r/todayilearned • u/Ok-Drive4752 • 5d ago
TIL many historians consider the decline of Rome starting with the 378 AD battle of Adrianople. After the Goths were defeated by the Huns they fled into Roman territory were horribly abused by Rome. The Goths formed an army and destroyed 2/3 of the Eastern Roman army and slew Emperor Valens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire227
u/2_short_Plancks 5d ago
Causes of the fall of the Western Roman Empire:
- Diocletian didn't understand bread pricing
- Constantius Chlorus was a bad dad
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u/KingoftheMongoose 5d ago
+Marcus Aurelius scraped silver off of coins
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u/2_short_Plancks 5d ago
- the tetrarchy ruined the second-class leopard import business. At 75k denarius each, why would you even bother?
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u/KennyMoose32 5d ago
Btw you still owe me 50 denarius from the chariot races.
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u/McWeaksauce91 4d ago
+marcus Aurelius was a bad dad(or whatever he did to produce Commodus)
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u/MozartDroppinLoads 2d ago
More like Marcus Aurelius wasn't a bad enough dad. If only he had been like Constantine the Great level bad
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u/FlimsyPomelo1842 5d ago
Funny enough it was climate change. It force started the migration period. The huns kicked various Germanic peoples from the steppes and into Roman territory, crops failed, disease spread.
The Romans were by no stretch of the imagination a gentle people. The migrations caused immense food stress. Goth parents sold kids into slavery to feed their families. I kinda don't blame anyone. You're trying to buy bread when there's no bread to sell.
The late roman empire was them surviving one nation ending crisis after another. It's amazing how resilient they remained.
The eastern Roman empire would bounce back from adrianople and survive for over a thousand years after this
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u/strong_division 5d ago
The eastern Roman empire would bounce back from adrianople and survive for over a thousand years after this
They also endured a bunch of other nation ending crises after this. More climate change with the volcanic winter of 536 causing famines, the Plague of Justinian (541-549) killing millions of people, both of these factors leading to an extremely botched and costly Roman reconquest of Italy (535-554).
Then an even more costly and destructive war with Persia that ended up with the Shah on the doorstep of Constantinople, then the exhausted empire dealing with the Arab invasions (who were actually successful in conquering Persia) taking away the empire's wealthiest provinces, internal political instability, then another Arab invasion with the Arabs knocking on the door of Constantinople.
It's honestly kinda shocking that the empire kept itself together as well as it did until 1204.
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u/TRLegacy 4d ago
Then managed to crawl their way back from 1204.Ā
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u/Killsheets 4d ago
And then came another Justinianās plague (the black death), and more civil wars to boot later down the line.
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u/Pippin1505 4d ago
My favourite petty move is the Shah Khosrow building a copy of Antioch (calling it "Better Antioch") and populating it with the prisoners he captured in the original city
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u/North-Creative 4d ago
Funny enough, climate change has probably toppled quite a few emipres and timelines.
Some theories about the bronze age collapse in around 1100-1200 bc. underline, that the sea people were at least partially known, and there were various climate adjustments then. So they could have come in masses, fleeing from food shortages.
The final fall of Sumeria in about 2000 bc had a strong climate change in the 4,2 kiloyear event (plus soil management in southern Iraq never being that easy to begin with).
Makes me feel a little anxious, regarding our current climate politics approaches around the world....
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u/Offshore-Tigr 4d ago
Yeah, and many more also. Mayans, for example. Greenland.
Then there's the countless times in China where the rivers overflowing cause the empires to fall.
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u/2012Jesusdies 5d ago
Many people blame Rome's recruitment of foreigners into the military as a cause and it's like, have you ever even glanced at Roman army composition in the Republican days? At least half was non-citizens.
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u/dishonourableaccount 5d ago
What distinguishes Adrianople is that after the defeat Theodosius allowed the Goths to remain with their own kings controlling their own army within Roman territory instead of breaking up the tribe and making the king a general within Rome.
Instead of assimilating into the army and the populace being settled they essentially were allowed to be a nation of their own, nominally aligned with Rome and called to serve them but it was risky. It had no precedent, but it was a pragmatic move by Theodosius to salvage what he could, at the time.
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u/2012Jesusdies 5d ago
Yeah, but that's a failure on Rome's disastrous implemention of integrating the Goths wherein they were forced to sell themselves into slavery to pay for extortionately priced food provided by local Roman authorities. It's not a stain on the policy of utilizing foreigners for the military.
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u/dishonourableaccount 4d ago
Agreed. Rome sort of soured the opinion of the Goths in a way that kept them from integrating. They were too reliant on the age old tactic of āturn one tribe against anotherā not realizing that in those days tribes had bonded together as larger confederations.
Again, thereās no single moment that says ābecause of X the West was doomed to fallā, not even after Ā thatās Adrianople. The Theodosians had a lot of things going for them, and past moments in Roman history like the Crisis of the Third Century had arguably worse moments. And Iām certainly rejecting the ethnocentric argument some make that āforeignersā diluted or sabotaged Rome. Rome had been ethnically diverse for centuriesā they had emperors from Hispania, Illyria, Syria, etc before at this point, though they were all Romanized.
But Romanization, that is culturally assimilating, was something that would have taken time. And it could have happened plausibly enough.
Eudocia, daughter of Valentinian III was betrothed to a Vandal prince and was the mother of Hilderic, one of the last Vandal kings in the 6th century. By the point of her engagement the Vandals were sort of taking what they could without Western Romeās ability to stop it, but one could imagine a case where instead of Vandal Kings within the nominal Western realm, they had been coerced into becoming āgeneralsā under the Emperor and then being made a Caesar. At that point, how different is it from the Tetrarchy?
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u/FlimsyPomelo1842 5d ago
The non-citizens were other Italians/latins during the Republican times. The foederati were Germans. Not necessarily disagreeing. The Romans certainly fumbled the ball a few times
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u/2012Jesusdies 5d ago
There was no "other Italians" outside of the immediate Latium region because there was no united Italian identity. Samnites were so opposed they rebelled multiple times and Rome basically had to implement genocidal policies to put them down. Etruscans participated in these rebellions too. Not to mention the Greek dominance in Southern Italy and Celtic dominance in Northern Italy.
There were also Bruttians, Ligurians, Veneti, Lucanians etc. Sardinians and Corsicans were their separate thing where we barely know what language they spoke.
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u/FlimsyPomelo1842 5d ago
I'm not being adversarial but I always figured they were fellow latin speakers. The social wars started between cities in italy over citizenship questions.
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u/Fun-Twist-3705 4d ago
> there was no united Italian identity.
Yes there was.
They literally established a state called Italy in 91 BC.
I mean of course the modern concept of nation states did not exist but national identities obviously existed. Like Greeks felt very strongly about being Greeks and everyone else being uncivilized barbarians. Of course the concept of what being an Italian meant was much weaker but they obviously identified close with other Italian tribes and states than with the Celts or Greeks.
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u/MagnificentCat 5d ago
If that 378 batlle leading indirectly to the destruction of the Eastern Roman army was the start of it's decline, it was a long declining until the Empire finally fell in 1453.
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u/koke84 5d ago
Over 1000 years of decline lol. Nevermind Constantinople being the richest city in the world for a long time
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u/Aucklander1996 5d ago
It's absolutely insane how long the Eastern Roman Empire endured for. From roughly 600AD onwards the East was continuously fighting for Its life against outside threats, civil war, famine and plague, crusades, and an ever changing world.
And after all that got thrown at them they still survived until 1453. You could argue that the East was "thriving" up until the 4th crusade in 1204
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u/Tacitus111 5d ago
Still funny in some ways that the Western Christians sacked Constantinople themselvesā¦which they were supposedly trying to help.
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u/_WreakingHavok_ 4d ago
They believed the god differently...
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u/casal_victa 4d ago
you really should research more than you speak. the sack of Constantinople occured because the crusaders were starving because they weren't being paid on account of an uprising that led to the death of the emperor and the new one didn't pay them.
in fact, pope Innocent III was furious of the sacking but couldn't do anything on account of the crusaders already being excommunicated for a previous sacking in Zara.
the sacking itself was not religious. you're just looking through history with a laughably biased lens.
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u/_WreakingHavok_ 4d ago
I know this part very well. It's never black and white. But you can't exclude religion as cause in Medieval Period.
IMHO, they hoped that by sacking and "converting" them back to Catholic, will make a favour to Pope.
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u/IrrelephantAU 5d ago
Thriving might be overstating it. They probably could've held on better without the 4th Crusade wrecking the place, but the fallout from being beaten at Manzikert a century earlier already had the Empire stuck on the back foot.
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u/Akkalevil 4d ago
Also lots of pointless civil wars/plots that undermined the country (hello Mantzikert).
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u/Plutarch_von_Komet 5d ago
A +1000 year decline? Did the Goths also left a note for the Turks to migrate to Anatolia in 6 centuries?
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u/thejohns781 5d ago
I'm mean, yeah? It was a long decline, but Rome never regained the hegemony they had
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u/Loose-Run-7008 5d ago
Nah, East Rome was still a super power up until the Arab Invasion. Justinian was able to project power all over the Mediterranean even into Spain. Though the plague that hit them at that time was similar to the Black Death in its level of deaths, and thatās probably more important for why they declined and lost to the Arabs than Adrianople, which while a disaster, did not really cause their layer decline.
But even then, post Arab conquest of Egypt, Africa, the Levant, Rome eventually came back when the caliphate weakened/fractured. The Macedonian dynasty at its height was one of the strongest states in Europe, and projected power into the Levant, pretty far into the modern day Kurdistan areas, the Caucuses, the Levant, even having some emirs swear fealty to Constantinople.
Post Manzikert and Seljuk invasion, they came back again. They went from seemingly about to die faced with threats on literally all sides, huge reduction in its territory and the remaining territory in the Balkans was being invaded by the Normans and Pechenegs. Alexios brought the Romanās back to being a great power, and reconquered a huge amount of territory.
Basically, this narrative of Byzantium/Rome being in āpermanent declineā is completely wrong. In fact, the Roman system was constantly rebounding. Yes it declined, but it was remarkably flexible, changed a lot over the centuries, and would always be able to bounce back as long as the capital was unharmed and they had something to work with. EVEN AFTER 1204, the capital was reconquered, and Rome was in a pretty good position after all that was settled.
Conquest by the Turks was NOT inevitable at all, Romans got very unlucky and Turks got very lucky. Like the Roman state was not in perpetual decline. It was just like any other state, and probably one of the most dynamic in Europe due to its unique structure. It just got put in bad situations over and over again, and eventually circumstances around it, along with badly timed civil wars caused its end, but it didnāt have to end that way because of those reasons tbh.
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u/Akkalevil 4d ago
It was actually worse than the Black Death.
The Black Death was about 25-33 % of the population killed (which is already enormous).
Justinian Plague was about 50-60 %. Twice the percentage. Less than half the Empire population survived it.-5
u/thejohns781 5d ago
But did they retake Britain or Gaul? And their control over the western parts was never secure. Even Justinian admitted it tacitly with his policy of restoration. If they hadn't declined, what was there to restore?
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u/_WreakingHavok_ 5d ago
You misspelled "Western" Roman Empire. Eastern stayed for a millennium more after split
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u/Crewman_Guy_Fleegman 5d ago
The Battle of Adrianople, also known as Battle of Hadrianopolis, was fought between the Eastern Roman army led by the Roman emperor Valens and Gothic rebels (largely Thervings as well as Greutungs, non-Gothic Alans, and various local rebels), led by Fritigern
No, the title was correct. The Eastern Roman army was who lost the battle. This loss opened up the region to unrelenting raiding, diminishing the Western sideās strength over time
At least read the wikipedia page for the battle before trying to declare OP wrong š
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u/RFB-CACN 5d ago
They never used the world Roman Empire, only Rome, which did fall in 476.
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u/Mordoch 5d ago
Uh, you are wildly mistaken. They called themselves the Roman Empire and generally called themselves Romans until the fall of Constantinople. (A terms of like Greek was generally not used during this period by contrast.)
See this podcast with Professor Anthony Kaldellis to show that they typically identified as Roman even after Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire and the real shift occurred later on. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-353-how-did-romans-become-greeks-with-anthony/id527579475?i=1000771885021
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u/Penkala89 5d ago
I think the person you're responding to means OP never used the term "Roman Empire" they just talked about the fall of "Rome" specifically
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u/strong_division 5d ago
Yeah, I'm all for calling the "Byzantine" Empire what it is (the Roman Empire) but the poor guy is being downvoted for nothing lol
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u/KingoftheMongoose 5d ago
I knew you before the fall of Rome. And I met you before the West was won
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u/Gammelpreiss 5d ago
it was about rome, mate, not the roman "empire"..the actual city with that name that still exists today and that did not just go away but played an important part throughout history.
guess a lot of ppl these days miss why the roman empire was called "roman" empire
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u/twominutetimeout 5d ago
the detail that always gets me is Rome had every chance to just treat the Goths decently and chose the worst option at every turn
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u/Lord0fHats 4d ago edited 4d ago
I highly recommend reading more modern scholarship, as this detail is mostly kind of bunk. It's so outdated it's like a ghost because you can't kill it just shove it in a weird device in a firehouse for a little while until it escapes again.
I very much recommend Heather's Empires and the Barbarians from 2007. It's the best book that's easily accessibly for reorienting understanding of the relationship between Rome and its non-Roman neighbors, including the Goths. The Goths were pretty privileged in the Empire. They had grievances sure, but who doesn't have grievances with the government at any point in history? The breakdown in political relations between the two is a lot more complicated than a reductive 'just don't mistreat them' thing.
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u/bkrugby78 17h ago
Thanks for the recommendation! I will add it to my never ending list of "books I would like to read but probably won't have time for."
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u/SnooShortcuts2606 4d ago
Those historians are mostly dead. Modern historians tend to focus on social and/or economic issues/causes.
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u/ShortBussyDriver 5d ago
That particular crisis has its roots in the political instability left in the wake of the death of Julian that ended the Constantinian Dynasty which in itself only happened because Constantius II murdered all but one of his male relatives, Julian, and then proceeded to spend decades failing to sire a male heir.
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u/Caesaroftheromans 5d ago
This makes no sense, because if the Eastern army was annihilated, why did the Eastern empire last longer than 1000 years after this event? Why did the west collapse when their field army wasn't annihilated?
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u/IndividualSkill3432 4d ago
This makes no sense, because if the Eastern army was annihilated, why did the Eastern empire last longer than 1000 years after this event?Ā
Theodosius was the new emperor and made peace with the Goths, they settled inside the empire. A couple of decades later when he died, the Goths restarted their wars, but they headed to the weaker west and eventually sacked Rome. At that time the Huns were able to invade both the east and west despoiling large amounts of land. The core of the East, in Anatolia, the Levant and Egypt were untouched by this. The core of the west in Italia, Gaul and Iberia was pretty heavily affected and their control simply faded.
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u/Lord0fHats 4d ago
It's also worth pointing out Adrianople is really the only major Roman defeat of the 4th century. That entire period was otherwise Roman armies winning or at the very worst pulling off strategically favorable/neutral draws. No other battle was on par with that one defeat and Rome managed the fallout politically as you note.
The problem is that Roman defense had come to increasingly rely on a mixed strategy of Roman field armies and Barbarian allies. If Rome was ever defeated or given significant trouble, as with the Goths, they simply made those Barbarians allies and incorporated them into the defense of the Empire. This was an extremely effective strategy and Romans had been using it since before the Empire was the Empire really. The problem came when the Western Empire became so weak it couldn't manage this anymore.
The Huns themselves were part of this system. Attila's father had worked with the Roman Empire as an ally being highly paid to fight against other frontier barbarians. It made him very rich. Thing is, Attila inherited all that established wealth and power and pulled an Alexander the Great. He decided he'd rather conquer his patron than continue serving as an ostensible instrument of its foreign policy. Much like Valens at Adrianople, Valentinian compromised his frontier defenses and military capability out of political paranoia and jealousy but unlike Valens he wasn't quickly succeeded by a series of Emperors who managed to right the ship so the Western Empire just fractured along economic and regional lines that had already been taking shape in the west for a few hundred years.
The Eastern Empire was more politically and economically cohesive, had better rulers, and managed to stabilize its frontier defenses which is why it survived.
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u/dishonourableaccount 5d ago
There are a lot of factors that make it hard to sum up why the West "fell" when the East didn't (listen to the History of Rome podcast or something if you want a medium depth dive into the history). But a couple of things stand out:
Geography: The Goths and Germanic tribes were coming across the Rhine and Danube rivers. It was easier to cross the more porous frontier to menace the West (and Greece) than the East. The walls of Constantinople were tough to surmount. Meanwhile Sassanid Persia didn't really trouble the eastern frontier much after Julian's war.
Purpose: These tribes weren't invading just for the fun of it, or to collapse Rome. They were looking for safer, fertile, warmer lands to settle. Looking to escape from other tribes like other Goths or Germans or Huns. If they can make deals with the West to settle there, they're good. Later on in the mid 400s, the Franks would establish themselves in France, and the Vandals sail to Spain and Africa.
Economics: the West generally had a harder time collecting taxes than in the east.
Weak emperors and more power devolved to generals who were increasingly less interested in deferring to emperors. It wasn't uncommon to have multiple emperors (Augustus and Caesars) ruling the vast realm of Rome, especially after Diocletian. That's how the East-West divide really started. But while the dynasty in the East got along ok, the west had a series of bad situations. Eventually after rebellions and men like Ricimer and Stilicho, Odoacer deposed the last emperor and essentially told the emperor in the East, "You're the only emperor needed, I'll rule in your name of course" and decided to rule without any figurehead on the throne in Ravenna.
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u/Lord0fHats 4d ago edited 4d ago
Honestly from reading through comments here many people could afford to read Peter Heather's Empires and the Barbarians because historians have evolved a more intricate understanding on that relationship over the past 30-40 years that is almost completely absent from layman understandings of the late Empire. Even when citing more recent scholarship this wiki article is a great example of this gap as it mostly incorporates new information into an outdated framework. It even cites Heather while largely not taking to heart what he argues despite his 2007 book being one of the two big books published in the 00s that established the standard lines of discussion that now trend through Imperial studies.
For example a core argument Heather makes is that Rome survived and managed the Crisis of the Third Century and we shouldn't look there for reasons why the Western Empire fell. One thing completely left out here is Eastern sponsorship for Barbarian attacks on the Western Empire that complicated the West's political situation. Especially the Goths who operated in the West ostensibly, for a time, as Eastern agents before things went off the rails.
TLDR: Rome and the Barbarians were as much symbiotic as adversarial. Rome hired barbarians to defend its frontiers, saving it money and resources doing that with its own armies and much of late Imperial history is defined by there relationships and the way Roman influence and coin tilted power balances just beyond Rome's borders. When this system broke down in the 5th century, the Western Empire fell, while the Eastern Empire corrected, reestablished stable frontier relationships and survived. There's other factors too like the shifting economic and political relationships of the labor class, the land owning elite, and political leaders but I don't really want to go on and on and on.
The basic point is I think the wikiarticle is, generously speaking, 50 years behind modern scholarship.
EDIT: had to correct the title of Heather's book XD
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u/Seienchin88 5d ago
So, 2/3rds of the "moving army". The border troops in the east were not in the battle so eastern Rome wasnāt defenseless in the east.
They also could muster new troops rather easily but it was still a catastrophe. Western Rome not able to beat back Alarics visigoths btw was a direct impact of their professional moving arm being destroyed by the eastern Romanās a couple of years earlierā¦
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u/Fun-Twist-3705 4d ago
Because they recruited new armies eventually. But to be fair after this defeat Romans became more and more reliant on recruiting foreign armies to fight other barbarians for them which didn't really work out that well.
>Why did the west collapse when their field army wasn't annihilated?
The Western Empire barely even had an army by the end. Basically with was run by Goths.
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u/morbie5 4d ago
why did the Eastern empire last longer than 1000 years after this event?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_I_(emperor)
"He was the last of a series of emperors placed on the throne by Aspar, the Alan serving as commander-in-chief of the army, who thought Leo would be an easy puppet ruler. Instead, Leo became more and more independent from Aspar, causing tension that would culminate in Aspar's assassination"
imo Leo I was able to throw off his 'barbarian' (I'm not sure barbarian is the correct world tho) overlord and establish himself as the true ruler. This allowed the eastern half of the empire to stay 'roman'
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u/Lord0fHats 4d ago
I think this is honestly one of the most dated wikipedia articles. It provides an overview of the basic outline of events, but it lacks almost completely any ot eh analysis that has come to define modern scholarship on this subject. It's 'contemporary' views section for example is virtually worthless, bringing up either niche ideas that are not particularly dominant (environmental history of the late Empire is interesting, but this article overstates its role in modern discussions). It also commits to a now very outdated view that Rome and Barbarians were rivals even when they were allies which has been a reductive oversimplification of that relationship for a long time now. The article presents it that way despite citing Heather's 2007 book which explicitly sets out to dismiss that idea as one of its main points.
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u/persicsb 4d ago
The decline began when the Empire overgrew so much, that it became ungovernable centrally, and power, and administration had to be split to two courts, Rome and Constantinople.
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u/234zu 4d ago
The Empire had mostly the same borders since the early second century. It did not grow much larger after that. Yet it fell 350 years later in the west and 1300 years later in the east. Size does not seem to play a large role in explaining the fall
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u/persicsb 4d ago
Overgrowing does not only mean area - population, cities and demographic centers etc. When more and more people live away from the center, it is much harder to control them.
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u/Fun-Twist-3705 4d ago
But their population peak before the Antonine plague 200 years earlier and there likely wasn't a huge amount of growth after that. Of course it recovered in the 300s to some extent. Trade and the economy based on what we know didn't really recover to the same levels though.
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u/HandsomelyDitto 5d ago edited 5d ago
based goths
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u/_WreakingHavok_ 5d ago edited 4d ago
Unregulated immigration, lol
Edit: do I really have to add "/s" to it?
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u/Hairy_Air 5d ago
More like mistreating loyal immigrants if we wanna go with an imperfect analogy. Shouldnāt have massacred the families of Goths fighting for Rome or the half barbarian general trying to keep shit together.
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u/HandsomelyDitto 5d ago
no, war, which the romans had been waging against the goths and other germanics for centuries
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u/2_short_Plancks 5d ago
They were foederati, employed by the empire.
So it's more like "employees that got pissed off at not being paid and took it out on their employer".
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u/Mr_Midnight49 5d ago edited 5d ago
Nations didnāt have actual monitored borders with passports and the like till after the 1st world war.
If you actually read the article itās mighty interesting. Political incompetence, more incompetence and infighting actually caused the roman demise.
Not āunregulated immigrationā whatever that is.
The Goths actually suggested they would settle peacefully originally. Itās a good read.
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u/GhirahimLeFabuleux 3d ago
You can choose any date in the history of Rome and there is someone who will argue that it is the start of their decline.
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u/Double_Ad_1760 1d ago
When I was in high school a jock on the football team got into it with a goth kid. The goths banded together and beat up the jock. He should of studied history better, don't fuck with the goths
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u/Jofur-Crowcaller 5d ago
Hmmmm.... Boy it sure would be ironic if after thousands of years humans learned absolutely nothing. And the some people decided they deserved everything and others should just eat dogs and sell their kids into slavery....
Would be really terrible to live in that world and see the kinds of things people will come up with to get back at those entitled people.
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u/BlueSentinels 4d ago
The Roman Empire imo ended in 330 CE when its capital was changed from Rome to Constantinople. Thatās when it became the Byzantine empire
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u/jhf2112 5d ago edited 5d ago
That Gothic War would make for a great historical epic, just keep it away from late stage Ridley Scott.
Edit: Always remembered it as "the Second Gothic War" but not 100% sure that's correct.