We interrupt this sports blog for a bit of history. My super-intern will get back to writing about sports soon, but today Maggie MacAlpine has a new piece on Dark Ages Rome:
CONCORD, NH – Imagine fabled Yankee Stadium, but half empty, eerily quiet, both for the lack of fans and the lack of spirit, of faith, of hope. Low attendance has become the norm, but in this case those 25,000 are nearly all the inhabitants of the city, its only remaining denizens.
Theaters, state buildings, and shops are dismal and desolate with emptiness. Streets are quiet but for the occasional passerby. What government that remains cannot afford to service all of the plumbing, and so blocks of the city are cut off when their pipes fail. Gradually, areas like Wall Street or Time Square have abandoned, forsaken, surrendered. It’s dangerous to walk any more, because the empty buildings have become havens for homeless and the desperate. The inhabitants scratch a living off whatever they can find.
The city crumbles by the minute.
This is not a sneak peak at the latest Hollywood disaster film, but a glimpse of history and a cautionary for the future. Cities and civilizations always rise, and fall, but only once has a cultural, economic, and political decay happened to a city so great and powerful, so magnificent and enlightened, that its fall triggered a world-wide collapse. Ancient Rome’s greatness has yet to see a rival. Yet ancient Rome’s sent the world into centuries of chaos.
The capital of a mighty empire, Rome was the only nation to ever rule the entire Mediterranean Sea. Rome’s mighty legacy includes Christianity, the Romance languages, and modern European and Western political systems as we know them. Without Rome there would be no English, no Protestant Reformation, no Renaissance or subsequent Enlightenment, no United States. It is a nation that hardly needs such an introduction, and there was a time when its fall was inconceivable.
And yet it happened, and it’s collapse sent shockwaves through history for centuries.
If you are well versed in Roman history, you have likely studied a period that ranges roughly 1000 years, from 500 BC to 500 AD. Many studies of the Empire will stop there, or if they continue the focus will shift eastward to the new capital of Rome, Constantinople. Either way, the narrative will usually abandon the Italian peninsula for centuries, until the rise of the Roman Catholic Papacy returns the city to the list of European powers. Yet what took place in this time would dramatically shape the city as it is seen today, and feature a landscape that would stun even the most imaginative post-Apocalyptic screenwriter.
Like Manhattan, Rome at its height had an enormous population in a small area: an estimated population of over a million people. This is in a time before super high-rise apartments or electricity, but the Romans did have running water, indoor plumbing, and tenement buildings that rose as high as seven stories in a time without elevators. The city bustled with the rich and the powerful. Usually they were one and the same, as wealth was a prerequisite to achieve office and to hold it, and those in office were well placed to gain it. Rome was the heart of a massive empire, the London or Washington D.C. of its day. But where would DC today be without the White House, the Congress, and the Senate? Who would live there if the fount of wealth and power diminished, or worse, disappeared? In 330 a Roman’s worst nightmare finally took place.
The capital was moved from the increasingly indefensible and unsustainable city of Rome, where over 1000 years the city had begun as huts of wood and skins, huddled between the Tiber and the seven hills. The new capital also had seven hills and straddled a body of water, but in this case it was the Bosporus at the mouth of the Black Sea, and it was called Constantinople. Rome would still have her emperor, but the bulk of the empire wealth and power fled east. In one generation the city would lose 80% of its population, bled white by the loss of power and influence.
It was not just the movement of the capital that changed the city. Many know that the date of the end of the Roman Empire was 476 AD, the year that the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus was deposed by barbarian Odovacar, who became the first Germanic king of Italy. Yet this was only one event in a series of humiliations that the city had seen. Already Rome had been sacked in 410 AD and would be again in 455. The world’s reaction to the event is chillingly described by St. Jerome:
“For a long time, from the Black Sea to the Julian Alps, those things which are ours have not been ours; and for thirty years, since the Danube boundary was broken, war has been waged in the very midst of the Roman Empire. Our tears are dried by old age. Except a few old men, all were born in captivity and siege, and do not desire the liberty they never knew.
Who could believe this? How could the whole tale be worthily told? How Rome has fought within her own bosom not for glory, but for preservation – nay, how she has not even fought, but with gold and all her precious things has ransomed her life…
Who could believe that Rome, built upon the conquest of the whole world, would fall to the ground? That the mother herself would become the tomb of her peoples? That all the regions of the East, of Africa and Egypt, once ruled by the queenly city, would be filled with troops of slaves and handmaidens? That to-day holy Bethlehem should shelter men and women of noble birth, who once abounded in wealth and are now beggars?”
He wrote this while far away in Bethlehem. One can only imagine the kind of confusion and horror the Roman world felt at the news. Rumors would have flown, each traveler bringing different word. Some would say the city was gone, burned to the ground, its people killed or sold into slavery as was customary of sackings. Other would report that, no, the city was safe but stripped of its wealth. No again, as another claims the barbarians were bought off long before the city could be taken and that this rumor cannot be true. Though the empire was besieged on all sides, it must have seemed that at least Rome was impregnable. The city had not been invaded for over 700 years, and had seemed untouchable in a time where great cities were falling every year to the oncoming Germanic tribes.
The city would be sacked again in 455, and in 476 the last of a long line of puppet emperors was exiled. But the loss of its secular power and wealth would not mean safety for Rome or her inhabitants in the centuries to come. The city was still a powerful trophy, the symbol of the great Roman Empire. Throughout the 6th c. it would be a major theater in the war between the Goths and the Byzantines, its walls hastily patched and re-patched as one side or the other took the city. By this time the only real power in the city was the Bishop of Rome, who was only one of four patriarchs that ruled the Christian Church from Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Constantinople.
Without power or populace, Rome’s grand past only put it in further danger as a focal point for aggression. So how did the city survive without being completely abandoned? Some shocking facts emerged. Unlike other cities, Rome never retreated into a smaller area but maintained walls that encompassed most of the ancient city. And yet within the entire Medieval period not a single new brick was made in the city. How was this so? It was because the city did not need fresh materials, when an entire city of abandoned buildings remained to be quarried.
It would be strange for a city to survive 1500 years in the same shape and with the same buildings, but anyone who has seen Rome knows that few of the ancient monuments remain intact around the city. Time alone is not sufficient to destroy buildings of stone; the great temples in Egypt are a testament to that. No, Rome’s destruction came from within. Its not that the marble and travertine was destroyed so much as spread very, very thin as quicklime.
Quicklime is best known for its use as mortar and plaster, it can be easily made by burning stones rich in calcium-carbonate, like marble. As much as 75% of the cities stone, including its greatest sculptures and monuments, disappeared into the limekilns to be converted into mortar and plaster. Monuments like Basilica Julia on the Sacra Via, the tomb of the Emperor Alexander Severus, half of the Coliseum, the remains of the Circus Maximus, and the basement of the tomb of Cecilia Metella. Yet in their defense, what else were the Romans to do? With barbarians literally at the gates, and easy access to blocks of building materials, it is hard to argue that survival would not have seemed more important than an ancient general’s monument to his own ego.
Yet limekilns, catastrophes, and the dominance of the Christian church in Rome had an unexpected side effect. The city began to forget itself. What ancient pagan monuments that were not converted into Christian sites lost importance to the Dark Age inhabitants. Theaters and sports arenas had ramshackle apartments built into them, or were simply dismantled to feed the kilns. The pagan held no importance to a Christian city, and by 1000 AD the amnesia was complete. The Palatine Hill, once the seat of the Emperor, the root of our word for “palace” was known as the “goat hill.” The Roman Forum, the heart of the empire, where once Cicero and Caesar had walked, was a marshy mess known as “the cow pasture”. The scattered bones of palaces meant nothing to people who were essentially farmers and villagers, but for the coincidence of living in the ruins of the capital. They regarded as a village would a nearby stone quarry – a valuable resource but not necessarily worth studying. A poem from this period beautifully expresses the loss of knowledge felt by the descendents of Rome:
“This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it
courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying.
Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers,
the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged,
chipped roofs are torn, fallen,
undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses
the mighty builders, perished and fallen,
the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations
of people have departed.”
(Excerpt from “The Ruins”, by Anonymous)
It is the work of an unknown Anglo-Saxon poet gazing upon the ruins of Bath, in modern day England. He has no idea what he is looking at, and imagines it to be an ancient palace, when in truth it would have been considered a backwater bath facility to one familiar with Rome.
Fortunately, the amnesia would not last forever. Knowledge of antiquity was rediscovered with the Crusades and it would filter back, prompting a new generation of humanists to study the city and seek to understand its marvels. Its power too would return, as the Bishop of Rome would become the leader of the Western church after its break with the East. Rome would once again rise up as ruler of Europe, with bemusing sparks of continuity. For example, the Pope referred to himself by the same title the emperor claimed, Pontifex Maximus, chief priest, in a line of Roman rulers that went unbroken back to Augustus. In a way city did not die, but only sleep, perhaps dreaming somewhere in the ruins of glories past and future.
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Keep an eye out on iTunes for “Discover History”, an upcoming podcast that will delve into history’s forgotten moments and show you why they’re cool.
Works cited in this article:
• Coates-Stephens, Robert. “The Walls and Aqueducts of Rome in the Early Middle Ages, A.D. 500-1000.” The Journal of Roman Studies 88 (1998): 166-78. JSTOR. Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. Web. 17 Oct. 2009.
• Gadeyne, Jan. “The City of Rome.” Rome. Feb. 2008. Lecture.
• Levine, David A. “The Roman Limekilns of the Bamboccianti.” The Art Bulletin 70.4 (1988): 569-89. JSTOR. Web. 17 Oct. 2009.
• St. Jerome. “The Fall of Rome.” EyeWitness to History – history through the eyes of those who lived it. Web. 17 Oct. 2009.
• Wickham, Chris. The Inheritance of Rome. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print.
