The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization

by Bryan Ward-Perkins

  The battle of Hadrianopolis shows that, with bad luck or bad management on the Roman side, the Germanic invaders could defeat even very large Roman armies. The prelude to the campaign confirms that the Romans were well aware of this fact and conscious of the need to gather together the greatest possible number of soldiers before confronting an enemy in open battle. Valens faced the Goths in the field only after he had made peace with Persia, allowing him to transfer troops from the eastern frontier to the Balkans, and after he had summoned additional help from his western colleague (although, as we have seen, he then chose to fight the battle before these troops had arrived). Even such a specially assembled force could be annihilated, as the battle of Hadrianopolis showed all too clearly.

  A further indication of the delicate balance between Roman and Germanic might was the common practice of swelling imperial forces, when preparing for a major campaign, with troops hired from the Germanic and Hunnic tribes living beyond the frontiers. We do not know the precise economic and military calculations behind this use of tribal mercenaries, because our sources do not provide us with logistical information; but there are good reasons to believe that the practice made sound strategic and financial sense. The soldiers came already trained in belligerence from early youth (if in a rather ill-disciplined and unsophisticated way); they almost certainly cost less in pay than a Roman soldier (because the standard of living beyond the frontiers was lower than that within the empire); they could be sent home after each campaign, rather than being kept on in peacetime; they did not have to be pensioned off when too old to fight; and they were entirely expendable—indeed, as one observer noted, the death of barbarians in Roman service thinned out potential future enemies of the empire.10 Furthermore, the historical record shows that these foreign troops were almost invariably loyal. Indeed, anyone who assumes that tribal mercenaries in an army are always a ‘bad thing’ should look at the proud history of the Gurkha regiments in the British army, which have been recruited from the hill tribes of Nepal (beyond the frontiers of direct British rule) from 1815 to the present day, for many of the same reasons that the Romans engaged the services of Germanic and Hunnic warriors from beyond their own borders.11

  When the emperor Theodosius moved against the western usurper Magnus Maximus in 388, his army contained so many troops from the traditional enemies of the empire that a court panegyrist made a special virtue of the fact: ‘A matter worthy of record! There marched under Roman commanders and banners the onetime enemies of Rome; they followed the standards which they had once opposed; and their soldiers filled the cities of Pannonia, which they had only recently emptied by their hostile plundering.’ And when the western government faced an invasion of Italy in 405–6, it hired a force of Huns and Alans from beyond the frontiers, and also took the quite exceptional step of recruiting from amongst the empire’s slaves, offering money and freedom in return for their service in war.12 If special forces like these had to be recruited to fight major civil wars and to confront substantial invasions, then the empire was always in some danger.

  The needs of an important campaign could even put normal frontier defences at risk. To tackle the Gothic invasion of Italy in 401–2, the western general Stilicho withdrew troops from all the frontiers under his command—from the north of Britain, from the Rhine, and from the upper Danube. The panegyrist Claudian, celebrating Stilicho’s subsequent success against the Goths, expressed his wonder that no one had dared to take advantage of this emptying of the frontiers: ‘Will posterity believe it? Germany, once so fierce that its tribes could scarcely be contained by the full might of the emperors of old, is now led so placidly by Stilicho’s reins, that it neither attempts to tread the soil denuded of its frontier troops, nor crosses the river, too frightened to approach an undefended bank.’13 Unfortunately for the Romans (and for Claudian’s reputation as a purveyor of empty flattery), this cheerful situation did not persist. Four years later, in the winter of 406, many of the Rhineland troops were almost certainly again in Italy (withdrawn in order to defeat the invasion of the peninsula of 405–6, and to prepare for a campaign against the East). This time the tribes across the Rhine were not so coy; on the last day of the year, groups of Vandals, Alans, and Sueves crossed the river and began a devastating invasion of Gaul. The empire simply did not have enough troops to maintain its frontier defences up to full strength while fighting major campaigns elsewhere.

  The story of the loss of the West is not a story of great set-piece battles, like Hadrianopolis, heroically lost by the Romans in the field. The other great battle of our period, the Catalaunian Fields of 451, was in fact a Roman victory, with Visigothic help. The West was lost mainly through failure to engage the invading forces successfully and to drive them back. This caution in the face of the enemy, and the ultimate failure to drive him out, are best explained by the severe problems that there were in putting together armies large enough to feel confident of victory. Avoiding battle led to a slow attrition of the Roman position, but engaging the enemy on a large scale would have risked immediate disaster on the throw of a single dice.

  Did Rome Decline before it Fell?

  Did the invaders push at the doors of a tottering edifice, or did they burst into a venerable but still solid structure? Because the rise and fall of great powers have always been of interest, this issue has been endlessly debated. Famously, Edward Gibbon, inspired by the secularist thinking of the Enlightenment, blamed Rome’s fall in part on the fourth-century triumph of Christianity and the spread of monasticism: ‘a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes, who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.’14 Although, as we have seen, some 209 other causes of decline have, at one time or another, been suggested, none, I suspect, has ever been presented with such dry wit and elegance.

  Explanations for Rome’s demise have come and gone, often clearly in response to changes in the broader intellectual fashions of society. Sometimes indeed an older theory has been revived, after centuries of absence. For instance, Gibbon’s ideas about the damaging effects of Christianity were fiercely contested at the time; then fell into abeyance. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fall of Rome tended to be explained in terms of the grand theories of racial degeneration or class conflict that were then current. But in 1964 the pernicious influence of the Church was given a new lease of life by the then doyen of late Roman studies, A. H. M. Jones. Under the wonderful heading ‘Idle Mouths’, Jones lambasted the economically unproductive citizens of the late empire—aristocrats, civil servants, and churchmen: ‘the Christian church imposed a new class of idle mouths on the resources of the empire … a large number lived on the alms of the peasantry, and as time went on more and more monasteries acquired landed endowments which enabled their inmates to devote themselves entirely to their spiritual duties.’ These are Gibbon’s ‘specious demands of charity and devotion’ expressed in measured twentieth-century prose.

  In my opinion, the key internal element in Rome’s success or failure was the economic well-being of its taxpayers. This was because the empire relied for its security on a professional army, which in turn relied on adequate funding. The fourth-century Roman army contained perhaps as many as 600,000 soldiers, all of whom had to be salaried, equipped, and supplied. The number of troops under arms, and the levels of military training and equipment that could be lavished on them, were all determined by the amount of cash that was available. As in a modern state, the contribution in tax of tens of millions of unarmed subjects financed an elite defence corps of full-time fighters. Consequently, again as in a modern state, the strength of the army was closely linked to the well-being of the underlying tax base. Indeed, in Roman times this relationship was a great deal closer than it is today. Military expenditure was by far the largest item in the imperial budget, and there were no other massive departments of state, such as ‘Health
’ or ‘Education’, whose spending could be cut when necessary in order to protect ‘Defence’; nor did the credit mechanisms exist in Antiquity that would have allowed the empire to borrow substantial sums of money in an emergency. Military capability relied on immediate access to taxable wealth.15

  Until fairly recently it was believed that the entire economy of the empire was in severe decline during the third and fourth centuries, with a falling population and much land going out of use: two things that would undoubtedly have weakened Rome’s tax base, and hence its military capability, long before the period of invasions. However, archaeological work in the decades following the Second World War has increasingly cast serious doubt over this interpretation. In most of the eastern Mediterranean, and in parts of the West, excavations and surveys have found conclusive evidence of flourishing economies under the late empire, with abundant and widespread rural and urban prosperity.

  Admittedly, in the West, which is where we need to focus, the picture is more varied and less straightforward than that for the eastern Mediterranean: some provinces, including much of central Italy and parts of Gaul, seem to have been in decline during the third and fourth centuries, from a high point of early imperial well-being; but others, including most of North Africa, were apparently doing very well right up to the time of the invasions.16 Although this may seem a rather weak conclusion, I think, on balance, the jury should remain out on the important question of whether the overall economy of the western empire, and hence its military strength, was in decline before it was hit by the problems of the early fifth century. A hung jury, however, suggests that any decline was not overwhelming; and, in common with most historians, I believe the empire was still very powerful at the end of the fourth century. Unfortunately, a series of disasters was soon to change things.

  Spiralling Problems in the Fifth-Century West

  The relatively benign conditions of the fourth-century West rapidly disappeared in the first decade of the fifth century, as a consequence of invasion. Italy suffered from the presence of large hostile armies in 401–2 (Alaric and the Goths), in 405–2 (Radagaisus), and again from 408 to 412 (Alaric, for the second time); Gaul was devastated in the years 407–9 by the Vandals, Alans, and Sueves; and the Iberian peninsula by the same peoples, from 409. The only regions of the western empire that had not been profoundly affected by violence by 410 were Africa and the islands of the Mediterranean (their turn, at the hands of the Vandals, came rather later). As a result, the tax base of the western empire was very seriously diminished at the precise moment that extra funds were urgently required; the four-fifths tax relief that the imperial government was forced to grant to the provinces of central and southern Italy in 413 gives a clear indication of the scale of the loss.17

  In April 406 the western government urgently needed more soldiers in order to oppose the incursion into Italy of Germanic tribesmen led by Radagaisus, and it issued a call for new recruits. Each was offered a bounty of ten gold solidi on joining up, but the payment of seven of these was delayed until ‘things have been brought to a conclusion’—in other words, because the money was not immediately available. At the same time, a highly unusual but even cheaper option was attempted—the levying of slaves, who were to be paid with a mere two solidi and with their freedom, the latter presumably at the cost of their owners.18 Radagaisus’ incursion was successfully crushed, but it was immediately followed by a disastrous sequence of events: the crossing of the Rhine by Vandals, Sueves, and Alans at the very end of 406; the usurpation of Constantine III in 407, taking with him the resources of Britain and much of Gaul; and the Goths’ return to Italy in 408. ‘Things’ in the West were never satisfactorily ‘brought to a conclusion’, and the recruits of 406 may never have received their seven owed solidi.

  Historians dispute when exactly the military strength of the western army declined. In my opinion, the chaos of the first decade of the fifth century will have caused a sudden and dramatic fall in imperial tax revenues, and hence in military spending and capability. Some of the lost territories were temporarily recovered in the second decade of the century; but much (the whole of Britain and a large part of Gaul and Spain) was never regained, and even reconquered provinces took many years to get back to full fiscal health—as we have seen, the tax remission granted to the provinces of Italy in 413 had to be renewed in 418, even though Italy had been spared any incursions during these intervening years. Furthermore the imperial recovery was only short-lived; in 429 it was brought definitively to an end by the successful crossing of the Vandals into Africa, and the devastation of the western empire’s last remaining secure tax base. By 444, when Valentinian III instituted a new sales tax, matters had certainly reached a parlous state. In the preamble to this law, the emperor acknowledged the urgent need to boost the strength of the army through extra spending, but lamented the current position, where ‘neither for newly recruited troops, nor for the old army, can sufficient supplies be raised from the exhausted taxpayers, to provide food and clothing’.19

  Invasions were not the only problem faced by the western empire; it was also badly affected during parts of the fifth century by civil war and social unrest. During the very important years between 407 and 413, the emperor Honorius (resident in Italy) was challenged, often concurrently, by a bewildering array of usurpers: a puppet-emperor supported by the Goths (Attalus); two usurpers in Gaul (Constantine III and Jovinus); one in Spain (Maximus); and one in Africa (Heraclian). With the benefit of hindsight, we know that what the empire required during these years was a concerted and united effort against the Goths (then marching through much of Italy and southern Gaul, and sacking Rome itself in 410), and against the Vandals, Sueves, and Alans (who entered Gaul at the very end of 406 and Spain in 409). What it got instead were civil wars, which were often prioritized over the struggle with the barbarians. As one contemporary source wryly noted: ‘This emperor [Honorius], while he never had any success against external enemies, had great good fortune in destroying usurpers.’20

  It is not difficult to show how these civil wars damaged Roman attempts to control the Germanic incursions. In 407 Constantine III entered Gaul as an imperial claimant from Britain. As a result of this coup, the emperor Honorius, when faced with the Goths’ second invasion of Italy in 408, was unable to call on the armies of the North. Despite obtaining military assistance from his eastern colleague, and from a large band of Hunnic mercenaries, Honorius and his generals never felt strong enough to engage the Goths in open battle during their four years in Italy; and no attempt was made to avenge the humiliation of the 410 sack of Rome.21 The military position in Italy had clearly worsened from the time of Alaric’s first incursion into Italy, in 401–2; then, with the aid of troops from north of the Alps, the Goths had been restricted to northern Italy, successfully defeated in battle twice, and eventually driven back into the Balkans.

  In Gaul, during these same difficult years, Honorius’ rival Constantine III had some success against the Vandals, Alans, and Sueves; but his position was always under threat from Honorius in Italy (who eventually succeeded in getting him killed in 411). He also faced challenges elsewhere: first, when relatives of Honorius waged war against him in the Iberian peninsula; and subsequently, when he himself faced a usurpation, again from a power base in Spain. In the meantime, both Constantine III and Honorius (to the extent that his writ ran at all in these regions) faced provincial revolts in both Britain and Armorica (north-western Gaul), aimed apparently at shaking off imperial power altogether. Needless to say, the invaders were able to take full advantage of this highly confused and unsatisfactory situation. One source explicitly tells us that Constantine III’s preoccupation with rivals in Spain allowed the Germanic invaders a free hand in Gaul.22

  Some civil strife went deeper than usurpation aimed at replacing the rule of one emperor with that of another. Areas of fifth-century Gaul and Spain were troubled by people named in contemporary sources as Bacaudae. Unfortunately these sources are, without ex
ception, so laconic that scholars have been able to differ widely in their understanding of who exactly these people were, and what they wanted. They used to be seen, when Marxism was in vogue, as oppressed peasants and slaves in revolt—a sign that the imperial system was rotten through and through. Currently they tend to be viewed as local self-help groups from much higher up the social scale, struggling to defend themselves and their interests in difficult times. Probably they were a bit of both. There is certainly good evidence to suggest that dissatisfaction amongst the lower classes played a significant part in these revolts. One of their two recorded leaders was a doctor, an unlikely commander of an aristocratic group; and a number of contemporary sources associated the Bacaudae with slaves and oppressed peasants—one text that has no obvious axe to grind says of a particular revolt: ‘almost all the slaves of Gaul joined the conspiracy of the Bacaudae’. Whatever their social origins, the Bacaudae certainly added a further twist to the political and military confusion of Gaul and Spain in the first half of the fifth century.23

  There was, of course, a close connection between failure ‘abroad’ and the usurpations and rebellions ‘at home’. It is not a coincidence that Honorius faced so many usurpers in the years following the Vandal, Alan, and Sueve crossing of the Rhine at the end of 406. His failure adequately to defend the empire dealt a devastating blow to the prestige of his regime, and encouraged those who wanted strong rule and successful defence against the invaders to seek them elsewhere—for instance, from Constantine III, whose power base was north of the Alps, and who would therefore keep the northern armies in Gaul, rather than withdraw them to Italy to fight the Goths. Honorius’ preoccupation with Alaric in Italy also allowed usurpation to flourish, since it delayed the mounting of a strong imperial response to any outbreak of rebellion. As in other periods of history, failure against foreign enemies and civil war were very closely linked, indeed fed off each other.