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Name: The Fate of Rome
Rating: 4.4 (380 reviews)
Author: Kyle Harper

Kyle Harper

Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

4.4 (380 Bewertungen)

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What’s in it for me? Learn how nature played a role in the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.

Often, we think of history as a kind of neverending story advanced by human leaders both great and terrible. What we don’t consider is just how great a role nature plays in that story.

In recent years scientists have grown ever more interested in the climate records that lie hidden within nature – inside tree rings, glaciers, caves, and even human remains. The unintended beneficiaries of this knowledge are historians, who now have a much better understanding of how our world looked and felt in the past.

As it turns out, the rise and fall of the Roman Empire coincided with a particularly fateful sliver of our planet’s climate history – for better and for worse. We can’t attribute Rome’s success or its decline to nature alone. But we can’t discount the role nature played, either. As you’ll see in these blinks, Roman history is utterly inextricable from environmental history.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

how the Romans won the climate lottery;
why the Romans were short; and
what caused a year without summer.

An unusually favorable climate contributed to the Roman Empire’s prosperity.

Life in the Roman Empire, even when that empire was flourishing, was rough. Infant mortality rates were high. Life expectancy, in general, was only around 25 years. There were no motorized vehicles or telecommunications devices, so travel and communication were incredibly slow.

Despite these limitations, the Romans were able to form a unified empire that stretched across Western Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia. As the empire and the cities within it expanded and the population exploded, the Romans were forced to extract more and more resources from the surrounding environment. Yet they never experienced a major food shortage, nor were they forced to farm on hard or difficult soil in desperation.

Why? Well, in part, the Romans got lucky: they happened to be living in a particularly hospitable moment in Earth’s climate history.

The key message here is: An unusually favorable climate contributed to the Roman Empire’s prosperity.

By the second century AD, the Roman Empire had slowed its expansion and achieved widespread peace across its vast territory. For the most part, conditions were very good: economic productivity was high, there was enough food for everyone, and wages were growing even for the most unskilled laborers.

Rome’s expansion and flourishing were linked to a climate regime known as Roman Climate Optimum, or RCO. Characterized by a stable, warm, and wet climate, the RCO began in the last two centuries BC and stretched into the first two centuries AD.

During the RCO, the sun warmed the earth more than usual – temperatures during the first century AD were even higher than those in the last 150 years of our own era. At the same time, volcanic activity was almost absent. This meant that the period saw none of the lower temperatures caused when volcanic ash blocks the sun.

These conditions were huge boons for the Roman Empire. Thanks to the warm and wet climate, farmers could cultivate wheat and olives on mountains – territory where they could never grow today! North Africa was exceptionally fertile, providing grain for huge swaths of the empire. By contrast, today, that region is a major importer rather than an exporter of grain.

Climate conditions helped Rome to prosper. But that prosperity came at a cost: the Roman Empire’s large number of trade routes and high connectedness created a perfect breeding ground for infectious diseases.

Disease and ill health were always part of Roman life.

Around the world, populations vary greatly in their average height. Why is that so? Well, one major contributing factor is nutrition.

The modern era has seen several nations undergo massive growth spurts thanks to economic development and the resulting nutritional boost. Just take the Dutch, whose men stood at an average of 164-5 centimeters in 1850. Today, they’re almost 20 centimeters taller on average.

The Antonine Plague triggered an economic crisis in the Roman Empire.

There is perhaps no environment that mosquitos love more than the swamp, a large body of standing water filled with tall grasses. And it just so happens that Rome, the city at the center of the vast Roman Empire, was built upon this kind of wetland.

Not only was Rome surrounded by swamp, but the city itself was full of waterworks like decorative fountains, pools, and urban gardens – ample breeding ground for mosquitoes.

In the third century, the Roman Empire experienced its first fall.

The City of Rome, AD 248. At first glance, the city looks much the same as it did a generation ago, at the height of its glory. But upon closer inspection, things seem less opulent, less prosperous, and generally less stable than before.

For starters, the coins circulating within the city, once solid silver, are little more than metal wafers with a thin wash of silver to coat them. Stone fortifications now surround the city, protecting against outside forces. An obscure cult known as Christianity is just showing signs of gaining footing.

The Roman Empire rebuilt after the first fall, but it didn’t last.

In the late third and fourth centuries, the Roman Empire was still the most powerful empire in the world.

A series of reforms occurred throughout this period. They included those of the emperor Diocletian, who established the tetrarchy, giving four separate rulers the power to manage the sprawling empire. The army was rebuilt, and currency stabilized too, allowing markets to regenerate.

Bubonic plague dealt the first of two fatal blows to the eastern Roman Empire.

In the fifth and sixth centuries, the Roman Empire’s eastern capital of Constantinople was a global hub – a trade center and major city in which you could hear ten or more languages being spoken on the streets at any given time. And sharing this diverse city with its human inhabitants was a species known as Rattus rattus: the black rat.

These rats weren’t just annoying pests – they were hosts for a vicious killer we now know as the Black Death, or bubonic plague.

The Roman Empire never recovered from the Late Antique Little Ice Age.

The Black Death wasn’t the only deadly and seemingly apocalyptic event gripping the faltering Roman Empire during the fifth and sixth centuries. In AD 535, a volcano exploded, belching out clouds of ash and smoke. Its eruption caused what came to be known as the year without summer. Witnesses claimed the sun rarely shone, and that when it did, its light was dim and murky.

That was just one instance in a larger chain of climate anomalies. AD 540 to 541 saw another volcanic winter. And the AD 530s and 540s were the coldest decades of the epoch. In AD 536, summer temperatures in Europe dropped by an entire 2.5 degrees Celsius – an astonishing figure.

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Worum geht es in The Fate of Rome?

Over the years, countless historians have theorized about the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire. The Fate of Rome (2017) tells this story from a slightly different angle, taking into consideration new information about the climate and epidemiological events that played a major role in the prosperity and downfall of one of the largest empires in history.

Wer The Fate of Rome lesen sollte

Roman history enthusiasts
Environmentalists and others interested in climate change
Anyone curious about the causes of the Roman Empire’s fall

Über den Autor

Kyle Harper is a scholar of Roman history who currently serves as Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma, where he is also Senior Vice President and Provost. He has written two other award-winning books: Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425, and From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality.

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