After reading about the Dark Ages, I wanted to go back and find out: how did the lights go out? The answer is war and economic collapse and war.
If you were there during the fall of Rome, you would feel it. Your armies are scattered by peoples without training. Your Container Stores are sitting languishing with your productive capacities sent overseas and destroyed by the hordes. The ships that brought food and oil and wine have stopped coming and those that are here sit in the harbor riding the waves like logs. Building great buildings is impossible. Your children will know your home by holes in the ground where you put wooden logs.
If you were in Roman Britain, you would have felt like you were a lunar colony and Earth had gone dark: a complete and total dearth of material production and economic complexity, such that your people are relegated to memes for weird city names and being sheep shaggers.
If you were in Roman Italy, you would have felt like a disposed Mughal elite living in the British Raj: “Wow, this empire was so splendid and neat and of course you can keep your own traditions which I respect but if you insult me I will take everything you own.”
Between Britain and Rome, the scaling goes somewhat linearly along “complete destruction” to “subjugation.”
The economy of the Roman Empire was, no doubt, a complex graph of interactions, but Ward-Perkins identifies a general shape: 1) a South agricultural basket in Africa, 2) a pre-industrial, agricultural, productive interior, and 3) a Northern/Eastern frontier manned by hundreds of thousands of soldiers that maintained breathing space for law and order.
The invasions of the Goths, Vandals and Visigoths and other Germanic tribes broke down and through the third, disturbted the second, and eventually extinguished the first. Indeed, the answer to “Why did Byzantium thrive and Rome unalive?” is that Egypt wasn’t lost to the Byzantines and that North Africa _was_ lost to the Romans.
As these regions of specialization became disconnected, the regions themselves could not generalize fast enough to maintain trade, productivity or stop the onslaught of Germanics. Iberian cities didn’t have standing armies- why would they need an army when the biggest threat was hundreds of miles to the north west? Rome didn’t need to farm enough to feed itself- why would it when it had an entire coastal range on a giant lake it controlled? America doesn’t need to build anything- why would it when it has an entire offshore workforce controlled by its only threat?
It’s a good question, and the answer is usually- it doesn’t! Specialization is fantastic and good for everyone, as long as everyone is pulling their part and not getting invaded. But how are the invasions possible?
Three answers, all of them related: The first is that the Barbarians, for the first time, were united. Most of Roman history, like most imperial histories, is picking off divided enemies one at a time until becoming a hegemon. The Germanics never united in a threatening way- until they were required to by the pressure cooker of Hunnic onslaught and Roman shield walls.
The second is the opposite side of the coin- Roman elite disunity. The Romans had gotten close to self-extinction before during the Crisis of the 3rd century, but the civil warring had been waning. Now, by the 5th century -the critical moment- it was waxing again. Who cares about the people destroying the cities of France- they can be used to destroy your Roman enemies!
The final component was the vastly unequal Roman system. Rome was a slave society, and these slaves fed the armies of its enemies and rebelled against their masters. The masters themselves were unbelievably rich and owned lands from one end of the Mediterranean to the other.
Enemy unity. Domestic division. Inequality. These led to a retreating army, an unending economic supply shock, and the end of a civilization.
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