From The Augean Stables:
The Fall of Rome, the Fall of Europe
Posted on January 6, 2006 by Richard Landes
The Fall of the Roman West, ca. A.D. 500/6000 A.M.
“…an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand…”
Thus says Walter Goffart about the “fall” of the Roman Empire in the West, a process he prefers to see as a cultural and political transformation fueled more by accommodation rather than violent invasion and political extortion. Goffart represents a school of historians who, pointing to the survival of Roman remnants — administrative structures, prominent families, social structures — argue that Rome went out with a whimper rather than a bang, if one could even say that it went out at all. Some medievalists actually argue that Europe is still Roman until the late 10th century.
Nor is this argument merely a seminar-room battle: the new revised view is for public consumption. Here is the introductory text to a large public exhibit in 1997 co-sponsored by the German and French governments, and worked on by prominent medievalists from both countries:
What will remain of our images of invasions and violence, of Barbarians plunging the Roman Empire and its institutions in the night of decadence? The Franks, were they really these devastators and the Merovingians, rois fenéants (lazy kings — what every schoolchild learns in France)?
This is the question [sic] this exposition on The Franks, Precursors of Europe intends to answer, proposing an ample vision of the Frankish world from the 3-8th centuries.
Archeology, throwing new light on these “barbaric” years, reveals to us today a culture and an art the inscribe themselves as a hinge between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
This passage, far from being brusk, was the result of a long, slow process during which the Franks would confer a common identity, based on Roman structures to a complex geopolitical map: Wisigoths, Burgunds, Alamans, Thuringians [NB: no mention of Gallo-Romans].
And Europe will constitute itself, not from serious ruptures, but from a long mutation, just as Gaul will become later, France under the sign of the continuity, whether it is a question of power and adminstration, of law and language, of society, of economy, of religion.
In a word, it is a process of immigration which became a successful integration that it pleases us to present in these 13 rooms of the Petit Palais.
Tout se passe dans le calme. (I later found out that the dominant school of medieval French historiography takes it for granted that the historian’s job is to “de-dramatize.”)
What I actually found most astonishing about the exhibit was that there was so little change in Germanic culture during over five hundred years of contact with the Roman Empire during which, about mid-way in that half-millennium, these Germanic tribal warriors took over Roman territory in a process the exhibit and so many other historians present as a transformation. The grave goods were very similar in style and content at the end to what they were at the beginning: swords and broaches. This was not a culture given to rapid assimilation of elements of a more sophisticated culture, and having these fellows at the top of the political hierarchy could not possibly have been the same as having an educated Roman administrator with a sense of the res publica (public affairs).
A recently posted interview with two authors of books on the fall of the Western empire challenge this “the tea party at the Roman vicarage” school of thought, and go back to an earlier interpretation that saw the process as “violent and unpleasant.” Ward-Perkins notes:
I argue what is currently an unfashionable view (though, in my opinion, it is blindingly obvious) – that the Roman world brought remarkable levels of sophistication and comfort, and spread them widely in society (and not just to a tiny elite) [by pre-modern standards, that is -- RL]; and that the fall of Rome saw the dismantling of this complexity, and a return to what can reasonably be termed ‘prehistoric’ levels of material comfort. Furthermore, I believe that this change was not just at the level of pots and pans, important though these are, but also affected sophisticated skills like reading and writing. Pompeii, with its ubiquitous inscriptions, painted signs, and graffiti, was a city that revolved around writing – after the fall of the empire, the same cannot be said for any settlement in the West for many centuries to come.
How could this have happened without the host culture, with its vastly superior resources and military might, reacting against it, defending itself? Peter Heather notes:
Once inside the Empire, the barbarian immigrant groups continued to unify, producing still larger and yet more powerful entities that the Empire could not hope to dismantle. The result was a reversal of the strategic power advantage that had brought the Empire into being, so that these new, and more powerful, barbarian groups were able to carve out kingdoms for themselves from the Empire’s living body politic. This was no peaceful process, even if, in its aftermath, some local Roman elites came to terms with the new powers in the land, and hence made it possible for these kingdoms to show some Roman features.
The existence of odd Roman elements must not, however, mislead us into thinking that we are looking at anything other than a revolution. The new states that emerged were not mini-Roman Empires. Key institutional differences – the absence of professional armies funded by large-scale taxation amongst others – as well as entirely different cultural patterns in areas such as elite literacy – the Classics – mark them out as entirely different kinds of entity from the Empire which preceded them. This was a highly violent process which both marked the culmination of long-term patterns of development in the periphery of the Empire and set European history off on a new course.
The Fall of Europe in the 21st Century?
Substitute Muslim immigrants and Islamism for Germanic warrior tribes and one gets an interesting subject for historical and contemporary meditation. The parallels seem too numerous to ignore; the differences well worth considering (e.g., Islam, unlike the Germanic religions, is monotheist and missionizing, and the missionizing variant tends towards apocalyptic). Is this a preview of the “Eurabian process” that some, like Bat Ye’or, and Bernard Lewis think is already too far gone to stop?
Nor do the authors shy away from what might strike some of us as the obvious lesson for the present:
I recommend caution in praising ‘Civilizations’ (whether Roman, or our own), and I do emphasize that ‘civilizations’ have their downsides. But, equally, I think the current fashion for treating all cultures as essentially the same – and all dramatic changes (like the end of the Roman world) as mere ‘transformations’ from one system, to another equally valid one – is not only wrong, but also dangerous. It evens out the dramatic ups and downs of human history, into a smooth trajectory. This risks blinding us to the fact that things have often gone terribly wrong in the past, and to the near certainty that, in time, our own ‘civilization’, and the comforts we enjoy from it, will also collapse.
[Note that the authors are careful not to get too specific on the time and place of this collapse; and they do so with a certain fatalism -- "our own civilization will also collapse." Not Bat-Yeor warning a culture to respond and defend itself, but Arnold Toybee, contemplating the patterns of civilization from the olympian heights of modern scholarship, and predicting an inevitable worst.]
I heartily agree with the caution about assuming civilizations don’t have their downsides (what Freud called their “discontents,” and what Marxists make the core of their moral outrage). As far as I can make out the late (Christian) Roman empire was something of a proto-totalitarian nightmare, with a heavy hand from a centralized bureaucratic elite pressing down, fixing from above prices, professions, even movement of populations. The Russian economic historian Michael Rostovtzeff called it “a vast prison.” As one Christian contemporary, Salvian, revealed in the early 5th century, some people would prefer to live under Germanic rule than deal with the rapacious Roman [Christian] tax collectors. And some,like William Carrol Bark, argue that its collapse was, in the long run, a boon to the emergence of freedom in the West, as opposed to the enduringly hierarchical patterns of Eastern Christendom where the empire survived (Byzantium).
But that’s a very long run — five centuries at least, during which, at least some of us medievalists argue, western Europe went from the frying pan to the fire. And just because the barbarians seemed better masters than the Romans does not mean that a well administered civic culture isn’t far superior to the rule of the warrior’s honor. To squint so that it all seems like one long homogenous process, a process in which no one really expressed outrage and horror at events — both at the violence of the barbarians and the corruption of the Roman Christians — does violence, it seems to me, to the experience of those who went through this process of collapse and its consequences for centuries. It certainly sets aside any screen on which we might delineate how a massive failure to produce a demotic reform (i.e., rulers attentive to the needs of their people), led to the victory of a far more primitive form of social organization and productivity.
So how do historians argue for this kind of homogenizing process? Heather here gives us a key component of this loss of perception. Take a strict cultural relativism — all cultures are equal; import it into ancient and medieval history — there is no real difference between late Roman culture and that of its barbarian successor kingdoms; stir a bit, and you come up with a mild and unalarming reading of what may be the single greatest cultural regression in recorded history.
After baking this recipe for a generation (in which post-colonial paradigms dominated much scholarly attention), what do we have? Several pearls of wisdom: Nothing dramatic happening, no threatening collapse, just a smooth transition. So either we have nothing to learn from the “fall of Rome” about our current conditions or, still better, we have nothing to fear from the challenge of Islamism to Europe. If this sounds like the kind of thinking that dominated French public discourse at the time of the Ramadan 2005 intifada, it’s because it is.
“Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana. The hardest question is: “what lessons should we be learning?”
This is not an easy matter. Compare and contrast… mutatis mutandis [i.e., those things (historical variables, conditions, the "contrast" between any two periods) needing to be changed (adjusted to make good historical comparisons with other periods) having been changed]…. But at least, let’s do the work without short-circuiting it by declaring there’s nothing there.
And let’s do it with a sense for the dramatic. Because whether or not later historians judge retrospectively that events were not so dramatic, to the people who lived through them — and to us who live through this early 21st century — they can and perhaps should seem dramatic.
This entry was posted in Americanophobia, Cognitive Egocentrism, Demopaths and Dupes, Eurabia, Fall of Rome/Europe, Global Jihad, Honor-Shame Culture, Media. Bookmark the permalink.
The Fall of Rome, the Fall of Europe
Posted on January 6, 2006 by Richard Landes
The Fall of the Roman West, ca. A.D. 500/6000 A.M.
“…an imaginative experiment that got a little out of hand…”
Thus says Walter Goffart about the “fall” of the Roman Empire in the West, a process he prefers to see as a cultural and political transformation fueled more by accommodation rather than violent invasion and political extortion. Goffart represents a school of historians who, pointing to the survival of Roman remnants — administrative structures, prominent families, social structures — argue that Rome went out with a whimper rather than a bang, if one could even say that it went out at all. Some medievalists actually argue that Europe is still Roman until the late 10th century.
Nor is this argument merely a seminar-room battle: the new revised view is for public consumption. Here is the introductory text to a large public exhibit in 1997 co-sponsored by the German and French governments, and worked on by prominent medievalists from both countries:
What will remain of our images of invasions and violence, of Barbarians plunging the Roman Empire and its institutions in the night of decadence? The Franks, were they really these devastators and the Merovingians, rois fenéants (lazy kings — what every schoolchild learns in France)?
This is the question [sic] this exposition on The Franks, Precursors of Europe intends to answer, proposing an ample vision of the Frankish world from the 3-8th centuries.
Archeology, throwing new light on these “barbaric” years, reveals to us today a culture and an art the inscribe themselves as a hinge between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.
This passage, far from being brusk, was the result of a long, slow process during which the Franks would confer a common identity, based on Roman structures to a complex geopolitical map: Wisigoths, Burgunds, Alamans, Thuringians [NB: no mention of Gallo-Romans].
And Europe will constitute itself, not from serious ruptures, but from a long mutation, just as Gaul will become later, France under the sign of the continuity, whether it is a question of power and adminstration, of law and language, of society, of economy, of religion.
In a word, it is a process of immigration which became a successful integration that it pleases us to present in these 13 rooms of the Petit Palais.
Tout se passe dans le calme. (I later found out that the dominant school of medieval French historiography takes it for granted that the historian’s job is to “de-dramatize.”)
What I actually found most astonishing about the exhibit was that there was so little change in Germanic culture during over five hundred years of contact with the Roman Empire during which, about mid-way in that half-millennium, these Germanic tribal warriors took over Roman territory in a process the exhibit and so many other historians present as a transformation. The grave goods were very similar in style and content at the end to what they were at the beginning: swords and broaches. This was not a culture given to rapid assimilation of elements of a more sophisticated culture, and having these fellows at the top of the political hierarchy could not possibly have been the same as having an educated Roman administrator with a sense of the res publica (public affairs).
A recently posted interview with two authors of books on the fall of the Western empire challenge this “the tea party at the Roman vicarage” school of thought, and go back to an earlier interpretation that saw the process as “violent and unpleasant.” Ward-Perkins notes:
I argue what is currently an unfashionable view (though, in my opinion, it is blindingly obvious) – that the Roman world brought remarkable levels of sophistication and comfort, and spread them widely in society (and not just to a tiny elite) [by pre-modern standards, that is -- RL]; and that the fall of Rome saw the dismantling of this complexity, and a return to what can reasonably be termed ‘prehistoric’ levels of material comfort. Furthermore, I believe that this change was not just at the level of pots and pans, important though these are, but also affected sophisticated skills like reading and writing. Pompeii, with its ubiquitous inscriptions, painted signs, and graffiti, was a city that revolved around writing – after the fall of the empire, the same cannot be said for any settlement in the West for many centuries to come.
How could this have happened without the host culture, with its vastly superior resources and military might, reacting against it, defending itself? Peter Heather notes:
Once inside the Empire, the barbarian immigrant groups continued to unify, producing still larger and yet more powerful entities that the Empire could not hope to dismantle. The result was a reversal of the strategic power advantage that had brought the Empire into being, so that these new, and more powerful, barbarian groups were able to carve out kingdoms for themselves from the Empire’s living body politic. This was no peaceful process, even if, in its aftermath, some local Roman elites came to terms with the new powers in the land, and hence made it possible for these kingdoms to show some Roman features.
The existence of odd Roman elements must not, however, mislead us into thinking that we are looking at anything other than a revolution. The new states that emerged were not mini-Roman Empires. Key institutional differences – the absence of professional armies funded by large-scale taxation amongst others – as well as entirely different cultural patterns in areas such as elite literacy – the Classics – mark them out as entirely different kinds of entity from the Empire which preceded them. This was a highly violent process which both marked the culmination of long-term patterns of development in the periphery of the Empire and set European history off on a new course.
The Fall of Europe in the 21st Century?
Substitute Muslim immigrants and Islamism for Germanic warrior tribes and one gets an interesting subject for historical and contemporary meditation. The parallels seem too numerous to ignore; the differences well worth considering (e.g., Islam, unlike the Germanic religions, is monotheist and missionizing, and the missionizing variant tends towards apocalyptic). Is this a preview of the “Eurabian process” that some, like Bat Ye’or, and Bernard Lewis think is already too far gone to stop?
Nor do the authors shy away from what might strike some of us as the obvious lesson for the present:
I recommend caution in praising ‘Civilizations’ (whether Roman, or our own), and I do emphasize that ‘civilizations’ have their downsides. But, equally, I think the current fashion for treating all cultures as essentially the same – and all dramatic changes (like the end of the Roman world) as mere ‘transformations’ from one system, to another equally valid one – is not only wrong, but also dangerous. It evens out the dramatic ups and downs of human history, into a smooth trajectory. This risks blinding us to the fact that things have often gone terribly wrong in the past, and to the near certainty that, in time, our own ‘civilization’, and the comforts we enjoy from it, will also collapse.
[Note that the authors are careful not to get too specific on the time and place of this collapse; and they do so with a certain fatalism -- "our own civilization will also collapse." Not Bat-Yeor warning a culture to respond and defend itself, but Arnold Toybee, contemplating the patterns of civilization from the olympian heights of modern scholarship, and predicting an inevitable worst.]
I heartily agree with the caution about assuming civilizations don’t have their downsides (what Freud called their “discontents,” and what Marxists make the core of their moral outrage). As far as I can make out the late (Christian) Roman empire was something of a proto-totalitarian nightmare, with a heavy hand from a centralized bureaucratic elite pressing down, fixing from above prices, professions, even movement of populations. The Russian economic historian Michael Rostovtzeff called it “a vast prison.” As one Christian contemporary, Salvian, revealed in the early 5th century, some people would prefer to live under Germanic rule than deal with the rapacious Roman [Christian] tax collectors. And some,like William Carrol Bark, argue that its collapse was, in the long run, a boon to the emergence of freedom in the West, as opposed to the enduringly hierarchical patterns of Eastern Christendom where the empire survived (Byzantium).
But that’s a very long run — five centuries at least, during which, at least some of us medievalists argue, western Europe went from the frying pan to the fire. And just because the barbarians seemed better masters than the Romans does not mean that a well administered civic culture isn’t far superior to the rule of the warrior’s honor. To squint so that it all seems like one long homogenous process, a process in which no one really expressed outrage and horror at events — both at the violence of the barbarians and the corruption of the Roman Christians — does violence, it seems to me, to the experience of those who went through this process of collapse and its consequences for centuries. It certainly sets aside any screen on which we might delineate how a massive failure to produce a demotic reform (i.e., rulers attentive to the needs of their people), led to the victory of a far more primitive form of social organization and productivity.
So how do historians argue for this kind of homogenizing process? Heather here gives us a key component of this loss of perception. Take a strict cultural relativism — all cultures are equal; import it into ancient and medieval history — there is no real difference between late Roman culture and that of its barbarian successor kingdoms; stir a bit, and you come up with a mild and unalarming reading of what may be the single greatest cultural regression in recorded history.
After baking this recipe for a generation (in which post-colonial paradigms dominated much scholarly attention), what do we have? Several pearls of wisdom: Nothing dramatic happening, no threatening collapse, just a smooth transition. So either we have nothing to learn from the “fall of Rome” about our current conditions or, still better, we have nothing to fear from the challenge of Islamism to Europe. If this sounds like the kind of thinking that dominated French public discourse at the time of the Ramadan 2005 intifada, it’s because it is.
“Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” wrote George Santayana. The hardest question is: “what lessons should we be learning?”
This is not an easy matter. Compare and contrast… mutatis mutandis [i.e., those things (historical variables, conditions, the "contrast" between any two periods) needing to be changed (adjusted to make good historical comparisons with other periods) having been changed]…. But at least, let’s do the work without short-circuiting it by declaring there’s nothing there.
And let’s do it with a sense for the dramatic. Because whether or not later historians judge retrospectively that events were not so dramatic, to the people who lived through them — and to us who live through this early 21st century — they can and perhaps should seem dramatic.
This entry was posted in Americanophobia, Cognitive Egocentrism, Demopaths and Dupes, Eurabia, Fall of Rome/Europe, Global Jihad, Honor-Shame Culture, Media. Bookmark the permalink.
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