No Barbarians Necessary

There is a strange tendency in modern scholarship to try to say, "actually the fall of Rome wasn't that bad". Which I guess is true from the perspective of several hundreds of years later after new, more successful societies have begun to form, but the fall of the Roman empire really was quite bad. Trade networks collapsed, entire industries disappeared, and animals and people shrunk in size because there wasn't as much to eat.

The article does make an interesting point though that the decay was from the top. And I think this is largely true. Societies don't usually collapse because they get overrun, they get overrun because they're already weak.

  Europe was too fragmented to be conquered by the Mongols. Their way would have been blocked by castles and town walls, each originally thrown up by one group in conflict with others—by a fractious nobility against its kings and against its own peasants, and by townsmen against them all. Above all, “there was no central government to offer surrender.”

For the same reason, Mongols failed to conquer the medieval Rus, it being all fragmented and internecine. Oh wait, no they didn't. They plundered it, conquered it, decimated the population, and taxed what's left.

They didn't really have castles there. Castles were pretty much impenetrable until artillery was invented. You could try to starve out the people in the castle, and that did occasionally work, but transportation networks were poor so it was hard to keep an army supplied long enough for a siege to work.

> There is a strange tendency in modern scholarship to try to say, "actually the fall of Rome wasn't that bad".

Not sure why that is particularly strange. In the age of overt empire, Gibbon wrote an explicitly cautionary tale, like the momento mori that accompanied a triumph. But we aren't in that same age.

From a broader perspective, the nature of "structural" Rome, especially once Octavian (Augustus) took control, lead to sclerosis as the control and wealth and power overwhelmed other activities of state and society. For example the literature of the republic and early empire is greater than that of later periods not because people became dumber but because society, even if richer over all, could not afford it.

Arguably the empire continued, not just in the east but through what remains of Charlemagne's realm (more diffuse yet of greater scope): hundreds of millions of people speak a form of Latin (we call it Spanish or French or other names); many legal systems contain roman influences (though sometimes vestigial, with a legislative chamber called a "Senate"), and many cultural norms trace back to or through Roman times.

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You can see this today, writ small (I'll ignore the politics of the larger scope). The older megacorps (think US Chamber of Commerce members) are focused more on extraction (of rents or of re-mining the same seams) rather than customer benefit. The "newer" (only a few decades old) tech upstarts themselves have largely entered late middle age and are heading to the same fate. Google, once an admirable innovator, is regularly pilloried on this site for having lost its way; some companies required a near death experience (Apple) or spell of privation (Microsoft, IBM) which may help (MS) or may not (IBM). Even in the old guard, GE is haeding downward, and though they've been around for a while and have in the past been a force for good, will anyone mourn?

I've long believed there's a Hayflick limit for both companies and social systems. And as it is for humans, it's a good thing.