The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper

The Fate of Rome by Kyle Harper

Most people think that all of the broad outlines of the ancient world are already known to historians, but in that last fifteen or twenty years an important new understanding of the problems that beset the Roman Empire is adding considerably to the debate over why Rome fell. I first became aware of this debate about ten years ago when scholars started to note that an event referred to as the Justiniac Plague was not a relatively isolated event in Constantinople but a crippling empire wide event on a par with the Medieval Black Death. Since then, much new information has come out and in this book, Kyle Harper looks at the related issues of climate change and disease in the last few centuries of the Roman Empire.

 

Why was the third century so difficult?—cooling temperatures and a consequent rise in diseases like small pox which devastated both the population and the economy. Things got a little better during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine before the temperature dropped again and disease returned to ravage the land. Justinian’s attempt to reconquer the west might have been doomed to failure anyway, but it didn’t help matters to have unusual volcanic activity cool the earth and set the stage for a surge in bubonic plagues that lasted at least two centuries. It’s hard to defend your new lands when the size of your legions is now one-third what it had been with no way to recover the numbers. It’s hard to keep funding your government when the tax base has just plummeted (leading Justinian to raise taxes to impractical levels).

 

This is a fascinating book with perhaps a little too much detail for the casual reader. It doesn’t lessen other issues that are discussed as contributing to the fall of Rome (like poor leadership) but it certainly goes a long way to show that the earth itself played a heavy role in bringing down the west’s most successful empire.