The Roman Empire's Collapse in the 5th century (In Our Time)

this is the BBC this podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK thanks for downloading the in our time podcast for more details about in our time and for our Terms of Use please go to bbc.co.uk/topgear Ben wrote of the decline of the Roman Empire while that greater body was invaded by open violence or undermined by slow decay a pure and humble religion gently insinuated itself into the minds of men grew up in silence and obscurity derive new vigor from opposition and finally erected the triumphant banner of the cross on the ruins of the Capitol but how far the growth of Christianity implicated in the destruction of the great culture of Rome how critical were their brawny incursions of the Ostrogoths the Visigoths and the Vandals to the fall of the Roman Empire should we even be talking in terms of blame or decline at all Sint Agustin wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD Edward Gibbon famously tackled it in the 18th century and it's a question that preoccupies my guest today with me is Charlotte Russe a historian of Late Antiquity at King's College London Richard Olsen lecturer in classics at Royal Holloway University of London and David warmest Lee Fellow and tutor at Jesus College Oxford and the editor of the latest edition of Edward Givens the history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire let's start in 410 arms quite an astonishing year for the West rally Alaric sacks Rome the Roman army withdraws from Britain and sent agustin starts to write the City of God so an immense amount was going on Charlotte Russia in the City of God he almost takes on the argument that Gibbon puts out fourteen hundred years later he defends Christianity for being responsible for the fall of the Empire to certain extent why did he feel impelled to do that in 410 well precisely Gibbon picks up all those years later a tradition which runs all the way through the crises of late antiquity because the big question always is if you lose a battle have you offended the divine powers and from Earth from the 3rd century onwards the the very question of persecuting the Christians arises from the question of whether Christianity is offensive to other divinities the department duty the first duty of a Roman Emperor is to conciliate the divine powers and ensure the continuing power of Rome with their support if you lose that that support if you're defeated the first and most obvious explanation is that something is wrong in your religious practice and Augustine is a gauge engaging head-on with that argument when he argues with the Romans in their own terms as to whether or not this particular religious diversion has undermined Roman power can you give us some idea of the strength and nature of the arguments between as it were the Christian point of view from Constantine hundred beginning of the fourth century and the pagan point of view as to whether this Christianity was an unfeeling a declining force as some of them in Rome did think I think enfeebling and declining undermining is more a slightly more modern take because we have a very strong image of Christianity is gentle in a way I think what is more offensive to contemporary thought is the exclusiveness is the argument that this religion excludes others that you can't although it's absolutely clear from archaeological evidence that people in fact did honor the Christian God and other gods at the same time David Worsley Gibbons famous for having us well for many things of course for being one of the greatest historians but one of the things he associated he did associate Christianity with the fall of the Roman Empire the first volume of history of his history came out in 1776 and caused huge controversy I think partly because of this chapter 15 about Christianity what was he saying and as importantly almost what did people fear he was saying well the argument that he runs in Chapter 15 is not quite the argument that Charlotte's just put forward in fact he picks up a point that Machiavelli has made about Christianity and the Empire and his argument is that Christianity and feeble the Empire because it took people out of public life Christians couldn't take part in public life fully because they weren't able to make the sacrifices that were part of public life that's the argument that he wants to carry forward it causes controversy in the 18th century because it seems to be a covert attack on established religions and it seems to be a subtle argument in favor of secularization that's why it caused outrage at the time what it all had covert he did seem to point out that the the Christians claimed that they were persecuted more than in fact they were persecuted they were often persecuted for treachery and crimes rather than for their religion for instance so he was he was attacking in that sense wasn't he one of the things he wants to attack is what he sees as a historical tradition which has ramped up the number of martyrs unsustainably and there's a very amusing section at the end of chapter 16 when he reduces the number of martyrs what he calls the annual consumption of martyrs - something like 50 throughout the empire so in in that chapter what he's really doing is apart from suggesting that there's been great exaggeration that he's pursuing a kind of private Vendetta with earlier historians who we think of who he thinks have written irresponsibly about the persecution Richard Olsen Roman life was centred on the urban what effect did Christianity have on the shape of the city the shape of this is the physical shape as well as the idea of the city and you think that is he's part of the argument I think so the great difference of course the Christianity is all the wealth of all of the wealth that was being generated by the exploitation of agriculture was not devoted to public ceremonies anymore but was being moved into building churches and not maintaining the old traditional infrastructure of call you artistic the beneficial elements like putting charitable donations into run games and things like that so the whole ceremonies of a traditional life were changing and in decline there is two different patterns that we have to see in that in the West the the traditions of games seem to decline much earlier than in the east and in many cases in the West predate the advent of Christianity but is there a sense in which Christians were were putting money into the city you know I'm just asking about this obviously and by this idea the rich should support the poor and in charitable work so that didn't that enhance the city in some ways well that what they were doing was supporting the very poor the reporting of widows and orphans you had a widows and orphans fund in before for the church and just great greater extent for the Classical period the money that was being devoted to good causes was political purposes and therefore potentially going to the wealthier members of the aristocracy or people like victors in games who receiving dolls all that on that basis and this would probably have meant that there was quite a large underclass which are completely invisible largely invisible within our classical tradition but who get talked about a lot more within the Christian tradition especially when you have bishops who are engaged in charitable activities and setting up hospitals and hospices for for the poor and even are the first maternity hospitals so that women have given birth a few days a rest which is entirely Christian idea so there's a whole change in in the cultural values that are being expressed in in the cities and that also has its reflections in the architecture of cities no longer do you need these great amphitheaters you now need churches and you need lots of churches and a whole raft of other kinds of Christian institutions which develop in the fourth to the sixth centuries but my favorite story of this is the story of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus who go to sleep during one of the great persecutions wake up several hundred years later and wander down the hill into Ephesus and find the city unrecognizable and I shocked when they asked where the city is and they're told that it's Ephesus it's a completely new social environment that they're working in and that I think is a very radical change from a continuity or believed continuity in classical architecture in classical styles from certainly for 800 years before that so we're talking about Christianity bringing huge cultural changes which can be seen in the streets and the daily practices of people can you be seen in genre can I be seen just to conclude this business of the Christians can be seen in a way for instance knowledge was purvey knowledge was sought we're talking about monotheism instead of many gods can we just develop what it would be like to see you know your sturdy Golden Age pagan looking with horror of what was happening what is happening that makes him look with horror well of course we have the ultimate sturdy Golden Age pagan the very last world in a way the symbol the symbolic figure about him so many people right is the Emperor Julian the Emperor who suddenly in a string of Christian Emperor's the last pagan Emperor who has this brief moment of trying to as we see it now turn the clock back and as people saw it then turn the clock back in many ways interestingly the most one of the most contentious things he did in his tiny short reign was to intervene in the educational process because education of cultivated people was rooted as I hope it still is in the study of the classical of classical literature because where else would one begin and it was he who said that it isn't appropriate for people who don't believe in the gods and goddesses to teach such material therefore Christians professed Christian should not be allowed to teach literature and that shocked everybody it shot the pagan commentators as well as being a rather mean approach because they realize is that being educated in classical literature was the only way to status and influence in society and the interesting thing is that the strong logic of his position was in fact not accepted although it caused quite a lot of anguish to the Christians and Christianity from then on managed to fuse amazingly the classical tradition of Education with Christian belief the one of the embarrassing things about Christianity is that it's basic documents were written in a low rather than a high level of language and you have for example a wonderful Egyptian poet at the end of the fifth century who translates and John's Gospel order transmutes and John's Gospel in two Homeric hexameter verse two sound as much like homer as possible because it's so much less embarrassing to read your sacred texts if it's in gentlemanly speech and if you consider reactions to modern translations of the Bible you can see a rather similar idea that the speech of sacred text should be gentlemanly the Richard do you think that the word decline is still useful it's used with tremendous ringing finality by by given and it was used a word like that was used at the time what's your view of it it's now not generally used by Byzantine and ancient historians because they think that the term has undesirable connotations so the term that tends to be used is is transformation as everyone agrees that there are changes going on in the 3rd and the 4th century but decline becomes a ideologically difficult term you also have to work out what your declining from and how you define decline and and this is one of the real problems I don't think this is really the problem for historians such as Gibbon who can talk about the zeitgeist in a very vague way as to what's that what's happening when more modern historians try to pin down where decline is they have great problems of working out whether its decline cultural history for instance is one of the various war might look for a decline we see that the cultural values are changing we see people are writing in different kinds of ways but a lot of these people are writing still very learn it however one does have to admit that at some point the Roman Empire Falls it is a defined historical fact and because of that something has to change there's no arguments I think that the Roman state is not as powerful in the fifth century as it was in the second century and similarly in the 7th century in the East when the Arabs arrived these are Arab in arab invaders managed to take over this very previously powerful state something must have happened in between very difficult to escape from using the word decline in those kinds of contexts my model of decline comes from excavating and out in Turkey and weird place where I've worked for quite a long time and where for many years the only source of a shower at the end of the day was a tank of water that had been left out in the Sun and that had a tap soldered onto it and thinking about this at about midday standing in the ruins of the large second century baths which were maintained quite carefully until the 6th century I think there is a level at which decline is quite measurable I'd have thought hot and cold running water wouldn't be a bad estimate decline and there was hot and cold running water throughout the Roman Empire until when do you get the the size of the baths tends to get smaller but people seem to manage to keep this one for last things that people tend to hang on to maintaining their baths ever less elegantly but functioning ly very often until the end of the 6th century what caused the decline I mean we usually think is it was a defeating war was it the economy or was it this Christian influence it was the combination of all those things let's have a crack at that what do you think David Worsley his view is that you can't expect things to go on forever the moderate great a moderate greatness is is the cause of the Empire's decline and that one shouldn't be shocked by it and in fact there are good things that come out of it if I could just go back to the point I made earlier about given not being an apologist for Empire what he is writing about is how we get from the ancient world to what was then the modern world for him what he called a Christian republic of nations and that comes out of the body of the Empire and that was he thought a much better way of organizing society than the Empire which he thought was an unnatural and irrational form of political organization and so decline for him is something that actually doesn't really need to be explained it's just a natural process so in fact I mean just would simply decline him is a good thing because it leads to a better thing that follows the decline the decline of the Roman Empire in his go I'm just trying to clarify is not to be mourned it's what happened before we got to a better place absolutely right we've got to divine this here because I was going to get complicated we were talking about a decline of the Western Empire the Roman didn't let's stick to the fifth century the Eastern Empire because they split went on until 1453 when the Turk okay so let's just stick to the fifth century and we're now basically talking about the West what would you say with the key a Marxist would say the economy what do you say about that Richard Olson well various things seem to happen in the third century it's very difficult to disengage the various causes and obviously instead sent you to get a wave of barbarian invasions which do seem to slow people down once a large number of barbarians come and burn down your villa it probably is an economic disadvantage and in various areas of the West in the third century you get invasions in northern Gaul some sense of disruption in some areas of Britain and problems in in Spain and these are is never seem really to recover from from those shocks in other areas that the pattern is very uneven the third century people survived the third century in the fourth century is an area of great expansion in terms of sites in terms of very great villains lost their villas for instance there at the apogee then and then in the fifth century we get another wave of barbarian invasions and a lot of ancient sites disappear that that stage but already in in the late fourth century we're beginning to see fewer coins appearing on on ancient sites the urban centres appear to be getting smaller certainly in in the in the northern provinces and to a certain extent in some more southern provinces as well which suggests there is some kinds of a broad economic change if you get a passage of decline of cities and there's lots of reasons why these cities might be declining in that period that process can then go into reverse and that's a long term process it seems very unlikely that barbarians who arriving would want to destroy this extremely rich and powerful culture that they actually want to adopt they want to exploit and when we find barbarians arriving in Italy for instance in their fifth and sixth centuries what they do is they use the Roman bureaucracy the government administered systems is there to enrich themselves I must say I'm a bit unredeemed in that I'm really rather keen on the barbarian invasions as the primary cause but you don't know why I think I read someone that you said you didn't know why the movement came from the steppe well I'm not an expert on the history of the upper steps but it seems I sit inside the Roman Empire looking out and it seems to me that I have no reason when this starts to happen in the third century I have no reason to believe that it's going to go on and on that just when I've dealt with one load of barbarians I'm going to find myself having to deal with another and this is when if I'm running in living in an empire which is also having to deal with a much more important power in Mesopotamia than it's had to deal with for several centuries there's a great growth of power in the kingdom based in Iraq in the third from the third century onwards so suddenly the Empire is under serious military pressure from both sides and it must be unpredictably impossible that this should go on to the extent that it does because if you're Roman you know that you'll go on forever because I mean obviously we'll because you always have there's 300 years of peace at the heart of a massive Empire the known world has then was in a way yeah he's an extraordinary a psychological Ferguson's it is and I think it's very we always it's very hard to imagine being an inside such certainty hmm so the old-fashioned thing is they decline because they were beaten on the battlefield I'm increasingly attracted by the and it's good and it's economic consequences I would have thought that it's difficult isn't it to think of these barbarian invasions as just some kind of eruption of the completely unknown and other because there been interactions between Empire and barbara's and for many centuries the Empire had been employing barbarians as auxiliaries how did the barbarians learn to beat the Romans on the battlefield because in many centuries they've been actually fighting for the Romans against other barbarians what you find is that barbarism isn't a stable category it changes and barbarians become rather civilized one of the interesting things about given this portrait of later barbarian leaders such as Alaric or Attila even is the way in which he will use the language which he's previously used of an emperor like Augustus to describe them so he will talk about the artful barbarian in the case of Attila or with Alaric who says that he combined find the daring spirit of a barbarian with the consummate art of an imperial general so what we're getting here is some kind of miscegenation of quality and one of the problems one has is trying to explain this is why extraordinarily rich and powerful empire suddenly I mean years have been dealing with barbarians on the frontiers three centuries quite successfully suddenly finds it very difficult to deal with these barbarian invaders and a lot of these barbarian invaders as far as one can tell we're not coming in in absolutely huge numbers and were coming in as refugees they were being coming in over the Rhine and the Danube without any resources having been pushed out of the territory by other movements on the steppes they had very few resources and suddenly these people are able to overwhelm the Roman army one of the thing that I think some Romans do is get very confused about this well why are armies not able to beat these barbarians anymore in Jerome's says well the barbarians are Christian as well so that's maybe that's why they're winning other people like Vegeta's rioting in the fourth century says well one of the reasons why why we can't be them is our soldiers just aren't as good as they used to be they don't train as well they don't have such good armor and which of course is that's another why the soldier is not as good as they were two centuries earlier well there is a sense there is a sense to switch it to North Britain when Bede's talking it the christianity and clever and brave young men going into the church is taking the eye off the army the state's getting weakened by the church sucking off good people and is that anything does that come into the calculation we have told there's an off-the-shelf sort of argument that's available to explain that and it's it traces the fall of an empire to the natural history of a republic you have a republic which is full of people who are virtuous in the sense that they fight and they also speak in public because they've got all these virtues they conquer all the surrounding territories when they conquer all the surrounding territories the wealth of those territories comes in they retire to their villa on the campaign in case they don't want to talk in public and fight anymore they're prepared to pay people to do that and then gradually the Empire collapse in on itself because there's a loss of civic virtue at the center and that's that's an explanation that is available to given which he plays with and which I think has quite a lot at the level of just sort of human psychology to recommend it can I just I know I want to move on to one more thing because we are we have been talking about part of the argument because the Western Empire as it were let's assume it declines at least in the fifth century and maybe starts at otter and fall in the sixth century but we have the eastern empire going on constantly know before until until 1453 for almost more than a thousand years now Charlotte it can you say why that continued when the West fell the great gift of Gibbon to our studies was that he didn't say that the Roman Empire fell in 476 just some rather unimportant North West Europeans disappeared but Constantinople survives as the new Rome and because Constantinople had been founded on top of an elder city called Byzantium for we we call it zamp are the Byzantine Empire because we're no good at saying constant and Politan because it actually is too difficult to say very frequently and one of the other a whole series of reasons this is a kind of classic examination question why does the West fall and the East not fall Constantine who started from York and to conquer the Roman Empire become emperor of the Roman Empire spotted a very good strategic point when he moved his his capital to Constantinople and I think the strategic importance of the actual city itself is surprisingly important again I'm going back to these military explanations but in the very darkest days in the heart of all I mean it's absolutely clear that there is there are several points in the history of Constantinople when its power almost is limited to what is within the walls of the city and it is unconquered until in fact the disaster of 1204 when the Crusaders concrete and then 1453 when the Turks take it but it also is in a crucial position for defending your your Balkan frontiers and also getting reasonably fast to the eastern frontier now it's still not sufficiently strong to resist the Arab advances of the seventh century and of course the Eastern Empire from 640 onwards is a very much smaller Empire than less than the whole greek-speaking half of the Roman Empire is it the Greek and just so people the Greek and Latin divide if you draw a line sort of down the Adriatic and cut through the Balkans and cut off sort of Libya you do tend have Latins bowing on one side in the Western Empire and Greek on the other side so that just a reference that people want you people making you know idea right what do you think about this survival of the Eastern Empire I think it's one of the great problems because you look at the fourth century late fourth century in the West where everything seems to be going downhill you say one can model of how the Empire is developing in the East when you look at the fourth century you see the number of sites are increasing the towns seem to be flourishing monuments are being being put up and this carries on certainly into the 6th century and maybe even into the 7th century in many areas so you have economic social prosperity the frontiers of the Empire remained virtually where they were in the the eastern half up until the Arab invasions this is a bit of a problem with the Persians you can conquer it all but then Iraq this beats them and actually defeats the Persian enemy who the Romans have been trying to defeat for six seven hundred years and here they've won they won this is great historical battle 20 years later the back on the walls of Constantinople so there is a huge structural problem if we're trying to explain the decline as to why the kind of social and economic phenomenon phenomena that happen in the West and not replicated in the East and the East is undergoing a period of unprecedented prosperity you see you see the development of a furtherance of a great educational tradition which may be given wasn't so aware of people that are touring around the the eastern Mediterranean in the for the fourth century developing learning they're going to places like Alexandria to Beirut to learn roman law which may sound a bit unusual in the holidays giving the reputation of Beirut Athens because it is still a center of philosophy and people like Julian are touring the Empire to develop learning well I don't think we might devise a hypothesis by which the survival of the East Roman Empire and the success of Byzantium is entirely thanks to its academics and that the strength of a culture should be measured by the power influence and arguably pay of its academics and you see this with the development of Byzantium you see it with a survival of Byzantium if this is in this entrepot position between many cultures and what the Byzantines realize is that you have to understand those people in order to manipulate them what's your reaction Richard Olson to this claim that the academics in fact caused this to last a thousand years longer than the male warriors in the West I think it's a touch unlike I think one has to look for more general socio-economic causes for the survival of the Empire in the in the East you may proclaim the Romanist of Carlisle but I suspect it was a very backward area really that's that is that is too provoking I was liking it all then thank you for listening we hope you've enjoyed this radio 4 podcast you can find hundreds of other programs about history science and philosophy a BBC code at UK forward slash Radio 4

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Keywords: comedy, danelaw, mohammed el-fateh osman, juliane koepcke, george lamson jr, erika delgado, neuba tessoh, james polehinke, first lieutenant martin farkas, annette herfkens, plane crash survivor, air disaster, plane crash, lone survivors, top 10 list, top ten, top10, toptenz, top 10, warrior queens, alfred, athelfled, bernard cornwell, last kingdom, uhtred, the last kingdom, anglo-saxon, anglo-saxons, ethelflad, ethelfald, ethelflaed, viking history

Id: JNLcDPkUpKs

Length: 28min 19sec (1699 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 04 2018