QUORA: WERE ROMANS MORE ADVANCED THAN MOST MEDIEVAL KINGDOMS?

[David P]

QUORA: WERE ROMANS MORE ADVANCED THAN MOST MEDIEVAL KINGDOMS?
answered by Enrico Toro [a Quora D-lister], Updated Apr 24
It depends on what terms you are defining as “advanced”. Could people in middle ages Europe build a bridge over the Danube like the Romans did multiple times? No they could not. Could they deliver clean water and sewage to their small cities? Likely not. Did they have an advanced bureaucracy and a fair tax system? Again not as developed as the Romans until the very end of the middle ages. However they had a more advanced agriculture, and their instruments of death, after the year 1300, were definitively more advanced than the Romans’.

The pantheon of Rome remained the largest concrete dome in the world until the Belgrade Fair Hall was built in 1957 and it is still the largest non reinforced concrete dome in the world. How many buildings keep a record for over 2000 years?

Water management systems at the time of the Romans were far more advanced than anything you see in the middle-ages, think about the drainage systems in the Fens in England or Claudius Tunnel, in Lake Fucino in Italy, which remained the longest tunnel in the world for more than a millenium.

However, there is no doubt medieval people had some technical advances of their own, better weaponry (but worse logistics and command and control systems), better ability to use nature’s energy, far better agricultural practices and, by the end of the 13th c. in Europe, tons of paper.

It also depends on where you lived. If you lived in Germany or the Baltic states, your world was a dream world compared to antique times, but if you were born in a place that was previously part of the Roman Empire you sure had a lot to compare with.

The truth is that there is a good reasons why medieval people, especially the ones in western Europe, saw the Roman times as an age of gold that they could at best try to imitate.

If they lived in the lands previously occupied by the Roman Empire, they used Roman roads to move around, they saw gigantic Roman ruins everywhere, they saw the remains of city that were orders of magnitude larger than the ones they lived in and buildings they had no idea how to recreate.

Imagine a pilgrim from England, headed to Rome in the year 1000, traveling on Roman roads, stopping at the remains of Roman cities, and finally making it to the tomb of Saint Peter, and looking at buildings that were much larger than anything they saw at home and in a city that was 3 times larger than the bigger city of his country still full of wonders of the past.

The idea that Rome’s economy was not based on trade, but on subjugation and exploitation of other people was very common in northern Europe, primarily in protestant historians in the 19th century, and strange bedfellows indeed, by many 20th century Marxist historians. Yet most of those theories have been widely debunked by modern discoveries and by so many archaeological, and scientific finds of the past century.

I suggest you to read books like Peter Temin’s, on Roman economics or Kyle Harper’s “The fate of Rome”, or “The science of Roman history”, by Walter Scheidel.

All of these books use the archeological and scientific discoveries of the past 100 years to prove that the traditional idea of the slave economy, a stagnant society that does not grow is a myth. It is mostly propaganda, anti Roman (hence anti Catholic), written to compare the fantastic progress of their country vs a fictional stasis in the Mediterranean, you know those lazy bums sleeping in the sun with all their superstitions. Of course an easy to understand lie spread more easily than a complex and nuanced truth.

The truth is that, in a world where land was the main form of capital, where energy sources were mostly limited to human and animal labor, where technological progress was incredibly slow compared to modern times, the Roman world managed, to show growth of economic output constantly for 200 years. Inside the empire growth rates were higher in the periphery than in Italy itself. Provinces in Gaul, Spain, Sicily, Northern Africa by the end of the second century AD had reached a level of development that was comparable to the center of the Empire. The most famous Latin grammar and rethorics school at the time of Constantine was in Gaul, not in Rome.

To quote Yates “This growth was not only continued when the had Empire reached its outer bounds, it now diffused throughout the conquered lands. The Romans did not merely rule territory transferring some margin of surplus from periphery to center. The integration of the empire was catalytic. Slowly but steadily Roman rule changed the face of societies under its dominion. Commerce, markets, technology, urbanization: the empire and its many people seized the levers of development. [...] the empire writ large enjoyed both intensive and extensive growth”.

Constant output growth for over 150 years was driven by 3 main factors:
1.The roman climate optimum, a period that greatly benefitted crops and made the agricultural output plenty almost every year.

2. Trade of large volumes of commodities across the different regions of the empire to take advantage of Ricardian comparative advantages. Urbanization was at a level that won’t be reached in Europe until the 19th c. And the cities needed commerce. The volume of bulk (non luxury) goods traded in Europe at the time won’t be reached again until the 17th c., when Europe’s population was 2X the one of the Roman Empire. The density of shipping traffic in trade lanes in the Mediterranean in Roman times would not be reached again until the 19th c. when a new great supervisor, the British Empire, arrived.

3. Single currency, a single system of weight and measures and a single system of laws to regulate commerce and industry across an area encompassing 70-80 million people. Compare that to your average middle age merchant forced to deal with new borders, and new sets of laws and regulations every 30 miles.

It is for these reasons that most countries in Western Europe did not reach the GDP per capita they had under Rome until the 17th-18th century.

The Roman Empire had political institutions that promoted economic activity. Primary among these assets was security for private individuals. When a society moves from rulers who demand money in exchange for protection to nonviolent rulers who charge taxes in a framework of law, the stage is set for economic growth.

Every year, large fleets of Roman merchant ships set sail from Egypt on voyages across the Indian Ocean. They sailed from Roman ports on the Red Sea to distant kingdoms on the east coast of Africa and southern Arabia. Many continued their voyages across the ocean to trade with the rich kingdoms of ancient India. Along these routes, the Roman Empire traded bullion for valuable goods, including exotic African products, Arabian incense, and eastern spices.

Plutarch, for example, tells us that Cato (who died in 149 BCE) would invest in a shipping consortium only if the consortium owned 50 ships and he could take only one of at least 50 shares. This observation suggests that Roman shipping was organized in shifting partnerships similar to those in colonial American shipping, although the seventeenth-century merchants never aspired to a partnership of anywhere close to 50 ships. This type of trade lasted for hundreds of years, and, as trade often does, enriched any party involved.

Currently archeologists are digging up Roman trade stations as far down the equator as southern Tanzania and as far east as India and Sri Lanka. Stations that would have had a stable population of Roman tradesmen 1500 years and more before Portugal did the same.

In addition multiple times Roman lead expeditions in other parts of the African continent and connected with West Africa’s rich trading network

While Roman Italy gained greatly by being at the hub of an empire and a large trading network, as Spain, Holland and Great Britain itself did much later. Rome imported food around the Mediterranean, bringing in wheat, olive oil and wine from as far west as Iberia and as far east as Egypt and the Middle East. The Roman economy of the first and second centuries CE was integrated enough for areas around the transportation network in the Mediterranean Sea to exploit their comparative advantages, and see their economies grow very quickly once they were connected to the trading network.

In addition, in almost every province the standards of living grew significantly, urbanization increased, production increased and intra provincial trade increased under the Pax Romana. To quote Yates again “The Roman world had, in short, edged toward the very limits what economic development was possible in the organic conditions of a premodern society.”

The symbol itself of the idea of Rome seen as the black hole who sucks away the wealth of the Mediterranean, the ships of the Annona, are now have been found delivering commerce not just to Rome but continued to many other ports of the Mediterranean after delivering the grain, contributing to a huge exchange of goods between the East and the West. They could do it, because their costs and risks were covered by the Roman state, so any trade beyond delivering the grain to Rome delivered large profits.

The Romans built over 53,000 miles of paved roads, stretching from Scotland to East Europe to Mesopotamia in present-day Iraq to North Africa. It was the greatest system of highways that the world has ever seen until recent times. Roman roads were built primarily to facilitate the movement of troops and supplies. Roman legionnaires would not have been nearly as effective in their conquests if getting them supplies was difficult. The system was so well set up that leaders could accurately calculate how long it would take to get their armies from one place to another: from Cologne to Rome was 67 days, Rome to Brindisi, 57 days, & Rome to Syria (including two days at sea), 124 days. The route the Blitzkrieg used to move into France in 1940 thru the Ardennes forests & over the River Meuse more or less followed Route Nationale 43, which in turn followed the old Roman road laid out not long after Caesar's conquest of Gaul in the 1st c. BC [Source: "History of Warfare" by John Keegan, Vintage Books].

But commerce was not limited around the Mediterranean, the Muziris papyrus, for example, records a maritime loan of an amazingly large size for a voyage starting out in the Red Sea, the size of the voyage is of the same size as Portuguese fleets of the 16th century.

And commerce was sustained by a thriving financial system, with loans, insurance, primary and proto financial markets with tradeable shares and commodities. Banks were in operation in Greece, before the Roman conquest and continued and thrived after the Romans came. The most famous banks were on Delos, where there were both temple and private banks, these banks saw their business grow, not shrink after Roman conquest. Unlike banks in 18th c. England, which were clustered almost exclusively in London, temples and endowments were spread among the minor cities of the early Roman Empire.

Argentarii in Rome received deposits and made loans. Ancient historians and modern economists fortunately employ the same definition of a bank, which makes it relatively easy to discuss to what extent loans and banks were present in the early Roman Empire. The role of banking was so deeply part of the society that, in 33DC we had a debt crisis solved by quantitative easing not as much different from what we had in 2008.

The Roman world was incredibly interconnected, as Cicero mentions, describing conditions in 66 BCE by reference to events 20 years earlier, “Coinciding with the loss by many people of large fortunes in Asia, we know that there was a collapse of credit at Rome owing to suspension of payment.... This system of credit and finance which operates at Rome, in the Forum, is bound up in, and depends on capital invested in Asia; the loss of the one inevitably undermines the other and causes its collapse”. It feels incredibly modern.

One of the reasons of the weakness of the Roman government finances in the late Empire is that it’s system of funding differed greatly from financial systems in early modern England and the Dutch Republic, which were dominated by government borrowing and in which government loans provided collateral which aided a system of credit intermediation to develop.

For the imperial government to avoid borrowing, it needed to accumulate tax revenues for future expenditures. We know these balances were loaned out from an exchange of letters between Pliny the Younger and Trajan in 109 or 110 CE, when Pliny was a provincial governor in Asia Minor. Pliny wrote that tax revenues were accumulating at the local government, but that they might lie idle because no one wanted to borrow at the offered rate of 9%, Trajan answered Pliny to loan the money out at a lower interest rate.

From an economic point of view, what characterized the Roman world between 200 BCE and 200 CE was the large role played by market forces: large-scale production and movements of resources in the early Roman Empire were dominated by free markets and proto capitalism.

In the end, the Roman world, especially around the early empire, through comparative advantage, political stability, personal security, widespread education and moderate technological progress, saw a modest rate of economic growth that resulted in prosperity levels which were not to be equaled in the West for almost two millennia thereafter.

This does not mean that the Medieval world was bad. The medieval world was incredibly complex, sophisticated and could provide a better life to some of its inhabitants than in Roman times. As Jason Almendra reminds us, they had better plows. But when you look at shear economic power, no medieval kingdom, not even the richest ones like France and the free city states of Italy, combined, could compare to the Roman world.