DARK AGES AFTER THE FALL OF ROME
THE ARRIVAL OF THE BARBARIANS
After nearly half a millennium of rule, the Romans finally lost their grip on Europe in the fifth century (the 400's CE). Their decline left in its wake untold devastation, political chaos and one of the most fascinating and problematical issues in history, what caused the "fALL OF ROME" the problem we'll tackle in this Chapter. Though Roman government in the form of the Byzantine Empire survived in the East for almost another thousand years, so-called barbarian forces overran western Europe, spelling the end of an era. While Rome's absence in the West brought with it tremendous change—and none of it seemed very positive, at least at first—before we can even address the question of why Rome logged off and Europe switched users, we must understand how this transition happened and what exactly came to a close during this period
The Barbarians Arrive: The Fourth and Fifth Centuries CE
Increasing pressure from peoples outside the Empire, the much maligned barbarians, had compelled the Romans in later antiquity to let more and more foreigners inside their state. Since most of these spoke a language , the Romans referred to them collectively as Germans, even though they actually represented a wide array of nations and cultures. These newly adopted resident aliens were assigned to work farms or were conscripted into the Roman army in numbers so large that the late Latin word for "soldier" came to be barbarus ("barbarian"). And where these barbarians met resistance, they sneaked or pushed their way inside the Empire, and in such a profusion that Rome was fast turning into a nation of immigrants
Not that that was much of a change. Things had actually been that way for centuries, only by late antiquity it was undeniable that, in spite of being called "Roman," the Empire was, in fact, a multicultural enterprise. The pretense of a "Roman" Rome had worn so thin it was impossible to maintain the illusion, for instance, that everyone in the Empire could speak—or even wanted to speak—Latin, the Romans' native tongue. Furthermore, it had been ages since any emperor had even bothered to pretend his lineage could be traced back to some ancestor who had arrived with Aeneas in Italy, an invented history which was beginning to look rather silly when Spaniards and North Africans had been steering the Empire for centuries.
The stark truth was that by the fifth century CE—and indeed for many years before that—a succession of dynamic and capable foreigners coming from all ends of the Empire had kept Rome on its feet and these men were as "Roman" as anyone born or bred in the capital. Barbarians were, and had been for a long time, guarding and feeding the Empire, which made it all the more difficult to claim they shouldn't also be running it. While three centuries earlier the Roman satirist Juvenal had lamented, "I can't stand a Greek Rome," now Rome wasn't merely Greek. It was Dacian and Egyptian and Syrian and, most of all, ever more German by the day
The Huns
Traveling all the way from Mongolia in the Far East, the Huns began encroaching on Europe sometime after 350 CE. Toughened by decades of crossing the Russian steppes on small ponies, these marauding Asiatic nomads spread terror far and wide, developing a reputation for insurmountable ferocity. That led easily to exaggerated reports of their speed and numbers. Indeed, there's little thatisn't exaggerated about the Huns, which amounts to a serious problem for historians, how to sift the facts from the frenzy. And besides that, there's an even greater problem. In all the history of the Huns, no Hun ever speaks to us in his own voice,
Those barbarian tribes who lived furthest east in Europe were the first to feel the sting of the Huns' assault from Asia, in particular, the Goths, a loose confederation of Germanic peoples living northeast of the Balkan mountains, who were hit so hard and quickly by these savage marauders, that they were split into two groups: the Ostrogoths ("Eastern Goths") and the Visigoths ("Western Goths"). By 376 CE, the Ostrogoths had fallen completely in Hunnic hands, where they would be victimized and enslaved for nearly a century.
The Visigoths, severed from their brethren but saved from the brunt of the Mongol assault by the mere fact that they lived further west than the Ostrogoths, desperately sought protection by appealing to Rome for asylum. There, they ran up against an impermeable shield of customs stations at the Roman border, a veritable wall of imperial disdain which was by then standard policy when barbarians began wailing and waving their hands. Thus squeezed between scorn and the spear, the Visigoths panicked and not a few tried to push their way into Roman territory. Facing a surge of frantic immigrants, the Roman Emperor Valens had little choice but to relent and let them in.
Once inside the boundaries of Rome, the Visigoths found safety but at the same time a new and in many ways more dangerous foe. As new-comers to Roman civilization, they were ill-equipped to live in a state run on taxes and mired in the complex language of legalities, and thus made easy prey for unscrupulous, greedy imperial bureaucrats who cheated and abused them. Very quickly, the Visigoths found themselves bound in something heavier and more constricting than chains—the gruesome coils of red tape—and they responded as any reasonable barbarian would: they demanded fair treatment and, when their pleas went unheard, they embarked upon a rampage.
Valens called out his army, a threat meant to intimate the Visigoths into returning to their designated territory and tithe. But like the truant step-children they were, the barbarians remained disobedient. Left with no other recourse but corporal punishment, Valens met the Visigoths in combat at the Battle of Adrianople (378 CE) in northeastern Greece, and what happened was not only unexpected but unthinkable to any Roman living then, or dead. Primed by the insults to their pride—or because they were simply scared out of their minds—to keep them in their room. Worse yet, Valens himself was killed in the course of the conflict.
His successor, Theodosius I resorted to standard Roman policy and pacified the Visigoths temporarily with handouts and promises. But money and titles couldn't buy back a Roman army or, more important, a reputation for invincibility. The Romans' essential weakness was now in full public view. Still, Theodosius managed to hold the state together and keep up a tense façade of peace within the Empire until, through an act which proves the cruel capriousness of fate, he died prematurely in 395. His young, pampered, feeble-minded sons were suddenly thrust to the forefront of Roman politics, yet another disaster for the Romans who could really have done without one at that juncture in history.
Those children, Arcadius and Honorius who were both still in their teens, were ill-prepared to hold real power. When a strong, new leader named Alaric rose to power among the Visigoths and started advancing on the West, Honorius panicked and recalled the Roman legions stationed on the Rhine river, Rome's northern border,which opened the door for other barbarians to force their way inside the Empire. A confederation of Germanic tribes, theVandals, poured across the border—crossing the Rhine during the particularly cold winter of 406 when the river had frozen to an uncustomary depth—and ranged freely about the every-day-less-Roman province of Gaul. After a while, the Vandals settled in Spain. This rendered pointless the Romans' military outposts in Britain that protected what was up till then the northwestern boundary of their domain, so the Romans withdrew from the island, as it turned out permanently. Germanic tribes seized the opportunity to occupy Britain, particularly the Angles and theSaxons. Leaks were fast becoming floods
Now unprotected, the eternal city, the heart of the Roman Empire, took the full brunt of the Visigoths' rage. In this infamous Visigothic Sack of Rome (410 CE) Alaric and his comrades plundered the city for three days, a devastation which turned out to be actually less physical than psychological but, even so, a wound which went deep into the heart of an already ailing state. When Saint Jerome, the great Latin translator of the Bible, heard the news of the Visigoths' capture of Rome, he wrote "My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth." The shock was indeed registered in deafening silence empire-wide.
At the same time, however, not everything went wrong for the Romans. For one thing, Alaric died only a few months after leading his forces on Rome. This left the Visigoths without competent leadership and, more important, still in search of a land they could settle and call home. After some negotiations, the remnants of their army and people moved out of Italy to southwestern Gaul, and later Spain where with the help of the Roman army they displaced the Vandals and established a kingdom that would endure for nearly two centuries. While barbarian in origin, the Visigoths of Spain quickly adopted Roman customs, the Latin language, and even the Christian religion, though in a heretical variation called Arian Christianity (or Arianism; see Although that later caused trouble between the Visigoths and the orthodox Church in Rome, this late-ancient civilization laid the groundwork for much of Medieval Spanish culture to follow, forging a unique synthesis of barbarian, Roman, Christian and—after 711 CE when Islamic forces invaded Spain
All this time, the Huns were marching through and enslaving eastern Europe, inflicting their own brand of terror on the barbarian tribes there. Oppressing peoples like the Ostrogoths had kept these Mongol nomads, by now only distantly Asiatic, occupied for several decades. Empires like the Huns are run on conquest and collecting tribute from terrified populaces. They must keep expanding or their momentum falters and their economy as well, if it's fair to say terrorists have economies. Fear, in fact, plays a large part in maintaining any such regime, so when the Huns' new, powerful, European-born leader Attila learned that Christians in Rome had pronounced him, in traditional Old-Testament fashion, "the Scourge of God"—meaning God's whip as a moralizing force to impose better behavior—he was very pleased and added it to his litany of royal titles. No doubt, the whip image appealed to him more than the moralizing part
Sweeping west across the Rhine River into Gaul, Attila's forces met a Roman army near Châlons (central Gaul) in 451 CE and, against all odds, the Huns were defeated. Infuriated and apparently under-educated in military protocol, the Hunnic general took the loss as an insult, a challenge of sorts, and wheeled south heading for Italy. The Romans in panic fled at his approach. Even the Emperor Valentinian III abandoned the capital—shades of Honorius!—but the leader of the Church, Pope Leo I, not only stood his ground but went to face down Attila in person. In one of the most remarkable moments in history (452 CE), they actuallydid meet and speak, but only in private. In the wake of their discussion, Attila wheeled about yet again, this time leaving Italy never to return. Leo's words must have contained some powerful magic.
The Vandals
Following their expulsion from Spain at the hands of the Visigoths and Romans, the Vandals fled to the northwest corner of Africa (modern Morocco). Once there, their wily and double-dealing leader Gaiseric helped them expand their domain by uprooting Roman control over the rich provinces of North Africa—the Vandals' imminent approach on Carthage (modern Tunisia) in 430 CE is one of the last pieces of news Saint Augustine heard as he lay on his deathbed—but their devastation to Rome was more than economic. Quite a few Christians living in this area were slain by the Vandals who ironically belonged to the same faith but as Arian Christians were strongly opposed to those who swore allegiance to the Pope. Indeed, more than one of the gruesome hagiographies ("saints' biographies") heroizing early Christian martyrs stems from the carnage which ensued as the Vandals—fellow Christians!—spread across North Africa, murdering their holy brethren
Next, moving to sea, the Vandals took up piracy and severely disrupted trade in the western Mediterranean. The recent assassination of Aetius, who was the most competent Roman general in the day and had died at the hands of none other than Valentinian III, the Emperor of Rome himself, only made the Vandals' path to naval power and domination all the easier. This horrifying replay of Stilicho's death—shades of Honorius again!—not only led to Valentinian's own murder in retaliation for Aetius' but also opened the way for a second assault on the capital itself, the devastating Vandalic Sack of Rome in 455 CE. Unlike the Visigoths' earlier siege, the Vandals' attack involved prolonged, physical ruin, a destruction so complete and indiscriminate, so emblematic of wanton atrocity, that these barbarians' very name made its way into common parlance, and ultimately English, as a by-word for "the malicious destruction of property," vandalism.
The "Fall of Rome"
The final days of the Roman Empire are usually assigned to the year 476 CE, when the German general Odovacar (or Odoacer) deposed the "last Roman Emperor,Romulus Augustulus. Although Odovacar acted with little respect for formalities—he removed the child from the throne and sent him off to a monastery where he subsequently died—the usurper faced no real opposition, political or military. The reality of the matter was that barbarian leaders like him had been the power behind the throne for many years in Rome, and the German strongman did little more than end the pretense of non-barbarian control of the Roman West.
His move was, moreover, driven by economics as much as anything else. Despite the travails of their Western counterparts, the Eastern emperors—by then, there were two Roman emperors, one in Rome and one in Constantinople—continued to demand that the entire Empire pay taxes into a common treasury. From there, few of these funds ever made their way back to the West where they were desperately needed to defend the state and rebuild its infrastructure. In open defiance of this tradition, Odovacar began keeping the monies he collected from those areas he governed.
Boethius, an orthodox Christian, dominate the accounts of his regime—Theodoric ultimately had Boethius executed—but the Ostrogothic king would be better remembered for building a sound and effective government centered in Ravenna (northeastern Italy on the coast of the Adriatic Sea), where his tomb can still be seen. It is fairer to him, perhaps, to recall his relationship with Cassiodorus, Boethius' successor to the post of secretary, who was also an orthodox Christian but not so contentious a man. Cassiodorus quietly oversaw the copying of many Classical manuscripts, which was an important contribution to the preservation of Greek and Roman literature and thought during the Middle Ages. All in all, whether or not any of them knew it—and quite a few probably did—these men were folding the tents of culture, packing its bags and quenching the fires of scholarship. The West was readying itself for its Medieval "camping trip." .
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