Pingback: The role of disease and climate change in the fall of the western Roman Empire « Quotulatiousness. The Fate of Rome (2017) tells this story from a slightly different angle, taking into consideration new information about the climate and epidemiological events that played a major role in the prosperity and downfall of one of the largest empires in history. Rome offered infrastructure and a cushy lifestyle enabled by infrastructure far ahead of its neighbors- even Shapur II turned his Roman POWs into a construction corps to build up his empire. Literary sources likely exaggerate the number of deaths, and are unreliable in many respects; though unquestionably the Plague of Justinian had far-reaching effects. There are contradictory archaeological reports for this site—an inconvenient fact that is avoided in the footnotes. And there is of course Greer’s explanation, which puts the emphasis more on the resource side of things, rather than the systems designed to access and use those resources, but gives us fundamentally the same result: a crisis followed by a drop to a lower level of complexity and resource consumption, followed by a small recovery with big promises of future prosperity, but ultimately not achieving the former level, but plateauing for a time, followed by another crisis, and so on. Here is the monumental retelling of one of the most consequential chapters of human history: the fall of the Roman Empire.The Fate of Romeis the first book to examine the catastrophic role that climate change and infectious diseases played in the collapse of Rome's power-a story of nature's triumph over human ambition. Gibbon’s fundamental conclusions about the end of Rome, as expounded over the course of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, remain unchallenged. At this point, the city of Rome’s population was still as high as 400,000. I disagree with the thesis above, although I think Greer is closest. According to chroniclers, the year AD 536 was bitterly cold; the sun was partly obscured by haze for a year and a half; temperatures cooled throughout the empire for almost a decade, leading to crop failures and famines in some parts of the empire. But that prosperity came at a cost: the Roman Empire’s large number of trade routes and high connectedness created a perfect breeding ground for infectious diseases. No-one wanted to destroy Roman institutions or enough of what the Romans built, until perhaps Attila, to really go after the Romans. The passage describing the disease that struck Carthage is not long; it is impossible to provide more than a vague, tentative diagnosis on the basis of this evidence, for hemorrhagic fever or any other condition. In the following letter to Agenuchia, a highborn lady of Gaul, Saint Jerome bemoans the fate of Rome, once so proud and powerful.The letter, dated 409, was written at a critical moment: the Visigoths had accepted a huge ransom to end their siege of Rome.. Over 70 years would pass before another Roman emperor died peacefully in his bed. Emperors debased the currency so that they could buy the loyalty of their soldiers; this led to hyperinflation throughout the empire. Some 700,000... Rome’s rise is a story with the capacity to astonish us, all the more so since the Romans were relative latecomers to the power politics of the Mediterranean. Harper suggests that Attila’s invasion of Italy in AD 452 was cut short by the threat of malaria as well as famine. The Fate of Rome (2017) tells this story from a slightly different angle, taking into consideration new information about the climate and epidemiological events that played a major role in the prosperity and downfall of one of the largest empires in history. Harper notes that pestilence of one sort or another was relatively commonplace; he counts nine epidemics in the city of Rome between 43 BC and AD 148. Watched Chinese businessmen get looks of - well, lust - as the dogs fought. After his father’s death, Aristides had cruised the Nile, the ultimate Grand Tour. Meanwhile, the Romans were losing control of their frontiers; in AD 260 an invading force from the upper Danube region almost reached the suburbs of Rome itself. The power of the aristocracy, the administration, and the army all flowed from his sacred energy. Within a few decades, the population of Constantinople had shrunk from 500,000 to scarcely 100,000. Christianity made inroads by making slave and master equal. A pandemic is not in evidence here. Kyle Harper, Senior Vice President and Provost of the University of Oklahoma, seeks to complement Gibbon’s account by emphasising the role of nature, and specifically climate change and infectious disease, in the fall of Rome in his provocative, exceptionally well-written book The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease and the End of an Empire. This month’s subject is The Fate of Rome, by Kyle Harper, which advocates for the view that Rome was done in by climate change and infectious diseases (which were exacerbated by climate change). It serves them right that they collpased; after all, what have the Romans ever done for us? After the Gothic War (AD 376 — 382), the western half of the Roman Empire limped along for almost a century, steadily losing territory to enemies and authority to the popes. Primarily equites- the middle class- paid taxes. No one alive could remember a time when the emperors actually resided in the ancient capital. 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