Well, consider the travelling times involved and the dangers of the road back then. The messenger from CNN delivered breaking news from 3 months ago. Then another 3 months for the reaction directives to make it back. Combine this with the fact that some Caesars didn’t take too kind a view on local leaders showing some initiative and gaining a little too much popularity and, well…
It must have been a bit like trying to coach a football match by postal mail. From Russia.
Look, we all know the answer. It’s in History of the World Part 1.
MARCUS: puff Hey, Lindus, do you care if it falls?
LINDUS: puff What?
MARCUS: The Roman Empire, man. Do you care if it falls?
LINDUS: Haw! Fuck it!
Yet other central powers, before and after, managed to organize things; the Roman Empire gave Europe roads, bridges and waterworks which lasted for centuries, some of them are still in use nowadays (the complete revamp of the sewer system in Saragossa in the 1990s discovered that the sewers under its Old Town were still the Roman ones; a part of that sewer system is now a museum).
And none of these things require quick, or in fact any, reaction time from the central power. The Emperor (or one of his people) says “go forth and build this and that”, this and that gets built. Doesn’t really matter how long it takes.
On the other hand, if Primate PassedForPromotion, off in his opidum in Germania or Iberia or whatever ass end of the Empire he’s stationed at notices a sharp and unplanned increase in Visigoth immigrants and wonders what, if anything, he should do about it ; by the time the directives get back the place has already been renamed New Visigothburg.
That was what happened with the Great Conspiracy. In the winter of 367, a coalition of the Saxons, Picts, and Irish attacked Britain, and Valentinian, who was campaigning in Germany at the time, didn’t find out until the spring of 368, by which point, most of Britain had been taken.
I should clarify, it was my understanding that within a century or two, much of the Frankish population that had settled in Gaul / Francia had essentially assimilated to Latin culture. Of course it wasn’‘t one dialect - the Northern and Southern versions were (are) quite different, but as compared to the process I was reacting to (BGs sinicisation re China) it’'s just as speedy, if not more so. Especially as I have always understood that Frankish (Franks and allied tribes) settlement in Gaul was fairly substantial, as compared to say Iberia where the Visigoths were just a small military elite.
Well, I have always read that it is theorized that Hispania collapsed so quickly because the Visigothic elite was pretty unpopular with the masses, due to religious differences. That’s similar to the hypothesis for much of the old Byzantine territories. Dunno if that is a currently supported hypothesis though.
Mmmmm, I think youre importing modern ideas about centralisation into this. I don’t ever recall having the impression that the regional Governors had to ask permissions on operational issues. Anyway, the opponent also suffers from the same time lag, so yeah, maybe you lose a chunk of territory for a year, but then your legions come on over and stomp the hell out of the even less-organised barbarian settlers, adn youre back to status quo ante.
I seem to recall reading somewhere (in some novel), that prior to 1789 there were dozens of languages in common use in France. Was this incorrect?
Several languages and a significant number of dialects is closer to the mark. There were two broad dialect groups - Langue d’oil ( northern France ) and Langue d’oc ( southern France ) and numerous sub-dialects. And of course there were the smaller isolates of Breton and Basque, which did qualify as separate languages. Not to mention 18th century France still included a sizeable number of German speakers, particularly in Alsace. Those barriers were fairly significant, hence the strenuous efforts by the post-revolutionary state to suppress them in favor of the standardized Parisian-centered dialect from northern France.
Just as an aside to the OP re: the Goths - my understanding is that they entered the main European mass from Scandinavia via the Vistula Basin in modern Poland and thence south to the Ukraine, before turning west to the Roman Balkans. Or in other words conquering to the Elbe may not have impeded their movement even a little bit ;). Of course maybe a Roman Germania would have had a significant impact past their borders through trade, etc., but as Little Nemo pointed out, to a state like Rome there were always going to be uncivilized borderlands past some line.
The “barbarization” of the Roman Empire was a slow process and a long-term problem. The real problem with the Roman Empire was that individual emperors were on average far more concerned with the possibility of being offed by rivals than they were about the barbarians nibbling on the borders or the fact that their armies relied more and more on barbarian mercenaries - until it was too late.
This weighing of priorities makes sense when you examine the number of emperors who died unnatural deaths at the hands of rivals vs. the number who died at the hands of barbarians.
Also, near-constant civil wars of course made the need for barbarian help ever more acute, by emperors and would-be rivals alike. Trading some land for Gothic help simply made sense, if the alternative was losing and seeing yourself and your whole family executed …
The endless round of civil wars within the Roman Empire tends to get less press, because on the surface it doesn’t change things bearly as much as a barbarian invasion. But the priorities of individual emperors were not necessarily those of historians acting with hindsight.
You could always keep conquering until you reach the Pacific Ocean.
The governors had indeed a good deal of autonomy to govern their little bit of the Empire (though they still had to send reports and justify whatever it is they were doing). But in most cases, they didn’t really have huge legions sitting around at their beck and call just in case either. Barb boys, barb boys, watcha gonna do when they come for you ? 
Nope - slow communication is all in the attacker’s favour, because *he *gets to plan beforehand. Before the attack has begun, he’s got all the time in the world to scheme, muster his forces, set up alliances and so forth. The invading army generally moves in a somewhat cohesive fashion too, so the messengers don’t have to travel all that far to relay news. Not to mention, barbarians are not burdened by a king or emperor or grand poobah a thousand miles away - Joe Visigoth brought his king right along for the ride. The next tribe over brought their king, and so forth. Once they’ve beaten you, they settle there and then, a small kingdom with small borders.
True enough, this does mean a certain lack of large scale organization or any grand strategic plan, which as the Gauls learned can be a bit of a problem in the long term - but really, all each barbarian sub-horde has to do is overrun a border garrison or two, then the chiefs will have a big meeting, decide where to go from there and so forth. Basically, the invader has all the initiative and gets to take out the defender one little chunk at a time with their entire might, moving barely slower than the news of their coming.
Now, it is true that once the riposte comes back, it can come back hard - banners flying in from all over the Empire, all that good stuff. Assuming there’s no more pressing concerns or wars of course.
But just as Rome wasn’t built in a day re-conquering places that are now entirely in the enemy’s hands, an enemy who’s fully expecting your counter-attack, is hard work. Almost starting back from scratch. That can take a while. For the Spaniards, who as **Nava **mentions got blindsided in such fashion in the 8th century, it took eight *more *centuries to “stomp the hell out” of their invaders. And Spain is not that big.
Sometimes, it’s easier and more expedient to just say: “Look, you lot can live over there and we won’t try and cut yer tonkers off just this minute - but we’re still the bosses, you hear ? We totally could drive you out, if we wanted to, swear to Mars. We’re being magnanimous as a motherfuck here, you got that? Now go ahead and settle, the tax collectors and legion recruiters will be here shortly”. Flash forward a generation or two and the barbarians have somewhat romanified… but the romans have barbarified, too.
Easier still of course is to utter the immortal words of Augustus Germanicus, circa 10AD: “Romani eunt domum”. Close sources say he privately added “Germania ire et ipsum copulare potest”.
It seems not often noted that the Roman generalissimo Flavius Aetius, so famous for orchestrating the defeat of the Huns at Chalons, had actually leaned very heavily on the Huns for decades as mercenaries, using them to beat up on assorted Germanic tribes as he played one side off against another over ~two decades. It even appears that he deliberately prevented the victory at Chalons from being too complete so that he could preserve Hun power to use in the future.
Nothing was ever simple when it came to the “barbarians” and the late Roman Empire.
Viable for imperial Russia, probably less so for Rome ;).
Yes and no. Post 1789, northern French was consolidated as the official, governmental and cultural language. But in day to day business, the locals still spoke mostly whatever was spoken in their pays, though as with all cultural borders people who lived on the fringes of each pays as well as people whose business it was to travel around a bit could speak or understand handfuls of them. But it took WW1 for the “problem” of French patois to finally get squared away.
You see, prior to the Great War, army regiments were mostly drafted each from a given region, so even if the men spoke some weird dialect only spoken within this region it wasn’t a problem. The men understood each other, and officers were all educated men so they could understand and relay French orders just fine.
Come WW1 and people from all over France get trucked over to get butchered somewhere near Belgium, the massacre forcing a consolidation of regiments coming from everywhere on an unprecedented scale. So you had Picards fighting next to Ch’timis fighting next to Bretons, with an Auvergnat officer leading them. Each speaking their own mumbo-jumbo, and most of them with barely any schooling in literary French since back then working class kids only stayed in school long enough to learn to read and do sums (if that), then off to work.
It wasn’t complete chaos because many of the patois are closely related and mutually intelligible, and some only differ from French in grammar constructs, idioms and the odd bit of vocab, but still. You can imagine the headaches*.
After that, education got reinforced and La République made efforts to basically stamp out all local cultures and patois, quite ham handedly at that. It’s still something of a contentious issue in some corners of the realm.
I actually think this is a critical part of the fall.
For a lengthy period in the middle of Roman history, Rome’s neighbors envied Roman life and many of them were eager to become Roman citizens when the chance offered – as I recall, some invaded Roman territory to demand that they be incorporated into the empire.
It was only when the idea of Rome became unattractive that there was no hope of maintaining what had been achieved. When people inside and outside the border stopped caring about it and turned to their immediate local concerns, the Dark Ages began.
It’s also not often noted that Flavius Aetius’s father was Scythian.
The way I see it, the Western Roman Empire simply was not viable:
-tax revenues were declining (as most of the former freemen were forced into serfdom)
-the army became uncotraollable (no money to pay the soldiers, conflicting loyalties among the goths, germans, sythians, celts, who now made up most of the soldiers
-Rome (city) could not feed itself-and imports of grain (frome Egypt, N. Africa) threatened by invasions
-hyperinflation had caused a contraction of trade
thus the empire reverted to a more feudalistic system.
Once the army became unreliable, the whole thing collapsed.
The Empire fell because Ro-Man got emotionally attached to a Hu-Man Wo-Man. “I must, yet I cannot! How do you calculate that?!”
In fact, there’s still a sizeable number of German speakers. I think that Alsatian is probably the language that resisted the best, it still being spoken commonly even in cities, while others languages in France generally have dissapeared or are only spoken by elderly people in the countryside. By the way, at the time of the French revolution, there also was a Flemish-speaking area in northern France.
However, dating that from the French revolution is innacurate. It’s both older and more recent than that.
Older in the sense that quite early (early 16th century) French was made an official language. For instance, trials had to be conducted in French everywhere in the kingdom and official documents written in French. As a result, by the time of the revolution, French was quite commonly known and used by somewhat educated people and in towns. Contrarily to the situation in, for instance, Spain, or in not yet united Germany and Italy.
More recent in the sense that the attempted obliteration of local languages and dialects was mostly the work of the third republic (and in particular of its schoolteachers, often called the “black hussars of the Republic” for their efficiency in propagating its values and norms) from 1870 to WW2.
The languages spoken in France would have been :
-Oil language (Modern French being its Paris-Orleans area dialect)
-Oc language
-Franco-Provençal
-Catalan
-Flemish (now totally extinct)
-Breton
-Basque
-Alsatian
-Corsican (Corsica only became French in the 18th century, so it’s a bit of an outlier. It’s in fact an Italian language/dialect)
And each could indeed include a number of dialects.
What do you mean, it’s not often noted? Insofar as people actually talk about the early 5th century in the West, Aetius’ non-Roman connections are pretty well attested in ancient and contemporary historiography.
No, I know both ancient and modern historians talk about it. I was just engaged in some parallelism for dramatic effect. People are making a division in this thread between “Roman” and “Barbarian” that wasn’t so clear cut in the later Empire.
A book I’d recommend about that whole thing is Eugen Weber’s “Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914”, which puts it earlier than the war, but its a look at the way modernization encouraged the promotion of the French language and a common French identity.