The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 4

Title: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 4

Author: Edward Gibbon

Publisher: Everyman’s Library, 1993 (First published 1788)

ISBN: 9780679435938

Pages: 598

 

This volume includes chapters 37 to 46, which begins with Zeno’s reign in Constantinople and Clovis’ rise as the dictator of the Franks and ends with the decisive victory of Heraclius over the Persians which left both the Roman and Persian empires desolate and vulnerable to the Islamic caliphate which had just originated contemporaneously. The time period of this volume is from 476 to 628 CE. Gibbon had originally intended to complete the work in three volumes till 476 CE, with the fall of the Western empire. Later he decided to carry it over to the fall of the Eastern empire in 1453. As such, this volume incorporates an introduction by Hugh Trevor-Roper which is much shorter than the one he wrote for the first volume. Trevor-Roper emphasizes Gibbon’s lack of enthusiasm for the Byzantine empire.

 

In Volume 3, Gibbon had described the downward spiral of the empire without going into the mechanics of it. He is much more forthright in this volume and the decay of Rome is ascribed to immoderate greatness. He suggests that instead of enquiring why the Roman empire was destroyed, we should be surprised that it had subsisted for so long. The seeds of degeneration were germinated in the military ranks. The victorious legions acquired the vices of strangers and mercenaries which led them to oppress the freedom of the republic and afterwards to violate the majesty of the rulers. The emperors were reduced to corrupting the military discipline and its fighting spirit sagged. We read about sovereigns trembling at the rebellion of soldiers and utilizing the kingdom’s scarce resources to vainly placate the misbehaving troops. Seldom did the military commanders preside over citizen troops. When barbarians attacked, the citizens and their ruler cowered and sought asylum behind the city’s walls leading to a siege that caused immense pain as it got elongated. When famine conditions become unbearable, they submit to the humiliating terms of the conquerors and a ruthless pillage follows. All wealth that can be found would be taken away and the ablest and fairest inhabitants of both sexes would be forced into slavery. We read about several such episodes.

 

Gibbon alleges that Christianity also had some influence on the decline and fall. It had reached the pinnacle of unquestioned spiritual glory by this time as the one and only faith of the empire. The clergy preached the doctrine of patience and pusillanimity. The last remains of military spirit were buried in monasteries. Monastic life in general and in Egypt and Syria in particular demanded the most severe penances. Sometimes they even abandoned costumes. These destroyed the sensibility of the mind and body. These fanatics were unable of any lively affection for mankind. A cruel, unfeeling temper distinguished the monks of every age and country. Their indifference was inflamed by religious hatred. A large portion of the public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion. Theological discord led to the birth of sects whose internecine conflicts were sometimes bloody and implacable. The attention of the emperors was diverted from military camps to religious synods. The persecuted sects became the secret enemy of their country. All these factors took its toll in varying proportions on the empire’s downfall.

 

A central figure in this stage of Roman history is Emperor Justinian and he is given due recognition in the book. He ruled for 38 years and conveyed a façade of stability to the regime though on a personal level his talents were only mediocre at its best. His name is eclipsed by that of his victorious generals such as Belisarius and Narses who subjugated the rebellious provinces like Africa and Italy. Gibbon comments on his florid style that Justinian was neither beloved in his life nor regretted in his death. Rather than directing the empire’s legions against the enemy, he played one barbarian group against the other – Goths against Vandals, Avars against Lombards. Religious bigotry forced him to close down the philosophic schools of Athens as a permanent rupture with paganism and Greek culture. This act is conventionally taken as the beginning of Dark Ages. As he officially ended the long line of Greek philosophers that extended a millennium before, seven of them escaped to the Persian court of Chosroes. But they were soon disenchanted with the despotism and venality of the Persian court and wanted to come back to Greece. Chosroes mediated a pardon for the seven sages that they should be exempted from the penal laws enacted against pagan subjects. Justinian’s reign also witnessed some traces of the intermingling of social classes. The emperor was probably the first monarch to marry an actress! His wife Theodora was a celebrity at the theatre. She was a bold woman who performed nude scenes on stage. Justinian scrapped the rule prohibiting marriage of patricians with people of low birth and accepted her as an equal and independent colleague on the throne. We read about her stratagems to concentrate power in her hands and to destroy her enemies, sometimes physically.

 

This volume includes a survey of Roman jurisprudence and law codes that existed at the time of Justinian. Some curious aspects of the Roman law are elucidated by Gibbon and we see in them the height of patriarchy at its invasive best. The father was perpetually dominant over his offspring. An adult son can enjoy the privileges of a citizen in public, but at home he was the personal property of his father. He could even be sold as a slave and only with the third sale would he be relieved of his filial obligations. The patriarch possessed the power of life and death over his children. When Justinian ascended the throne, the reform of Roman jurisprudence was long overdue. In the space of ten centuries, the infinite variety of laws and legal opinions had filled many thousand volumes, which no one could procure or study in any detail. Justinian appointed seventeen lawyers with Tribonian at their head to exercise an absolute jurisdiction over the works of their predecessors and to come up with an updated code of law. The modern Common Law is based on Justinian’s code.

 

Volume 4 ends at a potent stage in which profound changes are in the air. The Romans and Persians, the two most powerful empires in the world at that time, are locked in a mortal combat which would thoroughly exhaust the former and would prove fatal for the latter. Heraclius was on the Roman throne. He was attacked from the European side by Avars on Persian behest and from the Asian side by Persians under Chosroes II. The Persian emperor had a dream run in the beginning like his ancestor Darius did more than a millennium ago and this time they conquered Egypt and Carthage. Roman empire was reduced to the walls of Constantinople and the remnants of Greece, Italy and Africa. Christians were persecuted by the Zoroastrians. Heraclius made an unbelievable comeback and chased Chosroes to the gates of his own palace at Ctesiphon. In 627, at the nadir of defeat, Chosroes was usurped by his son, but he could not safely keep the throne which was ascended by nine kings in four years. It was this emaciated Persian Empire that fell victim to the Islamic thrust from Arabia, leading one to wonder how history would have run differently had the two great empires were on more friendly terms. We read about Prophet Mohammed’s epistle to Chosroes exhorting him to embrace Islam and the emperor tearing away the letter in disgust.

 

The scholar in Gibbon laments that the commerce between Rome and China brought silk instead of printing which was already in existence there. Great works of Rome could have been preserved in that way. Writing in parchment ran the tedious task of re-copying every few centuries and thus making the text vulnerable to errors or modifications by the copyists. It is amusing to note occasional eruptions of colonial pride or even blatant racism in Gibbon’s text which was not at all offensive to the public sentiment in his time. Regarding the people of Colchis he says, “The curled hair and swarthy complexion of Africa no longer disfigure the most perfect of the human race” (p.350). On another occasion he is more blunt: “The hand of nature has flattened the noses of the Negroes, covered their heads with shaggy wool and tinged their skin with inherent and indelible blackness” (p.362).

 

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

 

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 3

Title: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol 3

Author: Edward Gibbon

Publisher: Everyman’s Library, 1993 (First published 1788)

ISBN: 9781857150957

Pages: 556

 

At the end of the third volume, we stand at the desolate pavements of Rome whose claims and privileges as the capital of the Western empire were cruelly ripped off by the terrible arms of the barbarians. This volume includes chapters 26 to 36, which begins narration with the ascent of Gratian, successor of Valentinian I, in 367 CE and ends with the deposing of Romulus in 476 CE in which year the Germanic prince Odoacer ends the royal line and starts ruling in his own name. This century saw not merely the eclipse of the western half, but the growth of barbarians first as servants, then allies and finally masters of the empire. At the height of the empire’s growth, a vast multitude of people with all possible variations of culture came under its ambit. The citizens and officials of the metropolitan state then indulged in luxury and leisure, leaving the hard areas of governance, including waging wars against neighbours, to trusted servants who happen to be those very same barbarians who had been defeated and tamed only a few decades back. Over time, the barbarians learn the skills of their masters and excel on the military front. The empire is then never safe from the neighbours or their mercenaries in the empire’s own legions who are ironically tasked with the duty to protect its borders. We read about Rome being sacked many times in this period, beginning with Alaric in 410 CE. We also see in the successful spread of the barbarians the germination of the future nations of Europe. At the end of this volume, the Western Empire is extinguished for all practical purposes and the Eastern half begins its precarious existence till 1453 CE.

 

Since Rome’s eclipse took place at the behest of the barbarians, Gibbon starts the volume with a survey of the nomadic way of life. Scythians and Tartars are taken as the examples to identify a common framework on which the society is organized. The camp, and not the soil, is the native country of the genuine Tartar. Within the precincts of the camp, his family, companions and property were always included. This helps the nomad to surround himself with the objects which are dear and valuable to him even in the most distant marches. Their migrations were in search of a more plentiful subsistence or a less formidable enemy. Agriculture was not widely practiced by the nomads, making pastoral life the preferred career that was undoubtedly ideal as compared to farming or manufactures. The Tartars assigned their captives to servile and assiduous duties. The shepherd’s leisure was devoted to hunting either for killing or to tame and train the strong and serviceable breed of horses.

 

The author is usually harsh on religious practices and worship which do not benefit the society. By the time Volume 3 starts, Christianity had become the religion of the emperor and most of the aristocracy.After paganism was subdued, fanatics among the Christian clergy targeted heretical sects among their own co-religionists. For the next century we see persecution and counter persecutions by the Arians and Orthodox/Catholic Christianity. The major schism of the Christian faith which we observe today had not come into being. Emperor Theodosius inaugurated the era of persecution of heretic Christian sects by the state with the declared aim to root out Arian heresy. The heretical teachers were excluded from the privileges and emoluments so liberally granted to Orthodox clergy. Prohibition of building places of worship was also in place. On the practice of religion involving mysteries and miracles, the old customs took on a new form. The progress of Christianity had silenced the oracles of Delphi and Dodona. In their stead, Christian monks turned to prophesy. John of Lycopolis in Egypt dwelt for fifty years on the summit of a lofty mountain in a crude cell. He never opened the door and lived without seeing the face of a woman and without tasting any food that was prepared by fire or any human art. Five days of the week he spent on prayer and on Saturdays and Sundays he opened a small window and gave audience to the crowd of supplicants. Paganism’s downfall is linked to the lack of organisation and concerted action. The obstinate zeal to stand by their gods was not congenial to the loose and careless temper of polytheism. The violent and repeated strokes of the Orthodox princes were broken only by the soft and yielding substance and ready obedience of paganism. Instead of asserting or maintaining the superiority of their gods, they desisted with a ‘plaintive murmur’ from the use of those sacred rites which their sovereign had condemned. Chapter 28 is an enlightening piece on how Christianity overwhelmed the traditional religion which provides some illuminating lessons on what happened in some parts of India from the modern representatives of the same religion. So rapid was the fall of paganism that only 28 years after the death of Theodosius, its minutest vestiges were no longer visible.

 

We have seen fortune’s wheel turn to transform Christianity from the role of the persecuted to that of the religion of the emperor. With this advent of spiritual power, clergy began to intervene in civil affairs of the state over which they had no moral or sacerdotal duty or obligation. Ambrose was the archbishop of Milan who was greatly revered by the flock as well as Emperor Theodosius who afforded every civil measure of the government to exalt the position of the bishop. But Ambrose was a fanatic too who claimed that the toleration accorded to the Jewish community in itself was a persecution of the Christian religion. The birth of antisemitism thus occurred in the Roman empire. Ambrose boldly intervened in political disputes and succession struggles also. When Eugenius usurped the Western throne by killing young Valentinian, Ambrose stoutly denied him the glories of sovereignty. He rejected the gifts of Eugenius, declined his correspondence and withdrew from Milan till the usurper was killed by Theodosius in battle.

 

So, what caused the downfall of Rome and the victory of their barbarian neighbours? Gibbon does not disclose the answer in a simple sentence or paragraph or even a chapter, but his idea permeates the book which become legible once the reader applies his mind to look at the direction various hints are pointing to. The loss of martial spirit was the single reason caused by enervation that set in following a life of luxury and well-regulated freedom. The more secure and established the rule of law, the less likely that the citizens care to take up arms, be it for the empire or for their own safety. The barbarians too readily succumbed to the mentally corrosive indulgence of civilization over time. But the empire slowly lost its power to diffuse its culture and enroll more of them as citizens before they came in hordes to overwhelm the metropolis. Pusillanimous indolence and relaxation of discipline accelerated the downfall. The citizen soldiers complained about the weight of armour and obtained permission for laying aside their cuirasses and helmets. This made them very vulnerable to archers in battle which was the specialty of barbarians such as the Goths, Huns and Alani. The emperors could not even enforce discipline and punishment over those barbarians recruited for imperial service. Alaric the Goth invaded the province of Greece and robbed the citizens of their riches, but he was quickly forgiven with impunity and was made the master-general of Illyricum and king of the Visigoths by the Emperor of the East.

 

The sack of Rome in 410 CE by Alaric is graphically described. Even though Rome was not the centre of the Sovereign’s residence, it still commanded great respect in the whole of the empire. The life inside the city on the face of the long siege prior to its capture is given special attention. The description of the enormous wealth accumulated in the city over the ages deeply impresses the readers of the high level of trade and commerce. The nominal emperor watched the proceedings from Ravenna, situated on the other side of Italy’s long coast. However, the Goths of Alaric were intent only to negotiate a treaty with the emperor rather than usurping him. Once this was achieved, they cheerfully vacated Rome with their captured treasures and entered into imperial service. In fact, the barbarians were in de facto total control of Italy and the provinces when the Western empire was finally extinguished.

 

We read about the great pioneers of Christian spirituality in this volume with the likes of Ambrose of Milan, Martin of Tours, John Chrysostom of Antioch, Leo of Rome and several others. All of them came into contact with the empire and either got persecuted or was offered the most reverent submission of the ruler. The Arian sect still exerted its defiant influence, often at the irritation of the Orthodox/Catholic faith. Gibbon’s treatment of the Mongols presents an amusing fact to Indian readers. While narrating the upheaval and influx of barbarian hordes, the Mongols play a prominent role, but Gibbon calls them Moguls which in the strictest sense must be addressed to the Muslim dynasty that ruled India for two centuries and claimed their descent from the Mongols. In the eighteenth century when this book was first published, both these terms must have seemed ambiguous to scholars.

 

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

The Indian Army and the End of the Raj

Title: The Indian Army and the End of the Raj

Author: Daniel Marston

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2015 (First published 2014)

ISBN: 9781107067578

Pages: 386

 

The most surprising thing about the British occupation of India was that it was brought about by Indian mercenary soldiers commanded by a few thousands of British officers and administered by a few hundreds of British bureaucrats who in turn controlled tens of thousands of Indians working in lower levels. The British Indian army was undoubtedly the backbone of the system with the bureaucracy as its nervous system. The British used this massive fighting force to combat the dirty wars of the Empire in the two world wars. It was used even to reclaim colonies of British allies like France and Holland in Southeast Asia after the Japanese surrender. The army was also constantly used as ‘Aid to the Civil Power’ in suppressing communal riots which sprang out unexpectedly but with unfailing regularity. In the last days of the Raj, the entire endeavor to broker independence rested on the loyalty and stability of the army. It went through a period of instability that could have destroyed any military organisation. The army’s experience in the events surrounding independence and partition is unique in the annals of military history. This book is about the last decade of the British Indian Army which successfully fought a world war, was tasked with suppressing nationalist forces in other distant colonies, had to undertake internal security duty to fight sectarian forces and finally had to undergo a painful division of itself into the regular forces of two sovereign nations. Daniel Marston is Professor of Military Studies at the Australian National University. His first book, ‘Phoenix from the Ashes’ is an in-depth assessment of how the Indian army turned defeat into victory in the Burma campaign of World War II.

 

The representation of various provinces – or races, if you prefer – in the army was not evenly distributed. The British favoured the Martial Race Theory for recruitment. The Sikhs, Punjabi Muslims and Pathans were given undue opportunities to enroll as soldiers. The British presumed that only these people showed martial qualities. Even though Marston does not look deep into this hypothesis, we know that this theory developed after the 1857 Rebellion when the British started restricting military ranks only to those groups which sided with them in the rebellion. Bengalis and numerous groups from south India were deemed non-martial and kept away. People who lived in urban areas were not considered for entry. By 1914, 75 per cent of the army was recruited from the so-called martial races. During World War I, the requirement of more hands forced the authorities to overlook the martial race theory and open the window of enrolment up to other societies, and they fought remarkably well in the battlefields. But they were insensibly retrenched after the war and the martial race theory again took hold. But these races were not fit for becoming officers as they were mostly dumb intellectually. The Simon Commission’s report of 1930 stated that ‘broadly speaking, those races which furnish the best sepoys are emphatically not those which exhibit the greatest accomplishments of mind in an examination’. Punjab itself contributed 54 per cent of the total troops. However, the theory came to an end by World War II and the British finally acknowledged the fighting spirit of all classes and races of people.

 

By the end-1920s, it was widely felt that India would sooner or later be turned into a dominion or a fully independent nation with self-rule. This required an indigenous army which will be manned by Indians as ordinary troops and at all levels as officers. As noted earlier, there was considerable difficulty in selecting cadets from martial races as they lacked the educational qualifications. The Indian Military Academy was set up at Dehradun in 1932. However, the Indian officers who graduated from this institution could command only Indian troops. Their powers and wages were also less than that of British officers of the same rank. Their plight changed for the better after their remarkable performance in World War II. Even though the columns officered by Indians suffered defeat in the early days of the War, it bounced back in the latter half. The army expanded from 200,000 men and officers to more than one million between 1939 and 1941. The training given to the new officers before deploying them to foreign theatres of war was meagre which explains their initial defeat. This was soon rectified and the Indian army reaped the benefits. It destroyed the Japanese army in Burma and played significant supporting roles in defeating Italian and French forces in north and east Africa and Italy. Indian army landed in Kuwait and captured Baghdad in 1941. Later, it attacked Iran. All these happened while the army at home was carrying out frontier defence of NWFP and support to the civil power. At the end of 1945, there was no Indian officer above the Brigadier rank. Government then estimated that it would take a decade to educate and train enough senior officers to take over the higher levels and 20 years for complete Indianisation to occur. In the end, it took only a few years for this to come about!

 

The British used the Indian army to fight the colonial empire’s dirty battles. When the world war ended, a peculiar situation developed in Southeast Asia. The French and the Dutch – the colonists in that part of the world – had fled and evacuated their possessions when the Japanese army steamrolled them. After the Japanese were defeated, they wanted to reclaim their colonies. But the natives of these countries had taken up arms against them in the meanwhile with generous Japanese assistance in training and materiel. After the War, Indian troops were assigned occupation duties in the British colonies of Burma and Malaya, French Indo-China (Vietnam) and Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia). They had to fight the local nationalists in end-1945 and 1946 and these pointless battles had nothing to do with India or the British Empire. The European troops refused to join these fights and wanted to reunite with their families. Britain found Indian troops expendable. In a discussion of the battle plans and probable casualties, Lord Mountbatten made a specific request that Indian troops be used, saying that he did not want to see British wives widowed so long after the war’s official end (p.193). And you know one thing? Mountbatten was the most sympathetic to Indian causes among all the British functionaries who ruled over India. The demonic nature of the others can only be imagined!

 

Marston explains the farcical nature of the criminal trial of INA officers captured during the war. As the days went by, political pressure forced the British to grant more and more concessions to the prisoners at the cost of bitter resentment of white army officers. Eventually, they were let go without punishment. Discipline also suffered badly, leading to the Naval Mutiny of 1946 and several minor disorders. Moreover, nearly two-thirds of the military had to be demobilized at the end of the war as there was no requirement of such a huge number of soldiers to be maintained in peacetime. The demobilized soldiers and INA volunteers eventually ended up in communal militias and took part in communal riots. Their discipline and high level of organisation escalated their conflicts with police and army to the level of guerilla warfare. A large part of the ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Noakhali was the handiwork of these former soldiers, encouraged by the Muslim League which was ruling the province of Bengal. This issue was especially troublesome in Punjab which had the largest number of ex-soldiers as most of the recruitment to the army was from there.

 

This book also provides the details of the division of military assets that took place. Stores, factories, vehicles and so forth were divided in the ratio of 30 to Pakistan and 70 to India. 140,000 out of 410,000 soldiers of the army (34 per cent) and 40 per cent of the navy and 30 per cent of the air force personnel were given to Pakistan. Here, we must pause to consider another statistic. The entire Muslim population in India in 1947 constituted only 24.3 per cent of the total, which included those Muslims who stayed behind in India. But the partitioned state was awarded more than 30 per cent when all else is factored in. So, this was a clean cut on the basis of religion, justifying exchange of populations. The author specifies that H S Suhrawardy, the premier of Bengal and Muslim League leader, recruited 600 Punjabi Muslims to Bengal police to offset the 1000 Gurkha policemen (p.290). Most brutal violence occurred in the Punjab while civil police ceased to function and law and order was ineffectually maintained by the newly constituted Punjab Boundary Force. The army of both the new nations was under the supreme command of Claude Auchinleck, but when India strongly objected to his partiality to Pakistan, he was removed from the post.

 

Even though the author fails to mention it specifically, the worst examples of colonial prejudice and supposed racial superiority fill up every chapter of the book. The numerous episodes of colonial occupation are saturated with racism like lichen sticking to an old wall. This wicked spirit so densely permeates the atmosphere and probably that may be the reason why Marston is unable to notice it. When native officers were introduced for the first time, they had no power of punishment over their subordinate British soldiers. His Majesty’s Government categorically stated that Indians should not have power of punishment over white men (p.91). This was partially lifted towards the later stages of World War II when Indian officers proved their mettle in the battlefields. Loss of rice-producing colonies like Burma to the Japanese and scarcity of vessels to transport the crucial cereal resulted in the Great Famine of Bengal in 1943 in which 3.5 million Indians died. Still, Churchill was reluctant to offer relief to the starving millions, saying that “starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks” (p.109) and he directed the aid to Greece. The book also includes some pompous and condescending remarks of British officers of exalted rank who in fact did not comprehend how India worked. Fearing violence erupting in Punjab from which the major recruitment took place, one senior officer remarked: “if the Punjab burst, the chances were that the mixed unity of the Indian army would also burst and that all of India would collapse” (p.236). Another officer worried that ‘Indian officers are drunk with the prospects of early promotions and that the Indian army is due for imminent disintegration if India is divided” (p.254). In the end, India was divided, the Punjab did burst, but the Indian army and the people determinedly braved the deluge.

 

Even though parts of the book looks like an academic paper with footnotes sometimes reaching half of a page, it is eminently readable and nicely written. The Indian army had suffered heavily in both the world wars – In World War II alone, 24000 of its soldiers were killed, 64000 wounded, 60000 captured and 11000 went missing in action. The sad fact is that this valorous episode is seldom mentioned in India where the World War II is wholly submerged in the Quit India Movement which had a flawed start in August 1942 and dissipated a few weeks later. This book rectifies the shortcoming and makes it crystal clear that India was inexorably moving towards independence by the end of the War. The only uncertain thing was whether it would preserve its integrity or be divided into two or more units on religious lines. The sources of this book are from Britain which provides a focal point unfamiliar to Indians, but serves to explain the subject in full.

 

The book is strongly recommended.

 

Rating: 3 Star