What was the fundamental cause of the collapse of the Roman Empire

I'm fairly sure that that text doesn't detail an army size specifically in order to do anything- it's just the army sizes in the Strategikon are assumed, rather than proscribed. I could be wrong though, it's been a while since I've read it. Realistically, though, small armies do tend to lose battles- it's just our sources like to talk about a handful of heroic figures mowing down legions of cowardly enemies.

Well, if large armies were better, I think we'd see more about maintaining large forces and less about fighting smarter, not harder.

And speaking in general, well lead armies tend to win battles, not merely large ones, though.

Not so much handfuls of heroic fighters vs. legions of ninnies as - for example - Stonewall Jackson having fewer troops than the total Federal troops in and around the Shenandoah Valley.

That sort of thing is a serious problem given the logistical hell of maintaining that many men in one place - I strongly suspect anyone would have broken it into more manageable chunks (which is not saying that they wouldn't be enough if well lead, but I keep emphasizing leadership because that's what the Vandals had in their favor OTL when they lost - and didn't when they lost to Beli).

As for the East being willing to prop up a Western state- I think the efforts of 425, 440, 468, 533 and 551 show quite conclusively that the political will and ideology was there. In any case, the East does not inevitably hold the whip hand here. Recall that Constantine and later Heraclius conquered the Eastern Empire from the West, not vice versa.

And the political will and ideology being there for a while is not the same as it always being there. I mean, let's say the East maintains it for as long as OTL plus change (call it up to ~600). What then? At some point, it's going to have other interests and commitments - assuming the twenty-sixty-years war is butterflied, there's still gonna be something at some point.

As for the whip hand: Constantine was a century and a half earlier and Heraclius with support for Phocas being . . . weakened.

I'm not sure the West has any leverage it can put on the East.

So what this all boils to is: I think the West might have a chance. But it's only a chance.

Good management and good generalship can make dent into things, but the days when Cannae level defeats looked worse than they really were are gone in the West by this point.
 
I agree with all of this apart from the part about the military reforms being "ill conceived". After all the Diocletian/Constantine military establishment persisted well into the eighth century and clearly was adequate at doing what it was designed for: the containment of Sasanian Iran. And there's no real reason, as far as I can see, to point in the direction of the army's inefficiency for the collapse of the West either, given it was quite capable of energetic and successful campaigns under Constantius and Aetius.

What I had in mind was Constantine's reorganization of the army into frontier and mobile troops, with the latter deployed into a central reserve. This had the effect of enervating both, because the frontier troops degenerated into static fortress troops, and the mobile troops were usually stationed in or near cities, with the decadence implied in that - and usually too far to respond to border incursions in a timely fashion.

For more on this problem, I recommend reading Arther Ferrill, The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation.

In any event, the army in the East was reorganized again in the 5th century, moving away from the old legions and cohorts to smaller units (tagma), and a broader range of different troop unit types, relying more and more heavily on allied and foederati troops by the time of the 6th century. And after that, Heraclius effected another major reorganization in the face of the Sassanid onslaught. So Roman military success in the 6th and 7th centuries owed much to subsequent reorganizations that moved away from Constantine's ill-conceived scheme.
 
The problem is that the East had considerably more resources than the West. So the Eastern Empire could afford - financially and militarily - screwups that the West could not.


Leo and Zeno deserve credit to be sure, but one has to acknowledge this.

The East also had more defensible positions than the West. Even when the Balkans were overrun, Constantinople's land walls and the straits kept the barbarians out of Asia.
 
The East also had more defensible positions than the West. Even when the Balkans were overrun, Constantinople's land walls and the straits kept the barbarians out of Asia.

And on the other half of things, Anatolia is surrounded by mountains.

But geography counts less than the men holding it.
 
And on the other half of things, Anatolia is surrounded by mountains.

But geography counts less than the men holding it.

True. But there's no evidence that quality of troops or leaders was all *that* much better in the East than the West.

It's a combination of favorable geography and greater resources that enabled the East to survive.
 
True. But there's no evidence that quality of troops or leaders was all *that* much better in the East than the West.

It's a combination of favorable geography and greater resources that enabled the East to survive.

I agree, although I'd say that a part of that resource disparity is the West being dependent on the barbarians that it was trying to stop from taking over, in a way the East wasn't.

Yes, both sides used lots of barbarians, but that's not the point. The Franks et all were settled on supposedly Roman land. The East's barbarian mercs by and large weren't.
 
What I had in mind was Constantine's reorganization of the army into frontier and mobile troops, with the latter deployed into a central reserve. This had the effect of enervating both, because the frontier troops degenerated into static fortress troops, and the mobile troops were usually stationed in or near cities, with the decadence implied in that - and usually too far to respond to border incursions in a timely fashion.

For more on this problem, I recommend reading Arther Ferrill, The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation.

In any event, the army in the East was reorganized again in the 5th century, moving away from the old legions and cohorts to smaller units (tagma), and a broader range of different troop unit types, relying more and more heavily on allied and foederati troops by the time of the 6th century. And after that, Heraclius effected another major reorganization in the face of the Sassanid onslaught. So Roman military success in the 6th and 7th centuries owed much to subsequent reorganizations that moved away from Constantine's ill-conceived scheme.

Hmmm, not sure about this. There were certainly still Limitanei and Comitatenses in existence throughout the sixth century, and even if there had been some tinkering, the basic idea of static garrison armies and mobile field armies remained intact. There's almost no evidence of any serious reorganisation of this structure under Heraclius, and the Themes were never a serious reform anyway- they were simply the old field armies having been withdrawn on what was assumed to be a temporary basis into Anatolia. That's why you see Roman provinces surviving as the primary administrative unit of the Byzantine Empire, below the Themes supposedly established by Heraclius, until the reforms of Nikephoros I.
 
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