Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

The Senate had only itself to blame as it watched the Goths climbing over the seven hills. For three days, the barbarians sacked the Eternal City, even breaking into the mausoleum of Augustus and scattering the imperial ashes. As these things generally went, the pillaging was not especially brutal, but it had a profound impact that sped out in shock waves to every corner of the empire. Saint Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, put into words the surreal horror that everyone felt: “A dreadful rumor has come from the West…. My voice sticks in my throat…. The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken.”^*

The shock of seeing this supposedly inviolate city at the mercy of barbarians hopelessly shattered the western view of the empire as a divinely ordered state. Here was the first great crack in worldviews between the East and the West. Safe in Constantinople, the East eventually would recover from the trauma and regain its faith in the universal and divine claims of the empire. In the West, however, such beliefs were no longer possible. Rome was revealed to be merely a mortal creation, and no government or state this side of paradise could truly claim to be divinely ordained. Christians were not citizens, but rather pilgrims traveling through a world that was not their home, and any empire—whether based in Rome or Constantinople—was only transitory. Such divergent beliefs at first seemed almost insignificant, but they would soon grow into a great cultural divide that would split the old empire more thoroughly than any barbarian army could have.

The Romans could take some grim satisfaction from the fact that Alaric didn’t enjoy his triumph for long. A few months after his victory, the barbarian king expired of a fever, but the damage to the imperial reputation had already been done.† The legions were powerless, and no city seemed safe from the waves of barbarism engulfing the empire. The eastern emperor Theodosius II was so alarmed that he immediately ordered huge new walls built around Constantinople. Rising forty feet high and nearly sixteen feet thick, these powerful defenses of stone and brick would throw back every hopeful invader for the next thousand years. The sack of Rome may have deeply scarred the Roman psyche, but it had also created the most impressive defensive fortifications ever built in the ancient or medieval worlds. The empire would seldom know peace in the long years to come, but at least the defenses of its capital city would be secure.

The West had no such luxury. Honorius had fled the moment the Goths were spotted, and with the weakness of Rome revealed, he officially moved the capital to the more defensible Ravenna. But even in a new city, the western emperor was powerless to stop the decay and could only watch as the provinces fell away. The Visigoths and Franks overran Gaul, Spain flared up in revolt, and Saxon invaders swarmed into Britain. The anxious British wrote to Honorius begging for help, but the answer they received made it all too clear that the imperium was failing in the West. “Look after your own fates,” the emperor advised.^*

He could hardly do otherwise; the imperial armies were everywhere on the retreat, and Britain was abandoned to its long and futile fight against the Saxons.† Rome still had the wealth of North Africa, but by the time Honorius finally expired of edema of the lungs in 423, the Vandals had wrested most of it from his control.

The eastern government did what it could to help its dying counterpart, but it had its own problems with a terrifying new enemy. Descending from the central Asian steppe in a wild, undisciplined horde, the Huns came crashing into imperial territory, destroying everything in their path and spreading terror and death wherever they went. Unlike the other peoples the empire dismissively called uncivilized, the Huns were barbarians in every sense of the word. Wearing tunics sewn from the skin of field mice, they never bathed or changed clothes, slept on their horses under the open stars, and ate their food raw. To the people of the empire, this wild, screaming horde seemed like some kind of awful divine punishment, and their terrible leader, Attila, was known throughout Europe as “The Scourge of God.”