Hey friends,

Hold on, because this will be the longest, gnarliest newsletter of the last three. We are always seeking to more clearly define the past by naming a specific date for a big event like the Fall of Rome. But what if Rome never actually, completely fell?

Welcome to this third and final newsletter on the Romans, based on a recent reading of the 1776 Penguin Classic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Abridged Edition, by Edward Gibbon, ed. David Womersley, 764 pages). This 3-parter has been intended to coincide roughly with the first 100 days of the American presidency we have just witnessed.

When we last visited with Gibbon, he was reporting the shift of the entire empire from West to East, the sacking of Rome by the barbarians, and the establishment of a new Roman capital at Constantinople. What essentially happened then was that Rome started to abandon its military state, and the tides of barbarians the legions desperately held back from its borders across the centuries began to flood in. This disorganized and nomadic rabble now began to form up into actual nation-states. Two-thousand-three-hundred walled cities and towns sprang up in Germany. Russia saw use of the plough, the loom, and the forge finally take hold across its entire expanse. And with these things also came the rise of Mahomet and the creation of the Arab world as we know it today. The empire lost much influence in this period, Gibbon explains, because of bad leaders like Theodosius II (408-450 AD) whose sons and grandsons were also equally poor at the job. This is the point at which the empire will declare itself fully and completely Christian. The philosopher Proclus, steward of Plato's teachings and author of an 18-point thesis against Christianity, lost influence at this time and was forgotten. Eventually, twelve nations would divide power over Europe, and six million Europeans would spread themselves across the Americas, and no barbarian force stood any further chance of disrupting this balance because, although they had armies, what they now lacked was cannons.

In this part of the book, Gibbon pays special attention to the emperors Justin and Justinian of the 6th Century because Justinian divided power with his beloved, Theodora, who started life as an actress and circus performer and liked to dine with an entourage of ten young men. ("Her charity was universal," Gibbon says.). The political scene was divided into four factions, the reds, whites, blues, and greens, complete with armed conflicts that resulted in the greens massacring three thousand of the blues (the faction favored by Justinian) at a festival. Unrest between blues and greens finally created mayhem in Constantinople with street-to-street fighting. With such chaos, the overthrow of the emperor seemed likely until Theodora stepped forth to tell the mob she would fight to the death to remain queen. This restored resolve to the blues, and in the ensuing fight to save the throne, thirty-thousand people are said to have died.

Gibbon devotes space here to the silk trade -- largely the invention and obsession of women, he says -- saying a pound of silk was now worth three-quarters of a pound of gold. Silk had to cross all of Asia to reach Roman markets, a journey of two hundred and forty-three days on average by caravan, and could be lost at any point to Tartars and other barbarian robbers. The Persians held a world monopoly in silk, and no remedy could be found until two Christian missionaries, based out of the church at Ceylon, managed to walk deep into Asia and procure some silk-worm eggs and walk them back out hidden in the hollow cavity of a staff. Seasoned travelers of the Earth who had traipsed the entire silk road on foot now believed the world was flat and oval and could be crossed end to end in about four hundred days.

Justinian was a customs-tax emperor who levied taxes on all goods entering on ships, causing the average citizens pricing hardships and placing many goods completely beyond the reach of the poor. Gibbon calls special attention to certain features of Justinian's reign, like his allowance of monopolies, his practice of selling honors and offices to the highest bidder, and a tendency to seize the fortunes of the richest citizens, treating their unusually high gains as proof they were not playing by his rules. The threat to the empire from being overrun by other nations was so great now that no outlying province or border town was safe from annual inroads by barbarian hordes such as the Huns and Sclavonians (Slavs). However, the emperor was friendly with the Goths and created long walls in Crimea to protect them from their enemies. As the Arab world began to form nations, the Huns and Arabs sometimes united against Rome under a Persian standard. At this time, both Rome and Persia made mutual investments in long walls of many hundreds of miles to keep out the Scythians who are variously described as Siberians, East Asians, Hungarians, Magyars, and even members of the 10 lost tribes of Israel.

Under Justinian, an effort to fix the starting point of the world resulted in a date of September 1st, 5508 BC. Now two Germanic tribes, the Goths and Vandals, arose with the Goths claiming a kingdom in Europe. The Vandals then took over in North Africa, led by Hilderic. But Rome had ambitions in Africa, too, and General Belisarius sailed to a point near Carthage to subdue a Vandal nation whose main pursuits were "love and hunting." In the taking of Carthage, Belisarius dislodged a large body of Arians or heretics who believed Jesus was a man, not a divine being, and also Donatists who held that a minister could not be just anyone: he must be a person beyond all moral reproach. He then seated himself on the throne of Genseric who had sacked Rome in 455 AD. The Vandals fled to the poverty-stricken Moorish lands and more lands and cities fell to the general including Sardinia, Corsica, Tripoli and Caesarea near modern Algiers. Treasures of the Temple of Jerusalem were also recovered and at last returned.

Strangely the early Nazis would, in modern times, say that rather than invading Europe they were only reclaiming their perpetual place of greatness there. By tracing their origins to the lands where the Vandals fled, they only wished to prove travellers' tales of a rootless, displaced people with "white complexion and long flaxen hair of a northern race" living among the Moorish tribes, along the slopes of mount Atlas. As for the rest of the Vandals, they went to live between the Elbe and Oder rivers, Gibbon says, under the Prussian yoke, now speaking a slavic dialect.

For the Goths, the fall of the Vandals unfortunately meant their best ally had been defeated by their common enemy, Rome. In a series of actions, including the defeat and imprisonment of the anti-Catholic rebel Amalafrida, a Goth by birth and Vandal queen by marriage, Roman forces suppressed the Goths and worked toward retaking Rome, the Italian peninsula and Sicily. By slipping in through a dry aquaduct, Belisarius managed to leverage a fighting force of five thousand into place inside Rome and charge them with defending the whole boundary, some twelve miles, against a beseiging army of one hundred and fifty thousand Goths. Battles ensued, a pope promoted by the Goths was deposed, and the emperor at last ceded the British Isles to the Goths in a deal to reclaim the city. Now and then in Roman history, a eunuch commander distinguished himself. In this conflict, it was Narses leading a small force of Danes or Heruli who helped turn the tide and rout the Goths. However, a Merovingian king of the Franks chose this moment to attack the Romans at Milan, partly undoing the victory.

Infamous women feature prominently in Gibbon's study and none behaved worse than Antonina, wife of Belisarius, who conducted flagrant affairs, murdered witnesses to her misconduct, and tried to destroy her son from a prior marriage. Gibbon also notes earth-moving natural events (comets, quakes, plagues) citing the 5th appearance of a huge celestial object during Justinian's reign that would pass by again during the Crusades and again after King Phillip's War with the American colonists. As for earthquakes and other frequent tectonic events, Gibbon points out how disastrously ill-conceived the world's cities were, saying they served as perfect examples of how "man has industriously laboured for his own destruction." Another proof was the plague or black death, also appearing for the first time in the Justinian Era, from the Nile delta. The disease caused black glandular tumors and death in under a week. It's clear that Gibbon, living a century before the cause was found, thought the plague an airborne illness. At Constantinople, under Justinian, the disease first began to rage, claiming ten thousand lives a day at its height.

Eight centuries after Justinian, Constantinople would at last fall to barbarians, in this case the Turks. Gibbon cites no less than ten groups, races, nations and creeds that played their role including the Franks, Arabs or Saracens (under Mahomet), Bulgarians, Hungarians, Russians, Normans, Latins, Greeks, Moguls and Tartars, and finally, once again, the Turks. Mahomet arose from the wastes of Arabia, in horse country unchanged since Moses' time. At this time, Rome could scarce maintain a centurion and custom house in the region. The legions of Augustus attempted a conquest, but disease forced a disastrous retreat. Gibbon describes the earliest Arab faith as an idolatrous worship of the sun, moon and stars, with a god governing each planet, and 360 idols, both human and animal, a system best displayed in the architecture of old Babylon. After Mahomet came, the religious rites of the Arabs did not really change, but the object of worship definitely did. The tradition stated that Mahomet descended from Ismael, son of Abraham, and that he was born from the tribe of Koreish, in the family Hashem, which happened to also be the caretakers of the oldest, most holy Arab religious article, the Caaba. It would be revealed to Mahomet at age forty that he was the one true apostle of the one true God. As a religion, Mahometism would face the same difficulty of all faiths: "The God of nature has written his existence on all his works, and his law in the heart of man. To restore the knowledge of the one and the practice of the other, has been the real or pretended aim of the prophets of every age." Gibbon observed that six revelations, all connected, had been granted so far to Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Christ and Mahomet. Gibbon also asserted here that Jesus was a mortal man. As for proof that Mahomet was a prophet, reports of his prophetic acts, sayings and miracles numbered in the hundreds of thousands, though only a few thousand were adopted as articles of faith. A true separation of the major faiths was hard to prove, Gibbon believed, because many older Egyptian rites had been wrongly treated as inventions of the Mosaic tradition and the Christian belief in resurrection had also originated in Egypt.

Of course, Mahomet's difference as a prophet was that he fought in nine battles and claimed the captive wives of his enemies as concubines, and he gave most opponents the choice of conversion to Islam or death. His campaign to spread Islam would finally bring him into conflict with Roman emperor Heraclius, who entered Palestine with a force of three thousand and slayed three key Muslim leaders at the Battle of Muta. Mahomet next declared all-out war on Rome, but with his forces badly fatigued, thirsty, and starving, and with Christians all around, he was forced into a "live and let live" position toward the infidels. His epileptic fits and a fever would take his life within a few more months, just before the launch of an expedition against Syria, and he would be buried at Medina, not Mecca. In the end, Gibbon upbraids Mahomet, apparently for believing too firmly in his own divinity, and for claiming himself divinely appointed to do what he merely wished to do. Mahomet's closest connections now contended over the future of Islam and these included associates like Omar and Mahomet's son-in-law, Ali, father-in-law, Abu Beker, wife, Ayesha and daughter, Fatima. Conflicts following Mahomet's demise would create two camps within Islam, Shiite (favoring Ali and blood relations of Mahomet) and Sunni (favoring leaders chosen by consensus). Gibbon remarked how stunning it was that a private citizen could rise up and achieve what Mahomet did, and also that no physical idol, symbol or article of faith -- like a crucifix -- ever took hold amongst his followers.

Of all shifts in faith across these centuries, Gibbon was most puzzled by persecution of the Paulicians who held more closely to the Old Testament than the New and attempted to bridge between Iranian Zoroastrianism and Christianity. Roman empress Theodora in the 9th Century reacted very violently against them with military action, and Pope Innocent III of the 12th Century was even worse. After this followed the age of Charlemagne and the empire faced a new outbreak of Norman, Saracen (Arabian) and Hungarian invaders along with 200 years of Christian crusades plunging all of Europe into chaos once again. Literacy was barely preserved by the clergy and the fortunes of the Barons were so depleted that feudalism began to collapse, liberating many serfs and establishing a basis for farmer, merchant, and artisan classes.

So it must have been the Crusades that finally, well and truly brought down the Roman empire, right? Or maybe it was the coming of the second Mahomet in the 15th Century? Did you know there have been two Mahomets? It's a wonder the new Roman capital stood as long as it did, because conflicts among those Christians inhabiting and charged with defending Constantinople were deep and fierce. Two forms of Christianity contended within its walls, Latin and Eastern Orthodox, and the former favored unleavened bread for the eucharist while the latter vehemently insisted on leavened bread. In fact, one Eastern Orthodox leader said he would rather share the city with Muslims than with "azymites" or Latinate Christians and he definitely got his wish.

In terms of glorious, sweeping military engagements, the seige and eventual toppling of Constantinople really had it all, including huge cannons able to hurl projectiles of six hundred and even eleven hundred pounds. The Christian forces also had an elaborate gun that took hours to load but could fire up to one-hundred-thirty balls at once. There were astounding naval victories including one in which five Christian ships broke a blockade of over 300 Turkish vessels to resupply the city and another in which Mahomet moved his whole navy over land ten miles to claim a superior strategic position and carry the day. Finally, there's the death in battle of the eleventh Constantinian emperor. "The distress and fall of the last Constantine are more glorious than the long prosperity of the Byzantine Caesars," Gibbon says. Mahomet was far from merciful to most of the sixty thousand residents, but somehow Greek Christians who survived were allowed to practice their faith inside the city walls for another sixty years, side by side with Muslims.

What finally brought the empire low, Gibbon says, was the failure of unity within Christendom itself. Before becoming Pope Pius the Second, Aeneas Sylvius said Christianity was "a body without a head, a republic without laws or magistrates." The pope could command, but nobody could obey because each state answered to a different prince. But maybe what we refer to as the fall of Rome applies chiefly to the city. Around the time of the fall of Constantinople, a scholar named Poggius visited Rome and took stock of what remained, about seven theatres, eleven baths, twelve arches and eighteen palaces -- and the coliseum. Gibbon cites the injuries of time, attacks by barbarians, abuse of the structures, and Roman domestic quarrels as the four causes of the fall. Several serious floods of the Tyber also figure in. A huge influx of new religious institutions including forty monasteries, twenty convents and assorted colleges of priests, also transformed the city. Great buildings like the Septizonium were deconstructed to build St. Peter's. Also, vast amounts of marble infrastructure was burned to make cement. The city dwindled to just over thirty thousand inhabitants. An important family would take over a structure and build a fortified tower for its defense. Gibbon says that, for a time, over three hundred such towers dominated the skyline. Those are mostly gone, but the Coliseum continues to stand. "As long as the Coliseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Coliseum falls, Rome falls; when Rome falls, the world will fall," said the Venerable Bede in the 7th Century. In Gibbon's time, the city's population had rebounded to one hundred and seventy thousand. Today, the city contains a nation-state, the Vatican, with its own head of state, Pope Leo, the 266th to hold the office, who is, at least in name, the head of 1.4 billion Catholics, many of whom go to great trouble to obey his commands. So what's the answer? Did the Roman Empire really fall?

Thanks for following along. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 if you want a refresh.

A movie I’m recommending this time is My Dead Friend Zoe, featuring a good part for Ed Harris.

For any new readers: My novel, Tania the Revolutionary, is available on Amazon for Kindle and paperback or Barnes & Noble for eBook.

The Fall of the Roman Empire Pt 3 (aka Rome Did Fall, Right?)

Thanks for following along. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 if you want a refresh.

The Fall of the Roman Empire Pt 2