Understanding the Fall of the Roman Empire

All right students, today we will finish our lecture unit on the Roman Empire, our fourth consecutive lecture on them. Today we're going to talk about the fall of the Roman Empire. So how does the greatest empire of the ancient era, an empire that controlled the entire Mediterranean, that could field multiple armies of more than a hundred thousand troops, that had the greatest navy in the history of the world, that traded overland with China, and by sea with India, controlled the ancient cultural centers of Egypt, Baghdad, Greece, the most literate, most populous, richest empire the world had ever known. How does it collapse? Well, as we've seen before, particularly talking about Egypt, but to a lesser extent when we talked about the Harappan people, sometimes success is its own sort of, you know, there's sort of a penalty you pay for being successful. So perhaps one of the issues that Rome had was just it was too rich, too powerful. And again, it did last a long time. Maybe it's just the natural cycle of things. It was the longest lasting empire of the ancient era as well, depending on how you define such things. Anyway, we'll get into the specifics here. That's just some general thoughts. The first real issue that hits Rome is what historians call the crisis of the third century. So you'll recall the last lecture we discussed the Pax Romana, which ended with the five good emperors. The fifth of the five good emperors was Marcus Aurelius, the famous philosopher. Marcus Aurelius left his son in charge after he died, his son Commodus. And you'll recall that Commodus was kind of an idiot. And he sort of cast Rome into political conspiracy mode, and there was a lot of political violence. Commodus was eventually assassinated. We get a civil war, and a man named Septimius Severus becomes emperor in 193. Now, Severus was a fairly successful emperor. If you were on the ground in Rome, let's just say you'd been alive in Rome. in the 160s and 170s, and you sort of lived through the end of the Pax Romana, and you were still alive through the rule of Septimius Severus, right, you wouldn't have noticed the decline, right? So if you were on the ground at the time, you wouldn't have said, oh boy, this is our downfall, right? We're in a downswing. It's only looking back as historians with our sort of historical privilege that we picked the year 180 then. There's this great turning point, right? There's nothing special that happens in the year 180 other than the fact that Marcus really stops being the emperor. But the decline then, again, it's not sudden or dramatic. It's not like what we saw with, say, the Persians. Do you remember in Mesopotamia we had the Neo-Assyrians, the Neo-Babylonians, and the Persians? And the Neo-Assyrians basically fall overnight, and they're replaced by the Neo-Babylonians, and they fall overnight, and they're replaced by the Persians. And then the Persians last for centuries, and they lose four battles to Alexander the Great over the course of a couple of years, and they're gone. In Rome, it's nothing like that. There's no dramatic... Like one dramatic event that we can point to, there's no, you know, there's nothing sudden. Again, at the time, people didn't think it was obvious that their empire was collapsing. If you lived in Neo-Babylon, right, in Nebuchadnezzar's Neo-Babylon, when the Persians came knocking, you said, okay, this is the end, right? Babylonians knew it was the end. The Romans, they don't know it's the end. And so Timaeus Severus spent a lot of his... Times emperor fighting military campaigns. And in fact, he died in modern day York, England, putting down a rebellion in Britain in the year 211. But the problems, or sort of the seeds for Rome's downfall had already been sown. So we talked in the last lecture about the Antonine Plague of the 160s. It killed 5 million people. So that was about 1 12th, between 1 12th and 1 14th of the entire population of Rome. For perspective, that would be like in the U.S. losing 27 million people. It was just a large percentage of the workforce, right? It was hard to replace that many people. And Rome always had sort of population pressure because mortality was so high. a lot of people in Rome died young just in general. So let's take out the plague. So not counting the plague years, right? A lot of people in Rome died young. There's no such thing as germ theory, right? They didn't understand germs. This is one of the things we talked about when we talked about the Harappans, right? One of the things that made them so exceptional was they had modern sanitation in their cities. Rome didn't have modern sanitation, right? People just threw their waste in the street and the rain washed it into the gutters. And so we went right back into the water supply. So people were dying of cholera and, you know, tuberculosis and sort of these diseases of pestilence and filth that we've done away with in the 20th and 21st centuries in most of the world, right? Because we have modern sanitation systems. But again, Rome didn't have that. So a lot of people in Rome died. And in fact, historians estimate that the average woman in Rome needed to have six children. Just to keep the population stable. That's how many people died at a young age. So that's what we call replacement level of a population. Typically, in modern societies with good medical care, replacement level is a woman needs to have 2.2 children to maintain population. Right, because you figure a woman is married to a man, that's two people, so they'll die, right? So you need two people to replace them. And then with mortality rate and so on, you need about 2.2, because it's not like every single person grows up and has a kid, right? Some people grow up and never have kids. some people don't grow up because they die young. So in modern societies, the replacement rate is a woman needs to have about 2.2 children. In Rome, it was more than six on average, right? Because it varies over the years, but it's like 6.1, 6.4, somewhere in that range. So this Antonine Plague then sort of dealt the Roman population a blow from which it could not recover. right losing 1 12th to 1 14th right 5 million people 1 12th to 1 14th of the population was just too much because rome was already a very violent society uh with a lot of disease and a high mortality rate and that was just too much for them and of course there's also the civil war um of 193 that followed commodus's death right the year of the five emperors that we talked about last time that killed some more people And then Rome, of course, is always prone to famine. And it's useful to talk about this a little bit, the Roman sort of trade economy, because the crisis of the third century sort of destroys it. So Rome, the Roman economy was actually... By far the most complex economy of the ancient era, right? It's more complex than Europe. It's the most complex economy in the world until about the year 1700, right? After Rome falls. It takes the world another 1,500 years or so to get that level of complexity back in the economy. Because Rome had currency. So you bought and sold things for money. And as we'll see after Rome... In medieval Europe, they don't do that. You don't buy and sell things with money. It's a barter system. In a barter system, let's just say, I don't know, I'm a carrot farmer, and you're a goat farmer, and you want some carrots and I want some cheese. So I'll trade you 12 carrots for a pound of cheese. So that's your typical pre-modern economy, but Rome is a cash economy. Again, it's an ancient marvel. You didn't trade carrots for cheese. You sold carrots for coins, and then you used coins to buy cheese. It's a modern economy in that way. And again, Rome had it by far. I mean, they weren't the only ancient society with a cash economy, but they had by far the most extensive and complex cash economy. And the way it worked was a very extensive and very complicated. trade network. Remember, Rome has roads everywhere. We talked about during the Pax Romana, all those emperors were constantly building roads. What were those roads good for? Well, they were good for two things. One, they were good at moving the army quickly. how do you get through a forest really quickly right a concrete road how do you get through a swamp really quickly a concrete road right so they're really good for moving troops back and forth across the empire to put down revolts or whatever but they're also really good at moving merchants back and forth across the empire very quickly. And historians today estimate that a merchant could, you know, could travel the length of the empire basically in a couple months. The roads were that good. You could just put a, you know, a wheeled cart pulled by some ox or a horse or something, right? And you're not going to have any problems just traveling the road. Whereas, you know, if you're traveling in the swamp or something, you get bogged down. Like even rivers weren't a problem, right? All the rivers had bridges. It was a very remarkable system. And what it allowed for people to do was it allowed for specialization of goods, right? So in the south of France, they grew a lot of wine, right? Grapes and wine and cheese. And in Spain, they had olives and oranges and that sort of thing. They used North Africa, particularly Egypt, to grow wheat. So most of the wheat and grain that was grown in the Roman Empire was grown in North Africa. And then again, Rome has the best navy in the history of the world. So they could just sail it anywhere they wanted from there. And they had great ports. They built these fantastic ports. And the ports were always connected into the road system. Greece had the marble mines and the marble was very important for all the building projects and all the sculpture. Rome was full of amazing buildings and sculptures everywhere. Any rich person would have a huge sculpture garden in their backyard. I'm talking like two or three acres with hundreds of sculptures made out of marble. Marble is crucial for the economy. You know, they got a lot of fruit from the Levant, you know, modern-day Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. They grew a lot of fruit there, particularly dried fruit. The Roman Empire had connections into the Baltic Sea region, you know, sort of southern Russia and southern modern-day Poland. And that's where they got a lot of their naval supplies. That region of the world has always been, like, the world's leader in supplying naval supplies, you know, things like pitch. and rope and sailcloth. Britain and Northern France are really useful for wool, for making clothing. And all of these things are connected together. So you could be a British wool farmer in the Roman Empire, and you could have Greek marble sculptures in your backyard, and you could drink French wine and bake bread from Egyptian wheat. And eat Spanish olives and dried apricots from Syria, right? While living in the second century England, again producing wool. One of the downfalls of this kind of economy. is that it's quite prone to famine because not everywhere produces its own food right so one of the truths we've talked about with the ancient era and we're leaving the ancient era right this is our real this is really our last week in the ancient period um and one of the hallmarks of the ancient period is that most people feed themselves, right? This is, you know, most people at the time were peasants, right? They lived in the countryside and they farmed. And the only people who don't feed themselves typically are people who live in cities. Well, again, Rome is different because people are specialists, right? So all of Rome is dependent on North African wheat for its food. And you have to get it there. So if there's rebellion or drought or some kind of insect pest or fungal pest that gets into the wheat supply, then certain parts of the empire don't get their food. So Rome had always been prone to famine. The weakening of the population... Population decline caused by the Antonine Plague made it more prone to famine just because there are fewer people to farm. You might think there are fewer people to feed, right? So, famine is not as big a problem because you have fewer people to feed. But that's not true in Rome. In Rome, the manpower is necessary to produce the food and to move it about the empire. Another problem with the weakened population is that Rome is open to invasion. Now... What really kicks off the crisis of the third century is this particular event here in 235. The current emperor at the time was named Severus Alexander, right? You can see the name similarity with Septimius Severus, right? So he's related. They're not very closely related, but they are related. He's assassinated by his own soldiers. He'd been combating the barbarians. Remember in Rome, the barbarians are anyone who aren't Roman, right? People who don't speak Latin. The term barbarian means it refers to their language, right? And to the people who spoke Latin, the barbarian language sounded like bar, bar, bar, bar. So they called them barbarians. So Severus Alexander was in Germany combating German barbarians. And rather than put his troops out in the field to fight, he basically tried to bribe the barbarians to go away. He paid them to go away and sort of used diplomatic means rather than warfare. And that made his troops mad. And he thought that the troops thought that they were, basically, if you're a Roman troop, you wanted to fight because when you get a little bit of glory and fame, but more importantly, you'd get to loot and pillage, right? So if you fought the barbarians, then you could go into their village and sort of loot and pillage it and carry off anything of value, right? So it was a way for a common soldier to get rich because soldiers'pay wasn't that great. So they wanted to fight so they were mad that Severus Alexander was denying them the chance to fight but the reason that Severus Alexandra is Not wanting to fight is precisely this lack of manpower. This Antonine Plague has sort of denied Rome its population. So losing soldiers is a big deal. You don't want to lose your soldiers. After he is assassinated, we get 50 years of chaos. And we call this the Crisis of the Third Century. So it goes from 235 to about 283 or so. It's about 50 years, the Crisis of the Third Century. And again, there are lots of causes. So there are internal causes, political intrigue, currency valuation, plague, famine, dry weather. So this is a really interesting one. Environmental historians have done a really excellent job of going back and studying the historical climate, right? How much, what was the average temperature and how much rain fell? And environmental historians of ancient Rome. have discovered a couple things. So one is that the whole period of the Pax Romana, it's from about 50 BCE to about 190 CE, right? The entirety of the Pax Romana, the Mediterranean, particularly around Italy, but the entire Mediterranean. had about the best possible climate it could possibly have. The temperature was consistently warm, but never brutally hot. Winters were quite mild. And rainfall was like, it was just the right amount of rainfall. It was enough to be plentiful, but if it had rained a little more, it would have been too much rain. It was the ideal climate. This is historical luck. This has nothing to do with Rome. They can't control the weather. And so it was like the perfect conditions for the Roman Empire to get extra powerful. And what happens is around the year 190 or so, the climate begins to dry up. and it's actually europe has about 200 years it's not drought right like just plenty of rain but it's less rain than people were used to and it did decrease agricultural output right so they they produced less food in the mediterranean and all of europe with this dry weather And we'll talk about this again later because it will lead around the year 500 to a mini ice age, right? It got really cold. Anyway, this dry weather doesn't just affect Rome. It also affects the Germanic tribes. So we talk about external causes here. The external causes is Rome is beginning to get enemies. Remember, the Pax Romana, Rome was sort of militarily dominant. No one wanted to mess with them. And around this crisis of the third century, Rome is beginning to look not in. invincible militarily. So people, you know, their neighbors begin to think maybe we could fight Rome, right? And one of those neighbors is the Germanic tribes. But the Germanic tribes, I say here, they're stronger. That's true. They do get stronger in the third century, but they also get more desperate because the dry weather affects them too, right? They also have less food. So the Germanic tribes need to expand their territory because more territory means more land, more land means more food, and more food means... right, they're not starving anymore. So in other words, the Germans are starving just like the Romans are starving, right? So the third century is a hungry century in Europe and the Mediterranean because the climate dries up. The other big enemy on the borders, and they're more important than Germans, are the Sassanids in Persia, right? The Sassanid Persian Empire. And we'll talk about them briefly as well. So this is just introduced. These are the causes. So let's talk about the internal troubles. So after Commodus, the Empire gets an increasingly unruly and unstable political culture. We'll talk about this momentarily, but we get this thing called the barracks emperor, where basically the people who become emperor no longer have sort of political experience or any... sort of legitimate or legal claim to the Roman throne. So remember, Augustus is the first emperor, and then the next several emperors are people who were related to Augustus. And then we get the Flavian emperors, and they're all related. And then we get the five good emperors, and they're all sort of related and or they handpick each other. So the first, we have Trajan, and he picked his cousin, and then his cousin picked Antonius Pius and Marcus Aurelius. Everyone there had a claim to the throne. And so did Commodus, right? Marcus Aurelius was his dad. After Septimius Severus, so there is a family line there, as I pointed out. They're both named Severus. That was a huge family, right? And some of the people who took, who claimed the throne didn't have a real claim to it. And this gets worse over time. And so basically, once we get to this crisis of the third century period, say around 235 CE or so, the people who claim the throne do so on military might alone, right? I'm claiming a throne. Well, what right do you have to claim the throne? these hundred thousand soldiers standing behind me, which is effective in the short term, but is not effective in the long term, right? So you can get short-term stability, but not long-term stability. This is the same thing we talked about way back in the second week of the class when we talked about ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. Remember, ancient Egypt had quite a bit of political stability. Why? Well, you know, several reasons, right, related to the Nile River mostly, right, the quickness of communication. But also remember that in Egypt, Pharaoh did things that empowered the office of Pharaoh, not the person of Pharaoh, right? So if Pharaoh did something good, it reflected well on Pharaoh, right, whoever the Pharaoh was. Whereas in Mesopotamia, it was much more down to the, right, Mesopotamia had no political stability, right? And that's because... The person who ruled, it was on him to be great, right? So Hammurabi was a great ruler, so he ruled for a while, right? The Akkadians had great rulers, so they ruled for a while. But there's no stability because basically power was won by swords, whereas in Egypt, power was won by the prestige of the office, right? Pharaoh had prestige as a position, not as a person. And that had been true in Rome, right? The Roman emperor had prestige. So the Roman emperor was able to claim power just by the fact that he was the emperor. What we will begin to see with this crisis of the third century, and they'll never resolve it, this will continue until the fall of the Roman empire, is the office of emperor loses its prestige, its power to make a claim for respect and a following, right? Follow me, I'm the emperor. No one listens anymore. And they begin to follow individuals, not the emperor. So they're not following the office, they're following the individuals. So that's what we mean by an increasingly unruly and unstable political culture. And we'll see examples of this too. Another thing that emperors did to ensure their grip on power, and this goes all the way back to Augustus, is they typically paid the army an accession bonus. I have acceded to the throne and to prove... that, you know, I have the best interest of the military in heart, you would give a small bonus to the military, you know, like one gold piece to every soldier. This got to be unwieldy after Commodus, because, well, after really, after Septimius Severus, because between 211 and 235, we get something like 17 emperors, right? 17 emperors in 24 years. And so that's a lot of payments. That's 17 payments in 24 years. Again, all the emperors had done this all the way back to Augustus, but usually there's only one new emperor every, you know, most emperors ruled for, you know, 10 to 20 years. So you only had to make this payment once every 10 to 20 years. Well, after Septimius Severus, we have to make it, again, something like 17 times in 24 years. So it got to be a lot of money, right? The payment was made too much or too often. Plus the rulers after Septimius Severus, because they begin to fear, um, the enemies on the outside, right, the Germanic tribes and the Sassanid Persians, they expanded the size of the army by a lot, right? They increased it by 24%, or 25%, sorry, by one quarter. And they also increased soldier pay. So that was very expensive. So basically they ran out of money. And you'll recall that other emperors had run out of money. Remember Caligula ran out of money and he began murdering nobles and seizing their lands. Well, that wasn't very popular, right? Another version, they changed the tax policy. They, you know, Nero taxed the rich too much, and that wasn't popular, right? So if you're an emperor and you already have a tenuous grip on power, right? Because again, political culture is increasingly unstable and unruly. So you can't raise taxes and you're not going to go murder nobles. So what they did was they debased the currency. Now Roman currency was silver coins and gold coins. And what they started doing was mixing copper and bronze in with the silver and gold. And that made the currency increasingly less You know, increasingly worth less, less trustworthy. I imagine if, I don't know how many of you have traveled internationally, but for instance, I was once a professor for a little while in Bangladesh, and the Bangladeshi currency is called taka. And in Bangladesh, you can use taka just fine, but outside Bangladesh, you can't use taka. you know like even when i was in india they didn't take taka and then definitely when i came back to the u.s i couldn't use my taka but still currency right it should count the same but uh you know u.s currency of course is a dollar and you can use dollars in bangladesh no one would mind right so i the exchange rate was 80 taka to a dollar so if i went out for a meal let's say and it was 400 taka i could pay with 400 taka or i could pay with five dollars it was fine either way right because The U.S. currency is trusted. So what happened here in Rome is the Roman currency got increasingly less trustworthy. No one knew what it was worth anymore because it used to be worth, right, the currency was a denarius, right, and a denarius was so much gold or so much silver. Well, when they started mixing copper and bronze in with it, people began to trust it less, right? Well, I don't know what it's worth anymore because, you know, maybe it's 50% copper, you know, rather than 100% silver. And what that made people do is spend less currency. It ruined Roman currency, which caused a phenomenon we call hyperinflation, which is sort of beyond the scope of the class to really explain it, but hyperinflation almost always causes economic disaster. Essentially what it did was it ruined that trade. Remember I talked about Rome being this... Very complex cash economy with this really intricate and interdependent trade network. When the currency got ruined here in this period, say, between, let's say, 210 and 250 CE, this is when the currency really gets ruined, that trade network dies. It becomes much more local and de-centered and much less integrated. So people in Britain aren't eating Syrian apricots while drinking French wine and baking the bread with Tunisian wheat. They got everything much closer to home. Their bread was made with oat flour, with oats they grew in their back garden. And their wine, they don't have wine anymore, they have apple cider, from apple trees that they grew themselves. The economy becomes local. Rather than this integration, empire-wide trade economy. It becomes a local, decentered economy, and they go to the barter system. Remember the barter systems? I'll trade you my carrots for your cheese. They stop using cash, and the Roman economy never recovers. It had been the greatest economy in the history of the world. It never recovers from this. These economic woes will become social chaos. So I talked about, again, there's a huge population loss from the Antonine Plague. This is made much worse by a second epidemic that hits in the year 249 and lasts over a decade. It's called the Plague of Cyprian. We figured it was probably smallpox, but we're not sure. But it completely obliterated the population again. These two plagues, particularly the Plague of Cyprian, so diminished the population that a lot of farmland went unworked. Which led to massive food shortages. Again, it's kind of counterintuitive. You would think a plague would kill a lot of people, right? And then you would have a surplus of food because you have fewer people eating food. But basically the plagues killed the wrong people, right? It killed the people in the countryside who grew the food and didn't kill as much the people in the cities who eat food but don't produce food. So it killed a lot of food producers. and led to food shortages. And again, the trade system also helped stabilize the food supply, right? Because you were shifting food across the empire. So when the trade system broke down, that also, right, that just exacerbates these natural food shortages that result from the plague. Again, so the breakdown of the trade system, a compounded issue because food is not circulating. Cities in particular are left with massive grain shortages. So people begin starving in the cities, particularly Rome, the biggest city. It had a population well over a million. So city dwellers, naturally, they flee to the countryside, right? If you're starving in the city, you're going to go out and try to farm. And they settled in the countryside as a population group called Coloni, which is basically a colonist, right? Sort of a term that's come down into English, but Coloni. And basically what they were were landless peasants, right? Because all the land is owned. Remember, we talked about that two lectures ago. All the land in Rome is owned. And so what they would do is they'd go to the landowners and say, hey, will you give me a small parcel of land and I'll basically, me and my children and my children's children and my children's children's children will work for your family for free for four generations if you'll give us an acre of land to grow food so we're not starving. So they begged landlords to offer them very exploitative contracts. And this will eventually become... We'll talk about medieval Europe has serfdom, but it grows out of these coloni in this third century period. This broke city life apart. Remember, Rome had this extremely cosmopolitan, diverse, highly literate, very, very rich culture city life. That gets shattered by these food crises. Right, and the migration from the city into the countryside. And also people, you know, once you move to the countryside, you get much less of a political voice, right? So people are, you know, sort of sacrificing their political and civil rights. Remember, what broke the Republic apart and gave rise to the Empire was that patrician-plebeian divide, right? Essentially what that was was the plebeians getting more and more political and civil rights. Well, those are the people who are fleeing the cities, right? So when famine hits the cities, the plebes leave the cities, and they go wherever they can find land to grow their own food. And in so doing, they sort of, they sacrifice those rights that they had won, right? They trade the rights for a stable, personal food supply. What good is the right to vote if you're starving, essentially? Another thing that began happening is as the Empire got weaker, right, law and order breaks apart. So another reason that that trade network, that overland trade network where merchants were going all over the place, is there's no crime in Rome. Alright, so you don't have to worry about bandits or raiders. Well as social order begins to break down here in this crisis of the third century, we get the rise of banditry again. And we also get barbarians entering from Germany and raiding. So all the cities have to start building walls to protect themselves from German raiders or from bandits. And walls are very expensive. So the country's already bankrupt, and now they have to spend money on building defensive walls. But again, you're going to be bankrupt and dead. So the economic woes become social chaos. So that's the internal stuff, but there's also external threats to Roman superiority. supremacy. Remember that Pax Romana is a result of Rome's unquestioned military superiority over its neighbors. No one would dare challenge Rome because there's absolutely no chance you would win. Well, all of this internal strife, right, the plagues, the famines, the people leaving the cities, the breakdown of the trade network, the complete and utter collapse of the economy. The growing political instability that comes from all of that, that removes that dominance. Rome can no longer field terrifying armies. Again, Rome, during the Pax Romana, the Romans could send 40,000 legionnaires into Britain and fight in Britain. And at the same time, they could have 70,000 legionnaires in Mesopotamia. Another 50,000 in Egypt, another 50,000 in Spain, and then just have 200,000 just hanging out in Greece, right, relaxing. No big deal, right? Well, that's gone now. They can't field armies of that size. They're no longer this terrifying dominant military force, so people begin to threaten them. The Sassanid Empire in Persia, right, is the major threat in the east. Remember, in the east, the Romans have been fighting the Parthians for centuries. The Sassanids... conquered the Parthians in 224, and the Sassanids hate Rome. They'd had a few battles with Rome. Rome liked to, about every 20 years, they'd go in and sack the Sassanid capital city of Cetiphon. So the Sassanids have a real hatred of Rome, and again, they begin to get really powerful here in the third century, at the same exact time that Rome is getting increasingly weak. So the Sassanids and the Romans will fight each other off and on for several... for the next couple centuries, basically. The Sassanids killed the Roman Empire in battle in the year 250 for instance. By the time the Roman Empire collapses the Sassanids control most of Mesopotamia and most of Anatolia as well. Remember Anatolia is modern-day Turkey and when we say Mesopotamia here we mean basically modern-day Iraq and Iran. So that would become you know the Sassanids will control that they take it from Rome slowly over time. The other major threat, these are in the north, not the east, the Germanic tribes, right? They're getting, as I already said, both stronger and more desperate, right? The same dry climate that made Roman farming suffer makes Germanic farming suffer, right? So the Germanic tribes begin to migrate. They begin to fight more, right? They're hungry, right? And they're desperate, so they fight and move around more. And they also... Beginning with this crisis of the third century, they begin raiding or just full-on invading, right? There's a group we'll talk about briefly or soon here called the Goths and the Goths Just full-on invade Rome several times Beginning in this you know third century crisis. So how does the crisis end? It ends as you might suspect if you Take into account ancient history that we studied so far, right? One great ruler comes in and ends it. His name is Diocletian. So I've already talked about this phenomenon of the barracks emperors, right? These were emperors with no claim to the throne or political experience, right? Who rule only because of the loyalty of their troops. So this creates very unstable politics and basically 50 years of civil war because the generals would fight each other, right? And while they're fighting each other, they're not defending the empire, right? So the general, these barracks emperors, these generals who control these huge armies, will be fighting each other and then the germans and assassinates and whoever can just raid and pillage the empire um again the germans are invading all the time the goths come in both by land and sea in the 250s not surprisingly the goths are step nomads who moved into europe right they moved off the step and into the forest of eastern europe right they lived in uh basically what is modern day um hungary and Romania. Transylvania for those who really know your European history, or geography I mean. But they had come from the steppe and they were from the same area of the steppe as the old Scythians. Remember the Scythians? And in fact the Romans used to call them Scythians. But they're completely different. They're not at all related. Just the fact that they were steppe nomads. Because of the work of the Goths and the Perics emperors and just the general economic crisis and renown to that plague of Cyprian as well, by 260, Rome has split into three separate empires, right? So there's no longer such thing as a Roman empire. Well, there is, but it's much smaller. So there's the Roman empire. There's the Gallic empire. The Gallic empire basically controlled modern day France, Belgium, Spain, and Britain. And then there's the Pomeranian empire. which controlled most of the Roman Middle East. And then Rome proper, they controlled North Africa, Egypt, and Italy. So this is a real problem, right? And they're all controlled by these barracks emperors who are fighting each other and not fighting people like the Goths. So the Goths are sort of burning and pillaging wherever they would like. The Goths were raiding Greece in this time. All of this is ended by force when a man named again Diocletian. He was a lowborn cavalry soldier. He was from Dalmatia. Dalmatia, we talked about last week or in the last lecture, had been conquered by Trajan. That's modern day Croatia. So Diocletian was a lowborn cavalry soldier who basically just got promoted up the ranks, became a barracks emperor. And then as a barracks emperor, he conquered all the other barracks emperors. He went and he defeated the Gallic. empire he went and defeated the palmyrene empire he went and he fought the goths and uh he sort of you know conquered his way to the emperor position in 284 and reunited rome he also stabilized the throne you know for a little while and he set about making massive uh political and military reforms and he's basically uh he wants to re-stabilize right he wants to create a stable political culture and he wants to help the economy recover. So here are just a couple maps to illustrate. So what's red is the Roman Empire, what's green is the Gallic, but the Gallic also controlled a lot of Spain at various points. And then the yellow here is the Pomeranian. And then here's just an idea of what the rest of Europe looks like around the year 300. CE. So here's the Roman Empire. Again, it's enormous. Here are the Goths in modern-day Transylvania. They had come from over here, so they migrated in because of the dry weather, right? They were feeling population pressure. They moved in. And then these are the various German tribes. You can't really read the map too well. That's okay. We'll talk about the ones that really matter for the Romans. And then over here, these are the Sassanids. Over here. All right, so let's talk about the rule of Diocletian. He'd be emperor for 21 years. It's quite a long rule, 284 to 305. So not a surprise given how he got to be emperor. He was a master military mind. And he really defeated all of Rome's enemies, right? He stabilized the frontier and he defeated all the enemies, right? All the Germanic tribes. Really defeated the Sassanids multiple times, right? He put everyone back to their rights, right? He's reasserted the domination of Rome militarily. He thought that Rome was too big to govern by himself, so he created what's called the Diarchy, or a co-emperorship, with one ruler in the east at a city called Byzantium. Byzantium is modern-day Istanbul, right? It's where Europe and Asia meet. in modern-day Turkey. So one emperor in the east in Byzantium and one in the west at Rome. So it's one Roman empire, but for administrative purposes it's split in two pieces. Think about like the U.S., right? The U.S. is one country, but it's also split into 50 pieces, right, for administrative purposes. So that's sort of what Diocletian does with Rome. He will eventually move from a diarchy to a tetrarchy, right? Instead of two pieces, he'll split it into four. We'll talk about that on the next slide. It gets a little complicated. He took the east, Diocletian did, so he stayed in Byzantium, and then he gave Maximilian, who's another general, the west. He greatly expanded Rome's administrative bureaucracy, mostly trying to regularize taxation abilities, to sort of restock the treasury to paid troops. Again, he's a military guy, and he understands how powerful Rome's enemies are, so he wants to make sure he has good troops. He also, when he reformed the tax code, he made taxes more equitable and more fair because the tax code hadn't really changed. It was like a 500-year-old tax code. It just didn't reflect current reality. So he made the taxes more equitable but higher. So everyone paid a little more, but everyone paid a... a fair amount. One of the more negative aspects of his rules was called the Diocletianic Persecution in 303. Diocletian decided that Christians were a major social problem for the Roman Empire. And so this Diocletianic Persecution was the largest and most sustained persecution of Christians in the entire history of the Roman Empire. The reasons for this are pretty complex, and we're not really sure we understand them. We sort of have to guess at what Diocletian's thinking. But we definitely know that Diocletian saw himself as a traditionalist who wanted to restore Roman glory. He had re-empowered the Senate, or pretended to. He didn't actually, but he talked about the Senate, just like Augustus had done. So he really wanted to reassert traditional Roman culture and Roman values. And Christianity is foreign, and it's not Roman, and it's new. And Diocletian saw all of those as threats, right? Rome had been great 100 years ago, right? If you're Diocletian, he's thinking, 100 years ago, we were great. And we didn't have Christianity, right? So that's one of the reasons, obviously, that Rome has a problem for Diocletian. So he goes after the Christians. This persecution varied in intensity from region to region. And most Roman Christians escaped all persecution altogether. Sorry, excuse me. So most Christians escaped unscathed. It was much stronger in the east, particularly in modern-day Turkey. So in Anatolia was where the persecution was the most intense. And then over in modern-day France, so Roman Gaul, there was no persecution at all. The governor of Gaul was like, nah, I'm not going after the Christians. That's a waste of my time. So it varies from region to region and over time as well. As I said, Diocletian had expanded his co-emperor idea, the diarchy idea, into four emperors. And again, this is called a tetrarchy. And the way the tetrarchy was supposed to work is you have two supreme emperors, Diocletian and Maximilian. And then they each have a junior emperor. And the two supreme emperors govern the two most important. So they split Rome into four parts, right? And the supreme emperors govern the two most important of the four parts, and the junior emperors govern the two less important of the four parts. And then rather than emperors dying, or maybe they will die, right? But they should retire, right? But if they don't retire, they'll die in office. That's fine. Either way is fine. And when the sort of... The big emperor, right, like the main emperor, the two main emperors, when one of them dies or retires, the junior emperor underneath him gets promoted to be the big emperor. And then the junior emperor, who's now the big emperor, will pick his own junior emperor to sort of be his understudy. So again, it's very complicated. So Diocletian and Maximilian both retire in 305, and they promote their junior emperors, right? So again, the two co-emperors each have a junior emperor. And Diocletian's junior emperor was a man named Constantius. So Diocletian retires in 305, and he takes his junior emperor, Constantius, and he makes him the emperor, right, the main emperor in the east in 306, or 305. But Constantius then picks his own junior emperor to serve under him. And Constantius dies in 306 of natural causes. So his junior emperor should become the next main emperor, right? So Constantius'junior emperor should replace him. His junior emperor was a guy named Severus. But Constantius, you know, had a big army. And his army picked Constantine, who was Constantius'son, to be the emperor instead. Right, so the Tetrarchy didn't even last a year. Right, Diocletian resigns in 305. And by 306, the Tetrarchy is already falling apart. They work all this out, but it reveals a problem, a couple problems. First, the army has too strong of a role in politics, because they pick Constantine. And Constantine gets to be the emperor, by the way. And also this new system is quite open to abuse and bribery. So Constantine got to be emperor because he basically paid off people and he had the army supporting him. So it's not a very good system. So all those reforms of Diocletian, they didn't solve the problem. Remember, Rome has all these internal problems, but the big ones, the three big ones, political instability, economic catastrophe, and population collapse. Well, Diocletian hasn't responded to any of them because he couldn't fix the economy. or the economy is broken. And he can't fix the population either. He's just one guy. It's not like he can make every woman in Rome have 14 babies and all the babies survive to adulthood. So the one thing he could fix was the political instability. So he tries the Tetrarchy and it doesn't work. By 310, the Tetrarchy has devolved into civil war. We call these the Tetrarchy Civil Wars. Constantine will be the winner. The most famous battle here is the Battle of Milvian Bridge. The Milvian Bridge is just a bridge over the river Tiber as a way to get into Rome. So basically Constantine's trying to get into Rome and he fights a battle with the co-emperor who was controlling Rome over this bridge. And Constantine wins and he's able to go into Rome. So he fights the Battle of Milvian Bridge in October 312. It's important not because... Not because of its military significance. Militarily, it's not that important of a battle. It's more symbolically important. Because prior to the battle, Constantine had been sent a vision by the Christian god who told him to go and conquer. Because Constantine, all of his advisors were telling him not to conquer. Not to go fight. You would lose. The conditions aren't right. Don't go, don't go. Constantine... No, Constantine... says, no, I've had a vision. The Christian God came to me in my sleep last night and he told me to fight at the Milvian Bridge and I would win. All I had to do was change my battle standard, right, the flag that he would carry in the battle to this new symbol, right? So, sorry, excuse me. So Constantine changes his battle standard to this weird thing that combines the Greek letter Chai and the Greek letter Rho and he marches into the battle at Milvian Bridge and wins. In the Chai and Ro, that's the first two letters in the name of Christ, right, in Greek. Early Christianity was dominated by Greek language. The early Christian writers all wrote in Greek. I think as I said in the last lecture, right, so Chai and Ro is the first two letters in the name Jesus Christ in Greek. And so here's Constantine carrying basically a Christian standard into a battle and winning. The Tetrarchy civil wars would last until 324. So again, after Milvian Bridge, Constantine marches on into Rome. He and another guy named Licinius, they'll be co-emperors, right? So Constantine will control the west from Rome, and Licinius will control the east from Byzantium. They meet, make a deal to be allies in 313, and they issue what's called the Edict of Milan. This officially ended the Diocletian persecution of Christians. It made all religious minorities, not just Christianity, all minority religions legal and stopped all religious persecution in Rome. But again, this most affected Christians, but it also affected Jews and all kinds of pagan religions that no longer exist today, and there's probably a few Buddhists around as well. Pretty soon, Licinius and Constantine have a falling out and they become enemies to symbolize how much Licinius doesn't like Constantine. Licinius begins persecuting Christians again in 320. Constantine and Licinius meet in battle in Greece at Adrianople. There'll be a second battle at Adrianople in this lecture, so sorry for that. There are two battles at Adrianople. But Constantine and Licinius fight on the 3rd of July, 324. Licinius has a much larger army because he has a lot of Goth mercenaries. So remember, Rome is short on manpower. because of the plagues. So to fill the army, the Romans began hiring German mercenaries. So Licinius had hired a bunch of Gothic mercenaries and has this huge army. Constantine has a bunch of Christians, Frankish Christians. The Franks were another German tribe, right? So he also has his own German mercenaries. Both sides talked about the battle as a clash of religion, of culture, of values. For Constantine, he and his Christian forces, they represented the future, right? And Licinius was much more about the past, right? So Licinius was fighting in the name of Roman tradition, and Constantine was fighting more in the name of a Christian future. Constantine wins the battle. He wins the Civil War. He takes sole control over Rome. We no longer have, you know, two emperors or four emperors. We just have one emperor, Constantine. Constantine the Great, as he's often called. So like Diocletian, Constantine decides he's going to make a bunch of reforms and he's going to try to stabilize Rome. Again, you can't fix the other problems, right? Rome's other problems of the economy and the population, right? The growing power and strength of the Sassanids and the Germans. He can't do anything about that. But maybe he can fix this broken political culture that causes all this instability in civil war. So that's sort of what he's after. One of the things Constantine does is he thinks he can use Christianity to unite the empire. He will become the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. He was baptized by Eusebius of Nicomeda in 337. But he'd been very friendly to Christians for 25 years prior to that. But he didn't officially convert to Christianity until 337. After Constantine, there is not a single emperor who wasn't baptized. There are a couple emperors who denounced Christianity and said that they weren't Christian anymore. But every single emperor after Constantine would be baptized. For those of you who move on from my class and study something like the history of Christian thought, there's a class at JCTC on... Sort of the history of, again, Christian thought. I think that's what it's called. That's what it's usually called. One of the big events in early Christianity was the Council of Nicaea. So by 325, the Christian church had split into several sects. And there was a whole array of beliefs and rituals, and nothing had been normalized yet, right? There's not like a Catholic church yet that's sort of dictating. you know, orthodox practice. And a lot of Christians, there's a lot of really violent disagreement in the Christian community over a few questions. The most important question that was really dividing the early church was what it meant for Christ to be divine, right? So was Christ human or was he God? Was he both? And how does all that work? But there was a lot of other theological problems as well. People weren't sure what constituted sin and what wasn't sin. They didn't know which books should be included in the New Testament and which ones shouldn't. So there was a lot of disagreements in the early church community. So Constantine called the Council of Nicaea in 325 to try to resolve these various disputes. And they did come to an agreement about the nature of Christ's divinity. I could explain it to you, but it's extraordinarily complicated. I have a PhD studying Catholicism from Notre Dame, and I'm still not sure I understand it. It's very complicated. It's beyond the scope of our class. But just know that Constantine is trying to unite the Christian community. And one of the reasons he's trying to unite the Christian community is he sees that Christianity is a force that could unite all of Rome. Another thing he does is he... permanently moves the capital of Rome to Byzantium. And he also carried out a massive construction project in Byzantium and sort of quadruples the size of the city, builds all these grand buildings there. He changes the city's name to Constantinople. And of course, today the city is called Istanbul. It was called Byzantium and then Constantinople and then Istanbul. So he permanently moved the capital over to there. And he did stabilize Rome for a generation. He fought off multiple invasions by Germanic tribes. He tried to reform the currency, right, to do away with all that inflation. And he made other smaller changes. He established a system of hereditary rule because he gave power to his sons. And he went back to the split system, right? So he gave one son control of the west and one son control of the east. And he ruled for 31 years. That's the second longest rule for any emperor. in all of Rome, right? Augustus ruled longer, only Augustus. Constantine had the second longest reign of any Roman emperor. But no matter what Constantine did, just like no matter what Diocletian did, Rome is broken. It's a broken society with broken politics, a broken economy, a collapsing population, and strong enemies on its borders, right? So Rome is in decline. All the problems of the 230s are still unresolved, right? The economy is still localized. We don't have the integrated trade-based economy. It's local, and it's in tatters. Roman main power is still shattered, right? There are armies that can't even fill the armies with Romans. They fill the armies with mercenaries. The Germans are getting increasingly threatening again. On the next slide, we'll discuss it in greater detail. The Sassanids are taking more and more territory in the east again, particularly in... Anatolia or modern-day Turkey and Roman politics remained violently unstable. In 395 the Empire had been united one more time by yet one more emperor, a guy named Theodosius. Theodosius had united it for another 20 years but in 395 it split apart into East and West and would never be united again. So after 395 there's no such thing as the Roman Empire, there's the Western Roman Empire. and the Eastern Roman Empire. Christianity had taken a firm hold in both halves. Now, historians have long debated the role of Christianity in the decline of Rome. Early historians, so all the way up to about 1930 or so, because history as an academic discipline starts in the 1840s. So for the first hundred years of academic history, historians agreed. that Christianity had played a role in destabilizing the Roman Empire. But since then, so the last 80 years or so of academic history, the prevailing opinion is going back the other way. It says Christianity probably didn't have much to do with it at all, right? It's just coincidental that as the Roman Empire is collapsing, Christianity is on the rise. I don't think anyone would go so far as to say Christianity had no effect whatsoever, but its effect was probably very minor. But either way, by the 4th century, this 300 to 400 period, Christianity has a very firm hold. Again, all the emperors get baptized. And to symbolize how strong Christianity is in the Roman Empire in the year 380, Theodosius, again, the last great Roman emperor, Theodosius... issued the Edict of Thessalonica, making Christianity the official state religion of the empire. Other religions were still tolerated, but Christianity became the official state religion. And when Rome split into East and West, it was the official state religion of both the East and the West. All right, let's talk about these Germans. So we've already talked about the Goths. There are a lot of other German tribes that are pretty powerful, like the Vandals. But the Huns were the terrifying ones. The Huns come in and they're the people who changed, they sort of changed the balance of power in Europe. Remember, the balance of power here is Rome controls everything and everyone else is beneath them. The Huns sort of mess with that. It should not be a surprise at all. The Huns, the great usurpers, are step nomads. Again and again, as we've seen in class, These outsiders who come in and change societies, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, they come from the steppe, right? We have them in China with the Xiongnu. We have them in India with the Aryans. We had them in Persia with the Scythians, right? Now we have them here in Rome, right, with the Huns. The Huns were steppe nomads, and they move into Eastern Europe in this period between 350 and 370 CE. And we're not sure why they moved. They were probably experiencing the same sort of population pressures and food pressures from the worsening climate that everyone else was feeling, right? The climate's getting worse. It's harder to find food. Now, they're nomads, so they don't grow food, but they find food. But food is getting scarcer all across Europe, including the steppe. Or maybe they had been conquered, right? you know, in Central Asia and a group had pushed them out. By the way, the Huns will not be the last steppe nomads we'll talk about. There'll be more steppe nomads in our future, don't worry. For whatever reason, by 350, they're firmly settled in Eastern Europe and they live in the old Goth homelands, right? So the same area there, Transylvania, Hungary, Romania, modern-day southern Poland, that sort of thing. And the Huns were militarily terrifying, right? They weren't as powerful as Rome when Rome was its most powerful, right? But they were as powerful as Rome now in 350. And they easily conquered the Germanic tribes, including the Goths and the Vandals. So they sort of move into Germany and take all the territory for themselves. And they give up the nomad lifestyle and they begin farming. But they... They begin farming on land that they take from the Germans. So the Germans now are landless, and they're fleeing the Huns. So essentially the Germanic tribes then are like the ancient version of refugees. So they seek refuge in Rome, and they agree to disarm and live peacefully in Rome. So the Romans bring in hundreds of thousands of Germans. To come live in Rome. Rome has a population shortage anyway, right? So this is good for both sides because the Germans need land and the Romans need people It doesn't matter that they've been enemies for a hundred years, right? They can just agree to be friends now, right a hundred years ago is a hundred years ago. Let's get over that So they will agree to leave live peacefully in Rome in 376 things go bad really quickly the Goths rebel and 377 We still don't know why they rebel. Supposedly it's because they were facing discriminatory tax policies, but it might have just been that they wanted to rebel. We're not really sure. But regardless, the Goths in particular, but all the Germans in general, quickly rebel. Rome will go to war with the Goths, and they'll fight a second battle at Adrianople. This is between the Goths and the Romans, and the Goths win. They completely wipe out. a Roman legion. They wipe out 40,000 Roman troops. And what will happen is these Germans will, these German barbarians will live within the borders of Rome for the next 100 years. And in general, they will be peaceful. But every now and then, they rebel and sort of just have their way with the Romans. And the Romans are powerless to stop them. The Germans are militarily dominant over the Romans. And they live inside the borders. And this is sort of the end of the Roman Empire. It's these Germans who live within the borders. can sort of politically and militarily boss the Romans around. The Goths will eventually split into two groups. One group is called the Visigoths, and these will remain friendly to Rome. And Rome will use them in lots and lots of wars. They sort of will use the Visigoths to fight people. And then the other side of the Goths are the Ostrogoths, and they are more friendly towards the Huns. You have to feel bad for the Goths, right? Because they either have to be friends to Rome or to the Huns, and those are their two enemies. The Visigoths weren't always allied with Rome, right? They will occasionally war against Rome, but Rome uses them in a lot of battles. For instance, the Romans used the Visigoths to go into Spain and fight the Vandals, right? The Vandals over here. The Vandals will have a rebellion in Spain. This is just an example. in the 420s and The Romans don't have enough troops to fight the Vandals so they hire the Visigoths and the Visigoths go over to Spain and defeat the Vandals So the Visigoths were mostly friendly with Rome, but occasionally they would war against Rome and they even sacked the city of Rome in 410 After the Romans so the Visigoths had rebelled in 408 and then 409 the Romans The Roman emperor encouraged the people of Rome to murder the wives and children of German soldiers. And the people of Rome murdered about 10,000 women and kids. And then the German soldiers, the Visigoths, got angry and they went and burned the city of Rome down in 410. They sacked the city. All right, the Huns will change the balance of power in Europe forever with the rise of Attila the Hun. King Attila reigned from 434 to 453. He's just the king of the Huns. We usually just call him Attila the Hun. For 50 years prior to King Attila's rise, the Huns had been raiding the Eastern Roman Empire, Greece, Dacia area. Under Attila, they go into the Western Roman Empire and they invade Gaul in 451. And the Visigoths join the Romans, right? And the Visigoths and the Romans fight the Huns at the Battle of the Catalonian Plains. And both sides say they won. So we don't actually know who won. We do know the Huns lost a lot of men, but the Huns also did keep raiding, right? They raided France for the next several years, next couple years. And they even went and invaded Italy for a little while. Attila would die in battle in 453. And after that, the Huns were never quite as powerful. The Germanic tribes all joined together and were able to defeat the Huns and basically push them back out of Europe. And they sort of disappear somewhere over in the steppe, and they disappear from history. We don't know what happened to them after that. But Attila the Hun was this sort of fierce military ruler. And we'll get more of these later, these steppe nomads with these fierce rulers. We'll get... like Genghis Khan, for instance, and the Mongols. So let's talk about the end of Rome. So we've had two centuries now of decline, and by this point, so we're now, let's just say we're in the 420s, 430s, 440s. The Germanic tribes, particularly the Visigoths, they dominate Roman politics and society. Remember, the Romans had invited them in because the Romans needed manpower and the Germans needed land. But the Romans can't control the Germans. And over time, more and more of these barbarians will enter, and the Roman military can't do anything to stop them. By the 450s, really the Romans themselves don't really control any territory. The German, the various German tribes. Basically what would happen is a German tribe would move into an area and conquer it and say, okay, I'm now the king of Gaul, I'm now the king of Sicily, I'm now the king of Illyria. And the Romans couldn't stop them. In 455, the Vandals, who we talked about, they come over and they sack Rome. And they really destroy the city. They do a lot of damage. And then the traditional end to the Roman Empire, the way it's taught, is the year 476. A guy named Odiacer, who was a German king, deposed the last Roman emperor and named himself king of Italy. And again, traditionally, historians see this as the end of the Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire will last another thousand years. And will end class with the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453. That will be our last lecture. So that's how the mightiest empire in the history of the world ends. Europe never really recovers. Right, well they do eventually. But it takes Europe several centuries to recover. When we get to the medieval period in Europe, you'll see. So from 476 to 800, we call it the Dark Ages. And then from 800 to about 1050, it's still kind of the Dark Ages. And then say around 1050 or 1100, that's when Europe really actually starts recovering from the fall of the Roman Empire. And really begins to sort of rebuild. with a stable economy and stable politics. So these two centuries of the decline of Rome are truly catastrophic. Again, it's a thousand years before it really bounces back. So there's Rome. We should be getting ready for our midterm. Yes, it's probably useful to just take a minute and discuss the midterm. It is this week, this coming week. Not the week you're listening to these lectures, the week after. And Rome will be the last thing covered on the midterm. It's a take-home midterm. It's open note. It's not timed. You'll get more than one attempt. It's not like the quizzes where you log in and then you can't log out without finishing the quiz on Blackboard. So you'll be able to start and stop as many times as you want. And you can consult your notes or any written sources you want. You're not allowed to consult any other person. That would be considered cheating. But you can consult anything that's not a living. person for help with the midterm and the form of the midterm is described in detail on the simple do fine on the midterm as well and i wish you the best have a good week

How does it collapse? Well, as we've seen before, particularly talking about Egypt, but to a lesser extent when we talked about the Harappan people, sometimes success is its own sort of, you know, there's sort of a penalty you pay for being successful. So perhaps one of the issues that Rome had was just it was too rich, too powerful. And again, it did last a long time.

Maybe it's just the natural cycle of things. It was the longest lasting empire of the ancient era as well, depending on how you define such things. Anyway, we'll get into the specifics here. That's just some general thoughts. The first real issue that hits Rome is what historians call the crisis of the third century.

So you'll recall the last lecture we discussed the Pax Romana, which ended with the five good emperors. The fifth of the five good emperors was Marcus Aurelius, the famous philosopher. Marcus Aurelius left his son in charge after he died, his son Commodus.

And you'll recall that Commodus was kind of an idiot. And he sort of cast Rome into political conspiracy mode, and there was a lot of political violence. Commodus was eventually assassinated. We get a civil war, and a man named Septimius Severus becomes emperor in 193. Now, Severus was a fairly successful emperor. If you were on the ground in Rome, let's just say you'd been alive in Rome.

in the 160s and 170s, and you sort of lived through the end of the Pax Romana, and you were still alive through the rule of Septimius Severus, right, you wouldn't have noticed the decline, right? So if you were on the ground at the time, you wouldn't have said, oh boy, this is our downfall, right? We're in a downswing.

It's only looking back as historians with our sort of historical privilege that we picked the year 180 then. There's this great turning point, right? There's nothing special that happens in the year 180 other than the fact that Marcus really stops being the emperor.

But the decline then, again, it's not sudden or dramatic. It's not like what we saw with, say, the Persians. Do you remember in Mesopotamia we had the Neo-Assyrians, the Neo-Babylonians, and the Persians? And the Neo-Assyrians basically fall overnight, and they're replaced by the Neo-Babylonians, and they fall overnight, and they're replaced by the Persians. And then the Persians last for centuries, and they lose four battles to Alexander the Great over the course of a couple of years, and they're gone.

In Rome, it's nothing like that. There's no dramatic... Like one dramatic event that we can point to, there's no, you know, there's nothing sudden.

Again, at the time, people didn't think it was obvious that their empire was collapsing. If you lived in Neo-Babylon, right, in Nebuchadnezzar's Neo-Babylon, when the Persians came knocking, you said, okay, this is the end, right? Babylonians knew it was the end. The Romans, they don't know it's the end. And so Timaeus Severus spent a lot of his...

Times emperor fighting military campaigns. And in fact, he died in modern day York, England, putting down a rebellion in Britain in the year 211. But the problems, or sort of the seeds for Rome's downfall had already been sown. So we talked in the last lecture about the Antonine Plague of the 160s.

It killed 5 million people. So that was about 1 12th, between 1 12th and 1 14th of the entire population of Rome. For perspective, that would be like in the U.S. losing 27 million people.

It was just a large percentage of the workforce, right? It was hard to replace that many people. And Rome always had sort of population pressure because mortality was so high.

a lot of people in Rome died young just in general. So let's take out the plague. So not counting the plague years, right? A lot of people in Rome died young.

There's no such thing as germ theory, right? They didn't understand germs. This is one of the things we talked about when we talked about the Harappans, right? One of the things that made them so exceptional was they had modern sanitation in their cities. Rome didn't have modern sanitation, right?

People just threw their waste in the street and the rain washed it into the gutters. And so we went right back into the water supply. So people were dying of cholera and, you know, tuberculosis and sort of these diseases of pestilence and filth that we've done away with in the 20th and 21st centuries in most of the world, right? Because we have modern sanitation systems.

But again, Rome didn't have that. So a lot of people in Rome died. And in fact, historians estimate that the average woman in Rome needed to have six children. Just to keep the population stable. That's how many people died at a young age.

So that's what we call replacement level of a population. Typically, in modern societies with good medical care, replacement level is a woman needs to have 2.2 children to maintain population. Right, because you figure a woman is married to a man, that's two people, so they'll die, right?

So you need two people to replace them. And then with mortality rate and so on, you need about 2.2, because it's not like every single person grows up and has a kid, right? Some people grow up and never have kids. some people don't grow up because they die young. So in modern societies, the replacement rate is a woman needs to have about 2.2 children.

In Rome, it was more than six on average, right? Because it varies over the years, but it's like 6.1, 6.4, somewhere in that range. So this Antonine Plague then sort of dealt the Roman population a blow from which it could not recover.

right losing 1 12th to 1 14th right 5 million people 1 12th to 1 14th of the population was just too much because rome was already a very violent society uh with a lot of disease and a high mortality rate and that was just too much for them and of course there's also the civil war um of 193 that followed commodus's death right the year of the five emperors that we talked about last time that killed some more people And then Rome, of course, is always prone to famine. And it's useful to talk about this a little bit, the Roman sort of trade economy, because the crisis of the third century sort of destroys it. So Rome, the Roman economy was actually...

By far the most complex economy of the ancient era, right? It's more complex than Europe. It's the most complex economy in the world until about the year 1700, right? After Rome falls. It takes the world another 1,500 years or so to get that level of complexity back in the economy.

Because Rome had currency. So you bought and sold things for money. And as we'll see after Rome...

In medieval Europe, they don't do that. You don't buy and sell things with money. It's a barter system. In a barter system, let's just say, I don't know, I'm a carrot farmer, and you're a goat farmer, and you want some carrots and I want some cheese. So I'll trade you 12 carrots for a pound of cheese.

So that's your typical pre-modern economy, but Rome is a cash economy. Again, it's an ancient marvel. You didn't trade carrots for cheese.

You sold carrots for coins, and then you used coins to buy cheese. It's a modern economy in that way. And again, Rome had it by far.

I mean, they weren't the only ancient society with a cash economy, but they had by far the most extensive and complex cash economy. And the way it worked was a very extensive and very complicated. trade network. Remember, Rome has roads everywhere.

We talked about during the Pax Romana, all those emperors were constantly building roads. What were those roads good for? Well, they were good for two things. One, they were good at moving the army quickly. how do you get through a forest really quickly right a concrete road how do you get through a swamp really quickly a concrete road right so they're really good for moving troops back and forth across the empire to put down revolts or whatever but they're also really good at moving merchants back and forth across the empire very quickly.

And historians today estimate that a merchant could, you know, could travel the length of the empire basically in a couple months. The roads were that good. You could just put a, you know, a wheeled cart pulled by some ox or a horse or something, right?

And you're not going to have any problems just traveling the road. Whereas, you know, if you're traveling in the swamp or something, you get bogged down. Like even rivers weren't a problem, right? All the rivers had bridges.

It was a very remarkable system. And what it allowed for people to do was it allowed for specialization of goods, right? So in the south of France, they grew a lot of wine, right? Grapes and wine and cheese. And in Spain, they had olives and oranges and that sort of thing.

They used North Africa, particularly Egypt, to grow wheat. So most of the wheat and grain that was grown in the Roman Empire was grown in North Africa. And then again, Rome has the best navy in the history of the world. So they could just sail it anywhere they wanted from there. And they had great ports.

They built these fantastic ports. And the ports were always connected into the road system. Greece had the marble mines and the marble was very important for all the building projects and all the sculpture. Rome was full of amazing buildings and sculptures everywhere. Any rich person would have a huge sculpture garden in their backyard.

I'm talking like two or three acres with hundreds of sculptures made out of marble. Marble is crucial for the economy. You know, they got a lot of fruit from the Levant, you know, modern-day Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine.

They grew a lot of fruit there, particularly dried fruit. The Roman Empire had connections into the Baltic Sea region, you know, sort of southern Russia and southern modern-day Poland. And that's where they got a lot of their naval supplies. That region of the world has always been, like, the world's leader in supplying naval supplies, you know, things like pitch.

and rope and sailcloth. Britain and Northern France are really useful for wool, for making clothing. And all of these things are connected together.

So you could be a British wool farmer in the Roman Empire, and you could have Greek marble sculptures in your backyard, and you could drink French wine and bake bread from Egyptian wheat. And eat Spanish olives and dried apricots from Syria, right? While living in the second century England, again producing wool. One of the downfalls of this kind of economy.

is that it's quite prone to famine because not everywhere produces its own food right so one of the truths we've talked about with the ancient era and we're leaving the ancient era right this is our real this is really our last week in the ancient period um and one of the hallmarks of the ancient period is that most people feed themselves, right? This is, you know, most people at the time were peasants, right? They lived in the countryside and they farmed.

And the only people who don't feed themselves typically are people who live in cities. Well, again, Rome is different because people are specialists, right? So all of Rome is dependent on North African wheat for its food.

And you have to get it there. So if there's rebellion or drought or some kind of insect pest or fungal pest that gets into the wheat supply, then certain parts of the empire don't get their food. So Rome had always been prone to famine.

The weakening of the population... Population decline caused by the Antonine Plague made it more prone to famine just because there are fewer people to farm. You might think there are fewer people to feed, right? So, famine is not as big a problem because you have fewer people to feed.

But that's not true in Rome. In Rome, the manpower is necessary to produce the food and to move it about the empire. Another problem with the weakened population is that Rome is open to invasion. Now... What really kicks off the crisis of the third century is this particular event here in 235. The current emperor at the time was named Severus Alexander, right?

You can see the name similarity with Septimius Severus, right? So he's related. They're not very closely related, but they are related. He's assassinated by his own soldiers.

He'd been combating the barbarians. Remember in Rome, the barbarians are anyone who aren't Roman, right? People who don't speak Latin.

The term barbarian means it refers to their language, right? And to the people who spoke Latin, the barbarian language sounded like bar, bar, bar, bar. So they called them barbarians. So Severus Alexander was in Germany combating German barbarians.

And rather than put his troops out in the field to fight, he basically tried to bribe the barbarians to go away. He paid them to go away and sort of used diplomatic means rather than warfare. And that made his troops mad. And he thought that the troops thought that they were, basically, if you're a Roman troop, you wanted to fight because when you get a little bit of glory and fame, but more importantly, you'd get to loot and pillage, right? So if you fought the barbarians, then you could go into their village and sort of loot and pillage it and carry off anything of value, right?

So it was a way for a common soldier to get rich because soldiers'pay wasn't that great. So they wanted to fight so they were mad that Severus Alexander was denying them the chance to fight but the reason that Severus Alexandra is Not wanting to fight is precisely this lack of manpower. This Antonine Plague has sort of denied Rome its population. So losing soldiers is a big deal.

You don't want to lose your soldiers. After he is assassinated, we get 50 years of chaos. And we call this the Crisis of the Third Century.

So it goes from 235 to about 283 or so. It's about 50 years, the Crisis of the Third Century. And again, there are lots of causes.

So there are internal causes, political intrigue, currency valuation, plague, famine, dry weather. So this is a really interesting one. Environmental historians have done a really excellent job of going back and studying the historical climate, right?

How much, what was the average temperature and how much rain fell? And environmental historians of ancient Rome. have discovered a couple things. So one is that the whole period of the Pax Romana, it's from about 50 BCE to about 190 CE, right? The entirety of the Pax Romana, the Mediterranean, particularly around Italy, but the entire Mediterranean.

had about the best possible climate it could possibly have. The temperature was consistently warm, but never brutally hot. Winters were quite mild.

And rainfall was like, it was just the right amount of rainfall. It was enough to be plentiful, but if it had rained a little more, it would have been too much rain. It was the ideal climate. This is historical luck.

This has nothing to do with Rome. They can't control the weather. And so it was like the perfect conditions for the Roman Empire to get extra powerful.

And what happens is around the year 190 or so, the climate begins to dry up. and it's actually europe has about 200 years it's not drought right like just plenty of rain but it's less rain than people were used to and it did decrease agricultural output right so they they produced less food in the mediterranean and all of europe with this dry weather And we'll talk about this again later because it will lead around the year 500 to a mini ice age, right? It got really cold. Anyway, this dry weather doesn't just affect Rome. It also affects the Germanic tribes.

So we talk about external causes here. The external causes is Rome is beginning to get enemies. Remember, the Pax Romana, Rome was sort of militarily dominant. No one wanted to mess with them.

And around this crisis of the third century, Rome is beginning to look not in. invincible militarily. So people, you know, their neighbors begin to think maybe we could fight Rome, right? And one of those neighbors is the Germanic tribes. But the Germanic tribes, I say here, they're stronger.

That's true. They do get stronger in the third century, but they also get more desperate because the dry weather affects them too, right? They also have less food.

So the Germanic tribes need to expand their territory because more territory means more land, more land means more food, and more food means... right, they're not starving anymore. So in other words, the Germans are starving just like the Romans are starving, right? So the third century is a hungry century in Europe and the Mediterranean because the climate dries up.

The other big enemy on the borders, and they're more important than Germans, are the Sassanids in Persia, right? The Sassanid Persian Empire. And we'll talk about them briefly as well. So this is just introduced.

These are the causes. So let's talk about the internal troubles. So after Commodus, the Empire gets an increasingly unruly and unstable political culture.

We'll talk about this momentarily, but we get this thing called the barracks emperor, where basically the people who become emperor no longer have sort of political experience or any... sort of legitimate or legal claim to the Roman throne. So remember, Augustus is the first emperor, and then the next several emperors are people who were related to Augustus. And then we get the Flavian emperors, and they're all related. And then we get the five good emperors, and they're all sort of related and or they handpick each other.

So the first, we have Trajan, and he picked his cousin, and then his cousin picked Antonius Pius and Marcus Aurelius. Everyone there had a claim to the throne. And so did Commodus, right?

Marcus Aurelius was his dad. After Septimius Severus, so there is a family line there, as I pointed out. They're both named Severus.

That was a huge family, right? And some of the people who took, who claimed the throne didn't have a real claim to it. And this gets worse over time. And so basically, once we get to this crisis of the third century period, say around 235 CE or so, the people who claim the throne do so on military might alone, right? I'm claiming a throne.

Well, what right do you have to claim the throne? these hundred thousand soldiers standing behind me, which is effective in the short term, but is not effective in the long term, right? So you can get short-term stability, but not long-term stability. This is the same thing we talked about way back in the second week of the class when we talked about ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. Remember, ancient Egypt had quite a bit of political stability.

Why? Well, you know, several reasons, right, related to the Nile River mostly, right, the quickness of communication. But also remember that in Egypt, Pharaoh did things that empowered the office of Pharaoh, not the person of Pharaoh, right?

So if Pharaoh did something good, it reflected well on Pharaoh, right, whoever the Pharaoh was. Whereas in Mesopotamia, it was much more down to the, right, Mesopotamia had no political stability, right? And that's because... The person who ruled, it was on him to be great, right? So Hammurabi was a great ruler, so he ruled for a while, right?

The Akkadians had great rulers, so they ruled for a while. But there's no stability because basically power was won by swords, whereas in Egypt, power was won by the prestige of the office, right? Pharaoh had prestige as a position, not as a person. And that had been true in Rome, right? The Roman emperor had prestige.

So the Roman emperor was able to claim power just by the fact that he was the emperor. What we will begin to see with this crisis of the third century, and they'll never resolve it, this will continue until the fall of the Roman empire, is the office of emperor loses its prestige, its power to make a claim for respect and a following, right? Follow me, I'm the emperor.

No one listens anymore. And they begin to follow individuals, not the emperor. So they're not following the office, they're following the individuals. So that's what we mean by an increasingly unruly and unstable political culture.

And we'll see examples of this too. Another thing that emperors did to ensure their grip on power, and this goes all the way back to Augustus, is they typically paid the army an accession bonus. I have acceded to the throne and to prove... that, you know, I have the best interest of the military in heart, you would give a small bonus to the military, you know, like one gold piece to every soldier.

This got to be unwieldy after Commodus, because, well, after really, after Septimius Severus, because between 211 and 235, we get something like 17 emperors, right? 17 emperors in 24 years. And so that's a lot of payments. That's 17 payments in 24 years. Again, all the emperors had done this all the way back to Augustus, but usually there's only one new emperor every, you know, most emperors ruled for, you know, 10 to 20 years.

So you only had to make this payment once every 10 to 20 years. Well, after Septimius Severus, we have to make it, again, something like 17 times in 24 years. So it got to be a lot of money, right? The payment was made too much or too often.

Plus the rulers after Septimius Severus, because they begin to fear, um, the enemies on the outside, right, the Germanic tribes and the Sassanid Persians, they expanded the size of the army by a lot, right? They increased it by 24%, or 25%, sorry, by one quarter. And they also increased soldier pay. So that was very expensive. So basically they ran out of money.

And you'll recall that other emperors had run out of money. Remember Caligula ran out of money and he began murdering nobles and seizing their lands. Well, that wasn't very popular, right?

Another version, they changed the tax policy. They, you know, Nero taxed the rich too much, and that wasn't popular, right? So if you're an emperor and you already have a tenuous grip on power, right?

Because again, political culture is increasingly unstable and unruly. So you can't raise taxes and you're not going to go murder nobles. So what they did was they debased the currency. Now Roman currency was silver coins and gold coins. And what they started doing was mixing copper and bronze in with the silver and gold.

And that made the currency increasingly less You know, increasingly worth less, less trustworthy. I imagine if, I don't know how many of you have traveled internationally, but for instance, I was once a professor for a little while in Bangladesh, and the Bangladeshi currency is called taka. And in Bangladesh, you can use taka just fine, but outside Bangladesh, you can't use taka.

you know like even when i was in india they didn't take taka and then definitely when i came back to the u.s i couldn't use my taka but still currency right it should count the same but uh you know u.s currency of course is a dollar and you can use dollars in bangladesh no one would mind right so i the exchange rate was 80 taka to a dollar so if i went out for a meal let's say and it was 400 taka i could pay with 400 taka or i could pay with five dollars it was fine either way right because The U.S. currency is trusted. So what happened here in Rome is the Roman currency got increasingly less trustworthy. No one knew what it was worth anymore because it used to be worth, right, the currency was a denarius, right, and a denarius was so much gold or so much silver.

Well, when they started mixing copper and bronze in with it, people began to trust it less, right? Well, I don't know what it's worth anymore because, you know, maybe it's 50% copper, you know, rather than 100% silver. And what that made people do is spend less currency.

It ruined Roman currency, which caused a phenomenon we call hyperinflation, which is sort of beyond the scope of the class to really explain it, but hyperinflation almost always causes economic disaster. Essentially what it did was it ruined that trade. Remember I talked about Rome being this...

Very complex cash economy with this really intricate and interdependent trade network. When the currency got ruined here in this period, say, between, let's say, 210 and 250 CE, this is when the currency really gets ruined, that trade network dies. It becomes much more local and de-centered and much less integrated.

So people in Britain aren't eating Syrian apricots while drinking French wine and baking the bread with Tunisian wheat. They got everything much closer to home. Their bread was made with oat flour, with oats they grew in their back garden. And their wine, they don't have wine anymore, they have apple cider, from apple trees that they grew themselves. The economy becomes local.

Rather than this integration, empire-wide trade economy. It becomes a local, decentered economy, and they go to the barter system. Remember the barter systems?

I'll trade you my carrots for your cheese. They stop using cash, and the Roman economy never recovers. It had been the greatest economy in the history of the world.

It never recovers from this. These economic woes will become social chaos. So I talked about, again, there's a huge population loss from the Antonine Plague. This is made much worse by a second epidemic that hits in the year 249 and lasts over a decade. It's called the Plague of Cyprian.

We figured it was probably smallpox, but we're not sure. But it completely obliterated the population again. These two plagues, particularly the Plague of Cyprian, so diminished the population that a lot of farmland went unworked. Which led to massive food shortages.

Again, it's kind of counterintuitive. You would think a plague would kill a lot of people, right? And then you would have a surplus of food because you have fewer people eating food. But basically the plagues killed the wrong people, right?

It killed the people in the countryside who grew the food and didn't kill as much the people in the cities who eat food but don't produce food. So it killed a lot of food producers. and led to food shortages.

And again, the trade system also helped stabilize the food supply, right? Because you were shifting food across the empire. So when the trade system broke down, that also, right, that just exacerbates these natural food shortages that result from the plague.

Again, so the breakdown of the trade system, a compounded issue because food is not circulating. Cities in particular are left with massive grain shortages. So people begin starving in the cities, particularly Rome, the biggest city. It had a population well over a million.

So city dwellers, naturally, they flee to the countryside, right? If you're starving in the city, you're going to go out and try to farm. And they settled in the countryside as a population group called Coloni, which is basically a colonist, right? Sort of a term that's come down into English, but Coloni.

And basically what they were were landless peasants, right? Because all the land is owned. Remember, we talked about that two lectures ago.

All the land in Rome is owned. And so what they would do is they'd go to the landowners and say, hey, will you give me a small parcel of land and I'll basically, me and my children and my children's children and my children's children's children will work for your family for free for four generations if you'll give us an acre of land to grow food so we're not starving. So they begged landlords to offer them very exploitative contracts.

And this will eventually become... We'll talk about medieval Europe has serfdom, but it grows out of these coloni in this third century period. This broke city life apart.

Remember, Rome had this extremely cosmopolitan, diverse, highly literate, very, very rich culture city life. That gets shattered by these food crises. Right, and the migration from the city into the countryside. And also people, you know, once you move to the countryside, you get much less of a political voice, right?

So people are, you know, sort of sacrificing their political and civil rights. Remember, what broke the Republic apart and gave rise to the Empire was that patrician-plebeian divide, right? Essentially what that was was the plebeians getting more and more political and civil rights.

Well, those are the people who are fleeing the cities, right? So when famine hits the cities, the plebes leave the cities, and they go wherever they can find land to grow their own food. And in so doing, they sort of, they sacrifice those rights that they had won, right? They trade the rights for a stable, personal food supply. What good is the right to vote if you're starving, essentially?

Another thing that began happening is as the Empire got weaker, right, law and order breaks apart. So another reason that that trade network, that overland trade network where merchants were going all over the place, is there's no crime in Rome. Alright, so you don't have to worry about bandits or raiders.

Well as social order begins to break down here in this crisis of the third century, we get the rise of banditry again. And we also get barbarians entering from Germany and raiding. So all the cities have to start building walls to protect themselves from German raiders or from bandits.

And walls are very expensive. So the country's already bankrupt, and now they have to spend money on building defensive walls. But again, you're going to be bankrupt and dead.

So the economic woes become social chaos. So that's the internal stuff, but there's also external threats to Roman superiority. supremacy.

Remember that Pax Romana is a result of Rome's unquestioned military superiority over its neighbors. No one would dare challenge Rome because there's absolutely no chance you would win. Well, all of this internal strife, right, the plagues, the famines, the people leaving the cities, the breakdown of the trade network, the complete and utter collapse of the economy.

The growing political instability that comes from all of that, that removes that dominance. Rome can no longer field terrifying armies. Again, Rome, during the Pax Romana, the Romans could send 40,000 legionnaires into Britain and fight in Britain. And at the same time, they could have 70,000 legionnaires in Mesopotamia. Another 50,000 in Egypt, another 50,000 in Spain, and then just have 200,000 just hanging out in Greece, right, relaxing.

No big deal, right? Well, that's gone now. They can't field armies of that size. They're no longer this terrifying dominant military force, so people begin to threaten them. The Sassanid Empire in Persia, right, is the major threat in the east.

Remember, in the east, the Romans have been fighting the Parthians for centuries. The Sassanids... conquered the Parthians in 224, and the Sassanids hate Rome. They'd had a few battles with Rome.

Rome liked to, about every 20 years, they'd go in and sack the Sassanid capital city of Cetiphon. So the Sassanids have a real hatred of Rome, and again, they begin to get really powerful here in the third century, at the same exact time that Rome is getting increasingly weak. So the Sassanids and the Romans will fight each other off and on for several... for the next couple centuries, basically.

The Sassanids killed the Roman Empire in battle in the year 250 for instance. By the time the Roman Empire collapses the Sassanids control most of Mesopotamia and most of Anatolia as well. Remember Anatolia is modern-day Turkey and when we say Mesopotamia here we mean basically modern-day Iraq and Iran.

So that would become you know the Sassanids will control that they take it from Rome slowly over time. The other major threat, these are in the north, not the east, the Germanic tribes, right? They're getting, as I already said, both stronger and more desperate, right?

The same dry climate that made Roman farming suffer makes Germanic farming suffer, right? So the Germanic tribes begin to migrate. They begin to fight more, right? They're hungry, right?

And they're desperate, so they fight and move around more. And they also... Beginning with this crisis of the third century, they begin raiding or just full-on invading, right? There's a group we'll talk about briefly or soon here called the Goths and the Goths Just full-on invade Rome several times Beginning in this you know third century crisis.

So how does the crisis end? It ends as you might suspect if you Take into account ancient history that we studied so far, right? One great ruler comes in and ends it. His name is Diocletian.

So I've already talked about this phenomenon of the barracks emperors, right? These were emperors with no claim to the throne or political experience, right? Who rule only because of the loyalty of their troops.

So this creates very unstable politics and basically 50 years of civil war because the generals would fight each other, right? And while they're fighting each other, they're not defending the empire, right? So the general, these barracks emperors, these generals who control these huge armies, will be fighting each other and then the germans and assassinates and whoever can just raid and pillage the empire um again the germans are invading all the time the goths come in both by land and sea in the 250s not surprisingly the goths are step nomads who moved into europe right they moved off the step and into the forest of eastern europe right they lived in uh basically what is modern day um hungary and Romania. Transylvania for those who really know your European history, or geography I mean.

But they had come from the steppe and they were from the same area of the steppe as the old Scythians. Remember the Scythians? And in fact the Romans used to call them Scythians.

But they're completely different. They're not at all related. Just the fact that they were steppe nomads. Because of the work of the Goths and the Perics emperors and just the general economic crisis and renown to that plague of Cyprian as well, by 260, Rome has split into three separate empires, right? So there's no longer such thing as a Roman empire.

Well, there is, but it's much smaller. So there's the Roman empire. There's the Gallic empire.

The Gallic empire basically controlled modern day France, Belgium, Spain, and Britain. And then there's the Pomeranian empire. which controlled most of the Roman Middle East. And then Rome proper, they controlled North Africa, Egypt, and Italy. So this is a real problem, right?

And they're all controlled by these barracks emperors who are fighting each other and not fighting people like the Goths. So the Goths are sort of burning and pillaging wherever they would like. The Goths were raiding Greece in this time. All of this is ended by force when a man named again Diocletian. He was a lowborn cavalry soldier.

He was from Dalmatia. Dalmatia, we talked about last week or in the last lecture, had been conquered by Trajan. That's modern day Croatia.

So Diocletian was a lowborn cavalry soldier who basically just got promoted up the ranks, became a barracks emperor. And then as a barracks emperor, he conquered all the other barracks emperors. He went and he defeated the Gallic.

empire he went and defeated the palmyrene empire he went and he fought the goths and uh he sort of you know conquered his way to the emperor position in 284 and reunited rome he also stabilized the throne you know for a little while and he set about making massive uh political and military reforms and he's basically uh he wants to re-stabilize right he wants to create a stable political culture and he wants to help the economy recover. So here are just a couple maps to illustrate. So what's red is the Roman Empire, what's green is the Gallic, but the Gallic also controlled a lot of Spain at various points.

And then the yellow here is the Pomeranian. And then here's just an idea of what the rest of Europe looks like around the year 300. CE. So here's the Roman Empire. Again, it's enormous. Here are the Goths in modern-day Transylvania.

They had come from over here, so they migrated in because of the dry weather, right? They were feeling population pressure. They moved in. And then these are the various German tribes.

You can't really read the map too well. That's okay. We'll talk about the ones that really matter for the Romans.

And then over here, these are the Sassanids. Over here. All right, so let's talk about the rule of Diocletian. He'd be emperor for 21 years. It's quite a long rule, 284 to 305. So not a surprise given how he got to be emperor.

He was a master military mind. And he really defeated all of Rome's enemies, right? He stabilized the frontier and he defeated all the enemies, right?

All the Germanic tribes. Really defeated the Sassanids multiple times, right? He put everyone back to their rights, right?

He's reasserted the domination of Rome militarily. He thought that Rome was too big to govern by himself, so he created what's called the Diarchy, or a co-emperorship, with one ruler in the east at a city called Byzantium. Byzantium is modern-day Istanbul, right?

It's where Europe and Asia meet. in modern-day Turkey. So one emperor in the east in Byzantium and one in the west at Rome.

So it's one Roman empire, but for administrative purposes it's split in two pieces. Think about like the U.S., right? The U.S. is one country, but it's also split into 50 pieces, right, for administrative purposes. So that's sort of what Diocletian does with Rome. He will eventually move from a diarchy to a tetrarchy, right?

Instead of two pieces, he'll split it into four. We'll talk about that on the next slide. It gets a little complicated.

He took the east, Diocletian did, so he stayed in Byzantium, and then he gave Maximilian, who's another general, the west. He greatly expanded Rome's administrative bureaucracy, mostly trying to regularize taxation abilities, to sort of restock the treasury to paid troops. Again, he's a military guy, and he understands how powerful Rome's enemies are, so he wants to make sure he has good troops. He also, when he reformed the tax code, he made taxes more equitable and more fair because the tax code hadn't really changed.

It was like a 500-year-old tax code. It just didn't reflect current reality. So he made the taxes more equitable but higher. So everyone paid a little more, but everyone paid a...

a fair amount. One of the more negative aspects of his rules was called the Diocletianic Persecution in 303. Diocletian decided that Christians were a major social problem for the Roman Empire. And so this Diocletianic Persecution was the largest and most sustained persecution of Christians in the entire history of the Roman Empire.

The reasons for this are pretty complex, and we're not really sure we understand them. We sort of have to guess at what Diocletian's thinking. But we definitely know that Diocletian saw himself as a traditionalist who wanted to restore Roman glory.

He had re-empowered the Senate, or pretended to. He didn't actually, but he talked about the Senate, just like Augustus had done. So he really wanted to reassert traditional Roman culture and Roman values.

And Christianity is foreign, and it's not Roman, and it's new. And Diocletian saw all of those as threats, right? Rome had been great 100 years ago, right?

If you're Diocletian, he's thinking, 100 years ago, we were great. And we didn't have Christianity, right? So that's one of the reasons, obviously, that Rome has a problem for Diocletian. So he goes after the Christians.

This persecution varied in intensity from region to region. And most Roman Christians escaped all persecution altogether. Sorry, excuse me.

So most Christians escaped unscathed. It was much stronger in the east, particularly in modern-day Turkey. So in Anatolia was where the persecution was the most intense. And then over in modern-day France, so Roman Gaul, there was no persecution at all. The governor of Gaul was like, nah, I'm not going after the Christians.

That's a waste of my time. So it varies from region to region and over time as well. As I said, Diocletian had expanded his co-emperor idea, the diarchy idea, into four emperors.

And again, this is called a tetrarchy. And the way the tetrarchy was supposed to work is you have two supreme emperors, Diocletian and Maximilian. And then they each have a junior emperor.

And the two supreme emperors govern the two most important. So they split Rome into four parts, right? And the supreme emperors govern the two most important of the four parts, and the junior emperors govern the two less important of the four parts.

And then rather than emperors dying, or maybe they will die, right? But they should retire, right? But if they don't retire, they'll die in office.

That's fine. Either way is fine. And when the sort of... The big emperor, right, like the main emperor, the two main emperors, when one of them dies or retires, the junior emperor underneath him gets promoted to be the big emperor.

And then the junior emperor, who's now the big emperor, will pick his own junior emperor to sort of be his understudy. So again, it's very complicated. So Diocletian and Maximilian both retire in 305, and they promote their junior emperors, right? So again, the two co-emperors each have a junior emperor.

And Diocletian's junior emperor was a man named Constantius. So Diocletian retires in 305, and he takes his junior emperor, Constantius, and he makes him the emperor, right, the main emperor in the east in 306, or 305. But Constantius then picks his own junior emperor to serve under him. And Constantius dies in 306 of natural causes.

So his junior emperor should become the next main emperor, right? So Constantius'junior emperor should replace him. His junior emperor was a guy named Severus. But Constantius, you know, had a big army.

And his army picked Constantine, who was Constantius'son, to be the emperor instead. Right, so the Tetrarchy didn't even last a year. Right, Diocletian resigns in 305. And by 306, the Tetrarchy is already falling apart.

They work all this out, but it reveals a problem, a couple problems. First, the army has too strong of a role in politics, because they pick Constantine. And Constantine gets to be the emperor, by the way.

And also this new system is quite open to abuse and bribery. So Constantine got to be emperor because he basically paid off people and he had the army supporting him. So it's not a very good system.

So all those reforms of Diocletian, they didn't solve the problem. Remember, Rome has all these internal problems, but the big ones, the three big ones, political instability, economic catastrophe, and population collapse. Well, Diocletian hasn't responded to any of them because he couldn't fix the economy.

or the economy is broken. And he can't fix the population either. He's just one guy. It's not like he can make every woman in Rome have 14 babies and all the babies survive to adulthood.

So the one thing he could fix was the political instability. So he tries the Tetrarchy and it doesn't work. By 310, the Tetrarchy has devolved into civil war. We call these the Tetrarchy Civil Wars. Constantine will be the winner.

The most famous battle here is the Battle of Milvian Bridge. The Milvian Bridge is just a bridge over the river Tiber as a way to get into Rome. So basically Constantine's trying to get into Rome and he fights a battle with the co-emperor who was controlling Rome over this bridge.

And Constantine wins and he's able to go into Rome. So he fights the Battle of Milvian Bridge in October 312. It's important not because... Not because of its military significance.

Militarily, it's not that important of a battle. It's more symbolically important. Because prior to the battle, Constantine had been sent a vision by the Christian god who told him to go and conquer. Because Constantine, all of his advisors were telling him not to conquer. Not to go fight.

You would lose. The conditions aren't right. Don't go, don't go. Constantine... No, Constantine...

says, no, I've had a vision. The Christian God came to me in my sleep last night and he told me to fight at the Milvian Bridge and I would win. All I had to do was change my battle standard, right, the flag that he would carry in the battle to this new symbol, right? So, sorry, excuse me.

So Constantine changes his battle standard to this weird thing that combines the Greek letter Chai and the Greek letter Rho and he marches into the battle at Milvian Bridge and wins. In the Chai and Ro, that's the first two letters in the name of Christ, right, in Greek. Early Christianity was dominated by Greek language. The early Christian writers all wrote in Greek. I think as I said in the last lecture, right, so Chai and Ro is the first two letters in the name Jesus Christ in Greek.

And so here's Constantine carrying basically a Christian standard into a battle and winning. The Tetrarchy civil wars would last until 324. So again, after Milvian Bridge, Constantine marches on into Rome. He and another guy named Licinius, they'll be co-emperors, right?

So Constantine will control the west from Rome, and Licinius will control the east from Byzantium. They meet, make a deal to be allies in 313, and they issue what's called the Edict of Milan. This officially ended the Diocletian persecution of Christians. It made all religious minorities, not just Christianity, all minority religions legal and stopped all religious persecution in Rome.

But again, this most affected Christians, but it also affected Jews and all kinds of pagan religions that no longer exist today, and there's probably a few Buddhists around as well. Pretty soon, Licinius and Constantine have a falling out and they become enemies to symbolize how much Licinius doesn't like Constantine. Licinius begins persecuting Christians again in 320. Constantine and Licinius meet in battle in Greece at Adrianople. There'll be a second battle at Adrianople in this lecture, so sorry for that. There are two battles at Adrianople.

But Constantine and Licinius fight on the 3rd of July, 324. Licinius has a much larger army because he has a lot of Goth mercenaries. So remember, Rome is short on manpower. because of the plagues.

So to fill the army, the Romans began hiring German mercenaries. So Licinius had hired a bunch of Gothic mercenaries and has this huge army. Constantine has a bunch of Christians, Frankish Christians.

The Franks were another German tribe, right? So he also has his own German mercenaries. Both sides talked about the battle as a clash of religion, of culture, of values. For Constantine, he and his Christian forces, they represented the future, right? And Licinius was much more about the past, right?

So Licinius was fighting in the name of Roman tradition, and Constantine was fighting more in the name of a Christian future. Constantine wins the battle. He wins the Civil War.

He takes sole control over Rome. We no longer have, you know, two emperors or four emperors. We just have one emperor, Constantine. Constantine the Great, as he's often called. So like Diocletian, Constantine decides he's going to make a bunch of reforms and he's going to try to stabilize Rome.

Again, you can't fix the other problems, right? Rome's other problems of the economy and the population, right? The growing power and strength of the Sassanids and the Germans. He can't do anything about that. But maybe he can fix this broken political culture that causes all this instability in civil war.

So that's sort of what he's after. One of the things Constantine does is he thinks he can use Christianity to unite the empire. He will become the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. He was baptized by Eusebius of Nicomeda in 337. But he'd been very friendly to Christians for 25 years prior to that.

But he didn't officially convert to Christianity until 337. After Constantine, there is not a single emperor who wasn't baptized. There are a couple emperors who denounced Christianity and said that they weren't Christian anymore. But every single emperor after Constantine would be baptized. For those of you who move on from my class and study something like the history of Christian thought, there's a class at JCTC on...

Sort of the history of, again, Christian thought. I think that's what it's called. That's what it's usually called.

One of the big events in early Christianity was the Council of Nicaea. So by 325, the Christian church had split into several sects. And there was a whole array of beliefs and rituals, and nothing had been normalized yet, right?

There's not like a Catholic church yet that's sort of dictating. you know, orthodox practice. And a lot of Christians, there's a lot of really violent disagreement in the Christian community over a few questions. The most important question that was really dividing the early church was what it meant for Christ to be divine, right?

So was Christ human or was he God? Was he both? And how does all that work? But there was a lot of other theological problems as well.

People weren't sure what constituted sin and what wasn't sin. They didn't know which books should be included in the New Testament and which ones shouldn't. So there was a lot of disagreements in the early church community.

So Constantine called the Council of Nicaea in 325 to try to resolve these various disputes. And they did come to an agreement about the nature of Christ's divinity. I could explain it to you, but it's extraordinarily complicated. I have a PhD studying Catholicism from Notre Dame, and I'm still not sure I understand it.

It's very complicated. It's beyond the scope of our class. But just know that Constantine is trying to unite the Christian community.

And one of the reasons he's trying to unite the Christian community is he sees that Christianity is a force that could unite all of Rome. Another thing he does is he... permanently moves the capital of Rome to Byzantium.

And he also carried out a massive construction project in Byzantium and sort of quadruples the size of the city, builds all these grand buildings there. He changes the city's name to Constantinople. And of course, today the city is called Istanbul. It was called Byzantium and then Constantinople and then Istanbul.

So he permanently moved the capital over to there. And he did stabilize Rome for a generation. He fought off multiple invasions by Germanic tribes.

He tried to reform the currency, right, to do away with all that inflation. And he made other smaller changes. He established a system of hereditary rule because he gave power to his sons.

And he went back to the split system, right? So he gave one son control of the west and one son control of the east. And he ruled for 31 years. That's the second longest rule for any emperor.

in all of Rome, right? Augustus ruled longer, only Augustus. Constantine had the second longest reign of any Roman emperor. But no matter what Constantine did, just like no matter what Diocletian did, Rome is broken.

It's a broken society with broken politics, a broken economy, a collapsing population, and strong enemies on its borders, right? So Rome is in decline. All the problems of the 230s are still unresolved, right? The economy is still localized. We don't have the integrated trade-based economy.

It's local, and it's in tatters. Roman main power is still shattered, right? There are armies that can't even fill the armies with Romans. They fill the armies with mercenaries.

The Germans are getting increasingly threatening again. On the next slide, we'll discuss it in greater detail. The Sassanids are taking more and more territory in the east again, particularly in... Anatolia or modern-day Turkey and Roman politics remained violently unstable. In 395 the Empire had been united one more time by yet one more emperor, a guy named Theodosius.

Theodosius had united it for another 20 years but in 395 it split apart into East and West and would never be united again. So after 395 there's no such thing as the Roman Empire, there's the Western Roman Empire. and the Eastern Roman Empire. Christianity had taken a firm hold in both halves.

Now, historians have long debated the role of Christianity in the decline of Rome. Early historians, so all the way up to about 1930 or so, because history as an academic discipline starts in the 1840s. So for the first hundred years of academic history, historians agreed. that Christianity had played a role in destabilizing the Roman Empire.

But since then, so the last 80 years or so of academic history, the prevailing opinion is going back the other way. It says Christianity probably didn't have much to do with it at all, right? It's just coincidental that as the Roman Empire is collapsing, Christianity is on the rise. I don't think anyone would go so far as to say Christianity had no effect whatsoever, but its effect was probably very minor.

But either way, by the 4th century, this 300 to 400 period, Christianity has a very firm hold. Again, all the emperors get baptized. And to symbolize how strong Christianity is in the Roman Empire in the year 380, Theodosius, again, the last great Roman emperor, Theodosius... issued the Edict of Thessalonica, making Christianity the official state religion of the empire. Other religions were still tolerated, but Christianity became the official state religion.

And when Rome split into East and West, it was the official state religion of both the East and the West. All right, let's talk about these Germans. So we've already talked about the Goths.

There are a lot of other German tribes that are pretty powerful, like the Vandals. But the Huns were the terrifying ones. The Huns come in and they're the people who changed, they sort of changed the balance of power in Europe. Remember, the balance of power here is Rome controls everything and everyone else is beneath them.

The Huns sort of mess with that. It should not be a surprise at all. The Huns, the great usurpers, are step nomads. Again and again, as we've seen in class, These outsiders who come in and change societies, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, they come from the steppe, right? We have them in China with the Xiongnu.

We have them in India with the Aryans. We had them in Persia with the Scythians, right? Now we have them here in Rome, right, with the Huns. The Huns were steppe nomads, and they move into Eastern Europe in this period between 350 and 370 CE. And we're not sure why they moved.

They were probably experiencing the same sort of population pressures and food pressures from the worsening climate that everyone else was feeling, right? The climate's getting worse. It's harder to find food.

Now, they're nomads, so they don't grow food, but they find food. But food is getting scarcer all across Europe, including the steppe. Or maybe they had been conquered, right?

you know, in Central Asia and a group had pushed them out. By the way, the Huns will not be the last steppe nomads we'll talk about. There'll be more steppe nomads in our future, don't worry. For whatever reason, by 350, they're firmly settled in Eastern Europe and they live in the old Goth homelands, right?

So the same area there, Transylvania, Hungary, Romania, modern-day southern Poland, that sort of thing. And the Huns were militarily terrifying, right? They weren't as powerful as Rome when Rome was its most powerful, right? But they were as powerful as Rome now in 350. And they easily conquered the Germanic tribes, including the Goths and the Vandals.

So they sort of move into Germany and take all the territory for themselves. And they give up the nomad lifestyle and they begin farming. But they... They begin farming on land that they take from the Germans. So the Germans now are landless, and they're fleeing the Huns.

So essentially the Germanic tribes then are like the ancient version of refugees. So they seek refuge in Rome, and they agree to disarm and live peacefully in Rome. So the Romans bring in hundreds of thousands of Germans.

To come live in Rome. Rome has a population shortage anyway, right? So this is good for both sides because the Germans need land and the Romans need people It doesn't matter that they've been enemies for a hundred years, right? They can just agree to be friends now, right a hundred years ago is a hundred years ago.

Let's get over that So they will agree to leave live peacefully in Rome in 376 things go bad really quickly the Goths rebel and 377 We still don't know why they rebel. Supposedly it's because they were facing discriminatory tax policies, but it might have just been that they wanted to rebel. We're not really sure. But regardless, the Goths in particular, but all the Germans in general, quickly rebel.

Rome will go to war with the Goths, and they'll fight a second battle at Adrianople. This is between the Goths and the Romans, and the Goths win. They completely wipe out. a Roman legion. They wipe out 40,000 Roman troops.

And what will happen is these Germans will, these German barbarians will live within the borders of Rome for the next 100 years. And in general, they will be peaceful. But every now and then, they rebel and sort of just have their way with the Romans.

And the Romans are powerless to stop them. The Germans are militarily dominant over the Romans. And they live inside the borders. And this is sort of the end of the Roman Empire. It's these Germans who live within the borders.

can sort of politically and militarily boss the Romans around. The Goths will eventually split into two groups. One group is called the Visigoths, and these will remain friendly to Rome. And Rome will use them in lots and lots of wars. They sort of will use the Visigoths to fight people.

And then the other side of the Goths are the Ostrogoths, and they are more friendly towards the Huns. You have to feel bad for the Goths, right? Because they either have to be friends to Rome or to the Huns, and those are their two enemies.

The Visigoths weren't always allied with Rome, right? They will occasionally war against Rome, but Rome uses them in a lot of battles. For instance, the Romans used the Visigoths to go into Spain and fight the Vandals, right? The Vandals over here.

The Vandals will have a rebellion in Spain. This is just an example. in the 420s and The Romans don't have enough troops to fight the Vandals so they hire the Visigoths and the Visigoths go over to Spain and defeat the Vandals So the Visigoths were mostly friendly with Rome, but occasionally they would war against Rome and they even sacked the city of Rome in 410 After the Romans so the Visigoths had rebelled in 408 and then 409 the Romans The Roman emperor encouraged the people of Rome to murder the wives and children of German soldiers. And the people of Rome murdered about 10,000 women and kids. And then the German soldiers, the Visigoths, got angry and they went and burned the city of Rome down in 410. They sacked the city.

All right, the Huns will change the balance of power in Europe forever with the rise of Attila the Hun. King Attila reigned from 434 to 453. He's just the king of the Huns. We usually just call him Attila the Hun.

For 50 years prior to King Attila's rise, the Huns had been raiding the Eastern Roman Empire, Greece, Dacia area. Under Attila, they go into the Western Roman Empire and they invade Gaul in 451. And the Visigoths join the Romans, right? And the Visigoths and the Romans fight the Huns at the Battle of the Catalonian Plains. And both sides say they won. So we don't actually know who won.

We do know the Huns lost a lot of men, but the Huns also did keep raiding, right? They raided France for the next several years, next couple years. And they even went and invaded Italy for a little while.

Attila would die in battle in 453. And after that, the Huns were never quite as powerful. The Germanic tribes all joined together and were able to defeat the Huns and basically push them back out of Europe. And they sort of disappear somewhere over in the steppe, and they disappear from history.

We don't know what happened to them after that. But Attila the Hun was this sort of fierce military ruler. And we'll get more of these later, these steppe nomads with these fierce rulers. We'll get...

like Genghis Khan, for instance, and the Mongols. So let's talk about the end of Rome. So we've had two centuries now of decline, and by this point, so we're now, let's just say we're in the 420s, 430s, 440s. The Germanic tribes, particularly the Visigoths, they dominate Roman politics and society. Remember, the Romans had invited them in because the Romans needed manpower and the Germans needed land.

But the Romans can't control the Germans. And over time, more and more of these barbarians will enter, and the Roman military can't do anything to stop them. By the 450s, really the Romans themselves don't really control any territory. The German, the various German tribes. Basically what would happen is a German tribe would move into an area and conquer it and say, okay, I'm now the king of Gaul, I'm now the king of Sicily, I'm now the king of Illyria.

And the Romans couldn't stop them. In 455, the Vandals, who we talked about, they come over and they sack Rome. And they really destroy the city.

They do a lot of damage. And then the traditional end to the Roman Empire, the way it's taught, is the year 476. A guy named Odiacer, who was a German king, deposed the last Roman emperor and named himself king of Italy. And again, traditionally, historians see this as the end of the Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire will last another thousand years.

And will end class with the collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453. That will be our last lecture. So that's how the mightiest empire in the history of the world ends. Europe never really recovers. Right, well they do eventually.

But it takes Europe several centuries to recover. When we get to the medieval period in Europe, you'll see. So from 476 to 800, we call it the Dark Ages. And then from 800 to about 1050, it's still kind of the Dark Ages.

And then say around 1050 or 1100, that's when Europe really actually starts recovering from the fall of the Roman Empire. And really begins to sort of rebuild. with a stable economy and stable politics. So these two centuries of the decline of Rome are truly catastrophic. Again, it's a thousand years before it really bounces back.

So there's Rome. We should be getting ready for our midterm. Yes, it's probably useful to just take a minute and discuss the midterm.

It is this week, this coming week. Not the week you're listening to these lectures, the week after. And Rome will be the last thing covered on the midterm. It's a take-home midterm. It's open note.

It's not timed. You'll get more than one attempt. It's not like the quizzes where you log in and then you can't log out without finishing the quiz on Blackboard.

So you'll be able to start and stop as many times as you want. And you can consult your notes or any written sources you want. You're not allowed to consult any other person.

That would be considered cheating. But you can consult anything that's not a living. person for help with the midterm and the form of the midterm is described in detail on the simple do fine on the midterm as well and i wish you the best have a good week

Transcript for:Understanding the Fall of the Roman Empire

Transcript for:
Understanding the Fall of the Roman Empire