Evacuations of Dacia and Britannia - a most serious blunder?

[Eleatic Guest]

Were the evacuations of Dacia (and Britannia) a most serious blunder by the Romans? Did Roman foreign and security policy fail completely here? I think yes. I am not contesting the decision to pull out as such, in fact I am of the opinion that it was not unwise to concentrate the efforts and energies on securing the core empire. But I believe the way how the Romans did their pull-out,was truely amateurish - the Romans could have capitalized far more on their retreat, and could have even improved the security situation of the Imperium by a few simple measures:

1. Did the Romans do their best to leave the power in the hands of a friendly Pro-Roman leadership? Did they do their best to form a true state of Dacia and offer it the best terms of a genuine border-and friendship treaty?

2. Why did the Romans not leave a small group of NCOs behind to organise the local people into an effective self-defence force, organise them according to Roman standards and give the locals the feeling that Rome is still on their side?

-> Both measures could have done by the Romans with relatively small expenditures in terms of manpower and money, and the final result could have been the resurrection of the Roman client state system which served the Republic and Early Empire so well. As it was the Romans sees to have wasted a genuine opportunity to decentralize the defensive efforts of the civilised world against the barbarian onslaught, to get urgently needed new allies in a world where they had none anymore and to remain politically credible in a time when the people wanted desperately leadership and not be abandoned easily by their Roman rulers.

Instead of even improving their strategic situations with strong allied states, united in a common cause, the Romans just threw the provinces in the arms of the barbarians to buy a few precious moments from their chasers. There seemed to be no longterm strategy, just a short-term desire to get as far away from the difficult provinces as possible. A wasted opportunity - what do you think?

[stevesarak]

Without a large military force to guard the vast boarders, wasn’t the outcome inevitable. Leaving advisors to help with training sounds good, but was it realistic to expect the ordinary person to take up arms and defend themselves from their own people (The barbarians). True, that after years of Roman dominance a lot of people from the cities thought of themselves as Romans but didn’t a lot of them follow the armies back to Rome. With the people that were left, was it realistic to expect them to take up arms against their hard core countrymen (The barbarians)? Could they hope to equal the might of the Roman soldiers stationed in their country, and if they did try to hold off the inevitable invasion, what could they expect if they lost? These were probable simple people living simple ways; it might have just been easier for them to live with whoever was in charge.

True, Rome could have pulled out gradually and maintained a steady flow of money into Britannia to maintain the infrastructure until they could stand on their own feet and thereby guarantee an ally, but because of the chaos going on in Rome at the time, it might not have been feasible to maintain the money drain, the emperor might have decided it was just easier to cut their loses, especially if they felt that Britannia would eventually fall without Roman might.

Would the majority of people in Britannia want to keep what they had or did they down deep long to have their own ways back?

Did Rome at the time have the expertise to help a country stand on its own, from afar, without the influence that came with being part Rome itself?

[Felix]

The other way Rome might have looked at it is this: a Roman style army not under Imperial control might just decide to march on Rome and install a new emperor. It certainly happened with peripheral armies, even while supposedly under Imperial control.

[Ebusitanus]

but was it realistic to expect the ordinary person to take up arms and defend themselves from their own people (The barbarians)

Against themselves you say? The Anglos and Saxxons who set up camp a while later did their very best to ethnically cleanse England from what population the romans had left in those provinces. Only Wales today constitutes a remanant of what ancient Britannia looked alike ethnically.

[Robert Vermaat]

Were the evacuations of Dacia (and Britannia) a most serious blunder by the Romans?

What evacuation of Britannia are you referring to? hock:
Britain was never evacuated.

[Petra Rocks]

What evacuation of Britannia are you referring to?
Britain was never evacuated.

Rome never withdrew from Britian. It is merely a tactical setback. Rome will be win in Britian.

Sorry, that was meant to be humor. Without meaning to speak for others he probably meant the Roman disengament from Britian in the early 5thc.

But would a Roman presense in Britian have helped it defend anything else? The Saxons had little to do with the Fall of Rome, I doubt the loss of the native British to Saxons was of great concern to the Romans by the time it happened.

Dacia is a differant story though, it lay right on the route of Gothic invaders. Your idea would probably have been a good one, though one might harbor doubts of a local Dacian king's ablitiy to permanently stop the Goths if all Rome's might could not.

The Anglos and Saxxons who set up camp a while later did their very best to ethnically cleanse England from what population the romans had left in those provinces. Only Wales today constitutes a remanant of what ancient Britannia looked alike ethnically.

I read an interesting article on BBC a few days ago on that very subject

[url:kv13iun8]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5192634.stm[/url]

[petrinus]

the armies were over extended, this and the infighting, always the infighting crippled rome, leaving a select few behind to support the romanized peoples we withdrew from would have just seen good soldiers overwhlemed and wiped out, rome needed the bettermen at the core-for what it was worth. i dont know what other political actions might have postponed this or improved the outcome if any.

[Come in Nighthawk]

I blame it all on "Augustus the Weak." If he had shown the resolve needed in 9 AD, then he would have mobilized a proper army under Tiberius and Germanicus and truly conquered, not simply "punished" the Germans. A Germany chastened and supplying auxilairies to the army constantly from 9 AD through the 4th century, instead of supplying barbarian invaders? The mind boggles. hock:

Then again, thinking ahead 600-odd years... What if he hadn't lost his resolve in 25 BC, and had conquered (REALLY conquered) Arabia? :roll:

[ambrosius]

What evacuation of Britannia are you referring to? Britain was never evacuated.

Rome never withdrew from Britian. It is merely a tactical setback. Rome will be the winner in Britain.

Damn right, bro'! And we're the guys to make it happen. 8)

The Angles and Saxons who set up camp a while later did their very best to ethnically cleanse England from what population the romans had left in those provinces. Only Wales today constitutes a remanant of what ancient Britannia looked alike ethnically.

I read an interesting article on BBC a few days ago on that very subject

[url:3qp6q59q]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5192634.stm[/url]

Yes. It's a curious article. It's conclusion is undoubtedly right, but its
reasoning is fatally flawed. You don't conquer and replace a native
population genetically through apartheid. Quite the reverse! :lol:
If you want your genes to replace those of the natives, then you either
kill them all or sellectively breed with them - how is 'apartheid' going
to further your genes at the expense of theirs? And as far as English
replacing Brythonic/Welsh is concerned, that indicates that Anglo-Saxon
women were coming over with their men. As it's a fact that children
learn to speak from their mothers. So to get to where we are in Britain
today would have required:

A.) A *LOT* of Anglo-Saxons migrating here with their wives. Probably
a lot more than 200,000. And since the population of Britain in the 5th c.
has been estimated between 2 & 6 million, it would be better to take the
average of 4 million as a starting figure.

B.) Maybe as many as 2 million Anglo-Saxons migrating here over
a period of 200 years, to effect the 50% genetic replacement in seen.

C.) Apartheid, as seen in the contemporary histories on both sides
of the ethnic & cultural divide, the placename evidence and the statutes
such as Ine's Law - which distinguishes between Britons and English.

So yes, there was apartheid. But that wouldn't explain why we're all
speaking English now. You have to add that there was a *BIG*
migration and a lot of slaughtering of the natives. :wink:

Mike

[Come in Nighthawk]

A.) A *LOT* of Anglo-Saxons migrating here with their wives. Probably a lot more than 200,000. And since the population of Britain in the 5th c. has been estimated between 2 & 6 million, it would be better to take the average of 4 million as a starting figure.

B.) Maybe as many as 2 million Anglo-Saxons migrating here over a period of 200 years, to effect the 50% genetic replacement in seen.

Mike

Do you have a source for your demographics? Colin McEvedy in Atlas of World Population History (1978) suggests about 800,000 living in "England & Wales" ca. 400 AD (i.e. "Roman Britain"), falling to about 600K two hundred years later. Of those ~600K, about half were then probably the descendants of the roughly 100,000 Saxon invaders of ca. 450-550 AD (by whatever "coupling" you choose, including forced). About the same time, i.e. ca. 400-600 AD, Denmark actually had about 300,000 and that figure kept rising, even as the Angles, Saxons, & Jutes debunked… Hence the population-pressure theory behind the "Saxon" migration... (pgs. 41, 43, 50, 53).

[montelatici]

It was a cost/benefit analysis. There were no great riches in either Britain or Dacia. The East was far more lucrative, The Eastern part of the empire prospered for more than another half a century after the fall of western Rome. What other civilisation has had such a run? Over 1,500 years. And, these silly little western empires of today, the Holy Roman, the Spanish, French, the British, the American, etc. last 2-3 centuries at the most. Think about it. The Roman Empire has no equals, temporally. Some say that its temporal power was transformed into a spiritual power through the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches.

[caiusbeerquitius]

the Holy Roman

2-3 centuries?

Errr. :?
Math 101: 1918 - 800 = 1118. That´s not THAT short. P

[S SEVERUS]

Very interesting topic but I must agree with this :

It was a cost/benefit analysis

But weren't there gold mines in Dacia that were exploited after the Dacian Wars? I am not sure but could the exhaustion of the mines have been a reason to abondon Dacia in connection with the difficult security problem?

What about arming the people after the retreat of the army? Well the Roman State didn't work that way. You can't create a client state out of nothing! The client states all had a non roman popullation and already a ruler. The Romans simply choose to let that ruler in place or not. Like the client kings in Oshroene, Adiabene, the client kings in Brittania, ...

"To help Rome govern its provinces, it often appointed “client kingsâ€

[S SEVERUS]

I blame it all on "Augustus the Weak." If he had shown the resolve needed in 9 AD, then he would have mobilized a proper army under Tiberius and Germanicus and truly conquered, not simply "punished" the Germans. A Germany chastened and supplying auxilairies to the army constantly from 9 AD through the 4th century, instead of supplying barbarian invaders? The mind boggles. hock:

Then again, thinking ahead 600-odd years... What if he hadn't lost his resolve in 25 BC, and had conquered (REALLY conquered) Arabia? :roll:

Augustus the Weak??? Where do you get this idea? Germanicus did invade Germany after the teutoburg disaster but he didn't make much headway and take into account the pannonian revolt that cost al lot in money, men, material,...
Do you really think that Agustus could see in the future??? In his time the germannic peoples weren't really a threat for the empire as in the 3th and 4th century AD. Germany couldn't give the empire much but would surely have cost the empire a lot.
And why would he have conquered Arabia??? Rome didn't need sand! He didn't see himself an Alexander!!

[Andrew Brozyna]

A note on population:

"Come in Nighthawk" above questioned the assertion that there were 2-6 million people living in Roman Britain. He sites Colin McEvedy's "Atlas of World Population History (1978)" as suggesting a population of 800,000. However, this book is quite out of date. A population as high as 4-6 million is pretty well accepted these days.