The empire fell to invasions, not internal decay

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 3:24:11

   What are the things in the ground when you zoom out, the thing that ate away at the, I like this term, sources of resilience? Oh, foreign invasions. There's no question. It's just invasions. It's foreign invasions, those which they could not cope with. They coped with lots of them. But, you know, all it takes is to lose to one and you lose some part of your territory. And if you keep losing enough, you won't have anything to fall back on.

2. 3:24:43

   And that's what happens. So really, if there's no significant external invasions, the East Roman Empire, the fundamentals, the taxation system, the way the policies were developed, the way the politics was done. and the way the representation was done, all of that, this empire could have lasted for another thousand years. Absolutely. I'm absolutely convinced of this because you never see movements to split away.

3. 3:25:21

   That is, there's no separatist movements, at least not on the part of any Roman provincials. There's one separatist movement, which is Bulgaria. We mentioned Bulgaria was conquered right in 1018. there's a couple of independentist movements, rebellions, eventually one succeeds in 1185. So just under two centuries. So Bulgaria is the only part of this empire that actively seeks to break away and does so. But for the rest of the 1200 years, you don't find provincials wanting to leave this system. However much they complain about the taxes, they don't want to leave and they make no move to do so. You also never have a moment when the center loses its ability to tax its territories, right?

4. 3:26:06

   You don't have, like, widespread peasant uprisings or agricultural rebellions or these kinds of things, which happens in every other one of these empires. They also never decide to partition it. The Franks partitioned theirs, right, like after Charlemagne. No, there are no, like, Roman warlords that try to carve out a piece of the territory for themselves and rule it independent. Nope, that doesn't happen either.

5. 3:26:33

   So if you're looking at the kinds of factors that cause states to fail, fragment, you know, become ungovernable, these never happen. This is so incredible. This is truly incredible. In the history of human civilization, just an incredible study of what human societies can form. So what are the whys? Why? Why? Why was it so stable? But now look, there are other stable, like for example, the British monarchy has been around for quite a while.

6. 3:27:09

   States like Portugal, Japan, they have one thing in common. They're all tucked away at the edges. Like they're off, they're little islands or whatever. They're not like, right? Like, we're talking about a society that was right in the middle of one of the main corridors of empire building and new religions in the world. This is the most dangerous neighborhood, right, that you can possibly live in.

7. 3:27:34

   So no wonder it didn't survive. Like, it would have been extraordinary if it had. But absent those forces, I don't see any forces of internal decomposition that would have imperiled it, you know, significantly. So what, I mean, we've talked about a lot of it, but just to like return to it, why was there no internal sources of decomposition? Like, why did it work so well? Why did the people feel represented?

8. 3:28:07

   yes they by the way you talked about how they complain about the taxes which is one of the signs of a healthy society that we it's like complaining about the weather the fact that you complain about the taxes actually means that you're happy with the taxes kind of counterintuitively or it's not too bad yeah just complaining is part of the system anyway but why why why did it work so well why did everybody get along oh no represented no not get along yeah not in a in a silly way. I mean, sufficiently to where they wouldn't, warlords wouldn't rise and break apart the system. Or if there was those kinds of forces, they would come back together.

9. 3:28:44

   Why is this such a great self-healing system? So you're exactly right. So sufficient is the key word. We don't want to idealize this, right? These aren't like, they're not just dancing in the streets, holding hands. Even when it comes to the attack system, they are complaining all Of course, they're doing so because they know that complaining gets you things. There's no disincentive to complaining. You might not get what you want, or you might get it, but no harm will come to you. So they're complaining all the time. They have all of these civil wars. They're like, okay. So I think I would give you a two-part answer really quickly as to why this held together so well. First is that an extraordinary effort was made by the authorities to persuade their subjects that they were ruling on their behalf,

10. 3:29:35

    and I think, for the most part, actually tended to do so. And the second is that it had a very tightly unified identity as Roman and as Orthodox. In other words, for the most time, they knew that they were surrounded by enemies who were not those things, and they did not want to live under the power of non-Romans and non-Christian people. And so those two factors combined, I think, gave everybody reason to hold it together. The alternatives were worse.

11. 3:30:09

    Yeah. I mean, that's a really brilliant summary. And I think we should mention