Dr. David Gwynn
Appearances
The Ancients
Ice Age America
The width of the route obviously grows over time and it opens in kind of a funny way. You know those winter coats that we wear that have a zipper that zips up from the bottom and zips down from the top? Well, this was the ice-free corridor. So it opens, it's pretty wide at the top, it's pretty wide at the bottom. And then in the middle, it still hasn't quite opened up yet.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
So people basically have to wait for the whole thing to be open. But, and this is an important point, and this is something that we found with ancient environmental DNA, just because the corridor is open doesn't mean it's a passage. Because when the ice retreats, you've got nothing there yet. at least immediately after the ice retreats, except mud water flats, lakes, nothing's growing there.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And so at the end of the Pleistocene, when the corridor opens up, you can't pack a lunch in Fairbanks and say, you know, if I'm really careful and I don't eat too much on the first day and the second day, I can make that thousand kilometer trek with my sack lunch.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
No, you've got to wait for animals and well, you've got to wait for plants and then animals to basically make that corridor biologically viable. You've got to have something to eat in there, right? And so...
The Ancients
Ice Age America
One of the things that we found, and this is again work with Willerslev's group, in particular Mikkel Pedersen, who's one of the sort of specialists in that group on ancient environmental DNA, we had cores from that center of the zipper, as it were. It was one of the last places within that corridor to open up. And what we found was that, again,
The Ancients
Ice Age America
With ancient environmental DNA, you know when the plants show up. You know when the animals showed up.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Sorry about that. Yeah, we go to a lake, we drill, we get a core of sediment, this tube of sediment, and you slice it up like a salami, right? And then you look at what the DNA is in the different slices that are of different ages. And what we found was that that corridor was not biologically viable until around 13,000 to 12,500 years ago.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And of course, we've had people in the Americas already for a few thousand years. So what that tells us is that the ice-free corridor was not the initial route into the Americas because it didn't become a route and available until well after people had already been here, which tells us they must have come down the coast.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Yeah, exactly right. This was a very, very different landscape at the end of the Pleistocene. The land bridge itself, I mean, look, for all intents and purposes, if you walked from Northeast Asia and Siberia into Alaska, you wouldn't have noticed the difference in terms of the environment. It was cold. It was dry. It was a grassland.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
The tundra, as we think of it today, is a much more geologically recent phenomena. And it has to do with warming and increased precipitation and that kind of thing. So during the Pleistocene in Alaska and across the entire land bridge, you had horses, you had mammoth, you had giant bison. And these are animals that needed to be dry underfoot. right?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
These are not animals that do very well on tundra. Caribou do great on tundra, but they're really not around during this time in the numbers that mammoth and horse and bison are.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Well, exactly right. These were diverse landscapes. You've got everything from vast grasslands to deep forest and forests that vary tremendously in terms of the nature of the vegetation. You've got boreal forests, you've got deciduous forests, you've got, as you go further south, of course, you're getting into tropical stuff.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And so one of the key things that's really important that we still haven't quite got our finger on is the whole issue of landscape learning. How do you figure out what to do if nobody's been there before, if the landscape is unfamiliar to you? How do you identify resources that will help you, that will cure you, that might hurt you, or that might even try and kill you, right?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
You've got to learn about the geography. You've got to do wayfinding. How do you move out across that landscape and make your way back? you've got to figure out the climate and the weather. And there's a distinction between the two, of course, right? Weather is what you see outside. It's what's going to come tomorrow, what may be here next week. Climate are those larger trends.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And so if you are somewhere in the Northern Plains and it's fall of the year, and you don't know that winters can be pretty darn harsh in that environment, this could not work out well for you, right? So there's going to be a strong incentive to learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible, about as large an area as possible as you can.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
On the other hand, there has to be a compromise because if you're just running willy-nilly around this entirely new landscape, you're not going to learn enough about what's going on in places with particular resources, right? You need to figure out, well, how do the animals in this locale, how do the animals on this landscape, in this kind of environmental setting, how do they behave?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
How do they behave at different seasons? How do they behave when there's young? How do they behave when there's other predators around? Because you've got to figure out enough to be a successful hunter-gatherer. So there's this sort of tension there.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
between wanting to go as far as you can, as fast as you can, to learn as much as you can, and pulling in the opposite direction, the need to stay and observe, stay and experiment, right? You've got plants in front of you. They have really lovely little red berries. Do you eat them? Well, no, actually you give them to your younger brother and make him eat them.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And then if he gets violently ill, you know, this is not a good thing. The whole process of adapting to a new landscape Finding your way around, finding your way back, learning about it is really fascinating. And that's one of the really interesting things that has great potential in terms of the DNA.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Because one of the things that we would suspect is that when groups come into a new environment, they're going to disperse. Because more eyes in more different places, then you come back from time to time, you get together, you share information. Okay, you don't need to go in that direction. We've been there. It doesn't work.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Or we've been there and this is where you need to refurbish your stone tools. There's a wonderful geological outcrop there. This is how you deal with the animals that you're going to find there.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
With ancient DNA, we can potentially identify those sort of rendezvous moments where different populations that have perhaps been separated by decades or centuries as their ancestors dispersed across the landscape, can we see them coming back together? We do know that dispersal process was in fact very, very rapid. The genomic signatures that we have in 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Time period in North America are very, very similar to the ones of ancient individuals in places like Southeast Brazil 10,000 years ago.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
I would actually use the word stunning rather than surprising. We'd always suspected archaeologically because of the near-contemporaneity of radiocarbon dates north and south in the hemisphere.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
But now we have genomic evidence that seems to, in fact, affirm that where it looks like, you know, the difference in sort of the genealogies, as it were, the genetic genealogies of these populations is that we're just talking about a limited number of generations before descendants of these groups that are in North America are already in South America.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
We actually call it a quick wave where, you know, small groups are just scattering and And then one of the other things that we found, and I can't remember if we talked about this or not, but it's just such a cool finding. I have to repeat it.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
If we didn't, they took their dogs with them. One of the studies that we did, and this is work with my friend and colleague Gregor Larson at Oxford. Gregor's a specialist on ancient dog DNA, and he had a student and colleague, Angela Perry, also a specialist in dogs.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Yeah, fantastic episode. Oh, fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was talking with Gregor and Angela one day about their dates on dog dispersal based on dog DNA. Okay. And as I was listening to them, I was thinking, hmm, those sound a lot like the human dates that we have. And then it dawned on me, I can be really slow about this sort of thing.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
It dawned on me, dogs are not going to colonize or move into the Americas by themselves. right? They must have come with people. So as people are moving through the hemisphere and splitting off and radiating out, of course, their dogs are going to have a similar kind of pattern because the dogs are going with people. People can go without dogs, but dogs don't go without people.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And so we published this paper and it was just a lot of fun to work on, to be sure, because we had these two very independent sets of evidence, which very nicely tracked one another for obvious reasons.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Well, formidable ones would be the answer. You have everything from Brachyprotoma obtusata, which is the short-faced skunk. And there will be a quiz afterwards on the genus and species names for all of your listeners. There was the spectacled bear. There was the giant short-faced bear. There was a saber-toothed cat. There was a scimitar cat. There was an American cheetah.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
These are all distinct genera. And then there were species such as the dire wolf and the American lion, Panthera leo. And I have to give one more scientific name for the saber-toothed cat just because it's so cool. The saber-toothed cat's name was Smilodon fatalis, which is kind of a mashup of Greek and Latin. which basically means roughly deadly knife-toothed.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
I mean, you had these sabers that were some six inches, these two fangs, basically, canines. Six inches? Six to eight inches long. They were probably about a quarter of an inch wide. They were serrated front to back. This was an animal that would rip your throat with one chop.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
They probably didn't mess with us. I mean, we wouldn't have been much of a meal. Not when they can go after a bison or a mammoth, for goodness sakes. There's just a whole lot more meat on the bone for the other prey.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And they tended to hunt around what's known today, I think it's the Los Angeles County Museum, the La Brea Tar Pits, very classic environment in which animals would come and these folks would be ambush hunters. jump out, grab them by the throat, and then hang on as the animal tried to twist its way out. If there were people that were eaten by saber-tooths, we have no evidence of it.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Well, I'm at a disadvantage here because I actually haven't seen that film. Okay. But I'll answer your question as best I can, which is to say, yes, there were all sorts of small mammals in North America. And let's take it one step further. If you're coming into an environment
The Ancients
Ice Age America
that you're unfamiliar with and you're a hunter-gatherer, you're not gonna be terribly picky about what your next meal is. And so if there were small mammals that humans encountered and that they were able to kill. We don't want to put the vision of people killing cartoon squirrels and eating them in your listeners' heads.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
But yeah, these folks were probably fairly generalized foragers, which is to say that they were eating up and down the body size chain. So small mammals, turtles, large mammals, yeah. They were probably hunters of great strategy and tactics, but also opportunistic. If the resource was there, they're going to take advantage of it.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
There's a lot of characters on the landscape, and the landscape itself is nothing we moderns have ever imagined.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Well, I mean, I think that just makes a lot of sense. You don't have a ready food supply. You're not necessarily building up a surplus, right? You haven't got corn that you harvested last fall that's still available in your corn bins. So you will take advantage. Now, at the same time, we know from slightly later in history,
The Ancients
Ice Age America
prehistory where we've got a large bison kills where bison, because they were sort of susceptible as a herd animal to being driven into arroyos or fall into big pits, natural pits, you know, solution cavities and the like. You're not able to control how many animals get killed.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And so you're not necessarily able, given the numbers of hunters that you have, to be able to fully exploit the amount of meat, right? So some stuff gets left behind, but certainly you're going to take what you can, as much as you can. And because these are highly mobile groups, they're also thinking a bit in terms of how much can you carry?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And it was a very, very different place, a very, very different time, and yet a wonderful opportunity to explore what modern humans did the first time they ever encountered a completely new world, a hemisphere that was teeming with animals, was far different than anything they'd encountered before, and a landscape on which they entered
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Yeah, you can kill an elephant, but are you going to be able to make use of all six tons of it? You know, you move the whole camp there and you spend, oh, probably several weeks, you know, roasting it on the barbecue. But, you know, at a certain point, it's just you move on. That's depending on how often they made these kills.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And one of the things that's really becoming clear, I mean, think about it. You're a hunter-gatherer. And let's just simplify it. You've got a stick with a sharp rock at the end of it. And you're staring down the very long nozzle of a Pleistocene elephant, a mammoth, which weighs six tons.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
One of the things that we've done recently is a fair amount of experimental work with their weaponry, their projectile points. And what we discovered, and obviously we weren't using these on mammoths because, well, they've been extinct for 10,000 years.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
But using experimental conditions that as best we could replicated the conditions of hunting a mammoth in terms of thickness, the material that you're going to throw your spears into, and that sort of thing. These projectile points that they were using, these so-called Clovis points, Absolutely could bring down an animal. There's no question about it, right? These were weapons.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
On the other hand, what we discovered was that they probably weren't all, they were described, they have been described as these quote unquote magnificent killing things, these magnificent killing tools. Turns out they weren't all that magnificent. When you think about, and we have data on this, when you think about the skin thickness of a woolly mammoth,
The Ancients
Ice Age America
A spear shot into it has to get through all the hair. It's got to get through the hide. It's got to get through layers of subcutaneous fat. And what we discovered with the experimental stuff is that, well, penetrating distance isn't very good. These things can go in about maybe 18 centimeters. So not very far.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Well, all the vital organs of a mammoth are basically hidden behind a picket fence of large ribs, right? And... scapula, other large bones. And so these weapons were effective. There's no question about it. We know that they went after some of these mammals and they were successful, but they just weren't successful all that often.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And moreover, what we realized, when you look at the wear patterns on these tools, when you look at the breakage patterns on these tools, they're probably more like Swiss army knives rather than weapons made specifically for killing elephants. The stereotype of these things as being highly specialized weapons, it actually doesn't make a lot of sense.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
If you're a highly mobile hunter-gatherer and you've got a limited amount of stuff that you can carry, wouldn't it be better to carry a tool that can be used for all manner of different tasks rather than a tool that's solely for the purpose of bringing down six-ton animals?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Because one of the things that we know from Bonner Day hunter-gatherers is that going after a really big game like that is actually a low probability of success activity. So more often, you're shooting a deer, you're prying open a turtle. And so if you've got that Swiss Army knife, you've got the tool that you need for all occasions and
The Ancients
Ice Age America
If on occasion you run into an elephant, you can use it on that. But don't count on it being all that lethal because the penetrating power of these things is just not that great.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And at some point must have realized there's no smoke on the horizon. There's no freshly killed animals. We're the only ones here. What the hell? Can you imagine the sensation that must have been when they realized nobody else is home?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Well, I think that argument is just flat wrong in terms of human impacts. Look, there's lots of reasons to doubt that humans had an impact on these animals, right? And the entire ecosystems, I'm guessing as well, yeah. Well, okay. Thank you. Because in fact, we're talking about 38 different genera in North America alone.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And the estimates of how many animals were out there range upwards of 100 million animals. And you've got a small band of hunter-gatherers coming in with sticks and sharp rocks. I'm exaggerating to make the point here. They're coming into a landscape that they still don't fully understand, that they still don't fully know well.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And as a wonderful archaeologist by the name of George Frizen, who actually did subsistence hunting as a child in the 1920s, has said, to successfully match wits with wild animals with the intent to kill them requires a thorough knowledge of the hunting territory and the behavioral patterns of that animal. And you're not going to get that as you're running pell-mell through the hemisphere, right?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And further, that as a hunter-gatherer, when you're coming into a new landscape, this is not like, let me use a sort of a Civil War analogy. where William Tecumseh Sherman, a Union general, basically burned his way through Georgia on his march to the sea. 62,000 men marching 300 miles just basically devastated everything in a swath about 50 miles wide.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
The hunter-gatherers coming into the Americas were not an army, right? They were not able to sort of devastate the ecosystem like that. But really, this all comes down to the empirical test. If overkill, if the notion that people were responsible for Pleistocene extinctions is correct, we should see ample evidence of kill sites, right?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
We've got 38 different genera, possibly tens if not hundreds of millions of them. We ought to see dead bodies all over the place with Clovis points stuck in them. And if, in fact, humans were responsible, then the extinction of those 38 genera should all have occurred within the window in which human hunters arrived and spread throughout the hemisphere.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Oh, those are the weapons that are used by the folks who are blamed for the extinction, right? This is the first group of serious hunter-gatherers that we see. They come into the Americas sometime around, they are in the Americas, let me correct myself, around 13,000 years ago. They're around for 500 to 1,000 years, depending on where you are in the continent.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
The Clovis point is the so-called smoking gun of the whole extinction scenario, all right? Okay, so we've got our two empirical tests. We should see lots of kill sites and the animals should all go extinct basically simultaneously, coincident with these Clovis groups, okay? All right, so the first test. We have looked at all of the claimed...
The Ancients
Ice Age America
In the last, oh, let's make it a decade, it has completely changed our understanding. It's been a remarkable sea change. Look, I'm an archaeologist. I've got rocks. Occasionally, I got bones, but that's pretty much it. If I want to do population history, if I want to know who these people are, where they came from, who they're related to, how often they got together, Did they survive?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Sites for which it is said humans are responsible for the death of one of these giant animals. And there's about almost 100 of them. Of those claimed sites, only 16 of them actually give clear, compelling, and secure evidence that people were responsible for the death or the scavenging of the animal that was found there.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
There's another element of that, which is that of those 16 kill sites, there's only mammoth, mastodon, gompothere, which is a form of mastodon, camel, and horse. Camel, wow. Yeah, Pleistocene camels. Pretty cool, huh? So there's only five of the 38 genera. have been found in these sites. What about the other 33?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
We have absolutely no evidence of any kind of interaction of humans with these animals. Then the second issue, the timing issue. What we see is that most of these animals are actually not well dated. We know that only a limited number of them have radiocarbon dates. And of that limited number, less than half of all those animals
The Ancients
Ice Age America
survive of those 38 genera, survive up until the time humans arrive, which means that some of them may have been gone long before people actually showed up on the landscape. So, how could they be responsible for the disappearance of an animal that happened 6,000 years before they even got there? There's a couple more pieces to that, okay?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
So, the timing issue doesn't work, the kill site issue, not enough, right? We also know what extinctions might look like in terms of the kill site record. And let me explain. Humans have been hunting bison for 12,000, 13,000 years. And they've been hunting them in sometimes large numbers.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
There are sites in Colorado that are 10,000 years old for which we have 190 bison that got stampeded into an arroyo and died a horrible death. I mean, you've got skeletons that are on their backs and they were clearly riding around, but they were then piled on by three or four other layers of bison. It must have been a terrible way to go.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
There's a site in southeastern Wyoming, it's a sinkhole where an estimated 10,000 or more bison were stampeded into the sinkhole repeatedly over several centuries. And yet, after all that intensive hunting, bison are still around. So here we have a record of
The Ancients
Ice Age America
heavy-duty almost, I hesitate to use the term industrial scale, but heavy-duty hunting of a species for 12,000 years, but it didn't go extinct. And yet people claim that these 38 genera of animals for which we have only 16 sites giving us evidence that they were hunting went extinct and they call that or they blame that on humans, that seems kind of unlikely.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Lots of stuff is happening at the end of the Pleistocene. We've got an increase in the amount of incoming solar radiation, a rapid rise in atmospheric CO2. We've got warmer climates. Patterns of seasonality are changing. So we're getting, in some areas... which had been sort of relatively mild winters, relatively mild summers. We're now getting really, really cold winters, really hot summers.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
We're changing moisture regimes. Ecosystems that had been in place for literally thousands of years are fragmenting because in response to these changes in the climate, species are going off in different directions depending on their ecological tolerances and their thresholds, right? You've got feedback effects because when megafaunal populations die off, they're no longer clearing out
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Did descendants of theirs survive to the present? Or did they disappear? I can't do that. I can't do that with rocks. I can't do that with bones. But with ancient DNA, I can. And since 2014, I've been fortunate to be involved in quite a number of the papers that that have explored human population history. That's really what we're talking about here.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
certain types of vegetation from an environment. So you've got changing habitats, you've got changing competitive relationships. So lots of different things are happening in the environment. The real tough question is how do you link that to the processes that would have led to the extinction of these animals.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And the first thing that you need to do is recognize there's not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution to this problem because each animal, each of those several dozen genera of large mammals, which includes actually a number of small animals, which includes, for that matter, trees going extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, turtles going extinct, snakes going extinct.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
You've got to figure out on a species by species basis, how are they being impacted by this whole constellation of changes that are taking place at the end of the Pleistocene? So what you have to do is figure out how are all these individual species responding to this constellation of changes that are occurring at the end of the Pleistocene? It has to be done on a species by species basis.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
What are their thresholds? What are their tolerances? What happened in the environment that caused them to spiral into extinction? Here's where ancient DNA comes in. We've not been able to figure this out. You can't learn this from the fossil record when you've got a bone here and a bone there, but you can use ancient DNA to look at changes in genetic diversity.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
You can use ancient DNA to measure demographic or population size changes. You can basically, if you get a DNA record through time, and this is something that we're actively working on at the Center for Geogenetics, you can measure, you can actually start to see when species begin to spiral down toward extinction.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
When they begin to basically lose population, you start to see inbreeding, you start to see changes in reduction in genetic diversity. You can see that the vegetation, and this goes back to something we talked about earlier in the podcast, you can see when the vegetation that had been supporting them for tens of thousands of years is no longer around.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
So with ancient DNA, we are finally going to get past the impasse that we've long had. Blaming extinctions on humans is just a kind of a simple-minded answer, and it doesn't work. It's actually hard work to figure out the link between the climate changes and the extinction of these animals. And that's work that's all in front of us, but work that's being actively done.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
First Peoples in a New World, Populating Ice Age America. And it's published by Cambridge University Press. It's actually in a second edition, came out in 2021. As for all of the late breaking DNA work, well, stay tuned. Maybe if we have this conversation again in a couple, three years, we'll be able to update your listeners.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Ancestry, relatedness, admixture among different population groups. With ancient genomic evidence, we can do that. And so this is answering questions that I as an archaeologist have had for many years. about, again, who they were, where they came from, who they're related to, what are the ancestral populations that contributed to the group that would ultimately make their way into the Americas.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Well, absolutely right. Not only can you, of course, extract DNA from animal bones, you can extract DNA from sediment. A gram of sediment, and this is just mind-blowing stuff, a gram of sediment contains literally billions, that's billions with a B, DNA fragments in just a gram of sediment. And in those fragments, you've got the ecosystem.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
So you can trace what plants are growing on the landscape at that instant, what animals are passing over and shedding skin or doing their business, right? Every time a mammoth would drop one of those, well, gigantic mammoth poops, that DNA gets worked into the sediment.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And so there have been some really phenomenal studies, and this is even more recent than a lot of the human DNA, in which, well, in one particular study, for example, we were able to track the last 50,000 years of Arctic vegetation and animal communities. And among the things that came out of that work
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And this is work that was done in concert with and under the direction of my collaborator at the University of Copenhagen, Eski Willerslev. We were able to show, for example, that mammoth, woolly mammoth, right, survived up until... around 10 or 11,000 years ago across most of the Arctic region, right? We had samples that were literally, you know, sort of circle the Northern hemisphere.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
We had samples from North America. We had samples from Northern Europe. We had samples from Northern Asia. And one of the just astonishing finds that came out of that work was that mammoth, as the Pleistocene is coming to an end, of course, are going extinct across virtually the entire Arctic, except in far northern Siberia.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
That's the exact correct term, because what happened is, and we know this from the vegetation record that we have in that sediment DNA, is that for all intents and purposes, in terms of the vegetation... The Pleistocene didn't end until 4,000 years ago.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Now, let me just add something because I suspect there'll be savvy listeners out there who will say, well, we've always known that mammoths survived on these islands in the Arctic seas. And that's true, right? But these were mammoths that survived on the mainland, right? The mainland of what's now the Timur Peninsula up until around 4,000 years ago when the vegetation finally...
The Ancients
Ice Age America
changed from that sort of mammoth step these animals favored to the vegetation that we have in that region today. So again, DNA in all its forms, ancient forms, whether from sediment or from bone, has been just a sea change.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Well, so the Ice Age proper, for all those geologists out there listening, it goes back 2 million years. Wow. But it was never sort of frozen the entire time. It was never that we had ice sheets. The Ice Age goes in cycles, where you have glaciers advancing, glaciers retreating.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
In terms of our story, the story of the Americas and people coming in and animals going extinct, we're really talking about the last, say, 30,000 years. Because starting around 30,000 years ago, we start to see glaciers building up over what's now Canada and expanding. And they will expand basically in all directions and ultimately will reach what's known as the last glacial maximum.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
That's the period of which ice was at its greatest extent on the landscape. And that last glacial maximum The dates vary depending on who you ask, but we're talking about, say, oh, 24,000 years ago up until around 18,000, 19,000 years ago. We don't need to be terribly precise about it. But that was the window of time when the ice was at its maximum. It was coldest.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
globally, as well as in North America, this was also the time when sea levels were at their lowest worldwide. And we know why that is. If you're building a glacier over North America, and at the same time building one over Northern Europe, the so-called Fenoscandian ice sheet, basically what you're doing is you're interrupting the hydrological cycle.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
The hydrological cycle, just put it in very simplistic terms, you've got evaporation from the ocean, clouds move over the land, they rain, the water drains into rivers, it goes back into the ocean. Okay? Real simple. Well, simplistic actually, but for our purposes, that'll work, right? If you stop that water by freezing it on land, it doesn't get back into the ocean. What happens?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Ocean levels go down. And the amount that they've gone down is going to vary geographically. because of a bunch of things that are related to gravitational forces, the pull of an ice sheet, continental shelves, mass. But on average, it's going to be about 130 meters lower than it is today, okay?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
What that does, of course, is it exposes shallow continental shelf, continental margins, and those become land, right? areas that are now underwater or land. And that includes, of course, the continental shelf that lies underneath the Bering Sea. So that's northwest? Indeed, indeed. That's Alaska area. It's only, you know, if you go out to the Bering Sea today, it's only about 52 meters.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
That sea level is about 52 meters above what's the continental shelf below it. So all you have to do is drop sea level 52 meters and you can walk from Asia to To America. You can walk from Siberia to Alaska, okay? All right.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
So we assume, and there's no reason to doubt, that the way in which humans got here, and in fact, the way in which animals over time may have come to the Americas, is that during these episodes where you have a lot of ice on land, there were these bridges, these land bridges. And so people came across. But at the same time, let me just give you a quick... geography of the ice sheets themselves.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
There's two major ice sheets in North America. There's the Laurentide ice sheet, which extends from what's present-day northern North America down to Central Ohio. I don't know if that's going to work for all of your audience, but basically past the Canadian-US border. Yes.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And it goes from Newfoundland and Labrador all the way across Canada and laps up against the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains. That's one big ice sheet, and it's literally kilometers thick. On the other side of the Rocky Mountain spine, you've got the Cordilleran Ice Sheet. And these are a series of mountain glaciers that come down from high elevation and coalesce to form an ice sheet.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
And that extends from the western edge of the Rocky Mountains down to the Pacific coast. So you've walked across from Asia, Siberia into Alaska, but then you're going to have to stop because you've got those two big ice sheets between you and the rest of North America.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Yes, exactly. Good. Thank you. I should have clarified that. Yeah. Alaska is a cul-de-sac. as it were, right? It's a dead end. You can get into Alaska because Alaska was glaciated along the Aleutian Islands and in Southern Alaska, it was glaciated on top of the Brooks Range in sort of Northern Alaska, but otherwise it was ice-free, okay?
The Ancients
Ice Age America
So you walk across the land bridge, you get into Alaska and you're thinking, you know, you're checking your watch and you're thinking, I could be in Miami, Florida if I just keep moving, right? But no, you can't because the glacial conditions that produce that land bridge by reducing the sea level at the same time are an obstruction.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Now, what that means is that it sort of sets some general parameters for when people could have come in, because it basically means that if we're assuming that they walked across, and at this time period, that's the most likely scenario, they could either come in after the glaciers have started to expand and sea level has dropped at least 52 meters, and before it has, the ice sheets, that is, have completely obstructed the route south,
The Ancients
Ice Age America
Or they have to wait until after the ice sheets begin to melt. Because when the ice sheets begin to melt as the world is warming at the end of the ice age, you've got a couple of routes that will open up that will take you from that cul-de-sac where you've been parked for however many centuries or millennia down into what we refer to here in the States as the lower 48, right? The lower 48 states.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
One of those routes is along the Pacific coast and it appears to be ice free starting around 17,000 years ago, but probably for sure by around 16,000 years ago. And then there's the so-called ice free corridor, which opens when the Laurentide and the Cordilleran ice sheets begin to melt and there opens between them.
The Ancients
Ice Age America
an unglaciated route down to the south, an unglaciated corridor down to the south. This is like a corridor, isn't it? A narrow route almost.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Severus wurde in einer Armeemutinie getötet und sein Nachfolger ist nur ein Soldat. Er ist kein Nobel, er ist gar nicht aufgewachsen. Das Einzige, was der Historiker Augustus über ihn sagt, ist, dass er acht Fuß sechs ist, was etwas ungewöhnlich aussieht. Aber Maximinus Thrax ist einfach ein Soldat, der charismatisch genug war, um andere Soldaten mit ihm zu verabschieden. Acht Fuß sechs?
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Whenever you say a fact that comes from the Historia Augusta, it always requires according to the Historia Augusta.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
He's a big, impressive man. And that seems to be his qualification. There must have been more to it, but we don't get any clear sense. He's just a soldier who's rallying the soldiers and they hail him emperor.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Einer der großen Features der ganzen Krise. Du sprichst von einem 50-jährigen Zeitraum. Es gibt ungefähr 25 offizielle Könige und ungefähr das gleiche Anzahl von großen Usurpern. Also ist es ein unglaublicher imperialer Umgang. Der mittlere Wachstum ist etwa zwei Jahre. Die Mehrheit dieser Amperen sind Soldaten-Amperen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Sie werden also von der Armee verheiratet, manchmal nur von der Teil der Armee, die sie kennen. Man hat also viele zivilistische Kriege zwischen verschiedenen Teilen der Armee. Diese sind nicht Menschen wie... Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, im 2. Jahrhundert. Keiner von ihnen sind Empere, die sich auf Kultur und Kunst konzentrieren.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Fast keiner von ihnen hat Zeit, sich ein Bild von sich selbst zu zeigen. Sie sind Soldaten. Und es ist wert zu sagen, dass ein paar von ihnen klar gute Soldaten sind. Auch einige, die verlieren, sind klar kompetente militärische Leiter. But in a sense that's all they are. The definition of a Roman Emperor never used to be just a good soldier.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Yet a lot of these 3rd century emperors, that's all that really defines them.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
There are no dynasties here. Of those 25 emperors, one maybe died of natural causes. Wow. Andererseits, ein paar Krankheiten, die meisten von ihnen werden ermordet, ein paar sterben auf dem Kampfplatz. Das ist das, was in diesem Zeitpunkt passiert. Egal, wie du die schlechten Aspekte der Prosperität ausdrückst, es gibt einige Aspekte der Kultur.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Wenn du nur über imperialen Macht sprichst, ist das der größte Zeitpunkt der Krise in der romanischen Geschichte.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Ja, so weit wie wir wissen, macht Maximilianus niemals nach Rom. Es ist nicht klar, aber im Grunde genommen hat die Armee ihn gefeiert. Aber der römische Senat, die noch wichtig sind, nicht so wichtig, wie sie es damals waren, die römische Republik zu sagen, aber sie sind die reichsten leitenden Nobler.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Der Senat hat keinen Interesse daran, diesen Art von König zu haben, also feiern sie ihre eigenen. Who then gets murdered, so they hail another one, who's also going to get murdered, before Maximinus Thrax himself gets murdered. And then we get the grandson of one of the predecessors until he gets murdered.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
I mean, there are approximately seven emperors between 235 and 244, depending on who you count as an emperor. So Thrax never actually has authority. Und das ist einer der rekurrenden Themen der dritten Jahrhundertkrise. Und das ist, warum es eine der schwersten Dinge zu beurteilen ist. Ist die römische Empire anstrengend, weil sie externe Druck hat, wie die Persien?
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Oder ist es anstrengend, weil die konstanten zivilen Kriege und die Verlängerung der imperialen Autorität die Empire verringern? In der Realität ist es ein Hühnchen-Eig-Szenario. Welches denkst du, kommt als erstes?
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
There are a few major battles. Mostly this is war. Nicht eine Zivilwahl im Sinne von, sagen wir, der englischen Zivilwahl oder der amerikanischen Zivilwahl, wo es alles über die Gesellschaft konsumiert. Im Grunde genommen sind das individuelle Arme, individuelle Barracks-Empere, die kämpfen über, wer gewinnt.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Also für die meisten der normalen Menschen ist es nur eine Frage, wie viel ihrer Lande von einem Armee, das durchführt, verpustet wird. Die meisten der Empere werden ermordet. So one leader's officers will decide, no, the other leader's better, so we'll kill ours. In a few cases, there are actually defeats on a battlefield.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And obviously, if you win a battle against a potential rival, that rival does not survive. Perhaps a closer parallel would therefore be, say, the War of the Roses. in denen es nicht so große Kriege gibt, sondern viele Menschen in England, die nur warten, zu sehen, wen wir jetzt als König oder Königin nennen sollten.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Some of them really do just seem to be, oh look, I have a dagger, let's create a job vacancy. There doesn't seem to be a lot of forward planning. But there are actually some who quite clearly have thought through how you need a support base. Im Grunde genommen ist die Ironie darin, dass die zwei erfolgreichsten von diesen Usurpern überhaupt nie Emporer geworden sind.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Was sie tatsächlich gemacht haben, war, Regionen zu verbreiten, die ihnen jetzt loyal waren. Also im Herzen der dritten Jahrhundertkrise, also in den 260er Jahren, als es wirklich so aussah, dass das Empire zerbrechen könnte, gab es tatsächlich drei Regierende in dem, was das romische Empire war.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
The official emperor is Gallienus, but Gallienus only rules the central bit, so North Africa, Italy, the Balkans. Out in the east, the Persian attacks have got so bad that a local eastern leader has united most of Syria, Palestine, Egypt in his own breakaway kingdom. Because he'll lead the defense.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Exactly. This is Odenarthus, the leader who founds the Palmyran Kingdom and then Zenobia, his widow. We actually had beautiful monuments from this. Unfortunately, Palmyra was badly hit by ISIS back in 2015. But Gallienus clearly made the conscious choice. It's not worth fighting Odenarthus. Odenarthus is doing the job that needs doing in the East. Und genau das selbe passiert im Westen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Wir bekommen also das sogenannte Gallic Empire, das ist ein Ausgangsgruppe, die originalerweise von einem romanischen General namens Posthumus geführt wurde, der sich an seinem Teppich mit Britannien, Gaul und Spanien verbindet. Aber genau wie Odenarthus, was Posthumus tut, ist, die lokalisierte Verteidigung zu bieten, die das zentralisierte Empire nicht liefert.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Posthumus handelt also um die Rhine-Frontiere. Both Odonathus and Posthumus are very successful, but also never manage to create long-term stability. They're both eventually murdered. And once the central empire has strengthened, they take those regions back again.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Denn es gibt zwei große Regionen im westlichen romänischen Empire, wo kein großer fremder Threat schießen kann. Einer ist Britannien, der andere Nordafrika. In both cases, they've got slightly problematic people. In the case of Britain, it's in Scotland. In the case of North Africa, it's on the desert fringe with the Berbers. But in neither case is there a serious invasion threat.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
So you can have the prosperity. You can therefore use it as a resource base. Because that's of course the great challenge. It's one thing for a user to say, oh, I'm emperor. But if the tax revenue isn't coming in, dann hast du keine Ressourcen, um die Armee zu bezahlen, um deine Unterstützer leistbar zu machen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Also benutzt Posthumus Britannien und die Teile von Gaul und Spanien, die nicht wirklich getroffen wurden, als seine wichtigen Basis für Ressourcen. Odenarthus im Osten, Palmyra ist eine Handelsstadt, und Ägypten ist das reichste Land auf der ganzen Karte, und es ist im Großen und Ganzen nicht beeinflusst. Wenn du also diese Ressourcen hast, Du kannst dann etwas aufbauen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Gallienus versucht, Italien, Nordafrika zu verwandeln, als er seine Rückkehr für den selben Zweck beginnt.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Yes. Was die dritte Jahrhundertkrise macht, ist, dass es der erste echte Punkt ist, zumindest externe, dass die römische Empire auf alle drei großen Frontiere gleichzeitig gespeichert wurde. Britannien und Nordafrika kommen nicht in die Reckung. Es gibt drei große Frontiere, wo die Römer einen großen Angriff haben können. Der Rhine-River, der Danube-River und der Osten.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And for most of the second century, the German frontiers had remained stable until it cracks wide open back in the 160s under Marcus Aurelius. He then restabilized it. Septimius Severus works hard to stabilize it as well. So in the 230s, the main threats in the East. But in the 250s and 260s, three major Germanic groups become a threat and two of them are brand new.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
The only one for whom we have a previous track record is what's collectively known as the Alemanni, which is just really a collective name for Germanic peoples, usually around where the Rhine and Danube don't quite meet. What's completely changed the reckoning is on the Rhine River a new people have emerged. V.a. um die niedrigen Länder, Belgien, die Niederlande, und das sind die Franken.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Das sind die Franken? Also das ist, als die Franken emergten? Die Franken erscheinen zuerst in unserem Rekord als eine deutlich distincte Gruppe in den 250er-Jahren. Und in den 240er-Jahren, für das erste Mal, treffen wir die Gothen. Denn die Gothen, die ursprünglich von irgendwo in der Baltischen Region kamen, sind im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert in die Ukraine geflüchtet.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And then, as the 3rd century progresses in the 240s through to the 260s, Gothic pressure is growing on the Danube. So you've got Goths raiding across the Black Sea and down over the Danube. You've got Alamanni and Franks raiding across the Rhine. And then you've also got the rise of the Sasanian Persians. Arguably no emperor, no matter how good, could actually have coped with that treble threat.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Ja. Eine Sache, die ich immer aufmerksam mache, ist, dass wir viele Könige haben. Die meisten von ihnen sind sehr intelligent, sehr aktive Männer. Rom ist nicht eine Gesellschaft, die sich runterliegt und stirbt. Das siehst du wieder, wenn du zu dem Verlust des römischen Empires im Westen des 5. Jahrhunderts kommst. Es fällt nicht, weil sie einfach abgeben und stoppen kämpfen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Die Römer wissen, wie sie die germanischen Triebe schießen. The key is you need enough of the resources to exploit the fact that your equipment and training is usually better, and crucially that you normally on a battlefield have reserves, and very few tribal armies remember the importance of having a reserve.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Maximinus Thrax does what he was originally hailed emperor to do, which would stabilize that German frontier. The problem is he'll never secure overall power. Posthumus Odonathus. Do what the local peoples look to them to do, which was protect the Rhine or the East.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And a number of the emperors, even quite short-lived ones, fight seriously hard and actually sometimes quite effectively against the Goths.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Nein, die Gothen waren eine neue Threat. Sie waren eine neue Stufe von Threat auf der Danube. Also plauerten ihre initialen Angriffe in die romanischen Provinzen der Balkan. Aber der König Decius hat tatsächlich gewonnen, mehrere Kämpfe gegen sie zu gewinnen, um sie zurückzuführen. Dann wird er in einem Teil einer Angriffsschachtel getroffen und ist getötet.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Und er ist der erste romanische König, der jemals von einem fremden Feind auf einem Kampffeld getötet wurde. Die Königinnen sind schon in den Kriegskriegen gestorben, aber Decius in 2.5.1 ist der erste König, der auf einem Kriegskrieg gegen einen externen Feind gestorben ist. Mit dem Ergebnis, dass Gallienus, der dann effektiv übergeht, gegen die Gothen kämpft.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Gallienus regiert eigentlich für 15 Jahre. Er ist die einzige Person, die in der 3. Jahrhundertszeit zwei Figuren erreichen kann. Und es gibt eine Debatte über, ob er gewinnt. the major victory against the Goths, or did Claudius II, because it happened in the year in which Gallienus is finally murdered, 268. Gallienus is not popular in our sources.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Claudius II Gothicus was claimed by Constantine, so the first Christian emperor, 50 odd years later, as his ancestor. So the accounts we get of Claudius Gothicus glorify Claudius in part because of, and as far as we can tell, totally fictitious claim of ancestry. But given that he takes the title, he must have certainly won some battles.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And crucially, after Claudius Gothicus, the Goths are not a threat again in the 3rd century. Whatever's happened in 268, 269 has pushed the Goths back.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Sicherlich hilft es nicht, der romischen Armee konstante zivilische Kriege zu haben. Nach allem, der echte Schaden von zivilen Kriegen ist, wie viel es dein eigenes Militär zerstört. Aber eines der Probleme mit der Frontier-Polizei der römischen Empire, wenn es um die Deutschen geht, ist, dass es viel einfacher für die Römer war, mit organisierten tribalen Units zu handeln.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Denn dann kannst du Verträge mit Führern signen. Du kannst versuchen, ihre Erfolge zu beeinflussen. Aber eine Seiteffekte davon ist, dass die Größe der germanischen tribalen Blöcke auf den Ecken des Empires erhöht ist. Wir haben Tacitus' Germania, geschrieben am Ende des 1. Jahrhunderts AD, und Tacitus beschreibt viele kleine Triebe.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
The Alamanni Federation seems to have emerged in part because it was easier for a larger federation to try and get things from the Romans. So it's partly the enemies right on the frontier who know the Romans are learning from the Romans. And then you've got the Goths. who are a distinct and larger group.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And like most groups that have just moved, are still in the process of stabilizing, which means they're particularly warlike. Certainly the Goths seem to be much more of a threat than the Franks, at least in the middle years of the 3rd century. The Franks are there, but as far as we can tell, they're really exploiting the Alemanni, destroying the Rhine frontier, and the Franks just raid over it,
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Die Golfs, auf der anderen Seite, sind tatsächlich in Asia Minor geraten. Sie haben die Stadt Athens gesackt. Ich meine, die Golfs sind eine echte Bedrohung, bis sie endlich zurückgefahren sind.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Die Burschen, also sie sind originalerweise am Ende der Severan-Dynastie gestorben. Cyrus Alexander versucht, zurück zu kämpfen, verliert und das ist tatsächlich das, was die Mutiny ermöglicht, dass er in 235 getötet wird. Von dann an sind die Burschen auf dem Weg. Ardashir ist klar ein sehr effektiver Regierer. Er ist derjenige, der die Dynastie zusammenbringt.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Und dann ist sein Sohn, Shapur, sowohl gut als auch besser. Also ist die Druckung nie wirklich aufgelöst. Schapel will die Prästige der österreichischen Territorien gewinnen. Sie haben diese Ideologie der Konquist. Durch die 240er-Jahre stellt Schapel immer noch die Druck. Aber dann gibt es auch die Romer, die versuchen, mit mehreren Frontiers zu kämpfen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Und so, was tatsächlich passiert, nachdem Decius getötet wird, ist, dass für das erste Mal zwei romanische Könige die Empire effektiv in eine klar definierte Dividende gespart haben. Es gab vorher gemeinsame Regierende, Marcus Aurelius und Lucius Verus, zum Beispiel. But what Valerian and his son Gallienus do is actually define areas of responsibility. It's a father and son, interesting.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
So it's a father-son combination. Valerian, the father, takes the east, because that's the immediate threat with Persia, and leaves Gallienus to try and deal with the Danube Rhine. So Valerian goes off to try and face Shapur, but the Sasanian army is a serious threat. It's a combination of very heavy cavalry, solid archers and then a fair number of sometimes unreliable infantry.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And the Roman army is not at its strongest. It's too divided in different places. They can't win. Indeed, in the entire 3rd century crisis, they're not going to win a pitched battle against the Sasanians. It's not going to happen until Diocletian and the Tetrarchy. Valerian versuchte sein Bestes und er war ein anderer Soldat.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Ich meine, er ist ein erfahrener Soldat, ein guter, aber er ist ausgematcht und sein Armee ist ausgematcht. Also versucht er zu negotieren. Das Ergebnis ist ein Art Schmuck, das aus der Hand kommt.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Und sobald Decius der erste König wurde, um von einem fremden Feind getötet, setzt Valerian seinen eigenen Rekord, indem er der erste römische König war, der von einem fremden Feind gefangen wurde und nach Persien entfernt wurde, im Grunde als ein Gerichtsmonument. Und er wird in der Gefängnis sterben.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Und laut unseren Gründen ist er dann etwas schmutzig, verpackt, grün gefärbt und in den main persischen Tempel gesetzt. Und wir haben tatsächlich ein Bild von der Führung von Valerian von Shapur auf Shapurs Rock-Cut-Monument. Mit Shapur auf seinem Horsen und Valerian mit seinen Händen verbunden.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Die Flasche ist nach wie vor endemisch. Sie ist ein Faktor der alten Welt. Man hat immer Wälder von Krankheiten. Aber es gibt bestimmte Punkte, an denen die Flaschen so prominent in unseren Ressourcen werden, dass sie klar über all das sind, was normal ist. Es gab also die größte Flasche, die im 2. Jahrhundert die Flasche von Galen genannt wurde. Possibly smallpox, it's an ongoing argument.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Actually identifying the specific disease is always a problem with these ancient epidemics. And then in the 3rd century, because it is so unstable, even what would probably in previous times have been relatively minor epidemic outbreaks are having a bigger impact. Because there's less strength. Valerians army gets ravaged by plague before he gets captured.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Claudius Gothicus, as you've already alluded to, that appears to be his cause of death. He may well have died of illness rather than been murdered. We're not always certain, particularly with the very rapid turnover, but it's another factor in imperial mortality.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And obviously it's also going to be weakening wider society, manpower, and that means both the army but also the tax base, and taxation is getting harder and harder to maintain. But taxation is what separates the Roman Empire from, say, smaller, later medieval kingdoms. It's when you've got a solid tax system that you can have a professional standing army and try and control it.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
So the instability of the army is linked to that wider issue of population plague. Famine.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
It's an interesting feature of those plagues in the case of Carthage and Alexandria. The reason we're well informed on them is we've got Christian writers for whom this is a major concern. Now, in fact, Christianity is growing right through the third century, not least because Christians care for victims. And they care for victims regardless of their religion.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
They don't make that distinction when it's a plague victim or an orphan. Are they Christian? That's not the point. They need to be supported. So we hear about these plagues from Christian bishops who are actively promoting support for them. Cyprian of Carthage is simply the best documented, because we've got a lot of Cyprian's letters and treatises.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
It helped, of course, that North Africa wasn't being greatly disrupted.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And particularly documents his own support methods, because... If we're thinking of this as a great period of dislocation, well, it's interesting that Kyprian can write letters to everywhere in the Mediterranean. So it's not actually destroying the communication network. Kyprian can write to Spain, to Gaul, to Alexandria, to Antioch.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
It's an economic crash for the imperial structure. This is where I think you'd get a lot of different answers from different scholars here. Because if we're focusing on the imperial structure, so the tax system, which relies on a stable coinage, it's collapsing. Buying things based on coins, well, debasement means inflation. If coins are worthless, you need more coins to pay for them.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
So inflation is going to be a major problem. But a lot of the Roman Empire is still an agricultural world where people are largely living by subsistence agriculture. Now, as long as an army doesn't march over your fields, you can carry on doing that. So what seems to be really crashing is the empire-wide economic structures that allowed for a higher standard of living.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Without a good coinage system, trade becomes problematic. The Silk Road is in a state of current flux, not least because the Sasanian Persians are still trying to work out exactly how best to profit from that famous great trade route that heads out all the way to China. And the Red Sea as well, the connection with India, does that continue?
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And the naval routes, so the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf routes are still trading. But the main thing that the Romans sent east was actually gold and silver coinage, because they didn't have the spices, the silk. And if you don't have that coinage, So that kind of luxury trade is going to diminish.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
But what's likely to happen in, say, an Egyptian village is now you're just going to revert to a barter economy. Was ist die Wertschätzung zwischen einem Schaf und einem Vogel? Wie viel Futter gibt es für diese Pfanne? Und die meisten der romänischen Empire können auf diesem lokalisierten Niveau überleben. Es ist also nicht so, dass es einen kolossalen Verlust in den Lebensstandards gibt.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Wir sehen keinen riesigen Verlust in der Bevölkerung. Die romänische Empire ist bis zum Ende des dritten Jahrhunderts wahrscheinlich noch um die 60-Millionen-Mark. That's where I'd temper it. Was it a great time to be alive? Well, especially if you were anywhere near the battlefields, definitely not.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Aber für viele der römischen kleinen Landwirte, also in Britannien, in Spanien, in Nordafrika, in Ägypten, aber auch in Asia Minor, können sie weitergehen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Es ist in vielen Fällen der Rückgangspunkt zwischen dem, was wir den klassischen Weltraum nennen, und dem frühen medievalen Weltraum. Viele Universitäten, wenn sie klassische Geschichte lernen, stoppen am Ende des 2. Jahrhunderts mit dem romänischen Empire, weil der 3. Jahrhundert so komplex, so verwirrend ist.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
The roots are there. One suspects the number of people using them is diminishing. This world's becoming localized. So you get the Gallic Empire, the Palmyran Empire. So you're getting more local distinctions there. Someone like Kiprian can still send messages with letters across these routes, so the routes are potentially available.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
But they're nowhere near as safe as, say, they were in the 2nd century, when you've got the 50 years of near total stability. And it's going to be more stable again in the 4th century. So the roots don't disappear. They're there to be revived when the great recovery fully takes effect. But during the heart of the third century, so the worst years, which is basically 250 to 270. 20 whole years.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
The other great theme of this period is religion and the role religion is playing. Now, in older scholarship, and there's a famous book called The Age of Anxiety, that this is a period of superstition of different views. Actually, what seems to be happening is it's an age of quite active intellectual philosophy. Und auch unvergesslich Menschen, die Antworten in verschiedene Richtungen suchen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Und es ist keine Frage, dass die Krise einen Einfluss hat. Und Sie sehen es vor allem mit der Christianity. Denn die Christen waren eine kleine Minorität Anfang des 3. Jahrhunderts und immer noch eine kleine Minorität am Ende. Aber Anfang des 3. Jahrhunderts sind sie vielleicht 2-3% der Bevölkerung. Am Ende des 3. Jahrhunderts sind es mehr als 10%. Es gibt oder nimmt 6 Millionen Christen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Und was daraus entsteht, ist das, was wir den späteren romänischen Empire nennen, die Welt der späten Antiquität. Viele Klassiker kommen also nicht dazu.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Christianity grew in this period. Now, partly that is this emphasis on charity, welfare in a time of crisis, of plague, of famine. The Christians provide support. But it's also very noticeable that this is the same period where for the first time Christians are really attracting detailed imperial attention. Wir denken oft an Christen, die ständig von der romänischen Empire verletzt werden.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Aber tatsächlich, für die ersten 250 oder so Jahre, können Christen überall leicht verletzt werden. Also haben wir große lokale Verbrechen von Gewalt. Aber was nie tatsächlich passiert ist, war ein umweltweiter Angriff auf die Christianity. Selbst, sagen wir, Nero, einer der wenigen Empressen, die wirklich versuchen, zu verletzen, macht es im Stadtgebiet von Rom. Aber Decius,
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
while he's trying to fight the Goths, is responsible for what becomes the first persecution of Christians. He's not even reigning that long. He's only got a two-year reign. And yet he's very prominent in, say, Eusebius Caesar's church history for this reason. Um Decius zu kritisieren, denken wir nicht, dass er die Versuchung der Christen auslösen wollte.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Was er tatsächlich glaubte, war, dass diese Krise wegen der göttlichen Angst zu tun hat. Nach allem, fast jeder in diesem Weltraum, Pagan oder Christ, glaubt an die göttliche Providenz, dass die Wille der Götter eine wichtige Rolle spielt. Decius beurteilt also, dass jeder in der Empire vertreten wird. Jeder, um seine Piety zu zeigen, lässt die göttliche Unterstützung gewinnen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
The problem is, there is one particular group who will not sacrifice to the old gods, so Decius' order to sacrifice becomes the Decian persecution. Now, Decius then gets killed by the Goths, so the persecution stops. What's interesting is, six years later, Valerian decides that's the right answer again. We need divine support. So you get the Valerian persecution of the Christians.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And unlike Decius, Valerian definitely meant it. So he targets clergy. Kyprian gets caught up in this. He targets churches as far as they exist, because they're really just small house churches. But it's a targeted persecution. Then Valerian becomes a Persian monument and Gallienus abandons it.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
I mean, you can see how the Christian writers are going to treat the fact that the two people who tried a persecution are Decius and Valerian. And then for the next 40 years, Christians just get left alone. Gallienus' View does seem to have been, there are bigger priorities than this.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And the subsequent emperors, like Aurelian, basically just ignore Christians unless they're forced to pay attention.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
I mean, it's one of the problems that still religious history is often treated in slight isolation from wider history. I mean, after all, the Christians have been there ever since Augustus, but they have been low profile except for those rare moments of persecution.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
The standard Roman view is the one that Trajan famously said to Pliny the Younger, which is, if you meet a Christian who insists on being Christian and won't then back down, you can go ahead and execute them, but don't look for them. ist Trajan's explicit instruction. Don't go looking. We're just otherwise going to let them get on with it.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And it's interesting that it was in the heart of the third century crisis that they changed that, which does suggest that Christians are becoming higher profile, as well as this great concern with what the Romans called the Pax Deorum, the peace of the gods, which the Christians are disrupting, well, by going around saying the gods don't exist.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Wenn man sich eine Karte des Regens von Gallienus anschaut, 253 bis 268 bis zum Herzen der Krise, sieht es so aus, als ob die Empire losgeht. Gaul, Britannien, Spanien gehen einen Weg, Palmaire geht den anderen Weg, Gallienus ist im Mittleren. Gallienus in unseren Gründen ist größtenteils enttäuscht.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Nichtsdestotrotz, weil er nicht den kleinsten Eindruck gemacht hat, seinen Vater von Persien zurückzubekommen. Aber Gallienus ist eigentlich der Anfang der Rückkehr. Was er konzentriert war, war in seinen Territorien, die imperialistische Administration zu bauen und vor allem die Armee zu reorganisieren, um eine viel stärkere Kavalierarmee zu haben und viel mobiler zu sein.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Now, by the time the Goths are beaten back by Gallienus and Claudius Gothicus, you're beginning to reap the benefits of that, and then the man who sees it through is Aurelian. Now, Aurelian only rules from 270 to 275, so it's not a hugely long reign. Aber trotzdem, in dieser Zeit hat Aurelian die Gothen gewonnen und beide Ausbrechergruppen zerstört.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Es hat geholfen, dass in beiden Fällen der ursprüngliche Founder von diesem Punkt aus ermordet wurde. Aber trotzdem hat Aurelian nach dem Ende seines Reiches fast das gesamte Empire zurückgezogen. at least on a map, to look as it had at the beginning. Only one territory is actually abandoned. It's the region of Dacia. So roughly speaking, modern Romania.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
So Trajan's conquest, the gold mines and everything, quite a rich province. Exactly. So the very last province that the Romans took and the only one beyond the Rhine and Danube. And basically Aurelian clearly decided you couldn't hold it. Not with the Goths moving into that region. So Dacia is the only region lost.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Absolut. Und man kann dazu noch sagen, dass es der schlechtestdokumentierte Zeitpunkt in der romanischen imperialen Geschichte ist. Das ist nicht, weil die Leute nicht geschrieben haben. Es ist nicht so eine Krise, dass niemand schreiben konnte, aber fast keine der Arbeiten überlebt. Also die letzten zwei wirklich guten oder soliden Historiker der früheren Zeit, Cassius Dio und Herodius,
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And then Aurelian gets murdered after what looks on paper like such a successful reign. The Historia Augusta simply summed up Aurelian by saying he was, quote, necessary rather than good, end quote, which suggests he was efficient, effective, and as soon as he'd done the job, enough people wanted him dead that he gets killed.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
With the result that you then now get another six emperors in the space of about five years, you get a massive new series of murders, Und dann endlich, die Rückkehr, die Gallienus und Aurelian begannen, wird geöffnet. because the last emperors of the true third century crisis are Carus and his children, Carinus and Numerium.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Now, according to our sources, Carus and at least one of his sons were struck by lightning. Oh, wow. That seems statistically unlikely, which suggests we may be dealing with a euphemism. And interestingly, the guy who was technically responsible for their safety endet als nächster König. Sein Name war Diakles. Er war ein balkanischer Pflanzer. Er ist durch die Räume gestorben.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Und er wird König Diakles, der einer der größten Könige der ganzen Geschichte des römischen Welt.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
I mean, it's one of the great things about the Praetorian Guard, the old imperial guard. They are responsible for the protection of the emperor and are directly responsible for more imperial deaths than any other single factor.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Und er hat diese Lektionen emphatisch gelernt. Und tatsächlich, die wichtige Lektion, die er gelernt hat, war ganz klar, bevor er die Macht erhielt. Wenn Dinge in Unruhe sind, ist das romische Empire einfach zu groß. You can't easily control it as one person. It doesn't matter where you are on the map. It's too big a map.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
So the first thing he does is appoint a co-ruler, another Balkan soldier who's risen through the ranks, who Diocletian knows he can trust, a man named Maximian. And they're going to share power. Und dann, für die nächsten fast zehn Jahre, halten sie die Kontrolle, Diocletian im Osten, Maximilian im Westen. Und dann hat Diocletian entschieden, dass eigentlich auch das nicht genug ist.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Nicht, wenn es eine Revolte in Britannien gibt, was passiert ist, nicht, wenn die Perser eine Bedrohung sind. Also, was Diocletian geschaffen hat, was in der Geschichte von Rom einzigartig war, ist das, was wir die Tetrarchie genannt haben, die Regel der Vier. So you still have Diocletian and Maximian, the two senior emperors, but they each now appoint a junior emperor, a Caesar.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
So Diocletian and Maximian are the Augusti, their title is Augustus, but Galerius is the Caesar to Diocletian and Constantius Chlorus is the Caesar to Maximian. Constantius Chlorus is the father of Constantine. And the reason he's done this is now you can have an imperial presence everywhere on the map.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
They stop in 229 and 238, respectively. We're not going to have another reliable narrative historian until Ammianus Marcellinus' surviving account begins in 354. So there's no historical narrative, even remotely contemporary, we can use. That's over 100 years where there's no narrative history.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Maximian kann den Rhein beobachten, während Konstantinus Chlorus den britischen Krieg von Carusius und Electus beobachten kann und sehr effektiv macht.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Diocletian kann sicherstellen, dass der Danube sicher bleibt und Galerius kann erreichen, was niemand im ganzen dritten Jahrhundert getan hat und die Sassanier gewinnen. For the first time, the Romans actually win a major pitched battle in 298. And that is in a sense the tribute to this organization. Because it's all now stabilized, they could give sufficient resources. The army had been built up.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
But the Tetrarchy may be unique. Almost everything else Diocletian did is actually what worked earlier on, just made better organized. So he used Gallienus' development of the mobile army. Smaller legions, the old big 5,000 plus man groups, you don't need those. You need small groups of about 1,000 men. But you need more forts so the frontiers can be stabilized.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
The tax system gets overhauled so that it's now effectively half barter. So it's half in kind, in goods, not just in coinage. So although the coinage is still a problem, the army supply system has been fixed. Die Regierungen, die Provinzen, werden verteilt. Diocletian hat die Anzahl der römischen Provinzen doppelt.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Er hat also kleinere administrativen Units geschaffen, weil erstens ihre Regierungen keine Bedrohung sind, aber zweitens können sie einen besseren Job machen, weil sie eine kleinere Region haben. Also alles, was er tut, ist, an früheren Modellen zu drücken, aber stabilisierend.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Was interessant ist, ist, dass er auch an einem früheren Modell drückte, das, man müsste sagen, nicht funktioniert hat und nicht für ihn funktioniert hat. Denn es liegt unter Diaklesien bei der großen Versuchung. Der letzte große imperialistische Paganer-Einsatz, um die Christentum zu zerstören, wurde im Jahr 303 eröffnet und fehlte.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Es ist sicherlich ein großer Veränderung. Was wir als das späte Romanen-Empire nennen, ist das remodellierte Empire von Diokletian, dann mit der Präsentation von der Christianity von Konstantinus hinweg. Es ist diese Kombination. Es ist schwer zu argumentieren, dass das die offiziellen Schwierigkeiten verursacht hat, die den folgenden Verlust verursachen würden.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
The later collapse of the Western Roman Empire, indeed all the disruption of the 5th century, there are some factors that come out of these developments, including the rise of Christianity, but then there are also factors that no one could have scripted, which is above all the arrival of the Huns, driving the Goths onwards on a scale that did not happen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Effektiv im dritten Jahrhundert haben die Romer ihren Worst-Case-Szenario getroffen, nämlich den Rein und Danube aus der Hand zu bringen, während man plötzlich den Riss eines neuen Empires im Osten bekommt. Und es hat sie sehr fast zerbrochen. Aber sie halten sich zusammen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Natürlich, wenn sie länger stabiler bleiben würden, würden sie dann eine noch stärkere Ressourcenbasis haben, in den vierten Jahrhundert. Oder tatsächlich, Im zweiten Jahrhundert, wenn sie friedlich sind, stagnieren sie tatsächlich.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
What we've got is we've got a church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, very useful, but obviously specifically focused on the church and tending to judge emperors by did they persecute. We've got a number of 4th century writers who wrote very short biographies of emperors and just give us a very basic outline. Und dann haben wir die eine Suche, die fast die gesamte dritte Jahrhundertkrise betrifft.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Also meine eigene Tendenz ist, zu argumentieren, dass das, was aus der dritten Jahrhundertkrise kommt, zumindest so gut organisiert und strukturiert ist, wie das Empire vorher. Es hat argumentativ ein etwas besseres System für die Unterstützung der Militär. Die Christenheit wird ein weiteres Lager der Organisation hinzufügen. Es wird auch einen viel stärkeren Einfluss auf Wohlfahrt hinzufügen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
But the empire is too big. The third century crisis demonstrated that, so will the later crises. A single person ruling the empire will actually be very rare in the last 150 years of Rome, because it is too large. You're too vulnerable. The basic structure was never able to cope against multiple shocks. The east-west divide. Now that is going to intensify over time.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
It's always there, partly linguistically. but it will potentially grow. And yet, if you took, say, Diocletians' provincial tax reforms, they're still there in Justinians' time in the Eastern Empire.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
So, you know, by the 6th century, they're still, I mean, indeed, ironically, they were still dating by Diocletians. In the 6th century it's why the man who came up with BCAD dating, a monk named Dionysius Exiguus. His original argument to the Bishop of Rome was, why are we still dating years from Diocletian, the man persecuted us.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Und das ist tatsächlich das, was den originalen Verabschiedungskalender verursacht. Dionysius Exiguus kommt mit einem estimierten, effektiv, Jahr des Herrn. Und so kriegst du den Wechsel zum Datingsystem, den der medievale Welt kennt. Aber Diocletian, die Organisation, die er verlassen hat, stärkte das Empire. So my own view would be, it's remarkable they survived this.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
The real question is, why couldn't they repeat this trick in the 5th century? You've got the same shattering effect happening, but Gallienus Aurelian were able to dig in and pull it back together. And a key part of that does seem to be that Posthumus and Odonathus never actually wanted to fully break away. They were proud of being part of a Roman orbit.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Whereas when you've got a much larger migration of Germanic peoples who are creating independent groups, then you do get the breakaway. But it's an awful lot more complex than that.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Aber das ist leider das Werk, das als Historia Augusta genannt wird. Ich dachte, du würdest das sagen. Das ist eine Kollektion von imperialen Biographien. Es wird also als »Lives of Emperors« geschrieben. Es wird von sechs verschiedenen Leuten zusammengearbeitet, die rund um das Jahr 300 zusammenarbeiten.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Es wird eigentlich fast sicherlich von einer Person geschrieben, die alle anderen sechs Personas entworfen hat und dies als literarische Übung macht, sowohl im späten 4. Jahrhundert als auch im frühen 5. Jahrhundert. Und es ist nicht nur so, dass er Personas kreiert, er inventiert Namen, er verweist Dokumente, er gibt Zitationen, die nicht existieren.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Basically, there is some genuinely useful material in the Historia Augusta. But finding it and identifying which bits you can trust has been a scholarly industry for a hundred years and has not stopped.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Genau. Und die Archäologie ist hier absolut wichtig. Sie ist immer in der alten Geschichte, aber besonders, wenn deine literarischen Ressourcen am besten unverantwortlich sind. Nicht nur, um Schaden zu beurteilen, sondern auch, um Dinge wie Populationsschiffen zu monitorieren. The debasement of the coinage? Can we see settlement patterns altering?
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
One of the key things actually from the archaeology is it confirmed that some areas of the Roman Empire are actually doing really well in the 3rd century crisis. So Britain famously seems to be reaching a peak of prosperity because Britain was far enough away that it wasn't touched by the crisis. North Africa is largely prosperous and the archaeology seems to bear that out.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Ja, und es würde helfen, wenn die Koinage besser qualifiziert wäre. Viele Leute, die später Coins verkauften, sammelten keine 3. Jahrhundertbeispiele. Sie waren nicht in guter Qualität. Ein wichtiger Aspekt der größeren Krise ist, dass sie mehr Geld benötigen, sobald die Empere unter Strain kommen. Was ist der einfachste Weg, mehr Geld zu kreieren? Man nimmt mehr Coins.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Aber die Unterschiede zwischen einem alten Coin und einer modernen 50-Piece sind, dass ein altes Coin seinen Metallkontent wert ist. Die Silber-Koinage des römischen Empires, am Anfang der dritten Jahrhundertkrise, war immer noch um 40 Prozent Silber. Bei 270 sind es weniger als 5 Prozent.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Wir finden also Coins, die technisch Silber-Coins sind, aber tatsächlich nur aus anderen Metallen hergestellt wurden. Wir haben auch Regeln, die von Empressen durchgeführt wurden, die beurteilen, dass Geldländer oder Geldausgaben die Coins nicht nehmen. Denn das ist natürlich das, was du tust, wenn du ein Geldverkäufer in der alten Welt bist. Du testest eine Karte, du zerstörst sie.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Du testest, kannst du sie zerstören? Sie sind tatsächlich sehr gut dabei, herauszufinden, ob eine Karte ihre echte Wertung verloren hat.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
After all, the original coins, the very first ones we have on record, are actually just lumps of gold with a stamp on them. Those go back to, indeed, earlier than the classical Greek period. The Romans have been minting coins, of course, for most of their history. But if you go back to, say, Augustus, the start of the Roman Empire, the gold and silver coinage is 90%.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
It's very high quality gold and silver. And it's going to be a real problem for the emperors after the third century to try and rebuild trust in the coinage. So Diocletian, who's the great figure who tries to rebuild the empire at the end of the crisis, never solves the problem of how to mint reliable coinage. It's Constantine who did, the first Christian emperor.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
And that's because a Christian emperor could melt down gold and silver statues from pagan temples. and gave him a supply of precious metal to rebuild the coinage.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Es klingt, als ob es 100 Jahre dauern sollte. Eigentlich ist die dritte Jahrhundertkrise von 235 bis 284. Also ist es im Mittelpunkt des Jahrhunderts eine Spannung von 50 Jahren. Denn die Zeit davor ist die Zeit der Severan-Dynastie, die letzte große Dynastie, die das Romane Empire für eine längere Zeit vor der Krise begann.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Genau. Der letzte der Severans ist Severus Alexander, der in 235 sterbt. Und seine Todeszeit ist meistens als erste Date betrachtet, am Anfang der Krise. In reality, three important things had happened under the Severans, which will have a major influence and are already having an influence on the crisis. One is the Severans placed more emphasis on the army than previous emperors had.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
So they're very strong on army support, which is giving the army greater say in who should be emperor. Der zweite ist, dass die Severanen über Religion sehr gehofft haben. Sie sind einer der ersten Dynastien, die sich zu einem bestimmten Kult verbinden. Es ist tatsächlich der syrische Kult von Baal. Oder ist es Elagabalus und diese Figur?
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Genau, weil Septimius Severus' Frau, Julia Domna, eine Priesterin des syrischen Kults ist. Und je länger die Dynastie dauert, desto mehr wird sie empfohlen. Nun, offensichtlich, werden sich einige späteren Empere, insbesondere die christlichen, in Teilen auf diesem Modell einer Dynastie mit Religion verbinden. So those are the two major Severan changes inside the empire, the army and religion.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Actually, for the 3rd century crisis, the biggest change didn't happen in the Roman world. It happened out in Iran-Iran. Denn in den 1920er-Jahren wurde der Parthian-Empire, der, was jetzt Iran-Irak ist, dominierte und 100 Jahre lang in Verlust war, von einer neuen persischen Dynastie, den Sassaniern, überwiesen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Und die Sassanier-Persien haben sofort große Angriffe auf den oberen Empire gestartet und werden das gleich durch die Krise weiter tun.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
hat seine eigene Vision, seine eigene Ideologie. Was die Sassanier behaupten, ist, dass sie die Fähigkeiten der Achaemenid-Persien sind. Das ist das alte Empire von Darius Xerxes aus den griechisch-persischen Kriegen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Das Problem ist, dass wenn die Sassanier die Begründung haben, das alte Persische Empire zu wiederholen, das betrifft Ägypten, Syrien, Asien-Minera und argumentuell, sehr kurz, Griechenland. Also können die Sassanier tatsächlich eine Begründung machen, dass all diese Territorien ihre sein sollten.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Und wir wissen, dass sie diesen Begriff machen, denn obwohl unsere persischen Ressourcen nicht großartig sind, hatten die älteren keimanischen Persen große, schwarze Monumente. Also gingen sie zu einem der großen schwarzen Klöcke in Iran, z.B. zu einem Ort namens Naki-Rushtan, und schafften Bilder von sich selbst darin.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Die Sassanier gehen dann zurück in die gleichen Orte und stellen ihre eigenen Monumente darin. Unter den Achaemeniden. Sie machen einen sehr spezifischen ideologischen Begriff. Interessant ist, dass Cassius Dio, der romische Historiker, das wusste. bevor er in den frühen 230er Jahren stirbt.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Dio weiß bereits, dass das der Begriff der Sassanier ist, was bedeutet, dass sie kommen und sie werden immer kommen.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Exactly. I mean, some parts of the Roman Empire in the East are actually going to break away temporarily and become quasi-independent, because they've got to protect themselves from the Sasanians. The Sasanians are going to sack Antioch, the greatest city in the Eastern Roman area of Syria.
The Ancients
Rome's Crisis of the Third Century
Shapur in particular, who's the second Sasanian Shah, the only rival he has for the greatest enemy Rome faced is Hannibal of Carthage. No one else strikes quite the same chord.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And then we've got the inscriptions, the artwork, the architecture, the archaeology, which is so crucial for economic affairs, for example.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Exactly. The coinage. It shows ideology. We only know about trade and how widespread it was because of the material finds. Texts don't tell us. So it's not that we don't have evidence, but it's got some notable gaps, and inevitably, it's got some clear biases.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Exactly. They're statements of ideology. It actually makes them enormously valuable, just not for what happened. You can normally assume someone giving a speech in praise of someone won't blatantly lie, if only because it would just make the audience laugh. But these are set piece speeches. They follow set patterns. They always use many of the same images.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And yet they do tell us how individual emperors, for example, wish to be perceived. So in the case famously of Constantine, we've got a panegyric from before his Christian commitment, which talks about the old gods like Apollo. Then we've got a panegyric written after 312, and suddenly all the old gods have disappeared.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
If you study classics at school or university, there's a tendency to stop in the year 200. The reason for that is the third century crisis, which is when the old classic Roman Empire very nearly did break apart. At the worst moment of the third century crisis, when the frontiers are crumbling and emperors are being murdered,
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The Roman Empire, which traditionally spans from Hadrian's Wall in Britain to the Sahara Desert, out towards the Crimea and the Euphrates River, the Roman Empire actually broke into three parts. Britain and Gaul had broken away. Syria, the Persian frontier, had broken away.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It really did look like the Roman Empire, which, remember, dominated the Mediterranean from the 2nd century BC onwards, was actually going to fall apart. What's perhaps the most remarkable feature of the third century crisis is that it didn't happen. And indeed, one of the great questions, why didn't the Roman Empire collapse in the third century when in the fifth century the West will go under?
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But crucially, in the third century, while there are major threat pressures on the frontiers, there aren't huge migrations moving into the Roman Empire. And over a long, hard-fought period, particularly between 250 and 275, The Roman emperors, Gallienus, Aurelian in particular, managed to retake all the lost territories, stabilize the frontiers. So the Roman Empire looked like shatterings.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And yet it emerges from the third century still basically intact.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Yes, I do. My primary area of research is the world of late antiquity, the world of the later Roman Empire. And the date we traditionally use is 284, because in 284 AD, the Emperor Diocletian begins the reorganization, drawing on things that had happened in the third century crisis. Diocletian's reorganization was then actually continued by Constantine. They are religiously completely different.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Diocletian, the emperor responsible for the last great persecution of Christians, Constantine, the first Christian emperor. But actually, in terms of military, political, administrative concerns, they form a unity. And what took shape in that 50 years, from Diocletian's accession in 284 to Constantine's death in 337, restructured
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The Roman Empire gave it a new, stronger bureaucracy, a well-organized tax system. The frontiers were once again reinforced. The army was reorganized. Whether it's stronger than, say, the high empire of the second century AD, it's a very difficult judgment to make. It is certainly not obviously weaker.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Diocletian's solution was, in order to achieve significant wide-ranging reorganization, he needed help. The Roman Empire is vast, and this is a world without modern communications, without radio, without the internet.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So Diocletian shares power, first with one co-ruler, then with two others to make what's famously called the Tetrarchy, the rule of four, because it means there's one imperial figure in every major region. And once that's secure, what Diocletian set out to do was, firstly, they needed a better administration system. Above all, because the purpose of administration is tax collection.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
You need the tax collection to pay for the army. It's always worth remembering one key thing that sets the Roman Empire apart from the later medieval kingdoms. The Roman Empire of Diocletian had a standing army of around 400,000 men. No one's coming near that figure in a thousand years later because it's got a tax system to pay for it.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But that meant dividing the provinces, so making individual provincial blocks smaller and easier to control, trying to reorganize the financial system, not always successfully, and making the tax collection a combination of money and kind.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So collecting taxes in food, for example, because if you're collecting taxes to pay and supply the army, you can just recruit the supplies and send them to the army. And the tax system, provincial system Diocletian put in place is still there under Justinian. Indeed, Justinian in the 6th century is the first emperor to significantly consider trying to revise it.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Exactly. It was clearly a solid structure. I mean, did it work brilliantly? No. Tax collection will always have the problem that people don't want to pay taxes, and it's not that the Roman Empire was ever some massive bureaucratic machine. By a famous older estimate, the Chinese Empire, same rough period, same rough size, had 10 times as many bureaucrats as the Roman Empire did.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The Roman emperors rely on their local aristocracies to do a lot of the heavy lifting of administration. So it's not that it isn't a flawed system. It definitely is. But it did seem to work remarkably well. And the proof is the Tetrarchs did stabilize the frontiers. They campaigned successfully in every direction. The Tetrarchy, as a division of power, is inherently unstable.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Four emperors are going to come into conflict eventually. But they delivered stability at the end of that period of crisis. And Constantine, who's actually the destroyer of the Tetrarchy, is the beneficiary, in a sense, of that stability. After Diocletian stands down, the Tetrarchy's instabilities come to the fore.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
You end up with a rolling series of civil wars until Constantine, who's originally hailed emperor in York in the year 306, It takes him until 324 to win the last of the great civil wars. And then from 324 to 337, Constantine sole rules the entire empire. He's reunited the whole thing. And what he simply does is keep Diocletian's political taxation systems rolling.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The great change, of course, is that now Christianity is receiving imperial patronage and the church begins playing a role as well.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
This is the great difficulty. Constantine left a well-organized, relatively secure empire. The only major change he's introducing is Christianity. Christianity is both a strength and a weakness. It adds great emphasis to charity, to community. Christian bishops are very important in the later administration.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
On the other hand, Christians are divided amongst themselves, so there's an ongoing conflict over how to define Christianity, who should be included. But overall, the empire that Constantine left in 337 is not about to collapse. Indeed, my own emphasis would be the Roman Empire of the fourth century was not about to collapse. It had definite flaws. In many ways, it always had had flaws.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But it's not on some path to decline. It's got the structures in place. It can manage its frontiers. They can have an emperor, Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor, who can find an army of 65,000 men marched into Persia and lose it And yet the Roman Empire manages to basically recover. It certainly didn't help.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But the very fact Julian could do that and the empire could then restore stability over the next decade suggests that 360s, 370s, the Roman Empire is not going to fall. Not unless it gets hit and hit very hard.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And the Roman Empire has always been vulnerable to civil war and usurpation, not least because technically it was never a dynastic empire. Succession was always a problem. In Constantine's case, having fought so hard to reunite the empire, what does he do when he dies? splits it between three sons very unhelpfully named Constantine II, Constantius II, and Constans.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And it is perhaps helpful that both Constantine II and Constans die quite early, partly in a civil war between the brothers. Constans is murdered in a usurpation. Constantius, who's Constans' longest surviving son, is an interesting figure simply because all our sources hate him. He actually seems to have been a solid, if not particularly imaginative, emperor.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
His problem is Ammianus Marcellinus, our one narrative historian, is a pagan supporter of Julian, and Julian revolted against Constantius. But Constantius in Christian tradition is remembered as a heretic, so the Christian sources don't like him either. But overall, Constantius left a relatively stable empire in 361. Julian was marching to attack Constantius, and then Constantius died.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It does genuinely seem to be of natural causes. So a civil war that would have happened didn't. After Julian's disaster, what you then get is a very short-lived emperor named Jovian, but then once again the empire is divided. Because everybody has been aware ever since the third century crisis, one man ruling the empire, if there's any kind of problems, can't cope.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Exactly. Sole rule, so one emperor, is actually very rare. from the heart of the third century crisis onwards. Constantine manages it for 13 years. Constantius is the sole emperor after he kills the usurper responsible for the death of his last brother, but again for less than a decade. Julian only rules for 18 months. Jovian, six months.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Then you have two emperors named Valentinian and Valens, their brothers, and they promptly split the empire again because Julian's disaster with the Persians has caused problems on the eastern frontier, but there's also problems on the Rhine. The other great frontiers, then you've got the Danube as well, the two great European rivers.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So Valentinian goes westward, leaves Valens to deal with the east. And the empire's only actually going to be reunited again once. And that's in the aftermath of, again, a series of civil wars by Theodosius I, Theodosius the Great, who actually only ruled the entire United Empire for a couple of years.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And when he died in the year 395, he split the empire between his sons, exactly what Constantine did. So it can't have surprised anybody at the time. What we know, hindsight being brilliant, is 395's the last division. The empire will never reunite again. But there's no way anyone could have known that at the time.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
To a degree, yes. And actually, it's before Diocletian. It happened during the third century crisis. The great Roman frontiers, so the Rhine and Danube rivers, the Persian frontier, you can't manage those from Rome. It's too far away. So more and more, the soldier emperors of the third century don't even come to Rome. It is a fascinating feature of the Tetrarchy of Diocletian.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
None of the four rulers use Rome. Actually, they hardly ever even visit it. And yet, Rome remains symbolically, psychologically important. It is the old imperial city. The Tetrarchs built monuments there. One of Constantine's most famous surviving monuments is still standing next to the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Constantius II, Constantine's longest surviving son, who was mainly based in the East, made a famous entry into Rome with his army, an adventus, an imperial procession. Ammianus Marcellinus, who doesn't like Constantius, nonetheless loves Rome, the city, and gives us a brilliant description of that adventus. So Rome still psychologically mattered.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And that, of course, is exactly what we'll see in the sack of Rome in 410. The Gothic sack of Rome didn't cripple Roman power. It wasn't attacking the heart of government. But the shockwave that the sack of Rome in 410 sent across the Mediterranean. You see in Jerome declaring that the end of the world must be coming. Augustine in Africa is going to right the city of God.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So Rome symbolically does matter. But no, it is not the political, military, government part of the empire, and indeed already wasn't by the time of the tetra.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And the rise of Christianity in the 4th century is one of the great transition points, indeed for later Western history. In AD 300, during the Tetrarchy, Christians are a small minority, perhaps 10% of the empire's 60 million population, so around 6 million Christians. And they're about to suffer an attempted, failed, empire-wide persecution of Diocletian.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Then in 312, so less than a decade after the Great Persecution began in 303, Constantine, for whatever reason, because it will always be debated, begins to support Christianity. By the end of the fourth century, Christians are the clear-cut majority of the Roman population. So they have gone from 6 million to, give or take, perhaps 40 million in the space of two, perhaps three generations.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
That's an amazing stat right there. I mean, it's supercharged on steroids. Exactly. I mean, it should be said... The fact that Christians actually got from nought to six million in the first 300 years actually makes them the fastest growing religious movement the ancient world had ever actually seen. Islam is going to change the scale considerably.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But the very fact Christianity even grew before Constantine is actually remarkable. And Christianity expanded notably in the third century crisis. Christians promote charity, promote community. Famously, they're repeatedly, it's complained by their opponents that they'll help people who aren't Christians. Christians will help the sick and plague is a recurring problem. They'll look after you.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So Christians as a movement, the Christian movement grows when there's times of conflict. But what you then get from Constantine onwards is money, legal privileges pouring into the church. Whether that's good for the Christian religion is something that, for example, the Reformation is going to take serious issue with. I don't think we'll discuss it here.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But what you do see with Constantine, there had never been huge churches. Constantine built the original Vatican, so the original Church of St. Peter's out on the Vatican Hill. He built the original St. John's Lateran. He builds the original Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Constantinople, of course, has multiple churches from the beginning. So just physically,
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
the prominence of Christianity's greatly increased. But money is pouring into the church. Constine wrote a famous letter to one bishop, just saying, here is a large sum of money. If it's not enough, I've told my treasurer to give you what you ask for. So money is going to the church. Bishops now matter. so a bishop can contact the emperor directly.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Bishops can therefore influence imperial policy, famously true of Ambrose of Milan, the great bishop in the late 4th century, who has a love-hate relationship with Theodosius I, two very strong-willed men, both of whom are devout believers, but with different priorities. So bishops matter. Is this strengthening or weakening the overall empire? It's doing both. You read my next question. Yes.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
There's no question this support for charity in a world that doesn't have much welfare support matters. So Christian community matters. Bishops are very important to Roman government, not least because the Roman Empire is split into these small provinces and there's a governor in charge of each. But a governor is not usually in office for more than one, perhaps two years.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
A bishop is for life once they're appointed. So the bishop of Alexandria, for example, the great city in Egypt, can be a much more influential figure than the annual governor. Because a bishop like Athanasius of Alexandria, who's a bishop for 45 years, has a degree of support structures that the government system can't necessarily manage.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So it can be a major asset, but only, of course, if church and empire are working together. And the problem there is that Christianity, in this post-process of enormous growth, also had to re-decide what it was. This is the great age of Christian definition. All the questions that Christians had been debating before Constantine suddenly became much more important.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
What books should be in the New Testament still had to be finally decided. What do Christians believe is orthodoxy, right belief? What's going to happen to heretics, wrong believers, now that the Roman emperor is a Christian and therefore has a divine injunction to enforce the correct form of Christianity?
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So there's going to be divisions within the Christian church, but those divisions are going to impact on wider history.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It's always very difficult comparing armies from multiple periods because in some levels, say the sheer strength of its infantry, Yes, the 4th century army is weaker than, say, its 1st century AD counterpart. It's not as uniformly recruited or equipped, although they still have imperial factories, so the equipment's been altered. It doesn't have the sheer density of the legions.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
On the other hand, during the 3rd century crisis, the Romans did learn a number of military lessons. That included, firstly, cavalry now matters much more than it did before. So the 3rd century and then the 4th century army has a much stronger cavalry arm than the earlier empire did. Big block legions, 5,500 men, work fine under certain conditions.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But when you're trying to protect a very wide frontier, more smaller groups work more easily. So one feature that seems to emerge with Diocletian and Constantine is you get an increase in the number of legions, which used to be argued to mean, oh, look, the army's getting much bigger.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But what the archaeology of the army camp suggests is that the legion size dropped from around 5,500 to more like 1,000. Wow. That's like four-fifths of the strength gone. So in reality, you've still got the strength because the number of legions is dramatically multiplying. But you've got smaller blocks because that way you can spread out across the frontiers.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Not least because the earlier empire of the first, second century wasn't so focused on frontier defense. It was more about when do you advance beyond the frontiers? Whereas in the third century crisis, they were reacting. They had to react.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
How far the Romans were actually ever clear-cut dominant is one of those interesting questions. The Romans lose a remarkable number of major battles in their history. Famously, the Roman Republic has a remarkable ability to lose battles. The Pyrrhic War, they lost two, won one. Fighting Hannibal, lose three, win one. The pattern's consistent.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
You lose, but you win the last one and come out still standing. You keep coming back. Exactly. The Romans always had that strength. And in many ways, that's their greatest military advantage. It's not utter brilliance on the battlefield. It's not a clear-cut technological advantage.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But it is consistent technology, reserves, the ability to re-recruit armies, retrain them, bring them back into the field. The third century crisis, they had to make it up as they were going along. The Romans had never come under this level of pressure before. The Persians, for example, used heavily armored cavalrymen, cataphracts. They don't move that fast, but they are very heavy cavalry.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
There are tanks on there. Exactly. And the Romans don't have an obvious response to that. So how do you adjust? The Germanic tribes, which largely, of course, have the advantage of energy, enthusiasm, but aren't good at having reserves. Julian the Apostate, as described in detail by Ammianus Marcellinus, wins us basically a set piece battle.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Battle of Strasbourg in the early 350s is actually a good demonstration of what the Then the Romans send in the reserves and the Germans hadn't thought of that. And it's basically, this is how the Romans have been managing the frontier. But when you get towards the late fourth century, where you get much larger groups moving, and crucially, the addition of the Huns,
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
who clearly do not fight according to the same pattern that the Romans are used to. And the Romans do not have an answer to the nomadic horse archers with their much better bow, their much more fluid tactics. The Roman army is going to be at a serious disadvantage.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The tetrarchy focused on stabilizing the frontiers. The Sasanian Persian Empire rose in the early third century and spent the next 50 years hammering the Romans to the east. Diocletian and his tetrarchs finally beat the Persians. The Romans had been trying for 60 years. Finally, they won a battle, stabilized the frontier. Constantine fights on that Persian frontier.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
He's also fighting with the Gothic tribes who are beyond the Danube. But there's no intention to push significantly beyond the frontiers. This is basically proactive frontier defense. After all, the best way to protect a frontier isn't to wait for people to come to you. It's to try and keep some control beyond your limits.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
That's what Constantine was doing, whereas what Julian is doing, launching a full-scale invasion of the Persian Empire, which is the same scale as the Roman Empire. Sasanian Persia ends in Afghanistan, Pakistan. It's a huge empire. This is a risk that Constantine would not have taken. Constantius was a stable frontier manager, never considered a risk like this.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And after the disaster, none of the subsequent emperors could even consider it.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It's very difficult. It's often called the barbarization of the late Roman army, that they're recruiting more peoples who are not actually Roman and therefore can't be trained to Roman standards. Now, of course, the Roman Empire by the fourth century, everybody in it from Britain to Africa to Syria is a Roman citizen. So the Romans have always recruited people who weren't Romans from Italy.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But it is true they are drawing more units entirely from beyond the frontiers, from people who are not therefore going to necessarily fight according to Roman patterns. So why are they fighting for Rome? The Goths, the Huns, partly for money, because the Romans can, of course, pay very well. Also, it gives you prestige.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Particularly for the Germanic tribes, serving in the Roman army, holding a high Roman military rank, is an important source of legitimacy of your own authority. So Alaric, before he sacks Rome, it's very clear he repeatedly demands certain things. He wants money. He wants food for his people. He wants somewhere they can all live.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
He wants a military title, Magister Militum, the commander-in-chief. And famously, the man who's opposing Alaric when Alaric first attacks Italy is Stilicho, the Roman general, the man's half-vandal. because he is the son of a Vandal German who served in the Roman army. Stilicho's a Roman. He's completely Roman by upbringing, by identity. But he's half Vandal because the lines really do blur.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Does it mean the Roman army's actually weaker? One of the oddities of tracing the collapse of Roman power in the West and the survival in the East, the Eastern army never succeeds in winning a really major victory. So the great disaster of Adrianople, where the Goths initially destroy a Roman army, kill a Roman emperor. It's an Eastern emperor who died.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The Huns will raid the Eastern empire for several decades and have to be bought off. Whereas the Western army, when it can concentrate on a battlefield, still actually does its job. So Alaric attacks Italy in 401-402 and Stilicho forces him back. Two battles seem to be fought, Verona and Plantia. Stilicho's army is still a very effective military machine.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Likewise, the next Goth to attack Italy, Radagaisus, will get exterminated. And even as late as 451, when the West really is shattering, it's a Roman army commander, Flavius Aetius, with the core of what's left of the Western army, who can ally with the Goths now settled in France and the Franks and face and beat Attila the Hun.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It's not decisive, the Battle of the Catalonian Fields, but the Huns get driven back. So it is true that the Western army is weakening, particularly in its organisation, but In the fall of the West, it's not that the army lost on a battlefield. What actually happened is the resource structure, the supply structure failed. And so the Western Roman army simply dissolves.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
More than there had been previously? That's difficult to argue. It's there. It's emphatically always there in Roman society. After all, we are now experiencing in our modern world a very expanding rich-poor gap. The Roman world has a colossal divide between the senators with their enormous wealth and the vast majority of the population who are a couple of bad harvests away from starving to death.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The third century, this is why it's such a period of disruption. Not everywhere across the empire. Some regions were basically untouched, like Britain, like North Africa. But if you are a farmer and everything is unstable, then you are extremely vulnerable. There's no question, therefore, that Diocletian prioritized stabilizing the economic system, ensuring a greater degree of social harmony.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It never totally succeeds. After all, the army want their supplies. They're going to clash with the local aristocracy, who usually are both the tax collectors and the people trying to avoid paying tax. And then the local populations, who of course we almost never hear about in our sources, are trying to get on with their lives. But we don't see colossal social revolutions.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
There are some individual major outbreaks of what look like social violence, famously the Begaldi, who are a Gallic revolt, who get put down under the Tetrarchy. But Christianity does actually help here because Christianity does believe in spreading out wealth. It does believe in charity. much more so than the traditional structures did. So on that score you're getting more support.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The monasteries help here because monasteries, although they're often on the fringes of society, they're also there to provide assistance. So you're getting the rise of hospitals, You're actually getting the emergence of a number of key features that will emerge over the next centuries in the fourth century because they're coming under Christian patronage. Likewise, pilgrimage, major centers.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So it's difficult to say there's a major increase in social tensions. What there always are are major social divisions because there is a massive rich-poor imbalance.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So what you always have, and in a sense, it's the theme that's running through all of these different problems, is it's not that the Roman Empire is going to collapse, but there are fracture lines within it that are going to be drastically exposed if the opportunity really does emerge.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And so what we see during the collapse of the West along social lines is most of the local populations, they're loyal to the emperor if the emperor is protecting them. But if the emperor is not protecting them, Why would they be loyal to the empire?
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
No. And interestingly, the Roman Empire does have mechanisms for if a community can prove they are exhausted and cannot pay. We do actually have imperial laws saying, right, for 10 years, this region is not paying taxes. There's no question there must have been a series of local incidents that we very rarely hear about. Our best glimpse is Egypt.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
That's basically just because of the Egyptian papyri that survives in the desert. But that's where you find complaints, for example, being sent to a local army commander that the sheep are being sheared in the night. So someone's breaking into farms and stealing the wool just before the sheep will be sheared.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So they complain to the local army commander because he's the one who's supposed to be maintaining law and order. It's entirely possible it was the army commander who sent his soldiers to do it. So there's not going to be a lot of justice here. And yet, while there is ongoing, therefore, tension, no, there are no really major social revolutions. Because overall, the Roman system did work.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It didn't work brilliantly. But most people, of course, can't see a better solution. And crucially, thanks to Diocletian and Constantine, across most of the empire, life is relatively stable.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The coinage is one of our key markers for imperial prosperity. Now, a lot of the empire didn't actually need to worry much about coinage. After all, a lot of local economic transactions can continue in kind. You just do it as barter. The key purpose of the coinage is the emperors mint it to pay the army. The army spend it and the tax system brings it back. Very crudely, that's the cycle.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Now, in the third century, the coinage, above all the quality of the gold and silver coinage, collapses. The silver coinage in particular goes from above 50% silver to less than 5%. And then we do have decrees that tell us that people were refusing to use it. Because a Roman coin, of course, differs from a modern 50p piece. Our money is not worth what it's made of.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
A Roman coin is worth its metal content. So debasement, taking the precious metal out, they're very good at noticing when that's been done. This is why you bite a coin or you try and bend it. In the third century, the coinage did basically collapse. The result was major inflation. That's going to particularly disrupt long distance exchange and the elite attempts to spend large sums of money.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
In local communities, what seems to have happened is a reversion to barter, because then you can manage it to a degree. Diocletian and the Tetrarchy set out to try and fix it. Now, there were two options there. You could stabilize the coinage by giving it proper metal content, and you can try and control inflation.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The problem with trying to control inflation, which is what they did by passing an edict called the Edict of Maximum Prices, so laying down this is the maximum anyone can legally charge for a particular good or service, is that totally ignores supply and demand and basically failed almost immediately. The problem with stabilizing the coins is you need gold and silver for that.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And the problem, of course, is now that the Roman Empire is no longer conquering anywhere, Trajan was the last person to bring in a flood of treasure from outside the empire. Where's the gold and silver going to come from? The result is the Tetrarchy can't succeed.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Exactly. And all the great Mediterranean gold and silver mines have been largely played out. So Philippa Maston used the ones in the northern Aegean. Spain, it's always ironic because anyone who's been studying late history thinks of Spain as bringing in gold and silver from the Americas. But actually, in the ancient world, Spain was a good place to go to to find those metals.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The person who actually solves the problem is Constantine, because Constantine does have access to gold and silver that the Tetrarchs didn't. That's because there's no way that the Tetrarchs, who were devout pagan emperors, would touch pagan temples. Constantine will.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
There are gold and silver statues of the ancient gods and goddesses, and we don't have them today because most of them get plundered. But Constantine uses that source of gold and silver and uses it to create a new gold coin Interestingly, you can do a chemical analysis on gold and silver coins to try and work out where the gold may have been originally mined.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
A number of Constantine's coins and the coins of his successors, the gold seems to have come from the northern Aegean. These are Hellenistic temple treasures. They're the ones that Philip and Alexander, that's where they got their gold from. So these are Hellenistic statues of gods and goddesses being reused for coinage.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But the result is Constantine stabilizes the gold coinage, the solidus, the solid bit. is simply the name for the gold coin. It will remain basically at the same rough level of gold and the rough weight unchanged for centuries to come. So the gold coinage is actually basically stabilized in the fourth century.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It's true, actually, of the Roman Empire right through its history. When everything's working as smoothly as they can manage, it's a relatively stable structure with major inbuilt inequalities. But it's not designed to cope with shock. They don't have those reserves in place. And if the shock comes, the fracture lines can all open up.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The Eastern Empire, of course, in the fifth century, is going to solve a lot of its problems by minting lots of gold coins and paying them off. So Attila the Hun gets 6,000 pounds of gold in one go. And yet the East could afford to do that. Whereas in the West, as the economic structures break down, you can't pay the army, you can't pay off enemies.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So all these different elements, they'll cope as long as things are relatively stable, as they are by the end of Constantine's reign. They can just about cope with the disruption caused by Julian's disaster, although it forced a reallocation of resources to the Persian frontier that weakened the others. but they are vulnerable if the shock comes.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The Persian Empire is the greatest single enemy the Romans ever have to face. It's the only other world-scale empire. So the Persian frontier always had to be a primary focus of attention. The usual estimate is roughly 40% of the Roman army needs to be watching the Persian frontier.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And if you take troops away from it, as, for example, Justinian will do in the 6th century, the Persians will wait to see if it's a definite movement and then smash through your defenses. So the Persians are playing a key role of leverage.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
In the story of the fall of the Roman Empire, what's arguably the key factor is that after Julian, there's actually around 100 years of stability on that frontier. One of the oddities about the whole story of the fall of the Western Empire, the Roman Empire has three great frontiers, the Rhine, the Danube and Persia. Well, the East has to cover two of them to the West's one.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Technically, the East is facing worse enemies than the West is. But crucially, if you can keep the Persian frontier stable, then all you have to do is watch the Danube and the defenses of Constantinople will prevent anyone breaking the Danube and pushing further east.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So perhaps one of the great questions of the survival of the eastern half is how did they manage to keep stability on the Persian frontier? And the key factor that seems to have been at play is the Persians, of course. It's another big empire. That means this isn't their only frontier. Internal troubles as well, civil war factions. Exactly. The Persians have their own problems.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
There is a tendency, particularly for historians like me, to mainly just look at the Persians when they're facing the Romans, not think about the Persians as their own entity. But the Persians have two major problems. One is a very powerful local aristocracy, which means a weak shah, a weak ruler, is vulnerable to immediate usurpation.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But the other is that the Persians have a very long northern frontier. And that's on the Russian steppe. That's where the nomads come from. It's the white Huns, isn't it?
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Exactly. So whereas the Romans only get the Huns, the Persians are fighting nomads their entire history. And every powerful nomad group hits the Persians before they hit the Romans. So critically, in the 5th century, when the Roman Empire is having so much trouble on the Rhine and Danube,
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The 5th century is the most peaceful period in the entire history of Roman-Persian relations, and it's quite clear it's because the Persians are much more worried about the Kidderite Huns, the Hephalites, sometimes known as the White Huns. My personal favorite is a peace treaty that was signed in the year 464.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
What that peace treaty said was the Persians asked the Eastern Roman Empire to pay for a Persian fortress manned by Persian soldiers on the Caspian Sea. So this is a fortress deep inside Persian territory. Why should the Romans pay? Because, as the Persians said, we're stopping the nomads.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Exactly. And this is the great advantage. Two great empires can talk to each other. And in the 5th century, they were actually aware that there were greater risks at stake. And so you get this. It's one of the greatest examples of high state imperial relations. But this is why it stayed quiet. If it had gone wrong, the Eastern Empire would have been in horrible trouble.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And that, of course, is exactly what happens under Justinian and even more in the early 7th century. This is a very dangerous frontier.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
To a degree it does. It's always one of those qualifying arguments. Constantinople, as it becomes more important, is going to draw further eastern resources The peace treaty after Julian's disaster handed over key fortresses to the Persians that destabilized the entire Roman frontier network.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
So the emperor Valens, when the Goths first came to the Danube in 376, there's a reason Valens isn't anywhere near. He's in Antioch. He's looking at the Persian frontier. That's where he had to be focusing. So there is that significant shift. But the Rhine and the Danube frontiers for most of the fourth century seem to be broadly stable. So Julian wins this battle at Strasbourg.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
That's for destabilizing the Rhine. Constantine is successful against the Goths. There's ongoing occasional conflict, but there's also peace treaties with the Goths in the 360s. So the Rhine and the Danube aren't heavily fortified, but in a sense, how can they be? These are huge rivers. The Roman frontier structures are about as stable as they're likely to be. The division between east and west,
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
they are still one empire and they think of themselves as one empire. So East and West don't usually work against each other. They try and cooperate, not always well. In a sense, I suppose what's my recurring theme is the weaknesses are emphatically there. And the way they'll play out in the fifth century is going to expose the West. But the Roman Empire was not about to collapse in, say, 370.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Its structures are still intact. It's basic east-west balance. The east is the stronger of the two halves, but not by such a clear-cut margin that you can see clearly this is what will happen. It's going to take a lot of shocks and a lot of very bad Roman mismanagement. to cause the eventual Western collapse.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It is no. Ammianus Marcellinus, who's the historian who tells us of the arrival of the Goths, their Gothic victory at Adrianople, knows the Huns are coming, isn't a defeatist. He deliberately didn't end his history with Adrianople. He actually ended it with the Goths turning away from Constantinople and a Roman massacre of Gothic mercenaries as a sign that the empire will continue to fight.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The first person who we are aware of who can really conceive of a world where there might not be a Roman empire is Augustine of Hippo writing The City of God. But Augustine is a unique intellectual. capable of this kind of visionary thought that separated what was going on around him from his vision of the divine plan of history. No other Christian writers are doing that.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
They're still seeing the Roman Empire as expressing Christianity. The East, of course, will carry on doing that for the next thousand years. They still believe very strongly that, yes, there may be threats on the frontiers, but there always have been. They'll absorb them if they have to. The empire will continue.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
I mean, the last time Rome was sacked before AD 410 was by the Gauls 800 years previously. David, with hindsight, do you think Rome's fall and decline was unavoidable? Emphatically, no. Gibbon famously said that the fall of the Roman Empire was inevitable and the reason is simple and obvious. We should just be surprised it survived so long.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It was the inevitable consequence of immoderate greatness. Gibbon's so good at using language. Basically, an empire that big will eventually collapse. I don't agree with Gibbon. The problem is the Romans have recovered from so many shocks before. It's what makes this series of shocks unique.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It's why whenever you're trying to understand the fall of the West, you've got to think about the survival of the East. Because the fact that an Eastern half of the empire with the same core structures of government organization, and if anything, more Christians and more Christian infighting, managed to survive That means it can't simply be an internal explanation for the collapse of the West.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Could it have been averted? Yes. There are several moments where the Romans, if they just handled it better, there hadn't been so many stupid civil wars. If they'd actually negotiated rather than trying to fight with people like Alaric, it could have turned out very differently indeed. So I do not regard it as an inevitable story.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But Brian Ward Perkins in Oxford wrote a very good book called The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. And as Brian said, the Romans of the late 4th century were certain that their world wouldn't significantly change. They were wrong. We might want to remember that as well.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It is brutally difficult because even as late as 468, they're still fighting. For me, it's not actually the division of the empire in 395. It's the civil wars of the very early 390s. Because those civil wars firstly badly weakened the Western Roman army in particular, which made them particularly vulnerable.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It's the first time a major civil war is fought when there is an independent Germanic people already inside the frontier, the Goths. And crucially, it was the massacre of the Goths at that battle that helps trigger Alaric's entire attitude that the Goths must break free of Roman control. That concentrated period, which is also, of course, the period where the anti-pagan laws get passed.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It's also a crucial period in the Christianization story. It's not that they're doomed at that point, but After Agent Oakland 378, it can still be managed. After the disasters of the early 390s, you're moving into a decade that saw renewed migrations, the failure of the Rhine frontier, and of course leads to the sack of Rome.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
All I'd emphasize is even then, even I would certainly argue as late as the 450s, you can see a recovery possible.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The fall of the Roman Empire in the West shaped subsequent medieval history. It destroyed the last great unity of the Mediterranean world, replaced it in the West with a mosaic that shaped medieval Europe and medieval Christendom. A change that great simply cannot happen fast. It's long, it is indeed complex.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
A lot of Roman elements survived, even while the imperial superstructure collapsed, and we see those elements all around us. So we've got to take a long view. Yes, there are great individual episodes. The Gothic sack of Rome in 410. The fall of Romulus Augustulus, the titular last Western emperor, in 476. But there is no one moment. It's a process.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
And this is a topic where definition genuinely matters. Edward Gibbon famously called his book The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. But the Roman Empire as a whole didn't fall in the 5th century in any case, because the Eastern Empire will survive for another 1,000 years. Is it decline?
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
That is a value judgment depending on whether you believe that the old Roman Empire was the greatest civilization, or whether you prefer the energy, dynamism, and occasional brutality of the early Germanic kingdoms. And if we're going to pinpoint a fall, 476 is the classic date. After that date, there is no Western Roman Emperor, not until Charlemagne will attempt to reclaim the title.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But a lot of those Roman elements that continue do blur the lines. All the Gothic kings who emerged in Italy, southern France, Spain, continued Roman elements. So did the Franks. The great anomaly, to a significant extent, being Britain, where there is a much more clear cutoff, partly because the Anglo-Saxons were much less interested.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
It's always difficult. Every major written source from any of the post-Roman kingdoms was written by someone of Roman ancestry and distinct Roman Christian bias. Isidore of Seville in Spain, Cassiodorus in Ostrogothic Italy, Gregory of Tours in Francia. So our evidence is skewing us towards continuation. There was clearly also significant change. There's an awareness that these are new rulers.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But there's also a genuine attempt in a lot of those writers to bring these new peoples into an overall Roman story, to show where they fit in, to make their rulers a continuation, not emperors. They're usually very clear on that. It is not a Roman empire anymore, but it is now a series of kingdoms with Roman elements.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Exactly. All this background, it's part of their legitimacy. It's part of their identity. But it is interesting that many of the most fascinating sources we can read, Isidore of Seville, Gregory of Tours, they're actually writing a couple of generations after the kingdoms took shape. So they're emphasising a continuity in a very different world.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Okay. So we're almost approaching the 250-year mark. Yes. And I spend much of my time, when I'm working on this, criticizing elements of Gibbon. But I always do try and begin by saying, if someone's arguing with me 250 years from now, I did my job well.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Exactly. Gibbon was a very good historian as well as a brilliant writer, which is why his account's still well worth reading. He knew most of the textual sources we know now. Archaeology is where there have been massive changes since Gibbon's time. But also, of course, like any other modern historian today, Gibbon has his own biases. He's got his own vision.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
He doesn't like the Eastern Roman Empire. He doesn't much like Christianity. And it makes his story very interesting to read. But more than anything else, that title, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, did significantly skew English scholarship because it's not the fall of the Roman Empire. It's the fall of the Western Roman Empire. And decline is a judgment. Doesn't make it wrong.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Yes. And they'll hear Gibbon's name. They'll hear his title. They may read his general observations on the fall of the empire, which is a little sandwich he inserted into the wider book, even if they'll probably never read the massive work. It's interesting. It's an English language bias.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
I remember meeting a number of Greeks who were very unhappy that people thought Gibbon was a starting point because Gibbon didn't really much like later Byzantine Greek culture. So other linguistic, other scholarly traditions, perhaps not so much. But yes, in the English speaking world,
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
He is still influential, not because I don't think any modern academic historian would defend the exact interpretation Gibbon gives, but he raises the questions that matter.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
One of the problems studying this world of the 4th, 5th centuries AD is very few detailed narrative histories actually survived. Writing narrative history is a Greek creation. It's a Greek and Latin tradition in the Western world. And yet there is a marked gap where we have no intact historical narrative that covers the third century and none that covers the first half of the fourth century.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
The only great narrative historian to survive from the later fourth century, which is where events really begin to accelerate, is a man named Ammianus Marcellinus, a Greek from somewhere near Antioch who actually wrote in Latin. And he is our key source on the arrival of the Goths and the first warnings of the Huns.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
But his work, which originally covered the entire period from AD 96 to AD 378, is lost until the year 353. So all we've got is the last, probably biggest, block of his history, but not his summary of the events before.
The Ancients
The Fall of Rome: Origins
Then we've got a lot of Christian historians, but the ecclesiastical historians know their job, and their job is primarily to tell the history of the church, not to tell the history of the empire. And then you've got an incredible array of individual texts, panegyrics, speeches given for a particular moment, orations that were written for circulation, letter collections.