The reason of falling of the (western) Roman empire:
- Lack of Military innovation / Military equipment improvements by the neighbors AKA barbarians
- The centralized Rome lost its attractiveness when Roman Rights were given to everyone in the Empire.
- Population diversity, not enough true blood Romans (not many really had that nationalistic feel for some time)
- Huns invasion was really devastating
- Losing agricultural territories around Mediterranean Sea
- Sassanian Empire? They defeated Roman Empire in the 3rd century (and later in the 6th century). Also the lack of good relation with Persia was bad for both Empires.
I don't necessarily find dividing the Empire in 4 a bad thing. The Byzantine Empire flourished. If the other three emperors and their successors were "genius" they could have changed the history!
I may missed a few points but the reasons were majorly these.
In order:
Rome's military was never at any point weaker than the fighting forces of its northern opponents; Elton (1996) bears this out in rather dramatic fashion, listing all historically attested engagements between the Roman military and unambiguously external forces and coming up with a rather startlingly-in-Rome's-favor set of outcomes. Sure, the Romans lost
some battles, but there's no such thing as an unambiguously perfect record for any military in history. Battle is a lottery, and even though the Romans could buy more tickets than anybody else, they couldn't buy
all of them. The series of events that is conventionally held to indicate the fall of the Western Empire - Odovacar's 476 coup against the government of Orestes and Romvlvs Avgvstvlvs - had nothing to do with external military pressure.
Rome was, if anything,
more centralized under the later Empire than it was before Caracalla granted citizenship to all free adult Roman males in 212. The later Emperors ruled what is sometimes referred to as the "Dominate" (as opposed to the earlier "Principate"), marked, ostensibly, by a growth of the imperial bureaucracy at the expense of local leadership and the senatorial aristocracy. More recent historians have shown that this is a false dichotomy. Either way, though, the problems of centralization existed throughout the Empire's existence and there was nothing particularly special about the late fourth century and fifth century that changed them in a meaningful way. It's basically impossible for me to see what Caracalla's citizenship edict has to do with the fall of the West; there's no obvious causative link, and the two things are separated by 250 years.
And the claim that the extension of the franchise was a Bad Thing is immediately contradicted by the next point, which claims that Rome was too diverse, not insufficiently diverse. More inhabitants of the Roman Empire considered themselves Romans first and other things second in the fourth century than they did in the first century. There was regional variation, sure, but there is
always regional variation, especially outside the aristocracy. When the various provinces went their own way in the late fifth century, it was not because they were insufficiently loyal to the Empire. Quite the opposite: I would argue that it was instead because the
Empire was insufficiently loyal to
them.
The Hunnic invasions were quite devastating. But they did not cause the fall of the West. Attila and the Huns raided the Balkan provinces of the Eastern Empire for a decade. They caused incalculable property damage, thousands of deaths, enslaved thousands more, and forced the imperial treasury in Constantinople to disgorge millions of gold pieces into Attila's hands. Then, the Huns turned west and launched two vicious unsuccessful campaigns that did not result in any tribute. If the Hunnic invasions of 451 and 452 were so bad that they contributed to the collapse of the Western Empire, why didn't the much worse incursions of the 440s cause the collapse of the Eastern Empire? What, precisely, is the line of causation between the Battle of the Campus Mauriacus and the abdication of Avgvstvlvs?
The second-to-last point, the loss of Africa, is something I wholeheartedly agree with as a major cause of the end of Rome in the West. It is no coincidence that the last Emperor in Italy fell within a few years of the last failed attempts to recapture Africa (in 468 and 471). Vandal conquest of Africa represented a humongous revenue loss for Rome, the severance of the Carthage-Rome trade spine (the single most important economic pipeline in the world at that point), the emergence of a pirate threat in hitherto-quiescent Mediterranean waters, and the end of the city of Rome's cheap food supply.
The Sasanian Empire was, to all intents and purposes, irrelevant to the fall of Rome in the West. It was a security threat to the Eastern Empire when it was a security threat to any Romans at all, and the East did not fall. For most of the fifth century, Constantinople and Tisifon were at peace anyway.
---
Africa was important, but the reason Africa was lost to Rome was because it was captured by the Vandals and Alans. And it was captured by the Vandals and Alans because the Western Roman military was so busy fighting itself that it didn't have the ability to defend the province. From 380 onward, the Roman military was engaged in a series of destructive, endless civil wars. They started because the Western Emperors had begun to fail at elite management. For most of the fourth century, the Western Emperors were generally competent: they were able to balance the patronage needs of Gallic and Italian interests. In 380, the Emperor Gratianvs failed at maintaining the balancing act, and the general Magnvs Maximvs revolted with Gaul as his base. Maximvs's rebellion eventually failed, but successive Emperors consistently failed to fix the underlying problem of elite management and relied on winning the inevitable civil wars to keep Gaul in line.
In 405-07, the Emperor Honorivs and his generalissimo, Stilicho, were confronted simultaneously by several threats. Firstly, Stilicho was trying to fight the Constantinopolitan government. His main weapon in this war was the field army of Alareiks, which switched sides frequently and required a great deal of finesse to manage. Secondly, Stilicho faced an invasion from the north of a broad collection of allegedly migratory "barbarians" led by one Radagaisvs. He successfully defeated this group at Faesvlae and enslaved the survivors. Thirdly, he was beset with an invasion over the Rhine by the Alans, Asdings, Silings, and Sueves, which he completely failed to address. And fourthly, he was attacked by the rebellious forces of the usurper Constantinvs "III" in Britannia, Gaul, and Hispania. This combination of threats - the most dangerous of which came from Eastern Rome and the Western rebel army - overloaded the imperial military and caused its near collapse.
Eventually, Honorivs's military climbed back from the brink under the leadership of the general Constantivs, who reestablished control over Alareiks' field army, crushed the Rhine invaders and drove the few survivors into Hispania, and annihilated the rebels in Gaul. Constantivs looked like he had everything under control, with only the last sad remnants of the Vandals, Alans, and Sueves to deal with, but his death in 423 precipitated
another civil war. During the confusion, the Rhine invaders invaded Africa, and then they conquered it in the midst of
yet another civil war. The eventual winner of the struggle for imperial primacy, the general Aetivs, was less competent than Constantivs and failed to recapture Africa, northern Gaul, or most of Hispania. Aetivs's eventual death precipitated yet
another struggle for power...and so on, and so forth.
The key problem was that the Emperors who ruled the West for most of this time period - Gratianvs, Valentinianvs II, Honorivs, and Valentinianvs III - were incompetents in the most basic of ways. They could not exercise even a modicum of control over their own aristocracies or their own militaries. It was left to powerful generals and statesmen to exercise real control from behind the scenes, but these generals never had the secure authority that the Emperors would have had. And nobody resolved the issue of managing the competing Gallic and Italian aristocracies until it was, to all intents and purposes, too late. The civil wars that were spawned from this failure of basic governance lay at the heart of each and every one of the West's problems.
It was by no means certain that, having become embroiled in civil war, the West was irrevocably doomed. Far from it. Rome had faced civil war before, and survived quite nicely. That's what the East managed to do, after all. But the West was struck with a run of rather awful luck: every time somebody appeared to be close to putting the pieces back together properly, something went wrong. Theodosivs I put the Empire back together but died and left two incompetent sons in charge of the whole thing. Constantivs put the Empire back together and died of pleurisy right before his final triumph. Later strongmen and Emperors - Aetivs, Maiorianvs, Anthemivs - came reasonably close to achieving something but suffered from a similar bit of bad luck. Anthemivs's Africa invasion fleet, for instance, was destroyed because the wind off Cape Bon had an unseasonable turn that allowed Vandal fireships a once-in-a-lifetime chance to close on a helplessly trapped target. Without that change in the breeze, Africa probably would've been back in Roman hands, and that could've changed
everything.
And the remarkable thing was that the Empire died in spite of the fact that literally nobody wanted to destroy it. Instead, the various squabbling generals were each aiming for a better position
within a functioning, powerful Rome. Many so-called "barbarians" - who were, in many cases, simply Roman-born officers in charge of Roman field armies, only some of whom had distant ancestors from over the border - were in the same boat. It was only after a century (380-476) of blatantly obvious evidence that the Empire was broken that they started to act less as Roman grandees and soldiers and more as the rulers of their own little pocket kingdoms.
Sussing out which of these men were barbarians and which were Romans is a bit of a joke. Historical convention, for example, labels the shadowy realm of Syagrivs and Aegidivs, centered on Noviodvnvm in Gaul, as the "Dominion of Soissons [sic]", a loyal Roman province that survived the fall of the West for some years. Its chief competitor was the realm of the "Franci", led by Childericvs and Chlodovechvs, which is described as a "barbarian" kingdom. Chlodovechvs eventually defeated Syagrivs, conquered his lands, and came to rule all Gaul, which eventually gained the name Francia after his kingdom, or France. Yet there was no meaningful difference between the two sides. Aegidivs and Childericvs were both born within the Empire, and led elements of the Roman military. Each obeyed and disobeyed various Emperors based on which way the political winds were blowing; they eventually both struck out on their own when it became clear that there was no real benefit to allying with whoever was flavor of the week in Italy. The only thing was, Chlodovechvs survived and had to create a founding mythos for his kingdom, so he drew on the "Franci"; Syagrivs didn't, so he was left as a Roman by default. The same situation obtained everywhere else. New identities were created wholesale, or elevated from obscurity to supersede a defunct Roman identity that lacked the same sort of cachet that it once had. Romanness did not cease to be afterwards - far from it. But it was a secondary layer of identity, not the primary.
When the end of the Empire came, it was not because some wooly, hairy, unlettered savages from the misty forests of the North came in and destroyed civilization. It was because the leader of the Italian imperial field army, Odovacar, once again launched a revolt against imperial authority looking for a bigger slice of the pie, and decided that he could get a better deal from the Emperor in the East than from the Emperor in the West. It was just one more sordid elite-management fiasco in a century-long line of them. And it was four decades until everybody decided that
that had unequivocally been the end of Rome in the West, and
that only happened because the Emperors of the East decided they wanted to have an excuse to conquer Italy so they'd better spread some stories about Italy being overrun by "barbarians".
It's an incredibly complicated story, most of which has very little to do with what is commonly taught to students in secondary school, and almost none of which has to do with
Attila. Hence my annoyance at the game's title.
At least with
Napoleon: Total War one could plausibly argue that Bonaparte stamped his personality on Europe during the era in question unlike anyone else. One cannot discuss war and high politics from 1805 to 1815 without mentioning Napoleon, otherwise it makes no sense. He even managed to affect the law, economics, gender relations, and high culture. Attila, on the other hand, was an incidental player who had an admittedly dramatic and well-publicized cameo. Naming this game after Attila would be like naming
X-Men: Days of Future Past after Quicksilver.
Medieval II doesn't need mods to shine.
Stainless Steel, Broken Crescent, Europa Barbarorum II.
Because really, there never was a unified Germany and there still isn't if we're talking ethnicity and cultural borders instead of dictated lines on a map drawn by politicians.
If your definition of a united nation-state is so stringent that literally no country in the entire world meets the definition, then it is a useless definition.
Germany is a united nation-state with a reasonably strong amount of cultural unification. That regional particular cultures exist within the continuum of Germanness does not change this. Neither does the existence of culturally distinct minorities. That's like saying there's no such thing as a united USA because of the Southeastern Conference and Mexican-Americans.
Retour en haut
