** 1st book of 2021: The Forest and the Trees. **

After reading this near 4000 page epic, I found myself made of questions. What is Rome? What is history? What is a book? I don’t know enough to know whether Gibbon threw out the norms, or just wrote this before the norms were created, but Decline and Fall is like trying read a fractal version of game of thrones while playing a memory game about every person you met in elementary school. Is this something you would enjoy? Read on…

First, every other book about the decline and fall of the roman empire is wrong. Not wrong as in factually inaccurate, but wrong as in hilariously incomplete. Fell two trees worth of paper, and you can start to tell the story. Gibbon attempts all the details, each succession, assassination and great campaign. I’ll quote Gibbon on the perils of such an approach: “These annals must continue to repeat a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery; the natural connection of causes and events broken by frequent and hasty transitions, and a minute accumulation of circumstances must destroy the light and effect of those general pictures which compose the use and ornament of a remote history. ” I couldn’t help but think of that other 4000 page saga noting that “Every time a new Targaryen is born, the gods toss the coin in the air and the world holds its breath to see how it will land.” Put another way, the mechanics of empire created a random walk composed of succession events to new Emperors that over time had a destabilizing effect. No one emperor can destroy the empire, and when you only toss the fateful coin once a generation, it can take a long time for the odds to play themselves out.

For Gibbon the question is not why did Rome fall, but * “rather, why did the roman empire last so long?” * As far as I could tell, the maritime trade connecting the prosperous north Africa with boat building and army-raising Europe and Asia created a stable advantage over the Iranian empires to the east and barbarians east of the Danube. But I digress by injecting economics into our story. What coin-tosses bankrupted the house? Like Seutonius, Gibbon does not summarize his history or create a narrative where the full details will suffice. So for the sake of my own sanity, I created one.

    1. ** 276: First, ** Diocletian divided the empire in two, doubling the number of dangerous coin flips and civil wars. 
    2. **Next, ** Christianity introduced a schismatic centrifugal force towards fracturing the empire.
    3. ** 330: ** the capital moved to Constantinople. Wealth and power concentrated in the east, making Italy and other western provinces more of a backwater. When Rome itself permanently fell some 152 years later, it was not by any means the most important city in the empire. 
    4. **Eventually, ** the western provinces, stripped of an African economic advantage or Asian support, fell. First in 395, then more permanently in 476, and then permanently for real with the fall of the exarchate in 751. 
    5. ** 565 ** After the Justinian reconquest, in which *“the genius to command and the wisdom to obey were found only in the mind of Bellesarius” *, Italy was essentially depopulated due to war and plague. There wasn’t anything worth taking for the weakened Byzantine empire. 
    6. ** 647 ** The Arab conquest of Egypt and North Africa stripped much of the economic advantage held by the Roman empire, this time for good.  Umayyads siege Constantinople repeatedly and unsuccessfully, so our story continues for another 800 years.
    7. ** At some point or another: ** Arabs, Turks, Bulgarians, and anybody in the neighborhood loot and annex provinces they can from the empire. 
    8. ** 1203 ** Crusaders and Venetians, through a bizarre combination of miscommunication, bribery, zeal, and debauchery successfully sack Constantinople on their way to fight infidels. Byzantines eventually get it back. 
    9. ** 1453 ** Sultan the Conquerer made it his life’s mission to subdue Constantinople, which at this point was the extent of the Byzantine empire and simply a ‘thorn in the side’ of the Ottomans.

The only thing to keep a dear reader transfixed with an endless procession of successions and depositions is Gibbon’s writing style, which is punchy even 300 years later. My favorite Gib-burns: * On the state of Rome in the 5th century: “Europe was overrun by barbarians and Asia by the monks” * On the Justinian code: “the books of jurisprudence were interesting to few, and entertaining to none” * On the Arabs: “In Arabia as in Greece, the perfection of language outstripped the refinement of manners.” * On Roman-Persian wars: “But the events by which the fate of nations is not materially changed leave a faint impression on the page of history and the patience of the reader would be exhausted by the same hostilities undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect. ” * On Byzantium, in general: “At every step, as we sink deeper in the decline and fall of the Eastern empire, the annals of each succeeding reign would impose a more ungrateful and melancholy task.” * On Baghdad falling to the Mongols: * but the city was distracted by theological factions, and the commander of the faithful was lost in a harem of 700 concubines. The invasions of the Moguls he encountered with feeble arms and haughty embassies." *

You’ll either need some reference reading, or a few barrels of ancient wine to make it through to the end, here’s what I recommend: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Romana * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_the_fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWwAC9dOTCE * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sieges_of_Constantinople