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The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation

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On the whole Ferrill's book is a useful resource as a summary of the major events in the collapse of the Western Empire, but the central thesis of Ferrill's work and his final conclusion are both very weak. Ferrill dismisses the longer term economic and administrative failings of the Western Empire, but does so without actually discussing them. He says that to see the later Empire "as a troubled giant .... a decaying Empire .... is to miss the point." (p.164) but he doesn't explain why. In fact, the long term problems of inflation, a declining population and a shrinking tax base, along with a widening gap between rich and poor in the West and a spiraling trend towards ruralisation of the population all combined and accelerated slowly over a long period between the reign of Diocletian and 476 AD.

What we conspicuously don't see in this period is any major military defeats of the Roman army by barbarian invaders. When the weakening, fragmenting and economically aenemic Western Empire is confronted by a military threat in this period it usually defeats it - at least for as long as the failing economy and collapsing administration is still able to organise armed resistance.

The fall of the West was an economic and administrative failing - battles and tactics had virtually nothing to do with it.

But Ferrill simply dismisses all this as "missing the point" without a word of explanation as to why all these highly significant factors are completely irrelevant. He simply tells us they are - end of story.

He writes:

"Many historians have argued .... that the fall of Rome was not primarily a military phenomenon. In fact, it was exactly that. After 410 the emperor in the West could no longer project military power to the frontiers."
(p. 164)

This is quite true, but what Ferrill skips lightly over is the reason for this - the depopulated and cash-strapped Western Empire, having fought five civil wars in the last century and wracked by political instability, was simply in no position to field the armies it needed to protect the border provinces. It's not as though outdated Roman armies were being tackled and beaten by superior barbarian forces. The armies weren't withdrawing after being routed on battlefields by overwhelming or tactically superior Germanic troops. The Empire simply couldn't maintain its centralised military infrastructure any more because it didn't have the manpower or the cash to do so.

Ferrill acknowledges that this so-called "military" collapse, strangely enough, didn't actually involved many battles or any major defeats, but he's not deterred:

"One need not produce a string of decisive battles in order to demonstrate a military collapse. The shrinkage of the imperial frontiers from 410 to 440 was directly as a result of military conquests by barbarian forces."
(p. 164)

Though these "military conquests by barbarian forces" occurred, strangely enough, without any decisive battles. The truth is the barbarians moved, usually without major opposition, into areas that the dwindling and economically starved Roman army had already abandoned or which it could no longer defend in strength. Their "invasions" - actually very small in number - were a symptom of the decline of the Roman army and the economic and administrative decline of the West, not its cause.

Ferrill asserts otherwise, with great boldness. But, again, he doesn't tell us why - he just tell us.

"To be sure, the loss of strategic resources, money, material and manpower compounded the mere loss of territory and made military defence of the rest of the Empire even more difficult. It is simply perverse, however, to argue that Rome's strategic problems in the 440s, 50s and 60s were primarily the result of financial and political difficulties or of long term trends such as depopulation."
(pp. 164-65)

Why is this quite reasonable and sensible conclusion "simply perverse"? Ferrill doesn't tell us, he just says it is.

He goes on to argue that any explanation of the fall of the West has to take into account the survival of the East - which is very true - and seems to believe that this is an argument against the "simply perverse" idea that systemic and economic problems were the real causes. In fact, the East always had a far greater population and a massive concentration of the whole Empire's wealth. The division of 395 made this disparity worse, giving the West more to defend and far less resources with which to do it. Further weakened by civil wars, local warlords and a string of weak or shortsighted rulers, it's actually amazing the West struggled on for as long as it did. So it's very clear why the East survived while the West fell.

Ferrill continually acknowledges key points in the real reasons for the fall of the West without acknowledging (or grasping) their significance. In discussing what the West did wrong while the East got right, he says the East "was better able to afford the heavy subsidies barbarian leaders demanded in the years after Adrianople" (p 166). But he fails to see why this is the case - because the East was far wealthier than the West. This was not a military factor, and it certainly had nothing to do with equipment, training or tactics - it purely economic. The East was able to pay Attila off for years and then, when he became too much of a nuisance, refuse to pay him anymore. The Hunnic king then decided to make up for his lost revenue by attacking the West, since the more impoverished half of the Empire made an easier target than the still relatively rich and strong East.

Similarly, the East were able to pay off and deflect a succession of potential barbarian problems, usually getting them to afflict the increasingly weak and fragmented West. Ferrill briefly acknowledges the East's significant economic strength, but then ignores it to pursue his ghostly theory of military explanations.

Without giving any good reasons for setting aside significant and relevant factors in the decline of the West such as economics and depopulation, Ferrill blithely declares that they can, indeed, be set aside. But not before lumping them in with "race mixture .... lead poisoning and other fashionable theories" (p. 166), which is a pretty shoddy piece of rhetorical trickery.

He goes on to argue that the real reasons for the fall of the West was a deterioration of the Western Roman Army - not the decline in the infratructure and recruitment which sustained the army, as I've argued above, but a decline in the tactics, training and quality of the troops.

For the decline in training he relies almost entirely on Vegetius' problematic manual and on a highly dubious report from Jordanes of a pre-battle speech by Attila about the quality of Roman troops. And for the decline in the quality of the troops he simply points to the "barbarisation" of the army and takes it as given that this meant the troops were therefore of low quality. Again, Hugh Elton shows the flaws in this idea. As he argues, the use of barbarian troops had been going on in the Roman army for centuries and continued in both the East and the West in this period. So why did this practice suddenly cause a decline in quality in the West in the Fifth Century?

Secondly, most of the barbarian troops used in the West weren't part of the regular units anyway - they were federate bands hired for specific campaigns or to defend particular territories. Their use and significance certainly did increase as the Fifth Century progressed, but largely for the very economic and administrative problems that Ferrill is so keen to dismiss. So, once again, we aren't seeing a "military explanation" - we're seeing the result of longer term, systemic economic and social weakness.

Ferrill's final sentence reads: "As the western army became barbarised, it lost its tactical superiority, and Rome fell to the onrush of barbarism". This is nonsense. There was no loss of "tactical superiority" - whenever the ailing Western Empire could field a decent sized army it won hands down. In fact the military history of the fall of the Western Empire is a string of Roman victories and barbarian defeats. It's the economic and administrative history of the West in this period which is the tale of woe and its the weaknesses here which robbed the Empire of its ability to field and maintain those armies and led, eventually, to its economic and administrative fragmentation and its eventual political collapse.

I found the book refreshingly easy to read and understand, and it certainly kept my attention. For the first time the answer to the question "OK now we know why the Western Empire fell, why did the Eastern last another 1,000 years?"

Simple, the Western armies weren't up to it. It was a military defeat or series of defeats and the nation could not withstand the invasions which followed.

One quibble, probably unfair. There are indications now emerging from tree-rings and global climate indicators as well as historical records, that there was some sort of natural but global catastrophe in the sixth century that helped finish off the Western areas still with some elements of Roman culture eg Britannia. Of course though, the author of this book would not have been aware of those later findings.

I enjoyed reading Ferrill's work. It was generally well written and easy to understand for a non scholar. Some areas were glossed over; why the Eastern Empire survived in spite of the Eastern army suffering two major defeats-Adrianople and Julian's abortive Persian campaign. I liked his thesis that barbarian armies were not composed of mostly cavalry which is a common misconception. Ferrill does defend the Western emperor Honorius in spite of history's judgement that he was a do nothing emperor and basically ensured the destruction of the west. He does not explain certain key events: namely why the Goths after victory at Adrianople became federoti under Theodosius only to rebel a generation later, culminating with the sack of Rome.

Overall, this work is worth reading for its simple style and essentially correct assessment of the Western Empire's demise.

When I first read this book, it was still under its original title of The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation. That pretty much says it all right there. Being a military historian myself, such a title naturally attracted me to the text. Unfortunately, Ferrill presents a rather thinly argued text that will prove a disappointment to serious historians or even knowledgeable amateurs. I happen to agree that military reasons; Roman and barbarian, brought down the empire in the west. However, Ferrill's theory taking to task Constantine's frontier strategy fails to take into account the realities faced by that emperor. Theodosius was patently guilty of weakening both the Eastern and Western empires, and Ferrill at least gets that right. His addendum concerning the essentially infantry composition of later barbarian enemies of Rome is interesting, but again hardly proven by the author's sketchy argumentation. Ferrill is right in contending that military matters are preeminent in the explanation of Rome's fall, but fails in presenting convincing arguments to that end.

The Fall of The Roman Empire, Arther Ferrill; Thames & Hudson (1986)


Ferrill's occasional bad writing habits & inept editing almost ruined The Fall. How often in 169 pages did I see the word, "however"? Easily, one hundred. And the bogus ironies! See Pat O'Conner's definition of irony in "Woe Is I" (1996), & see if Ferrill's "ironies" conform to the definition (doubtful).

At any rate (another otiose crutch-phrase found often in mediocre histories), Fall's not worth a full review. But it is worth holding on to - due to the sustained moments when Ferrill wrote enthusiastically & well, which is the point of writing, to begin with.

I worked with the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment in the 1990s. For all the fuss made back then about an emerging Revolution in Military Affairs - long range precision strike capabilities and information dominance - many of us believed that the truly important core competence of the US armed forces was (and would remain) the vastly superior training and professionalism of our troops. Technology is relatively easy to replicate and/or undermine; an army and navy led by highly educated and disciplined but innovative officers and NCOs takes generations to build.

Arther Ferrill makes a similar point in this compact monograph, maintaining that the Roman Empire fell because it was no longer able to consistently defend itself against outside threats once the vaunted Roman legions had lost their edge in infantry battle, which was the outcome of two major strategic decisions that ultimately undermined the training and discipline of frontline troops.

First, Ferrill questions the wisdom of the mobile strategic reserve force, a force of nearly 100,000 that was meant to leverage interior lines and reinforce threatened areas along the frontier. He claims that Theodor Mommsen canonized the view that the mobile reserve created by Constantine in the early fourth century was a much needed innovation and that following generation of scholars accepted that verdict almost without question. However, Ferrill sides with the great British historian, Edward Gibbon, who saw that organizational change as disastrous. The arguments against the mobile force are compelling, Ferrill writes. First, a mobile reserve couldn't necessarily counter a two front war any better than the preclusive defensive policy of a strong frontier force. Second, it was apt to create a central elite force that inevitably led to the decline in the fighting power of the frontier units that were no longer expected to engage and defeat the enemy. Third, the mobile nature of the central elite force meant that it was dominated by cavalry and that over time the Roman's prowess at close order infantry, for centuries their core competence, would be steadily eroded. In summary, Ferrill writes that the centralization and militarization of the Roman Empire under Constantine and after took a heavy toll on the military efficiency and morale of the forces along the perimeter, which for generations had held the barbarians at bay. It was the first but not the most consequential crack in the Roman war machine.

The real cause of the Roman army's downfall, Ferrill says, came a century after the mobile strategic reserve was created. He writes: "The cause of [the] deterioration in Roman arms is almost certainly the 'barbarization' of the army resulting from the use of 'federate' troops by Theodosius the Great and his successors...Too long and too close an association with barbarian warriors, as allies in the Roman army, had ruined the qualities that made Roman armies great...[thus] the Roman army of AD 440, in the West, had become little more than a barbarian army itself." But actually it was worse than that, Ferrill goes on to argue. The barbarized Roman army combined the worst features of each style of warfare. "Close formation and indiscipline make a very sad conjunction," he wryly concludes. Ferrill sees the work of Vegetius, which argued for a return to the old Roman ways of training and discipline, as the best and most obvious evidence of the deleterious influence of barbarians in the legions.

It must be noted that several modern scholars have disputed the "barbarization" argument, including Hugh Elton ("Warfare in Roman Europe, AD 350-425"), who argues that the claim of heavy, negative barbarian influence is widespread but poorly documented. Elton suggests that likely only 25% of the Roman army of the late fourth and early fifth centuries were barbarian and that number probably held steady.

For Ferrill, the years 407 to 410 were decisive. Indeed, he calls them the "Turning Point" and devotes an entire chapter to that brief period. The author claims that historians, both ancient and modern, have been too harsh on the Emperor Honorius (395-423) primarily because he reigned over a critical period of Roman decline, including the sack of Rome by the Visigoths under Alaric in August 410. Ferrill writes that Honorius, while no genius, pursued a reasonable enough garrison strategy in the face of the threat posed by the Visigoths. Ravenna and Rome each had powerful walls and the barbarians were notoriously unable to conduct sieges effectively. Moreover, the emperor had no effective field army left to oppose Alaric and almost certainly would have lost an open battle. The author claims that Honorius strategy very well may have worked, had not someone inside Rome, in an act of treachery unequaled in the city's long history, opened the Salarian Gate to the barbarians.

Rather it is Stilicho, the Romanized barbarian who served as field general of the western army from 395 to 408, who is singled out by Ferrill as the one man perhaps most culpable for Rome's demise. It was Stilicho who pursued the Theodosian policy of barbarian appeasement and wholesale incorporation into the Roman army, which doomed their fighting effectiveness and thus led to the collapse of the empire. "Stilicho was wrong," Ferrill writes, whereas "Honorius was unlucky."

Overall, I enjoyed "The Fall of the Roman Empire," although I felt like it was a journal essay that unnaturally stretched itself into a book of some 160 pages. I don't believe that Ferrill's arguments are particularly novel, nor is his prose narrative style especially riveting, but as one view point on the ultimate cause of Roman decline and collapse targeting the lay reader, it may be worth your time.

I became obsessed with this book--and with Rome, as a result of this book. I could not put it down, and I give that to perhaps five books I've read. I think the more well read will find each paragraph to contain the distillation of an entire thesis. (Alas, the less patient will find only eight or so illustrations, and large text on the cover and title page to hold their attention.) I had to put it down every page or so to awe over the depth of what I'd just read. This process made my reading last weeks--almost as though I were reading scripture. My obvious emotional attachment to this book should make readers pause, of course. So to be balanced I should say that, as any academic work, Ferrill's must surely be matched by alternative scholarly conclusions somewhere. But it struck me as so expertly and thoroughly reasoned, that it is my chosen watershed on Rome's decline. I recommend this book as the best starting point I've found on Rome's decline, and . . . perhaps her persistence?

What did it really propitiate Rome `s fall ?. Since the days of Gibbons, diverse erudite men have debated this thorny question with vehemence and bravery with different answers that include from the racial decadence to the proclaimed immorality apart of an excessive bureaucratization. But lastly, the most probably explanation has focused about the slow process of raveling and cracking of the military establishment in all orders, product of an unlimited ambition and pernicious anxiety of rampant greed as expected result of the visible moral degradation and sinister corruption in the higher spheres of the power.

In the last decade of the IV BC, the emperor Theodosius governed on a territory so extensive as August was then, leading an army of hundred thousand men. Nevertheless it was enough, due only eighty years later the Empire and the Army would be entirely destroyed. What happened on the road ? Undoubtedly, the inclusion of barbarians as reinforcement of the army permeated the moral of the soldiers and the discipline of the infantry; on the other hand the huge mobile reserve created by Constantine accented still more the vigor of the frontier forces, reinforcing the cavalry at expense of the infantry. That distortion o the real situation and the breakthrough of the infantry as vertebral column of the Roman Empire would eventually become its nemesis.

This absorbing analysis will engage you from the first pages, introducing and making us to participate in this passionate subject. And far beyond, you may disagree or not around this perspective, the book maintains an febrile state of undeniable interest that will captive your attention all the way through.

There is a lot of nonsense in circulation about the Fall of the Western Empire. Ferrill gets past all of it by starting from one obvious but often neglected criterion: Any explanation of the Fall of the Western Roman Empire must also account for the survival of the Byzantine East. From there he goes on, in a very readable manner, to the military events, and their consequences.

Almost all good intentions Mr. Ferrill had when writing this book were wasted due to his bad writing skills. The book is rough, truculent, some topics that would be easy to follow are boring because the writing is so bad. Anyway, the Roman Empire is decently focused in this book, as well as the explanations for its fall.