everyman's library decline and fall of the roman empire

As central tax raising powers disappeared, so too did the need to keep the city, and by 700 AD it was history. The Roman city, for instance, was the basic unit of local administration through which taxation was raised. The characteristic patterns of local Roman life were in fact intimately linked to the existence of the central Roman state, and, as the nature of state structures changed in the post-Roman world, so too did local life.

On the level of local 'Roman-ness' too, the revolution could not have been more profound. Even where other less important Roman institutions survived, the new kings had only much-diminished revenue rights and their armies were composed of semi-professional contingents of local landowners. The new states of post-Roman Europe were much weaker affairs. This high-tax, high-spend structure meant that the Roman state both intruded itself bureaucratically into localities to raise taxation, and was also able, if necessary, to compel obedience to its demands by employing the army, which the taxation supported. In 650 AD, as in 350 AD, peasants were still labouring away in the much the same way to feed themselves and to produce the surplus which funded everything else. Its structures were probably unspeakable vile to pretty much everyone else.Īs late as 383 AD, captive barbarians were being fed to wild animals in the Colosseum, and its criminal law dealt ruthlessly with anyone seeking to remedy the highly unequal distribution of property. They represented maybe 3% of the whole population. I am still staggered by feats of Roman engineering, blown away by the beauty of some the buildings Romans lived in, and delighted by the sophistication of the empire's literary and political culture.īut these cultural glories were limited to a tiny privileged elite - those who owned enough land to count as gentry landowners. There really was little change at one deep level - the life of the peasant producers who made up perhaps 90% of the population. These revisionist arguments have some real substance. No one denied that many things changed between 350 and 600 AD, but it became fashionable to see these changes as much more the result of long-term evolution than of a violent imperial collapse. At the same time, there still lived in the west many individuals, who continued to describe themselves as Romans, and many of the successor states, it was correctly pointed out, were still operating using recognisably Roman institutions and justifying themselves ideologically with reference to canonical Roman values.Ĭonsequently, by the late 1990s the word 'transformation' had come into vogue.

Everyman's library decline and fall of the roman empire