September 24, 2020 61
No Barbarians Necessary
Peter Brown
The Tragedy of Empire:
From Constantine to the
Destruction of Roman Italy
by Michael Kulikowski.
Belknap Press/Harvard University
Press, 382 pp., $35.00
Escape from Rome:
The Failure of Empire
and the Road to Prosperity
by Walter Scheidel.
Princeton University Press,
670 pp., $35.00
King and Emperor:
A New Life of Charlemagne
by Janet L. Nelson.
University of California Press,
668 pp., $34.95
Ever since the Renaissance, the
fall of the Roman Empire has
remained the cherished night-
mare of the West. Here are three
books calculated to chase this
nightmare away. The first, Mi-
chael Kulikowski’s The Tragedy
of Empire, sets out to tell what
actually happened. The second,
Wa lter Scheidel’s Escape from
Rome, argues that this fall was,
in the long run, the best thing
that could have happened to
Europe. The third, Janet Nel-
son’s King and Emperor, is a
deeply learned and humane
portrait of Charlemagne, a man
who wielded supreme power in
much of Europe three centuries
after the fall of Rome.
Given the charged nature of
the topic, Kulikowski’s narra-
tive works like an open window
in a smoke-filled room. He explains
several crucial points: first, that the
Roman Empire did, indeed, fall, but
only in its western parts, leaving the
eastern empire to enjoy a “later late
antiquity” of remarkable creativity.
Second, that the Western Empire suc-
cumbed to no grand waves of destruc-
tion set in motion by irresistible forces.
There was no murderous onslaught of
barbarian tribes and no landslide of
refugees escaping the arrival of the
Huns from Central Asia. Nor had there
been any dramatic economic recession:
for certain areas, such as Sicily and the
dry plains of the Alentejo in southern
Portugal, the fourth century CE was
“one of the richest and most prosper-
ous moments in history.”
Moreover, as Kulikowski sees it, the
Western Empire was trashed by its own
top brass. Civil war alone caused its
fall. In the words of the proverb, “the
fish rots from the head downward.”
During the fourth century, competing
emperors fought each other in murder-
ous civil wars. More Romans died in
the killing fields of the Danube, where
the armies of East and West clashed
on behalf of rival emperors, than were
ever killed in the course of the so-
called barbarian invasions. In the fifth
century, civil war slipped easily into
warlordism, as leading Roman generals
and their armies clashed for the control
of provinces rather than entire conti-
nents. A winner-take-all mentality led
competing generals to inflict local vio-
lence (with surgical cruelty) in order to
gain or to retain a foothold at the very
top of the empire. Warlordism, not any
great movement of peoples, was the
political virus that brought down the
Roman empire in the West.
Throughout this feeding frenzy,
the barbarians stood, as it were, on
the sidelines. Kulikowski insists that
they should not be seen as immigrants
pressing against the fences of the em-
pire. Rather, they were lured ever
deeper into the empire by rivalrous
emperors and generals, who disbursed
treasure (often gained from the plun-der of Roman provinces) and ceded
taxable land in return for military sup-
port. Some generals had a special rela-
tionship with the Huns, others with the
Goths, still others with groups along the
Rhine. The first loyalty of warriors was
to the generals who paid them, and not
to the Roman state. And the generals
kept at it for some fifty years, until there
was no empire left to fight about. As
Kulikowski presents it, the end of the
Roman Empire in the West was mean
and dirty—and thoroughly Roman.
Kulikowski is trenchant on this issue.
He rejects “the search for external bad
guys” that was built into the rhetoric
of contemporaries, who regularly con-
trasted “Romans” with “barbarians”:
the Romans were responsible for their
downfall, and they enlisted the barbar-
ians, as they had long done, to do the
dirty work for them. What is remarkable
is the speed with which a highly cen-
tralized empire, fed by a sophisticated
tax system, unraveled: “In less than
a generation, provinces had become
kingdoms.” This situation speaks to the
localism of the Roman West beneath its
imperial carapace. Like any large state
in the premodern world, the Roman
Empire was a giant perched on stilts.
Kulikowski knows his barbarians as
well as he knows his Romans. He de-
scribes the changing face of Rome’s
great enemy, Sasanian Iran, as its pri-
orities swung in a huge arc between
Afghanistan and Mesopotamia. He
follows the development of Hunnish so-
ciety on both sides of the distant PamirMountains in Central Asia. In a bril-
liant tour d’horizon of the West from
Ireland to the Black Sea, he measures
the effect of the fall of Rome on the
world beyond Rome. No longer sucked
into the maw of a still rich but flailing
empire, many societies (such as the
inland Saxons) slumped: warriors had
been their cash crop. The fall of Rome
was the fall, also, of Old Germany.And all for the better, Walter Scheidel
would say. Escape from Rome is a re-markable book. It is based on a deter-
mination to study the rise and fall of
empires throughout history and across
the globe without privileging Rome.
This is comparative history at its most
austere. Scheidel gives short shrift to the
Eurocentric narcissism that regards the
fall of Rome as the only memorable di-
saster in world history. Instead, Scheidel
analyzes the mechanisms of “imperio-
genesis” across the globe. He studies
the way in which certain states gained
control of large proportions of the pop-
ulation of the ancient world, maintained
this control, lost it, and (just as often)
regained it with the passing of time. The
book contains mind- stretching maps
and many graphs. The solid plateaus,
sudden drops, and slow upticks shown
on these graphs—like the patterns on
an EKG monitor—enable us to follow
the amassment and dispersion of im-
mense efforts on the part of human be-
ings to dominate their fellows. It leaves
us with the overall impression of a view
of the earth seen for the first time from
the surface of the moon.
And what does Scheidel see? Mainly,
he sees Rome and China. These two
“behemoths” sat at each end of Eur-
asia. Between them, they controlled
two thirds of the entire population of
Africa and Eurasia. In 395 Rome still
dominated up to four fifths of the in-
habitants of what is now called Eu-
rope. A century later, in 500, the scene
changed dramatically. The western end
of Eurasia was a blank. Empire van-
ished from Europe, never to return onsuch a scale. By contrast, despite peri-
ods of disintegration, China remained
a behemoth. Europe became the odd
man out (one might almost say, the
truant) in a world where hegemonic
empire proved to be the default posi-
tion in every other area with substan-
tial settled populations (which included
not only China but the Middle East and
South and Southeast Asia).
A formidable historian of Roman so-
ciety, Scheidel also knows China.^1 He
brings Escape from Rome to a startling
conclusion. Seen in a global perspec-
tive, the fall of Rome requires
no grand explanations. Empires
have often disappeared. The
really interesting question was
why, unlike China, Europe did
not produce another empire.
Rome was a “one-off empire.”
That is what the historian needs
to explain.
And here Scheidel springs his
great surprise. Nothing better
could have happened to Europe
than this break in the cycle of
“serial imperial state forma-
tion.” The “enduring absence of
hegemonic empire” in Europe
eventually fostered the growth
of mighty midgets—the small
states, thriving cities, and frag-
mented social structures (kings
against nobles, knights against
commoners, laity against clergy,
and, later, Catholics against
Protestants) that characterized
medieval and early modern
Europe. By the year 1240 the
mighty midgets had won: north-
western Europe “boasted the
largest cluster of similarly orga-
nized polities anywhere in the world,”
and they were thriving.
In the spring of 1241, Mongol armies
from the other end of Eurasia came
within striking distance of that privi-
leged conglomerate. Could they have
gone further, and, if so, would they
have succeeded? At this gripping mo-
ment, Scheidel resorts to one of his fa-
vorite tools of analysis: the exploration
of counterfactuals. One should savor
these, if only with the enthusiasm of
a small boy imagining world battles
while reading military histories. For
in this way, Scheidel hammers out the
horizons of the possible.
What if the Mongols, who had left
Kiev as an empty bone-field, had gone
on to Paris? His answer is reassuring
but not necessarily flattering: Europe
was too fragmented to be conquered
by the Mongols. Their way would have
been blocked by castles and town walls,
each originally thrown up by one group
in conflict with others—by a fractious
nobility against its kings and against its
own peasants, and by townsmen against
them all. Above all, “there was no cen-
tral government to offer surrender.” By
contrast, the Mongols swallowed all of
China north of the Yangtse in one gulp,
thereby illustrating the old Chinese
axiom that i and chi—the disciplined
behavior of imperial subjects—areA relief showing battles between Roman soldiers and barbarians, from the sarcophagus
of a Roman general, circa 180 –190Leemage/Corbis/Getty Images(^1) Rome and China: Comparative Per-
spectives on Ancient World Empires,
edited by Walter Scheidel (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2009).