External Crisis of the Roman Empire
The decline of the Roman empire is one of the great formative dramas in world history. there has been considerable debate over the causes for this ‘event’. One must remember, right at the onset, that though there was a real decline in the political power and unity of the Western Roman EmpireThe Empire was to live on in the East for many centuries, though as an essentially regional power centered on Greece and Anatolia till the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Modern historians tend to prefer the term ‘Byzantine Empire’ for the eastern, medieval stage of the Roman Empire.
owing to the long-standing debate on whether one should view Roman decline as a ‘fall’ of Western Civilization or merely as a ‘transition’ or ‘transformation’ caused by Germanic invasions. Complex societies emerged for a time in parts of Gaul, Spain and England, based upon a mixing of local elites converging around Roman traditions. However, it was also true that the 5th century was replete with invasion, death and suffering, the displacement of populations, the partial destruction of cultural resources, and the very real fracturing of the power of the Western Empire. The external factors which led to the decline of Rome included migrations and invasions by two cultures: The Germanic Tribes and the Central Asian nomadic tribes (mainly the Huns).
Contact between the Germanic peoples and the Roman world existed long before the empire’s crisis in the third century. Prior to Caesar’s conquest of Gaul, most Romans had simply never bothered to distinguish between the Germans and the Celts, instead lumping them together under the term barbarians. While there were innumerable confrontations along the Rhine-
Danube border over the centuries, Roman contact with the Germans for the most part benefited both societies. The Germans learned Roman concepts of statehood and statecraft, agricultural techniques, and eventually knowledge both of Latin and writing; the Romans used Germanic immigration to settle the land and stabilize the frontier. The border between their two worlds was in fact an extremely porous oneBy the 4th Century, Romanized Germans actually made up the bulk of the imperial army in Western Europe.
According to G. I. Smith (The Historical Geography of Western Europe), the Germanic tribes originated from a northern Scandinavian and Baltic stock from c. 1000 B.C.
Prior to the 3rd Century A.D., most of the Germanic tribes were agriculturalists with a rudimentary degree of social organization. They tended to live in nucleated villages of modest size, seldom involving more than a couple of hundred people. A nucleated village was one in which the inhabitants lived in a central cluster of houses, mere hamlets, from which the crop fields radiated out, with meadows and pastures lying just beyond. There are signs that their populations swelled significantly starting in the Ist Century B.C. and continuing until the 3rd century A.D. Increased need for food and the desire to avoid Asiatic nomads like the Alans and Huns began to force many thousands of these Germans toward the Roman border.
Nonetheless, warfare and violence certainly characterized the life of these tribes by the time the Romans encountered them, but these attributes were due more to the harsh conditions they lived in than to any genetically-ingrained aggression.
Among a people that lacked rigid social hierarchies, one could advance oneself within the clan or tribe by feats of arms, or perhaps create a new such group under one’s direct rule.
The Germanic tribes had been pressing against the Roman frontier long before the 4th Century, without leading to a cleavage of that frontier. As M. Grant (The Fall of the Roman Empire) points out, Rome still possessed superficial strength in the late 4th Century. Even as late as 363 A.D. the Empire was able to field major armies in the east which could successfully invade, if not permanently hold down, the Persians.
It is now necessary to examine the reasons behind the Ist Great Wave of Germanic Migrations and Invasions in the 4th and 5th Centuries B.C. By the late fourth century, the internal crisis had reached its flash-point and Rome was on fire, beleaguered by a crumbling administrative and political edifice, with the Roman currency, Denarius, being devalued to hitherto unseen levels, coupled with a degradation of coins, leading to a demonetization of the economy, leaving Rome
penniless. It was not even in a situation to pay for the upkeep of its military.
In such a situation, it became impossible to control the Germanic migrations. Several factors caused the Germans to push westward in increased numbers. First was the general problem of overpopulation. The Roman territories, despite the problems they were experiencing, were considerably wealthier, the land itself more fertile, and the general climate more tolerable than what was available north of the Danube and east of the Rhine. Added to the economic lure of the empire was the desire to flee the blood feuds that increasingly characterized Germanic life. As the struggle for survival intensified, conflicts between clans and tribes became more frequent, and drove many to seek a more peaceful life within the Roman world. A third factor was the approach of the Huns, a fiercely aggressive group of warrior-nomads from central Asia. Recognizing that they were powerless before these new invaders, the Germans sought refuge with the Romans. Thus, what had long been a stable process of more or less orderly migration and acculturation turned into a full-scale invasion of terrified, starving, and desperate—and therefore aggressive—Germanic groups into the empire. Modern Germans refer to this period of their history as the Völkerwanderung, or the “Wanderings of the Peoples.”
Matters came to a head in 376 A.D. when the Huns arrived at the easternmost reaches of Europe, There they crushed the Ostrogoths and sent them fleeing into the Balkans. The Visigoths, who were the Huns’ next target, pleaded with the emperor in Constantinople for permission to settle within the imperial province of Moesia, which lay just south of the Danube. The emperor Valens (A.D. 364–378), an Arian Christian, sympathized with the Visigoths, who had some time before converted to Arianism and granted them refuge on the usual condition that they serve as federati and defend that section of the border. Valens failed to provide the arms and materiel he had promised, however, and left the Visigoths exposed to continued attack from the Huns and scorn from the local population for their failure to defend them. The Visigoths responded by renouncing their alliance with the empire and going on a rampage. They plundered the province of Thrace and began to march on Constantinople itself. Valens, at the head of the imperial army, met them in battle near Adrianople in 378. The Visigoths defeated the Romans and killed Valens, then went on to pillage much of Greece.
Later emperors survived the onslaught in two ways. First, they relied increasingly on the power of German generals familiar with the fighting strategies and tactics of the invaders. Within just a few years the generals themselves were in real command, often using the emperor as a mere puppet to be set up or pulled down at will. Second, the emperors focused their energies on defending and preserving the eastern half of the empire only, and opened up the west to the newcomers.
We do not know exact numbers, of course, but historians generally agree that several hundred thousand Germans entered Western Europe at this time. The Alans and Suevi plundered their way diagonally through France, from the northeast to the southwest, before ultimately settling in northern and western Spain. The Vandals followed at their heels and in 429 crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and took control of the western portion of North Africa and the city of Carthage in 439. Groups of Franks moved into northern and central France, while large numbers of Angles, Jutes, and later Saxons crossed into England. The search for food and safety from attack drove them all.
If it seems that the seemingly invincible Roman army (at least till a couple of centuries ago) fell like nine-pins before the Germanic onslaught, there were some fundamental cancers which festered within Rome itself which led to this situation.
By the end of the fourth century, several factors limited the Roman military. According to Arther Ferrill (The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation), the shift of strategy from
preclusive frontier defense to a system of ‘defense-in depth’ backed by large mobile field armies held in reserve was not entirely effective. Ward-Perkins argues that the unwillingness of the general populations to be conscripted into the army, and their unwillingness to either support the army through the burden of taxation or of levies of goods made it increasingly difficult in the fourth century to support something like the 600,000 that were needed to fully defend the frontiers.
These Germanic movements convulsed western Europe and disrupted agriculture, trade, and civic life. But the Germans’ aim was never to destroy Roman society. The confederation of clans and tribes into “kingdoms” was itself a means to accommodate themselves to the needs of the tottering empire. Nevertheless, Roman life disintegrated. The cities of western Europe fell into decay through pillage, neglect, and abandonment. In order to preserve the state, administrators in the west raised taxes to exorbitant levels, which prompted city-dwellers—or at least the wealthier ones—to flee the cities altogether and take up residence in country estates, where they survived by bribing officials The government in turn placed all its demands on the common populace, who found the burden so intolerable that many frankly welcomed the arrival of Germanic kings who offered far easier terms in return for popular support.
One group, though, was never welcomed anywhere: the Asiatic Huns who from 433 to 453 were ruled by the savage warlord Attila. From their base in what is today Hungary, Attila’s soldiers terrorized Europe. Aiming first at the wealthier east, they slaughtered people throughout the Balkans and advanced to Constantinople itself; but when they proved unable to break through the fortifications there, they turned their eyes westward. They tore through central Europe quickly, burning and pillaging everything in sight. In 451, near Châlons in northeastern France, however, a coalition of Roman soldiers and Germanic armies defeated Attila, whose successes had always resulted from quick raids instead of pitched battles. Defeated in Gaul, Attila turned toward Italy where he once again plundered with abandon. Attila flattened Milan and Pavia next, but disease began to weaken his forces soon thereafter.
Attila’s empire broke up quickly after his death in 453 and the Huns never again threatened the west, but their brief appearance in Europe had three important consequences. First, as one of the prime motivating forces for the flight of the Germanic groups into the empire, the Huns indirectly served as a catalyst of Roman decline. Second, their defeat at the hands of the largely German imperial army and the temporarily united Germanic “kings” boosted the newcomers’ morale and helped to legitimize those leaders and justify their new “royal” status. Lastly, the negotiated settlement outside Rome greatly enhanced the prestige of the pope in secular affairs.
Only two decades after the withdrawal of the Huns, the Roman Empire in the west formally ceased to exist. In 476, Odoacer, another in a long string of German generals who dominated Italy, deposed the last of the puppet emperors in the west—a boy named Romulus Augustulus—and ruled in his own name. Like other German kings, he sought some sort of legal recognition of his new title from either the emperor in Byzantium, the pope in Rome, or both..
During the following centuries Italy would be ruled by kings, whether Goths, Ostrogoths or
Lombards. Only for a short time in the 6th century would the eastern empire be able to reassert itself. Meanwhile, Gaul would settle down to new patterns of accommodation between tribesmen and the Gallo-Roman population. With the emergence of Clovis as King of the Franks in 481, a new phase of nation building would begin in the west.
Armed with their new faith and buoyed by the legitimacy bestowed upon Clovis’ rule by his alliance with the Church, the Franks expanded aggressively. Their first campaigns after their conversion aimed eastward, back into the Germanic homelands east of the Rhine. After virtually annihilating the Alemanni, they fought against the Saxons, whom they quickly persuaded to flee across the North Sea into England. Franks were in the best position to replenish their numbers with other migrants of Germanic stock, and also that Frankish society remained the most intensely Germanic of all the early medieval kingdoms, with the least amount of assimilation between their Frankish and Roman heritages. Once they had solidified this link with the Germanic homeland, the Franks swept southward in the hope of reaching the Mediterranean. They were frustrated in this hope by Theodoric and his Ostrogoths, who moved quickly to occupy the region of Provence. From Clovis onward, virtually all the Frankish kings for the next seven hundred and fifty years had their sights set on extending their dominions to the Mediterranean shoreline— until Louis IX finally succeeded in the middle of the thirteenth century.
The strategic and military defeat of Rome was crucial, but this was not just based on the external barbarian problem, nor on the barbarization and decline of the imperial armies. The
Roman army relied upon a secure access to resources, manpower, bullion, and goods. In the past it had been superior in its organization, logistics and administration to the armies opposing it, while its tactical and technical abilities were only slightly better than those of the Germanic tribes. Without a stable system of government, administration and taxation to secure these advantages, the Roman army had to decline both in numbers and quality.
The final decline of Rome formed the basis of Late Antique culture and the following Middle Ages.
Policies of barbarian settlement began as early as Marcus Aurelius in southern Dacia (from the 160s A.D.), but continued with Constantine and Valentinian I. Aurelius’s strategy of granting permission to Germanic cultivators to settle down within Roman territories was his way of appeasing them and putting a brake to their constant incursions. The Germanic cultivators were legally free but they were assigned to specific landowners and tied to the soil. Each group of cultivators was placed under the supervision of a Roman official.
Later, in late 6th century A.D., when the Germanic tribes had firmly established their kingdoms, there emerged a new agrarian system.
Both Frankish and Lombard rulers simply confiscated local latifundia on a large scale, annexing them to the royal treasury or distributing them to their noble retinues.
Scattered Celtic hamlets gave way to nucleated villages, in which the individual property of peasant household was combined with a collective agrarian expansion on open fields. Above all, local chiefs and lords consolidated their powers. By the turn of the 7th century A.D., a legally defined and hereditary aristocracy was consolidated in Anglo-Saxon England. Thus, the second wave of Germanic invasions produced both a larger aristorcracy with large estates and also populated the countryside with village communities and clumps of small peasant holdings. Thus, we see that the stage is set for the next stage of social formations, i.e. Feudalism.