I attended a very interesting seminar yesterday on 'Gibbon and the Falls of the Roman Empire' and it raised a few intriguing questions, so I wonder if anyone else here have any comments on this as well. The speaker, Mark Whittow (a big name in Byzantine studies), began by confessing that he hadn't read Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire until this year and even then he only read it because someone had asked him to write a chapter for a forthcoming book on Gibbon. This is quite relevant for me because for all my Gibbon-bashing in this subreddit, I haven't read it cover-to-cover either. I have tried to read it last year after someone brought up Gibbon here, but only succeeded in working through a few extracts (my one attempt to read it from the beginning ended in a matter of minutes after I got annoyed by his prose), so it made me feel pretty good to know that even a noted academic did not see reading this 'classic' as necessary and that apparently many other academics only read Gibbon to mine for snarky quotes. Given the sheer number of times Gibbon gets recommenced online, I have sometimes wondered whether I'm right to think that Gibbon should not be recommended as a good narrative history of the Roman Empire, so vindication felt great.

However, after reading all six volumes Whittow also made the very good point that most, if not all, historians since Gibbon still write history following the Gibbonian model. Gibbon's explanation for the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire was actually a lot more complicated than just blaming Christianity, as his mastery of the Latin/Greek sources is incomparable. He had for instance noted the importance of the steppe peoples in destabilising the Roman world, which sounds a lot like Peter Heather's recent argument from his The Fall of the Roman Empire (2005). Another example would be Gibbon's admiring portrait of Theodoric the Ostrogoth and his less than positive view of Justinian, which is essentially the modern perspective found in Heather's The Restoration of Rome (2014), O'Donnell's The Ruin of the Roman Empire (2008) and Arnold's Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration (2014). The alternative view, that Rome 'fell' largely due to internal factors, such as those proposed by Goffart and Halsall, is likewise similar to Gibbon's interpretation; one of his more famous lines is about the "immoderate greatness" of Rome after all.

So why is it that historians seemingly haven't moved on from Gibbon despite all our talk of having developed more nuances interpretations of history? This is all because Gibbon read the primary sources very well, so even after 200 years the narrative itself generally hasn't changed. Of course we now have other sources to draw upon that adds to our understanding of this period - apparently the archaeological evidence from late-antique Britain suggests that it wasn't so gloomy in the fringes of empire for example, since the decline in urban sites was matched by growth in rural areas, which I didn't expect at all since the British provinces are often places suggested to be where the empire 'fell' the most. Another interesting point raised by Whittow is that Gibbon seemingly never argued that the empire was substantially poorer despite all those 'barbarian' raids, which he said is a mistake a lot of careless readers make; this made me think about where this image of an economically declining empire comes from if not from Gibbon, especially as the literary sources, which were obviously written by the elite a lot of the time, continues to testify to the wealth of the upper crust of the imperial/post-imperial world.

Gibbon obviously isn't the alpha and the omega of Roman history, since he wasn't very good with legal, religious and cultural history, so there is still plenty of room for historians to explore beyond Gibbon, but for political history Whittow suggests that our understanding of Roman history has improved only because we've come to read a lot of our sources against the grain, whereas Gibbon more often than not took them at their words. His description of a declining Byzantine Empire was after all reflected in the sources, since it is true that a lot of Byzantine historians were rather pessimistic and always looked back to the good old days. So despite all the efforts of recent historians, Gibbon wasn't too far off the mark, especially as general histories of the Roman/Byzantine Empires (Heather and Treadgold for example) still essentially tell the same story. More specialist works are very different, but even so I see Whittow's point, since it means that all the progress we've made can essentially be boiled down to younger historians being more contrarian than their predecessors and read texts in increasingly innovative ways, which doesn't sound very encouraging.

This is especially relevant as I'm currently working on a paper on Constans II, a seventh-century emperor whose reign has undergone a lot of revision recently: we now have a fresh new perspective on the monothelete dispute under Constans, which was previously only written with the help of anti-monothelete sources, as well as an awareness that it is likely that Constantinople was attacked in 654 and 668, rather than just during 674-8 as part of the "First Arab Siege of Constantinople" (which may have just been a fabrication!). Despite these quite dramatic changes however, the core narrative didn't change too much, as the Roman Empire at this point did face an unprecedented crisis and the historical sources continue to tell the same story Gibbon narrated. To truly break with Gibbon, we have to look beyond the role played by the 'barbarians' pushed into the empire by the Huns, which I don't think is realistic at all, which implies that Gibbon was right after all. The best example of a truly non-Gibbonian work would be Anthony Kaldellis' The Byzantine Republic (2015), which argues that republican institutions/offices still played a major role in the Byzantine Empire and that everyone was aware of that, but this is a very controversial view amongst academics in my experience; this doesn't bode well for any truly revolutionary non-Gibbonian work coming out anytime soon!

Naturally Gibbon still had his misconceptions and his book is obviously not something to recommend to a newcomer to Roman history, as his views about the moral decline of Rome and his atrocious treatment of Byzantine history in Chapter 48 (incidentally also the only chapter without any footnotes, which says a lot about his attitude towards the empire in this period...) is more than enough reason to suggest literally any other academic history published in the last few decades. However, having gone to the seminar I do feel very differently about him now. Rather than just feeling a vague of sense of annoyance at the mention of his name, all this talk about Gibbon's methodology made me feel more doubts about my own work - the narrative has long been entrenched into the historical consciousness by the primary sources, since by necessity we have to constantly refer to them, so how can we construct a non-Gibbonian narrative, if it is ever possible or even necessary?

I mean, I can totally see how a story told outside of framework provided by the sources would be very useful, since primary sources clearly don't tell the whole story. A few people suggested that rather than creating narratives, we should look at the structure or the context within which the narrative occurred, which may allow us to escape the curse of the narrative, so that might be something. It would however be quite difficult for periods such as the seventh century, for which there are very few sources and but at the same time so many divergent interpretations of what we have, which makes it very difficult to synthesise everything together to build a coherent picture. So my question for you guys is, if any of you are still here after reading through this wall of text, how can we escape the tyranny of the primary sources? Is it even worth trying? Did I get into an epistemological crisis for nothing?

I've been having a fun little mental crisis all week that feels like it fits into today's subject. I was answering a question on medieval sieges earlier this week which reminded me that I had an article on the subject by Bernard Bachrach* (who is a historian whose work I have a lot of respect for) that I'd downloaded sometime in the last year and never gotten around to reading. So I opened it up and gave it a perusal after writing my post.

If you'll excuse me somewhat oversimplifying Bachrach's excellent point, his observation was: Medieval Military Historians all (pretty much) acknowledge that siege warfare was the dominant form of warfare during the period. However, we still almost exclusively write battle-focused accounts of medieval warfare and are more concerned with the ins and outs of battles like Hastings, Crecy and Agincourt than we are with any medieval sieges. Bachrach attributed this to early historians like Oman, Morris and Burne seeing medieval warfare through the lense of modern continental warfare.

Bachrach also calls attention to how many of our older, enduring and more problematic myths of medieval warfare are rooted in this battle-centric view. The idea of heavy cavalry as the 'tanks of the medieval world' makes even less sense when you consider how underwhelming they are at siege warfare. When besieging a castle you need infantry and engineers, not a vast horde of horses shitting everywhere.

Bachrach then went on to discuss/review Jim Bradbury's book The Medieval Siege and R. Rogers Latin Siege Warfare in the Twelfth Century which had both been published recently (the article was written in '94). This set off two things in my head:

Firstly, I must point out that this week I spent a lot of time re-reading Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy's The Great Warbow. This is important because the bulk of this book is really nuanced discussions of battles and the role the longbow played in them. After reading Bachrach's article I went on (the next day) to read what must be my sixth detailed description of Agincourt. Strickland devotes an entire chapter to the battle and I realized that with all of the accounts (and debates) over Agincourt I've read I have never read a detailed description of the Siege of Harfleur. Strickland devotes barely more than a line to the siege that starts the Agincourt campaign and in many ways is one of its more enduring successes. I just got a strong feeling of "what's the point?" at this stage. Surely we've said enough about Agincourt and Crecy by this stage, or at the very least we could try and say something about Calais and Harfleur.

The second thing was that it made me wonder if anything had improved since Bachrach's article. The article is actually relatively positive because two serious academic histories of siege warfare had been published just two years previous to his writing. While it was shocking to learn that Bradbury's book was a complete revelation to an almost entirely neglected subject it was at least a positive step forward. What I haven't been able to determine is if this trend has continued at all. I can't readily find many books on sieges published since Bradbury and Rogers' wrote theirs. I have a copy of Costick's Siege of Jerusalem which is nice but just one major siege, and one that is already better understood than most (the First Crusade necessarily engenders a higher level of engagement with sieges than most campaigns. It has two not very interesting battles and some pretty epic sieges). I suppose I'm interested here in knowing if my cursory research has just been unsuccessful, has there been a sudden increase in coverage of medieval siege warfare in the last two decades?

I suppose on the upside, I think I might have found my next area of research...

• Bernard Bachrach "Siege Warfare: A Reconnaissance" The Journal of Military History vol. 58 no. 1 (1994) 119-33.

Can you discuss the problem of scholar exgeisis, it is getting tiring to read academic books that are based on what the scholar said and what that scholar said. It has reached the point where academic history books spend 1/2 there time on the historiography and unwilling to just look and say their views (based on archaeology and the primary sources) forthrightly.