The causes of the collapse of a civilization or society in history provides clues and warning signs for our own civilization. Large societies are more worthy of our study than smaller societies because we live in a large society. Regional disasters that could doom a small, localized culture, are incapable, by themselves, of causing a larger society to collapse.
Obviously, the Roman Empire provides one of the most provocative examples of the collapse of a wealthy, powerful nation, well distributed across a large geographic area, economically diverse, and with a powerful military. Yet, the Empire was forced to split into two political entities. The Western Empire "fell" in the 5th Century A.D., while the Eastern (or Byzantine) Empire was not fully destroyed for another thousand years.
The traditional view of the collapse of Rome (such as found in Edward Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) generally has focused on (i) moral decay and (ii) foreign invasion. The basic theory is that as the Empire became morally bankrupt, the quality of its leadership and military declined. The leadership became obsessed with power, dragging the Empire through various political crises and civil war. The quality of military recruits fell, and the Empire was forced to rely on foreign troops and mercenaries. Ultimately, because of the lack of effective leadership and quality native troops, the Empire was unable to resist the migration and military incursion of various tribes of barbarians. Obviously, even this is a very basic and simplified version of the theory adopted in most history books.
However, it is not the whole story. Recent theories and findings are shedding light on many interrelated factors and "black swan" events that combined to critically weaken the Empire (and, in particular, the Western Empire). Here are some other factors that played a role.
Inflation and Taxation
Even though the Empire ostensibly used a monetary system based on precious metals (gold and silver), the reality is that constant debasing of the coinage resulted in ruinous inflation. Professor Joseph Peden's lecture "Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire" provides a brief overview of the role of inflation, taxation, and loss of economic freedom that contributed to the fall of the Empire.
The circular trap that the Empire fell into should be familiar to anyone that has studied U.S. history. The basic issue was that the size of government, and therefore, government expenditures, increased.
The army itself had grown from the time of Augustus, when they had about a 250,000 troops, to the time of Diocletian, when they had somewhat over 600,000. So the army itself had doubled in size in the course of this inflationary spiral, and obviously that contributed greatly to the inflation.Dr. Peden also notes:
In addition, the administration of the state had grown enormously. Under Augustus, essentially, you had the imperial administration at Rome, the secondary level of administration in the governors of different provinces, and then the primary governmental units in the Roman Empire in this time were the cities.
By the time of Diocletian this pattern had broken apart. You had not one emperor, but four emperors, which meant four imperial courts, four Praetorian Guards, four palaces, four staffs, etc.
Under them were four Praetorian prefectures, regional administrative units with their staffs and their budgets. Under these four prefectures, there were then 12 dioceses, each diocese having its administrative staff and so on.
Under the diocesan rulers, the vicars of the dioceses, we have the provinces. In Augustus's time there were approximately 20 provinces. Three hundred years later, with no substantial increase in territory, there were over a hundred provinces. The Romans had simply divided and subdivided provinces for the purposes of maintaining internal military control of the regions. In other words, the cost of policing and administrating the Roman state became increasingly enormous.
The soldiers' pay rose from 225 denarii during the time of Augustus to 300 denarii in the time of Domitian, about a hundred years later. A century after Domitian, in the time of Septimius, it had gone from 300 to 500 denarii; and in the time of Caracalla, about 10 years later, it had gone to 750 denarii. In other words, the cost of the army was also rising in terms of the coinage; so, as the coinage became more worthless, the cost of the army had to be increased.The Roman government followed two traditional methods for dealing with these increased costs. First, it debased the currency, which led to inflation.
The advance in the soldiers' pay in the rest of the 3rd century and into the 4th century is not known; we don't have figures. One reason is that the soldiers were increasingly paid in terms of requisitions of supplies and goods in kind. They were literally given food, clothing, shelter, and other commodities in lieu of pay. This applied also to the civil service.
When one Roman emperor refused to pay a donative on his accession — this was a bonus given to the soldiers on the accession of the emperor — he was simply murdered by his troops. The Romans had had this kind of problem even in the days of the Republic: if the soldiers don't get paid they rather resent it.
What we find is that the donatives had been given on the accession of a new emperor from the time of Augustus on. In the 3rd century, they began to be given every five years. By the time of Diocletian, donatives were given every year, so that the soldiers' donatives had in fact become part of their basic salary.
The size of the army, I indicated already, had also increased. It had doubled from the time of Augustus to that of Diocletian. And the size of the civil service also increased. Now, all these events strained the fiscal resources of the state beyond its ability to sustain itself; and the ship of state was kept going, frequently by debasing, then by taxing, and then often simply by accusing people of treason and confiscating their estates.
The basic coinage of the Roman Empire to this time — we're speaking now about 211 AD — was the silver denarius introduced by Augustus at about 95 percent silver at the end of the 1st century BC. The denarius continued for the better part of two centuries as the basic medium of exchange in the empire.Dr. Peden described various efforts to introduce new coinage and currency, which was rapidly debased, and the issuance of fiat money by some cities to pay debts. Interestingly, however, during the entire Roman period, the purchasing power of gold (in its non-debased form) stayed constant.
By the time of Trajan in 117 AD, the denarius was only about 85 percent silver, down from Augustus's 95 percent. By the age of Marcus Aurelius, in 180, it was down to about 75 percent silver. In Septimius's time it had dropped to 60 percent, and Caracalla evened it off at 50/50.
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But the real crisis came after Caracalla, between 258 and 275, in a period of intense civil war and foreign invasions. The emperors simply abandoned, for all practical purposes, a silver coinage. By 268 there was only 0.5 percent silver in the denarius.
Prices in this period rose in most parts of the empire by nearly 1,000 percent. The only people who were getting paid in gold were the barbarian troops hired by the emperors.
* * *... [Diocletian] finally abandoned the silvered coinage, which by this time was simply a bronze coin dipped in silver rather quickly.
Second, the Roman government increased its tax revenues.
Constantine issued two new taxes. One was on the estates of the senators. This was rather new because senators were usually free of most taxes on their land. He also issued a tax on the capital of merchants; not their earnings, but their capital. This was to be levied every five years and it was to be paid in gold. He also required that the rents from the imperial estates, which were rented out to tenants, were to be paid only in gold.
* * *The increased taxation and laws on taxes eroded personal economic freedom.
The taxpayers had to buy these gold coins in order to pay their taxes. If they were wealthy enough, they could afford to buy these gold coins, which were increasingly expensive in terms of token money. If they were poorer they simply couldn't pay the taxes; they lost their lands in one form or another or became delinquents. We hear constant references to people abandoning their land, disappearing.
One of the odd things about inflation is, in the Roman Empire, that while the state survived — the Roman state was not destroyed by inflation — what was destroyed by inflation was the freedom of the Roman people. Particularly, the first victim was their economic freedom.
Rome had basically a laissez-faire concept of state/economy relations. Except in emergencies, which were usually related to war, the Roman government generally followed a policy of free trade and minimal restriction on the economic activities of its population. But now under the pressure of this need to pay the troops and under the pressure of inflation, the liberty of the people began to be seriously eroded — and very rapidly.
We could start with the class known as the decurions. This was your prosperous, small- and middle-landowning class who were the dominant elements of the cities of the Roman Empire. They were the class from whom the municipal counsels, magistrates, and officials were chosen.
Traditionally, they had viewed service in the governments of their towns as an honor and they had donated, not merely their time, but also their wealth to the betterment of the urban environment. Building stadiums and bathhouses, and repairing the streets and providing for pure water were considered benefactions. It was a kind of philanthropic act and their reward was, of course, public recognition and esteem.
This class, in the mid-3rd century, was assigned the task of collecting the taxes in the municipality. The central government could no longer collect its taxes effectively, so they made the decurion class collectively responsible for getting revenues and passing them on to the imperial government.
The decurions, of course, had as much difficulty as anyone else in doing this, and the returns were, again, frequently inadequate. So the government solved that problem by simply passing a law that any taxes that decurions could not collect from others, they would have to pay out of their own pockets. That's known as the incentive method for the tax collector. [laughter]
As you can well imagine, as the crises became greater and the economy was disrupted by civil conflicts and invasions and the effects of inflation, the decurions, strangely enough, no longer wanted to be decurions. They began to abandon their lands, abandon their cities, and escape to wherever they could find refuge in other larger cities or other provinces. But they were not to be allowed to do that with impunity, and a law was then passed that any decurion discovered somewhere else was to be arrested, bound like a slave, and carted back to his hometown where he would be restored to his dignity as a decurion.
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Now, the merchants and the artisans were traditionally organized into guilds and chambers of commerce and that sort of thing. They now, too, came under government pressure because the government could not obtain enough material for the war machine through regular channels — people didn't want all that token coinage. So merchants and artisans were now compelled to make deliveries of goods.
So that if you had a factory for making garments, you now had to deliver so many garments to the government requisitions. If you had ships, you had to carry government goods in your ships. In other words, what we have here is a kind of nationalization of private enterprises, and this nationalization means that the people who use their money and their talent are now compelled to serve the state whether they like it or not.
When people tried to get out of this they were then, by law, compelled to remain in the occupation that they were in. In other words, you couldn't change your job or your business.
This was not sufficient because, after all, death is a relief from taxes. So the occupations were now made hereditary. When you died, your son had to take up your profession. If your father was a shoemaker, you had to be a shoemaker.
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The peasantry, known as the coloni, were leaseholders on both imperial and private estates. They too were formerly a free class. Now under the same kinds of pressures that all smallholders were in in this situation, they began to drift away, trying to find better opportunities, better leases, or better occupations. So under Diocletian the coloni were now bound to the soil.
Anyone who had a lease on a particular piece of land could not give that lease up. More than that, they had to stay on the land and work it. In effect, this is the beginning of what in the Middle Ages is called serfdom, but it actually has its origins here in late Roman society.
Because the smaller landholders and producers could not pay the taxes in gold, as required, they had to sell out to wealthier landholders. This resulted in a concentration of wealth and destruction of the middle-class.
How did people protect themselves from this? Well, first of all, long-term mortgages virtually ceased to be given. Long-term loans of any kind disappeared. No one would lend unless they were guaranteed payment in gold or silver bullion.Interestingly, the currency became so debased, the government ceased accepting its own currency and required like-kind payments or payment in gold.
In fact the government itself, under Diocletian and Constantine, refused to accept gold coins in payment of taxes, but insisted instead on gold bullion. So that the coins that you bought in the marketplace had to then be melted down and presented in the form of bullion. The reason was that the government was never sure how adulterated its own gold coinage really was.
Pledges and securities for crops and for loans were always in gold, silver, or indeed in crops themselves. In Egypt we have a document in which it seems that the banks had been refusing to accept coins with the divine image of the emperor; in other words, state issues. The government's reaction to that, of course, was to force the banks to accept the coinage. This led to wholesale corruption in Roman society, as people refused to exchange coinage at the officially fixed tariffs but instead used the black market to exchange coinage on a market principle.
There was, obviously, flight from the land, massive evasion of taxes, people left their jobs, they left their homes, they left their social status. Now, Diocletian's final contribution to this continuing disaster was to issue his famous Edict on Maximum Prices, in 301 AD. This is a very famous instance of a massive effort by the government to limit inflation by price controls.
Now, one of the things that had happened in the course of this 3rd-century inflation was that the government found that when it paid its troops in token coinage, or even in debased silver coins, prices immediately rose. Every time the silver value of the denarius dropped, prices naturally rose.The end result?
The result was that the government, in order to try to protect its civil servants and its soldiers from the effects of inflation, began to demand payment of taxes in kind and in services rather than in coin. They wound up, in effect, repudiating their own issued coins, not accepting them for tax collection purposes.
The Roman state survived. The liberty of the Roman people did not. When freedom became possible in the West in the 5th century, with the barbarian invasions, people took advantage of the possibility of change. The peasantry had become totally alienated from the Roman state because they were no longer free. The business community likewise was no longer free. And the middle class of the cities was no longer free.This article on the economic deterioration of the Empire also addressed this issue:
The economy of the West was perhaps more fatally weakened than that of the East. The early 5th century Christian priest Salvian of Marseille wrote an account of why the Roman state was collapsing in the West — he was writing from France (Gaul). Salvian says that the Roman state is collapsing because it deserves collapse; because it had denied the first premise of good government, which is justice to the people.
By justice he meant a just system of taxation. Salvian tells us, and I don't think he's exaggerating, that one of the reasons why the Roman state collapsed in the 5th century was that the Roman people, the mass of the population, had but one wish after being captured by the barbarians: to never again fall under the rule of the Roman bureaucracy. In other words, the Roman state was the enemy; the barbarians were the liberators. And this undoubtedly was due to the inflation of the 3rd century. While the state had solved the monetary problem for its own constituents, it had failed to solve it for the masses. Rome continued to use an oppressive system of taxation in order to fill the coffers of the ruling bureaucrats and soldiers.
From the second century onwards, the question of how to fund the empire became absolutely fundamental due to widespread economic contraction. The problem of indebtedness was so common that it was seriously hindering economic enterprise. In 118 A.D. Hadrian agreed to wipe off a bad debt to the treasury which amounted to the equivalent of £7 million and also reduced many sums which were outstanding for rent. However, when the citizens of the empire could not afford to pay at all then simply reducing debts was not a long-term answer. It got to the stage when tax-payers simply had to pay what was demanded of them meaning that the State would necessarily have to become strengthened. Here we see the growth of bureaucracy and a parallel development of what we today would call the “police-state”. During the republic, the money for Rome’s expansion came largely from the plunder of foreign war. However during the pax romana we see a very sad state of affairs emerging whereby the only means of keeping the empire funded was through legalised extortion. By the time of Antoninus Pius (AD 138-161), the Roman bureaucracy was as all embracing as that of modern times. This tendency sowed the seeds for the tyranny of the third century. The historian ‘Trever’ says of the situation… “the relentless system of taxation, requisition, and compulsory labour was administered by an army of military bureaucrats… Everywhere. were the ubiquitous personal agents of the emperors to spy out the remotest case of attempted strikes evasion of taxes”. Under Hadrian we also see the development of a system of secret police and informers. This system functioned in much the same way as the Gestapo and kept going until its was changed by Diocletian. The fact that an emperor as enlightened as Hadrian introduced this system speaks volumes about the state of the empire at this stage and the inevitability of the system coming about.
Climate Changes, Reduced Crop Production and Disease
It has long been recognized that crop production had fallen during the late Roman period. As noted in this article, the change to a cooler climate reduced crop production, with a resultant drop in population:
During Augustus’ reign in the first century A.D., the Roman Empire enjoyed a beneficial climate resulting in bountiful harvests and expanding birthrates. By the time of Marcus Aurelius, the global climate began to change. The world grew cooler wrecking havoc upon agriculture. The poorer harvests led to malnutrition, decreasing birthrates, and disease. As the population failed to expand, the government tax base and military pool decreased making it virtually impossible to defend the west against barbarian incursions.
By the mid-second century, the Roman population totaled at least 65 million people. Some researchers believe that the actual total topped over 120 million, but that is probably too high. At the same time, the climate grew cooler and food became more scarce forcing animals to forage closer to human populations. This led to a series of outbreaks [of disease] in the latter half of the second century. The epidemics may have wiped out half of Europe’s population. Emperor Marcus Aurelius himself died of the plague.
By 200, the Roman population stood at 40 million. The lack of food led to disease and malnutrition. Both factors decreased birthrates. The demographic disaster weakened the empire by decreasing the tax base. In order to continue funding levels and provide bonuses for the military, the Severan Emperors devalued the currency leading to hyperinflation and destabilizing the government. In 235, the empire fell into chaos. Various claimants spent the next fifty years fighting each other for power. The power struggles and civil wars led to a complete breakdown of civil government.
The lower birthrates and civil wars stifled Roman population growth. By 310, the empire boasted a population of 55 million. However, 2/3 of that figure lived in the more prosperous and stable east. By this point, the empire split in two culturally and eventually politically. The split created a more provincial eastern empire further weakening the west. At the same time, emperors shrunk the size of the military in an attempt to deal with the declining population. This led to a more porous border for barbarians to punch through.
As emperors attempted to deal with the demographic disaster, the climate remained cool into the fifth century. The population did not recover as it declined to 51 million by 400. The Roman defeat at Adrianople in 378 marked a turning point. After Adrianople, the fighting grew more desperate and the empire struggled to replace dead soldiers. Additionally, the eastern empire made the tactical decision to reinforce their borders deflecting the nomadic hordes westward. The once powerful Western Roman Empire could no longer defend itself and stood alone against the invaders.
The Visigoths sacked Rome itself in 410 and the Vandals followed suit in 455. The Huns also wrought destruction in the 450s, but left following an agreement brokered by the church and a realization that an extreme famine left little to plunder. The western empire collapsed in all but memory in 476. Meanwhile, the global climate remained cool until about 800 when the planet entered the Medieval Warm Period.
Recent research indicates that the transition to a cooler climate may have been preceded by a period of climate chaos.
Centuries of unpredictable climate may have been partly to blame for the fall of the western Roman Empire. A detailed record of 2500 years of European climate has uncovered several links between changing climate and the rise and fall of civilisations.
Climate fluctuation was a contributing factor alongside political failures and barbarian invasions, says Ulf Büntgen of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research in Birmensdorf, Switzerland, who led the project.
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From AD 250 to 550, the climate flipped, from one decade to the next, between dry and cool, and warm and wet. "Such decadal changes seem to have the most impact" on civilisations, Büntgen says, because they harm agriculture but are not prolonged enough for people to adapt their behaviour.
The climatic turmoil coincided with political upheaval and waves of human migrations. By AD 500, the western Roman Empire had fallen.
In other notable periods, the relatively stable medieval society was characterised by more constant climatic conditions. But the Black Death coincided with a wet spell and the disease spreads faster in humid conditions.
As noted above, the Empire was subject to epidemics that further strained its population and economic base. Rome suffered from outbreaks of malaria. Other plagues also weakened the Empire.
In 165 AD Roman soldiers returning home from war in Mesopotamia brought with them a microbe—smallpox is the best guess. Rome had suffered disease outbreaks before, but the Antonine Plague of 165-180 AD killed more people than any other; a quarter to a third of Rome's population died, including two emperors: Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who gave the pandemic its name. The Antonine Plague, says McNeill, the Robert A. Millikan distinguished service professor emeritus in history, coincided with the start of the Roman Empire's 300-year decline.
The year 251 AD brought another pandemic to Rome, the Plague of Cyprian, which imposed a similar death toll. Ultimately, "about half the population died," McNeill says. "That has an enormous effect on society." And yet, among the myriad theories about what caused the fall of Rome—political corruption, deteriorating morals, constant wars, economic chaos, the tremendous burden of a rapidly expanding empire—historians had said little about disease. The way McNeill sees it, Rome's pandemics left it with a population too small to support its large military and state apparatus, a predicament that led to further civic and economic unraveling. Collapse was inevitable.See also here.
Conclusion
We can see many of the same factors in play today. Inflation has eroded the wealth of the middle-class; wealth and power is increasingly concentrated; the size of government expenditures and mandates has dwarfed the ability of the nation to support it. After a period of warmer weather following the Little Ice Age, and the resultant prosperity, global temperatures have faltered and we potentially face a period of "climate chaos" and/or declining global temperatures, with the concomitant decline in crop production. As is clear from above, these factors, alone, did not cause the collapse of the Empire. But, combined with other factors, made the Empire easy prey for invasion.
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