External Crisis of the Roman Empire

The decline of the Roman empire is one of the great formative dramas in
world history. there has been considerable debate over the causes for this
'event'. One must remember, right at the onset, that though there was a real
decline in the political power and unity of the Western Roman EmpireThe
Empire was to live on in the East for many centuries, though as an essentially
regional power centered on Greece and Anatolia till the fall of Constantinople
to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Modern historians tend to prefer the term
‘Byzantine Empire’ for the eastern, medieval stage of the Roman Empire.

owing to the long-standing debate on whether one should view Roman decline
as a ‘fall’ of Western Civilization or merely as a ‘transition’ or ‘transformation’
caused by Germanic invasions. Complex societies emerged for a time in parts
of Gaul, Spain and England, based upon a mixing of local elites converging
around Roman traditions. However, it was also true that the 5th century was
replete with invasion, death and suffering, the displacement of populations,
the partial destruction of cultural resources, and the very real fracturing of the
power of the Western Empire. The external factors which led to the decline of
Rome included migrations and invasions by two cultures: The Germanic
Tribes and the Central Asian nomadic tribes (mainly the Huns).

Contact between the Germanic peoples and the Roman world existed long
before the empire’s crisis in the third century. Prior to Caesar’s conquest of
Gaul, most Romans had simply never bothered to distinguish between the
Germans and the Celts, instead lumping them together under the term
barbarians. While there were innumerable confrontations along the Rhine-
Danube border over the centuries, Roman contact with the Germans for the
most part benefited both societies. The Germans learned Roman concepts of
statehood and statecraft, agricultural techniques, and eventually knowledge
both of Latin and writing; the Romans used Germanic immigration to settle
the land and stabilize the frontier. The border between their two worlds was
in fact an extremely porous oneBy the 4th Century, Romanized Germans
actually made up the bulk of the imperial army in Western Europe.

According to G. I. Smith (The Historical Geography of Western Europe), the

Germanic tribes originated from a northern Scandinavian and Baltic stock
from c. 1000 B.C.
Prior to the 3rd Century A.D., most of the Germanic tribes were
agriculturalists with a rudimentary degree of social organization. They tended
to live in nucleated villages of modest size, seldom involving more than a
couple of hundred people. A nucleated village was one in which the
inhabitants lived in a central cluster of houses, mere hamlets, from which the
crop fields radiated out, with meadows and pastures lying just beyond. There
are signs that their populations swelled significantly starting in the Ist
Century B.C. and continuing until the 3rd century A.D. Increased need for food
and the desire to avoid Asiatic nomads like the Alans and Huns began to force
many thousands of these Germans toward the Roman border.

Nonetheless, warfare and violence certainly characterized the life of these

tribes by the time the Romans encountered them, but these attributes were
due more to the harsh conditions they lived in than to any genetically-
ingrained aggression.

Among a people that lacked rigid social hierarchies, one could advance oneself
within the clan or tribe by feats of arms, or perhaps create a new such group
under one’s direct rule.
The Germanic tribes had been pressing against the Roman frontier long before
the 4th Century, without leading to a cleavage of that frontier. As M. Grant (The
Fall of the Roman Empire) points out, Rome still possessed superficial strength
in the late 4th Century. Even as late as 363 A.D. the Empire was able to field
major armies in the east which could successfully invade, if not permanently
hold down, the Persians.
It is now necessary to examine the reasons behind the Ist Great Wave of
Germanic Migrations and Invasions in the 4 th and 5th Centuries B.C. By the late
fourth century, the internal crisis had reached its flash-point and Rome was
on fire, beleaguered by a crumbling administrative and political edifice, with
the Roman currency, Denarius, being devalued to hitherto unseen levels,
coupled with a degradation of coins, leading to a demonetization of the
economy, leaving Rome
penniless. It was not even in a situation to pay for the upkeep of its military.

In such a situation, it became impossible to control the Germanic migrations.

Several factors caused the Germans to push westward in increased numbers.
First was the general problem of overpopulation. The Roman territories,
despite the problems they were experiencing, were considerably wealthier,
the land itself more fertile, and the general climate more tolerable than what
was available north of the Danube and east of the Rhine. Added to the
economic lure of the empire was the desire to flee the blood feuds that
increasingly characterized Germanic life. As the struggle for survival
intensified, conflicts between clans and tribes became more frequent, and
drove many to seek a more peaceful life within the Roman world. A third
factor was the approach of the Huns, a fiercely aggressive group of warrior-
nomads from central Asia. Recognizing that they were powerless before these
new invaders, the Germans sought refuge with the Romans. Thus, what had
long been a stable process of more or less orderly migration and acculturation
turned into a full-scale invasion of terrified, starving, and desperate—and
therefore aggressive—Germanic groups into the empire. Modern Germans
refer to this period of their history as the Völkerwanderung, or the
“Wanderings of the Peoples.”

Matters came to a head in 376 A.D. when the Huns arrived at the easternmost
reaches of Europe, There they crushed the Ostrogoths and sent them fleeing
into the Balkans. The Visigoths, who were the Huns’ next target, pleaded with
the emperor in Constantinople for permission to settle within the imperial
province of Moesia, which lay just south of the Danube. The emperor Valens
(A.D. 364–378), an Arian Christian, sympathized with the Visigoths, who had
some time before converted to Arianism and granted them refuge on the usual
condition that they serve as federati and defend that section of the border.
Valens failed to provide the arms and materiel he had promised, however, and
left the Visigoths exposed to continued attack from the Huns and scorn from
the local population for their failure to defend them. The Visigoths responded
by renouncing their alliance with the empire and going on a rampage. They
plundered the province of Thrace and began to march on Constantinople
itself. Valens, at the head of the imperial army, met them in battle near
Adrianople in 378. The Visigoths defeated the Romans and killed Valens, then
went on to pillage much of Greece.

Later emperors survived the onslaught in two ways. First, they relied
increasingly on the power of German generals familiar with the fighting
strategies and tactics of the invaders. Within just a few years the generals
themselves were in real command, often using the emperor as a mere puppet
to be set up or pulled down at will. Second, the emperors focused their
energies on defending and preserving the eastern half of the empire only, and
opened up the west to the newcomers.
We do not know exact numbers, of course, but historians generally agree that
several hundred thousand Germans entered Western Europe at this time. The
Alans and Suevi plundered their way diagonally through France, from the
northeast to the southwest, before ultimately settling in northern and western
Spain. The Vandals followed at their heels and in 429 crossed the Strait of
Gibraltar and took control of the western portion of North Africa and the city
of Carthage in 439. Groups of Franks moved into northern and central France,
while large numbers of Angles, Jutes, and later Saxons crossed into England.
The search for food and safety from attack drove them all.

If it seems that the seemingly invincible Roman army (at least till a couple of
centuries ago) fell like nine-pins before the Germanic onslaught, there were
some fundamental cancers which festered within Rome itself which led to this
situation.

By the end of the fourth century, several factors limited the Roman military.
According to Arther Ferrill (The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military
Explanation), the shift of strategy from
preclusive frontier defense to a system of 'defense-in depth' backed by large
mobile field armies held in reserve was not entirely effective. Ward-Perkins
argues that the unwillingness of the general populations to be conscripted
into the army, and their unwillingness to either support the army through the
burden of taxation or of levies of goods made it increasingly difficult in the
fourth century to support something like the 600,000 that were needed to
fully defend the frontiers.
These Germanic movements convulsed western Europe and disrupted
agriculture, trade, and civic life. But the Germans’ aim was never to destroy
Roman society. The confederation of clans and tribes into “kingdoms” was
itself a means to accommodate themselves to the needs of the tottering
empire. Nevertheless, Roman life disintegrated. The cities of western Europe
fell into decay through pillage, neglect, and abandonment. In order to preserve
the state, administrators in the west raised taxes to exorbitant levels, which
prompted city-dwellers—or at least the wealthier ones—to flee the cities
altogether and take up residence in country estates, where they survived by
bribing officials The government in turn placed all its demands on the
common populace, who found the burden so intolerable that many frankly
welcomed the arrival of Germanic kings who offered far easier terms in return
for popular support.
One group, though, was never welcomed anywhere: the Asiatic Huns who
from 433 to 453 were ruled by the savage warlord Attila. From their base in
what is today Hungary, Attila’s soldiers terrorized Europe. Aiming first at the
wealthier east, they slaughtered people throughout the Balkans and advanced
to Constantinople itself; but when they proved unable to break through the
fortifications there, they turned their eyes westward. They tore through
central Europe quickly, burning and pillaging everything in sight. In 451, near
Châ lons in northeastern France, however, a coalition of Roman soldiers and
Germanic armies defeated Attila, whose successes had always resulted from
quick raids instead of pitched battles. Defeated in Gaul, Attila turned toward
Italy where he once again plundered with abandon. Attila flattened Milan and
Pavia next, but disease began to weaken his forces soon thereafter.

Attila’s empire broke up quickly after his death in 453 and the Huns never
again threatened the west, but their brief appearance in Europe had three
important consequences. First, as one of the prime motivating forces for the
flight of the Germanic groups into the empire, the Huns indirectly served as a
catalyst of Roman decline. Second, their defeat at the hands of the largely
German imperial army and the temporarily united Germanic “kings” boosted
the newcomers’ morale and helped to legitimize those leaders and justify their
new “royal” status. Lastly, the negotiated settlement outside Rome greatly
enhanced the prestige of the pope in secular affairs.

Only two decades after the withdrawal of the Huns, the Roman Empire in the
west formally ceased to exist. In 476, Odoacer, another in a long string of
German generals who dominated Italy, deposed the last of the puppet
emperors in the west—a boy named Romulus Augustulus—and ruled in his
own name. Like other German kings, he sought some sort of legal recognition
of his new title from either the emperor in Byzantium, the pope in Rome, or
both..

During the following centuries Italy would be ruled by kings, whether Goths,
Ostrogoths or
Lombards. Only for a short time in the 6th century would the eastern empire
be able to reassert itself. Meanwhile, Gaul would settle down to new patterns
of accommodation between tribesmen and the Gallo-Roman population. With
the emergence of Clovis as King of the Franks in 481, a new phase of nation
building would begin in the west.
Armed with their new faith and buoyed by the legitimacy bestowed upon
Clovis’ rule by his alliance with the Church, the Franks expanded aggressively.
Their first campaigns after their conversion aimed eastward, back into the
Germanic homelands east of the Rhine. After virtually annihilating the
Alemanni, they fought against the Saxons, whom they quickly persuaded to
flee across the North Sea into England. Franks were in the best position to
replenish their numbers with other migrants of Germanic stock, and also that
Frankish society remained the most intensely Germanic of all the early
medieval kingdoms, with the least amount of assimilation between their
Frankish and Roman heritages. Once they had solidified this link with the
Germanic homeland, the Franks swept southward in the hope of reaching the
Mediterranean. They were frustrated in this hope by Theodoric and his
Ostrogoths, who moved quickly to occupy the region of Provence. From Clovis
onward, virtually all the Frankish kings for the next seven hundred and fifty
years had their sights set on extending their dominions to the Mediterranean
shoreline— until Louis IX finally succeeded in the middle of the thirteenth
century.

The strategic and military defeat of Rome was crucial, but this was not just
based on the external barbarian problem, nor on the barbarization and
decline of the imperial armies. The
Roman army relied upon a secure access to resources, manpower, bullion, and
goods. In the past it had been superior in its organization, logistics and
administration to the armies opposing it, while its tactical and technical
abilities were only slightly better than those of the Germanic tribes. Without a
stable system of government, administration and taxation to secure these
advantages, the Roman army had to decline both in numbers and quality.
The final decline of Rome formed the basis of Late Antique culture and the
following Middle Ages.
Policies of barbarian settlement began as early as Marcus Aurelius in southern
Dacia (from the 160s A.D.), but continued with Constantine and Valentinian I.
Aurelius’s strategy of granting permission to Germanic cultivators to settle
down within Roman territories was his way of appeasing them and putting a
brake to their constant incursions. The Germanic cultivators were legally free
but they were assigned to specific landowners and tied to the soil. Each group
of cultivators was placed under the supervision of a Roman official.

Later, in late 6th century A.D., when the Germanic tribes had firmly established
their kingdoms, there emerged a new agrarian system.
Both Frankish and Lombard rulers simply confiscated local latifundia on a
large scale, annexing them to the royal treasury or distributing them to their
noble retinues.
Scattered Celtic hamlets gave way to nucleated villages, in which the
individual property of peasant household was combined with a collective
agrarian expansion on open fields. Above all, local chiefs and lords
consolidated their powers. By the turn of the 7 th century A.D., a legally defined
and hereditary aristocracy was consolidated in Anglo-Saxon England. Thus,
the second wave of Germanic invasions produced both a larger aristorcracy
with large estates and also populated the countryside with village
communities and clumps of small peasant holdings. Thus, we see that the
stage is set for the next stage of social formations, i.e. Feudalism.