The Fall of Rome OR: Was Charlemagne Really the Magne?

Categories: In the News , History , Nonfiction

Just when I'd become okay with the idea, gathered from my college history text, The Middle Ages, 395-1500, that the western part of the Roman Empire fell because the upper-class Romans who ruled it all moved out to the country and lost interest in even having an empire, let alone paying taxes to support it, a new book, The Fall of the Roman Empire: a New History of Rome and the Barbarians comes out and says no, it really was the barbarians after all.  My own ancestors were among the worst barbarians, but you can't blame them because at the time they were too barbaric even to think about attacking anyone.  Later, when they did, The Middle Ages, 395-1500 scornfully says they mistook some small Italian hamlet for Rome.  The Middle Ages, 395-1500 authors hated my ancestors.

Still, I'm sorry about the Dark Ages, what with being the beneficiary of many centuries of Western culture, as well as other cultures.

Many people say we should study history in order not to repeat it, and there are other reasons. For years, writers including Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West was published between 1918 and 1923, not to mention just about everybody on the Internet, have been saying contemporary society has become decadent, like Western society before the fall of Rome.  Berman Morris's 2006 Dark Ages of America: the Final Phase of Empire posits his concern is that only 5 percent of Americans can identify which country the Allies fought in World War II, while 95 percent of Americans believe World War II occurred before World War I. Cullen Murphy's 2007 Are We Rome? discusses 6 points of similarity between the US and the western Roman Empire in its decline:

a powerful military but not enough people to fill it; a practice of contracting government work to private agencies; immigration problems and immigrant communities that threaten us from within; prideful ignorance about the outside world; accelerating decadent national character; and leaders influenced by moralizing religion and superstition. Murphy points out that the U.S. is seen as "dangerously overcommitted abroad and rusted out at home, like Rome in its last two centuries."

Personally, I have to say no, because of better medicine, a lack of actual barbarians, a society that will put up with a lot but not Trial by Ordeal, the Internet, the fact that books no longer have to be copied out by hand, and that the North American continent has not used up all its resources yet.  (Think about the fall of Easter Island.)  

Anyway, after Rome, centuries passed during which Europeans spent all their time hacking away at the earth and at each other with pathetically ineffective tools, using a two-crop rotation system rather than a more effective three-crop system, thinking a lot about religion, and dying of diseases that for the moment we can control by antibiotics.  Illiteracy reigned.

Finally, it looked like the West was going to get up and running again in the 8th Century, after the Charleses and Carlomans and Pepins got in as the Carolingian Empire, but it didn't work out.  Jeff Sypeck in Becoming Charlemagne (whose title's resemblence to Being John Malkovich is coincidental) writes gracefully about "Karl der grosse," who although unable to learn to write himself, surrounded himself with educated people who dedicated themselves to copying ancient manuscripts and otherwise organizing Europe.  The Middle Ages: 395-1500 identifies the division of Europe into three parts several years after the death of Charlemagne as being the root cause of World War I and the western part of World War II.  Thinking about the causes of World War I, I'd gone back to about 1870, but 843--it blows my mind.

For Discussion and Further Study:

1. Compare a map of the Carolingian Empire after the Treaty of Verdun in 843 with a 20th- or 21st-century map of Europe.  What problems do you notice? (Hint: Look at the middle section in particular.)
2. Using colored pencils, create a new map showing a more sensible division of Europe into countries. Be creative: For example, it's okay to have just one big country with you in charge, if that's what you want.
3. While imprisoned, make a detailed plan of how you will change the boundaries of the world's countries from what they are now to the way you modified them in Exercise #2.  How will you overcome other people's possible objections? (Hint: the trebuchet.)
4. Agree or disagree with the following, which is a criticism often made against ancient Rome, but comes from a summary of the argument of Dark Ages of America: the Final Phase of Empire: "The United States is a belligerent, overstretched empire, saddled with huge deficits and a hollowed-out economy."
5. If the economic part of the above statement is true, which troubled country does it make the most sense for the United States to invade? (A) Iraq; (B) Colombia; (C) Haiti.  Create a papier mache model to support your point of view.
6. What are the advantages, if any, of invading countries far away from your own rather than those relatively close by? 
7. Because the Christians of the 12th Century were so successful in putting down the heretical Albigensians, we don't know exactly what the Albigensians' heresies were.  Imagine that you were an Albigensian.  What would your heresy be? Hint: Make it a really boring one, and then explain why anyone would bother to torture you because of it.
8. Why is Charles Martel known in English as Charles Martel, rather than as Charles the Hammer?  Less impressive relatives of the Charleses have insulting but English sobriquets: Charles the Fat, Charles the Bald, Charles the Simple, Pepin the Short, Bertha of the Big Foot, and Pepin the Hunchback.
9. Why was it okay to call Charles the Fat that name, but you probably would have gotten into big trouble referring either to Stalin or Hitler as "Evil Psycho Dictator with Stupid and Possibly Fake Mustache"?
10. Why would it be a bad idea for Jeb Bush to spin off Florida as a separate country, even if his brother and father were to okay it?  Relate this to the Carolingian kings' habit of dividing their empires among their sons.