When did the decline of the East Roman Empire begin for you? Throughout this, when, if you were to predict, would you be able to say where this is going to be over? And what led to that decline and the collapse? So, of course, the collapse is finally in 1453 AD, right?
That's actually a very good question. In other words, not looking at all of the previous crises that caused loss of territory, like, you know, you lose Egypt, you lose Syria, you lose Palestine, you lose Eastern Asia Minor, right? But at what point could you say there's no coming back from this, right? I would say early 14th century, somewhere between 1300 and 1350. The sources of resilience begin to dry up. And you have a number of setbacks. They lose Asia Minor to the Turks by 1300, roughly. Which means that you can now no longer draw upon the two wings, as it were, the European side and the Asian side, which they could always do. They're confined to Europe. And then you have a series of civil wars. You have the Serbian expansion. And you have the Black Death. And they never recover from that. In 1300, you think of this, you look at it and you think that's a tiny little Balkan state.
Okay, it goes from Constantinople to the Adriatic in this sort of ribbon, right? This corridor that just stretches across the Balkans. And yet, it's not that much smaller than England. And has about as much, if not more revenue, because they're still able to raise cash because of taxes. Right? So, the emperor is still able to pull in a lot of gold. And his territory is not, you know, completely insignificant. It's not what the Roman Empire used to be. But I don't think that it's completely lost. Then they have some civil wars. Then one rebel makes a deal with the Serbs, surrenders half that territory. Okay, after that, game over. What's surprising is it takes the Turks that long. 1453, that's another century, right? It didn't need to be. It looks like they might have had it wrapped up like 50 years after, you know, like by 1400. But then accidental events happened. This is Timur, Tamerlane comes from Central Asia, trounces the Turks, breaks up their empire. So, they go into a cycle of, you know, rebuilding. And so, that's why it takes another 50 years. Anyway. But I'd say by the 1340s, game over.
And so, why did it collapse? 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 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. And that's what happens.
So, really, you know, if there's no significant external invasions, the Eastern Roman Empire, the fundamentals, the taxation system, the way the policies were developed, the way the politics was done, 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. 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. You 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? You don't have like widespread peasant uprisings or provincial 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 partition 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 independently. Nope, that doesn't happen either. 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 was it so stable?
