Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Asking the question of when the Roman Empire fell leads you into a decently difficult task of asking what constitutes a fall, and indeed what actually fell in the first place.

The traditional answer of 476 is interesting for things that didn't happen in 476:

* The capital of the Roman Empire wasn't sacked, nor was the capital of the Western Roman Empire sacked.

* The last claimant of Augustus of the Western Roman Empire wasn't killed. (Although the imperial court in the Eastern Roman Empire didn't recognize his claim).

* No vestiges of Roman rule, such as the Roman Senate, ended.

* Contemporary political discussions didn't feel that a major event or break in history had happened.

* Archaeological evidence doesn't point to a major break in the economic conditions or the material record of the era (that would come later, with the Plague of Justinian).

Of course, many pedants will come out saying that the Roman Empire really fell in 1453, because that it is when the Ottomans sacked Constantinople. But again, why 1453?

* Why not 1204, when the Latin Empire sacked Constantinople and ruled from there for 60 years?

* Why not 1461, when the Empire of Trebizond (another rump state of the Byzantine Empire created by the sack in 1204) fell to the Ottomans?

* Or indeed, why not 1475, when the Principality of Theodoro, itself the rump state of the Empire of Trebizond, also gave in to the Ottomans?

* Or 1460, when the Despotate of Morea--the last part of the Byzantine Empire supposedly conquered by the Ottomans--was disestablished as a tributary state by the Ottomans?

* Indeed, it's worth pointing that the last Byzantine Empire had to have his accession to the throne confirmed by the Ottoman Emperor of the time (Murad II)--the Byzantine Empire by the 1440s was itself basically an unruly tributary state of the Ottoman Empire.

So going back to the article's question, if lead poisoning is supposedly one of the reasons for the fall of the Roman Empire, which fall of which Roman Empire are they talking about, and why didn't it contribute to the not-falling of the contemporary not-exactly-the-Roman-Empires running about?

The fall of the Roman empire interpreted as a moment has no explanation because as you point out, there was no specific moment to explain. The fall of the Roman empire interpreted as a process taking place over centuries has an explanation, and longterm factors like lead poisoning fit the bill.

Perhaps a more fitting replacement for 'fall' is "failure to rise".

The Roman empire had plenty of places to expand to (much of Africa, all of Russia/Asia). Yet they didn't manage that.

It controlled most all the resource-producing regions of Africa north of the Sahara. Russia and Germania were densely wooded or covered in plains, in either case sparsely populated and not of substantial interest to a rich Mediterranean power. Persia was the only viable region of expansion, but after Trajan’s inability to incorporate them, the effort seems to have been abandoned

Persia (current Iran) itself was an empire with similar ambitions to incorporate at least the eastern parts of the Roman empire. Too sad that the two most progressive systems of governance in history were in war for around a thousand years, possibly leading to the fall of both.

I’m dubious that this is the explanation, it’s too simple and too neat. Real life is messy and complex and usually defies simple explanations.

This explanation also strips agency from the various peoples who made their own decisions to setup autonomous Roman style rule, throw off Roman rule, or peel off Roman territory and traditions for their own pre-existing polity.

Implicit in the hypothesis, it seems to me, is the idea that the Roman Empire was the good and proper state of affairs, which its administrators could and should have maintained in perpetuity, if not for having had their brains pickled by lead.

As you point out, a whole lot of the Empire's subjects had a very different take on the matter.

The fact that quality of life improved for the average person after Rome fell, and the fact that the average person probably knew that would happen, is likely to have contributed to the fall.

Wasn't there a major regression in the quality of craftsmanship, the size of urban settlements and the volume of commercial trade, after the Roman Empire collapsed?

On the other hand, from what I understand, there is some evidence that there was a significant pick up in the rate of technological innovation after the fall of Rome. Not sure how that stacks up against the technologies lost in the early Middle Ages.

Yes, but most of those were made by slave labor. The drop off in state capacity also made it impossible for the state to afford large armies for war, which further improved the quality of life for the average citizen.

The focus on the decline of public works and art is fundamentally an elite view, since they were never coerced to labor for them or die in the fields protecting the empire. For the common man the empire was much worse, but the common man doesn’t write the history books.

I think it's very useful to consider the ways in which a drop in state capacity can benefit the common man, so I appreciate that perspective.

Still, I have trouble imagining a decline in economies of scale / specialization that large scale trade brings wouldn't have harmed the quality of life of the common man.

You know what also strips agency from people making their own decisions?

Toxic heavy metal poisoning.

To some degree, yes. But this telling still has (as a sibling comment put it) an implicit assumption that the empire was good and stable, and the only thing that matters was the lead poisoning of the elites.

That might be splitting hairs. It was probably a multiple of factors, but lead poisoining, if it occurred on a mass scale, undoubtedly had a big part to do with it.

Rome had already been sacked in 410.

16-year old emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed, but his life was spared which is a better fate than Vercingetorix received at the hands of Caesar.

Odoacer installed himself as ruler and the seat of power moved to Ravenna. So basically all vestiges of Roman rule ended.

By 476, Rome hadn't been the primary capital of the Western empire for almost 200 years. Diocletian moved the capital of the Western Augustus from Rome to Milan in 286[1]. The Capital then moved from Milan to Ravenna in 402, where it remained until Odoacer "reunited" the Western and Eastern empires. The Roman Senate long outlasted the Western Emperor, existing at least until 603.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrarchy#Regions_and_capitals

The Ottomans, in holding together a multi-ethnic, multi-religous empire, frankly did something that seems more Roman than what the Byzantines did.

Perhaps it fell in the 4th century, perhaps it fell in 1922.

Geographically at least that's more an extension of the Persian empire than Rome.

I disagree. Yes, Mesopotamia was usually controlled by the Parthians or Sassanids, but everywhere else was squarely Roman sphere of influence. And they never controlled Persia proper. That would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safavid_Iran. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_empires for a fairly stable rough division of geography both before and after they period too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_antiquity I should say 3rd not 4th.

Perhaps it fell in 1806 when the HRE was dissolved.

But it wasn’t too long after then that Germany put the gang back together, later teaming up with the ottomans to have another crack at taking over the world.

Was the fall of the Third Reich final chapter of the Roman Empire?

Because it wasn’t too long after that event that another pan-European empire… sorry I mean Union emerged, politically dominated by the Holy Roman Empire… sorry I mean Germany.

> The traditional answer of 476 is interesting for things that didn't happen in 476

I think you are focusing too much on what happened inside Italy. Yes, the state in the location continued on without much change. But the Empire was over, no longer were Roman legions wandering all over Western Europe, and had been receding for the previous century.

I've heard it said that Roman empire finally ended in 1283 with the Norman conquest of Gwynedd, since that would mark the end of the period of uninterrupted Roman rule (assuming one believes that the rule of the Welsh princes descended from Roman rule in Britain nearly a millennium earlier).

The reality is that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire wasn't a sharply defined event and more of a process that took an awfully long time. The idea that lead poisoning contributed to that process is an interesting one but I'm not sure that the article answers any questions about that.

I like to think 363, the end of the rule of Julian, the last pagan emperor or Rome, and winner of the last real military victories of the Western Empire. But I make no claims of objectivity here.

For those who'd like to know more, play Europa Universalis 4, it starts in 1444 and you can play all of the abovementioned states.

Not recommended for beginners though (except the Ottomans).

I've always thought about the fall of an empire as the moment the bureaucratic wheels seize to function and the shared cultural values fall apart.

If a new war lord storms in but just sets themselves on the throne with the machinery in place the empire staggers on culturally and bureaucratically.

A mongol like situation and the whole structure and culture is shattered.

Rome in 476 I think had a broken bureaucratic system and shattered culture.

The Byzantines kept that stuff in place until the final fall of Constantinople.

> wheels seize to function

It's 'cease' but I can't imagine a more appropriate use of seize, as it's a wheel/gears metaphor!

The dangers of typing on an iphone SE :)

> A mongol like situation and the whole structure and culture is shattered.

The Mongols were more of the putting-themselves-on-the-top type of invader. Almost all conquerors are. (Though it's true that wasn't the Mongols' original intent -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yel%C3%BC_Chucai )

Where did they insert their own culture in the place of their subjects'?

Why not 1806, when the Holy Roman Empire, considered by many in the middle ages to be the legal successor of the Roman Empire, was dissolved?

Because, though they claimed that, we see little sense in which they were in fact the "legal successor" of the Roman Empire.

Why did cultural and technological development seem to subside after 476?

What makes you think it subsided after 476 and not, say, 235?

I'm not an expert in Late Antiquity, but it should be recalled that when most people think of Rome and Roman innovations, we usually harken back to Classical Rome, that of say from 200 BC to 100 or so. If you think about Roman political figures you know, or Roman escapades you remember, or Roman authors you read, chances are you're going back to that time.

Of course, there is one very, very, very major cultural institution after the Crisis of the Third Century that Rome bequeathed to the world. But many--perhaps most--people would stridently object to considering it Roman. I am of course talking about Christianity.

Augustine was one of its foremost practitioners and was fully inculcated in Roman culture. His writing is as good as anything produced during the classical era. The Confessions are one of the most significant texts in all of Latin literature.

If we see Christianity as a shift in focus rather than a break, that pushes the “downfall” back to 400 AD or later at the least.

> there is one very, very, very major cultural institution after the Crisis of the Third Century that Rome bequeathed to the world. But many--perhaps most--people would stridently object to considering it Roman. I am of course talking about Christianity.

You mean Roman Catholicism, the organisation both named after and headquartered in Rome?

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