The author is an 18th century Brit who has granted the ancient Romans their conceit, and the work must be read and understood in that light. One of the great opportunities for reflection in reading this work in the early 21st century is to consider what Europe, north Africa, and western Asia must have looked like to someone living in 1776, and the different forms show more of continuity and discontinuity which are maintained. As an example, Gibbon confesses how there are some areas of Italy which, in his day, had not yet recovered in population from the Byzantine-Gothic wars and the bubonic plague of the middle of the 6th century; we would not be able to make such an observation on the other side of the population boom which has attended to the industrial revolution.

Gibbon does well at considering not just secondary but especially primary sources, and he is rather opaque about his biases and prejudices regarding them. The length of discourse ebbs and flows with the amount and quality of these witnesses: the introductory books set forth the condition of the Empire in the days of the Antonines, the generally confessed high point of the Roman Empire, and fills in some of the details about the infrastructure of the Empire as it had developed from the days of Augustus. Then over a few books Gibbon covers the long/awful "third century" of 180-280 and all of the trials of the Empire. The fourth century resurgence and crisis defeats of 280-400 are covered in many books, including discussions of the development of Christianity, and thus ends the first modern volume. Then Gibbon gets to the collapse of the Empire at the hands of the German tribes in the West, and the maintenance of the Empire in the East. Over many books we read of Justinian, his conquests, and his law code; Gibbon has precious little to say about the Justinian plague beyond its virulence. Gibbon quickly covers Justinian through Heraclius, and the second modern volume ends with his characterization of the various Emperors from Heraclius until Isaac Angelus and the Latin conquest of Constantinople. The third modern volume covers the medieval period, and does so in two phases: from 600-1200, looking in across the world of the former Roman Empire and the exploits in Italy, Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, Muhammad, the rise of Islam, the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, the Bulgarians, Russians, Normans, the Turks, and then the Crusades, leading to the Fourth Crusade. Then Gibbon does something similar with the 1200-1450 period: the Greek loss of Constantinople, their fragmented empires, and recovery of Constantinople; the Mongols and the rise of the Ottomans; relationship between Byzantium and the West; the final loss of the Eastern Roman Empire; and Gibbon concludes by considering Rome itself from the tenth century until the end of the Great Schism. He then renders some conclusions.

Gibbon is often criticized for how he blames the fall of Rome on Christianity. I did not perceive in his work any truly monocausal explanation of this sort. In places where he would presume Christianity would have loosened the "martial spirit" of the Romans, he would be misguided. While Gibbon is a man of the Enlightenment - and in his notes you can tell he is a big fan of Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment in particular - his explorations of the various doctrinal controversies are well expressed and reasoned, and he seems less condemnatory of the religion itself and much more fatigued with the constant in-fighting over ultimately speculative matters. And in truth the divisions within Christianity absolutely weakened the standing of the Empire: when the Coptic Christians of Egypt welcomed the conquest of the Muslims so they would no longer be under the yoke of Constantinople, that tells you something; a big part of the ultimate end of the Byzantine Empire was the division and hostility engendered between them and the Catholics to the west.

What should stand out about this narrative, both as told by Gibbon and in general, is not about how Rome declined and fell, as if we can thus read the tea leaves about how such powers decline and fall in order to ameliorate our own, because all powers invariably rise, decline, and fall. Instead, it should be about the resilience of the Roman Empire: the miracle is not that it collapsed, but that it endured for so long in reality, and has never been exorcised from the mentality of Europeans ever since. "Caesars" as Kaisers and Czars and Sultans ruled in Europe until only a century ago; one cannot understand medieval and modern European history without grappling with how the Roman Empire continually captured their imagination.

The most modern research leads us to put far more weight on the role of climate change and its attendant consequences: more challenging food growing conditions which can quickly lead to greater ravaging and repine, the ferret and the transmission of the bubonic plague, and thus a devastation in the 6th century which leaves its mark in the archaeological record for over a century and which the world of Late Antiquity could not adequately recover (and, as seen above, in some respects, had not even recovered by the time the United States of America came into being!). If we're looking for a big lesson from Rome about how powers fall, that's the one we should heed. show less

Volumes V and VI include probably the most interesting period for my taste, while also including the worst individual chapter and even more unnecessary Byzantine-bashing (Constantinople's "decline is almost coeval with her foundation") and even clearer bias on Gibbon's side. It's fascinating to read someone so blithely unaware of the inconsistencies in his own beliefs, and so happily accepting of the superiority of his own class. You know who should control everything, Gibbon asks? The most show more wealthy merchants and the nobility. Why? Because that's freedom and liberty. But don't let others have freedom and liberty, that way lies anarchy. This is based on a rigorous classicism, which imagines that "the old patricians were the subjects, the modern barons the tyrants, of the state." Yes. In Ancient Greece, the massively wealthy just hung out talking about Homer all day. Ignore the slaves being used as footstools while they read.

On the other hand, the sheer volume of things he knows makes it much harder for him to keep up his own bigotries for long, and he concludes there there were many causes for end of Rome in both West and East--not just one. He's clearly made uncomfortable by the knowledge that what we have of Ancient Rome in the West was saved by the Papacy, but gives Sixtus V his due. Womersley argues in the introduction that Gibbon's movement away from philosophical history was complete by the end of the History, but that's a bit extreme.* There's plenty of hatred for everyone who isn't a rich, British, post-Anglican rationalist.

And there are still plenty of great fantasy-novel stories in this volume; I expect a dissertation soon, "Fall of Thrones: Gibbon's influence on George R. R. Martin". And many perfect turns of phrase: "Hitherto the weight of supernatural belief inclines against the Protestants; and many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God, than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant." Not sure the doctrine of predestination is coming back from that. "The battles won by lessons of tactics may be numbered with the epic poems created from the rules of criticism." Hah. On gunpowder: "If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind."

It makes me slightly uncomfortable that it took me so long to put my finger on the great flaw in Gibbon's prose, but I finally did: his rhythms and cadences don't alter according to the importance of the information being presented. Whether he's describing one of the most important points in his argument, or just throwing away a line about a fifth-rate Byzantine princeling, his words *sound* the same. In this, at least, we've gone one better than Gibbon. But, as he says, "Genius may anticipate the season of maturity; but in the education of a people, as in that of an individual, memory must be exercised, before the powers of reason and fancy can be expanded; nor may the artist hope to equal or surpass, till he has learned to imitate, the works of his predecessors." Gibbon helps us to to exercise memory, his work is an example of the powers of reason, and he is certainly an artist worthy of imitation, as well as worth surpassing.




*: The best part of Womersley's excellent introduction is his quote from Johnson's 'Journey to the Western Islands': "whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings." Most certainly this applies to Gibbon's History. show less

One of Penguin's biographies of British monarchs. Without overlooking the breadth of the subject this is merely a glimpse of James II's short turbulent reign from 1685-1688. As Duke of York (for which New York is named) James was influential before succeeding to the throne when his brother Charles II died without children. But the joy of the still fresh Restoration abated when The "Popish Plot" and James' secret conversion to Catholicism gave rise to the political Exclusion Crisis that, show more although it failed, ushered in new political tactics. When William, Prince of Orange, was invited by nobles to come to England with an army, prepared to invade, James II effectively abdicated when he declined to attack the invading army. Womersley's sources include historians of the period including some interesting comments by Samuel Pepys.

This is an excellent summary that would serve well as a starting point for further study of a fascinating era. show less