Quick Take: So, Why Did the Roman & Chinese Empires Fall?
Trying to make sense of a hundred different explanations
It’s hard to overstate the collective trauma caused by the fall of the (Western) Roman Empire on the Western consciousness.
For well over a millennia, multiple Western European rulers called themselves Roman Emperors or Kings of Romans. The Greeks, perhaps the most influential people in the history of the West, rejected their own name (“Hellenes,” which became a byword for “pagan”) and insisted on calling themselves Roman.
The whole idea of German statehood was born of the dream that, since Germans had sort of destroyed the empire, it was theirs now to bring back to life — and thus, Europe had a Holy Roman Empire that was, as the old joke goes, neither holy nor Roman nor much of an empire, to be honest. When the descendants of the Anglo-Saxons crossed the Atlantic and built up a Republic, they made it as Roman as possible and filled it with Roman-looking monuments and buildings.
So it fell, in various stages. But why? The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was, obviously, the result of multiple causes. In 1984, German historian Alexander Demandt listed 210 causes proposed for the event, which is clearly a bit too much. I’d like to focus on those that look less obviously kooky.
For starters, it’s important to point out why I’m comparing Rome with its contemporary Han Chinese Empire: it was established late in the Roman Republican era, had a similar life-span, and ended a bit earlier: just as Rome emerged from what seemed like a similar tailspin in the late 3rd century, the so-called Eastern Han Dynasty went down in flames, starting the Chinese Middle-Ages.
Much like the Chinese empire, the Western Romans faced an increasingly dysfunctional political system that wasn’t effectively reformed fast enough: Diocletian and Constantine, two heavy-handed autocrats, came up with temporary fixes that amounted to nothing like the fine-tuned balance provided by Augustus’ principate, were in fact the source of future trouble, and couldn’t survive several spells of turmoil at court and a few relatively minor civil wars.
Also like the Chinese empire, the Roman went through phases of apparently rapid decomposition and sudden, seemingly miraculous recovery, before it settled into terminal decadence.
Both empires struggled to contain barbarian deluges like nothing seen before, the result of climate change that cooled the weather, making the northern steppes extremely inhospitable and dry regions like the Mediterranean and Northern China not so fertile. The so-called “Dark Ages Cold Period”1 had a significant impact across the world, particularly in the northern hemisphere, between roughly 400 and 765, when the climate tentatively started to turn warmer and wetter again.
In Western Eurasia in particular, extreme drought and cold spells created knock-on effects that ended up with Scandinavian-Baltic Vandals in control of an African kingdom and the Eastern Asian Huns – Priscus’ description of Attila, who might not even be fully Hunnish, ethnically, is clearly that of a proto-Turk, proto-Mongol or proto-Manchu – trying to carve out a domain in central Gaul.
Ultimately, both empires were effectively brought down by barbarian invasions that destroyed imperial institutions and both survived as shrunk versions of themselves, in alternative capitals in Constantinople and Nanjing.
Now, differences between Rome and China were also significant: the Chinese Empire was highly bureaucratized, unlike a Roman Empire that was so lacking in officials that the Christian Church quickly took over many of the state functions.
The Romans of the late empire may have been more impacted by long-term dysgenic effects of urbanization, leading to the shrinkage of cognitive elites as they had less fertility than farmers not selected for their cognitive ability – nor, increasingly, for their martial prowess either, given the switch towards relying more and more on foreign warriors to protect their empire2 — a trend also visible in China, but perhaps not as acute.
There’s also the issue of personalities. Most of the Chinese emperors of the last two centuries were, to summarize, useless youngsters kept entertained in their harems, so the bureaucrats and palace eunuchs could scheme for power in peace. This never happened in Rome.
The Eastern Empire had capable administrators and, at key junctures, emperors able to hold the reins of power and make reasonable decisions. The Western Empire had talented strongmen like Stilicho and Constantius (briefly emperor as the third of his name), capable officers with a good grasp of politics and human psychology.
At the same time, at its most critical juncture, the Western Empire ended up under the control of general Aetius, a serial plotter and schemer whose endless triangulations solved no problems and who, in addition, stayed in power for a very long time. Personalities matter, that’s why political assassinations exist.
Political arrangements matter too. Rome’s imperial state, fairly well-oiled and with a remarkably libertarian bent until the 3rd century, emerged from that century’s crisis as a stiff, centralized, ineffective, proto-socialist, tax-extracting machine.
The northern barbarians themselves were rather effective military machines, sharpened by centuries of confrontation with and learning from the best troops the Roman army had to offer. Their tribal assembly system, coupled with flexible systems of elective monarchy, proved much more flexible than the hardened Roman autocracy of the 4th and 5th centuries, and many barbarian peoples, from the Goths to the Vandals to the Angles, overcame massive defeats to eventually obtain their goals and create new southern kingdoms for themselves.
Barbarian resilience and adaptiveness was unmatched by wealthier Romans, unable to muster enough strength to defend the system that guaranteed their dominance, despite their evident nostalgia for the old times. At a time of extreme wealth and power disparities, Roman elites proved unable to meet the moment, and deserve all the blame they have been given over the centuries. Their late lunge towards Christianity, as they tried to save their power and privilege, was too little too late.
Both empires were exceedingly fragile. Like the Chinese empire, the Roman Empire had become richer than any barbarian could dream by treating every part of its domain as a cog in a massive machine that, once disconnected from the whole, became essentially helpless and useless. The entire population had benefited from this, achieving levels of welfare unthinkable outside of imperial borders, and yet the benefits had been much more tangible for elites with access to plum positions and trading contracts: and these were, in China and the Roman lands, the groups that remained attached to, and pining for a recovery of, imperial power to the last minute.
Entire provinces like those of Spain and Britain had been optimized to become part of the Mediterranean globalization, not to function as autonomous self-defense units in case of a serious crisis. When the serious crisis arrived, a few thousand determined, well-armed barbarians took city after city with little trouble.
Indeed, across the provinces, Roman subjects had long become accustomed to be part of an interconnected system that prized specialization and punished redundant local production and initiative. With barbarians streaming into Noricum – modern Austria – for decades on either side of the year 400, locals were highly concerned about killing, robbing and raping, but they were also very much worried about their inability to receive olive oil imports from Italy and Spain that had become central to local cuisine3.
I’d like to single out a final similarity in the fall of the Roman and Chinese empires: ideological and religious weakness. The Graeco-Roman compact, comprising a pagan religion with colorful festivals for the masses and what essentially was atheistic nihilism for the elites, was a spent force by the 3rd century. Something similar occurred in China with Confucianism, after it lost significant prestige — especially among the masses — over the last two centuries of the Han Dynasty, being associated with arrogant, selfish bureaucrats in love with great plans.
It’s certainly not a coincidence that Rome became Christian and China became Buddhist just as the great empires of antiquity on both sides of Eurasia went down in flames.
See the paper “Dark Ages Cold Period: A literature review and directions for future research,” by Samuli Helama et al (The Holocene, 2017), focusing on evidence of colder condition across Eurasia during the period.
See “Intelligence Trends in Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of Roman Polygenic Scores,” by Davide Piffer, Edward Dutton & Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, published in OpenPsych, July 21, 2023. The authors analysed 127 Ancient Roman genomes and took the polygenic score for educational attainment (EA4) as a proxy for intelligence; taking Z as the IQ average 100, they found that intelligence increased from the Neolithic Era (Z= -0.77) to the Iron Age (Z= 0.86), declines after the Republic Period and during the Imperial Period (Z= -0.27) and increases in Late Antiquity (Z= 0.25) and is approximately at the same level as of 2023 (Z= 0.08) “We show that this is congruent with a cyclical model of civilization based around intelligence, with the documented history of Rome, and also with patterns of immigration into Rome.” W.V. Harris, in “Demography, Geography and the Sources of Roman Slaves” (Cambridge UP, 1999), postulated the impact of the mass introduction of slaves into Italy from less cognitively developed regions.
Cit. “The fall of Rome and the end of civilization,” by Bryan Ward-Perkins (Oxford UP, 2006). Such concern led to complaints and, eventually, to emergency shipments of oil just before the empire collapsed, according to the “Life” of the religious scholar Eugippius.
I tend to think of the classical Roman Empire as ending with the 3rd Century Crisis. What emerged from it was a recognizably Early Medieval empire, with limited trade, small fortified cities and a mostly agrarian economy. It called itself the same, but it was a different beast.
So, basically, the Romans destroyed their own empire in a cataclysmic 100 years of civil war.
I wouldn't say "China became Buddhist" in the same way Rome went Christian.
Maybe because Buddhism was an older religion with its passionate proselytizing days more in the past than Christianity? Maybe because Buddhism gained popularity amongst the Barbarians more than the native Han Chinese, maybe Confucianism was more resilient than Hellenism? Maybe because Christianity comes from the same aggressive monotheistic Abrahamic roots as Islam? The Christian takeover of Rome and the West was thorough and more enduring, eradicating the very roots of European "pagan" civilization. Buddhism never seems to have gained similar dominance in China like the way Christianity did in the West. There never was a Buddhadom like there was a Christendom, no Chinese emperor sent crusading armies to retake the birthplace of Siddartha Gautama.
Therefore it's no surprise the Late T'ang emperor Wuzong in AD 845 was able to initiate his anti-Buddhist persecutions and China's very own Dissolution of the Monasteries almost a thousand years before King Henry VIII did the same in England. This would lay the groundwork for a Confucian Revival in the late T'ang and Song Dynasty with Neo-Confucianism. It's a pity the West didn't do the same with a Neo-Hellenism, a deep and sincere revival of ancient Classical European beliefs. (I don't count the current superficial popularity of Stoicism amongst the alt-Right crowd).