David Frum notes that over the past three years, three excellent books have been published on the end of the Roman Empire — and by coincidence they came out in the order in which they should be read.
The first, The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization, by Bryan Ward-Perkins, emphasizes that Rome did in fact fall:
Fossils of cattle bones show that livestock withered in size between the peak of the Roman empire in 200 CE and the early medieval period. Not until the 1300s would cattle recover their Roman heft.The ice of the Greenland glaciers preserves frozen air from different historical periods. Air from the first and second centuries of the Common Era contains byproducts of smelting and other industrial activity. Such activity then disappears from the air for 17 centuries, not to reappear until the Industrial Revolution.
Even very ordinary Roman houses and buildings were roofed with tile. With the fall of Rome, tile manufacture ceases – and for the next thousand years, rulers and prelates were roofed by timber, everybody else by insect-infested thatch. The Romans made pottery by the tens of millions of units; to this day, one of Rome’s hills is a garbage dump filled with the broken shards of an estimated 50 million pots. Trade and manufacturing slows after 200, vanishes after 400. The dwindled population of Europe has to make do with crude, misshapen local handiwork. Coins and ironwork vanish. Not until the Victorian era did Europe recover Roman plumbing and road-building skills. Not until the 20th century did human beings improve on Roman concrete.
From the point of view of every aspect of material culture that can be measured and recorded, the overthrow of the Roman empire was a catastrophe that annihilated a millennium of material progress. North of the Alps especially, Europe in CE 700 looked much more like the Europe of 1500 years before than like the Europe of 500 years before.
The second book, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, by Peter Heather, emphasizes barbarian invasion:
Rome’s ferocious aggressiveness and radical untrustworthiness forced its barbarian neighbors to organize in self-defense. The non-urban and fragmented culture of 3rd century Germany evolves into larger-unit societies. Villages grew into towns, clans into tribes, tribes into something close to nations. The barbarians gained military effectiveness and hurled themselves upon the aggressor and enslaver. The balance abruptly tilted against Rome — very abruptly.Heather strongly argues against the idea of a “decline” of the Roman empire. After the civil wars and upheavals of the period 235-280, the empire had re-established itself more grimly powerful and centralized than ever. The army and bureaucracy grew, taxation became heavier, agriculturalists were enserfed, but Roman authority continued supreme. It might have continued supreme for much longer still, but for the accident of contingent events. The newly organized barbarian confederacies attacked with unprecedented ferocity in the years after 405 and gained a series of grand victories. Then came catastrophe for Rome: one of the barbarian confederacies, the Vandals, penetrated the previously untouched province of Spain, improvised a navy and invaded North Africa.
Since its seizure by Rome 550 years before, North Africa had been one of the most secure and prosperous of all the imperial domains. Its grandest estates were owned outright by the emperor and its huge agricultural surplus supported the cost of the imperial armies — armies that a low-productivity pre-modern society could only sustain through the ruthless exploitation of slave labor. The loss of North Africa in the 430s wrecked the finances of the western Roman empire, extinguishing the empire’s power to sustain its military forces. Desperate attempts to regain the province were easily repulsed — and the western Roman state collapsed, victim of a shattering military defeat.
The latest book, How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy, emphasizes the how:
It was not the barbarians who brought down Rome, argues Goldsworthy. It was the Romans themselves — the instability of their state and its tendency to erupt into civil wars. It was civil war that had felled the old Roman republic — destroying its institutions in an accelerating cycle of internecine violence from the 80s BCE onward and enhancing the appeal of one-man rule. The same internecine violence erupted as one-man rule faltered after 235. The Roman armies destroyed each other in the struggle for power, exposing the Roman state as a tempting victim to the enemies against whom the armies were supposed to defend.