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Some thoughts on the provocative "The End of the Roman Empire Wasn't That Bad" article by @JamesFallows: theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
@JamesFallows Nobody whose opinion is worth hearing thinks that post-Roman Europe immediately devolved into a Mad Max-style hellscape. The world that followed was different. Population health and possibly diet were better, but it was less literate, urban, wealthy, and there were fewer people.
@JamesFallows One of the valuable things about the scholarly trend toward Late Antiquity and away from decline/fall has done is emphasize the importance of seeing these people and their time on its own terms and understanding and appreciating their world for what it was, not what it had been.
@JamesFallows Lots of interesting stuff happened in the early Middle Ages. The world was much more local and much more fragmented. By most metrics, it was probably a lot better to be a peasant in 700 than it had been in 350.
@JamesFallows On the other hand, though, the general peace and order of the Roman world shouldn't be taken for granted. Nor should the economic role of the Roman state, or the connectivity between vastly separated regions that it promoted. All of that went away with the Empire.
@JamesFallows It's clear that the climate got much worse in the sixth century, and that plague played a major role in creating the post-Roman world. A still-extant Roman state, with durable institutions and mechanisms of control, might have mitigated some of that misery. Might not have, either
@JamesFallows So, to return to the headline, was the End of the Roman Empire All That Bad? For some people, like those who bore the brunt of a much more violent world or who starved because you couldn't move grain from one place to another anymore, yeah, it was bad.
@JamesFallows For others, like local elites, surviving peasants, and people with a talent and propensity for ambitious violence, the post-Roman landscape offered a lot of intriguing opportunities in the context of a world that was less populous, less urban, poorer, and materially simpler.
@JamesFallows So if you're asking about better or worse, you need to specify where - Britain and Spain had much different experiences of the end of the Empire - and precisely whom you're discussing. They're questions worth asking, I think; it's why I've spent most of my adult life on them.
@JamesFallows Anyway, good talk.
