In the absence of the Catholic Church, the use and coherence of Latin would presumably have faded more rapidly from the fifth and sixth centuries onward. Vernacular variants would gradually have gained ground as part of ongoing linguistic evolution rather than in reaction to a church-driven renewal of Roman-style Latin. Latin would not have proven as resilient as regional usages continued to diverge, and would have found it much harder to reclaim a prominent position. In the most extreme scenario, it might even have disappeared altogether except as a pursuit for learned antiquarians.
In the absence of a viable foundation—ecclesiastical formal Latin coupled with formidable clerical power—there is no good reason why the revival of state power and the attendant shoring up of regional languages and scripts should have been accompanied by a renewal of Latin in elite circles: the appeal of emerging regional identities might well have been too strong. This highlights the crucial role of Christianity not just in creating and maintaining a unifying system of norms and beliefs but also in helping to preserve a modicum of linguistic unity. Both directly and indirectly, therefore, religion and the church acted as the most significant integrative force.
But what would it have taken to erase Christianity—and thus probably also (high-register) medieval Latin—from post-Roman Europe? In principle, very little. Regardless of what we make of the canonical stories, there can be no doubt that Christianity grew from very small beginnings, and might just as well not have done so at all. When in the early 60s CE, one Jesus, son of Ananias, made a nuisance of himself by predicting a judgment “against Jerusalem and the sanctuary … and against all the people,” the local authorities handed him over to the Roman governor, who had him “flayed to the bone”: yet even after Jesus failed to respond to the governor’s queries, the latter chose to dismiss him as a harmless madman. Except for the final outcome, the other elements of this tale closely resemble those attributed to his more famous namesake.32
What if the latter had also been let go? The Savior’s sacrifice on the cross was essential, especially for his greatest popularizer, Paul of Tarsus. But what if no Paul had stepped in to market this new sect to a wider, non-Jewish audience? Or if different versions of this tradition, or some Gnostic variant, had gained the upper hand? Or if rival churches had splintered among irresolvable schisms, beginning with Marcionite rejection of the Old Testament tradition? And what would the late Roman church have looked like without the emperor Constantine’s unexpected embrace? Or without the Nicene creed: it was the uncompromising affirmation of Jesus’s divinity that was to set Christendom apart from other civilizations, ruling out divine kingship, making it harder to check the claims of the church and setting the scene for formative conflicts between popes and secular rulers. There are so many ways in which Christianity could have failed to get off the ground or developed differently even if it had. And we cannot blithely assume that some comparable movement might seamlessly have taken its place, least of all Judaism.33
A mature Roman empire without Christianity or anything like it is thus perfectly plausible, and arguably more plausible than what actually happened. This, in turn, would have deprived post-Roman Europe of a shared belief system as well as Latin, alongside an important means of co-opting the Germanic successor regimes into an existing cultural ecumene. All of these absences would inevitably have deepened the divisions emerging from the wreckage of universal empire: after a while, there might no longer have been a single elite language to be used across borders; there would have been fewer and less specific widely shared beliefs and norms, and less-“domesticated” successor kings; and fewer if any classical texts written in Latin would have survived. Without Roman-style Christianity, postimperial spatial polycentrism would have asserted itself with even greater intensity than in real life, whereas individual societies might have ended up less fractured within.
Could that have diverted Europe from its trajectory toward competitive modernization? If that had been the case—if the lack of unifying features had made fragmentation less productive—we would find ourselves in the remarkable position of having to attribute the emergence of the modern world to a highly contingent chain of events, from the Disciples who spread the faith to Paul of Tarsus who made it more accessible and on to the emperor Constantine and his sons. Then again, if polycentrism without Christianity had, in the end, been “good enough,” we would be forced to conclude that Roman tradition in general did not really matter: after all, if it were possible to remove what was by far the most influential of these legacies—Christianity—without aborting modernity, it would seem exceedingly unlikely that the erasure of any less potent legacies (say, in law or political thought) would have made a critical difference.
It seems to me impossible to decide between these two stark alternatives, not least because they involve the kind of brazen counterfactual conjecture that gives the whole exercise a bad name: a sweepingly maximalist rewriting of history that opens up so many second-order counterfactuals that the simulation becomes impossible to control. The best we can do is to acknowledge that there is at least a good chance that imperial Christianity was in fact essential in bringing about much later breakthroughs.
This position preserves a space for the notion that the Roman empire contributed meaningfully and perhaps decisively to modernity. However, it would have done so in a much narrower and more specific manner than the richness and variety of Roman legacies might lead us to suspect. If it did contribute to this end, it did so in the spirit of “no man cometh unto the Father, but by me”—in the sense that there might not have been a path to the modern world except through the imperialized Catholic Church. Nothing else that Rome handed down to later generations would have mattered nearly as much, or—most notably Latin—mattered only because Christianity allowed it to.34
Without Rome
But what if there had never been a Roman empire to begin with? This question makes even the scenario of a Roman world without Christianity appear moderate by comparison: a concern fit only for the foolhardy, if not the outright foolish. Even so, the very idea is far from exotic. As we have seen, the Roman empire was a unique formation in that part of the world (chapter 1). Many conditions had to come together in just the right way to make it succeed (chapters 2–4). And it not only never returned, it was never even likely to (chapters 5–9). For all these reasons, a Europe without the Roman empire is more plausible than one with it. This alone makes this counterfactual less pointless to pursue. What, then, might Europe have looked like had the Romans never taken over?
Just as in the case of the church, it would not take any dramatic modifications of history to produce this alternative outcome. In the fifth and early fourth centuries BCE, defeat by its neighbor Veii, destruction by Gauls, or failure due to internal strife were all perfectly plausible events that could have prevented Rome from ever becoming a major power. Nor was it a given that some other Italian entity, such as the Samnitic confederation, would have taken its place and, above all, would have proved as adept at setting up a comparably effective war machine.
In the absence of large-scale expansionist state formation in the Italian peninsula, the most likely short-term outcome in the western Mediterranean would have been some form of stalemate between Carthage and the western Greeks. While the former would have been better able to access additional manpower and resources by expanding farther west (as they eventually did in actual history), the latter could balance this with the help of other Greeks polities to the east. Although a variety of shocks might have upset this uneasy equilibrium—a successful Greek or Hellenistic attack on Carthage, or conversely Italian encroachment on the Greeks—the lack of Roman-scale mobilization capabilities speaks against a scenario of stable imperial consolidation in the western Mediterranean.35
In the eastern Mediterranean, meanwhile, the Hellenistic successor states would have remained locked in conflict. Absent Rome’s intervention against Macedon, the Seleucids would have found it difficult to expand westward. Although Sele
ucid conquest of a Ptolemaic Egypt shorn of Roman support might well have been feasible, long-term control would have been an elusive goal, just as it had been for Assyrians and Achaemenids and was again to be for the Abbasids later. Parthian pressure, which in actual history subdued much of the Seleucid territories, posed a further constraint. In the longer term, renewed Iranian expansion was a plausible outcome, with the Parthian empire eventually absorbing the remaining Seleucid domains and perhaps advancing into Asia Minor and Egypt as well. Yet in that case, they too would have faced the same challenges as the Achaemenids before them, struggling to hold on to the Nile valley or the Aegean region.36
Over time, an Iranian empire centered on Iran and Mesopotamia might have been balanced by Hellenistic states in the eastern Mediterranean basin. In this context, Hellenistic culture could have survived and even prospered, just as it did under Roman rule. The major centers of Greek learning—the Aegean and Alexandria—were relatively far removed from Iranian power bases, and might have endured as long as they did in real life.37
Would Hellenistic culture have spread as widely as it did under the aegis of Roman power? The use of Greek language and writing is a critical issue. They were successful where Macedonians ruled but also made inroads beyond: Roman historians writing in Greek are the best-known example. Latin literature arose only when Rome was already on its way to empire and initially involved a great deal of translation from Greek into Latin. In the absence of Roman rule, would other societies in Western Europe have done the same as political and socioeconomic complexity increased and state-level polities formed?38
Real-life evidence gives little cause for optimism. During the last half of the first millennium BCE, local populations tended to adapt existing scripts of Phoenician, Etruscan, and Greek origin to record their own languages. Without a later Roman takeover and the concomitant spread of its script and language, this trend would not have been conducive to cultural unity. Most Iberian groups that left written material wrote in Iberian languages using Iberian scripts, influenced by the Phoenician alphabet. The spread of the Greco-Iberian script remained minimal, to say nothing of Greek itself. In Gaul, despite a long-standing Greek presence in Marseille and trade links up the Rhone, Greek inscriptions are rarely found outside the extreme south, even if they were on occasion set up to record texts in native languages. Evidence of the use of Greek as a lingua franca among the Celtic Gauls is exiguous as well as ambivalent, reflecting weak penetration overall.39
What is now the most visible sign of influence, Celtic coinage, was originally closely modeled on Greek types but gradually diverged into native designs. Only Greek lettering was frequently used in this context, not just in Gaul but even, if rarely, in Britain: even so, Gallo-Greek coin appeared only late (dating from period of Roman advance) and remained highly limited in scope.40
The picture is complicated by the observation that Iberian and Celtic—as well as Illyrian and Germanic—societies at the time had not yet reached levels of development that would have provided strong impetus for more systematic literacy. Before the Roman conquests, writing had been optional—or at least that is the most economical conclusion to derive from the patchy nature and uneven density of writing practices.41
Thus, continued development without Roman intervention might eventually have opened up opportunities beyond what the actual pre-Roman record shows. Even so, the Iberian case should give us pause: given the established dominance of local writing and language, the most plausible longer-term outcome would seem to be the intensified use of local scripts to record local languages. Much the same would have been true of Italy, with its profusion of local letters and languages, and even future Gallic state elites might well have elected to adapt rather than copy Greek writing. Under these circumstances, it is highly doubtful that Greek cultural traits would eventually have come to be shared across the diverse societies of continental Europe. This matters because in view of the differences between Iberian, Celtic, Germanic, and Illyrian languages, Hellenization without empire would have been the only available means of creating some degree of coherent linguistic and cultural framework for a politically divided Europe, at least in elite circles.
Yet even in the most optimistic scenario, there is no plausible way to imagine Greek becoming anywhere near as influential as Latin was under Roman rule. Whether a thin veneer of Hellenistic elite culture, insofar as it would have developed at all, would have left much of a mark on later European civilization is questionable. This is not a trivial issue: some of the most important Greek influences on later Europe could in theory have occurred without Latin-Roman mediation. Key texts of the medieval canon—Aristotle, Ptolemy, and Galen—were of Greek and Hellenistic origin, as were the gospels and the letters of Paul. Absent Roman rule, such writings—or rather, in most of these cases, their putative counterfactual Hellenistic equivalents—could have been accessed in the original, even if only by the very few. The same is true of technical texts—most notably by Archimedes—that stimulated early modern advances in mathematics and physics and may arguably have made a vital contribution to the eventual scientific revolution.42
In this Rome-less environment, trade and religion would have served as the main conduits for the dissemination of Greek. Even without Pontius Pilate, the Hellenistic Levant might very well have produced belief systems that were not wholly dissimilar from Christianity: the famous “Dead Sea Scrolls” from Qumran show the potential. And even if that had not happened, plenty of other regional religions from Isis worship to Mithraism and Manichaeism that were successful in the actual Roman west could have made inroads, and indeed perhaps even more so if unconstrained by Christian competition. Given enough time, a Greek-inflected intellectual and cultural superstructure could have helped build bridges in a Europe without hegemonic empire.
Just how fractured would that Europe have been? There were no plausible substitutes for the Roman empire. Even if it had managed to overcome the western Greeks, Carthage, centered on Tunisia and constrained by lower mobilization capacity, would not have been in a position to advance anywhere near as far into continental Europe as the Romans did. Greek- or Macedonian-led imperial state formation—another Alexander-style eruption, this time directed westward—was made unlikely by the multiple weaknesses of the Hellenistic state system around 200 BCE that I discussed in chapter 3. Thus, given the limitations of the major powers along the Mediterranean rim, indigenous state formation among Iberians, Gauls, and Germans seems by far the most realistic long-term scenario.43
Given the tremendous scope of this counterfactual, there is simply no sound way of guessing what this world might have looked like in the second half of the first millennium CE. All we can say is that it need not have been dramatically different from the real one. If we accept my argument in chapter 8 that Europe was inherently less suitable for large-scale imperiogenesis than other core regions of the Old World, the emergence of sometimes sizable but not vast regional polities, endowed with kings, cities, writing, and currencies, might well have been the most realistic outcome.
FIGURE E.1 Actual and counterfactual concentration of state power in Europe, 250 BCE–1800 CE (in terms of the population of Europe ruled by the largest power, in percent).
In this case, at least in the broadest terms, the political map of Europe in 500 or 1000 CE need not have diverged widely from that of post-Roman Europe, dominated by some large but not particularly capable states interspersed with more highly fragmented regions. There was more than one path to that point: the historical trajectory, which involved an enormous detour from tribes, chiefdoms and city-states to near-monopolistic empire to weak regional polities, and alternative counterfactual trajectories charting a more gradual but also more linear progression from the first to the third of these stages (figure E.1).44
The plausible counterfactual of indigenous state formation makes it unnecessary to consider Roman legacies of centralizing statecraft an essential precondition for the later rise of what Daron Acemoglu an
d James Robinson call the “Shackled Leviathan” in Western Europe—the powerful yet nondespotic type of state that came to protect liberties and promote human flourishing. Even if centralizing governmental traditions needed to balance localized consensual decision-making for such productive polities to emerge, imperial Rome was by no means their only possible source.45
Just how interconnected elite culture would have been across Europe’s counterfactual societies of the mid- and late first millennium CE, so many centuries after we diverge from actual history, is obviously impossible to divine. At one—and admittedly far-fetched—end of a broad spectrum of possibilities, we might encounter a world of kingdoms run by bilingual (local-language and Hellenophone) elites, supplied and educated by equally bilingual traders and scholars, and tended to by the Greek-speaking priests of some Levantine salvation religion. At the opposite extreme, vernacular languages and concurrent writing systems of the Paleo-Hispanic, Celtic, Italic, Illyrian, and Germanic varieties would have suppressed transregional modes of communication, and a wide range of indigenous animistic and polytheistic beliefs would have coexisted with Hellenistic imports. In the latter case, deeply entrenched fragmentation would have sustained political polycentrism and institutional variety while impeding the flow of people, goods, and ideas within Europe.
Only if, in a world without Rome, outcomes had come to be concentrated near that end of the spectrum could the Roman empire be credited with a contribution that might have been vital to later European development. And even this view is predicated on a premise that cannot be accepted a priori, and therefore remains little more than a guess: that without empire, there would not have been enough connectivity and cohesion later to make fragmentation developmentally productive and nurture eventual breakthroughs.
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