The Imperial Life Cycle, Part 1

When I was sitting down and trying to brainstorm more blog post ideas, I thought to myself, "Lucas, you should really write something practical and player-focused, rather than more worldbuilding stuff. You've been doing reviews and interviews recently, why not write something super player-focused?" And then, walking home from work and listening to my current podcast, the History of Byzantium, I heard a comparison between Ancient Rome and the Arab Caliphate (originally from historian Patricia Crone--for those interested, it is in Episode 83) that really inspired me to write another history article to inform your worldbuilding that provides essentially zero player advice. Sorry.

An important caveat: I don't think that this is some universal truth to every empire. I also think that it is less true the more modern you get. There are plenty of imperial exceptions to this rule, not least Byzantium itself, if you treat it as discrete from Rome. This is just an odd historical fact, that both the Roman and early Islamic empires followed essentially the same arc.

And it is a quirk of history that we can leverage for worldbuilding. By taking this outline for our worldbuilding, we can quickly write a history for an empire's rise and fall that sounds convincing and has more depth than a surface-level, unchanging, static imperial regime.

We'll go through this proposed imperial life cycle. Subscribers to the blog can also read me putting this into practice in my own world. Writing this all out was about to clock 3000 words, however, so I've broken it into a two-week mini-series: two posts that are a little shorter than average (especially for non-subscribers) rather than one hulking behemoth. This week, we'll cover the first 3 phases of the life cycle of an empire as proposed by Patricia Crone. Next week, we'll cover phases 4-6, as the empire undergoes radical changes and all pretenses of original traditions are thrown out the window.

Historical Cycle

First off, when defining "empire" for the context of this blog post, I mean specifically a multiethnic, multi-region state with a government and bureaucracy. A single kingdom, even a large one, is not an empire if it lacks this important multi-ethnic element. Some empires place one ethnic group over another, while others are focused on assimilation or integration of minority groups, but all need to include multiple groups to be considered "imperial" (again, for the purposes of this blog post at least).

Phase 1: Rapid Expansion

Empires are born out of conquest, and in the ancient world, these are often born from a territory that is particularly militarized, but still small in population and scope. The ancient Roman republican city-state was certainly this, as it had a reputation for being the home of a large number of violent men, compared to some of its more "civilized," Greek neighbors. The early Caliphate was distinctly Arabic, a cultural group from a desert region with a pretty limited population due to the lack of water and natural resources. We can extend this idea too to someone like Alexander the Great: Macedonia was just another Greek city-state at the time, but Alexander's father radically reformed their military, which would be the backbone for their conquests of Greece, Persia, and the Mediterranean.

This small but militarized society then bursts from its confines at a moment when the previous hierarchy has a moment of weakness. Rome rose as Greece fell, the Caliphate swept to power as the Persian Empire and Byzantium both were weakened by plague, and Macedonia arose only after the heyday of Athens and Sparta. Conquest seems easier in the ancient world, but there are exceptions even in the modern era: Napoleon managed to conquer most of Europe thanks to the way that France had militarized during the French Revolution with the introduction of mass conscription into the army.

The length of time for this conquest can vary. The Roman Republic took centuries to complete its takeover of the map, while the Caliphate did it in about 80 years, and both Alexander and Napoleon achieved their empires in essentially a single ruler's lifetime.

Phase 2: Cultural Instability and Civil War

But the rapid expansion of the state leads to new wealth. Foreign goods and people are brought under the banner of the new overlords, and many of the original "in-group" become rich beyond their wildest dreams. The Italian Patrician and Senatorial classes of Rome are far wealthier by the days of Crassus than they were under Cincinnatus. The Arab leaders of the Caliphate too gain unexpected wealth.

This newfound wealth, status, prestige, and opportunity for political power destabilize the old regime of its original core. Rome and Medina both have extensive internal power struggles as people vie for control over a newly powerful state. In Rome, civil wars dot the timeline of the late Roman Republic: Marius and Sulla, for example; and a generation later, Julius Caesar's falling out with his fellow triumvirs, Crassus and Pompey. In the early Caliphate, the conflict between Ali and rebels during the First Fitna would prove the basis for a religious schism between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims that lasts to the present. The bitterness of these conflicts is due to the high stakes: control over a large swath of the known world, full regional leadership, and being at the top of a social pyramid with unprecedented wealth.

This is a make-or-break point for an empire. Alexander's empire went through this cycle and had a massive civil war for control over the empire after Alexander's death, and it never really recovered. Rump states existed, slowly decaying away, but there was no clear winner of the civil war to rebuild a single, unified empire. But if a new empire can survive this pivotal moment of massive civil war (or civil wars), then they can reach the next phase.

Phase 3: Innovation Masked

After the period of civil war, if a new, single emperor emerges, they might transform and centralize the empire. For Rome, this is Augustus Caesar, who emerged from the post-Julius Caesar anarchy, bested his rival Mark Antony, and founded a far more centralized regime--transforming the Roman Republic into the Empire, with him at the center. For the early Caliphate, this is Mu'awiya I, who ended the reign of the original "Rashidun" caliphs of the prophet Muhammad's personal family and establishes the Umayyad dynasty. Mu'awiya moved the capital from Arabia (Medina) to Syria (Damascus), centralized taxation and military authority, and cemented a new dynasty for the empire.

Yet people in the new empire's core are tired of change and innovation. Julius Caesar was murdered on the Senate floor for centralizing authority as "first citizen," a far less central state than that of Augustus. They're tired of civil war. And so this new, centralizing emperor needs to mask their centralizing innovations as a restoration of tradition.

This is the reason for Augustus establishing the "Principate" mode of ruling the empire. The early Emperors of Rome said that they were merely the first among equals, leaving symbolic power in the Senate; he was trying to "reclaim" the republican tradition of Rome, while centralizing the empire under his personal rule and destroying that same republicanism in practice.

The Arabs did not have this same republican tradition, so that is not the system that Mu'awiya needed to herald back to. Instead, Mu'awiya claimed to be restoring the power of the various Arab tribes. But these too were relegated into a mostly ceremonial role, while the new imperial/Caliphal role was where all true power resided.