Gibbon and the Eternal Crisis of Rome

250 years after its publication, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains the supreme meditation on the mortality of civilisations. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) In the 1980s, German historian Alexander Demandt attempted to catalogue every explanation ever proposed for the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. In ‘Der Fall Roms’ (1984), Demandt detailed more than two hundred causes that led to Rome’s collapse, from the eminently plausible to the positively whimsical....

min read

250 years after its publication, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire remains the supreme meditation on the mortality of civilisations. Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) In the 1980s, German historian Alexander Demandt attempted to catalogue every explanation ever proposed for the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE. In ‘Der Fall Roms’ (1984), Demandt detailed more than two hundred causes that led to Rome’s collapse, from the eminently plausible to the positively whimsical. These included, among others, military overstretch, Christianity, lead poisoning, race mixture, taxation, plague, inflation, declining birth-rates, climate change and simple bad luck. The point of Demandt’s eccentric catalogue was that Rome has never stopped falling because historians have never stopped arguing about why it did. And no work in the Western historical canon has shaped that argument more profoundly than Edward Gibbon’s sublime and magisterial ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ whose first volume appeared in 1776, exactly 250 years ago. Even today, Gibbon’s magnum opus still towers above the vast literature it inspired. While subsequent historians have proposed new causes, revised old explanations, and challenged many of Gibbon’s conclusions, none, however, has displaced him from the centre of the debate. Antiquarian Puzzle But why were eighteenth-century thinkers so fascinated by the fall of Rome? Their preoccupation arose naturally from the Enlightenment itself, the great European intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that championed reason, science and human progress. The new philosophy of progress encouraged Europeans to look critically upon the past, especially upon classical antiquity and the early Church. Human society, it was increasingly believed, advanced through reason, commerce and science. Progress seemed not only possible but almost inevitable. Yet, the more thoughtful wondered how secure was that progress? Might not a Roman philosopher living during the apogee of Empire have entertained similar assumptions? Who, in the second century CE, could have imagined that the civilisation of classical antiquity would one day be overrun by ‘barbarians,’ its cities diminished and Europe plunged into centuries that later generations would call the ‘Dark Ages’? And yet, it had happened. If civilization had declined once, it could decline again. This unsettling possibility transformed the fall of Rome into one of the central questions of Enlightenment thought. To understand the future, one first had to re-examine the course and analyse how the greatest empire the world had known had yielded to decay and collapse. The origins of Gibbon’s monumental work have themselves entered literary mythology. On October 15 1764, while visiting Rome, Gibbon sat “musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter.” In that instant, he later recalled, “the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” But ‘Decline and Fall’ did not emerge merely from a romantic reverie among Roman ruins. It was the product of one of the great intellectual revolutions of Europe. For centuries, history had largely been written under the shadow of theology. Christian chroniclers and churchmen explained away the rise and fall of kingdoms as expressions of God’s will. Empires prospered because Providence favoured them; they declined because Providence judged them. The task of the historian was less to investigate causes than to discern divine purpose. Christian historians from Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century to Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet in the seventeenth treated empires as instruments of divine purpose. Eusebius’s ‘Ecclesiastical History’ and Augustine’s ‘City of God’ established the providential model in late antiquity: Rome rose because God permitted it and fell because God judged it. But this theological view of history was increasingly challenged by Renaissance and early modern thinkers. Instead of asking what God intended, they began asking what human beings actually did. They looked for political, economic, military and social causes behind historical events rather than divine intervention. Yet, by the 17th century, the pendulum had swung too far in the opposite direction. By then, radical sceptics, especially the ‘Pyrrhonists’ led by writers like Pierre Bayle, subjected historical evidence to relentless criticism. Bayle’s monumental ‘Historical and Critical Dictionary’ (1697) was a veritable demolition chamber for received truths wherein he exposed forged documents, pious inventions and inherited myths. While their criticism was often valuable, it raised the unsettling question that if every source could be doubted, could history explain anything with certainty at all? Philosophical History Gibbon sought a path between these extremes. While he rejected the notion that history was merely the unfolding of a divine plan, he also refused to believe that the past was unknowable. Instead, he embraced ‘philosophic history’ approach - the search for human causes behind historical events. Why do empires rise? Why do they decline? How do religion, institutions, commerce, ideas and political power shape the fate of civilisations? These were the questions that would animate Decline and Fall. The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Barbarians by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre, 1890 The intellectual genealogy of Decline and Fall can be traced to Niccolò Machiavelli, who was among the first modern thinkers to treat history not as the record of God’s purposes but as the consequence of human actions and political institutions. It was Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy (published posthumously in 1531) which marked one of the first decisive breaks with medieval providential history. For Machiavelli, republics rose through virtù – a mixture of energy, civic courage, military discipline - and decayed through corruption, luxury, faction, and dependence upon mercenaries. Machiavelli’s younger contemporary Francesco Guicciardini carried the break even further. His History of Italy (Storia d’Italia), published in 1561, abandoned medieval moral allegory in favour of documentary evidence, diplomatic realism, and psychological scrutiny. Guicciardini distrusted grand abstractions and concentrated instead on contingency, motive, and self-interest. But such secular historiography came under immense pressure from religious orthodoxy. The Counter-Reformation had reasserted theological authority across Catholic Europe. Meanwhile, Protestant states had developed rival providential narratives of their own. Both confessions sought to reclaim history as evidence of divine order. It was in this atmosphere that Jacques Auguste de Thou produced one of the boldest historical projects of early modern Europe. His Historia sui temporis (“History of My Times”), published between 1604 and 1620, attempted the audacious feat of narrating the French Wars of Religion without surrendering to sectarian hatred. Though personally Catholic and loyal to the French crown, de Thou treated Protestant actors with striking fairness and resisted reducing politics to theology. The result scandalised zealots on all sides. The same spirit animated Paolo Sarpi’s History of the Council of Trent (1619), which dismantled triumphalist Catholic accounts of the Counter-Reformation by exposing ecclesiastical politics, factional intrigue and institutional self-interest. The most decisive precursor to Gibbon, however, was Pietro Giannone. Gibbon had encountered Giannone’s Civil History of the Kingdom of Naples (Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli, 1723) - a pioneering work of secular history - during his formative years in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had been sent after a disastrous period at Oxford, of which he later would memorably recall as being “steeped in port and prejudice.” Giannone treated the Church not as any sacred institution but as a political corporation competing for wealth, legal privilege and temporal authority. It was a frontal assault upon ecclesiastical historiography. Giannone paid heavily for this. Condemned by the Church, excommunicated, driven into exile, he was lured into Savoyard territory under false assurances of safety and eventually imprisoned in Turin, where he died in 1748 after more than a decade in confinement. Giannone’s ideas on history were adopted and extended by an even more consequential writer, the President de Montesquieu, whose Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734) supplied perhaps the single most important model for Enlightenment historiography before Gibbon himself. Montesquieu broke decisively with providential explanation by analysing Rome through institutions, military organisation, commerce, civic virtue, and political psychology rather than divine favour. Rome’s greatness, he argued, contained the seeds of its own corruption. Scottish Enlightenment David Hume (1711-1776) The Scottish Enlightenment and Montesquieu’s disciples had carried this “philosophic history” to its fullest eighteenth-century expression. David Hume’s History of England (published between 1754 and 1762) demonstrated that historical writing could combine philosophical explanation with literary elegance - a combination that would deeply shape Gibbon’s own prose. Like Montesquieu, Hume treated commerce and public opinion as historical forces equal in importance to battles or dynasties while approaching national myths with ironic detachment. William Robertson widened this historical inquiry still further. His ‘History of Scotland’ (1759), ‘History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V’ (1769), and ‘History of America’ (1777) expanded the historical narrative beyond courts and campaigns towards colonialism, religion, and social development. Gibbon admired Robertson enormously. Gibbon inherited this entire tradition and fused it with the severity of Tacitus, his supreme ancient model. Gibbon believed that it was Tacitus, alone among the ancient historians, who most clearly revealed the hidden workings of power – the fear, servility, corruption and imperial hypocrisy lurking beneath the language of Roman government. Gibbon’s staggering erudition was in scintillating display on almost every page. In the opening chapters alone, he moved effortlessly between the ancient historians - Tacitus, Polybius, Dion Cassius, Josephus among others while cross-examining ecclesiastical writers such as Eusebius and Sozomen with almost prosecutorial care. He drew upon Roman law, military organisation, provincial administration, imperial taxation, frontier defence, geography, coinage, trade, demography and religious controversy with equal confidence. What astonished contemporaries was not simply the range of his learning but the way he marshalled it. Gibbon seemed to command the entire surviving literature of the ancient world. Greek and Latin chroniclers, Church fathers, Byzantine annalists, legal codes, inscriptions, theological treatises and medieval chronicles were all summoned as witnesses in a single argument. More than a million words and six volumes later, Gibbon brought his narrative to a close in 1788, having traced the fortunes of Rome from the age of the Antonines to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 - a span of thirteen centuries. What distinguished Gibbon above all predecessors was his understanding of decline as a process rather than a single cataclysmic event. Rome, in Gibbon’s telling, was already doomed in the moment of her zenith. Fierce Controversy No part of ‘Decline and Fall’ provoked a greater storm than Chapters XV and XVI, where Gibbon coolly argued that Christianity, far from saving the Roman Empire, had contributed to its weakening by turning men’s energies away from civic duty and public life towards the concerns of the ‘next’ world. The Course of Empire: Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836 Contrary to popular perception, he did not claim that Christianity single-handedly destroyed Rome but rather, it altered Roman priorities at a moment when martial discipline and civic energy were already eroding. The backlash was immediate and ferocious. Clergymen denounced Gibbon across Britain. It was only in 1779 when Gibbon responded with his Vindication, defending himself with devastating erudition and icy composure. It was Gibbon’s treatment of Byzantium that remains more problematic today. He viewed the Eastern Roman Empire with barely concealed impatience, as a civilisation of eunuchs, theological pedantry and endless palace intrigue. Steven Runciman later complained that Gibbon lacked both the Greek scholarship and theological sympathy necessary to understand Byzantine civilization on its own terms. Gibbon’s distaste for what he regarded as monk-ridden superstition prevented him from grasping the intellectual seriousness of Byzantine theology. Yet even where he misjudged Byzantium, Gibbon’s prose retained its hypnotic grandeur. Under his hand, the reign of Heraclius, the eruption of Islam, the Mongol invasions, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 became part of a single civilisational drama of Rome slowly surrendering the Mediterranean to younger, harder, and more disciplined powers. Every historian who has attempted a civilisational panorama on a comparable scale has done so in Gibbon’s shadow - from Theodor Mommsen and Arnold Toynbee to Ronald Syme, whose ‘The Roman Revolution’ (1939) perhaps came closest to Gibbon’s irony and authority. In India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar brought a distinctly Gibbonian grandeur to his history of Mughal decline. No historical work of such scale has retained its authority for so long as ‘Decline and Fall.’ As Hugh Trevor-Roper observed, “Its intellectual content remains valid today, and any discussion of the course and causes of the decline of Rome is still dominated by it. Of no other historian writing before 1830 can this be said.” Why does Gibbon still feel so modern? Because the anxieties that haunted him remain our own. Overextended states, polarised societies, military overstretch, ideological fanaticism, elite decadence, bureaucratic paralysis and the illusion that prosperity guarantees permanence are not merely Roman problems. That is why Rome never stops falling. For every age sees in Gibbon’s Rome an image of itself.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Aurangzeb?

Shoumojit Banerjee
Mar 8, 2025
5 min read

Updated: Mar 10, 2025

The spirit of Aurangzeb continues to haunt India’s political discourse, as the latest row in the Maharashtra Assembly over remarks eulogizing the Mughal Emperor prove.

The latest controversy over Mughal emperor Aurangzeb erupted in Maharashtra’s Assembly when Samajwadi Party MLA Abu Azmi, after praising the Mughal, declared that Aurangzeb was not a cruel ruler and had, in fact, built temples. He argued that the emperor’s war against Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj was a battle for state control, not a Hindu-Muslim conflict.

The statement provoked a furious backlash, culminating in Azmi’s suspension.

So, how does one make sense of Aurangzeb and his reign of nearly half-a-century? If there is one work that provides an unvarnished, rigorously researched and gloriously three-dimensional portrait of the Mughal Emperor, it is Sir Jadunath Sarkar’s monumental five-volume ‘History of Aurangzib’ (1912-24). It is precisely because Aurangzeb remains a lightning rod in contemporary politics that Sarkar’s magisterial work is more relevant than ever.

At a time when historical discourse is increasingly dictated by political biases, reading Sarkar is an act of intellectual defiance. It asks us to understand Aurangzeb - his motivations, his ambitions, his prejudices and his failures - on the basis of documented history rather than polemical fantasy.

What makes Sarkar’s History of Aurangzib indispensable is its scholarly integrity, in letting the sources speak. Nowhere is this more evident than in Volume 3, Chapter 34, titled ‘Islamic State Church in India.’ In it, Sarkar lays bare Aurangzeb’s vision of an Islamic state governed by the strict tenets of Sharia. The emperor, he writes, was a rigid upholder of the doctrines and rules of the Mohammedan Canon Law and sought to remake India in its image. Unlike his great-grandfather Akbar, who had envisioned a syncretic state accommodating multiple faiths, Aurangzeb believed in enforcing orthodox Islam as state policy, seeing it as his divine duty.

He does not attempt to rehabilitate Aurangzeb nor demonize him beyond what the evidence supports. It is this commitment to historical truth that makes his work essential reading, particularly today, when intellectual dishonesty masquerades as scholarship. Take Audrey Truschke’s Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth (2017) a slim volume that offers a sanitized, even hagiographic, portrait of the emperor.

Truschke’s argument hinges on selective anecdotes, such as Aurangzeb’s alleged generosity towards Brahmins, while conveniently downplaying the destruction of countless temples and the forcible conversions under his reign. Her mendacious arguments only underscore the necessity of returning to Sarkar’s tour-de-force, which is a meticulous reconstruction of not just Aurangzeb’s policies, personality and military conquests, but practically the whole history of 17th century India based on Persian, Marathi, old Hindi and European sources.

Sarkar’s History of Aurangzib is not merely great history in a Gibbonian vein, but a safeguard against intellectual dishonesty. For decades, India’s historical discourse has been shaped less by scholarship and more by ideology, especially, the Nehruvian era and later regimes saw Marxist historians gaining control over key academic institutions and rewriting textbooks to fit a narrative that downplayed the atrocities of Islamic rulers.

The facts, however, remain immutable. Aurangzeb was no misunderstood administrator but a zealot who imposed Sharia as state policy and persecuted religious minorities. Sarkar gives us an Aurangzeb who is ruthless but disciplined, acknowledging his subject’s military genius, his sheer endurance that allowed him to fight wars into his eighties, his piety but extreme cruelty; a man of immense willpower yet ultimately a failure, having left behind a fractured and declining empire.

One need not be a partisan to acknowledge the sheer weight of historical evidence against the narrative of Aurangzeb as a tolerant or benevolent ruler.

Take Mathura, once a stronghold of his brother Dara Shikoh, who had sought to bridge Hindu and Muslim traditions. Aurangzeb appointed Abdun Nabi as faujdar of Mathura and tasked with ensuring that Hinduism in the sacred city was not just suppressed but erased. While we know of the horrific fate of Chhatrapati Sambhaji, less known is that of Jat leader Gokla, the zamindar of Tilpat, under whose leadership the Jat peasantry rose against Aurangzeb’s oppression in Mathura in 1669. The uprising was ruthlessly crushed and Gokla was taken to Agra, his limbs hacked off in public, his family forcibly converted to Islam.

Aurangzeb’s intolerance was not merely an outgrowth of political expediency but the logical outcome of his puritanical theocracy. His personal piety was extreme - he lived simply, sewed his own skullcaps - but this asceticism did not temper his zealotry. Holi was prohibited. Muharram processions were banned after a fight between rival processions in Burhanpur in 1669. Hindu fairs, which even Indian Muslims attended, were suppressed in Malwa and elsewhere.

His policy of religious discrimination extended far beyond symbolism. The jaziya tax on non-Muslims, abolished by Akbar a century earlier, was reinstated. Even during the Maratha war, when Hindu traders were scared off by forced jaziya enforcement, which in turn led to food shortages in the Mughal camp, Aurangzeb refused to revoke the tax even as his soldiers starved, arguing that he could not “jeopardize his soul by violating the Quranic precept.”

In fact, an army of Muslim collectors fanned out across the empire to ensure the enforcement of jaziya. So much so, that in 1687, an Inspector-General of jaziya was appointed to oversee its realization in the four Deccan provinces. An ordinance issued in 1671 required that revenue officials in crown lands be exclusively Muslim, throwing out the Hindu accountants and head-clerks (though this was later deemed impractical due to the sheer necessity of Hindu clerks).

The scale of temple destruction under Aurangzeb was unprecedented. In 1669, he issued a general order to demolish all schools and temples of ‘infidels.’ This resulted in the second destruction of Somnath, the Vishwanath Temple of Benares and the Keshav Rai Temple of Mathura. In Chittor alone, 63 temples were destroyed in February 1680 during the Rajput revolt while 172 temples in and around Udaipur were decimated. The grand temple in front of the Maharana of Udaipur’s palace was razed, its deities shattered.

Aurangzeb’s own family bore the weight of his tyranny. Obsessed with Shah Jahan’s prophecy that his sons would turn against him, he kept them under watch, minutely regulating their lives. His eldest son, Mohammad Sultan, was imprisoned for twelve years (he had defected to the side of Aurangzeb’s brother Shuja during the Battle of Khajwa). His youngest, Kam Baksh, spent time in confinement. His favourite, Muhammad Akbar, revolted in 1681, aligned with the Rajputs and sought refuge with Chhatrapati Sambhaji. Harried and hounded, he eventually died a fugitive in Persia.

A dishonest narrative that paints Aurangzeb as a secular, misunderstood ruler does disservice not just to history but to those who suffered under his rule. The chilling execution of Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675, his massacre of the Satnamis, a non-conformist Hindu sect, are just two instances.

Aurangzeb’s own letters reveal his commitment to Islamic supremacy, his disdain for non-Muslims, and his belief in ruling through the lens of religious orthodoxy. For those who wish to understand Aurangzeb, not as a villain or hero but as he truly was, there is no better guide than Sarkar. History is not meant to be screamed from a screen or distorted in political speeches. It must be studied and understood in all its grandeur and horror.

Gibbon and the Eternal Crisis of Rome

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Aurangzeb?

Recent Posts

Comments