Rome: Imperial Instability

Perhaps one mystery about the Roman Empire is not why it fell, but why it ever stood in the first place. In contrast to the Roman Republic, the empire contained within its very structure, or lack thereof, the seeds of its own destruction.

This inherent instability was crystallized in the question of succession. Because the empire was structured around the empty pretense of continuing the republican form and procedure, no clear procedure for, or line of, succession was codified.

The result was a built-in motive for assassinations, and an increased likelihood of power struggles, if not civil wars, between competing pretenders to the throne.

That there was never a smooth transition of power, and that an emperor ever died a natural death, is something of a marvel in these circumstances.

The system did apparently work to a limited extent for the first five emperors, whom historians treat together as the Julio-Claudian Dynasty. Of these first five, one was indisputably assassinated: Caligula. Nero committed suicide in order to avoid assassination. Of the remaining three - Octavian, Tiberius, and Claudius - the evidence is ambiguous as to whether their deaths were natural or contrived.

Despite the dubious causes of death, the mechanisms, if improvised, for the transitions of power functioned relatively smoothly, up until the death of Nero in 68 A.D.

After Nero’s death, Rome lived through “the year of four emperors,” as it is routinely called, and problem of succession emerged as one of the clear weaknesses of the imperial government.

This tumultuous pattern of succession would continue for many years, interrupted occasionally by bits of stability. Historian Ernest Gottleib Sihler describes the situation among the emperors of the early third century:

Caracalla, the cruel elder son of Septimius Severus, perished through Macrinus, commander of the Imperial Guard, in 217 A.D. In the very next year this short-lived Emperor was in turn slain while fleeing from the unspeakable Elagabalus, priest of the Sun and incarnation of every possible form of sexual depravity. This monster in turn was killed by his own praetorians after the world had endured him for four years, in 222 A.D. A nobler youth succeeded, known in history as Alexander Severus, but he, too, was done to death by his own troops, on the Rhine, in 235 A.D.

That the empire functioned for nearly five centuries is perhaps due to the efficiency of the civil service. The bureaucrats at the middle and lower levels kept the system running.

The instability in the succession process was matched by instability caused by powerful tribes who threatened the borders of the empire. The whole of these two problems was more their sum.

The attacking tribes created a need for a loyal and devoted military to defend the empire. But given the ambiguity about the emperor’s claim to sovereignty, such dedication was more difficult to find, instill, or call forth.

Ultimately, the emperors could rely only on the raw assertion of power to back up their claims to sovereignty. As long as they maintained the appearance of republican government - the senate met regularly throughout the centuries of the empire, even though its true power was microscopic - there could be no talk of dynastic succession or divine right. The emperors would also not tolerate the thought of being in any way confirmed or elected by the senate.

While the senate did formally declare some of the emperors to be emperor, this was again merely a formality for the sake of appearance.

Over the centuries of the empire, as Christianity went from being a ruthlessly persecuted underground movement to a legally accepted and acknowledged part of Roman society, the cultural impact of belief also impacted the power structure.

Historians diverge on the question of how the new faith affected Roman civilization: did it strengthen it or weaken it? Professor Sihler writes:

After this the emperors, one and all, were simply military pretenders, creatures of their own legions. None of them succeeded in establishing a dynasty. Persians, Goths, Sarmatians, Franks, Alemanni, began to overrun the frontier provinces of the Empire, the integrity of which was more and more threatened by its vastness. At the same time the inner unity and loyalty of the subjects were felt by the Roman officials to be gravely impaired by the aloofness of the religious sect ever growing at the cost of the idolatrous nations - felt perhaps by some statesmen of Rome to be a state within the state - the Christian church, an element of disintegration.

On the one hand, as Sihler notes, the followers of Jesus were perhaps at times less inclined to invest themselves fully in imperial power struggles and political machinations. On the other hand, the early Christians were less likely to seek power and initiate self-aggrandizement campaigns.

Finally, after the reign of Constantine, Christianity was given a recognized and legal status, and under the subsequent Christian emperors, Rome’s older polytheistic paganism was tolerated alongside Christianity. By ushering in an era of religious toleration, Roman unity may have been threatened by religious diversity, but energy and resources were not wasted in efforts to suppress or exterminate any one faith.

The net impact of Christianity on Rome, then, is ambiguous, or at least disputable. In any case, it was overshadowed by succession problems and by threats from external nations, among other challenges faced by the empire.

Manzikert in Context

To understand why the Battle of Manzikert is a turning-point, one must see first what caused it, and second what it caused.

The Seljuq Turks were a migrating ethnic group from central Asia. Turks had lived in central Asia for centuries. After most of them embraced Islam, they set out for lands to conquer. The Seljuqs - also spelled ‘Seljuks’ - were but one migrating group of Turks. The Mongols were another. The Seljuqs and the Mongols were cousins.

As the Seljuq Muslims moved southwest from their Asian homeland, they eventually encountered the territory of the Byzantine Empire. It is helpful to remember that ‘Asia Minor’ and ‘Anatolia’ and ‘Turkey’ all refer to the same piece of land.

Over a period of years, the Islamic Seljuqs attacked the Byzantine Empire in a number of battles. They also attacked other sovereign territories as they made their way across large portions of southeast Asia.

The Seljuk leader, Alp-Arslan, led his Muslim soldiers not only against the Byzantine Empire, but also against Egypt, Armenia, and Georgia. Emperor Romanos Diogenes led the Byzantines in their attempt to defend themselves. Historian Avner Falk writes:

In 1071, the Seljuk Turks, led by Arp-Arslan (1029-1072), had fought a battle with the Byzantines at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia (now Malazgirt in eastern Turkey), defeating the “Eastern Roman Emperor” Romanos Diogenes, whom they captured, blinded, and exiled to an island in the Sea of Marmara, where he soon died. This battle was an important milestone in the Turkish settlement of Asia Minor. The warlike Seljuks went on to capture Egypt and Syria, including Palestine.

A more detailed telling of the events informs us that Alp-Arslan, whom Falk’s text perhaps misspells, captured the Emperor Romanos Diogenes, held him captive until massive sums were paid for his release, and then returned him to the Byzantines. During his brief stay in captivity, a coup in the palace meant that when Romanos Diogenes returned home, he was no longer emperor. Those who had taken power in his absence had him cruelly blinded.

While the Battle of Manzikert was significant, it was far from the only significant attack mounted by the Muslims. In a large context, the invasion of Anatolia by the Islamic Seljuqs was a continuation of the pattern begun by Islam’s invasion of Spain in 711 AD, and continued by Islamic invasions of France, Italy, and Mediterranean Islands like Malta, Sicily, Cyprus, Sardinia, and Corsica.

Manzikert was, therefore, not the beginning, but rather the continuation, of a long string of Muslim attacks.

Manzikert was also not the end of, but rather one in a series, of subsequent instance of Islamic aggression.

The Seljuqs continued to assault Byzantine territories in Asia Minor for decades and centuries, chipping away at Byzantine civilization, until the capital city Constantinople was savaged by Muslim invaders who largely destroyed the city in 1453 and thereby ended the Byzantine Empire.

At the same time, other Islamic forces continued their attacks on Italy and various portions of Europe. Avner Falk continues the narrative:

Some historians consider the Battle of Manzikert a major cause or origin of the Crusades. A few years later, the Seljuks created their “Sultanate of Rum”, the sultanate that ruled Anatolia in direct lineage from 1077 to 1307, with capitals at Iznik and Konya, and, at times, at Kayseri and Sivas. At its height, the sultanate of Rum stretched across central Turkey from the Mediterranean coast to the Black Sea. In the east, the sultanate absorbed other Turkish states and reached to Lake Van. Its westernmost limit was near Denizli and the gates of the Aegean basin.

After decades of enduring Islamic savagery, Europe had been attacked on many fronts: Spain, France, and Italy. It was clear that an invasion through Greece and the Balkans would be next. If the Seljuq Muslims consolidated their hold on all or most of Asia Minor, then that territory would become their launching pad for Islamic invasions deep into the heart of Europe.

Manzikert was one of many causes of the Crusades; it was not the only cause of the Crusades. The Crusades were a response to long pattern of unprovoked attacks.

Finally, to borrow an athletic metaphor, Europe decided that the best defense would be a good offense. Rather than brace for more attacks, it would be best to go to the source of the attacks, to stop the invaders before they reached Europe. The so-called ‘Crusades’ (they were not given that name until centuries after they ended) were an attempt to go into the Islamic world and there stop the armies of Muslim conquest headed for Europe.

Guilt vs. Shame - What Motivates Literary Characters?

Examining various societies, and the literature they produce, scholars have noted a difference between ‘outer-directed’ and ‘inner-directed’ civilizations.

Authors like Homer and Virgil reflect an ‘outer-directed’ (or ‘other-directed’) worldview, and their characters are motivated by shame, or by a desire to avoid shame.

Writers like Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Kafka express an ‘inner-directed’ (or ‘self-directed’) society, and their characters are deeply affected by guilt, or by the effort to avoid guilt.

The inner-directed character seeks justice and forgiveness as the remedy for his guilt. The outer-directed individual seeks to restore honor and fulfill expectations which society places upon him. Jayson Georges writes that scholars

identify three responses to sin in human cultures: guilt, shame, and fear. These three moral emotions have become the foundation for three types of culture: (1) guilt-innocence cultures are individualistic societies (mostly Western), where people who break the laws are guilty and seek justice or forgiveness to rectify a wrong, (2) shame-honor cultures describes collectivistic cultures (common in the East), where people shamed for fulfilling group expectations seek to restore their honor before the community, and (3) fear-power cultures refers to animistic contexts (typically tribal or African), where people afraid of evil and harm pursue power over the spirit world through magical rituals.

The third category, the ‘fear-power’ culture, is less relevant to literary contexts, because these societies leave little belletristic text. They are examples of a pre-religious phase, centered on myth as explanation and magic as an attempt to manipulate nature.

The ‘guilt-innocence’ culture and the ‘shame-honor’ culture do not attempt to control nature or to concoct explanatory fables.

Instead, the guilt culture seeks confession, forgiveness, restitution if possible, and reconciliation. The shame culture seeks a renewed recognition in the wake of a moral failure.

In this way, readers can understand the motives and actions of characters liked Raskolnikov, Gregor Samsa, Aeneas, Odysseus, and Achilles.

A Glimpse into Hammurabi’s World

The code of Hammurabi - also sometimes transliterated into our alphabet as Hammurapi - is a staple for history classes. It stands as an early marker for the concept of the rule of law.

Beyond its legal ramifications, however, it can tell us about Babylonian society at the time. A law code reveals the values and the problems of a society: nobody bothers to make a law against something unless someone’s been doing it.

Hammurabi’s society has quite of bit of magic and superstition: talk of casting “spells” and of “sorcery” inhabits the code, and such things are dealt with through trial by ordeal, which implies either that the river has supernatural powers, or is being manipulated by some supernatural spirit.

The class structure of Babylon is quite rigid, and the laws can confidently mete out punishments based on whether a crime was committed against an aristocrat or against a commoner. In any case, human life is quite cheap, and is readily extinguished for mere crimes against property.

The coarse equation of human life with money is evidenced in cases concerning the death of a slave or of a pre-born child.

Despite its underdeveloped pre-religious spiritual outlook, the economics and mathematics of Hammurabi’s code are relatively sophisticated. There is talk of altering interest payments during years in which the weather reduced the harvests.

Likewise, the legal documentation is not simple-minded, as is independently confirmed by other cuneiform texts from the same era.

Gender inequality is starkly presented in cases of adultery. A woman convicted, or in some cases even merely accused, receives capital punishment. It is implied that a man in the same circumstances receives a lesser punishment, if any.

Hammurabi’s code, probably written sometime prior to 1750 B.C., reflects a modern sensibility against incest; a man who sleeps with his daughter is exiled.

The lex talionis is quite literal between equals, but a freeman who harms a slave can simply offer money as restitution.

A certain liability is born by someone who knew that his ox was in the habit of goring. The frequency of agricultural specifics reveals the extent, and the type, of farming which supported the society.

Hammurabi’s code is a rather neutral legal document, as opposed to a moral statement. Certain actions entail specific consequences, but are not condemned as immoral, and no imperative against them is given. One might simply understand the fine of silver coins as the price to be paid if one wishes to injure a neighbor’s slave.

The code is designed to support, reinforce, and maintain the status quo in Babylon. It reflects a static society, not a revolution in social forms. This fits a circular sense of time, rather than a linear conception of time which allows for progress.

Hammurabi’s people were outer-directed, motivated by shame or the avoidance of it. Motive does not play a large role in legal consideration.

Moses will form, in many ways, a counterpoint to Hammurabi, in a Hebrew society which, only a few decades after Hammurabi, will be quite different on some of these points.

The Wrong Way to Teach History: The Migration Era as an Example

Many history books and history courses are organized around a framework of eras: the Age of Exploration, the Age of Ideas, the Age of Revolution, the Age of Reason, the Age of Darkness, the Age of Industry, the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Absolutism, the Age of Progress, the Age of Methodism, etc.

This approach, however, is misleading. The world does not move from one “age” to another. At midnight, Monday becomes Tuesday, or Wednesday becomes Thursday. But there was no defining stroke of midnight which changed “the age of ideas” into “the age of reason.”

Such ages are called ‘constructs’ and are the products of (over) generalization. Rather than beginning with such generalizations, history should begin with the study of specifics, of the data points which are given: people, places, and events.

When beginning with concrete evidence, we can give clear answers. If studying about Voltaire, we can learn the year of birth, the year of his death, and the towns in which both occurred. If we study the city of Leipzig, we can learn the geographical data about the distance between it and other cities, and learn which individuals were, or were not, in it at some point in time.

By contrast, if we attempt to study the Gilded Age, the Space Age, the Modern Age, the Hellenic Age, the Hellenistic Age, or the Global Age, we cannot give specific answers to questions about when this age began or ended, or about the geographic extent of its physical presence. We cannot definitively decide who was, or was not, a part of this age.

We see, then, that doing history as a series of “ages” fails to reflect the fullness of evidence given in the data. Such constructs are unnecessarily ambiguous and are generalizations which can ultimately mislead students.

Diligent historians have long realized the deficiencies to this approach. Avner Falk writes:

Most historians like to divide history neatly into periods, such as Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Modern times. In reality, historical developments are much more complicated. The “Migration Period”, or the “Barbarian Invasions”, is a name given given by historians to the great wave of human migration which lasted about four centuries, from about 300 CE to 700 CE, and even later, to 1000 CE, in Europe, marking the transition from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages.

Using the era of the Völkerwanderungen as an example, Falk already notes the ambiguity in the endpoint of the alleged “age.”

Mass migrations are documented throughout recorded history, going back at least to 1400 BC, with the “Sea Peoples” recorded in Egyptians texts and the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt.

Such mass migrations continue up to the present time, e.g., as refugees flee war-torn regions in the Middle East and Africa.

It seems at best artificial, and at worst simply wrong, to demarcate a segment of time and label it the "Age of Migrations," given the presence of migration across all history. Abandoning generalizations and listing specifics, Avner Falk continues to describe the Völkerwanderung era:

During that time, especially in the fifth century, after being divided into a Western and Eastern part, the Western Roman Empire was destroyed by marauding tribes. The migration included the Huns, Goths, Vandals, Swabians, Franks, and other Turkic, Germanic, and Slavic tribes. The Huns were confederation of Central Asian equestrian nomads or semi-nomads (like the Mongols), with a Turkic aristocratic core. The migration of the Germanic tribes may have been triggered by the incursions of the Huns, which were connected to the Turkic migrations in Central Asia. Eight centuries later, in the thirteenth century, the Mongols made the vast “migration” which led them to conquer most of Asia and large parts of eastern Europe.

By noting that the Mongol events also constituted a “migration,” Falk further undermines the notion of a finite “Age of Migration,” because it has now been extended to the thirteenth century.

Overgeneralized notions of a migration era fail to register the divergent natures of the groups (e.g., Germanic or Turkic), of their motives (aggression or seeking food), of their varying levels of social and economic development, of their routes, of their points of origin, or of their final stopping points.

To structure of history of those centuries around the narrative of each group, rather than around a construct of an era in which groups migrated, gives the student more data, and a more usable conceptual framework into which to lodge that data.

Romans, Germans, and Foreign Trade Policy

The amazing civil engineering projects which the Romans completed in central Europe together form the Limes, a series of border fortifications, garrisons, walls, and barracks. Between the Rhine and Danube rivers, a sophisticated border structure was built.

But the purpose of these military constructions was, perhaps, not directly military. Instead of preparing for massive confrontations and battles, the goals of these efforts may have been economic and diplomatic. Historian Andrew Curry writes:

For centuries emperors used a mix of threats, deterrence, and outright bribery to secure peace. Rome negotiated constantly with tribes and kingdoms outside its frontier. Diplomacy created a buffer zone of client kings and loyal chieftains to insulate the border from hostile tribes farther afield. Favored tribes earned the right to cross the frontier at will; others could bring their goods to Roman markets only under armed guard.

A manned border would enable Roman officials to enforce the distinctions they had negotiated between various Germanic tribes. Vindolanda was a military installation just south of Hadrian’s Wall in England. Some of the men who staffed this location were from Germanic regions, or from other areas outside the empire.

Trade with northern Scotland or the northeastern Germanic tribes flourished at times during the Roman Empire, which last from 27 B.C. to 476 A.D.

Loyal allies were also rewarded with gifts, weapons, and military assistance and training. Friendly barbarians sometimes served in the Roman army; after 25 years, they retired as Roman citizens, free to settle anywhere in the empire. Vindolanda alone was home to units recruited from what are now northern Spain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Iraqi bargemen once sailed England’s rivers under the banner of Rome, and Syrian archers watched over the bleak countryside.

Roman coins have been found in locations as diverse as Denmark, Sweden, or the northern Scottish island of North Uist. Germanic exports, like amber from the Baltic, were traded deep inside Roman imperial borders.

Individual Romans may have settled northeast of the Limes, outside the empire, and created agricultural estates for themselves. A settlement located in Hechingen-Stein, for example, is near the Limes. Whether it was inside or outside the empire might have varied: the exact borders changed over the decades, as aggressive or cautious policies correspondingly expanded or contracted the empire by a few miles.

Trade was also a foreign policy tool: The Roman-Germanic Commission in Frankfurt, part of the German Archaeological Institute, has a database of more than 10,000 Roman artifacts found beyond the limes. Weapons, coins, and goods like glass and pottery show up as far away as Norway and modern-day Russia.

It seems, then, that the borderlines of the empire were at least porous, and possible designed to not only allow trade, but to encourage it.

The Roman Empire, like the Roman Republic before it, had large amounts of foreign trade as an essential component of its economy. It cannot have escaped Roman bureaucrats that the borders should be managed in a way to encourage, regulate, and monitor imports and exports, and to collect tariffs and other taxes in the process.

Hadrian Had More Than One Wall

During the reign of the emperor Hadrian, the Roman Empire, which had arisen around 27 B.C. from the political rubble of the Roman Republic, changed its military and imperial strategy from expansion to defense. Having rapidly grown to an enormous area, the empire realized that it would have difficulties retaining its already-annexed territories, and that further expansion would bring the empire to an untenable and unsustainable size.

Hadrian was born in 76 A.D., became emperor in 117, and died in 138. He and his successors reconfigured to the Roman military hold the external borders of the empire against threats like the Germanic tribes, the Scots, and the Irish.

The Romans had expanded northeast into Germanic territory. The seemingly natural boundary between the Romans and the Germanic tribes was the line connecting the Rhine and Danube rivers. When the Roman placed settlements northeast of this line, they soon realized that they had overextended themselves, and needed to pull back. Hadrian ordered a sort of strategic retreat, surrendering the territory to the Germanic tribes. Historian Andrew Curry writes:

Hadrian may simply have recognized that Rome’s insatiable appetite was yielding diminishing returns. The most valuable provinces, like Gaul or Hadrian’s native Spain, were full of cities and farms. But some fights just weren’t worth it. “Possessing the best part of the earth and sea,” the Greek author Appian observed, the Romans have “aimed to preserve their empire by the exercise of prudence, rather than to extend their sway indefinitely over poverty-stricken and profitless tribes of barbarians.”

The Rhine was difficult to cross, and formed an obvious natural boundary. While there was some valuable farmland on the far side of it, the Roman drive to expand, in this case, was based more on pride than on the value of this particular piece of land to the empire.

Although wise, Hadrian’s policy was not an easy sell to the expansionist Roman collective ego. The glory of Rome had been its ability to continuously expand, and to do so quickly and easily. Hadrian had to convince the Romans, and especially the Roman military, that they should stop overreaching. Quote fellow historian Anthony Birley, Andrew Curry writes:

The army’s respect for Hadrian helped. The former soldier adopted a military-style beard, even in official portraits, a first for a Roman emperor. He spent more than half of his 21-year reign in the provinces and visiting troops on three continents. Huge stretches of territory were evacuated, and the army dug in along new, reduced frontiers. Wherever Hadrian went, walls sprang up. “He was giving a message to expansion-minded members of the empire that there were going to be no more wars of conquest,” Birley says.

Hadrian transformed the Roman army in significant ways. Instead of a mobile force for attacking and invading, it became a stationary defensive force.

The Roman army began to build substantial structures of wood and stone. It was attempting to established a clear, permanent, and defendable border.

By the time the restless emperor died in 138, a network of forts and roads originally intended to supply legions on the march had become a frontier stretching thousands of miles. “An encamped army, like a rampart, encloses the civilized world in a ring, from the settled areas of Aethiopia to the Phasis, and from the Euphrates in the interior to the great outermost island toward the west,” Greek orator Aelius Aristides noted proudly, not long after Hadrian’s death.

Probably the most famous of these border structures is Hadrian’s Wall, separating England from Scotland. On the island of Great Britain, the Romans had successfully occupied the southern half, but the Scots proved unconquerable.

The wall cut the island in half, from coast to coast: a spectacular engineering and construction feat.

That “outermost island” was where Hadrian built the monument that bears his name, a rampart of stone and turf that cut Britain in half. Today Hadrian’s Wall is one of the best preserved, well-documented sections of Rome’s frontier. Remnants of the 73-mile barrier run through salt marshes, across green sheep pastures, and for one bleak stretch not far from downtown Newcastle, alongside a four-lane highway. Miles of it are preserved aboveground, lining crags that rise high above the rain-swept countryside.

While spectacular, Hadrian’s Wall is not the only, and not the greatest, civil engineering accomplishment of the Roman army. In central Europe, a 31-mile section of the wall there is so close to perfectly straight that it deviates only 36 inches over its course.

The total mileage of the Limes wall between the Rhine and the Danube exceeds that of Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, and the physical structure of the wall and its accompanying watchtowers, barracks, and garrisons is more complex.

More than a century of study has given archaeologists an unparalleled understanding of Hadrian’s Wall. The wall, perhaps designed by Hadrian himself on a visit to Britain in 122, was the ultimate expression of his attempt to define the empire’s limits.

Although the wall on the northern border of England is called “Hadrian’s Wall,” the walls in central Europe and other remote parts of the empire are equally his.