Who Really Killed the Pax Romana?

The Gates of Vienna ^ | August 13, 2012 | Baron Bodissey

[wtd]

The title of this thread "Who Really Killed the Pax Romana?" refers to a recent post at Gates of Vienna Blog written by Baron Bodissey. The Baron reviews the book Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy by Emmet Scott.

If you have an interest in the subject of the Greco-Roman legacy and Islam as they relate to the sudden decline of medieval Europe this book will expose the linkage between Islam's destructive forces at that time and have you reconsider the implications of current events related to Islam today.

Scott argues that the collapse of Latin-Greek civilization in Western Europe happened not in the 5th century during the migrations of the Goths, Vandals and other Germanic peoples, but was delayed until the 7th century.

Among other evidence of continuity after the fall of Rome, Scott writes the the barbarian kings issued coins with the face of the Eastern Roman Emperor on them until about 640AD. He also shows that learning, long distance trade, building, intensive agriculture, and other facets of Latin-Greek culture continued until about that date.

Archeologist cited in the book have found serious soil erosion only after that same 640 date. This is true not only for all of Western Europe but also for North Africa and much of the Middle East.

So, what happened in the Mediterranean world about that time? The Arab-Islamic conquests. Which effectively forced trade across the Mediterranean to be given up, the abandonment of coastal agriculture, and the building of the first castles near the sea. The pirate raids and looting carried out by the Arabs destroyed Roman civilization, not those Germans, who only wanted to benefit from the culture they took over.

The above paragraphs were quoted from Amazon's reviews which are good . . .but to really whet the appetite for this highly recommended book, treat yourself to the long awaited review by Baron Bodissey over at Gates of Vienna blog. You won't be disappointed.

[Sherman Logan]

Minor problem with this theory.

After the Ostrogoths and Byzantines had fought back and forth across the peninsula several times, Italy had been largely depopulated.

There was little or nothing to buy food from overseas with, not to mention few merchants, especially specizliaing in bulk goods such as grain, and the few remaining people in Italy could certainly be supported by local agriculture, if there was any.

But the Byzantine temporary conquest of Africa did indeed leave a power vacuum that the Arabs took advantage of. Although the ease of conquest by Belisarius was an indication that the Vandals weren’t much of a power bloc anyway.

[Pilsner]

Would love to see a link to the text of the Treaty of London.

http://books.google.com/books?id=U8nYFSTQhXcC&pg=PA131&output=html

I think the above description is rather polyannish.

[GGpaX4DumpedTea]

Constantinople...today it is known as Istanbul. I had a fellow I worked with (he was with a supplier company) who was from there...I took great liberties with him in referring to his ‘home town’ as Constantinople. He did not like it much...kept trying to tell me it was ‘Istanbul’. :)

[Billthedrill]

Oh, Rome was hurting for awhile but the rest of Italy didn't actually fare all that badly. Recall that was left of the non-Gothic western Empire had retired to Ravenna before the city's final change of hands. And note how quickly Venice arose as a maritime power beginning at that very time, partly through the dwindling connections to Ravenna, partly as a consequence of Lombard power and partly through still-maintained connections to Constantinople. That direction was northward and eastward, but as you state, and I agree, the south was dead.

There was, in support of your objection, a serious deterioration of the ability of the North African grain fields to support farming anyway. The Vandals had been terrible proprietors and the eastern Empire simply did not have the manpower to fill the vacuum. But it was undeniable that when Ostia died, Rome was crippled - Theoderic certainly thought so, and he was in a position to know. What his successors were squabbling over was a shell of what he once ruled.

The sea routes of communication had certainly changed - that was the original topic - but were undeniably still vital to trade on the Italian peninsula, and their control was contested by Muslim pirates nearly as long as Muslim armies threatened the land routes. And not just by Muslims. Constantinople would, I suspect, come to view Venice in a very different way by the time of the Fourth Crusade, a viper nurtured in its bosom whose army ended up sacking the place. After that, the Turks, and the whole thing began over again.

[muawiyah]

There are a lot of 'links' to Treaty of london (1604) but most of them do not take you to the text.

However, with a bit of searching you will run into several that give you most of the text IN ENGLISH.

One of them is on a site that has many other treaties so it has this clunky cross referencing deal ~ but that will give you explanations of why this and what is that!

I haven't looked it up in several months, but it's there ~ the FOUNDING DOCUMENT FOR what became the UNITED STATES.

[wolfman23601]

The history is actually quite clear. Constantine moved the capitol and center of Rome during his reign. The Roman empire did not fall until the fall of Constantinople, they just lost their territory in Western Europe. Western Romans moved to Gaul and eventually merged with the Franks under Charlemegne while some remained in Briton and merged with the modern day Welsh and in fact fought with them against the Saxon. The history is true in that the fall of the Western territories did bring upon the Dark Ages in Western Europe (with the exception of Charlemegne’s reign and the reign of Alfred in England), but Constantinople continued to thrive. Justinian did reconquer much of the Western territories, but then was stopped short due to plague.

[Sherman Logan]

There was, in support of your objection, a serious deterioration of the ability of the North African grain fields to support farming anyway.

Large cities without nearby agricultural resources, distant grain growing regions and long-distance bulk product merchants have an obvious symbiotic relationship.

Knock any one of the three out and the other two collapse.

Nobody was going to grow massive amounts of grain in North Africa with nobody to sell it to and no way to get it to market.

This is similar to early American grain crops on the frontier. No way to get the grain to market, so they converted it to whiskey, which was much smaller in bulk. Not a problem after development of steamboats and canals, and eventually railroads.

Of course, distillation wasn't around in Late Classical/Early Dark Ages times, so it wasn't an option for them.

[JCBreckenridge]

True but in the overall ‘Eastern Med’, it was still number 2.

Once the Muslims owned both, they controlled the entire spice road and had no other competitors. This is why they were able to increase the prices.

Once they did that, they made it economical to go the long way around to bypass the middle man so to say.

[Sherman Logan]

FWIW, the Fourth Crusade is not nearly as simple a story as it is usually portrayed. It was originally launched to reinstate the “legitimate” emperor as against a “usurper.” The Crusaders undertook this mercenary job due to extreme financial distress.

Things deteriorated and the allies fell out and the conquest took place, but I think there is little actual evidence that the Pope or Venice or the Crusaders set out initially to conquer the Eastern Empire. They wanted to fight the Muslims and got sidetracked.

[TXnMA]

"Indeed, to this day, there exists a large body of opinion, throughout the Western World, which sees Islam as in every way superior to, and more enlightened than, Christianity."

Indeed...

[Billthedrill]

Yes indeed - the Fourth Crusade was, in military terms, an early example of a cluster...well, you know. But it wasn't obvious when it started just why it would be so destabilizing. The Pope wanted doctrinal concessions from the Orthodox church, the Venetians wanted to get paid because they owed their mercenaries, and there were Muslim mercenaries working for both sides. The Seljuk Turks had taken over from the Arabs, were fighting to regain the Holy Land from the Latin States, and were about to get popped by Genghis Khan from the east, which would send them a tribe that would be known as the Ottoman Turks when all that blew over. This was a tiny twenty-five-year slice of history. And into that powder keg the Venetians sent their galleys.

Yeah, I guess it might be a little tough to get much farming done right around then...

[Sherman Logan]

Actually, at the time of the Fourth the Seljuqs were out of the picture in the Levant, or on their way out. They had been replaced in Syria and Egypt by the Ayyubids, founded by the famous Saladin, who was a Kurd, 20 or 30 years before.

Also, the Mongols didn’t show up in the area for something like 40 years.

Something I have always found fascinating is the foreshortening effect of history. The farther in the past something is, the closer together the events appear to us in time, making events spread out over 50 or 75 years appear to be almost contemporaneous. Even though we don’t think of the Vietnam War or Great Depression as being last week, we do tend to think of ancient events happening over a similar timespan as close together.

[Billthedrill]

Sure, but the Mongols actually started their campaigns almost contemporaneously (1206?). The push when that happens is what brought a lot of people into the area long before the originators ever made it. It happened with the Huns, too, 800 years before. I can't remember the historian who first suggested it, but to a great degree the fall of the western Empire was started by events in Central Asia and the migratory patterns they created.

I agree with the time compression illusion, although in fact we depend on point events - battles, etc - to place a temporal framework on this sort of thing that has its own illusion of granularity that isn't really justified by the quality of record-keeping at the time. These days we're better at that, but we still have the challenge of communicating that information forward unmarred by historical revisionism. And there's an awful lot of that about.

[wideminded]

The Pax Romana ended in the second century, so clearly it was not ended by Muslims.

[Sherman Logan]

You are quite correct in most of what you say.

However, I would contend that the Mongols were very different from the Huns, Scythians and other previous steppe nomad conquerors. Most of them were nomadic tribes that moved more as peoples than as armies or as state actors with a strategic plan of conquest.

The Mongols, OTOH, were brilliant at military and political strategy and had a definite plan for conquering the rest of the world. They moved like lightning across the steppe and most other tribes could not get away in time, leaving them the options of annihilation or submission and joining the Mongol armies.

While there were of course various refugee groups fleeing the Mongols, I don’t think there was anything like the westward billiard ball effect lasting a century or more that was created by the Han defeat of the Hsiung-nu (sp?).

[Sherman Logan]

Looked up the date. The Mongol invasion of Khwarezm started in 1220. That is the reasonable date for Mongol activities in central and western Asia, as previously they had been limited to the other side of the Pamirs.

Interestingly, Jerusalem was sacked by a refugee Khwarezmian army in 1244, with the Christians massacred and the Jews driven out.

[Billthedrill]

Good stuff. I’m sort of glad I wasn’t around in the 13th century. Everytime you hear someone bleat “just imagine a world without guns” I do...and shudder...

[P.O.E.]

Thanks for this thread and for all the knowledgeable comments. Fascinating stuff and grist for future research.

[Sherman Logan]

Damn good point. Lots of morons imagine a world without guns would be a world without violence.

You might be interested in an SF series called Dies the Fire by SM Stirling.

Suddenly one day all high-energy processes: nuclear, high-energy chemical reactions like gunpowder, internal combustion engines, even high pressure steam engines just stop working. So functioning technology is back to about the 13th century. People still know how to do advanced stuff, it just doesn’t work.

Utopia does not result. Quite the reverse. Very well worked out,IMO.