Course of Empire

The Course of Empire: Desolation (1833-36, Thomas Cole)

Wealth, vice, corruption––barbarism at last.

~ Lord Byron

Fall of the Western Roman Empire, A. D. 476 

                    From this moment, the germanization of the West steadily proceeded. Ostrogoths poured into the Balkan peninsula, creating by their restless and turbulent activities a problem similar to that which had taxed the resources of the Eastern Empire a century before. In Italy a succession of phantom and ephemeral emperors reached its close with a pathetic figure, named by the supreme irony of providence, Romulus Augustus, who was deposed by Odovacar, the East German master of the troops (476). Military revolutions were no novelty in the annals of the Roman Empire, and the act of Odovacar had many precedents… It is true that he deposed Romulus, but the lad was a usurper, unrecognized in Constantinople, and the deed condoned by the bestowal upon its author of the high imperial title of patrician. What was original in Odovacar’s action was not that it was revolutionary, but that it was conservative. He refused to appoint a successor to Romulus, calculating that he would have more elbowroom in a united Empire governed from Constantinople as in the days of Theodosius the Great. That unity was in fact and theory preserved until the coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor of the West in 800. 

Roman Empire, 376 A.D., showing Teutonic (Germanic) migrations

Fall of the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire, A. D. 1453

                    Constantine VI (1458-53), the last of the Caesars, though the nominee of Murad and his vassal, shines out in the final crisis of the Empire as a statesman and hero, prepared alike for compromise and for sacrifice. The Greek population of Constantinople, for whom the quarrels of monks were always more important than the clash of races, were unworthy of such a leader. While Mohammed’s artillery was battering at the walls, the public opinion of the capital was inflamed by denunciation of the Emperor who, in the desperate hope of winning the West to his side, had dared to recognize the Roman Church and to permit the celebration of Roman rites in the Church of Saint Sophia. To these wretched theological preoccupations we may perhaps ascribe the fact that the main part of the defence of the city was undertaken, not by the Greeks, but by Spaniards, Germans, and Italians. And as the defending force was not principally Greek, so the attacking army was not wholly Turkish. The levies of Mohammed were largely recruited from men of a Greek and Christian stock. So it happened that on May 29, 1453, by default of the Christians the great city was breached and stormed, the last of the Byzantine Emperors perishing honourably in the death agony of the Empire.

H.A.L. Fisher
A History of Europe (pp. 124-125, 418-419)
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1935

Left: The Sack of Rome by the Barbarians in 410 (1890, Joseph-Noël Sylvestre)
Right: The Entry of Mahomet II into Constantinople (1876, Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant)

Glossa:

                     H.A.L. Fisher renders the the final fate of the Western and Eastern Roman Empires with a deft gift for compression. He describes complex history vividly, yet with great economy, attending to all that are remarkable and consequential, even to the peculiarity of personality: the pathetic Romulus Augustus, named, ironically, after the Rome’s mythic founder and its most august emperor; the Germanic military mensch, Odovacar, usurping power from the effete boy-king but ruling with conservatism; the tragic Constantine XI (not VI), last emperor of Byzantium, defending with his life a city that bickered with him.

                    While barbarians whittled away at the Western Empire over a hundred years, the Byzantine Empire slowly collapsed under its own weight for another thousand, until the Ottoman Turks finished the job when they finally captured Constantinople (ironically, employing Greek and Christian mercenaries). But then Fisher zooms-in on the immediate causes of the fall by dramatizing how, even as Mohammed II’s army banged at the walls, the busy-body Greek monks were navel-gazing at the scandal of the Emperor permitting Latin liturgy in an Orthodox church.

                    Such epic historical moments were popular subjects of 19th century paintings, with Sylvestre depicting in Academic mode the sack of Rome by the Visigoths, while Benjamin-Constant employed the lush Orientalist style for Mohammed II’s triumphal entry into Constantinople. In Sylvestre’s painting, brutish barbarians—as if to defile with their animal nakedness—scale the stolid statue of Caesar in order to topple it. The white marble of the Forum, where the Senate debated Roman Law, and the larger-than-life Caesar, adorned with imperious laurels and lion shield, clash with the beastly chaos of the German mob, overseen by their long-maned leader on his steed. In Benjamin-Constant’s painting, Mohammed II on his black Arabian stallion raises the green crescent flag as he tramples upon the Byzantine dead—patrician women and slaves, monks and knights, even Moors. Smoke billows from the burning Christian city, as a late afternoon light washes the stone archway with a tinge of saffron—the sun setting on the ruins of a once glorious Empire.

                    Such arcane theological quarrels that caused so much grief and bloodshed throughout Europe’s history seem quaint today, but is it any different from our sophistries surrounding gender identity and climate change? While the West rejects its own traditions—out of the liberalism that emerged from those same traditions—fundamentalist traditions with their heroic alpha-males circle the borders at the frontier. Who would prevail in the end? Our long cultivation in the pap of high civilization has removed us from the grim facts that prop up the conditions of its existence, like the Orthodox monks behind the walls of Constantinople forgetting the foundations on which those walls were built.

Cities, however, are not defended by beliefs, but by will and material power. Had the Greeks been resolute and united, had the navies of Genoa and Venice been placed at the disposition of the Imperial Government, had there been among the Greek and Italian peoples a common will to save Constantinople, saved it would have been.

                    This flight from reality is symptomatic of a decadent exhaustion in the late phases of Empire. What fools we would seem when Europe is finally reduced to the rule of tribal despots and subjected to Sharia Law. The barbarian invasions (or, actually, migrations) of the 5th century forever changed the character of Europe; there is no reason it will not happen again. But while the pagan German invaders converted to Christianity and schooled themselves in Latin culture, the Ottoman Turk did not. At the end of his account of the fall of Constantinople, Fisher writes this coda:

The conquerors were Asiatic nomads and so remained. Sir Charles Eliot, describing the interior of the house of a Turkish gentleman in the nineteenth century, observes that it contained no more furniture than could be carried off at a moment’s notice on a wagon to Asia. A certain dignity of bearing, coupled with a grave exterior polish and a sense of humor and irony, were noted by Western observers as favourable traits in the Turkish character… But the culture of the West was not valued. The Turk remained an alien in Europe, having no part in its traditions, and limited in his notions of imperial government to the philosophy of a slave-owning oligarchy in a world of potential slaves.