No Robots

Pirenne's thesis is basically that it was Muslim control of the Mediterranean that brought an end to antiquity through massive disruption of trade and communications. European civilization was forced off the coast and into isolation on the inland waterways.

figuer

An end to antiquity or to the Mediterranean commonwealth? They are not the same. Clearly, the culture of Byzantium or of the Latino-Germanic kingdoms was very different from that which preceded it.

It seems equivalent to saying that the Middle Ages ended as a result of the French Revolution.

Steven Avery

Something like the "endless war" of George Orwell ?

stuart shepherd

No matter when we date the fall of the Roman Empire, is there an agreement that the Roman Empire has fallen?

Stuart Shepherd

No Robots

Pirenne's point is that Byzantium and the Germanic kingdoms saw themselves as continuing Roman civilization, whereas the Muslims did not. Pirenne would also say that the Roman Empire, including its Byzantine and German successors, was the apotheosis of Mediterranean civilization; and that this civilization came to an end with the Muslim conquest of the Mediterranean.

jakejonesiv

I saw a pamphlet where the European Union was the revived Roman Empire, and prophecy was coming to pass with the Rapture, AntiChrist, and the Book of Revelation.

figuer

1. After the 5th century the culture had so changed and deteriorated materialy and intelectualy, one can not include it within a concept of "apotheosis of Mediterranean civilization", regardless of its continuity.

2. Mediterranean civilization as such did not come to an end with the Muslim Conquest. It was significantly altered, but not destroyed. On the contrary, the material and intelectual culture of conquered regions such as Spain and Syria rose to new heights. Even if the Arabs did not view themselves as "Heirs to the Romans", as the Germans did, they did use the remains of Classical culture to build their own.

No Robots

What can I say? I may be misrepresenting Pirenne in a way that puts you off. I suggest taking a look at the book and the critical literature that it has inspired.

Chili

The Vatican is the evidence of abundance inside Rome which is the home of eternal life that belongs to the mythology. The saying: Rome Sweet Home refers to a state of mind that is exclusive to Catholics wherever they are. I argued before that eternal life belongs to the mythology and if we have saints in heaven there better be some evidence of that and so there you have it.

Remember here that our temporal life is an illusion because we die but since a pair of opposites cannot be conceived to exist without the other eternal life wherein we cannot die must be real. Like, we find it easy to agree that Agape is the source of love and that science is extracted from omniscience but here we have temporal life to be an extraction of eternal life. This concept is not that difficult to grasp if you consider that during the Inquisition many people were quite willing to die to defend their intimations of immortality.

Amedeo

When did you stop beating your wife? By this question I assume that you did beat your wife. By your question, "When did the Roman Empire actually decline and fall?", you assume that there was a Roman empire, and now you want to know when it started declining, etc. etc. And since there have been different answers, you are asking about the true date when it all started.

Actually the different answers you quote do not consist merely in the different dates that have been advanced.... as if a number of people were watching or making inferences about the departure of a certain airplane and came up with different clock-times. Rather, the speakers of the Roman Empire in question were not focusing on ONE AND THE SAME thing at all and ended up with such diverse dates! What went wrong with the "historians"???

Nothing went wrong with them. What went wrong was the use of the term "Roman Empire."

As I am not versed in historiography, I do not know who was the first historian that used the expression [locution], "decline and fall of the Roman Empire." Was it Toynbee? At any rate, upon considering the presuppositions and and implication of that expression, I personally would say that there never existed a Roman Empire. So, your thread question is really analogous to, "When did you stop beating your wife?" To explain:

I think that the English term "Roman Empire" is taken to means something analogous to "Frankish Empire," "Persian Empire," "Egyptian Empire," and the like. In these cases, "empire" means dominion [lordship] over various inhabited lands, which means that there is an emperor who becomes the owner of many lands and of the people who work it. So, if an emperor conquers another country, he becomes the owners of the land and its products, and the whole native population is subjected to his legislature: he tells them what they must or must not do, and what they may do. (For example, they must not leave the territory, they may get married, they must not speak against the ruler and lower lords or against a church., and so forth. The subjects are not free, and they have no rights to do anything.) The difference between "emperor" and "king" is that a king is the ownner and ruler of only one country.

It is clear that "empire" is the sum total which is owned and governed by an emperor. The fall of an empire may be defined as the end of the imperial rule over the imperial territory. The decline of an empire is the lessening of the lordship over the land by somebody's conquest of some of his lands, or the weakening of his lordship by some enforced demand that his lieutenants (or barons) or his subjects impose upon him.

There has never been a Roman empire, for the simple reason that when the Roman General Commanders [called emperors] conquered a nation, essentially the broke the military power of that nation (thus exercising a restraining power), but they never took possession of the land or of the people. Land proprietors were not divested of the proprietorship, any freedom or right that people had was respected, and they did not interefere with the social customs and religions they had. What often happened, rather, is that the people of a conquered country were granted citizenship in the Roman republic [that is, the political society of free men, who have all the civil (citizens') rights and duties]. As the Roman commonwealth or republic grew, the Romans even devised a Jus Gentium, or Rights of the Nations, which in effect was an attempted compromise between
the Roman civil [jurisprudential] law and the customaty laws of various nations.
It was a felt honor for any man to be a citizen of the Roman republic.

The difference between the royal empires of the world and the Roman republican comminwealth is the difference between heaven and earth, freedom and bondage, rational law (such as you can read in Justinian's compilations and other digests of Roman jurisprudence), and lordly or subjugating law.

The Roman Republican Commonweath ended when the battle on the Milvius Bridge in Rome in 312 was over. The defeat of Maxentius by Constantine [the two "emperors" over the western and the easter parts of the "empire" -- as the misleading language goes] is one of the most consequential events in history.

The death of Maxentius carried with it the death of the republic, the death of Roman culture, and the death of territorial defense. Constantine was a royal, not a republican emperor, wherefore he established the "Roman empire" in the commonplace sense of the word and should be called the Byzantine empire. And it was the Byzantine emperors that had all the authority over the former Roman Commonwealth. The secondary emperors or the popes that ruled Rome and the west did not have the legions that might attack the invaders. There was no Scipio to chase the new Hannibals, vandals, or other invading barbarians.

And Constantine became a Christian, who unleashed the Christians bent on the destruction of anything pagan in sight -- temples, art, books of learning -- poetry, philosophy, mathematics, and so forth. He empowerd the Christians to be the spiritual leaders of man's behavior. The ideal Christian devoted himself to the care of heaven ["coelicola"] and to renounce the world, the care of the earth and of what we call humanistic life and culture. This was the beginning of the Dark Ages. So, Rome and the western commonwealth were totally ruined: No republic (that is, no freedom, no proprietorship and other civil rights), no territorial protection, no public works and maintenance thereof, and no humanistic culture; just farming for subsistence and for providing for the owners (foreign or domestic).