14e: Conclusions

1. Christianizing the Empire
Christianizing the Empire was a process, not an Imperial directive. Constantine started the process, although he never made Christianity the official religion of the Roman state, or officially converted until his deathbed. The Christian church first attracted Empire-wide notice in the second century AD, as waiting for the Second Coming became less important than preparing the Church and its people for when it did come. The Christian church's focus on the heavenly life to come rather than on the earthly life won it followers, as did its social outreach to the less fortunate. When Constantine did give Christianity the status of an officially approved religion, he did not persecute pagans. Nor did the Christians persecute pagans. Instead, they were more concerned with persecuting other Christians over issues which would now seem trivial. The fact that almost all of Constantine's successors were Christian increased the Christian church's prestige and power. But paganism flourished well into the sixth century at Rome.

2. Those dirty barbarians
They came from the East, sometimes from as far as Asia. The first wave was primarily Germanic tribes such as the various tribes of Goths (Visigoths, Ostrogoths) who had basically grown too large to live comfortably in their traditional homelands. The Goths originally wanted to settle within the boundaries of the Empire and become Romanized, but for whatever reason this did not work out. By the time Theodosius I was ready to try assimilating the Goths, there were literally too many Germans knocking at Rome's figurative front door. Visigoths, Vandals, Suebi, and Alans all took turns at pillaging the Western Empire, sometimes even sacking Rome. Worst of all were the Asiatic Huns, led by a former hostage in the court of Emperor Honorius, Attila T. Hun. Having been turned away by the Persian Empire and then encouraged to go farther west by the Eastern Roman Empire, the Huns drove the Visigoths out of their native lands, and once the Visigoths had passed within the boundaries of the Empire, the Huns threatened first Constantinople (447 AD) and then Ravenna (452 AD). Inexplicably Attila T. Hun chose not to pursue the matter further, and died a year afterward. Rome's problems were hardly over.

3. The Eastern Empire had all the advantages.
Part of the Eastern Empire's advantage was plain old luck. Constantinople had the advantage of an easily defended site on a peninsula commanding the trade routes between East and West. It had also been built (or rebuilt, to be more accurate) on a grand scale for the express purpose of rivaling Rome. The Western Empire's capital, on the other hand, had to be moved to Ravenna because Rome was too far away from the military flashpoints on the frontier. Ravenna could not compare with Constantinople either as a capital or a military base, and the West suffered for it. The East as a whole was more urbanized than the West, which gave it an advantage in rounding up and distributing men, money, and materials. But part of it was just plain luck: for whatever reason, the barbarians who raided the Empire preferred to strike at the agricultural western part of the Empire than the urbanized East.

4. When did the Western Empire fall?
The influential historian Edward Gibbon, a favorite of our nation's Founders, believed that the Western Empire fell in 476 AD with the departure of Romulus Augustulus and the accession of King Odovacar of Italy. It's doubtful that anyone outside of the respective royal courts noticed any difference. Same taxes, same local bureaucracies, same money in most cases. When Theodoric and his Ostrogoths defeated Odovacar in 493, again, life went on pretty much as usual, except for that neither Odovacar nor Theodoric claimed to be the Western Emperor, but "King of Italy." Both kings respected the old Roman culture, as did the Eastern Emperor Justinian, who reconquered Italy and North Africa by 540 AD. Of course, Justinian also destroyed much of Italy's remaining infrastructure when he did this, but at least he was a genuine Emperor. I myself pick 568 AD, which marked the beginning of the Lombard invasion of Italy. Under the Lombards, Italy would very soon come to bear little, if any, resemblance to the great city founded on April 21, 753 BC.