LITMIR.BIZ

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empire created real peace across a huge area for hundreds of years. My one hundred bloodiest events include seven conflicts fought in the Mediterranean region in the four centuries before Augustus, but only one during the four centuries after him.

      Historians used to consider the fall of Rome a sharp fault line that split the ancient and medieval worlds, but since the 1970s, academia has been experimenting with a new viewpoint. Nowadays, the whole span from 200 to 800 CE is considered a single transitional period called Late Antiquity. As part of this, there is also a tendency to downplay the violence associated with the barbarian invasions—as well as frowning on calling them barbarians. In fact, some scholars argue that the whole fall of the Western Roman Empire is overrated as a milestone, and that the changes sweeping Europe were mostly the peaceful immigration of wandering tribes, who imposed a new ruling class but were culturally assimilated in a couple of generations.¹⁵

      This view is especially popular among the English, Americans, and Germans since they are the descendants of the aforementioned barbarians, who would now seem less barbaric. In the larger sense, it’s just another one of those shifts in historiography in which former savages (Vandals, Mongols, Zulus, Vikings) are rehabilitated while former paragons of civilization (Romans, British) are denigrated. Every now and then scholars grow bored with overrated golden ages, and they gain a renewed interest in former dark ages. It happens all the time. It’s never permanent, and we shouldn’t take it too seriously.

      Under this new paradigm, there is also a tendency not to differentiate between each storm front that pounded away at Mediterranean civilization. Whether Huns, Goths, Avars, Vikings, Magyars, or Arabs, it’s all part of the same megatrend. While this helps to keep the whole matter in context, it obscures the fact that the fall of Rome in the fifth century was the hurricane.

      The fall of Rome is arguably the most important geopolitical event in Western history. Without the shattering of the empire, the Romanized populations of western Europe would not have evolved separate identities. Instead of French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, there would be only Romans in these lands (speaking something very similar to Italian). This neo-Roman homeland would also have included Britain, North Africa, and the south bank of the Danube, whose Romanized populations were later absorbed, assimilated, and replaced by Anglo-Saxon, Arab, and Slavic invaders. Imagine a single ethnic group filling all of the lands from Liverpool to Libya with a two-thousand-year history of unity. It would have rivaled China as the most ancient, most populous country on earth.

       How Many People Died?

      The numbers are pure speculation, but almost every archaeological site across Europe shows a steep decline in the number of artifacts discovered in fifth-century layers. Copper coins, broken tiles, rusty tools, nails, broken glass, cobblestones, graffiti, cracked bricks, tombstones, and pottery shards are found in countless ruins, foundations, mounds, middens, and dumps from the Roman era all across western Europe. Then in layers dating to after the arrival of the Saxons, Franks, and Goths, archaeologists find fewer new deposits. In some cases, the sites dry up altogether, and regions that formerly had a lot of little towns, villas, and villages appear reduced to a handful of fortified strongholds.

      When archaeologists find less stuff, it generally means one of four things:

1.	Fewer people.
2.	The same number of people but less stuff per person.
3.	The same quantity of both people and stuff, but the stuff is less durable.
4.	Everything was the same, but we’re looking in the wrong places.

      Of these four possibilities, the simplest is the first, and that is usually considered the default position unless special evidence points to one of the other three possibilities. On the other hand, these four explanations are not mutually exclusive. The reduced number of people might be greatly impoverished, leaving behind even fewer artifacts per person. As these sites leave less debris, it becomes harder to find them for study.¹⁶

      Most demographers believe that the population of the Roman provinces in Europe reached a peak of 30 or 40 million in 200 CE, and then fell by one-third, or even one-half, during the entire period of decline, bottoming out at 20 million or so in 600 CE. The loss at the core of this period, during the fifth century, is sometimes estimated as one-fourth or one-fifth of the population. Most of this decline would not be the direct result of violence, but rather the result of famine and disease spread by the disruption of society.¹⁷

JUSTINIAN

      Death toll: zillions

      Rank: 59

      Type: despot

      Broad dividing line: Romans vs. barbarians (rematch)

      Time frame: ruled 527–65

      Location: Mediterranean

      Major state participants: Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, Gothic kingdom, Vandal kingdom

      Who usually gets the most blame: Justinian and Theodora

       Life at Court

      Procopius, the official historian in the court of Emperor Justinian in Constantinople, kept two sets of books. By day he wrote public histories that showered praise on the emperor, but at night he would pull out his secret history and describe what really happened. Much of what we think we know about this era depends on whether you consider Procopius a liar.¹

      Justinian was born in 483 to a peasant family somewhere in the Balkans, and he always spoke the Eastern Empire’s Greek with a barbarous accent. Justinian would have passed unknown to history if his Uncle Justin hadn’t joined the palace guard in Constantinople and worked his way up through the ranks to become commander. From there, Uncle Justin easily made himself emperor in 518 when the old emperor died childless.

      Having no children himself, Justin adopted his nephew Justinian as his chief assistant and heir. As Justin tottered into senility, Justinian became the true ruler of the empire long before he officially inherited the throne at the age of forty-four.

      Justinian’s wife, Empress Theodora, has been reviled across history for her sexuality. According to Procopius, she worked her way up from being a child prostitute to performing live sex acts on stage, eventually becoming a high-class courtesan, where she caught the eye and other anatomical parts of the heir apparent. Procopius spares us no detail of her sexual escapades. When Edward Gibbon wrote his chapter dealing with Theodora, he was too embarrassed to actually describe her activities in common English. Instead, he cloaks her tales from innocent eyes with quotations in raw Greek and commentary in Latin.²

      According to less interesting (and probably more accurate) historians, however, she was an ordinary actress with a talent for comedy and uninhibited sexy roles. The daughter of the circus bear keeper, Theodora was in her mid-twenties, with at least one child out of wedlock, when she became involved with the middle-aged Justinian. When he ascended the throne, she moved up with him. Justinian considered her a valuable partner, and all imperial edicts were issued in both their names.³

      Life among the high and mighty in Constantinople involved the usual collection of plots, schemes, and assassinations. Theodora set a standard of easy sexuality among the ruling class, and she was the only person at court to show a backbone when

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