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Roman rise and fall 'recorded in trees'?

M. Porcius Cato

Entry posted by M. Porcius Cato

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This was an interesting article, and I'm always very thrilled to see quantitative analyses of Roman history. That said, it seems like the article ignores an important insight gained from the many previous attempts to understand what caused the changes that occurred in the late Roman empire. That insight is that the variables that appear to explain change in one part of empire (e.g., the Western empire) fail to accurately predict what happens in another part of the empire (e.g., the Eastern empire).

 

So suppose the authors' theory is right: climactic change causes disease, famine and war. If so, the theory explains their observations of climactic change occurring with the Germanic migrations in Central Europe. So far, so good. But what about the rest of the empire? The theory predicts that there would be much less climactic change occurring in North Africa and the Levant, which were relatively healthy, prosperous and peaceful during this period. But that prediction seems highly unlikely to be right. In North Africa, for example, there was massive desertification and shortages of water, leading the agricultural frontiers of the empire to move back toward the coasts. Yet, the empire was fine in North Africa throughout this period of climactic change, and it only began to decline when the same Germanic people that invaded central and western Europe made it to North Africa, where they busied themselves impaling babies and butchering children (which I'm sure the authors would argue is just a rational response to climate change....)

 

The history of North Africa, then, presents a real problem for the theory. That is, given climactic change, we have an equal likelihood of experiencing disease/famine/war (like Central Europe) or continuing health/prosperity/peace (like North Africa). Framed that way, the article totally loses its Cassandra-like punch regarding modern climate change. Framed another way, however, we could observe this: given massive migrations of violent, anti-GrecoRoman foreigners, we have a much greater likelihood of experiencing disease/famine/war (like *both* Central Europe and North Africa).

 

When you look at the *whole empire*, and not just a fragment of it, you come away with a very different historical lesson. Namely, the most likely threat to civilization isn't climate change but cultural change, specifically people starting to act like those early Germanic hordes. Of course, I'm sure no one in New York, London, Madrid, and Moscow could possibly imagine that there's a group of armed fanatics who hate the Greco-Roman way of life....

 

Anyway, that's my two cents.

 

Source: Roman rise and fall 'recorded in trees'

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caldrail

North Africa was a declining region on a longer scale. The encroachment of desert has been going on for thousands of years as rainfall patterns atrophied, and in any case, the prosperity of the Romans did the region no favours at all, since their predations and over-use of resources had implications for their future (and ours, as it turns out).

 

After all, the north african region was the most heavily urbanised area of the Roman Empire, and with such a population to support, the increasingly arid conditions would have eventually spelled doom had not the germanic tribes found the region full of babies to impale.

 

That said, the economic decline that surely must have followed the end of the organised Roman regime (and the decline of its needs as a consumer) meant the long term survival of large scale urbanisation was not good.

 

However, what is true is the pressure that climatic changes can force upon human behaviour, such as the westward expansion of the Huns, driven to migrate aggressively by increasingly arid conditions in their own ranges, or the social changes of early human colonisers of Britain at the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago, when melting ice flooded Doggerland and forced tribes to find new ways of surviving.

 

I've also read that Krakatoa, on the other side of the world, may have influenced european events by causing temporary climate change after a volcanic explosion in late imperial times.

 

One point that is also relevant to us in the modern age is that human beings tend toward specialisation like any other animal. We get used to doing things a certain way, finding food and water from certain sources, and in civilised socieities, increasingly reliant on infrastructure. Look how the Minoan empire evaporated overnight when sea commerce was destroyed by the Santorini Tsunami.

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