Possibly. The question then becomes about why the Germanic peoples had so much more structural robustness and manpower given the relative territories controlled and infrastructure levels.
So Why DID the Western Roman Empire Collapse?
- Thread starter asnys
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Possibly. The question then becomes about why the Germanic peoples had so much more structural robustness and manpower given the relative territories controlled and infrastructure levels.
Mostly because they weren't ethnically defined : a Barbarian was someone obeying more or less directly to a Barbarian king. You have a lot of non-Germans people that were assimilated politically (culturally, it was rather the contrary) : Romans, Iranians, Turks, etc.
Critically when they entered Romania, they were assimilated really quickly into Roman structures, because of this, because they were needed and because their very ethnogenesis was due to Roman presence and definition.
Not that they were much more structurally robust than the Roman state, but they beneficied actually from the Roman Imperial state (and post-imperial Barbaro-Roman states) presence to either structurate or being integrated, as Alans.
And giving their relative specialisation in military matters, Barbarians being (to use the tomb epigraph mentioned before) "Barbarian Citizens, and Roman soldiers", it gave a more military-driven society where the Barbarian citizen was and remained definied by being armed up to the Carolingian Era : a freeman had weapons and no matter who was Barbarian, ethnically-speaking, it became the norm (at the point some weapons even had to be partially invented out of nowhere, in order to distinguish between Barbarians and Romans, as the francisca, after the political collapse of WRE).
What makes you thinks that?
By the IVth, Barbarisation of Roman society was more or less bound to happen, with a restructuration at the benefit of foederati. But a balance was technically doable, while not strictly likely*
I tried to explain why Barbarians went to play an important role politically, not that it was bound to end with a political collapse of the imperium in the West no matter what, especially with Barbarians still tied up with the idea of imperium to their own "ethnical legitimacy"; and why Barbarians ended up being more structured within Romania when Roman state weakened.
* One should remember that if it happened, then it was the most, the only, likely outcome to possibly happen. Which doesn't mean that it all comes down to what Barbarians were, but as well by relatively bad management in the Vth century, which itself is caused by something else.
But on a non-epistemologic base, we could talk about a "perfect storm" rather than overdetermination, as in a bundle of factors that could, or couldn't, be managable on their own but whom sheer addition made the situation particularly critical.
I'd say that overdetermination implies there was no escape from the situation, while I think there were solution to this "perfect storm" except they ended being less likely historically than political collapse.