"If Huns Had NOT Pushed Germanics Into W. Roman Empire???" Topic

I did not want to hijack the current thread analyzing the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and its conquest by Germanic barbarians . . .

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QUESTIONS TO YOU:

Had the Huns not defeated Ermanaric Gothic kingdom in Eastern Europe (Baltic to Sarmatia), would the Germans have inevitably swallowed up the W. Roman Empire?

Could the W. Roman Empire have re-organized and survived, or was it doomed?

What are your thoughts on that?

CC
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CC says

Had the Huns not defeated Ermanaric Gothic kingdom in Eastern Europe (Baltic to Sarmatia), would the Germans have inevitably swallowed up the W. Roman Empire?

I am not sure what the question is exactly. The Western Empire was indeed swallowed up by many different peoples. What part are you looking to discuss?

Could the W. Roman Empire have re-organized and survived, or was it doomed?

Ah, something to sink our teeth into.

Perhaps it could have reorganized but to put your finger on when and what kind of changes would be needed is going to be wide open to speculation and opinion.

I would suggest that the west would have survived longer if the empire could have figured out a system of transferring imperial power that did not involve murder and rebellion.

Without the fear of armies rebelling across the empire the Romans could have gotten a LOT more done. Stationed troops where they needed to be. I think most Emperors knew what needed to be done to keep the borders safe, but to save their own position they were forced to pull key troops away from where they should have been. Most emperor's made the selfish choice and attempted to preserve themselves. . .

Rome's Rhine/Danube border could never have been impenetrable, but with reactionary forces in place to limit barbarian incursions and then quickly follow up with retaliatory attacks on the offenders, it would have preserved the boundaries for the empire.

If I was tasked to preserve the Western Empire and could only make one change, a stable system of succession would be my choice. . .

Matt

Sounds like grist for a Turtledove novel to me. We can only speculate about the ability of the Empire to sort itself out. I think a strong leader might have prolonged things but absent some real political and social reform . . . not likely.

Also don't over look the impact of malaria. The most severe form of this disease hit Italy at about the same time the Vandals sacked Rome. Indeed, Malaria might have been the reason the Vandals were able to occupy Africa.

mjc

I think the possibility of them moving into the eastern Kingdom (current Greeece/ middle east) is possible and could suggest some very interesting gaming possibilities (Goths vrs. Sassanids!!!).

If it hadn't been the Huns, it would have been someone else. Steppe nomads had been boiling out of the East for a good thousand years by then and would continue to do so for another thousand or so.

And I truly do think the Western Empire was so screwed up that not much could have saved it anyway.

Well, the Empire didn't actually HAVE a system of succession that depended on murder and rebellion. What they had was an inability to PREVENT the murders and rebellions. Under such circumstances, politics are going to get VERY interesting, because succession and survival are going to depend on your ability to manipulate others and how not to be a target.

This means that over time, Emperors are going to be guys who successfully managed power alliances and dodged assassins… NOT guys who were necessarily well qualified to run an oversized aging empire.

I understand that the slow disintegration of the yeoman farmer class had something to do with this as well -- when you didn't have enough Romans to fill out the legions, and you had to depend on recruiting non-Romans, well, how long can you hold out?

Particularly when you're recruiting like hell from the same Germanics who are pushing pretty hard on your western borders…

Doc: "Well, the Empire didn't actually HAVE a system of succession that depended on murder and rebellion. What they had was an inability to PREVENT the murders and rebellions. Under such circumstances, politics are going to get VERY interesting, because succession and survival are going to depend on your ability to manipulate others and how not to be a target."

But the Eastern Empire had the same problem too.

RMaker: "If it hadn't been the Huns, it would have been someone else. Steppe nomads had been boiling out of the East for a good thousand years by then and would continue to do so for another thousand or so."

The next big wave would have been the Avars, who did not make it to Ukraine until about 555.
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The Huns entered Ukraine in or around 370, when Ermanaric's kingdom was overwhelmed:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huns

So, that means that there's a 185 year difference between the two, which would have given the west more than a century and a half to get the next wave of eastern nomads.

QUESTION: Could the Western Empire, without the pressure of Parthians and others that the Eastern Empire had, have survived if it had reorganized during that period?

CC

What if's again? I like them actually.

If the Western empire had remained capable of fielding armies of sufficient size (this is aka "if the Roman empire had not gone rotten within"), they would have continued to see off every barbarian incursion. But the conglomerate weight of successive barbarian incursions was too much for the manpower of the West by then. the Eastern empire remained vital, and the reasons for that vitality are complex. I wonder if anyone really can ID those reasons confidently. Total population had to be a biggie, though: the West's population went into a steady decline, while the East had enormous manpower pools, which also meant the taxation base to maintain large professional armies (most of the time, anyway).

(Also, I hasten to add, that had either empire had Templars, the chances are that the "Roman" empire would not have fallen at all; or at least would have held off the Ottomans considerably longer. I mean, look at how much trouble those feeble copycats, the Knights of Rhodes -- the erstwhile Hospididdlers -- gave the Ottomans! Templars would have kicked their collective asses.)

KT: "had either empire had Templars, the chances are that the "Roman" empire would not have fallen at all; or at least would have held off the Ottomans considerably longer."

Well said, my man. Well said.

What if they had come up with a Germanic equivalent of the Janissaries, meaning Germanic children raised to be more Roman than Romans? Could that have helped a bit?

CC

Actually I think it would have formed something like the ideal of the 'Holy Roman Empire' – a series of semi-independant duchies – each with their 'Roman' Dux (whence Duke) or other civil/military leader, all answerable to a central 'Emperor' for the survival of their patch.

The Germans would likely have gone much the same way, there is evidence from Illerup of Roman styled & equipped forces in the range of a few thousand strong in the Barbaricum – it seems some of those Foederati units went home intact at the end of their contract.

When the next wave of displaced 'barbarians' arrived, there would have been a series of cities with garrisons to shelter the civilian population and forces available from the other duchies to see off the invaders without destroying any of the duchies economies.

This was already evident in the evolution of offices such as the Dux Britanorum, Dux Lit. Saxorum etc.

The succession was a basic problem created when Augustus decided not to become King, but just 'top bloke oh and I have the army BTW'. Fix that and a lot that was wrong might have been right.

But IMHO an awful lot of usurpation was driven not by bad men seeking power, but by real Human Beings recognicing real local problems and seeking to do something about it. Imagine how INFURIATING it must have been to be local hard man in, say Brittannia or the Rhine, receiving idiotic orders from the centre, watching the place you are tasked to defend going to hell in a handbasket. Hell, I would have been a usurper in the 3rd century.

I would fix the economy. Rome's economy, especially in the west, was based on a ridiculously narrow support. Roman Agriculture was shockingly primitive, and there was almost no industry and very little trade.

If I could have been Trajan, I would have done the following;
1) start manumitting, gradually but steadily, and forbid the import of new slaves. Slaves is a terrible way to run an economy.
2) get the freed slaves building canals. Roads are no good – canals is the way for a primitive agrarian economy to improve.
3) Send some serious trade missions to Scandinavia and the Barbaricum
4) Conquer Hibernia and plant naval colonies on the tip of Scotland and a nice Island on the Jutland Peninsula. Then whip the Legions out of Brittania and add them to the Rhine/Danube frontier.
5) Try to introduce a solid token coinage to overcome the silver shortage.

Pat

The question boilsdown to two assumptions:
the Western Roman Empire fell especiallt because of invasion by "Germanic" groups
the Germanic groups needed the catalyst of Hun invasions.

The first is only part of the picture:
the Germanic invasions were not waves of Goths, Lombards, Vandals, Franks, etc. The groups were more mixed than these labels suggest; they were predominantely such but …
The "Germanic" invasion had been going on as a matter of migration for hundreds of years – this would have changed Rome anyway.

The second is well answered above.

Not to hijack the thread, but…

…all the more reason we NEED plastic 28mm LATE Roman Imperial miniatures :-) so we can game this out, of course.

Ahh, early dark ages, my favorite "ancient" period.

Actually, this would be a good one for Turteldove to write a story about. As much as I don't really enjoy his recent stuff, some of his earlier stories were quite good, and IIRC he is a historian specializing in Byzantine history.

Rob

We have been somewhat mislead by the maps in our history books with arrows indicating the advance of non-Roman peoples, in a fashion similar to the arrows that show troop movements in battles. Much of the movement of peoples in Europe were migrations (as reddrabs states). And many of these can be characterized as casual and incremental movements of individuals to a "better" or less crowded place.

The world population was exploding during this period. The Huns might have been the tip of the sword, but the world populations were all churning around like a pot of boiling spaghetti. I think that one way or the other the Roman Empire would eventually become the unstructured melting pot of heterogenious peoples that it did.

The irony is that the Huns pushed the Goths etc into the Eastern half of the empire, leading to Adrianople and the crushing of the Eastern Army, yet it was the Western army and Empire that fell first.

Was this because Theodosius put all of his resources in the Eastern army and crushed the Western army in one of the civil wars?

Had Stilicho finished off Alaric when he had the chance to do so (several times in fact), might that have extended the shelf life of the Western empire?

The Winter of 407AD seems to be the turning point for the Western Empire, when the massive Germanic wave surged over the Rhine and into Gaul for good.

Hi

Which addresses another point that the usual histories don't address. This was a period of global cooling. Remember that in persuit of Alaric in, I think, about 408, the gulf of corinth froze allowing the goths to escape a trap on a penensula!

This seems to have peaked in the 500s and there was a massive invasion of "the black plague" that depopulated a lot of towns in the med. Cold means people stay home inside and are more subject to some types of contact diseases. Some of the dead zones actually protected the east by not having places to raid for supplies.

In one light, the movement of the goths themselves was driven not really by hun pressure out of hun "evil" but a chilling that forced migrations south.

Rocky

I do remember Gibbon quoting comtemporary sources about people abandoning towns, fields, etc., and going into areas that had been untouched or depopulated, because of plague, weather events, lawlesness and oppression.

Yes, the Goths hit the Eastern Empire first, but were enticed to head to the West soon after. As Alaric moved West his forces, we are told, swelled with willing recruits (presumably Germanic deserters, Roman slaves and the disenfranchised) so that by the time they arrived it is not entirely Goths doing the raiding.

Yet, the catalyst for Adrianople (378) and what happened later still seems to be the destruction of Ermanaric's kingdom (c370), right?

I'm not saying that the cause of all the problems in the West were the Germanic invaders coming in at once, but they were sort of the straw that broke the camel's back.

Ammianus Marcellinus, Historiae Book 31:
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Jordannes' Getica:
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Back on topic though . . .

IF the Huns had not destroyed the Gothic kingdom, could the West have handled the other obstacles it faced (including the other East Germanic nations) and survived?

If not, what would it have had to do to survive? How would it have had to evolve to remain an empire?

Would it have adopted a more centralized form of government, as the Eastern Empire eventually did?

Or would it have fragmented like the Holy Roman comment made above by BSRLee?

CC

"I would suggest that the west would have survived longer if the empire could have figured out a system of transferring imperial power that did not involve murder and rebellion."

Indeed. But the Eastern Empire didn't solve this either. Manzikert was lost largely due to treachery. The 4th Crusade stormed Constantinople with a claimant to the thrown in their ranks.

They progressed from murdering losers to mutilating them and finally just tonsuring them and throwing them into monastaries and convents.

I think the main reason the East survived the deluge of the fifth century was because Constantinople was impregnable to the barbarians. It shielded Anatolia and the the Levant.

Hmm, migrations to the West. History seems to be repeating itself.