How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (11 page)

Valerian succeeded Decius to the throne and continued the persecution of Christians. The hiding places of more bishops were discovered, and they, too, were tortured and killed. But no Christian victim came to a worse end than did Valerian himself, who led his forces east to meet a Persian threat, lost the battle, and was taken prisoner. The Persians humiliated him, tortured him at great length, and, after he died, stuffed his skin with straw and kept it in a temple as a trophy.

Valerian’s son Gallienus became the next emperor. Like so many other emperors, Gallienus was murdered by the army, but not before he
repealed all of his father’s anti-Christian policies. (His wife was a Christian, as revealed by coins minted at the time.)
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This done, everything was quiet until 303, when the last and most furious persecution commenced.

As had Decius, the Emperor Diocletian sought to enlist the old gods to set everything right. When, once again, the Christians refused to participate, his designated successor, Galerius, pushed him to crack down. So, despite the fact that Diocletian’s wife and daughter were Christians,
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he issued a decree, probably crafted by Galerius (who succeeded him as emperor two years later), that banned all Christian gatherings, ordered the seizure or destruction of all churches, required that all Christian scriptures be burned, barred Christians from public office, and prohibited anyone from freeing a Christian slave. Arrests, torture, and brutal executions began at once. All told, approximately three thousand Christian leaders and prominent members died, and thousands of others were sentenced to slavery.

But on his deathbed in 311, Galerius revoked all the anti-Christian decrees. He grumbled that the persecutions had been ineffective and then ordered Christians to pray for his recovery (and some probably did).

The persecutions were over. In part, they failed because Romans mistakenly thought that the way to destroy the Church was from the top down—that if deprived of their leaders, the rank and file would fall away. This probably would have destroyed pagan temples, but among Christians, behind every leader stood a line of members ready to step up into the role. In any case, the imperial persecutions came too late. Christianity had become too big to be stopped.

In 303, when the great persecution prompted by Galerius began, Christians already made up about two-thirds of the citizens of the city of Rome—and they were soon to make up the majority of everyone in the empire.
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Then, after Constantine won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and seized the throne in 312, he declared his conversion to Christianity. Subsequently every Roman emperor was a Christian, except for Julian (332–363), who served fewer than two years. The Christianization of Rome was complete.

But the “Romanization of Christianity” (to use Peter Heather’s phrase) had begun.
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Constantine meddled endlessly in church governance, and soon Christianity became a highly centralized bureaucracy modeled on the Roman state. Ironically, this new ecclesiastical structure was destined to long outlive the empire and to play a pivotal role in the rise of the West.

The Fall of Rome

In 410 the city of Rome was sacked by the Gothic
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army of King Alaric. All across the empire the educated and privileged classes went into mourning—and have continued to do so through the centuries. Upon hearing the news, Saint Jerome (347–420) lamented that “the whole world perished in one city.”
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In 2006 the Oxford historian Bryan Ward-Perkins wrote that the fall of Rome had the tragic effect of “throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times.”
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Of course, Rome was not the capital even of the Western Empire at the time—the emperor had made Ravenna his new capital, easily defended because of its geography (on the Adriatic coast, more than two hundred miles north of Rome), but badly situated for any attempt to defend Italy. No matter, the city of Rome was of such immense symbolic significance that its dire fate was regarded as bringing an end to the empire. Technically, the Western Empire lingered for several more decades (the last emperor was deposed in 476), and the Eastern Empire lasted for another millennium. But when Gothic troops could prowl the streets of what had been the largest and most powerful city on earth, looting its palaces and public buildings, the Roman Interlude was over.

Assigning Blame

From the start, there have been vigorous and bitter efforts to explain this “calamity.” The first seems to have been by the Byzantine pagan Zosimus, who published a
New History
written in Greek several decades after the last emperor in the Roman West was deposed. Early in his volume, Zosimus wrote that just as the historian Polybius (200–118 BC) had reported how “Romans acquired their sovereignty … I am going to tell how they lost it through their own blind folly.”
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He proceeded to anticipate Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) by blaming Christianity, but with a remarkable twist. Like Gibbon, Zosimus charged that “the precepts of Christian religion had the effect of debilitating the martial spirit.” But as a pagan, Zosimus also agreed with those emperors who blamed Christians for offending the traditional gods of Rome, causing them to abandon the empire to its fate. Zosimus cited other Roman follies as well. He believed that everything had gone downhill since the republic had been abandoned for rule by an emperor. This transformation led to increasingly unsupportable taxation, moral depravity, corruption, weakening of
the army, and needless appeasement of the barbarians. In his massive six-volume work,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, Gibbon put it all in elegant prose, but Zosimus had anticipated most of his conclusions—as Gibbon was fully aware.

Since Gibbon’s time, explaining the fall of Rome has been a bustling cottage industry among professional historians. In 1984 a German professor published a collection of 210 theories of why Rome fell
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—including a widely publicized claim that Romans became mentally incompetent because of lead poisoning caused by lead water pipes
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—and more have been added since. Surely the strangest of the lot, even more bizarre than the lead-poisoning theory, is Kirkpatrick Sale’s claim that Rome was so overfarmed that “millions of square miles of European soils were soon exhausted and the imperium collapsed of its own inability to feed itself.”
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This seems to have taken place without leaving any record of famine.

Nearly all the theories agree with Zosimus and Gibbon in placing the blame squarely on the Romans themselves—that Rome fell because of its internal failures and shortcomings. But as the historian A. H. M. Jones pointed out, “Most of the internal weaknesses which these historians stress were common to both halves of the empire”—and only the West fell.
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For example, if Christianity weakened Roman resolve, why didn’t the Eastern Empire fall too, since Christianity was even stronger in the East? Similarly, government bureaucracy and corruption afflicted the East every bit as much as they did the West.

Other scholars have argued that a severe economic decline precipitated the fall of Rome. The celebrated British historian Arnold J.Toynbee, for example, claimed that during its glory days Rome developed a plunder economy—that its standard of living was based on booty and loot from conquered territories—and that when the empire ceased expanding, revenues began to fall substantially and forced increasingly heavy taxation and then a recession.
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Another twentieth-century historian, Michael Rostovtzeff, agreed that Rome fell mainly from economic decline and crisis:

Work was disorganized and productivity was declining; commerce was ruined by the insecurity of the sea and the roads; industry could not prosper, since the market for industrial products was steadily contracting and the purchasing power of the population was diminishing; agriculture passed through a terrible crisis.… Prices constantly rose, and the value of the currency
depreciated at an unprecedented rate.… The relations between the state and the taxpayer were based on more or less organized robbery: forced work, forced deliveries, forced loans and gifts were the order of the day. The administration was corrupt and demoralized.… The most terrible chaos thus reigned throughout the ruined Empire.
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The trouble is that a very substantial body of archaeological evidence now indicates that during the latter days of the empire, the economy was booming.
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In any event, Alaric and his Goths did not overcome Rome by promising to stimulate the economy, reduce taxes, or stabilize the currency. Theirs was a military victory, and the fall of Rome occurred primarily on the battlefield. Why?

Military Shortcomings

In the nineteenth century the illustrious German historian Theodor Mommsen argued that the Emperor Constantine introduced a brilliant innovation to the Roman army by creating a central “strategic reserve.” Generations of historians have elevated Mommsen’s observation into the received wisdom—in 1976 the distinguished military analyst Eugene N. Luttwak hailed it as Rome’s “Grand Strategy.”
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When Constantine gained the throne in 312, Rome defended its frontiers—especially those along the Rhine and the Danube, facing the various Germanic “barbarians”—with a static, linear perimeter defense. The troops were stationed along the frontier in a series of fortresses, often linked by walls, from which they could move quickly to repel any intruders. When large groups of barbarians entered Roman territory, the nearest garrison troops attacked, knowing that reinforcements would be coming and confident that their superb battle readiness would allow them to stand fast even when greatly outnumbered.

Constantine decided that this system required too many troops and was vulnerable to a major breakthrough. He withdrew most of the troops from the frontier posts, leaving only enough scattered along the borders to deal with small matters such as bandit raids. Constantine then used the troops withdrawn from the borders to form a massive reserve army consisting of the best legions. These reserve forces were stationed in and around central cities, where it was easy to supply them—the cities being
sufficiently close together so that the reserve force could fully assemble rapidly. In the event of a significant barbarian attack, the frontier guards would shut themselves up in their fortresses and send fast riders to summon the strategic reserve. Hence, any invader attacking at any point would always encounter Rome’s biggest and best forces. Little wonder that so many modern, amateur strategists regard this as having been a brilliant move. But as Arther Ferrill noted so insightfully, this innovation contained the seeds of the decay and defeat of the legions.
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For one thing, it made it quite safe and usually profitable for Germanic tribes to raid the frontier areas. Incursions across the Rhine and the Danube became chronic; the fortress troops remained holed up and the raiders could be long gone before central-reserve forces arrived. This imposed such a severe burden on residents of border areas that they tended to leave, creating an inviting vacuum that subsequently led to negotiated “barbarian” resettlements on this land.

Second, the central-reserve troops were not out in remote areas spending their days training and chasing down raiders. They were exposed to all the delights that city folks can provide for soldiers. Zosimus recognized these deficiencies:

Constantine abolished this [frontier] security by removing the greater part of the soldiery from the frontiers to cities that needed no auxiliary forces. He thus deprived of help the people who were harassed by the barbarians and burdened tranquil cities with the pest of the military, so that several straightway were deserted. Moreover, he softened the soldiers, who treated themselves to shows and luxuries. Indeed (to speak plainly) he personally planted the first seeds of our present devastated state of affairs.
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Third, since the frontier troops were no longer expected to fight, they soon were unprepared to do so and no longer could contribute to victory. With the best troops reserved for the central force, the frontier defenders became, as Ferrill put it, “merely second-rate actors in defense policy.”
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Hence, even though on paper the Roman army was larger in the fourth century than in the second, effectively it was smaller.

Finally, as Ferrill remarked, “the worst feature of the new grand strategy was that it undermined the infantry.”
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The strategic reserve force depended on mobility. How fast could it get to where it was needed?
Cavalry could always get there long before the foot soldiers. So the cavalry became the favored force, even though throughout the entire era the major battles were decided by the infantry. It remained true then, as has been true throughout history, that cavalry were no match for well-disciplined infantry. This was especially true given that Roman cavalry, like all cavalry of that time, had no stirrups and rode on thin pads rather than saddles that supported their hips. Consequently, the cavalry could not charge behind a lowered lance without being vaulted off their horses. So cavalry in this era could only swing swords or axes, throw javelins, or shoot bows.

Nevertheless, the Roman the cavalry grew larger than the infantry. Worse yet, by late in the fourth century the infantry had lost their armor to the cavalry and now carried long swords unsuited for close fighting. The Roman military writer Flavius Vegetius Renatus reported in about 400 that the Roman soldiers had dispensed with “breastplates and mail and then the helmets. So our soldiers fought the Goths without any protection for chest and head and were often beaten by archers. Although there were many disasters, which led to the loss of great cities, no one tried to restore breastplates and helmets to the infantry. Thus it happens that troops in battle, exposed to wounds because they have no armour, think about running and not about fighting.”
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