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Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium.

Episode 61. Why did the Romans survive?

I think the narrative largely speaks for itself on how devastating the 7th century was for the Roman Empire.

While the popular perception may always be that the decline and fall of Roman civilization came in the West in the 5th century, you know better.

The Eastern Mediterranean was Roman place with people identifying themselves and their land by that name in 600 AD.

What followed was a far more dramatic collapse than anything the West had seen.

As the damaging war with Persia weakened the Roman army to the point where the Arabs could lift the entire Eastern seaboard from their control in a matter of months.

Between those two devastating conflicts, the Empire went from being one of the most powerful states in the world to only a middling power in Europe.

Hemmed in by a chaotic Balkans on one side and the mighty caliphate on the other, the Byzantines had no option but to grimly cling to what they had left.

In today's episode we're going to survey the changes to the Roman army and government while also appreciating that it could have been much worse.

The Romans are still here and we have to ask how they survived.

The headline stories are of course all bleak. The Empire had lost two thirds of its land and three quarters of its wealth.

About ten million subjects were now serving other governments or lost to imperial tax collectors.

Not only was the Empire much poorer than it once was but Anatolia and the Balkans were also cut a drift from the profitable networks of trade that they had been connected to for the past six centuries.

The rich lands of Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt had been wealthy for millennia but only with the arrival of the Romans had that wealth penetrated Western Europe.

Slowly over the last few centuries the collapse of the Roman Empire had cut off Western Europe from that prosperity.

Britain in the fifth century, Gaul in Italy in the sixth and now in the seventh century what remained of Romania was cut off too.

The wealth of the Middle East would fund the caliphate's growth while the remaining traders who ventured into the Christian Empire were cut to a trickle.

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