During the mid-third
century, rebellions, invasions, and coups almost destroyed the Roman Empire. This video will
consider how such a collapse could have occurred, and speculate about some of the consequences.
First, a brief tour of the Roman world in AD 268.
The emperor is Gallienus, dissolute and distrusted.
By the year’s end, he will be dead, assassinated by his own generals.
Gallienus controls only Italy, the Balkans, part of Asia Minor, and North Africa.
Even here, he has to contend with a seemingly endless series of rebellions.
The central provinces are being ravaged by three barbarian hordes. The Alemanni
are rampaging to the gates of Milan. The Goths have overrun Dacia and are pouring into Thrace.
Germanic pirates are raiding up and down the Aegean.
From the Black Sea to the Egyptian frontier,
the eastern provinces are under the control of Odaenathus, lord of the caravan city of
Palmyra, who has established what amounts to an independent kingdom.
The rebel emperor Postumus rules Gaul, Britain, and Spain – the so-called Gallic Empire.
Thanks to relentless debasement, the currency is almost worthless.
Constant warfare has destroyed much of the trade network.
A plague that appeared a generation ago, killing hundreds of thousands, resurfaces every few years.
In 268, in short, the Roman world was divided, invaded, bankrupt, and wracked by rebellion.
The empire seemed to be on the brink of ruin – and we might imagine a few
scenarios that could have brought about its effective collapse two centuries early.
Scenario one: a house divided
Gallienus, the emperor at Rome, was assassinated in the summer of 268.
His death, along with the murders of his rivals Postumus and Odaenathus over the following year,
set the stage for the rise of Aurelian, the emperor who would reunite the Roman world.
But what if Gallienus had survived?
The literary sources – which are scanty and problematic – present Gallienus as
a sort of second Nero, dabbling in cultured pursuits as the empire crumbled around him.
This probably isn’t fair. Many historians now think
that Gallienus managed a desperate situation with considerable skill.
In the last years of his reign, Gallienus was apparently content
to leave the breakaway Gallic Empire alone, and allowed Odaenathus a free
hand in the east – a tacit acknowledgement that the empire could have multiple masters.
The part of the empire Gallienus controlled, centered on Italy and North Africa,
was economically viable. In fact, as long as Gallienus retained control of Egypt,
it contained all the wealthiest provinces, and was relieved of two of its most expensive frontiers.
If Gallienus had lived another decade, he and his successors might have come
to regard the division of the empire as permanent, and even beneficial.
Within two decades of Gallienus’ death, Diocletian would institute the Tetrarchy,
the power-sharing arrangement that stationed an emperor near each of the threatened frontiers.
If something similar had emerged under Gallienus, and if such an arrangement could have become
stable – admittedly a big “if” – it might have even delayed the collapse of the empire.
The Gallic emperors were remarkably adept at securing the Rhine frontier, and seem – to
judge from coin finds deep in central Europe – to have engaged in far-reaching diplomatic
efforts with the tribes beyond the river. Since their power base was on the frontier, they could
never have ignored the sort of incursions that would overwhelm Gaul in the early fifth century.
Odaenathus, likewise, had been a superb manager of the eastern frontier. Under his wife and effective
successor Zenobia, who attracted the loyalty of elites across the Roman east, it’s quite possible
that a stable Romanesque empire centered on Antioch or Alexandria could have emerged.
In the long term, of course, peaceful co-existence between three Roman Empires would be unlikely.
Zenobia wanted Egypt; and neither Gallienus nor any other Roman emperor would have let Egypt go
without a fight. Although the historical Gallic emperors stayed north of the Alps,
they struggled for the legitimacy that only military victory and plunder could confer;
and the wealthy cities of northern Italy were enticingly close.
But if the division of the empire had endured for more than a few decades,
it might have been the beginning of a sort of Roman commonwealth,
more flexible and perhaps more enduring than its monolithic historical counterpart.
Scenario two: nobody has to learn French
After Gallienus was assassinated, his army chose Claudius, a general from the Balkans,
as his successor. Within a few months of his accession,
Claudius won a great victory over the Goths at Naissus. What if he had lost that battle?
Of itself, a defeat might not have mattered; other third-century emperors lost battles
to the barbarians without lasting political or military consequences.
But what if – as happened at the Battle of Abritus in the previous decade – the emperor
and most of his senior staff were killed? What, in other words, if Aurelian and Probus,
the men destined to restore stability to the empire in the 270s, died in 268?
Virtually every Roman emperor between the mid-third and late fourth centuries started
his career as an officer in the Balkan legions. Besides Aurelian and Probus,
this was the reservoir of talent from which Diocletian and (ultimately) Constantine emerged.
A massacre of Claudius’ officer corps could thus have dramatically changed
the next generation of Roman emperors. Aurelian,
Probus, and the tetrarchs beat back a series of barbarian incursions along the northern frontier.
What if, thanks to incompetent rulers or civil wars, those raids hadn’t been stopped?
The barbarian invasions of the third century were, for the most part, raids in force,
made by warbands intent on seizing plunder and captives. But during the fifth century,
almost as soon as the frontier defenses broke down, raiding turned to settlement. If this
had happened during the third century, the history of Europe would have been dramatically different.
During the barbarian invasions of the fifth century, most of what are now
France and Spain were occupied by relatively large and well-organized Germanic tribes,
which established working relationships with the local Roman aristocracy. The dominant
culture remained Roman, which is why French and Spanish are, essentially, dialects of Latin.
Roman Britain, where the barbarian invasions were
more chaotic and carried out by smaller groups, provides a counterexample.
Here, thanks to decades of almost constant war, the entire infrastructure of Roman
society broke down, and Germanic languages – the bases of old English – replaced Latin.
The tribes that crossed the Rhine and Danube in the third century were not as organized as their
fifth-century descendants. If what are now France and Spain had been overrun two centuries early,
it’s likely that they would, at least in part, have shared the eventual fate of Roman Britain.
The heartland of medieval Europe might have ended up as a patchwork of small, non-Christian,
German-speaking states, with consequences hard to fathom for the rest of European history.
We might imagine any number of other scenarios centered on that critical year 268.
What if Odaenathus had learned about the plot to assassinate him and fled to Persia,
allying the eastern third of the Roman world with Rome’s traditional enemy?
The result might have been a reincarnation of the Achaemenid Persian Empire,
stretching all the way to what would have been the site of Constantinople. Or what
if Aurelian, the unifying emperor, had not been assassinated after a reign of only five years?
Perhaps the cult of the Unconquered Sun would have become an imperial religion to rival Christianity.
The great benefit of thinking about what didn’t happen is to emphasize
the significance of what did – in this case, how a single year in one
of the worst-documented periods of Roman history could have changed everything.
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