Spend too much time in any one community, and you’ll see a stupid, pointless debate. Gamers have the Xbox vs. PlayStation rivalry. Baseball fans have the designated hitter rule. And history fans have the debate between the “great man” and “trends and forces” theories of history.
The great man theory of history is a 19th-century theory that states that major historical events can be traced to the actions of exceptional individuals, or “great men”. The trends and forces theories propose that history progresses as a result of the interaction between social trends, structures, and outside forces. Trends and forces theories share no one ideology, and run the gamut from capitalist Whig historiography to Marxist historiography. What they share in common is a respect for the Hegelian idea of inevitable historical progress.
Unfortunately, unlike students of the “hard” sciences, historians don’t have a way of testing these theories. They can’t go back and test the great man theory by replacing Hitler with a peace-loving humanist, or George Washington with a power-hungry megalomania. They can’t test the trends and forces theory by undoing the collapse of the Northern Song Dynasty to see how the Mongols would have fared against a united China.
I’ve never found either theory to be completely convincing. On the one hand, the great man theory states an obvious truth: extraordinary events and extraordinary individuals come together. On the other hand, it ignores the impact of broader social, technological, and even biological trends. For example, the Emperor Justinian is famous for (mostly) reuniting the Roman Empire, but it fell apart again because of debt and disease, not because someone tore it apart.
On a similar note, trends and forces cannot fully explain some of history’s most important events. Perhaps it’s true that American independence, for example, was historically inevitable. After all, most of the rest of the former British Empire is independent from Great Britain. Thirteen American colonies fully dependent on the crown would be a historical oddity in the year 2020. But in 1783, republics were an oddity. It would have made far more sense for the new American nation to be a monarchy or an aristocracy. Exceptional individuals ensured that this would not be the case.
The great man and trends and forces theories also fail to fully explain the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth century. In last week’s podcast, I talked about the so-called Gothic “invasion” of the Roman Empire, and why it’s a misnomer. There was plenty of fighting and killing, but nobody “invaded” anybody. In fact, the first Goths crossed the Roman border not as a fighting force, but as refugees fleeing the Huns and various Gothic civil wars.
In theory, this was no different from the Germanic barbarians who had settled in the Empire periodically throughout its history. But in the past, the Romans had followed strict rules for admitting migrant tribes. First, the people were to be disarmed when they entered the Empire. Next, they were to be divided into smaller groups and settled throughout the Empire, rather than in one place. Finally, they were required to commit a percentage of their young men to military service.
This policy had a number of benefits. Disarmed barbarians were less likely to cause trouble. Barbarians who were scattered in small bands were faster to assimilate into Roman society. And barbarians who served in the legion had literal skin in the game.
When the first groups of Goths, called the Thervingi, crossed the Danube in 376 AD, the local Roman commander, Lupicinus, failed to follow any of these rules. His men took bribes to allow the Thervingi to remain armed, and the immigration plan called for all the Thervingi to be settled in Thrace as a single group. Worse yet, Lupicinus did not have enough food to feed all the migrants, and many were starving.
Clearly this was a failure of trends and forces, right? The Roman Empire was already weak, and a culture of corruption and carelessness had settled in along the border. This toxic stew inevitably led to poor conditions for migrants, sowing the seeds of violence.
If we’re going to be fair, though, we need to look not just at the circumstances, but at how people responded to them. Were the people on the ground going along with prevailing trends, or were they attempting to chart their own course?
In the case of Lupicinus and his leading officers, it seems that they were going right along with prevailing trends. The Roman leaders diverted much of the grain that was sent for the Thervingi, making an already bad situation worse. Then they squeezed out further profit by trading dog meat to the Goths in exchange for selling their own children into slavery.
During the march south to Thrace, word arrived that another Gothic tribe, the Greuthungi, were making their way across the Danube without permission from Roman authorities. Having brought most of his forces south to accompany the Thervengi, Lupicinus had left the border mostly undefended, and the few troops who remained were able to do little more than watch helplessly as Goths surged across the Danube on logs and homemade rafts.
Now Lupicinus was concerned. With the Goths on the other side of the Danube, they posed little threat to the Empire or his army. But with the Goths now inside the Empire and the bulk of the army occupied on the Persian border, the barbarians now posed a significant threat. To try and gain leverage, Lupicinus stopped in the city of Marcianople. Under the guise of a feast, he invited several Thervingi chieftains into the city, and effectively took them hostage.
When some Thervingi people tried to enter the city for supplies, a fight broke out with the Roman guards. The fight at the gate turned into a full-on riot, and Lupicinus had the Thervingi chieftains’ guards killed to keep violence from breaking out inside the walls. One chieftain, named Fritigern, convinced Lupicinus into letting him go outside and calm the Thervingi down. Instead, he promptly led an assault on the Roman garrison. Lupicinus fled, and was one of the few Roman survivors.
This one local uprising turned into six years of war, with Thervingi and Greuthungi defeating a Roman army at Adrianople in 378 and killing the Emperor Valens. When the dust settled, the new Emperor Theodosius made peace. As part of the bargain, the Goths would remain armed, and their region of Thrace would remain semi-autonomous. Perhaps most importantly, their young men would not serve in the Roman legions. They would serve in their own tribal units and fight as auxiliaries.
The Roman Empire was forever changed, at least in the west. Over the next few generations, one barbarian kingdom after another would carve out its own piece of the once-mighty empire. When the last Emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476, his title was little more than symbolic. What little real authority he exercised extended only a few miles from the city of Ravenna.
So, where does this leave us? Did historical and social trends lead inevitably to the fall of the greatest empire the western world has ever known? Or did the cowardly, corrupt acts of a few imperial officials open the floodgates of “invasion” during a time of military weakness?
At first blush, it would seem that the trends and forces perspective is more accurate. After all, Lupicinus and his cronies weren’t an abnormality in the 4th century empire. Corruption and cruelty were part and parcel of how the late empire operated. If it hadn’t been these particular men, it would have been similar officials in a similar situation who brought down the empire.
But what if we imagine a counterfactual scenario? What if, instead of Lupicinus, the Thervingi had instead encountered a Roman version of Abraham Lincoln or Nelson Mandela? What if this exceptional individual had managed their integration properly? Could the Gothic War of 376–382 have been avoided?
It’s tough to say for sure. For one thing, the Thervingi were still being settled as a large group in a single area. Even disarmed and properly fed, there was still the potential for disagreements down the road. For another thing, there’s no guarantee that the actions of one individual would have mattered in the long run. Even if the Thervingi migration had been properly managed, there’s no guarantee that future migrations wouldn’t have run into similar problems.
If any flavor of the trends and forces school is correct, the fall of Rome would inevitably fall in more or less the way it did. No exceptional individual could have changed this. On the other hand, if the great man theory is correct, the Empire could have been saved by the right individual at the right time.
Of course, no serious historian — or history buff — would suggest that the Roman Empire could have lasted forever. But imagine the ramifications if it had lasted for another century or two, or even longer as the empire did in the east. The actions of a Roman Nelson Mandela, rather than a Lupicinus, could have allowed this to happen.