The urban fact in pre-Islamic Central Asia : diachronic approach, synchronic approach, III : urban crisis and reurbanization (^3rd-6th s.), a general process ? (continued) (1)

These two ages of Central Asian urban civilization are separated by a period that historians and archaeologists alike agree was a dark one, the "barbarian invasions", from the mid-4th to the mid-6th^century - a little later than in China, a little earlier than in India, and around the same time as in the West.

The modalities and long-term impact of the "barbarian invasions" are currently at the heart of a lively debate among Western historians. We summarize the main points. The very black vision of traditional historiography has recently been renewed, mainly by Bryan Ward-Perkins [1], who bases his work above all on archaeological facts, in contrast to the enthusiasts of the "Late Antiquity" school, whose most prolific representative has long been Peter Brown. They are criticized for having overestimated the vitality of the period on the basis of the intellectual revival carried out by a narrow class of clerics who had no influence on the real reading (and we're thinking above all of Saint Augustine). In return, Ward-Perkins has been accused of over-extrapolating the British situation, arguably the worst in the West.

What does he say? In the West, everything came to a head in the^{5th century} . The former ex-Roman Western world around 500 is extremely different from what it had been around 400. He favors four criteria to assess the collapse:

1. General regression of urban territories, even to the point of total desertion in England.
2. Regression of the use of money (totally abandoned in England). Concurrent collapse of monetary taxation.
3. Decline in quantity and quality of high-level craft production, particularly ceramics, due mainly to the breakdown of secure communications by land and sea, putting an end to the regional division of labor. King Arthur's England reached the technological level of the Bronze Age.
4. Regression in the use of the written word, which recedes towards the top of the social pyramid, and only towards the ecclesiastical part of it (whereas in all other empires, even in crisis, the aristocracy remained literate). Disappearance of "poor literacy".

In his view, the main causes of all this were military and political: the Barbarians had always wanted to integrate, mainly through the army, but the capacity for integration was shattered throughout the^{5th century} by the cumulative scale of migrations, a consequence of the Hun shock at the beginning of the century. Henceforth, without ever calling into question the existence of the Empire or allegiance to its values, they arrived collectively with their own laws and political hierarchies, appropriating the fiscal resources of the territories they were allocated according to the ancient process of federati, thus disrupting the financial transfer mechanisms on which Roman power was based, and in particular the control of the army. The barbarian invasions really were the barbarian invasions. Ward-Perkins does not consider other factors, of an epidemic and climatic nature, which some today tend to emphasize (notably the "Justinian plague", between 540 and 740, which undoubtedly contributed in no small way to opening up the Mediterranean to the Arab invasion).

Why recall these debates in Western historiography? Apart from the intrinsic interest of the comparative approach, the common "Hunnic" factor (in the West, the only imperial project that was opposed to the Roman Empire) is another reason to attempt a comparison with Central Asia, as we have just done with India [2].

[1] B. Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome. Fin d'une civilisation, Paris, Alma Éditeur, 2014.

[2] T. Stickler, "The Gupta empire in the face of the Hunnic threat. Parallels to the late Roman empire?", in J. BEMMANN and M. SCHMAUDER (eds.), The Complexity of Interaction along the Eurasian Steppe Zone in the first Millenium AD, Bonn, 2015.