After taking notice of my previous article on the impact Columbus had on medieval thought and society, “The Age of Exuberance,” Ran Prieur wrote: “I’m getting more and more convinced that we’re heading into a second Medieval age, centuries of physical poverty and relative freedom from central control, during which we develop technologies that no respectable person would guess, leading into another age of complexity even stranger than this one.” (11 October 2006). This is a fairly common opinion among those aware of peak oil and other crises civilization faces, but it is not one that I share. I hope here to explain why.

To understand the Middle Ages, we must first understand Rome. In the Republic, Rome became trapped in a cycle of escalation based on conquest.

With this kind of payoff, Rome’s conquests under the Republic were economically self-perpetuating. The initial series of victories, undertaken as a matter of self-preservation, began increasingly to provide the economic base for further conquests. By the last two centuries B.C. Rome’s victories may have become nearly costless, in an economic sense, as conquered nations footed the bill for further expansion.

This process culminated with Octavian’s (later Augustus) conquest of Egypt. The booty of Egypt allowed Augustus to distribute money to the plebians of Rome—and even, when necessary, to relieve shortages in the state budget out of his personal fortune. Yet the geometric Roman expansion of the Republic ended under the Principate (the emperors from Augustus up to the accession of Diocletian [284 A.D.]). Augustus (27 B.C. - 14 A.D.) terminated the policy of expansion, particularly after losses to the Germans, and concentrated instead on maintaining a stable army and restoring the prosperity that had been ruptured by the civil wars. … (Tainter, 1988)

With the profits of this pattern of conquests, with each conquest financing the next, the Romans created a new kind of empire: one built on connectivity, a graph that they controlled.

Many of the major empires that preceded Rome shared a common source of formational energy. As described by historian Karl Wittfogel, they were largely “hydraulic” empires. The mechanism of centralization was their shared need to pool massive labor and resources to build and maintain the irrigation works of a river basin upon which their agricultural sustenance depended. Rome formed in the absence of great public-irrigation projects, and in the absence of the natural constraint of a river basin. As such, it required a new mechanism of political centralization to provide formational energies and counter the distributed spacing and centrifugal tendency of economic organization. Rome pioneered a new form of Empire, a connectivity empire, laying the groundwork for modern hierarchal state-economies. …

While the Roman roadways fulfilled the normal functions of roads such as trade, military transport, communications, they did so in a manner that directed power flows towards Rome, and specifically precluded the accumulation of regional power. … The physical layout of the road system served to centralize the flow of power in the empire. In low-intensity or non-centralized civilizations, roadways are an emergent phenomena. They grow out of economic necessity in a pattern that more closely resembles ecology than hierarchy.¹

We can see the disintegration of the Republic, and the establishment of the Empire, as a sort of small-scale collapse and re-integration in response to the shifting strategy, as the Republic’s strategy of conquest began to reach its limits. Though it was only under Trajan that the Empire reached its largest geographical span, most of Rome’s conquests happened under the Republic, not the Empire. At its zenith in the second century, with its largest territory and highest complexity, the Roman Empire was a truly miserable place—a totalitarian police state dominated by a military dictator who ruled through terror.

Citizens of the Roman Empire at its height, in the second century A.D., were born into the world with an average life expectancy of less than twenty-five years. Death fell savagely on the young. Those who survived childhood remained at risk. Only four out of every hundred men, and fewer women, lived beyond the age of fifty. It was a population “grazed thin by death.” In such a situation, only the privileged or the eccentric few could enjoy the freedom to do what they pleased with their sexual drives. Unexacting in so many ways in sexual matters, the ancient city expected its citizens to expend a requisite proportion of their energy begetting and rearing legitimate children to replace the dead. Whether through conscious legislation, such as that of Emperor Augustus, which penalized bachelors and rewarded families for producing children, or simply through the unquestioned weight of habit, young men and women were discreetly mobilized to use their bodies for reproduction. The pressure on the young women was inexorable. For the population of the Roman Empire to remain even stationary, it appears that each woman would have had to have produced an average of five children. Young girls were recruited early for their task. The median age of Roman girls at marriage may have been as low as fourteen. In North Africa, nearly 95 percent of the women recorded on gravestones had been married, over half of those before the age of twenty-three. (Brown, 1988)

Rome maintained its dominion over subject peoples through the careful arcane use of power.

Traders of other Germanic peoples, if they were given permission to enter the Roman provinces at all, were disarmed at the frontier and travelled under a military escort, and found their activities confined to the fortresses along the frontier. They were not allowed to travel far into the interior; and so, during their visits to the provinces, they would see little more than the military camps and the weapons of the soldiers—a sight that might cause potential raiders thin twice about their raids. (Thompson, 1982)

Of course, as the cost of empire grew greater, Rome became even more draconian.

From the early fourth century on sons of civil servants were made to enter their fathers’ offices. The same was required of workers in government factories, as well as many private sector occupations. Indeed, the distinction between public and private sectors blurred, as the State directed persons into occupations and levied their output. By the time of Diocletian city offices, which were such a financial burden on their holders, had become hereditary. Since the very wealthy had by this time largely fled the towns to establish country villas, or obtained exemptions, this burden fell on the middle income segment

Perhaps most important to the economy of the Empire was the tying of agricultural labor to the soil. First mentioned in an announcement of Constantine’s in 332, this had the effect of establishing a system of serfdom in which tenants were bound to large estates. The colonate, as it is known, was a boon to large landowners during a time of agricultural labor shortages. Colonates continuously tried to escape unsatisfactory conditions, to the army, the church, the civil service, the professions, and other proprietors.

Concomitant with the decline in population and in agricultural labor there was a significant abandonment of arable, and formerly cultivated, land. In some provinces under Valens (364-78) from 1/3 to 1/2 of arable lands were abandoned. This problem first appeared in the late second century, perhaps due to the plague, and was a subject of Imperial legislation from before Diocletian’s time to that of Justinian (527-65). In the late third century Aurelian had held city councils responsible for the taxes due on deserted lands. (Tainter, 1988)

When the Roman Empire finally did end, it was a great relief to those freed from domination.

The Roman Empire was initially successful because stolen goods from each conquest financed the next one. The broad logistical limits of the process were reached by the time of Augustus. Thereafter, territorial changes were minimal. Without further loot (a sort of primitive accumulation of statist capital), Roman rulers had to defend vast territories out of current revenues drawn from a contracting economy. In general, the Roman state crippled and ruined the developed east (Greece, Egypt) so as to hold onto the less productive west. Making citizens of all free men in the Empire (212 AD), in order to tax them, acknowledged the decline.

Faced with rising costs and declining revenues, emperors debased the coinage while trying desperately to extract taxes out of a demoralized people. But by the third century, taxes were eating up citizens’ capital and savings. In the following two centuries, further imperial inroads brought about “a drop in actual output.” Later emperors, from Diocletian onwards, undermined society’s capacity to pay at all. …

The Germanic kings who replaced the empire in the west were better at defending their (smaller) territories against invaders and could do so more cheaply than the overextended empire. In North Africa, the Vandals (victims of a bad press) lowered taxes and economic well-being grew, until Justinian brought back Roman rule and, with it, imperial taxes. “Investment” in this lower level of political “complexity” paid for itself, so to speak, by being less costly. Collapse is not all bad: a disaster for the state apparatus may not be one for people as a whole. Devolution of power to smaller geographical units is “a rational, economizing process that may well benefit much of the population.”²

Yet the collapse of the Roman Empire was a catastrophe in slow motion. The Late Empire propped up regions that would otherwise have collapsed, keeping them instead in a vicious state in-between, still suffering the crushing burden of Roman complexity, but without any of its benefits—the worst of both worlds. Rome’s collapse was slow and drawn out because it was not hitting any real resource limits nearly so much as it was simply running out of room to grow. It was choking on its own complexity. There was no resource shortage or ecological catastrophe that finally broke the Roman Empire; instead, it merely stagnated on the staggering costs of its own complexity, and could only be taken apart piecemeal by the barbarians on its periphery.

The cost of saving the Empire was extremely high for a non-industrial population. And as in the third century, payment of this cost yielded no increase in benefits. Yet what happened during the fourth and fifth centuries was more than simply a further decline in marginal return. The Empire was by this time sustaining itself by the consumption of its capital resources: producing lands and peasant population. Continued investment in empire was creating not only a drop in marginal output, but also a drop in actual output. Where under the Principate the strategy had been to tax the future to pay for the present, the Dominate paid for the present by undermining the future’s ability to pay taxes. The Empire had emerged from the third century crisis, but at a cost that weakened its ability to meet future crises. At least in the West, a downward spiral ensued; reduced finances weakened military defense, while military disasters in turn meant further loss of producing lands and population. Collapse was in the end inevitable, as indeed it had always been. (Tainter, 1988)

Even so, the Empire did not collapse entirely. The Eastern, Byzantine Empire lasted for another thousand years. When Constantine divided the empire, he took the east for himself, beginning a massive project to turn Byzantium into the “New Rome.” In essence, the rulers of Rome decided to sacrifice the West for the sake of the East.

The Roman collapse has an instructive feature which offers further support to the model presented here. In 297 the emperor Diocletian divided the empire into western and eastern halves. Coordination between them waned, and by the death of Theodosius I in 395, the two halves of the empire were effectively independent states. Since the western empire produced 1/3 the revenues of the eastern empire, but had more than twice as much northern frontier to defend against barbarian encroachments, this placed most of the original empire’s vulnerabilities in one half and most of its remaining resources in the other. In terms of the catabolic collapse model, the eastern Empire allowed massive quantities of relatively unproductive, high-maintenance capital to be converted to waste, bringing its M(p) [maintenance production] below its remaining C(p) [capital production] and breaking out of the catabolic cycle. The eastern empire’s territory decreased further with the Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries CE; while this was involuntary the effects were the same. Successfully shifting to a level of organization that could be supported sustainably by trade and agriculture within a more manageable territory, the eastern Empire survived for nearly a millennium longer than its western twin. (Greer, 2005)

Ken Dark takes a unique position, arguing that the Britons were comparable to the Byzantines in their creation of a distinct post-Roman culture. He points to a great deal of evidence, including the finds in Tintagel³ and the phenomenon of “black earth” usually used to discredit the notion, that post-Roman Britain had as much continuity with Late Antiquity as divergence, and that the “collapse” of Roman Britain was not nearly as absolute as we have often assumed.

It is reasonable to claim that, in political and cultural terms, ‘Roman Britain’ ended in the seventh century, but Britain in the sixth century was not as romanized as Britain in AD 400, nor as romanized as fifth-century Gaul. Sub-Roman kings were not barbarian Celtic chiefs, but nor were they fourth-century intellectuals. A sixth-century British king might be educated in the Late Antique fashion, read sophisticated Latin texts, converse (presumably in Latin) with merchants from Constantinople, and participate in Christian life; but these were also the leaders of warriors, riding out from their hill-forts against their neighboring rulers. (Dark, 1994)

In other words, what we see in Britain after the withdrawal of Rome is no mere “collapse” in its usual meaning, but a creative synthesis of Roman and Celtic elements to create a whole new culture.

Through most of the empire, though, the migration of Germanic peoples into the former Roman Empire was a definate case of collapse. Contrary to our usual perception, the “barbarian” tribes wanted nothing more than to be Roman. Germanic peoples were routinely hired by Rome as feoderati (essentially, mercenaries), but were so disrespected by the imperial government that they would renege on the agreed payment almost as routinely. When Alaric famously sacked Rome in 410 CE, he was leading a revolt of disaffected Germanic feoderati that the Senate had declined to pay. Even so, the Germanic ambition to become Roman was a deeply-felt reaction to the awe Roman complexity could instill in those who did not bear its costs. Velleius Paterculus recounts a tale from the early days of the Empire that puts this attitude in stark terms.

We were encamped on the nearer bank of the aforesaid river, while on the farther bank glittered the arms of the enemies’ troops, who showed an inclination to flee at every movement and manoeuvre of our vessels, when one of the barbarians, advanced in years, tall of stature, of high rank, to judge by his dress, embarked in a canoe, made as is usual with them, of a hollowed log, and guiding this strange craft he advanced alone to the middle of the stream and asked permission to land without harm to himself on the bank occupied by our troops, and to see Caesar. Permission was granted. Then he beached his canoe, and, after gazing upon Caesar for a long time in silence, exclaimed: “Our young men are insane, for though they worship you as divine when absent, when you are present they fear your armies instead of trusting to your protection. But I, by your kind permission, Caesar, have today seen the gods of whom I merely used to hear; and in my life have never hoped for or experienced a happier day.” After asking for and receiving permission to touch Caesar’s hand, he again entered his canoe, and continued to gaze back upon him until he landed upon his own bank.⁴

We can see the same attitude reflected in later medieval mentions of Rome as a shining paragon of human achievement, such as the inaccurately named “Holy Roman Empire.” The Germanic migrations, sometimes called the “barbarian invasions,” were only sometimes violent—and even then, usually questions of Germanic response to the imperial government’s attempts to cheat them. More often, the “invasions” were matters of land given in payment for military service or negotiations with powerful land owners. The Middle Ages can be seen as a period in which Germanic and Roman culture blended into a new, syncretic whole. The “barbarian” cultures that moved into the Roman Empire were typically oral cultures, employing court poets to retain important information. By 900 CE, writing—preserved in the interrim by the Church—began to makes its way back into secular administration. This brief period of reduced complexity, prior to the Church’s success in reasserting the previous, imperial levels of complexity, is often referred to, quite romantically, as “the Dark Ages.”

This concept of a “Dark Age” was first created by Italian humanists and was originally intended as a sweeping criticism of the character of Late Latin literature. Later historians expanded the term to include not only the lack of Latin literature, but a lack of contemporary written history and material cultural achievements in general. Popular culture has further expanded on the term as a vehicle to depict the Middle Ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and expanding its scope. The rise of archaeology and other specialities in the 20th century has shed much light on the period and offered a more nuanced understanding of its positive developments. Other terms of periodization have come to the fore: Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages and the Great Migrations, depending on which aspects of culture are being emphasized. Most modern historians dismiss the notion that the era was a “Dark Age” by pointing out that this idea was based on ignorance of the period combined with popular stereotypes: many previous authors would simply assume that the era was a dismal time of violence and stagnation and use this assumption to prove itself.⁵

Many other civilizations—the Maya, the Anasazi, the Hohokam, and so forth—collapsed far more quickly than the Roman Empire, and yielded no successive civilizations. The Hohokam and the Anasazi were succeeded by the Pueblo tribes of the American southwest; the Maya city-states were succeeded by horticultural Mayan tribes. In both of these collapses, diminishing marginal returns weakened the civilizations in question, such that they could not handle the ecological and resource problems that ultimately destroyed them. The Roman Empire did not suffer from any major resource failing; it choked on the cost of its own complexity. Thus, the infrastructure was left in place, allowing for a recurrence of complexity.

The High Middle Ages restored much of the complexity of the Roman Empire after the brief reprieve of the “Dark Ages.” This was permitted by two primary factors that both conspired to greatly increase the energy available to medieval society. The first was the Medieval Warm Period⁶, a climatological increase in the energy available to Europe—at its most basic level, in simple terms of heat. This became available to human society in a number of ways.

The Medieval Warm Period, the period from 10th century to about the 14th century in Europe, was a relatively warm and gentle interval ended by the generally colder Little Ice Age. Farmers grew wheat well north into Scandinavia, and wine grapes in northern England, although the maximum expansion of vineyards appears to occur within the Little Ice Age period. This protection from famine allowed Europe’s population to increase, despite the famine in 1315 that killed 1.5 million people. This increased population contributed to the founding of new towns and an increase in industrial and economic activity during the period.⁷

The other element was technological. The import of the horse collar from China allowed medieval farmers to use horses rather than oxen to pull their plows—one of the greatest technological advances in agricultural history.

Arguably the biggest technological leap of the era was the invention of the horse collar about 1,500 years ago in China. Before this, tillage in both Europe and Asia had depended heavily on oxen and a throat-and-girth yoke that suited those ponderous beasts. The same harness was used on horses, but was so inefficient that it greatly limited the load and mobility of these much faster animals. A smaller horse collar allowed a quantum leap in the load a horse could pull, so fields became larger and more widespread almost immediately. This invention traveled quickly from China to Europe. (Manning, 2005)

The complexity of the High Middle Ages renewed the misery of the Roman Empire; pestilence, plague, and famine provided the ecological counter-balance to keep society in balance.

France—”by any standards a privileged country,” according to its great historian, Fernand Braudel—experienced seven nationwide famines in the fifteenth century and thirteen in the sixteenth. Disease was hunger’s constant companion. During epidemics in London the dead were heaped onto carts “like common dung” (the simile is Daniel Defoe’s) and trundled through the streets. The infant death rate in London orphanages, according to one contemporary source, was 88 percent. Governments were harsh, the rule of law arbitrary. The gibbets poking up in the background of so many old paintings were, Braudel observed, “merely a realistic detail.”⁸

The High Middle Ages were by no means kept sustainable by this misery, however; it merely slowed their descent, as they ran into the hard, ecological limits Rome never reached. The crisis of the High Middle Ages was very similar to our own “peak oil” problem—it’s what we might call “peak wood.”

The situation was different in England and France. Much land had been cleared for agriculture in Roman and again in medieval times, and the population was much denser than in mountain Germany and Bohemia. Although metal mining was never on the enormous scale of the Central European strikes, many small mines exploited tin, lead, copper, and iron deposits. All these ores were smelted with charcoal, and with heavy demands on the forests for building timbers for castles, cathedrals, houses, and ships, for building mills and most machinery, for barrels for storing food and drink, and fuel for the lime-burning, glass and brewing industries and for domestic fires, the English and French found that they were approaching a major fuel crisis.

A fuel “crisis” implies a lack of supply, and the other factors involved are supply and transport. Overland costs of transport were very high except for the highest-value goods, and it was simply not economic to carry bulky material like wood for very far on a cart. So thinly populated areas in forest land had no fuel crisis at all, whereas large cities soon felt a crisis as woodlands close by were cleared.⁹

The soils of Europe were being depleted, which further accelerated the plagues and famines of medieval Europe (and show in stark contrast to the health of New World colonists who enjoyed “virgin” soil for their agriculture).

The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant-mortality rate—all indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.¹⁰

In other words, the discovery of the New World effectively rescued an Old World on the verge of collapse. This was discussed in greater detail in my previous article, “The Age of Exuberance.”

But now we have laid out the general path of complexity, from the creation of the Roman Empire to the end of the High Middle Ages. What we see is that Roman complexity was built on a completely unsustainable scheme of each conquest funding future conquest, such that the Empire was dependent on constant expansion for simple maintenance. When this failed, draconian laws, totalitarian state control, and catastrophic mortality were employed to extend the empire’s life span, but even that was insufficient to keep such an unsustainable scheme afloat. The seperation of the Empire sacrificed the least productive, most expensive portion in favor of the most productive, least expensive portion—in other words, the Western Roman Empire was set up to fail. The final dissolution of the Western Empire in 476 CE was remarkable primarily for how long it was in coming.

The end of imperial rule greatly improved the lives of most people, though it was catastrophic for the literate elites who once profited from Rome’s complexity at the expense of everyone else. But because Rome had choked on its own complexity, leaving the infrastructure needed for that level of complexity intact, a successive complex society was all but ensured. The Church’s preservation and reassertion of writing and other elements of Roman complexity, the ecological energy subsidy of the Medieval Warm Period, and the technological breakthrough of the horse collar all allowed medieval Europe, as we typically think of it, to regain the level of complexity—and misery—the Roman Empire had once endured. Yet even the rampant mortality and disease of the Middle Ages could not make their society sustainable—medieval Europe was nearing collapse when the discovery of the New World gave it a second chance.

There are obvious similarities to our current situation, but it is the differences that are even more telling. Unlike Rome, we are reaching limits to growth beyond the overwhelming cost of our complexity. The Middle Ages were made possible because Rome left so many resources intact. Our civilization is leaving almost nothing intact. The economic supplies of metals, fossil fuels and other resources are now beyond the reach of any pre-industrial society. Even the Holocene ecology necessary for agriculture is coming to an end with global climate change. As Kötke argued so eloquently in The Final Empire, civilization has depleted the millennia-old biological wealth of the soil—the basis not only of civilization, but of all life on earth.

The Europe that Rome left behind was not much changed from the Europe it found; the world our civilization inherited is much diminished from the world it was given. One stark example of this can be found in the toll civilization has taken on North America.

I believe we all know the story. Of the great multitudes of seabirds I wrote of: “They slaughter them with iron-tipped clubs in such quantity that it is an incredible thing.” Of the native people: “The soldiers mowed down dozens with point-blank volleys, loosed the dogs to rip open limbs and bellies, chased fleeing Indians into the bush to skewer them on sword and pike, and ‘with God’s aid soon gained a complete victory.’”

The great auk was gone by 1844. The last of the billions of passenger pigeons died in 1914. Both hunted to extinction, along with the eastern buffalo, the Eskimo curlew and many, many others. Those who were lucky enough to escape complete annihilation, such as the cougar, the gray wolf and the old growth forest, are greatly diminished in their numbers.

What the man on the street said, what all the signs and bumper stickers and sloganeering politicians say is nearly correct: God, if there is a God, did bless America. Quite generously. But then the Americans came, spit in God’s face, and systematically destroyed every one of those blessings over the course of 400 long, bloody years.¹¹

So despite the similarities, I do not see a second Middle Age in our future. A collapse that follows from resource depletion is very different in this respect from one that follows purely from the costs of complexity. Rome may have left enough resources for future civilizations, but like the Hohokam, the Anasazi, or the Maya, our civilization’s course has “damned” us to sustainable, healthy, happy lives. This should ultimately come as no surprise, of course; the civilized mode of life is so abnormal in the course of human history that we should be more amazed when it endures than when it finally eliminates itself.

As Joseph Tainter points out in The Collapse of Complex Societies, civilizations are anomalies. The whole statist configuration of hierarchy, specialization, and bureaucracy emerged fairly recently—about six thousand years ago—and has to be constantly reinforced and legitimized. It also requires an expanding material base and a constant mobilization of resources, and the trend is always toward higher levels of complexity. There is the processing of greater quantities of information and energy, the formation of larger settlements, increasing class differentiation and stratification, and the development of more complex technology. Collapse, which involves a progressive weakening of the political and administrative center, is the reversal of all this, and a recurrent feature of human societies.¹²

Our equilibrium state is that in which we evolved. We should not mistake the current anomoly of civilization for any more than it is simply because we happen to live in it. We may fear (or hope) for a new Middle Age, but when we are left with so little to make one out of, why should we look to Rome for an example, when other, closer examples abound? We are not like Rome, choking simply on the cost of our own complexity. We’re choking on our own air, turning the forests into deserts, and rapidly destroying the ecological basis of our complexity. In other words, we’ve finally reached the point that by all odds we should have reached some time ago: the final empire.

Works Cited

Brown, P. (1988). The Body & Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in
Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press.

Dark, K.R. (1994). Civitas to Kingdom: British Political Continuity 300-800. Leicester: Leicester University Press.

Greer, J.M. (2005). “How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse.” [PDF]

Manning, R. (2005). Against the Grain: How Agriculture Has Hijacked Civilization. New York: North Point Press.

Tainter, J.A. (1988). Collapse of Complex Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thompson, E.A. (1982). Romans and Barbarians. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.