Why empires collapse: from ancient Rome to Putin's Russia ("New Statesman", Great Britain)
When did the Roman Empire cease to exist? You can still find books on storieswhich give a very accurate answer to this question. The curtain for the Roman Empire, as is usually claimed, was closed on September 4 476, when a young man named Romulus Augustulus was formally deprived of the imperial regalia of the Gothic commander and went to rest in the area of Naples. The peculiarity of his name in this particular version of the fall of Rome is a framing of a thousand-year-old Roman history perfect in character. Still, Romulus was the founder of the Eternal City, and Augustus was his first emperor. And now, after the overthrow of Augustus, that is, “little Augustus,” this imperial line was interrupted. The light was off. Antiquity ended, the era of the dark ages began.
In fact, almost all the options for determining the specific date of the fall of the Roman Empire on a particular 476 day of the year are incorrect. Speaking very meticulously, the title “the last Roman emperor of the West” should, in fact, belong not to Romulus Augustulus, but to the Balkan commander named Julius Nepos, who was killed in the 480 year.
Meanwhile, in Rome itself, as a whole, ordinary life continued. The elections of consuls, members of the Senate were held, and the chariot races were held in the Great Circus. The Roman Empire remained strong, and was the most prominent player in the Mediterranean region. Driven from a city specifically named Second Rome, she continued to be the most significant force of her time. Constantinople still had to be part of the Roman Empire for many centuries, but already as its capital.
It turned out, if not to go into details, that the fall of Rome occupies the same place in human history as dinosaurs in natural history: the main example of extinction, which, however, if looked closely, turns out to be more difficult than one could imagine. If it is true that, to some extent, birds are dinosaurs to some extent, then this shatters our understanding of the fall of asteroids at the end of the Cretaceous period as a kind of guillotine that descends on the neck of the Mesozoic era. The same can be said about the "Romanism" (romantitas), preserved in the Middle Ages, and possibly longer - this theory also casts doubt on the idea of the Roman empire as a phenomenon exclusively of the ancient world that most of us have.
It is important, of course, not to go too far with your revisionism. Just as the finch is not a tyrannosaur, just as, say, England of the time of Rev. Bida (Bede) has absolutely no resemblance to the Roman province of Britain. Many historians prefer to use the term "transformation" to describe the decline of the Roman Empire, although it is hardly justified in defining this process. The gross facts of social decay are recorded both in the history of this period and in the remaining material objects. The imperial system that had existed for centuries collapsed under the influence of internal causes; barbarian states were built on the ruins of the former Roman provinces; paved roads, central heating and decent sewer systems have disappeared for a thousand years and more. In short, there is every reason to consider the fall of the Roman Empire in the West as something very similar to the fall of an asteroid, if we take a comparison from natural history.
The striking aspect of the fall of the Roman Empire — according to historian Aldo Schiavone, was “the biggest catastrophe in the history of civilization, a shift of incredible proportions” - even today it affects the instinctive perception of the term “empire” in the West. That which rises must fall. Most of us take it almost as a law in geopolitics, as well as in physics. Every Western country that ever received the status of an empire or a superpower, existed with an awareness of its own mortality.
In Britain, which only a century ago ruled the largest territories in the world in the history of mankind, there are special reasons for this. In the 1897 year, when the empire seemed to be at the height of its glory, and the sun never set in it, subordinate peoples from around the world gathered in London to celebrate Queen Victoria's brilliant anniversary. Rudyard Kipling, who is believed to have been praising the empire, wrote the poem “The Last Chant” (Recessional), which, however, turned out to be the exact opposite of hurray-patriotism. Instead, he described the future of the country in gloomy and (as it turned out) prophetic terms:
“Our fleet dies away;
Fire burns in the dunes and fields
Take a look - all our pride of yesterday
Like Nineveh and Tire! ”
Today in Washington, DC, the same concerns are voiced - and the example of Rome is often given openly. In 2007, the head of the United States Central Audit Office, David Walker, made a gloomy forecast about the prospects for the state. America, he argued, suffers from the same problems that we believe caused the fall of Rome: “the degradation of moral values and political correctness in their own homes, overly confident and overly stretched military forces in foreign countries, as well as central fiscal irresponsibility government. "
American self-confidence after that seems to have regained some of the lost positions. Nonetheless, pessimism remains the default setting in the United States and in the West as a whole. When the state capital boasts the presence of the Senate and Capitol Hill, the example of the rise and fall of Rome will always be hidden somewhere in remote corners of consciousness.
However, those who consider it an inevitable fact of nature that all empires, sooner or later, share the fate of Rome, just look at the main American competitor for the title of hegemon of the 21 century in order to doubt their attitudes.
The People’s Republic of China, unlike the states of the modern West, clearly does not fit into the traditions of ancient empires. Three years ago, a professor at the National Defense University Colonel in Beijing named Liu Mingfu published a book about the future of China called The China Dream.
Already in the title itself clearly hinted at the ideal of the American dream, but its Chinese equivalent, as it turned out, consists of both a reliance on the past and a look into the future. Unity within the country, the projection of force abroad, an organic combination of soft and hard power: all this, according to the Chinese colonel, is the DNA of Chinese greatness. How does he know that? And why does he refer to the ancient history - first of all, for example, Qin Shi Huangdi (Qin Shi Huangdi), the so-called first emperor, who in the 3 century before the birth of Christ united China, began the construction of the Great Wall of China, and also set the pattern leadership, which even Mao admired?
It is as if American commentators, who are trying to determine the future course of a country, would take Caesar Augustus as a model. The reason they never do this is on the surface. The United States, despite the fact that they have both the Senate and the Capitol, by the type of their self-consciousness is a young country located in the new world. While China is an ancient country, and it is aware of its antiquity. Dynasties come and go, waves of barbarians roll over the country again and again, the emperor himself can be replaced by the general secretary - but there is no gap between Xi Jinping and the First Emperor, like what separates Barack Obama from ancient Rome. The “Chinese dream” in its essence is simply a dream, according to which the “Middle Kingdom” should once again receive what many Chinese consider it an ancient birthright - global supremacy and a place in the very center of world affairs.
Here taste is felt - a very light, very tantalizing taste of something contradictory to reality, and Rome has never found itself in a similar situation. China was able to survive the conquest of the Mongols and Manchus, which indicates how deep the roots of civilization can be. And what can be said about the Romans of the heyday of the empire: did they have the same sense of confidence in the eternal existence of the empire that the Chinese have observed throughout history? And if it was, what happened to him?
People in antiquity, of course, knew that civilizations could experience ups and downs. In a sense, this is the great geopolitical topic in the Bible. The book of Daniel says that he saw four beasts appearing one after another from the raging sea, and then the angel explains to him that each of them represents a certain kingdom. The fourth beast, according to Daniel, symbolizes the most powerful empire of all; and, nevertheless, it will also be destroyed and “committed to burning fire”. Gold and purple in the Bible are considered only a shroud of this greatness.
The Greeks, who took into account the previous looting of Troy, also understood very well how impermanent greatness could be. Herodot - the first person who tried to show how and why empires succeeded each other and did it without resorting mainly to gods to explain the reasons - frames his great history with arguments about the fragility of civilizations: “Great and minor things should be discussed”, - he marks the beginning of his first book. “After all, many great cities in the past have now become small, and those that still in my memory have gained power, were previously insignificant. And since I know that human beings and prosperity rarely coexist for a long time, I will mention the fate of those and others alike. ”
Then, in one of the most recent paragraphs of his history, he expounds what, in essence, is the first materialistic theory explaining why civilizations rise and fall. The Persians, having conquered a great empire, wanted to retire from their harsh mountains and settle on richer land - but their king, Cyrus, forbade them to do so. “The soft land begets soft people,” he said. This perspective Herodotus traces throughout his story about the vicissitudes of civilization, and he uses it to explain why the Persians were able to conquer the Lydians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and all this was ultimately done in order to suffer defeat from the poor, but persistent greeks. In his book, written at a time when Athens was at the height of its glory, there is a caution in a hidden form: the Athenians, of course, will be in the same place as the other great powers.
The Romans signaled their own appearance in the international arena by participating in three terrible wars with their rivals in the western Mediterranean - the Carthaginians. At the end of the third Punic War, in 146, before the birth of Christ, they managed to capture Carthage and level it with the ground. This was the great realization of Rome’s military objectives. In 216, before the birth of Christ, Hannibal, the most prominent general from Carthage, almost defeated the Romans - for them it was the touch of a civilized death, which they will never forget.
In these circumstances, the destruction of the most dangerous enemy of the Romans was a moment of exultation. Nevertheless, the Roman commander who burned Carthage is said to be crying while watching the burning city, and quoting Homer's lines about the fall of Troy. Then he turned to his Greek comrade. “I have a bad feeling that one day the same fate will befall my country,” he admitted.
The Romans continued to expand their possessions in the Mediterranean region, but at that time many hoped that this presentiment was true. Rome was a cruel and domineering ruler, and a growing number of more ancient civilizations were very unhappy with its autocratic rule. The Greek traditions of the prophets began to mix with the Jewish in predicting the inevitable destruction of the Roman Empire. "Civil unrest will swallow up the Roman people, and everything will collapse," was the meaning of the predictions.
A century after the burning of Carthage, in the middle of the 1 century before the birth of Christ, it seemed that the oracles were not mistaken. Rome and his empire were engulfed in civil war. During one particularly bloody military campaign, it was found that a quarter of all citizens of military age fought on one side or the other. Not surprisingly, against the backdrop of such bloody events, even the Romans dared to discuss the end of the empire. "The Roman state, like all states, is doomed to death." So wrote the poet Virgil, who witnessed the horrors of his age.
However, the Roman state did not die. In the end, the civil war that lasted for decades has ended, and a new and universal era of peace has been proclaimed. Rome, as well as the world known at that time, came under the rule of one person - Emperor Caesar Augustus: he was the first person from a long succession of imperatores, “victorious generals-emperors”.
Virgil, perhaps because he dared to look into the abyss of civil war and understood what anarchy means, turned out to be a very valuable herald of the new century. He reminded the Romans of their god-given fate - "to help establish peace, spare the vanquished and overthrow the arrogant means of war."
By the time when Rome in 248, after the birth of Christ, celebrated its thousandth anniversary, the idea that the reign of this city was forever was taken for granted by a large majority of its subjects, most of whom considered themselves Romans by that moment. “Everywhere,” said one resident of the province, addressing the Eternal City, “you have made the most perfect and powerful people among the noblest citizens. The whole world is decorated with you, like a garden of pleasure. ”
Over time, this garden will be overgrown with prickly shrubs and weeds. Invaders will tear apart the fence. New owners will share most of it among themselves.
However, the dream of Rome has not disappeared. Her influence was too strong for that. The Goths, striving for conquest, wanted to be like the Romans - and only the poor Romans wanted to be like the ready. " So said Theodoric, the successor to the king, who ousted Romulus Augustulus: this man had a German type of mustache, but he wore clothes and insignia of Caesar. He was not the first barbarian in the history of Rome - the splendor of his monuments, the vastness of his influence, the sheer scale of his claims - all this was the only conceivable model to follow, which the ruler could use to raise his status.
In fact, it can be said that the whole history of the West in the early Middle Ages is best understood as a series of attempts by various military rulers to align the greatness of Roman ambitions with the paucity of their resources. There was Charlemagne, who was not only crowned as an emperor at Christmas on 800, the birth of Christ, but also brought columns from the city for his own capital in Aachen. There was also Otto I, a great warrior and king of the Saxons, a courageous man with a fierce temper who was also crowned in 962 in Rome. The imperial line established by them was interrupted only in 1806, when the Holy Roman Empire, as it was called in 13, was destroyed by Napoleon.
“Not a sacred, not a Roman or an empire,” Voltaire remarked sarcastically at the time. However, this joke was not entirely fair. There were periods when she answered all the qualities listed. Otto III, a grandson who bore the same name as the old Saxon king, crowned in 996 and ruled the Christian world during the celebration of the millennium of the birth of Christ, was supremely Roman emperor.
He lived on the Palatine Hill, like Augustus a thousand years before him; he reintroduced the title of "consul" and "senator". He was engaged to a princess from Second Rome, Constantinople. Otto III died in the 1002 year, on the eve of his wedding, which could have contributed to the unification of the eastern and western empires, but remained in a series of great assumptions like: “what would happen if”. Otto III’s ambition to restore the Roman Empire was an important topic during his reign. It is very tempting to think about what could happen if he united his empire with the Eastern Roman Empire - with the empire, which, unlike his own, led his line of origin directly from Ancient Rome.
Today, when we use the adjective “Byzantine” to describe this empire, we run the risk of not noticing the extent to which the people we call “Byzantines” felt like Romaioi, that is, the Romans. However, they did not mean Rome of Julius Caesar or Cicero, but Rome of the great Christian emperors: Constantine, the founder of their capital, Theodosius the Great, who at the end of the 4 century turned out to be the last person to rule both the eastern and western parts of the empire. In this sense, it was the capital of the Roman Empire that was captured by Mehmed II, the Turkish Sultan, when he stormed the high walls of the city built by the grandson of Theodosius a thousand years ago around the city of Constantinople, the “king among the capitals”, in 1453. The last conquered part of the territory of the Roman Empire was the small state of Trebizond, which in 1461 was absorbed by the Ottoman Empire. In the end, the story that began more than 2000 years ago in the hills near the Tiber, put an end to the Turkish weapons on the shores of the Black Sea.
But is it really? The Turks were not the first to besiege Constantinople. In 941, the soldiers-mercenaries, known as “Russia,” the same Vikings, who traveled a long way along the rivers from the Baltic Sea to the Bosphorus, also attacked this city. Their attack ended in failure, but the city of Miclagard, the golden capital of Caesar, continued to excite their imagination. In 986, one of their princes sent a delegation there for informational purposes. Vladimir was the ruler of the border city of Kiev, which was not distinguished by its special grace. He decided that it was time for him to join the community of states.
The fresco "The Baptism of Prince Vladimir." V.M. Vasnetsov, Vladimir Cathedral in Kiev (the end of 1880-x)
But what was this community? He invited the Jews into his court, but after talking with them he said that the loss of Jerusalem was a sign that God had left them. He invited the Muslims, but was rather surprised that their religion forbids them to eat pork and drink wine (he openly told them: “Drinking is the joy of Russia”). Then he sent representatives to western churches, and they told him that they "saw the beauty." Only in Constantinople, in the great Cathedral of Saint Sophia, did the envoys of Vladimir see a performance worthy of the ambitions of their ruler.
“We did not know whether we were in heaven or on earth at that time: there is no such beauty on earth that we saw there. We only know that God is there with people ... we cannot forget the beauty of that. ”
Thus began the commitment of Russia to the Orthodox faith of the Second Rome, and this choice will have serious consequences right up to the present day. Vladimir, shortly before his decision to send envoys, recaptured the city of Chersonesos from Crimea, a city that was originally founded by a Greek colony as early as the 6 century before the birth of Christ. He returned it to the emperor, and in exchange, as they say, was baptized in this city, and also received Caesar's sister as his wife. It was a very important step. Never before did Byzantine princesses marry barbarians. And Russia will never forget this precedent. In the 1472 year, almost two decades after the Turks seized Constantinople, the niece of the last emperor of the Second Empire married the ruler of Moscow Ivan III. “Two Romes have fallen,” the Russian monk sternly said in 1510 to their son. “However, the Third Rome stands, and the fourth does not happen.”
Moscow, from the point of view of the West, is not very similar to Rome. There is no Senate, no Capitol Hill. There are no such buildings, which are in Paris or in Washington, and which would be similar to the Rome of Augustus. But, nevertheless, if there is a country in the world where the influence of the Roman ideals would have noticeably affected the policies of its leaders, then this is Russia. In the 1783 year, when Catherine the Great annexed Crimea, this was done as an obvious realization of the Roman dream - the dream of restoring the Byzantine Empire under the double-headed eagle on its coat of arms. “The lands on which Alexander and Pompeii, so to speak, only looked, you tied them to the Russian scepter,” Potemkin wrote to her. “And Chersonese is the source of our Christianity, and therefore our stucco is now in your hands.” No one has yet written such words to Putin, but if someone would have done this, it would not be completely unexpected.
Today, here in the West, the dreams of restoring the Roman Empire have forever sunk into oblivion. The shadows they cast are too dark. The latest political philosophy, which was inspired by them and even got its name from a bundle of rozok with an ax in the clothing of bodyguards of the Roman judges, was developed only in the 20 century - this is fascism. Together with Mussolini and Hitler, this thousand-year tradition of turning the West to the Roman Empire as its model reached its monstrous climax, and then ceased to exist.
But if the First Rome no longer exists, as does the Second Rome, the Third Rome, as it turned out, unexpectedly retained the ability to rise from its grave. Even in the 21 century, the Roman Empire still clings to a kind of phantom life after death.
- Tom Holland (Tom Holland)
- http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/05/why-empires-fall-ancient-rome-putins-russia
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