VI.

Disintegration of the Empire

When Commodus became emperor in ad 180, the age of the good emperors came to an end, and soon the Roman Empire experienced far worse leadership. A century of turmoil began that caused a collapse of political institutions, a weakening of the army, and economic disaster. Even under such perverse emperors as Caligula, Nero, and Commodus, the government of the empire had continued its normal functions of collecting taxes, protecting the frontiers, and distributing food. Insane emperors persecuted the senatorial elite, but they had limited effect on the population outside Rome. However, after the murder of Commodus in ad 192, a civil war between rival claimants to the imperial throne penetrated every corner of the empire and changed all aspects of Roman life.

A.

Severan Dynasty

Between ad 193 and 235 a series of rulers known as the Severan dynasty ruled Rome, but for much of that time civil war continued in many areas. Lucius Septimius Severus, who became emperor in 193, was the first African provincial to reach the throne. He was an equestrian from Lepcis Magna, a city in what is now Libya, who commanded the Roman army along the Danube River when civil war gave him the opportunity to seize the throne. After Septimius secured Rome and defeated his rivals, he spent much of his reign campaigning on the frontiers. Septimius knew that he had to control the army and the ambitious praetorians and senators who often led rebellions. Septimius disbanded the praetorian guard and replaced them with his own troops. He had a personal hatred of the Senate and took many offices away from senators. He transferred legionary commands to the less ambitious and more trustworthy equestrians.

Septimius tried to keep soldiers loyal by raising their annual pay and by relaxing military discipline. He permitted legionaries who were on active duty to marry, farm their own land, and live in cities rather than in camp. He trusted the army so much that he gave soldiers numerous administrative tasks such as tax collection, which lessened military readiness. More openly than ever before, Septimius made it clear that his regime relied on the army alone. By pampering the troops, he intended to secure the future of his dynasty, but instead he weakened imperial defenses while inflaming the greed and ambitions of the soldiers. Even the emperor’s plans for a dynasty did not meet his hopes. His five successors, including both his sons, were all murdered. The Severan dynasty stayed in power for several decades by indulging the troops, but the enormous cost became clear during the next half-century.

B.

Military Anarchy

The Severan Age was a time of turmoil, but Rome remained a large empire with an impressive system of law, food production, commerce, and frontier defense. Its fatal weakness lay in its lack of a constitution. After Septimius Severus, all power derived from the army, which claimed to represent the Roman people. Earlier civil wars had shown that legions would support their own commanders in the hope of rewards. For 50 years generals caused incredible destruction in their quest for power, but their efforts were largely in vain. Between 235 and 284, the troops acclaimed about 20 “emperors” and another 30 “pretenders,” although the two groups only differed in that the emperors briefly managed to control the city of Rome. Only one of these emperors died of natural causes, so the imperial throne was a dangerous prize.

Civil war and the collapse of central authority affected every aspect of Roman life. While roving armies commandeered supplies from farms and cities, imperial tax collectors made increasingly harsh demands for funds to support the armies and the bureaucracy. Farmers who were barely surviving could no longer pay these taxes, so many fled their land to work for large landholders or turned to robbery.

Newly arrived Germanic peoples from beyond the Rhine and Danube rivers, whom the Romans regarded as barbarians, settled on some of this abandoned property, while some of it remained barren wasteland. Many of these small farms were incorporated into large villas, which in many ways foreshadowed medieval manors. Landlords who owned these large villas were often senators, and they had the wealth to raise defensive forces against bandits, soldiers, or barbarians. However, because farmers were growing less food, widespread food shortages occurred for the first time in centuries.

Anarchy made trade dangerous, but the decay of roads, bridges, and harbors made any kind of commercial relationship nearly impossible. People in towns and villas created their own pottery and clothing. The army could not obtain enough manufactured goods, and weapons produced locally were of inferior quality. The decline of commerce was also disastrous for cities, whose economic problems had begun in the 2nd century ad when too much wealth was invested in public monuments for the sake of prestige. Urban economies were further weakened when cities could no longer trade their products for food.

The poverty that resulted from the decline in trade discouraged the local elite from holding offices because they had become too costly. Local services—games, schools, religious festivals, and much else—deteriorated in the absence of benefactors. As central authority declined, the enormity of local economic problems became clear.

The soldier-emperors who followed the Severan rulers continued to treat the military generously, but as tax collections fell and silver mines were exhausted, imperial funds disappeared. The treasury melted down available coins and issued new money that had less real value. By 270 the silver content of the coinage was only 1 percent. This devaluation of the currency soon had a terrible effect on Rome. As money became worthless, much of the empire was reduced to a barter economy. The state collected food, animals, and other supplies instead of tax money.

During this period of crisis, emperors no longer automatically came from Italy or the Romanized western provinces, but from Africa, Mauritania, Syria, the Balkans, and even Arabia. These emperors made little use of the Senate, although the senators retained their prestige and their enormous land holdings. Political and military power shifted to equestrians, so that for the first time in Roman history, political authority did not depend on wealth and status.

The changes that swept the empire affected every level of Roman society, but had the greatest effect on the lower classes. The rich freedmen of the early empire disappeared because they had few commercial opportunities to accumulate wealth. They were also eliminated from the civil service because of the rapid turnover of emperors. Slavery declined as a result of its cost. Romans found that it was cheaper to hire wage labor as needed than to support a slave through the entire year. Social mobility was impossible, except for soldiers. The burdens of taxation and poverty crushed both the rural and urban masses. Widespread bitterness and growing hatred of authority led to popular revolts in Rome, rural massacres in Africa, and local separatist movements that attempted to break away from the empire entirely.

C.

Diocletian

During the 3rd century, renegade armies, rebellions, and foreign invasions brought Rome’s social and economic system to the point of collapse. Some contemporary observers quite reasonably concluded that the empire was doomed to collapse under its own weight. Yet the extraordinary recovery of the 4th century showed that brilliant political leadership could rescue even a seemingly hopeless situation.

This extraordinary leadership came from the emperor Diocletian, a native of Dalmatia on the Adriatic coast (part of modern Croatia), who ruled from 284 to 305. Diocletian instituted reforms that restored stable government and prosperity to the empire racked by 50 years of civil unrest. He understood that the chaos of the 3rd century had stemmed from the inability of one person to inspire the loyalty of armies across the empire and to coordinate imperial defense. Diocletian took the dramatic step of naming a coemperor, who held the title of Augustus, and also added two junior emperors (each called Caesar) to ensure a peaceful succession. This rule of four, called a tetrarchy, divided the administration of the empire, and it soon caused the empire to separate into eastern and western segments.

All four members of the new tetrarchy were tough soldiers from the Balkans in eastern Europe. Their first task was to secure Rome’s frontiers. They established four headquarters at strategic points across the empire: Nicomedia in northeastern Asia Minor; Mediolanum (present-day Milan) in Italy; Augusta Trevirorum (present-day Trier) on the Mosel River in what is now Germany; and Sirmium located on the Danube. For two decades the tetrarchy was a remarkable military success. Diocletian was a better administrator than general, but his colleagues defeated the Persians and the Goths, who were ancient Germanic peoples, and they also suppressed revolts in Britain and North Africa.

The military anarchy of past regimes had caused economic collapse as rival emperors produced worthless coinage to pay their troops. Diocletian instituted broad economic reforms in an attempt to restore value to the currency and to control runaway inflation. He also established a new system of taxation to finance the imperial budget. Since inflation threatened people on fixed salaries, including most members of the army and the bureaucracy, Diocletian issued a decree that attempted to set maximum prices across the empire for everything from onions to haircuts to Chinese silk. It became known as his famous Edict on Prices.

Diocletian was the first Roman leader who tried to adjust imperial income to annual expenditures. He was not frugal in his support of the army or the civil service, which he quadrupled in size, but Diocletian did try to balance the budget by collecting enough taxes to cover state costs. He created a uniform system to evaluate the economic resources of the empire. Diocletian was not successful in all his individual economic policies, but through years of unremitting effort he restored the economic health of the empire that had suffered from half a century of reckless expenditure.

D.

Constantine the Great

On his voluntary retirement in 305, Diocletian left two Augusti (assisted by two Caesars) to rule the empire, which was essentially divided into eastern and western portions. But the next year the death of the western Augustus, Constantius I, upset these careful plans. Constantius’s son, Constantine, quickly moved to claim his father’s throne, and his military success gradually caused Diocletian’s system to collapse.

In 312 Constantine invaded Italy, where he triumphed in the battle of the Milvian Bridge. In a dream Constantine saw a cross with the words, “In this sign you will be the victor.” The vision inspired the emperor to emblazon Christian insignia on the shields of his soldiers, and his victory at the Milvian Bridge convinced him the Christians’ militant god possessed great power. Constantine’s military success also led him to proclaim the Edict of Milan, which established toleration of all religions, including Christianity.

Constantine was now master of the western part of the empire, but it was only after another decade of civil war that he defeated the eastern emperor and reunited the entire empire under his sole rule. In 330, for religious and strategic reasons, Constantine dedicated a new capital, called Constantinople (modern İstanbul), on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. Constantinople’s location on the shores of the Bosporus strait placed it at the intersection of Europe and Asia. The new Christian city, which became the “New Rome,” sat on the route that linked the Mediterranean to the territory of Rome’s greatest enemy, Persia (now Iran).

By his death in 337 Constantine had established Christianity as the favored religion of the Roman state. Other emperors had greater political, economic, or military impact, but when Constantine recognized that small religious sect, he eventually transformed the course of world history.

Both Diocletian and Constantine greatly increased state control over the lives of Roman citizens. Both believed that the disorder of the 3rd century demanded a larger army, central economic planning, and an expanded bureaucracy to collect the taxes and monitor an increasing number of regulations. They tried to maintain order in the empire through the detailed management of Roman society. Local officials could not control trade and economic planning, so the government divided the provinces into smaller units and sent separate military and civil administrators to enforce new regulations.

Authoritarian rule permeated every aspect of Roman life as the government bound farmers to their land and craftspeople to their trade. The government required the sons of bakers or shipbuilders to follow their fathers’ careers. The emperors even established a secret police, and the old unregulated economic system yielded to a planned economy. The emperors often appealed to the public good when they suppressed individual rights, requisitioned goods, or increased taxes. In the words of one writer of the period, the empire became a prison.

The imperial bureaucracy of the 4th century was not large by modern standards, but the expense of maintaining approximately 40,000 officials in an empire of over 60 million became an enormous drain on the economy. The bureaucracy relished their own inflated titles while they paralyzed the empire with antiquated and time-consuming procedures that resulted in masses of paperwork. People were promoted based on seniority rather than competence, and the enormous complexity of the system led to rampant corruption. Government officials expected bribes for the smallest transaction. Some emperors tried to outlaw the practice, while others more savagely decreed mutilation for corrupt officials.