The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [39]
Discussion of the Fall of the Western Roman Empire
Let us digress for a moment and discuss an overview of history to this point: the fall of the Western Roman Empire about AD 455.[47] The fall of the Western Roman Empire ushered in a new age in Europe. Rome (in the west) was obliterated, and what took its place was a new society in which the learning and unity of the Romans was utterly lost, replaced by disunity, chaos, and a distinct lack of quality in every aspect of life. Seldom has the world experienced such a complete loss of knowledge. How do people forget how to build frame and panel doors, how to read and write, or how to make light wheels with spokes? In a relatively short period, memories of Roman quality, accomplishments, and innovation faded. Mud huts sprang up under the great Roman aqueducts, and rubble rapidly replaced wonder.
Comparing this total cultural collapse to conquests in Asia, we note that China suffered invasions as brutal as those invasions suffered by Rome (the Mongols for example); nevertheless, China continued as a culture and a people. The invader’s language, dress, and cultural identity were absorbed into China, never to return. Rome fell and its culture, dress, language, heritage, and learning were totally lost for centuries; however, by contrast, China endured the invasions and fundamentally remained the same. It may be that the vastness of both the geography and the populace of China just swallowed the invaders whole. The invaders normally brought a somewhat crude culture into China, so the more sophisticated culture of the Chinese may have been so attractive to the conquerors they were ready to copy and adopt it as their own.
Egypt also survived at least two outside invasions, and their population was much smaller than China’s; still, they managed to retain their ancient traditions, dress, and culture, and in due course, toss the invaders out. Why did Rome fail to do the same?
These questions are impossible to answer, because after the fall of Rome the area fell back into a prehistory of sorts, in that few remaining inhabitants of Western Europe could read or write. The Roman population declined for decades before the conquests, and the invader’s numbers were large; thus, perhaps the more numerous invaders—after killing off many more Romans—simply overpowered the remaining Roman population. We may speculate that since Rome fell slowly, and inhabitants of the West knew of safer areas in the empire, they escaped the descending carnage using the Roman roads; thus, the Romans left and the invaders were all that remained. In the other instances, such as China, the population stayed and eventually overcame the invaders along with reestablishing their culture. In Egypt, their sophisticated society may have kept them apart from a set of crude invaders, or they may have simply felt their gods would eventually bring them through. All this is conjecture, but by making comparisons we can obtain a deeper understanding of history.
This view of the Western world becoming a big heap of debris after the Western Roman Empire fell is somewhat dated as many historians now say the period we once called the “Dark Ages” were nothing of the kind. They say a new vigor was put in place eventually giving the world the Renaissance, the printing press, science, and the flowering of the modern world. In my mind, “eventually” is the key word, because that “eventually” took centuries and a lot of luck. There was no guarantee the world following Rome would produce