Fall Of the Roman Empire

[bailey_187]

whats the different views on this

i know that Gibbons said that it was Christianity (how exactly?), but i heard that this view is pretty much discredited now (why exactly?)

I read some of a history book by this ex-SWP archaeologist who says that it was because Rome was based on constant expansion, and plundering resources. Once this reached what is now Iraq and Scotland, and they could not expand much more, rather than the army (and its plunder) bringing in resources, it became a drain on resources as it occupied areas of the empire

what other views are there? i think some marxists say something about transition to feudalism (maybe wrong), ok, but what was it exactly that meant Rome could no longer continue?

any other views too please

[Kowalsky]

whats the different views on this

i know that Gibbons said that it was Christianity (how exactly?), but i heard that this view is pretty much discredited now (why exactly?)

I read some of a history book by this ex-SWP archaeologist who says that it was because Rome was based on constant expansion, and plundering resources. Once this reached what is now Iraq and Scotland, and they could not expand much more, rather than the army (and its plunder) bringing in resources, it became a drain on resources as it occupied areas of the empire

what other views are there? i think some marxists say something about transition to feudalism (maybe wrong), ok, but what was it exactly that meant Rome could no longer continue?

any other views too please

there are a series of articles published by the International Marxist Tendency dealing with class struggle in Roman Empire, but now I don't remember if a english versione exists...

anyway, would you like to deal with long term or short term causes? on the short term christianity can't be the cause of the fall, as the empire lasted some hundred years after the setting of christianity as official religione. but, on the long run, it is certain that the pagan religion was much more flexible and could incorporate the religious beliefs of conquered people

the expansion theory is consistent with Kennedy's Rise and Fall of Great Powers that, even if not marxist, gives a lot of intelligent answers...

[graymouser]

I've read some works that do agree that Christianity changed the kind of bond within the empire from a military/political into a cultural/economic one. But overall I think the "Christianity" thesis is too idealist (in the idealism/materialism sense).

There were a lot of factors leading into the decline and fall of the empire. In the West, it never completely recovered from the crisis of the third century, which brought on increasing military rule, reliance on paying off soldiers, and hyper-inflation as emperors debased the coinage. The East of course took a thousand years longer to fall, although they lost the bulk of their land after the expansion of Islam in the seventh century.

In terms of the requirements for expansion, the military machine fed on conquest and when that stopped, it bled the provinces white. Connected with that was the question of the independence of the large land-owning families: by the 5th century, many of the big landlords in the West (modern France, Spain, Italy) were more comfortable making their own terms with the Germanic tribes than relying on the increasingly incompetent leadership from Rome. The East was wealthier, having many prominent trade routes; there were also more competing noble families, each controlling a smaller part of the land where in the West you had few families with huge landholdings. So when the various nomads came in, the East had the resources to fight them and the money to pay them off, while the West really didn't have either. For the East, the West was a liability they no longer had to pay attention to; their breadbasket was in Egypt, and their culture centered in the cities around the east Mediterranean, particularly Constantinople.

When we speak of the "fall," we have to realize that the erosion of the empire happened over a long, tumultuous period. Usually the final emperor is counted as Romulus Augustulus, a child puppet of the Germanic king Odoacer, but that was just the visible line. The empire was already gone by then, it was just the maintenance of a façade.

A good recent book on this is Adrian Goldworthy's How Rome Fell, which discussed a lot of the decay within the society. But the mechanics were straightforward: the East withstood the Germanic invasions while the West didn't. There was a lot of statecraft, economic, and military nuance that went into it. But at the end the West just wasn't the social center of the Empire any more, and the emperors of the East held onto what was more valuable.

[caramelpence]

This isn't really strictly about the OP's question but there's a good case to be made that Gibbon's Decline and Fall should be understood less as a history of the end days of the Roman Empire as such and more as a component of that genre of political and historical writing that involves writers unconsciously or subconsciously using the experiences of the past or a foreign land as a way of reflecting on and conveying the concerns of the present and their immediate context - in basic terms the context was decisive, and Gibbon's understanding was shaped by his position as an inhabitant of Britain during the War of Independence and a period of political and social unrest, in much the same way that Montesquieu's Persian Letters are more instructive for what they can tell us about Montesquieu's immediate concerns and anxieties, as opposed to being an accurate empirical account of the customs and social structures of a foreign society.