Synthetic ‘civilization’ scores are unavoidably subjective
Just to be clear, the Ian Morris graph is Western Eurasia vs Eastern Eurasia(since it can’t be Western Europe vs colloquial East, as Western Europe was a backwater pre-Rome)? I’m very skeptical of these historical score approaches, they obscure more than they enlighten and depending on how actual data is weighted the author can come up with any conclusion they want.
For instance, why wouldn’t population density be the defining characteristic of a successful society(higher energy density, more efficient use of space, all sorts of engineering style arguments favour that)? China would utterly dominate Western Eurasia in that model. I don’t necessarily prefer that metric, I’m just pointing out synthesized metrics are very subjective though of course they have pop-history appeal.
Pet theory: Rome collapsed because all the greedy farmer soldiers became serfs
The fall of (Western) Rome has been the subject of 15 centuries of scholarship, so I’ll just toss my personal favourite single cause to rule them all(it wasn’t just one cause, it was multifactor but whatever): the collapse of the small-scale citizen farmers and the rise of the latifundia and the general demilitarization of roman citizens.
Disclaimer: the Romans were the historical villains of the region, in my opinion, I’m not glorifying them or their society.
The key contrast: Hannibal killed >100,000(?) roman soldiers while in Italy, yet never felt able to besiege the city. His army was maybe 100,000 strong. In 410 Alaric takes Rome with ~40,000 soldiers, despite the city being larger than the one that faced Hannibal, with no resistance worth mentioning.
The problem is the composition of Roman society had changed.
Growing Rome was a society where most fighting age males knew a bit of how to fight and could be drafted and would answer the draft out of patriotism/religious/civic devotion or greed. Late Rome was a society where a lot of people were coloni(proto-serfs) or fully slaves. They were purposefully not allowed to fight since their owners were afraid those skills might be turned against them. Late Roman society also wasn’t expanding ⇒ the wars being fought wouldn’t result in plunder ⇒ the incentive for citizens to join the army was greatly reduced.
Early Roman soldiers had arguably unlimited upside, conquer some rich city or tribe and your share of the loot leaves you set for life. Late Roman soldiers just had a salary and much more competent enemies.
There were tons of rich land owners in the Italian peninsula, tons of people? How could the city fall to a mere 40,000 soldiers? No one really cared to defend it. The latifundiaries made their own deals with the ‘barbarians’, not caring about the fact that their families would slowly lose control of the land over the coming centuries. The religious(?) obsession with long-term legacy of the Republic and early empire were gone, the men of the Late west were short term focused. Early Rome elites cared about their prestige in Roman society, they saw themselves as part of the population of one city, at the end of the day they’d fight together against external societies. Late Roman elites had their wealth and power in the provinces and didn’t see other latifundiaries as part of their in-group and worth fighting along with.
Plot twist: the latifundia grew because the farmer soldiers were too successful and wouldn’t stop
The reason the latifundia grew and the old Roman system collapsed was the very success of the old Roman system flooding Italy with slaves and money and allowing elites to buy out small landholders. Furthermore a good reason for the Roman state to allow this process to happen was that the old get rich quick Roman war strategy ended up being used against Rome itself as Imperial pretenders persuaded our heroic yeomen farmer soldiers to turn arms against the state(since there wasn’t much worth conquering outside the borders). Damned if you do damned if you don’t.
Just for fun: modern democracies fuse roman legalese, revived roman civic religion, dying christian feudal ideas of obedience to authority and feudal cultural practices for peacefully transferring power
Epistemic status, wild fun speculation.
I’d argue that Western Europe continued evolving culturally and politically after Western Rome collapsed. The key technology that developed in Western Europe was the (comparatively) peaceful transfer of power from one monarch to another upon death, without lobotomizing the monarch and replacing him with a weaselly bureaucracy the way the Ottomans/Chinese harem systems solved the endless succession civil war problem.
The ability to ACTUALLY transfer power, as opposed to sidestepping the succession by having real power embodied in a constantly regenerating collection of people is the enabling cultural technology for modern republican democracies. Better put: both elite and popular culture expects a peaceful, legally codified transfer of power. It’s this ingrained instinct that’s valuable and is essential(and can be lost, as Republican Rome lost it and Imperial Rome never acquired it in the West), rather than the formal rules for how you transfer power.
That and Europe’s weird obsession with separating the person of the king from the institution of the monarch(see Britain’s linguistic weirdness around King/Queen-in-parliament, possibly related to Christian weirdness around the Trinity, maybe the religious mental calisthenics got applied to political ideas as well) creates a neat interface where you can cleanly replace a monarchy with an elected government and it sort of all just works the same in the minds of everyone involved.
I would like to slightly argue with this proposition regarding the fall of Rome.
It is indeed true that the direct reason for the fall was the weakness of the late Roman armies compared to barbarian forces. But Rome moved away from using farmer soldiers as the backbone of the army with the Marian reforms in 107 BC. This did not stop the expansion of the empire nor weakened the army for several centuries. Q.E.D.
However, I think your speculation in the second part (transition of power) is actually a really good explanation for this decline of the Roman army. The Imperial armies often rebelled in the late period, trying to promote a new Emperor. To counter this, reforms were introduced that decreased the chance of a successful army rebellion, but they also greatly diminished their effectiveness: ”Under the Roman emperors, besides, the standing armies of Rome, those particularly which guarded the German and Pannonian frontiers, became dangerous to their masters, against whom they used frequently to set up their own generals. In order to render them less formidable, according to some authors, Dioclesian, according to others, Constantine, first withdrew them from the frontier, where they had always before been encamped in great bodies, generally of two or three legions each, and dispersed them in small bodies through the different provincial towns, from whence they were scarce ever removed but when it became necessary to repel an invasion. Small bodies of soldiers quartered, in trading and manufacturing towns, and seldom removed from those quarters, became themselves tradesmen, artificers, and manufacturers. The civil came to predominate over the military character, and the standing armies of Rome gradually degenerated into a corrupt, neglected, and undisciplined militia..” Source: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book05/ch01.htm (The link is to the first chapter of Book 5 of the famous Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. I suggest reading it, it has really good insights on the nature of armies.)
The key technology that developed in Western Europe was the (comparatively) peaceful transfer of power from one monarch to another upon death, without lobotomizing the monarch and replacing him with a weaselly bureaucracy the way the Ottomans/Chinese harem systems solved the endless succession civil war problem.
I love wild speculation like this. (Appropriately labeled, of course.)
I think another thing that made Alaric successful was that by 410, Rome was not located in Rome. For the most part, the Western Empire was not as rich as the East, and the city of Rome itself was becoming less and less favoured by emperors (especially after the 3rd century crisis). Alaric was able to capture Rome in part because they had lost the culture of warrior-farmers, but also because Rome was like Philadelphia: Once a great city and capital, but now a medium-sized town with no real attractions (except the Pope, but even then, the Patriarchs were more powerful at the time).
I agree, but keep in mind just the city itself was like twice the size in the later period. Population wise 2nd Punic war Rome was around 3-500k, 410 Rome was around 8-900k. Presumably the greater southern Italian region was also way more populous, tho also less able/interested in coming to the city’s aid.
Synthetic ‘civilization’ scores are unavoidably subjective
Just to be clear, the Ian Morris graph is Western Eurasia vs Eastern Eurasia(since it can’t be Western Europe vs colloquial East, as Western Europe was a backwater pre-Rome)? I’m very skeptical of these historical score approaches, they obscure more than they enlighten and depending on how actual data is weighted the author can come up with any conclusion they want.
For instance, why wouldn’t population density be the defining characteristic of a successful society(higher energy density, more efficient use of space, all sorts of engineering style arguments favour that)? China would utterly dominate Western Eurasia in that model. I don’t necessarily prefer that metric, I’m just pointing out synthesized metrics are very subjective though of course they have pop-history appeal.
Pet theory: Rome collapsed because all the greedy farmer soldiers became serfs
The fall of (Western) Rome has been the subject of 15 centuries of scholarship, so I’ll just toss my personal favourite single cause to rule them all(it wasn’t just one cause, it was multifactor but whatever): the collapse of the small-scale citizen farmers and the rise of the latifundia and the general demilitarization of roman citizens.
Disclaimer: the Romans were the historical villains of the region, in my opinion, I’m not glorifying them or their society.
The key contrast: Hannibal killed >100,000(?) roman soldiers while in Italy, yet never felt able to besiege the city. His army was maybe 100,000 strong. In 410 Alaric takes Rome with ~40,000 soldiers, despite the city being larger than the one that faced Hannibal, with no resistance worth mentioning.
The problem is the composition of Roman society had changed.
Growing Rome was a society where most fighting age males knew a bit of how to fight and could be drafted and would answer the draft out of patriotism/religious/civic devotion or greed. Late Rome was a society where a lot of people were coloni(proto-serfs) or fully slaves. They were purposefully not allowed to fight since their owners were afraid those skills might be turned against them. Late Roman society also wasn’t expanding ⇒ the wars being fought wouldn’t result in plunder ⇒ the incentive for citizens to join the army was greatly reduced.
Early Roman soldiers had arguably unlimited upside, conquer some rich city or tribe and your share of the loot leaves you set for life. Late Roman soldiers just had a salary and much more competent enemies.
There were tons of rich land owners in the Italian peninsula, tons of people? How could the city fall to a mere 40,000 soldiers? No one really cared to defend it. The latifundiaries made their own deals with the ‘barbarians’, not caring about the fact that their families would slowly lose control of the land over the coming centuries. The religious(?) obsession with long-term legacy of the Republic and early empire were gone, the men of the Late west were short term focused. Early Rome elites cared about their prestige in Roman society, they saw themselves as part of the population of one city, at the end of the day they’d fight together against external societies. Late Roman elites had their wealth and power in the provinces and didn’t see other latifundiaries as part of their in-group and worth fighting along with.
Plot twist: the latifundia grew because the farmer soldiers were too successful and wouldn’t stop
The reason the latifundia grew and the old Roman system collapsed was the very success of the old Roman system flooding Italy with slaves and money and allowing elites to buy out small landholders. Furthermore a good reason for the Roman state to allow this process to happen was that the old get rich quick Roman war strategy ended up being used against Rome itself as Imperial pretenders persuaded our heroic yeomen farmer soldiers to turn arms against the state(since there wasn’t much worth conquering outside the borders). Damned if you do damned if you don’t.
Just for fun: modern democracies fuse roman legalese, revived roman civic religion, dying christian feudal ideas of obedience to authority and feudal cultural practices for peacefully transferring power
Epistemic status, wild fun speculation.
I’d argue that Western Europe continued evolving culturally and politically after Western Rome collapsed. The key technology that developed in Western Europe was the (comparatively) peaceful transfer of power from one monarch to another upon death, without lobotomizing the monarch and replacing him with a weaselly bureaucracy the way the Ottomans/Chinese harem systems solved the endless succession civil war problem.
The ability to ACTUALLY transfer power, as opposed to sidestepping the succession by having real power embodied in a constantly regenerating collection of people is the enabling cultural technology for modern republican democracies. Better put: both elite and popular culture expects a peaceful, legally codified transfer of power. It’s this ingrained instinct that’s valuable and is essential(and can be lost, as Republican Rome lost it and Imperial Rome never acquired it in the West), rather than the formal rules for how you transfer power.
That and Europe’s weird obsession with separating the person of the king from the institution of the monarch(see Britain’s linguistic weirdness around King/Queen-in-parliament, possibly related to Christian weirdness around the Trinity, maybe the religious mental calisthenics got applied to political ideas as well) creates a neat interface where you can cleanly replace a monarchy with an elected government and it sort of all just works the same in the minds of everyone involved.
I would like to slightly argue with this proposition regarding the fall of Rome.
It is indeed true that the direct reason for the fall was the weakness of the late Roman armies compared to barbarian forces.
But Rome moved away from using farmer soldiers as the backbone of the army with the Marian reforms in 107 BC. This did not stop the expansion of the empire nor weakened the army for several centuries. Q.E.D.
However, I think your speculation in the second part (transition of power) is actually a really good explanation for this decline of the Roman army. The Imperial armies often rebelled in the late period, trying to promote a new Emperor. To counter this, reforms were introduced that decreased the chance of a successful army rebellion, but they also greatly diminished their effectiveness:
”Under the Roman emperors, besides, the standing armies of Rome, those particularly which guarded the German and Pannonian frontiers, became dangerous to their masters, against whom they used frequently to set up their own generals. In order to render them less formidable, according to some authors, Dioclesian, according to others, Constantine, first withdrew them from the frontier, where they had always before been encamped in great bodies, generally of two or three legions each, and dispersed them in small bodies through the different provincial towns, from whence they were scarce ever removed but when it became necessary to repel an invasion. Small bodies of soldiers quartered, in trading and manufacturing towns, and seldom removed from those quarters, became themselves tradesmen, artificers, and manufacturers. The civil came to predominate over the military character, and the standing armies of Rome gradually degenerated into a corrupt, neglected, and undisciplined militia..”
Source: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book05/ch01.htm
(The link is to the first chapter of Book 5 of the famous Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. I suggest reading it, it has really good insights on the nature of armies.)
I love wild speculation like this. (Appropriately labeled, of course.)
I think another thing that made Alaric successful was that by 410, Rome was not located in Rome. For the most part, the Western Empire was not as rich as the East, and the city of Rome itself was becoming less and less favoured by emperors (especially after the 3rd century crisis). Alaric was able to capture Rome in part because they had lost the culture of warrior-farmers, but also because Rome was like Philadelphia: Once a great city and capital, but now a medium-sized town with no real attractions (except the Pope, but even then, the Patriarchs were more powerful at the time).
I agree, but keep in mind just the city itself was like twice the size in the later period. Population wise 2nd Punic war Rome was around 3-500k, 410 Rome was around 8-900k. Presumably the greater southern Italian region was also way more populous, tho also less able/interested in coming to the city’s aid.
Different comparison: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7v15js/why_was_roman_military_so_small_during_the/ Late Roman armies were crippled by a loss of 75k men, despite similar losses being overcome by just Rome’s Southern Italian coalition centuries earlier.