The disasters are always happening on the surface: they are what we hear about. The Picts and Scots who were seen as the least civilised people on earth would, one day, renew their capital city, Edinburgh, as an architectural homage to Roman culture. The wild people of the North who the Romans so feared became, eventually, Danish interior designers and German intellectuals and Parisian socialites. And all the time - in the centuries of decline - new forces had been developing in the background. The main beneficiaries of the demise of the last fragment of the Empire was the city state of Venice, which became the most widely loved place on earth and the exodus of scholars to the West was pivotal in the story of the Renaissance. The vastly prolonged decline ends with the fall of the city - where the people still called themselves Romans - to Muhammed the Second in the middle of the 15th Century.Īnd yet the world didn’t end. Only Constantinople holds out, getting weaker and weaker. There are mad, despotic Emperors, the barbarians invade again and again, the plans for reform fail, the key institutions become corrupt, the government loses control of the army, there are plagues that last for decades, the harvests decline, there is insane factionalism, the economy collapses, the Roman Forum - once the heart of the Empire - is abandoned and sheep graze amongst the ruins. The immense story he tells moves from one disaster to another, century after century. Portrait of Edward Gibbon by Henry Walton, c.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |