Dan M said:
> Historically, empires can last a long time. The eastern part of the
> Roman
> Empire, which was split by Constantine in the 300s, lasted roughly
> 1500
> years, and was defeated by another empire. IIRC, the Chinese empire
> lasted
> about the same length until it was overtook by the Ghengas
> Kahn...who's rule
> ended up merging into that empire.
It may be an aside, but both of those statements are misleading. To
begin with, Constantine reunified rather than splitting the
administration of the Roman state. The history of the separation
between West and East bears closer examination. Under the Republic,
the Romans had a long history of the division of the supreme
magistracy, first between two consuls and later into first an ad-hoc
and later a formalised "triumvirate". This tendency briefly re-emerged
during the second century with the co-imperium of Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus and Lucius Aurelius Verus, which enabled the presence of
emperors at several trouble-spots concurrently.
During the troubled third century this need for divided absolute
authority became even more pressing and was formalised by the emperor
Diocletian's institution of the "tetrarchy", in which there were two
senior emperors ("Augusti") and two junior emperors ("Caesars"). It
was Diocletian's intention that the Augusti should periodically
abdicate in favour of their junior colleagues who would in turn
appoint two new Caesars from the best men of the state. The succession
of the emperors would thus be regularised, putting an end to the cycle
of rebellion and civil war that had plagued the empire for fifty
years. Unfortunately, it didn't work like that, as sons of the Augusti
who had been passed over in favour of new, unrelated emperors,
asserted their supposed hereditary rights, alternative centres of
power crystallised and a new phase of civil wars began. The ultimate
victor was Constantine, who became sole ruler of the Roman empire in
324.
Before Constantine, there had been many temporary Roman capitals - for
many decades the capital had effectively not been Rome but wherever
the emperor was. Under the tetrarchy, for example, the capitals of the
Augusti had been Nicomedia in Asia Minor, Mediolanum in northern
Italy, Sirmium in what's now Serbia and Augusta Treverorum (modern
Trier). One of Constantine's several innovations was the establishment
of a permanent new capital at Constantinople. Rather than this city
being the capital of an "Eastern Roman Empire", it was the capital of
the whole empire. Even during periods of division of the imperial
authority, the empire itself was seen as a unitary whole and the usual
procedure was for edicts to be issued in the name of all the current
emperors and to be enforced across the Roman world.
It's commonly held that the final division of the Roman empire
occurred in 395 at the death of Theodosius I, at which Honorius became
emperor in the west and Arcadius in the East. From then until the
extinction of the western dynasty in 476 there was always an emperor
in Constantinople and another usually in Ravenna. However, even as
these two centres of power solidified, the Roman world formally
remained whole. The two emperors provided each other with military
assistance even as late as a major joint naval expedition against the
Vandals in 468. Even the man sometimes seen as the last fully
legitimate western emperor, Julius Nepos, was appointed by the eastern
emperor Leo I. Furthermore, following the overthrow of the last
western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, many of the Germanic successor
rulers claimed to be ruling not as independent kings but as
representatives of the emperor at Constantinople.
As for when the Eastern remnant of the Roman empire fell, I think
there were two very clear periods during which large swathes of
territory were lost and the character of the empire deeply changed.
The first was during the lightning conquests of the Muslim armies in
the seventh century, which cut away from the empire the ancient Roman
provinces of Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa. Augustus might
well have recognised the sixth century empire of Justinian as a
successor, however much transformed by the passage of centuries, to
his own; but the Byzantine empire of Heraclius and his successors was
a different world. The second major collapse occurred with the defeat
of Romanus Diogenes by the Seljuk Turkish
sultan Alp Arslan at Manzikert in 1054. (The Seljuk sultanate was a
successor to the Arab Caliphates that had inflicted the earlier
defeats on the Byzantines.)
In any case, much of this is a distraction from the central questions:
what endured for those 1500 or more years, and was it totalitarian. In
my view the main continuity was that of the administrative bureaucracy
created by the Romans, despite the changes at the highest levels of
power, the shifts of culture and even the change of religion. During
the first few centuries of the Empire, the military and civil leaders
were essentially talented amateurs drawn from the senatorial class. A
major development during the third century was the replacement of
these aristocratic leaders by middle class, professional leaders,
first in the military sphere under Gallienus and then in the civil
administration under Diocletian and Constantine. Alongside this shift,
the administrative bureaucracy expanded dramatically in size as the
troubled empire sought to organise its still massive economic
resources to meet its ever more desperate military needs. It's
striking that the empire of the second century was run by an imperial
staff of a few hundred bureaucrats but more striking that by the
fourth century this had increased to tens of thousands.
It was this vast administrative machinery - and the parallel hierarchy
of the Christian Church, with which it became increasingly entangled -
that endured through so many changes of dynasty, provincial structure,
prevailing religious orthodoxy and military organisation. Indeed, it
even survived the collapse of Roman political authority in both East
and West. The Germanic rulers of post-Roman Europe attempted to
preserve the Roman administration and the Roman laws, but both
fragmented and decayed during the first few centuries of the German
states. Under Islam, however, the bureaucracy flourished, becoming the
administration of the Ummayyad and Abbasid Caliphates. The
civilisation of classical Islam fused the Arab religion with Roman
administration and Persian elite culture.
(I think that this kind of continuity through administrative
bureaucracy, or at least continuity of scribal and bureaucratic
standards, pratice and culture, is typical of ancient civilisations,
whether Roman, Egyptian, Mesopotamian or Chinese.)
As for totalitarianism, I think it's clear that it's a product of
modern states. Even when the Roman rulers might have aspired to
totalitarianism, such as during Diocletian's attempts to control the
economy through edicts, or the exasperated attempts by Christian
emperors to impose some kind of religious orthodoxy, the tools to do
so - mass media, mass surveillance and so forth - simply were not
available. Likewise, republicanism or democracy on scales larger than
that of city-states are products of modern times. It's not clear to me
that the endurance or otherwise of pre-modern empires has much to say
about the prospects for democracy or dictatorship in the modern world.
I could say as much about China, but I'll spare the List the details.
However, it's incorrect both that Genghis Khan conquered China and
that the empire the Mongols conquered had endured for 1500 years.
Since the fall of the Tang dynasty in 907, China had been divided into
a number of smaller states. During the period from 906 to 960, five
dynasties rapidly succeeded one another in the north of China and the
south was divided into ten or so small states. China was briefly
reunified by the Song dynasty but by 1127 the northern part of the
country had fallen under the rule of the non-Chinese Jin and Xia
dynasties in the east and west respectively. These two northern
dynasties were defeated by Genghis but the conqueror of China proper
was his grandson Kublia, founder of the increasingly sinicised Yuan
dynasty. The Mongols ruled China for a century until the Yuan were
overthrown by the native Chinese Ming dynasty.
As with Rome, China passed through succeeding periods of political
unity and disunity. Indeed, the normal state of affairs might have
been a division into smaller states ruled by independent dynasties.
From the first unification of China by the Qin dynasty in 221BC to
the Mongol conquest in AD1271, China was only inarguably a single
state from 221BC to AD220 under the Qin and Han, from 581 to 907 under
the Sui and Tang and from 960 to 1127 under the Northern Song, or
about 60% of that period. It was only during the Yuan, Ming and Qing
that the idea of China as a coextensive political and cultural zone
achieved an enduring reality. (Which is not to denigrate the earlier
achievements of the Chinese. For example, at the time of the Mongol
conquest the Song capital, Hangzhou, may have been the most populous,
wealthy and sophisticated city in the world.)
I'll say even less about another civilisation that I know something
about - ancient Egypt - but that one also wasn't a single "Egyptian
Empire". Instead, four periods of unity (the Old Kingdom, Middle
Kingdom, New Kingdom and Late Period) were separated by periods of
political decentralisation or foreign domination, and I seem to recall
counting something like fifteen distinct periods of ancient Egyptian
imperialistic expansion. In this case too, the continuities across
vast periods of time are not so much political as cultural and
administrative.
In any case, I think that's enough rambling for one email...
Rich
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
