On Historical Recoveries

For all our fear of civilizational collapse, we spend little time talking about those civilizations which recovered from periods of decline or crisis

Tropes about “decline and fall” are common in history, especially in some traditional and pop-culture narratives. A young society starts out strong and vibrant, with dynamism and confidence. Health and vigor build great things and create success and prosperity, but then ease, sloth, and decadence creep in, leading to decline and fall.

Such narratives are very common in earlier historiography, and have a seductive appeal even today, especially at a classical school. More than once I’ve had parents, upon finding out that I teach the Roman Empire, ask me if I “think America will fall like Rome.” Here beginneth the reading from Edward Gibbon…

I think we ought to be very hesitant about what lessons we take from historical examples of “falling civilizations,” if nothing else because such endeavors are usually driven by fears about the present. In fact, I think most such popular tropes about falling civilizations are themselves examples of historical presentism, where the past is used as a canvas for painting modern anxieties and concerns back onto a reality that may or may not exist.

It’s also extremely easy to cherry-pick examples and supposed key variables with such narratives. Most historical societies are complex enough to have a myriad of moving pieces and variables at play, meaning that almost any theory will find some purchase, however tenuous. Rome, with its outsized role in our popular imagination is probably the best example of this. Just about any theory you can think of has been applied to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which has enough data and sources to reward any line of inquiry, while also being vague and remote enough to avoid conclusive certainty. One German historian (of course it was a German historian) came up with a list of over 200 reasons that have been given for Rome’s fall, and they read like a laundry list of what Europe and American intellectual classes have worried about dating back to the Enlightenment.

The problem of reading whatever variable we think is the skeleton key explanation into something certainly isn’t unusual. We all do it in our personal lives quite often, such as when we dismiss someone’s behavior as primarily the product of their parenting, schooling, cultural background, or other formative experience. When you have nothing else to go on, and are searching for an explanation, such broad categories may be useful. But if that’s your go-to explanation for someone, and leads you to foreclose looking for other possible explanations, then you may not be seeing the whole person. A classic problem of immature students is to learn one key thing about a topic, and then think they actually understand the topic as a whole, where that one key thing is the only thing they can mention in a conversation.

The alternative is to try to build an explanation of another person (or historical event) from the ground up, and holistically survey the major variables that shape, explain, or define the subject. Of course, this is by no means easy, and requires much more effort. We might even find ourselves filtering through many historical examples and ruling most of them out, just to find the few examples which do fit. This would “waste” much labor along the way.

There is another direction we can attack this question from, however, which seems to me under-utilized. For all our fear of civilizational collapse, we seem to spend precious little time talking about those civilizations which recovered from periods of decline or crisis. A doctor will naturally try to understand a patient’s cause-of-death, but they might benefit just as much, if not more, from studying those patients who recovered. Flipping our inquiry around and looking for historical recoveries may even be an easier task than dissecting a civilization’s corpse for the thousandth time. It's easier to notice a positive variable bringing order in the midst of chaos as opposed to determining which set of variables failed (and in what proportion) when a destructive event came along to wreck a complex system.

That said, there’s a challenge in looking for historical recoveries, as they may be less visible in the historical record unless you already have some familiarity with the time period. Historical collapses are obvious, but ones which didn’t happen are, almost by definition, harder to spot (Antonine Pious can relate). Also, once we’ve found one, we may still end up with similar debates about which underlying variables were most helpful in leading to recovery (why was one civilization able to reform itself and not another, etc.). But often, I think, just knowing that such recoveries are possible may be a very good thing to foreground in our minds. Studying a list of collapses will just remind us that all things ultimately fail and die. Reminding ourselves of recovery and renewal, however, are grounds for hope and encouragement.

I don’t really intend this article as a commentary on current affairs in America, as I’m mostly interested in how we tend to stereotype the past, and the value of trying to see it more clearly. If there’s anything I’d take from this list to apply to the present, it would be the usual Thucydidean admonition about how difficult it is for participants in a historical event to properly understand its significance in the moment. When viewed with hindsight, the past looks much more inevitable. All other things being equal, we should probably update our priors a bit towards uncertainty.

So, with that in mind, here are a few broad examples I can think of:

• The Byzantine Empire. This is a massive topic, and at some point I hope to do a few deep-dive essays on the Eastern Roman Empire, whose underrated status continues to severely distort just about everyone’s popular narratives on history (left, right, progressive, trad, classical, you name it). For now, I’ll point out that, depending on how you want to date it, the Byzantine Empire survived for a thousand years as a continuous state and civilization (almost two-thousand years if you want to reach back to the Roman Republic), far longer than any sort of average life-expectancy you might use for most historical societies or empires. Within that period, the Empire survived the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the 6th century Plague of Justinian and 7th century Arab Invasions, and actually recovered its Eastern Mediterranean hegemony by the 10th century. Even after the disasters of Manzikert and the 4th Crusade, the Empire managed to repeatedly stabilize itself in the face of new crises. The Ottoman empire which finally sacked Constantinople in 1453 proceeded to reanimate many Byzantine institutions, and the “Sultans of Rum” would survive into the 20th century. The Eastern Roman Empire also flies in the face of popular stereotypes about the interplay of urbanism, wealth, trade, luxury, intellectual attainment, technological progress, and religiosity, all of which it possessed at levels outstripping its rivals for most of its lifespan.

• Carolingian Europe. Charlemagne and his Papal allies styled his kingdom as a renewed Roman Empire, and anyone living in the early 9th century might well have imagined that “the good times were back.” But by the end of that same century, the Carolingian dynasty had fractured, and its successors were reeling in the face of Magyar and Norse raids. A few decades after beseiging Paris, Norse vikings were settling in denuded Frankish territory. It wouldn’t be hard to construct a doom-and-gloom narrative from the point of view of a monk in 950 AD, lamenting the spent energy and vitality of the Frankish peoples now sinking into decadence. The heirs of Merovech, Charles Martel, and Charlegmagne included kings such as Charles the Fat and Charles the Bald (probably named more for his loss of territory). Civilization arguably appeared to be collapsing, just as Rome had before it. This period also saw some of the worst Papal corruption in the history of the church, easily rivaling the Renaissance (which is saying something). Multiple German kings invaded Italy, repeatedly deposing Popes and Anti-Popes, and this era, which featured the so-caleld Cadaver Synod, was dubbed “The Rule of Harlots” by contemporaries.¹ And yet, in 955 the Ottonian Holy Roman Emperors would crush the Magyars, and in 987 the French Capetian Dynasty would begin its very long ascent, as Europe itself entered the High Middle Ages. In the 11th century, reform movements cleaned house within both the Papacy and Monasticism, and launched one of the definitive high periods of the Medieval Church.

• Perhaps our Carolingian monk might have learned from the Anglo-Saxons, however. After arriving in Roman Briton as the wild and barbarous settler/conquerors of the 5th and 6th centuries, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes had settled down in England, creating a patchwork of petty kingdoms by the 800’s. Once again, four-hundred years might’ve seemed long enough to exhaust the vitality of a warlike people now softening in the green fields of Englaland. Wilting under the fury of the Northman, the last Anglo-Saxon rulers presented as weak heirs of Hengist, Horsa, and Offa of Mercia. And yet, in the late 9th century, a sickly, weak, and bookish ruler of Wessex was about to reclaim his kingdom from the brink of disaster, and go on to become the only king of England to ever earn the title of “the Great.”

• 14th Century Venice. By the 1300’s, the Venetian Republic had been on the ascendency for several hundred years, culminating in its joint conquest of Constantinople with the 4th Crusade, which brought most of the Byzantine Empire’s Aegean bases into the hands of the Serene Republic. But Venetian contact with the Mongols in the Black Sea, and the incredibly unsanitary and crowded conditions of the city itself, meant that the black death would strike Venice harder than most other locations in the Mediterranean. Over half the city was wiped out. In the following decades, Venice’s long and exhausting struggle with Genoa finally came to a head. In the 1370’s, a joint Genoese-Hungarian-Paduan alliance brought Venice to the brink of ruin. As the surviving Venetian aristocracy began to gather oligarchic power and tighten their hold on the city, one could easily imagine that Venice’s best days had been ruined by plague and war. And yet, the next two-hundred years would see the apogee of Venetian maritime power, and her cultural efflorescence would last even longer.

• 17th century Europe. Using many of our contemporary “doom and gloom” standards, a bystander at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 could have concluded that Europe’s best days were behind it. The old institutions and certainties of Medieval Europe were bent or broken, as church, crown, university, and even the cosmos itself fell into disarray in the face of new ideas and beliefs, themselves spreading like wildfire thanks to the printing press. In the face of these new religious and scientific ideas, established institutions struggled to retain their traditional gatekeeping status (note strongly the parallels to our day and the internet). Public discourse expanded out and down, becoming more extreme, coarse, and paranoid (this was the period of the most intense witch-burnings). Protestantism had permanently splintered Christendom, the Spanish Empire was spent, and France betrayed her co-religionists for the sake of dynastic interest. A bitter English civil war would martyr a monarch and usher in a despotism. On the frontier of Europe, the Ottomans would soon launch their greatest assault on Vienna in 1683. Artistically, few visual aesthetics can more easily suggest decadence than the Baroque. In the background, Europe experienced repeated outbreaks of bubonic plague and smallpox during this period, while also enduring some of the coldest winters of the “little ice age.” In 1666, London itself burned down. How could Europe live up to the achievements of the previous century’s Renaissance, and would anyone have been bold enough to predict that the next century would produce Newton, Bach, Samuel Johnson, David Hume and Adam Smith, Montesquieu and Voltaire, and the American Founding? Whatever arguments one wants to have about the Enlightenment, hardly anyone can honestly call it a collapse, or decadent dead-end.

• Speaking of America, let’s consider it. As we approach our 250th anniversary as a country, you can find anxious missives online pointing out that the average age of a civilization is two-hundred and fifty years. But why date from 1776, when one could just as easily date from 1608 and the founding of Jamestown?² Just because the American Republic began in the late 18th century, doesn’t mean that American civilization as a distinct enterprise wasn’t already two-centuries old. One could easily see the Founding as a crowning accomplishment of America growing into maturity and taking up its mantle. But the Fathers generation of statesmen gave way to distinctly lesser men during the Antebellum period (consider the horror that many venerable Easterners felt watching John Quincy Adams give way to Andrew Jackson). As the nation rushed westward, enriching itself on the spoils of manifest destiny, the heirs fought over the American mantle, and the serpent of slavery planted in the garden of liberty spread its poison. Almost exactly two-hundred and fifty years on from Jamestown, America ripped itself apart in a conflict which foreshadowed all the horrors of 20th century Total war. The Reconstruction Era which followed was also the most corrupt, and one of the most rancorous and partisan periods in American history. One can have sympathy for Thomas Cole’s anxiety about American collapse in his Destruction painting, while still noting that the last century has not played out like his Desolation.

I hesitate to draw too many general lessons from these examples, as most of them seem fairly unique and context-specific. We could note that in many of these recoveries, the civilization or nation in question had a core strength or identity which wasn’t eroded or damaged too severely, and could serve as a focal point for regeneration. Constantinople’s geography and defenses, along with a strongly held sense of Romanness served Byzantium very well, as did Venice’s lagoon and maritime traditions. 9th-century Frankia was big enough to avoid being completely overrun by invaders, buying time for France to coalesce as a dynasty and civilizational identity. American institutions bent but didn’t break during the Civil War, and sclerotic government in the late 19th century was more than outweighed by cultural dynamism and good geography.

One observation that occurs to me after writing that last paragraph, is that good geography can help cover quite a few sins in a nation or civilization.

Despite the fact that each of these civilizations experienced a recovery, we should point out that in most cases, the new society wasn’t exactly like the old. Rome and the Byzantine Empire each looked and felt different after recovering from a crisis (think of Diocletian’s Dominate constitution as opposed to the Principate of Augustus), and Capetian France wasn’t, at the end of the day, the same thing as the Carolingian Empire. Critics and supporters alike of American Democracy have described Lincoln as inaugurating a new national settlement which grew in size and scope up through FDR and LBJ. If there is something to the trope about empires only lasting two-hundred some-odd years, it may refer more to a coherent cultural paradigm that people were aware of living through, and anxious about losing, even if the underlying structures of a society survived or were successfully rebuilt.

This sense of change and dislocation, which can be extremely alienating, may also help explain some of the angst around cultural decline narratives. I’m reminded of families and their stages of growth and change. A family crisis can be traumatic, and require a mourning period. But even good changes such as the birth of a new child, or the marriage of an older one, can be dislocating, as old rituals and habits are forced to make room for new ones. The constitutional settlements of families and countries alike can die and grow anew at the same time.

Albrecht Durer’s Charlemagne portrait from 1512. Charlemagne represented the high point of the Carolingian Dynasty, which was itself a revival after the decline of the Frankish Merovingian Dynasty before it. Crowned Augustus and Emperor of the Romans by the Pope, Charlemagne’s empire symbolically claimed to be a revived Roman Empire, only to split within two generations of his death. Durer’s portrait includes the shields of France and Germany, which claimed lineage from Charlemagne. The Holy Roman Empire in Germany would last until 1806.

1. The Cadaver Synod referrs to the exhumation, trial, and sentencing of the six-month deceased Pope Formosus by his successor. The “Rule of Harlots” epithet (also called “The Pornocracy”) refers both to the general level at which the church was sold-out to the power-struggles within the Italian aristocracy, and specifically to the extent to which Theodora Theophylactus and her daughter Marozia influenced both Papal elections, and the Papal bedchamber.

2. Or even, to use a date that was all the rage just a few years ago, 1619. All the recent focus on race has obscured the fact that, in 1619, Virginia also recieved its first female settlers, and it established the first House of Burgesses. So, in one year, you have the family and domesticity, self-government, and the original American sin of slavery. I will admit to a slight bragg and note that, when I taught 11th grade history a decade ago, I had students memorize this date on their timeline, long before the New York Times’ project.