by Dan Carlin
Tracing the reason great states decline or fall is always difficult. In Assyria’s case, civil war and military overextension are popular culprits. Of the last of several great kings, Sennacherib, the destroyer of Babylon, was assassinated by his sons. Tradition says his brains were bashed out from behind while he was praying and that the murder weapon was a religious icon representing Babylonian deities. The Babylonians considered this payback for what Sennacherib had done to Babylon. His successor, Esarhaddon, might have thought so, too, and he went to work rebuilding the great city. (Nobody wants a god mad at him.)
Esarhaddon, a son of Sennacherib, brushed off internal rebellions and did what his forebears had only thought to do: attack Egypt. It’s this attack on such a large, powerful, and faraway land that some historians cite as the Assyrian “bridge too far.” Defeating the field forces of the Egyptians proved to be relatively easy for the still formidable Assyrian armies, but holding the region proved to be a nightmarish and expensive endeavor. The main Assyrian army was tied down for a long time in the Egyptian quagmire while things festered back at the heart of the homeland. It was a classic trap of empire: military overextension.
Meanwhile, in the vacuum created by Assyria’s regular smashing of the formerly powerful Elamites, a once insignificant and little-known tribe was rising to power in what’s now western Iran. A people known to history as the Medes began to coalesce into a more organized state, all under a king named Cyaxares, whose father had reportedly been killed by the Assyrians. Cyaxares is credited with reorganizing the Median army into a formidable force.* While the bulk of Esarhaddon’s forces were tied down in Egypt, Media started giving Assyria trouble in a way it hadn’t been given in a very long time.
In 615 BCE, Cyaxares attacked Assyria. He was initially thwarted, but the following year he came back and managed to destroy the ancient religious center of the empire, the old capital at Ashur. This was a shock. The Babylonians—always looking for a way to break free of Assyrian domination and smelling blood in the water—then allied themselves with the Median army in a ceremony under the ruined walls of Ashur. A powerful anti-Assyrian alliance was coalescing.* Cyaxares gave his daughter to the Babylonian king as a traditional cementing of the alliance. The tipping-point moment, if such things can be assessed so long after the fact, came when the barbarian Scythian mounted archers joined forces with the Medes and the Babylonians, and together all three powers moved on Nineveh in 612 BCE.
After several battles and a three-month siege, the great ancient metropolis fell. The Medes treated Nineveh just as the Assyrians would have treated a Median city. Legend has it that the last Assyrian king gathered all his precious goods and artifacts around him and set them on fire with him in the middle, burning to death as the allied armies were breaking down the walls of Nineveh.
Modern archaeologists have found ruins of the pottery and glazed bricks and other debris thrown into the city’s moat to facilitate attacking the walls. They’ve also found the breaches made in those walls. Among the layers of burned ashes and soot, researchers have also discovered evidence of a fire so hot that glass might have melted, as well as human remains showing clear evidence of fatal violence from all over the site.
The biblical prophets, who allegedly predicted Assyria’s downfall, wrote its epitaph:
‘Behold, I am against you,’ says the Lord of hosts . . .
It shall come to pass that all who look upon you
Will flee from you, and say,
“Nineveh is laid waste!
Who will bemoan her?”
Where shall I seek comforters for you?’ . . .
Your injury has no healing,
Your wound is severe.
All who hear news of you
Will clap their hands over you,
For upon whom has not your wickedness passed continually?
And two hundred years later, when Xenophon stumbled upon the ruins, no one could even tell him they were Assyrian. The ghost city, however, remained in mute testament to the greatness and majesty of its builders, whomever they might have been.
We assume such a fate won’t be ours. But once upon a time, so did they.
Chapter 5
The Barbarian Life Cycle
It’s easy to take for granted all the things that keep the lights on in our society—the complex, interconnected system that provides things like power, food, and military or police protection. The financial system seems to run on autopilot. The same is true of the electrical grid; most of us hardly notice it until a storm knocks it out and we light some candles and wait for the power company to fix it. But what if the electricity were never fully restored? How would a people as reliant as we are on modernity deal with a forced, permanent reduction in it?
No generation of humans has ever had the capabilities ours has, or has relied on them to the degree ours does. And our minds are hardwired to think in terms of continuous improvement and modernization, an unspoken assumption that capabilities will always be advancing and the pace at which technological discoveries and innovations occur will only speed up.
It may be one-directional thinking, but it broadly reflects how things have been for many centuries. It’s understandable that over time we would forget that things could ever move in the opposite direction. After all, when was the last time anything went the other way?
The fall of the Roman Empire is perhaps the most classic example. The experience of the Romanized areas of the British Isles is perhaps the starkest specific case. It was Julius Caesar who in 55 BCE famously made the first foray by a Mediterranean power over the English Channel to explore the misty, little-known (at least by non-natives) land on the far side. He fought with the local inhabitants, who he said* seemed culturally similar to the Celtic tribes he’d encountered in Gaul;* they rode and fought from chariots and many warriors dyed their skin blue to make them more frightening in battle. He portrayed the natives as a people primitive by Roman cultural and technological standards. After defeating them in several battles, Caesar crossed back over the channel with his troops and proceeded on toward his destiny in Italy. The tribes in Britain had almost a century of respite before the Romans returned. In 43 CE a Roman army of conquest crossed the channel and defeated and pacified the locals. They did this the usual way, and it involved large amounts of killing and repressing. Roman nastiness in what we might today call counterinsurgency warfare was often taken for granted and its immediate downsides to the local inhabitants were terrible. But the long-term gains for the descendants of the conquered inhabitants were immense. The Romans brought the proverbial “blessings of civilization” to much of the world.* But when they eventually left and returned to where they came from, they often took those blessings back with them. And it’s at that point that the local version of the Statue of Liberty begins the long process of melting into the sand.
Britain, under Roman rule, had been part of one of the great cutting-edge empires in world history, and then it rather rapidly lost that status. It’s hard for us living today to relate to that. Several centuries of living as Romans had changed the formerly “barbarian” tribesmen into “Romano-Britons,” a people who enjoyed their hot public baths, wonderful public buildings, fantastic roads, powerful walls, and any manner of forts and defenses—all manned by Roman soldiers from all over the empire. The Britons had been connected to the great Mediterranean and Near Eastern civilizational version of a power grid (the roots of which stretched all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia)—and then in the early 400s CE that direct connection was disrupted. The troops and money that supported the system in Britain were badly needed back in a threatened Italy. After several centuries of Roman governance and administration, the emperor essentially told the inhabitants of Britain that they would have to look after themselves.
The result was that a hundred years after Rome’s power receded, the inhabitants of Britain were living in a less cutting-edge age than the one inhabited by their ancestors. What would be the result if that happened to
day—if a central government ceded all power over a given area? Some problems, such as food and fuel shortages, would appear almost instantaneously, while others would develop over a longer period, as systems and structures deteriorated and degraded.
Metaphorically speaking, how long did the lights stay on in the Roman Empire after its disintegration? How long did the public baths last in the outlying former provinces before they broke down and there was no one left who remembered how or had the materials on hand to fix them? What about the aqueducts that supplied the water? Who manned the walls and fortifications that kept out enemies and invaders? How did anyone pay for anything if taxes weren’t being collected or allocated? Who stepped in and took over the basic roles that government usually assumed?
Hundreds of potential scenarios have been proposed for the “fall of the Roman Empire.”* Just as with other “falls,” some experts believe that, instead of a dramatic “fall,” there was a transition—a change in management, if you will—that may have better met the needs of people on the ground than the Roman administration did. But regardless of the truth, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the new managers of many of these formerly Roman provinces in the West, even though they usually tried to preserve Roman practices, were Germanic tribes.
To look at a map of the formerly Roman world circa 600 CE is to see what an empire looks like when it’s fragmented. That’s basically what occurred. The Roman lands in North Africa had been occupied by a Germanic tribe called the Vandals. Spain and parts of what’s now southwestern France were under the control of the Visigoths, while the Burgundian tribe dominated and administered southeastern France. What is today northern France was ruled by a “barbarian” Frankish king, and the heart of the old Roman Empire, Italy, was Ostrogothic. Many other formerly imperial territories were controlled by even smaller ruling entities. It had all been Roman in 400 CE. In many places the “barbarian” warlords were still trying to keep it that way as much as possible. The historian Chris Wickham writes, “The larger western polities were all ruled in a Roman tradition, but they were more militarized. Their fiscal structures were weaker. They had fewer economic interrelationships, and their internal economies were often simpler.” He adds, “Over and over again, ‘barbarian’ armies occupied Roman provinces, which they ran in Roman ways; so nothing changed; but everything changed.”
How had it ever come to this? At its height (around 100 CE), the Roman Empire was probably the greatest state the world had yet seen. Only contemporary Han dynasty China could be considered to have been on par with Rome. The empire was incredibly sophisticated, controlled an enormous landmass, governed something like seventy million* citizens, and kept the “barbarians” at bay. The fact that Rome was also one of the most warlike states in human history is not a coincidence. None of this empire building would have been possible if Rome hadn’t possessed one of the finest armies in world history.*
The Roman army still fascinates modern military historians. As with other armies from the ancient world, the actual physics of how it functioned in combat on the battlefield isn’t entirely understood. At the empire’s height, the army was a multinational force of long-serving professionals composed of men recruited from all over the empire, bound by an institutional tradition going back centuries. The troops were disciplined, drilled, equipped by the state, and highly motivated. Leadership at the unit level was provided by the famous centurions, and Roman armies did things on the battlefield most other armies couldn’t.* It is a wonderful example in microcosm of just how sophisticated the ancient world really was. Simply feeding and supplying such a force on campaign requires logistics on a scale that we don’t normally associate with long-ago societies. The entire Roman state was protected at any given time by between three hundred and five hundred thousand* men, guarding outposts from northern Britain to North Africa, and from Spain to Syria.
And in combat they dominated. As the historian Arther Ferrill writes: “Contrary to the usual rule of pre-modern military history, Romans inflicted heavy casualties even when they were defeated. Normally Romans did not run, which is when the heaviest casualties are taken. Against untrained troops, they simply could not be defeated, even when they were greatly outnumbered. Only when a Roman army was caught by surprise on unfavorable terrain did barbarians have a chance to win a tactical victory.”
If one could transport the Roman army one thousand years into the future, it’s hard to imagine them losing to any European army until the high Middle Ages.* How far into the future could the best military today be transported and still compete successfully?
If a neighboring state was at peace with the Romans, it was usually for one of three reasons:
They’d already been beaten. Many states at peace with Rome had been made client states or incorporated into Rome, with their population often becoming Roman citizens.
They hadn’t yet been beaten. Sometimes Rome’s own occasional weakness—like any long-lasting state, it experienced ebbs and flows of power—forced its diplomats, usually very aggressive, to make long-term, peaceful relationships with the neighbors. These relationships often ended when Rome’s fortunes turned for the better.
They were unknown to Rome.
Number three reflects a facet of an earlier time in human history. Occasionally, we moderns will stumble upon a small, hitherto undiscovered community living in complete isolation in some very remote location. In ancient and medieval history, not knowing what the world looked like beyond a certain point on the map and bumping into a previously unknown state, culture, or people was not just possible, but, as empires expanded, inevitable.
We live in an age when all the world has been mapped and satellite imagery has turned the entire surface of the planet into a known commodity. No longer do our maps have sea monsters on them representing the vast edge-of-the-world territories that aren’t charted or known. Modern defense strategists wouldn’t know where to start if they had to account for, and plan for, areas of the globe that were as hidden from them as the dark side of the moon. What might be lurking in an undiscovered hemisphere? It could run the civilizational gamut from a terrestrial version of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds—in which a more technologically advanced, hitherto unknown society swoops into your hemisphere and suddenly starts shredding your backward armed forces—to the opposite, in which primitive barbarians not much different from hordes of Neanderthals come out of the dark unknown and smash against your empire’s defenses.
This happened to military planners in the past repeatedly.*
And while we moderns wouldn’t be particularly frightened of any newly found society if it were discovered to be far below our technological, economic, or complexity levels, some of the most frightening peoples in history were the ones who fit these criteria, the ones we’ve come to know as “barbarians.”
The terms “Roman” and “barbarian” have become closely associated with each other, in large part because of the role the latter had in stripping the former of its western territories. But there were so-called barbarians long before there were Romans. The general public perception of a “barbarian”—a badass, bearded, horned-helmet-wearing, battle-ax-wielding warrior who prays to heroic gods, drinks a lot, and rides the line between sane and insane in battle—is more period and culture specific than the ancient Greek conception. It was they who invented the root of today’s term, and by it they basically meant anyone who wasn’t Greek.* That covered a lot of different types of people; most, in fact. The Romans used the word in a similar sense, often classifying even very refined peoples such as the Persians and Carthaginians as “barbarians.” But the term has long been used by the settled agricultural states and societies as a denigrating label for tribal peoples and nomads. When we think of barbarians today, that’s the stereotype we have: a fierce, uncivilized, illiterate, dangerous, and yet almost childlike destroyer of fine places and things.
It seems that any ancient city-state in its long-ago formative years had local barbarians, nomads, or tr
ibes living nearby. Often these tribes made their homes or set up their tents or shelters in the rugged terrain avoided by the farmers and city dwellers—the hills or mountains, the desert, or the treeless steppe. There was trade, interaction, diplomacy, and, yes, friction between these two groups, and the city-states often subdued the local tribes or nomads—or vice versa.
Somewhere in the misty, semilegendary past of Italy in the eighth century BCE, this is how the city of Rome began. By the fourth and third centuries BCE it was a small city-state—fighting wars against its local neighbors who lived a mere day’s walk away. Two centuries after that it had swelled into a vast empire operating on all three of the then-known continents.*
The Roman writer Livy wrote that Rome conquered the world in self-defense, but this idea seems more than a little self-serving for a patriotic Roman writer to claim.* It rests on an assumption that conquest and the smashing of dangerous foes was often done to pacify the unstable frontier, but the frontier never seemed to stay pacified. There seemed always to be new enemies (usually ever tougher and fiercer) beyond the ones recently defeated. Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, for example, stabilized the Gallic situation, but added a new Rhine River border to Rome’s frontiers with new ferocious tribal neighbors that had previously been Gaul’s problem. Now they were his problem, and Rome’s ever after. From the perspective of the Romans, it must have seemed like every barbarian tribe had another even more barbaric tribe behind it forever stretching off to the ends of the earth. If you are seeking border security, where does it end?
