The Ancients - Fall of the Western Roman Empire

Episode Date: June 26, 2020

In the late 4th century and early 5th centuries two massive largely-Germanic confederations arrived on Roman borders, having been uprooted from their homelands by the Huns. These were the Goths and the Vandals. Both peoples would become prime enemies of the Roman Empires in the East and West. Both would sack Rome; both played significant roles in the decline of the Western Roman Empire, inflicting terrible defeats and seizing some of the most lucrative territory in the Western Mediterranean. To talk through this ‘barbarian’ impact on the Fall of the Western Roman Empire, I’m chatting with Peter Heather, Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London and the author of ‘The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians’.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. Welcome to The Ancients, a new podcast dedicated to all things, well, ancient. I'm Tristan Hughes, and in each episode I'll be chatting with a world's leading historian or archaeologist about our distant past. The art, the architecture, the battles,

the larger-than-life personalities, events that have helped shape the world we live in today. From Neolithic Britain to the fall of Rome, from the Assyrians to Alexander the Great. Today I'm being joined by Peter Heather. He is a historian and a professor at King's College London and we're talking about the fall of the Western Roman Empire. In particular we're going to look at two key barbarian groups, the Goths and the Vandals. Enjoy. Peter, Heather, thank you so much for

coming on the show. Oh it's my pleasure. Extraordinary circumstances, but history goes on. Exactly. I couldn't have said it better myself. Now, the fall of the Western Roman Empire, this is a huge topic. But you believe a key reason for its fall is it's not an internal one, but an external one. I do. I mean, there's no serious account of the ending of the empire which doesn't actually have internal and external factors working together. Because the external factor would not have brought down just any empire that you can think of. It brings down this particular empire, which depends on the sort of limitations of the workings of that empire and so on. which depends on the sort of limitations of the workings of that empire and so on. And I think there's also a sort of deeper linkage between internal and external,

which is the one that interests me very much, namely the fact that the scale of the external threat grows over time and it grows over time because of the interrelations between the empire and its neighbours. over time because of the interrelations between the empire and its neighbours. So in a sense, if you want to play games, the external threat is also an internal threat, because it's been created by the workings of the system. But it's outside the formal political frontiers and control of the empire that the threat comes from. You mentioned how this external threat is a product of the empire system, as it were. And of course, that external threat is a product of the empire system, as it were. And of course, that external threat is this wave of Germanic immigration that hits the empire at the end of the 4th century AD. But as you were saying there, has there always been Germanic immigration into the Roman Empire?

the empire expands into Europe in the sort of century either side of the birth of Christ, you know, sort of 50 BC, 50 AD, thereabouts. And it immediately runs into, obviously, the indigenous populations of the region. And the empire broadly comes to a halt, its frontiers, And the empire broadly comes to a halt, its frontiers, at a pre-existing fault line, actually. If you look at the broader archaeological picture, you find that Europe around the birth of Christ is divided into three very unequal zones of development. These are all agricultural economies, but you have more and less intensive agricultural economies. So the most intensive with the largest populations, the biggest settlements, most evidence for exchange, that's in the south and the west. You have a middle zone, which is a smaller population than the west,

very much subsistent agriculture, a little bit of exchange evidence, but not much. And then you have an eastern zone beyond sort of poland and the where poland and the carpathians are now obviously carpathians were there then and there those population densities are even lower and the agricultural regimes are less developed as well but the fault line the empire stops on is broadly that the line between the most developed zone and the intermediate second zone, and it more or less stops there. It goes a little beyond that line, but not much. And that central zone, that intermediate zone,

is dominated by Germanic speakers at the time. So the empire is always engaged in relationships with these Germanic speaking groups right from its establishment as a major force in the European landscape. And that involved all kinds of relationships, some of which certainly involved migration. The empire is very happy to encourage military recruitment, amongst other things. I mean, that's the main form of migration that's documented on an individual basis. But we know also that there were slaving networks operating out of that region into the Roman world too. So there are population transfers as part of that relationship, but that's not the only dimensions of the relationship. So why does it all start to spiral out of control in the late fourth century AD? I think as many things are, it is the intersection of some long-term processes

of development with some very contingent factors. The long-term process of development is that in that central zone, or at least in the portion of the central zone that's in contact with the Roman world, you see a sort of three to four hundred year process of development unfold. So agricultural regimes become more intensive, you're producing more food, populations grow bigger, extra wealth and population are being combined in more complicated and more durable political structures. In other words, the nature of the neighbouring societies that Rome is facing along the rivers Rhine and Danube, which mark that original boundary more or less, that changes. Rome is facing larger, more durable political entities

which are, well, wealthier, but wealth is being unevenly spread. It's just a different foreign policy problem, if you like. Whereas, for instance, when Rome first came into contact with these groups in the first century AD, we know from Tacitus Germania that that central region was divided between about 50 and 60 primary political units. So that's sort of, you know, Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, Czechoslovakia, Western Poland. It's a big area, but it's not that big. So if you've got 50 or 60 primary political units in that kind of a region, they're all very small and they're very unstable. But by the time we get to the fourth century, then there is a much smaller number of larger confederative political entities that Rome is facing.

So that's the sort of long term process. And what happens in the fourth and fifth century is, to my mind, completely inconceivable without that long term process for a reason that we'll get to in a minute. reason that we'll get to in a minute. But then that intersects with a very sudden, short-term, more contingent factor, which is an explosion of a very militarily powerful nomadic group from the steppes, from what's now southern Russia and Ukraine, broadly speaking, north of the Black Sea, who, their basic effect is to destabilise the confederative world around the edges of the Roman Empire. And several of the new and larger groups that have formed around the fringes of the Roman world appear pretty suddenly on Roman soil. Without the Huns, this is not a choice they probably would have taken.

It's a very dangerous choice. A lot of them end up dead. I mean, we know about the survivors, but there were plenty, as many died as who survived, probably more, actually. You can't do the figures entirely. So it takes a very unpleasant negative stimulus to make these groups take that kind of a choice. And that's the

role of the Huns in this. They're the steppe confederation. So I think Rome was going to face a problem with these confederations around its fringes. They were already posing a new type of foreign policy strategic kind of dilemma to what Rome had faced earlier on. But it is the intersection of that long term process with the sudden destabilization of that world by the Huns that produces these very large scale, large scale but limited. I mean, there aren't lots of them. It's a concentrated burst of migratory moments across the frontier. Yeah. So these large scale migrations of these powerful confederations, as you say, this sounds very different to migrations Romans had to deal with in the past with Germanic tribes. I'm thinking maybe of the Kimberi and the Teutons,

all those hundreds of years before where it was just one, a couple of tribes and the Romans struggled then. But now with this powerful united confederations of Germanic tribes being uprooted and heading towards Roman lands, this is a problem unprecedented in its scale. Yes, I do think that's right. It's not unprecedented in its nature, but it's unprecedented in its scale. And I think the issue is that so many come at once. You get one cluster in the mid 370s, and then you get a second cluster about 30 years later in the first decade of the fifth century. And those two clusters are reflecting, I think, the stages of Hunnic intrusion into central, well, eastern and then central Europe. So every time the Huns make a major move, first of all, into what's now Ukraine, that displaces one set of confederations, and then they move into what's now Hungary, the other side of the Carpathians, and that displaces a second large body. And Rome hadn't quite managed to deal with the first cluster of the 370s when the second cluster of the first decade of the 5th century arrives, and having the two clusters loose on Roman soil together,

that eventually proves to be a problem. Let's have a look at that first cluster in a bit more detail. You mentioned the mid-370s. So why is the year 376 so significant? Well, for one reason, it's so beautifully neat in the sense that the last Western Roman emperor is deposed in 476. So you've got a 100-year period that you can delimit here. Of course, it's modern historiographical fashion not to like this kind of thing, but it gives me pleasure, even if I do think the sort of long-term process

is incredibly important and couldn't happen without it. Nonetheless, the fact you've got 376 to 476, it's an absolute gift and is not to be thrown away, in my view. But more substantially, 376, there's a sudden crisis on the very easternmost part, the northeastern frontier, northeastern European frontier of the Roman world, and that is various of these confederations on the fringes of the Roman world decide that the Huns are making life too dangerous, and they decide that they're going to move, and they decide that they'll actually move into Roman territory rather than somewhere else. We're told that this wasn't a sort of simple decision. One reliable contemporary commentator says they deliberated for a long time in the Latin, de equa deliberans, and actually I think you would think twice before you move into Roman territory.

That's not something to be done in a very simple kind of way. And two very large Gothic confederations turn up on the banks of the Danube. They send a request asking to be admitted. The Emperor Valens is nowhere near the Danube where this crisis is unfolding because he's actually engaged in a full-scale conflict with the Eastern Roman Empire's great enemy, which is Persia. So he and his army are mobilised around Antioch in eastern Turkey now, facing up to a Persian problem, squabbling over bits of Armenia in the Caucasus. So he's a bit

stuck. His range of options is limited. The answer that comes back from him after the embassies arrive with Valens is that one of the groups will be, one of the two powerful confederations will be allowed in and the other will be kept out. The sources describing this say that Valens was jumping up and down with joy, that his northeastern frontier had fallen to pieces while his entire army is facing the Persians. This is spin. Emperors are appointed by God to rule the entire planet. There can't be anything that's not under imperial control. And you can't ever admit that barbarians are forcing you to do something

that you don't want to do anyway. That doesn't go down well with your taxpayers, because that's not the deal, that's not the ideological deal on which Rome's social contract is founded. So he pretends that he's happy about letting one in, but I think the fact that he lets one in and keeps the other out shows you what they're trying to do. This is damage limitation.

They know they can't keep both out, they don't have any troops in the Balkans, they're hoping to let. This is damage limitation. They know they can't keep both out. They don't have any troops in the Balkans. They're hoping to let one in and keep one out. And how do the Goths, well, these are the Goths, I'm assuming. How do the Goths react to this allowance of one of their groups across the Danube? Yeah, it's the two Gothic groups. You've got Tervingi and Groitungi.

The Tervingi are allowed in and the Groitungi are kept out. They take the deal. The Tervingi take the deal, but they're hedging their bets. They stay in contact with the Groitungi north of the Danube. I take it, you know, they've been in contact with the Roman system for 70-odd years. They probably well understand that valens is letting them in really because he's got no choice and they may well have got well i imagine like any sensible

uh leadership they got plans a b c and d in their heads not just one plan and while ostensibly the hand of friendship is being offered them they they must realise that there's a good chance that that hand will be withdrawn or at least renegotiated when the emperor has sorted out his Persian problem, which he incidentally starts to do immediately. He starts to negotiate a peace deal with Persia to extract his forces, which also tells you that he's really not that happy. And then in that regard, as if they're still talking with the other Gothic group, is there, because once again, this sounds very different from what would have happened like two centuries earlier with a Germanic group, where one group would have gone in, and I presume would have forgotten about any allies and just looked to themselves but in this case is there an overriding sense of gothic unity that also plays a factor in why they are um they keep together as it were

there might be uh and this is one of the most contested things in the sort of modern historiography is that what kinds of senses of identity might exist. The sort of old nationalist era accounts of these things regarded things like Goths as proto-nations and basically thought they're Goths, of course they love each other, you know. In fact, it's quite easy to dismantle that. The question is to what extent do you dismantle it? Do you say that they have no commonalities that might form the basis of a political relationship, or are there some?

A lot of the literature has gone exactly the opposite direction from the old nation-type account and assumed that there's none. It seems to me you can't actually tell. And what you can certainly say is that it's perhaps, well, at that point it could become clearer when we come to the Vandals, it's not absolutely necessary for there to be a cultural commonality. The political stress of the situation would be quite enough actually to make the Tovingi and the Groitungi think that there might be a really good reason to cooperate, even if they don't all regard each other as Gothic brother-in-arms,

which they may well not have done. As I said, I don't think you can really tell. But it's not an easy choice, this, to leave places that you've been inhabiting for 70 years or thereabouts, take to the road. You're very vulnerable. The Roman state is large, armed and nasty. The Huns are very unpleasant. There are no good choices here. We're making up a future which is totally different from the present that we know.

And you'll be wanting to keep your options open. Of course, sandwiched between two superpowers. So ultimately, Valens, he does return from the East with his army. And when he returns to European Seoul, how does he deal with the Gothic presence then? Well, in the meantime, there has been a Gothic revolt. It's, as presented in our sources, it's created by food shortages. I mean, I think the Tovingi are certainly 10,000 plus warriors, that's what the sources imply, plus dependents. So whatever multiplier you want to give for dependents, we're looking at several tens of thousands of people suddenly arriving. And the Roman Empire's logistic capacities are not that good. So there are certainly food shortages. I also think there are hints in the sources that one of the causes of

the food shortages is the fact that the Roman Empire's immediately stuffing all the available food inside defended cities so that it can control the food supply if there should be a revolt. I mean, I think the only way to model this is that everybody's operating with plan A, B and C. So plan A is it might work out and that plan is there and real. But plan B is, well, what if it doesn't work out? What countermeasures do we want to be in place in case it doesn't work out and the relationship breaks down? So there are food shortages and that causes tension.

And a local Roman military commander invites all the leadership of the Tvingi to dinner and launches an ambush. I think that's plan C. This is something that you find in the Roman playbook of frontier management. Kidnap foreign leaders. We have three other kidnaps or attempted kidnaps reported by our best historian just from the period 353 to 376. So, you know, this is not something that Romans don't do. And presumably the Goths knew that this was something that Romans don't do. But the local commander does it. And then it seems he panics because he lets one of the leaders back out again. This is Fritigern. So I think that's

probably the worst of all options. If you're going to do it, if you're going to go for this kind of blood red banquet you kind of follow through exactly it sounds like he's trying to change the plan halfway through which is what you never do no exactly it it smells of uh medium uh rank officer panicking in the face of circumstance and i take it this murderous banquet started to unfold and Fridgund says, look, let me out. I'll make sure there isn't a revolt, you know, something like that. But anyway, there is a revolt, the Tevingi revolt, and immediately the Groetungi also cross the Danube. And this is over the winter of 376, 377. So by the time Valens gets to the Balkans, which he doesn't do until 378,

it takes him that long to disengage from the Persian War and move his forces, then he's facing Tervingi and Groitungi in the Balkans and in revolt. And ultimately, this leads to one of the most famous defeats in Roman military history. Yes, it does. Valens has decided to go for the military option, which would have been the traditional Roman option

faced with a large group of outsiders anyway. It's not surprising that he does so. And he negotiates help from his nephew, who's the ruler of the Western Empire. So the idea is, I think, to catch the Tevingi and the Groitungi between a pincer movement of Western forces under his nephew called Gratian and his own Eastern army. But Gratian gets held up, is slow in arriving. And by August 378, we're getting towards the end of the campaigning season. And Gratian is still not there in the Balkans. And Valens' advisors are telling him, you can win a battle by yourself.

And you can win all the glory by yourself. I think also he's misled into thinking that he can ambush just the Tervingi. Because I think although they're operating broadly together, the Tervingi and the Groitungi are moving slightly separately in the Balkans, which makes sense from the sort of feeding purposes. I mean, if you concentrated the two together, I imagine that we're getting close to 100,000 people. And that would be a colossal problem. So they probably are operating in slightly more disengaged groups. So the scouts report that Valens, if he nips up quickly to Hadrianople, to modern Idione on the Turkish-Bulgarian border, more or less, then he can attack just the Tervingi. And that's what he decides to do.

But the Groitungi turn out to be there too. And that results in a catastrophic military defeat for the Romans, along with the Emperor Valens himself, doesn't it? Yes, that's right. Our main source, Ammianus Marcellinus, again, tells us that two-thirds of the Roman army dies on the battlefield. How many Roman troops do you think that is? Depends on your estimate of the size of the Roman army. The biggest estimates are that Valens came with 30,000 men and that 20,000 die.

I think that's too large. I think he probably came with more like 15,000 and 10,000 die. and 10,000 die. But the scale of the defeat is colossal. And it still shows up in a Roman military listing of the 390s, in the sense that there are 16 missing regiments of heavy infantry from the Eastern Empire. And these are the regiments that get destroyed at Hadrianople and are not reconstituted. So this is an extraordinary shock. Wow. And is the significance, therefore, in that the Goths, they send this very clear message that they are here to stay? Yes, I think that is the effect of Hadrianople. The Romans don't accept it immediately.

They have one more go at trying to defeat them. That also fails, more in skirmishing and negotiation rather than head-on confrontation. But it essentially buys the Goths a longer-term existence on Roman soil. And by 382, so four years after the battle, the Romans are prepared to admit that at least for the moment, they can't defeat these Goths and they have to form a political relationship with them. And we get a treaty being made in October 382, whose central point is that the Goths

are to be allowed some kind of autonomous existence on Roman soil. Wow. I mean, is that unprecedented for the time? Has Rome ever conceded this to a migrating external force before, basically giving them all these rights within the Roman Empire? Not a force of that size. This is the kind of interesting thing about it. In a sense, you've got a model for this, in that you've had little groups admitted onto Roman soil. And if they're admitted peacefully, Rome doesn't always dismantle their existing political structures that puts them in a place and lets those structures fade away over time. And that's the way that it's the Emperor Theodosius,

Valens' successor, who's negotiating this. That's the way that Theodosius' spin doctors present this treaty. The Goths have been settled, they've got autonomy at the moment, but, you know, over time they'll just become good Roman citizens like anyone else. But there are totally unprecedented circumstances. A, the scale of the Goths, how many there are, and B, the fact that this is done after a Roman defeat. You know, Rome doesn't normally not avenge its defeats.

In fact, it makes serious point of doing so, like after Arminius's victory over Varus at the Teutoburger Waltz or whatever back in the first century, not to avenge the defeat, to allow the defeat to be followed by a negotiated compromise peace. And the spin doctors don't try and pretend it's not a compromise peace. compromise piece and the spin doctors don't try and pretend it's not a compromise piece that is very unprecedented absolutely and just want to keep on the gospel just a bit longer before we go on to the vandals but of course with hadrianople at that time valens you mentioned grecian as a western roman empire the empire is divided at that time so how how do the Goths move to become a significant force in the ultimate collapse of the Western Roman Empire? It's the transfer of the Tevingi and the Grotungi.

And we don't know the full details, but both of their pre-existing leadership structures disappear. both of their pre-existing leadership structures disappear. So all the named leaders who crossed the Danube in 376 are gone. And I think it's probably would have been a Roman condition for the peace of 382 that Fritigern, the victor of Hadrianople, if he were still alive, would be handed over to them. So he may have been dead. No one comments on it, interestingly, but Fritigern doesn't reappear after about 380. He may just have died in the course of the skirmishing that's carrying on up until 382. But with the extinction of both of those pre-existing leadership structures

of the Tevingi and the Grotungi, we see a new one emerging around the figure of Alaric in the early 390s. And by the 390s, none of our sources that talk about the Goths from then on distinguish Tovingi and Grotungi. So that originally very important distinction has eroded in the intervening 15, 20 years. And in fact, most people who talk about 376 and the Gothic crossing only talk about Goths. It is only Ammianus Marcellinus writing much closer to the time with the details fresh in front of him who makes that crucial distinction for us.

For everybody else, it's just the Goths. And I think that's reflecting the fact that Tavingi and the Grotungi unite and have clearly pretty much indissolubly united under Alaric but their their existence as an autonomous force on Roman soil, East Roman soil, remains a politically problematic point you know Romans don't forgive and forget Hadrian Opal, and there's lots of political mileage to be made with an anti-Gothic line of argument at court. And by the late 390s, after Theodosius' death,

regimes are coming to power on the basis of, we'll stop doing deals with the Goths. We're not going to do that. And Alaric finds himself thrust at that point into the political wilderness. He loses. The relationship with Constantinople is cut off from about 397 onwards. And for the next decade or so, he's hovering between East and West, And for the next decade or so, he's hovering between East and West, deciding, looking for an opportunity to force one side or the other to make a political relationship with him. And he ends up in the West, I think, partly because Constantinople is implacable, but then probably more importantly, because circumstances in the Western Empire are much more promising.

because circumstances in the Western Empire are much more promising, precisely because of the vandals that we're about to talk about, in the sense that the second great pulse of Hun-inspired migration into the Roman world affects Western Roman territory, whereas the first one in 376 affects the eastern half of the empire, the second one from 405 affects the western half of the empire, the second one from 405 affects the western half of the empire. And it creates chaos in the western empire. And chaos is political opportunity as far as Alaric is concerned. And he shifts the Goths definitively onto western soil a couple of years after the Rhine crossing in 408.

And that's not an accident. It's just the chaos in the Western Empire offers him a much better opportunity for negotiating the kind of deal that he wants. So you mentioned it just there, this second pulse of Germanic migration across the Rhine. So is this the Vandals making their move? It is. Well, we actually get two pulses within a year.

So 405, first of all, a large group headed by a man called Radagaisius invade Italy. And they're loose on Italian soil over the winter of 405-6. over the winter of 4056. And that's described not in much detail, but with a lot of rhetorical flourish as a very large and problematic group. The most coherent bit of evidence we have for the scale of the threat is the fact that the then ruler of the Western Empire,

a general called Stilicho, because the emperor himself is a sort of 10-year-old boy called Honorius. Stilicho mobilizes 30 regiments of the Roman army to deal with Radagaisus and any allied contingency he can get hold of as well. So he's mobilizing everything. So Radagaisus invades Italy, 4056. And then at the back end of 406, we get a very large, a second large intrusion across the Rhine this time. Radagaisus went through sort of sound of music country in Austria, over the Austrian Alps into Italy, there or thereabouts, Noricum, as it then was in Roman terms. then was in Roman terms. The Vandals, Alans and Suevs, by contrast, go over the upper Rhine, somewhere south of Strasbourg, that kind of a region. And although the Vandals will become the dominant force within that constellation of groupings, it's very clear that the Alans, who are more steppe nomads, they're the steppe nomads who used to occupy the Ukraine

before the Huns turned up. In numerical terms and in terms of military power, the Alans are actually the dominant grouping, the largest grouping in that set of allies. So we get two very big moments of immigration into Roman Empire, one over the Alps into Italy, then the second over the Rhine into southern France. So the second one over the Rhine into southern France,

as you were saying just now, it's not just the Vandals, who I'm presuming are Germanic people, but it's also the Alans, which are these nomadic, more Hun-like people. I mean, having those two cultures together, more Hun-like people, I mean, having those two cultures together, that really must create a powerful, mighty force to deal with. Yes, and even the Vandals come in two separate units. In 406, when the intrusion happens,

there are two separate groups of Vandals there under different dynastic leaderships. You've got Hasding Vandals under Hasding rulers, and you've got Siling Vandals. So you've got two separate groups of Vandals. You've got this numerically dominant block of Alans under several different kings, actually. They're Iranian-speaking nomads, so they're speaking a sort of uh persian language and then you have swavy as well who are various odds and sods from the sort of middle danube region but germanic speakers too yeah it's a colossal and messy enterprise 100 i love i love that i actually really love the fact that um said these alans are persian speakers you know they come originally from the Iranian parts of the world, but actually they've migrated

all this way west and they go even further west with this migration, don't they? It goes down into modern day Spain. Yes, that's when we first get any kind of coherent evidence for what's going on. And it's actually the

settlement in Spain that shows you that the islands are dominant because they were we have a good source that tells us who got which bits of spain and the islands get most of it actually so it shows you that they are the dominant for this is in 412 so six years after the five six years after the original crossing that they divide up the provinces of spain and the Alans get most of them. Spain is such a wealthy province. Is this the loss of Spain for the Western Roman Empire? Is this very significant? Yes, that would be a serious moneymaker within the imperial system. And this is where you start to need to think about how the Roman system operates in order to understand the process of imperial collapse.

The Roman Empire is overwhelmingly an agricultural economy with all the limitations that that involves. It basically taxes agriculture to maintain professional armed forces. Pre-modern states have two ways of doing military capacity. You either get local landowners to turn up with contingents of their largest, most aggressive peasants, or you tax their agricultural production to maintain professional forces. You can have things slightly in the middle, but those are the two ends of the spectrum. So, you know, something like Anglo-Saxon England is the local landlords turning up with the biggest gorillas they can find,

and the Roman Empire with civilian landowning elites who pay taxes to maintain military forces. That's the other end of the spectrum. Once you've got that clear, the next thing is, of course, that agricultural economies don't produce very much in the way of surplus. Things like health services or social services, those are modern inventions based on industrial economies which produce very large surpluses.

So the amount of tax revenue you get from an agricultural economy, a purely agricultural economy, is limited. And what that means is that the only basic governmental function there is, is military defence. So most estimates reckon that something like 70% of the tax take of the empire is spent on maintaining the professional army. And you don't get figures from the Roman world, except that it's large. But if you look at all the comparative evidence, you're ending up somewhere between 66% and 76% of the tax take will be being spent on the army.

That's what a pre-modern, pre-industrial state does with its tax revenues. It makes war one way or another. And that immediately then unlocks for you what the problem is of these groups being loose in Roman provinces. It starts to eat away at those tax revenues on which your military capacity is based. It can either eat away temporarily by fighting over good agricultural lands, which does inflict significant damage on revenues for probably 10 to 20 years, or once they start annexing actual provinces, you're looking at a structural diminution in the scale of the tax revenues coming into the centre. And Spain in the 4th century didn't require very many troops.

It's not exposed to any kind of frontier. It's a bit like North Africa, which we'll get to in a minute, in the sense that it's a real jewel in the imperial crown in the sense that it produces a lot of tax revenue but doesn't require an awful lot to be spent there because you don't need many troops there. You need some for controlling bandits, you've got a few gold mines that need protecting and whatever. It's not there are no troops whatsoever there, but the bulk of the army is not there. And yet it produces

plenty of revenue. So when you start losing provinces like that, which are net contributors to the imperial system on a large scale, then yes, you're looking at a very serious problem. So the Western Roman Empire, they lose this jewel of the empire in Iberia, Spain. How long does it take for the Vandals to look across the Mediterranean further south at the other great jewel of the Western Roman Empire? It's really fascinating to think about, you know, did the Vandals have any bloody idea that North Africa, where North Africa is? We know that they start out more or less in Slovakia, you know, right in the heart of Central Europe. And, you know, how good is their geographical knowledge? They work their way through southern Gaul and get to Spain.

So they work their way through southern Gaul between 406 and they cross into Spain in 409, so three years later. Dividing up Spain in 412, as we're told, they move into North Africa, 429, 430. But there had been some exploration going on. There's some raiding on the Balearic Islands. So they went partying in Ibiza in the 420s beforehand. But I take it they have no idea when they set off. No one's got any maps. You have to find these things out. And that might

in part explain the sort of time delay. There is a sort of 20 year sojourn essentially in Spain before they moved to North Africa. And how long does it take them then to, I guess, what numbers are we talking about when they cross over from Gibraltar into North Africa at the start of their campaign of conquest, as it were? We're talking a few tens of thousands by then. The West Roman state doesn't, of course, take kindly to this division of Spain, and it reacts. The Goths of Alaric, they're no longer led by Alaric, but that confederation does a deal with the West Roman state,

which sees it settled in southwestern France, in what's now Aquitaine. And that deal is hatched around about 415. And the central purpose of that deal is that the Roman state has decided that the Goths, the West Roman state has decided that the Goths are less bad than the Vandals, Alans and Suevs. So from the Roman state's perspective, the point of that deal is then to launch joint campaigns with the Goths against the Vandals, Alans and Suevs. So from the Roman state's perspective, the point of that deal is then to launch joint campaigns with the Goths against the Vandals, Alans and Suevs, which they do between 416 and 418. And in that period, the Alan majority suffer huge defeats. And so too, do the Siling Vandals,

who cease to exist as an independent entity. So by the early 420s, the sources imply that the survivors from the Alans and the attacks on the Alans and the attacks on the Siling Vandals joined with the Hasding Vandals. So at that point, we have a much reduced, more consolidated confederation. The leaders of the Hasdings do call themselves in North Africa kings of the Vandals and the Alans. The Alanic presence is real there. But I take it that the casualties were pretty fierce.

That's what's described. And it leads to... It's a bit like the unification of the Tevingi and the Groetungi between 376 and the rise of Alaric in the early 390s. Roman counteraction forces the survivors to create a larger, more coherent entity. And this is what's there in southern Spain by the early 420s. And they do win their equivalent of the Battle of Hadrianople.

We don't have as good a source, so we can't describe any of the action really, and the scale of Roman losses are not known directly. But the outline is that this combined West Roman Gothic force turns its attention now to the last surviving group from the Rhine crossing, that group, of course, being swollen by refugees from the previous defeats. But the Goths changed sides at the crucial moment. It had all been prearranged, and the Romans suffer an enormous defeat.

The scale, as I said, the scale, no one gives us numbers for the actual defeat, but we do have a Roman military listing for the Western Empire dating from the early 420s, the other side of that defeat. And we also have a West Roman listing from 395 before their action unfolds. And if you compare the two, this is work done by a great late Roman historian called A. H. M. Jones, you can show that the West Roman field army, the key mobile forces, about 50% of its regiments had disappeared in that between period, between 395 and 420. So the scale of the

action that has been happening, I mean, not all of that happened in southern Spain in the early 420s, but the overall degree of loss to the West Roman army shows up very strikingly. Goodness gracious. And there's that, I'm guessing, does that help pave the way for why the Vandals are able to take over swathes of North Africa in the years following? Yes, it does. I mean, again, the limitations of the Roman system have to come into the story in the sense that the military strongman who'd organised the Gothic Roman counterattacks against the Vandals, Alans and Sueves in Spain makes himself emperor, but then dies suddenly. And we get a protracted succession crisis. It's brutal. It makes sort of modern political parties' succession look like a picnic, both in terms of the amount of violence and the length of time

that it takes. So there's something like a decade of lack of coherence at the top of the Western Roman Empire. And it's that decade which immediately follows the Vandals, Alans and Swayves victory, where the Goths change sides, that gives them the opportunity, I think. It's quite clear that southern Spain is a bit too easy to get to. The Romans can march down there. They'll probably come back. We might not be so lucky next time the Goths might not change sides, whatever.

So I think from the Hasding leadership perspective, they're looking for somewhere safer. And they work out, A, that they can get to, well, A, first of all, where the hell North Africa is, and B, how to get to it. And that's how they exploit this chaotic succession struggle in the Western Empire. So long story short, they're able to exploit this crisis

and take over all the way to Carthage and all of that rich land is one of the crown jewels of the empire. And how long does it take before the Western Roman Empire is able to gather a force to attempt to retake Carthage and North Africa? In a sense, not that long. I mean, logistics in the Roman Empire are very slow. There's usually a two to three year gap between a problem appearing and any kind of sustained response to it. I always think it's probably like that old image of the Brontosaurus, which supposedly didn't know it was being eaten. The Roman Empire is a bit like that. But if it does realise it's being eaten and turns around and treads on you, then you're in serious trouble.

I think that's not a bad image for the Roman Empire in some ways. The Vandals take over North Africa in two stages. There's an interim settlement in 436 where they're settled in what's now western Algeria, but that's not the really rich bit. And in 439, they fight their way into Carthage. They're taking eastern Algeria. They're taking what's now Tunisia and Libya. And I think for very modern audiences, unless they've been on holiday there, they won't realise

just how gorgeous, fantastically productive these landscapes are. In the interwar period, when all of this is still under French control, this is where all the millionaires went for their summer holidays. All those great French designers have villas there. And this is where Roosevelt and Churchill liked to meet to plan World War II. You get enough rainfall relief off the Atlas Mountains to make this a kind of agricultural wonderland, albeit that on the other side of the Atlas Mountains, you've got the Sahara Desert. It's very different north of the mountain. So losing that territory is a terrible disaster in late 439. 442, so two to three years later, we have a large counter force being gathered in Sicily, combining both whatever the Western Empire can scrape together and large reinforcements from the Eastern Empire too. So we've got a combined East-West expedition being prepared to be unleashed against Carthage. Three years, if you like, to respond to that. Just before we go on to this great final encounter, because you mentioned the wealth of Carthage just there, and how this contributes to the fall of the Western Roman

Empire. In your eyes then, obviously we know, well, one of the most famous stages of the late Roman Empire is Alaric's sack of Rome in 410. But would you argue that actually the vandalic seizing of North Africa is more significant in the Western Roman Empire's decline than actually the sacking of the capital? Myself, I would. The sort of slightly fun, fun is the wrong word, but the sort of interesting thing about the sack of Rome is that Alaric didn't want to do it. He's sitting outside Rome for 18 months. He's trying to use Rome as a bargaining counter to make the ruling coteries of the Western Empire, who are safe behind the marshes of Ravenna, far to the northeast, give him the deal that he wants. He doesn't want to sack Rome. He's under pressure from his own followers to sack Rome. You know,

they think that's a great idea. A great Gothic Saturday night out will sack Rome and plunder all its wealth, etc. But he's got a bit more of an idea that actually he needs a long term. Well, I think what emerges, because we have a lot of sources for that period, and what emerges from it is just how clear he is in his head that he needs a long-term structured relationship with the Western Empire. He doesn't think it's about to disappear. And he thinks security and prosperity for his followers lies in an ordered, mutually sustainable relationship. So for him, sacking of Rome, he's pressured into it by his own rank and file, and it represents a diplomatic defeat. He's failing to get what he wants. The Western Empire is being very stubborn, and it doesn't really affect anything, the sack of Rome. It affects

nothing of any substance. The loss of North Africa is like the loss of Spain, but on speed. This is a much bigger version of the same problem. It's affecting that crucial equation that keeps the empire in being. Tax revenues in, army sustained. And North Africa is richer than Spain, and doesn't require many more troops than Spain actually to defend it. So again, it's a huge net contributor to the overall Western imperial budget. And its loss is really hitting at that jugular of how many military forces you can sustain. And if I just come briefly back to that military listing of the 420s, what Jones was able to show from it was A, the scale of the losses, but B, how the Roman Empire had made up those losses.

And it had more or less made them up, but it had made them up not for the most part by new recruiting. It basically needed to replace half the field army that it had lost. Three quarters of those replacements were merely frontier garrison troops upgraded. Very few new field army quality units were actually recruited. And it looks as though barbarian auxiliaries were pulled in to replace the garrison troops on the frontier. And all of that just stinks of lack of money, actually. And whether those upgraded garrison troops were really upgraded

in terms of weaponry and military capacity to be field army troops, that's really questionable. And then again, from the 440s, immediately after the loss of North Africa, there's a sequence of laws passed by the Western imperial regime, which again, smell of, we're short of cash, we do not have enough money to maintain the army. So you've got an unfolding fiscal crisis, which is instantly a military crisis, because that's all you spend your tax revenue on. You spend it on the army. So let's then talk about the Western Roman Empire's, you know, last great counter-attack attempt to reconquer North Africa, which you were mentioning just earlier about. So they've gathered this large force of Sicily. Is it a land army and an armada? Yes, but there are two. There are two attempts.

This first one never gets beyond Sicily. And it doesn't get beyond Sicily because Attila turns up. This is where Attila the Hun comes in. Attila and his brother, because most of the troops sent to Sicily from the Eastern Empire have gone from the Danubian frontier. And, you know, the frontier leaks information like a sieve. It's very obvious. I mean, we know non-Roman groups beyond the frontier watch Roman troop movements very closely. That's specifically reported in our sources. They know that some key units have been moved away. And lo and behold, Attila and his brother Blader

take that opportunity then to launch the first of their massive campaigns into the Balkans. So the eastern contingents have to be withdrawn and sent back from Sicily to the Balkans. I won't dabble on Attila too long because actually we do also have another podcast where you feature talking extensively about Attila. We don't need to talk about that.

But that's why that first attempt to reconquer Vandal Africa doesn't happen. Yes, another good example of Romans being preoccupied with other stuff, also hindering its ability to strike back, isn't it? It is, and I think by that stage, the Western Empire is already dependent on eastern help because its own military forces have been eroded by this fiscal crisis uh so much so

that if the eastern help was withdrawn it can't mount this campaign by itself really fair enough we we then get basically uh a sort of 20-year hunnic crisis with the rise of Attila and all his campaigns and the chaos then generated by the collapse of Attila, of Attila's empire and all the fallout from that. So it's not until the 460s that we can start to think again after this Hunnic crisis has come and gone about Vandal Africa and how to try and put some life back into the Western Empire. So that takes us to the 460s, really,

which is the next window after 4412 that you can do anything. This is fascinating in the 460s. You say that this is the last chance, as it were, to revive the Western Roman Empire with this campaign against North Africa. What happens during it? Again, even in the 460s, they have two goats. The Emperor Majorian tries at the beginning of the 460s. His preferred route is, as it were, to follow what the Vandals did themselves, gather an army in Spain, transport it from Spain to North Africa.

I mean, Spain transported from Spain to North Africa. But the Vandals, the Hasding leadership, they're led now by this extraordinary character, Geiseric. They catch wind of it by whatever means. I mean, there's a lot of cross-Mediterranean shipping of one kind or another. And the Vandals burn the ships that are being gathered to transport the Western armed forces, whatever they were. So that expedition doesn't make it to North Africa either in the early 460s.

You then come to the sort of very final attempt, which is going back to Eastern help in the late 460s. The expedition sails in 468. And this is fundamentally based on Eastern forces coming from Constantinople, the largest armada, we're told, that the Eastern Empire ever gathered. Wow. And it sails from Constantinople. Yeah, and it comes the route, Italian coast,

and then Sicily and goes on to North Africa. And what happens? Ah, well, yes, the gods of war are not on the Roman side. This huge armada, it's trying to find a place to land. I mean, that's the problem. That's the problem with all kind of seaborne military adventures, getting your forces safely onto the opposition shore. I mean, this is what the Allies in the summer of 1944 are most worried about.

Can they get the bridgehead? Can they get that established? Eisenhower had his message prepared for if the Allies had been thrown back on June the 7th. We have the text of it. This is risky business. You're throwing the dice. And what happens is that the Byzantine Armada finds itself trapped on the western side of the isthmus, Cape Bon, that pushes out in northern Tunisia. And the western side is rocky and you cannot land there. And they're trapped by easterly winds, so blowing them towards that coast. They can't get round to the eastern side of it, where there are plenty of places to land,

and where most of the ports of Tunisia, all the different landing places, all the commercial centres are, there are lots of places up and down there that you might be able to land. We don't know where they were aiming for, I don't know. There's no record of what their plan A was, but they ended up stuck off the eastern shore. It's not possible to land there and the easterly winds are pinning them against it. The Vandals by this stage presumably drawing on the extensive maritime expertise of local North African populations are very effective. A bit like Francis Drake with the Spanish Armada, they use these prevailing winds, which are blowing towards the Vandal fleet, to launch fire ships. And we're told that the fire ships cause absolute chaos in the Byzantine fleet.

And then the Vandals move in and start to pick off the survivors one by one. So the fleet is destroyed, the army never lands, the losses are colossal. And this, you would argue, is like the last great attempt at the Western Roman Empire's survival. It is. And the effects of it show up very clearly. I mean, if the expedition had succeeded, and I suppose the subsidiary question is, you know, given that the Eastern Empire was doing most of the fighting, then how much of restored revenues from North Africa would actually have gone to the Western Empire?

How much might Constantinople have kept for itself? But the willingness to launch that expedition in the first place, and we're told that Constantinople have kept for itself. But the willingness to launch that expedition in the first place, and we're told that Constantinople bankrupted itself for a generation to do so, that suggests that it was committed to maintaining the western half of the empire as best it could. So, I mean, let's suppose that either directly or indirectly, a substantial chunk of North African revenue has come back into the West Roman budget. Then you can rebuild the army.

You know, there's nothing magical about the army. You know, yes, you have to train people. But if you've got the funds, there's only a slight time delay between starting training regimes and producing soldiers who will obey orders at the end of it. I don't think you would have restored the Western Empire to its fullest extent. Britain had dropped out of the Roman system at the end of the first decade of the 5th century. It had asked to be readmitted a couple of times

and it hadn't been. And our sources tell us that the manure hits the air conditioning in a substantial way in Britain in the 440s. That's when Anglo-Saxon takeover, I think, probably really caught hold. So by 468, it's too late. Anglo-Saxons are very firmly entrenched in at least southern and eastern Britain, and Britain would never have been returned. southern and eastern Britain, and Britain would never have been returned. Likewise, I think parts of the northwest or the very northern parts of Gaul, both east and west, are probably not going to be easy to return to Roman rule by 468. The Goths were a permanent presence in

southwestern Gaul, and you wouldn't have got rid of them. There's also a Burgundian settlement in the Rhone Valley in Switzerland and that adjacent part of France now. But you could have restored Roman rule certainly in Africa, in Italy. Dalmatia is not touched, and that's an important revenue generating part on the Adriatic coast, Spain and parts of Gaul. And you would have certainly made the, even though it's a slightly rump Western Empire, it would have been far larger and more powerful than the Goths in southwestern Gaul or the Burgundians in their own valley. They would have had to have maintained good relationships with that entity. Would have looked a bit more like a confederation maybe than an empire, but it would have been a very big

entity with plenty of resources, with a resource base that should have allowed it to outface its potential rivals for the foreseeable future. And we don't get any other really large-scale migratory bursts after the 460s, so it would have looked a bit different, but I don't see why you couldn't have put really quite a lot of political life back into this system, even if the system was slightly different. Wow. Peter Heather, you have convincingly thrown Edward Gibbon's argument out of the water. Peter, that was fantastic. Your book is called? I think it's called The Fall of Rome. Or is it called The Fall of the Roman Empire? I forget.

I'm embarrassed. I've got a copy behind me. The Fall of the Roman Empire. The book is called The Fall of the Roman Empire. Peter, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been my pleasure.