How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (12 page)

Romanized “Barbarians”

As the Roman legions became less well armed and armored and less able to perform complex maneuvers, the “barbarian” armies were becoming better armed and armored and tactically far more sophisticated. This was demonstrated in 378 when a Goth force slaughtered the Romans in the Battle of Adrianople. Consider, too, that the Roman army was now filled with “barbarian” legionnaires and that there even were many Germanic generals leading the Roman forces. Although some historians see this as having undermined the loyalty and diligence of the Roman army, there is no evidence that while serving, the “barbarians” were other than loyal and dedicated.
⁵⁷
But what is true is that the ranks of the “barbarian” armies were filling with veterans returning from Roman service and that many “barbarian” leaders had held Roman commands. Indeed, Alaric, who one day would lead the Gothic sack of Rome, served as a unit commander under Emperor Theodosius I and only returned to lead the Goths when the Romans denied him promotion to general (probably unfairly).
⁵⁸
Or consider that Flavius Stilicho, the son of a “barbarian” Vandal leader,
served as the consul of the Western Empire (which made him the effective supreme commander of the whole Roman army) for a number of years; in 402 he even defeated a Gothic army led by Alaric. In 408 Stilicho fell victim to a political conspiracy and was executed, whereupon, as Ferrill pointed out, “nearly thirty thousand allied barbarian troops marched north to join Alaric.”
⁵⁹

Given all this intermingling, it is absurd to suppose that nothing rubbed off on the Goths, that they remained uncivilized “barbarians” through it all. Indicative of their eagerness to be “Romanized,” soon after their initial contact with Rome, the Goths began to cut their long hair in the shorter Roman style.
⁶⁰
More significantly, well before Alaric’s day the Goths had become Christians—a Gothic bishop attended the Council of Nicaea in 325. In 341 the Goth Ulfilas was consecrated as a bishop by Eusebius, who was then the imperial bishop of Constantinople. Bishop Ulfilas completed a full translation of the Bible from Greek into Gothic in 383 (thus transforming Gothic into a written language).
⁶¹

Nor was Gothic progress limited to copying the Romans. Consider that neither the Romans nor the Greeks had soap; it was invented by the northern “barbarians.”
⁶²
The Germanic farmers beyond the Rhine and the Danube possessed iron plows far superior to anything used by the Romans.
⁶³
They also far surpassed the Romans in making trousers and laced boots, and they even had an early safety pin.
⁶⁴
Perhaps more important, the Germanic “barbarians” were far better at metallurgy than were the Romans, and they produced swords and battle-axes of steel, with cutting edges that were “unequalled until the nineteenth century,” according to historian Lucien Musset.
⁶⁵
They also had ships and the navigational skills needed to successfully battle the Romans, not only in the North Sea but even in the Mediterranean. These matters will be expanded upon in chapter 4.

The point is that even though the Romans called all the Germanic groups “barbarians,” Rome did not fall to a bunch of ignorant savages.

Sacked!

To a significant extent, the Persians caused the Gothic sack of Rome. By posing such a constant military threat from the East, they tied down large imperial forces that might well have been sent to the relief of the West. Instead, the Western Empire had to go it alone.

In October 408 Alaric led his powerful army of Goths (including
the thousands of Roman veterans) over the Alps and into Italy. He was unopposed as the Emperor Honorius holed up in Ravenna. Lacking siege machines, Alaric probably had no intention of trying to take Rome. What he seems to have wanted was land and money, as well as Roman honors to make up for his having been passed up for promotion to general. To this end he marched his forces past the city of Rome and took possession of Ostia, Rome’s port, through which passed the immense supplies of grain needed to feed the city. Fear of famine caused a panic in the city. At that point, in Ferrill’s telling, the Senate offered “a ransom of five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand of silver, four thousand silk tunics, three thousand scarlet hides and three thousand pounds of pepper.”
⁶⁶
Alaric lifted the blockade but did not accept the ransom, demanding that in addition the Emperor Honorius agree to a treaty of alliance that gave permanent settlement to the Goths. Not being personally subject to the blockade, the emperor refused. Alaric resumed the blockade. Again there were negotiations. Finally, in August 410 Alaric surrounded the city. Then someone inside opened a gate and the Goths poured in.

There is debate about what happened next. Some historians claim it was the usual orgy of looting, rape, and massacre—“After three days of pillage, [Rome] was battered almost beyond recognition,” in William Manchester’s words.
⁶⁷
Others claim it was an amazingly restrained performance. Peter Heather characterized it as “a highly civilized sack.”
⁶⁸
Everyone agrees that the churches were not looted and that the Senate was the only building that burned. In any event, it was the symbolic devastation of Rome that mattered most, and that lives on.

The End of the Interlude

But it was Rome that fell, not civilization. The Goths did not suddenly return to barbarism. Nor did the millions of residents of the former empire suddenly forget everything they knew. To the contrary, with the stultifying effects of Roman repression now ended, the glorious journey toward modernity resumed.

Part II

The Not-So-Dark Ages (500–1200)

4

The Blessings of Disunity

I
n response to the long-prevailing absurdities about how the fall of Rome plunged Europe into the “Dark Ages,” some historians now propose that very little happened after the Western Empire collapsed—that the “world of Late Antiquity,” as Peter Brown has identified the era from 150 to 750,
¹
was one of slow transformation. Brown is, of course, correct that the history of these centuries can be told “without invoking an intervening catastrophe and without pausing, for a moment, to pay lip service to the widespread notion of decay.”
²
But to deny decay does not require the denial of change.

The fall of Rome was, in fact, the most beneficial event in the rise of Western civilization, precisely because it unleashed so many substantial and progressive changes.

This chapter will examine the dramatic progress that began after Roman unity fell apart. Europe in this era was blessed with lasting disunity; periodic efforts to reestablish empires failed. Disunity enabled extensive, small-scale social experimentation and unleashed creative competition among hundreds of independent political units, which, in turn, resulted in rapid and profound progress. Thus, just as the Greek “miracle” arose from disunity, so too “European civilization … owes its origins and
raison d’être
to political anarchy,” as Nobel Prize winner F. A. Hayek explained.
³

Not surprisingly, most of the early innovations and inventions came in agriculture. Soon most medieval Europeans ate better than had any
common people in history, and consequently they grew larger and stronger than people elsewhere.
⁴
They also harnessed water and wind power to a revolutionary extent. In addition, faced with constant warfare among themselves, medieval Europeans excelled at inventing and adopting new military technology and tactics, all of them consistent with the Western principles of warfare initiated by the ancient Greeks. In 732, when Muslim invaders drove into Gaul, they encountered an army of superbly armed and trained Franks and were destroyed. Subsequently, the Franks conquered most of Europe and installed a new emperor. Fortunately, the whole thing soon fell apart and Europe’s creative disunity was reestablished.

The Myth of the Dark Ages

Belief in the Dark Ages remains so persistent that it seems appropriate to begin this chapter by quickly revealing that this is a myth made up by eighteenth-century intellectuals determined to slander Christianity and to celebrate their own sagacity.
⁵

It has long been the “informed” opinion that after the fall of Rome came many centuries during which ascendant Christianity imposed an era of ignorance and superstition all across Europe. In her long-admired study of medieval philosophers,
The Age of Belief
(1954), Anne Fremantle wrote of “a dark, dismal patch, a sort of dull and dirty chunk of some ten centuries.”
⁶
Fremantle’s assertion merely echoed the anti-Christian fulminations of various eighteenth-century dissenters. Voltaire described the era following Rome as one when “barbarism, superstition, [and] ignorance covered the face of the world.”
⁷
According to Rousseau, “Europe had relapsed into the barbarism of the earliest ages. The people of this part of the world … lived some centuries ago in a condition worse than ignorance.”
⁸
Edward Gibbon called the fall of Rome the “triumph of barbarism and religion.”
⁹

More recently, Bertrand Russell, writing in the illustrated edition of his famous college textbook (1959), declared: “As the central authority of Rome decayed, the lands of the Western Empire began to sink into an era of barbarism during which Europe suffered a general cultural decline. The Dark Ages, as they are called.”
¹⁰
In 1991 Charles Van Doren earned praise for his book
A History of Knowledge
, in which he noted
that the fall of Rome had “plunged Europe into a Dark Age that lasted for five hundred years.” It was an age of “rapine and death,” since “there was little law except that of force.” Worse yet, “life had become hard, with most people dependent on what they could scratch with their hands from the earth around their homes.”
¹¹
Van Doren blamed Christianity for prolonging this dismal era by disdaining consumption and the material world while celebrating poverty and urging contentment.
¹²
In 1993 the highly respected historian William Manchester summed up his views of the period “AD 400 and AD 1000” in his book title:
A World Lit Only by Fire
. He dismissed those who no longer believed in the Dark Ages on grounds that “most of what is known about the period is unlovely.… The portrait that emerges is a mélange of incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness.”
¹³

Nevertheless, serious historians have known for decades that these claims are a
complete fraud
. Even the respectable encyclopedias and dictionaries now define the Dark Ages as a myth.
The Columbia Encyclopedia
rejects the term, noting that “medieval civilization is no longer thought to have been so dim.”
Britannica
disdains the name Dark Ages as “pejorative.” And
Wikipedia
defines the Dark Ages as “a supposed period of intellectual darkness after the fall of Rome.” These views are easily verified.

There may have been some serious, but short-lived, dislocations associated with the collapse of Roman rule and the organization of new local political units. But the myth of the Dark Ages posits many centuries of ignorant misery based on four primary factors: (1) most cities were abandoned and fell into ruin; (2) trade collapsed, throwing local communities onto their own, very limited resources; (3) literacy all but disappeared; and (4) the standard of living of the average person fell to a bare subsistence level.