 Well, good morning everybody. As ever, I'd like to begin by thanking Hanson Gulchin for their great kindness in having invited me back, yet again to speak at this Auguste Conference. And I'd like to thank them also for the great honour they've shown me, or perhaps the great victimisation they've inflicted on me in allowing me to speak first. Now, the subject I have been given this year might seem on the face of it both obscure in itself, and somewhat unrelated to the overall purpose of the Property and Freedom Society, which is to promote the defence and survival of our civilisation. I will speak today about the emergence and survival of the Byzantine Empire, which is perhaps more appropriately called the medieval Roman Empire. By way of introduction, I do feel obliged to go over a number of matters, and I'm sensible of the fact that many of you will be perfectly familiar with these yourselves, and so I hope you will forgive me and hope that I'm not patronising you. But it is useful for when I publish the text, it is useful for when the YouTube video goes up, and there may be one or two people in this room who are not familiar with the leading facts of the subject that I will discuss. If you turn to the maps that I've handed round, and if you don't have one, there's a pile just by Andy Duncan, and I'm sure he will pass them back if required. If you look at the first of these maps, you will see the Roman Empire as it was around the year 395 AD. This shows the Empire at something like its maximum extension, the conquests north of the Danube have been given up, and the conquests east of the Euphrates. But what you have here is the entire Mediterranean world and its various hinterlands, a vast expanse of territory stretching from the north of England to Upper Egypt and from Casablanca to Trebizond. The reason I start with 395 is that in that year, after a century of experiments, the final division was made of the Empire into two administrative zones. You have the western half on my map, the red half, which is governed sometimes from Rome, sometimes from Milan, but mostly from Ravenna by a western emperor. You have the eastern half, or the purple half on my map, which is governed from Constantinople. The idea was that each would have its own emperor. The emperors were always related to each other and did not go to war with each other. The idea was that each would have its own emperor, and each would look after the particular military and diplomatic concerns of his own part of a theoretically undivided empire. As you move forward, the western half of the empire falls on evil times. If you look at the next map in my series, dated around 650 AD, you will see that the western half of the empire has entirely disappeared. The western provinces have been replaced by various barbarian kingdoms, which are the origins of our own Europe. Those remaining provinces, North Africa and parts of Italy, are now part of the eastern empire ruled from Constantinople. You will also see that the eastern empire itself has lost territory. It has lost Syria and Egypt to the Arab Caliphate. If you move forward another few hundred years to around 867, to the third of the maps I give you, you will see that the empire has lost and gained territory. It has now reconquered the whole of Greece. It has however lost further territory to the Arabs, it has lost Cyprus, it has lost North Africa and it has lost most of Sicily. This is the medieval Roman Empire, centered on Constantinople and speaking Greek, but still a direct legal continuation of the empire founded by Caesar and Augustus and indeed of the Roman state founded by Romulus in 753 BC. This is not the end of it. Over the next few centuries the empire will reach out and it will retake some of its lost territories. It will, for example, reconquer the whole area south of the Danube. It will absorb the Bulgarian kingdom and re-establish its border on the Danube. It will expand to the south, taking in Antioch. It will become, what it was already in 867, the richest and most powerful and by far the most civilized region of the Mediterranean world. A world in which life, liberty and property were better protected and the life, liberty and property of virtually all its citizens was better protected than in any other medieval state. It will, as I said, become and remain the most powerful and the wealthiest state in the Mediterranean world. It will continue for many centuries to be that. After 1071 the empire does fall on evil days. The Turks will take virtually the whole of the Anatolian heartland of the empire. But the empire will handle the crusades on the whole rather well and reconquer many of the lost territories. It will remain wealthy and powerful and respected. Even up to the great disaster of 1204 of the Venetian sack of Constantinople it will remain great and powerful and respected. And then even after the re-establishment of the empire in 1261, although much shrunken in territory, it will remain a significant player in Mediterranean politics. All the way down to 1453 when having shrunk to Constantinople at its environs as an effective city state rather than empire, it will continue to feature large in the diplomatic and economic and military annals of the eastern Mediterranean. We are talking about a state organisation which lasts from, let's say, 395 when these maps begin, all the way down to 1453, indeed down to 1461 when the Turks mopped up the last remnants of what had been the medieval Roman empire. The consensus of school books in England used to be that the Roman empire ended in 476 AD. That was when the last Western emperor was deposed. If the continued survival of the medieval Roman empire was admitted, it was with a great deal of contempt. The Byzantine empire was filled with shifty degenerate Greeks. These people were drivelers. They were cowards. They were uncreative. They were of zero significance in the grand sweep of European history, which begins with the Greeks, passes through the Romans, switches to the Barbarians and ends with the ultimate glory of Victorian England. When I think about it, it is not a bad historical narrative, but it is not entirely correct. There was this medieval Roman empire. As I said, the consensus in the 18th and 19th century well into the 20th century and a prejudice that lingers on even today is that the medieval Roman empire or the Byzantine empire was some kind of zombie state that survived on the sufferance of its neighbours or by accident almost. But what I would say, quite obviously if you look at this map, is that any state organisation which is able to survive for so very long and with such a record for recovery after disaster cannot by any definition be called a zombie state. Indeed, what you will see by looking at the history of this state is a record of courage and determination and of survival in the most forbidding and against the most apparently overpowering odds. To explain roughly what happened, let me give you my own version, which is partially a summary of an actual or an emerging scholarly consensus and partly is based on my own reading of the primary and secondary sources. Now, until about 1800, there was a tendency for population to rise to something close to its Malthusian ceiling. This is the number of people, sorry, the Malthusian, sorry, yes, yes, it is output divided by the number of people and when you do this calculation the result will be just enough to keep people alive. I said that the Malthusian population will tend to approach the Malthusian ceiling, it will never quite reach it because there will be an unequal distribution of wealth and income, some people have more considerably more than others and so of course the average will be below this Malthusian ceiling. For us it has been raised completely out of sight, but until 1800 this was the grim fact of life for all of humanity. Now there were ages, ages of expansion, ages when a new territory might be settled or ages when some new transport or agricultural technology might be introduced or ages of benign climate. And then that would be an age of plenty or a golden age, but of course the tendency of population was to rise back towards the new higher Malthusian ceiling and if there was any lowering of the Malthusian ceiling for any reason, whatever, you would see a sharp and sudden collapse of population. Now if I say that the, if I say that climatic studies is a young and not entirely settled science I might be, I might be underestimating. However, if you look at studies of climate and of climate change in the past you will see on the one hand the lack of any apparent political bias which I suppose is a surprise bearing in mind the uses to which climate science are put in our own age. And you will also see an attempt to get at the truth. And I'm not an expert in these matters and so I cannot tell you that what I've read is the settled and unchangeable opinion forever afterwards. But the present consensus has looked at things like tree ring data, carbon dating at ice core samples, at things like the height of the dead sea in the Middle East and has looked at the records between about 100 BC and 300 AD of the height of the Nile floods which have been carefully recorded. And has also looked at contemporary historical and other documents and documents written by later historians which are drawing on sources which have since disappeared. If you take into account all the scientific and archaeological and literary evidence which can be found and you synthesize it and you try your honest best to get at the truth. I suspect that something like the truth has been found and this truth is that between about 100 BC and at least about 150 AD the Mediterranean world went through a period of benign climatic conditions. There was just the right amount of radiation reaching us from the sun, there was just the right amount of rainfall, the harvests were abundant and it was an age of peace and plenty. Now after about 150 AD this benign climatic period came to an end. There was a period of cooling, there was reduced rainfall in some parts of the Mediterranean world and increased rainfall in other parts of the Mediterranean world. The data from the Nile flooding tables shows us that the Egyptian harvests were much less reliable and much less abundant than they had been in earlier periods and bearing in mind the very different costs of land and sea transport, we can suppose that most Mediterranean cities had become dependent for their grain imports on the Egyptian harvests. Now if you look only at the climate evidence, if you ignore all other information we have about the period, you would suppose that the Mediterranean world after about 150 AD would have experienced these things. A fall throughout the empire of agricultural productivity, a fall of living standards and general status among the poorer classes, the emergence of new diseases to thin the number of the hungry poor, the movement of pastoral and therefore mobile nations from suddenly cooler regions in Central Asia to the still temperate regions of the Mediterranean world and the appearance of political instability and a general breakdown of institutions under new and unexpected strains. That is what a close reading of only the climatic data from that age would suggest and in fact of course that is exactly what happened. The empire was beset suddenly by pandemic diseases. We are not sure what these were, smallpox, measles, some people say typhus, others say bubonic plague, we are not entirely sure the examination of human remains has not yielded so far completely certain data. What we can say however is that these diseases swept through the Mediterranean world. We can't say what the incidence or the mortality was but somewhere between a quarter and a third of the entire Mediterranean population is not unreasonable. At least one emperor died of the plague and we have records that whole cities were depopulated and empty and given over to grass and wild animals. At the same time there was greatly increased pressure along the northern frontiers along the Rhine and the Danube frontiers as the Goths, the Lombards, the Vandals and the various other barbarian tribes moved in from Central Asia pressing against those already in Europe, forcing them onto the frontiers. It was necessary to militarise the frontiers as had never happened before and against the Persians in the east as well. It was necessary to double the size of the army, it was necessary to double military spending and there just wasn't the tax money to do this and so in consequence the currency was debased. There was a shortage of recruits for the army and so the practice began of recruiting barbarian mercenaries. Of course the political institutions of the early empire were unable to bear the sudden new strain and the record of military coups and the civil wars is almost endless, it's very hard to work out how many rival emperors there were in the third century. We know that from the records and we know that from the climate data. I'm not stating here any general thesis of climatic determinism, there is no doubt that climate produces tendencies, there is no doubt that climate is a very important influence on history and it's an influence which we cannot and indeed should not, even though we so far have mostly done so, we should not ignore the influence of climate. However we should also not forget the importance of autonomous human institutions. If you have a bad set of ways and institutional arrangements even the most benign climatic period will go to waste. If you have fundamentally sound ways and institutional arrangements it is possible perhaps to minimise but at least to mitigate unfavourable climatic conditions. Now there is a very good fit between what happened after 150 AD with climate and what we know happened with the political, economic and military history of the Roman Empire. There is also a very good fit after about 300 AD, the climate improved after then across the empires as a whole, it was never as good as it had been before 150 but after 300 the cooling phase stopped and the Nile floods were more reliable and you'll see that the empire recovered, the gold currency was stabilised, the frontiers were stabilised, there was as far as we can tell an increase of population and there was a general political stabilisation of the empire. There is not such a good fit between the climate data and the political history of the empire after about 400 AD when the climate began cooling again and the patterns of rainfall changed. This led to much colder winters, now in the west these colder winters meant that in 406 AD the Rhine froze solid, apparently it froze several feet thick and countless numbers of barbarians walked across by passing the elaborate fortifications and fanning out and striking deep within the empire. A combination of bad luck and military incompetence meant that these barbarians were never driven out and within 70 years they had sacked Rome, they had swallowed up all of the provinces of the western Roman Empire. That is a pretty good fit for the climate data, however in the east which may have been equally ill affected by the climatic changes, so far as we can tell you had an age of peace and prosperity. It was seen in later centuries as one of the empire's golden ages and so here you do not have, you have a divergence between the climatic evidence and the historical evidence. Once we get past the year 500 there is a general divergence where the medieval Roman Empire is concerned between the climatic data and the survival and the stability and indeed the prosperity of the empire. Now after about 500 AD the cooling phase became more intense and at the same time there was a, there appears to have been a failure of rainfall in the eastern Mediterranean which is naturally drier than the west. This put the empire under obvious strain and then in 537, as far as we can tell, there was a year without a summer. In 536 and 537 the historical records record that the sun was hidden all year behind a haze which covered all the sky. The sun's light barely reached the earth, the sun's heat barely reached the earth. We don't know exactly what this was, it may have been a small asteroid impact or it may have been a big volcanic eruption somewhere in the southern hemisphere. But the effects described in the historical records and recorded in various legal sources are very similar to the effects of the Icelandic volcano which exploded in 1784, a haze obscuring the sun across the whole of the northern hemisphere. I suppose I could mention without elaborating that the Icelandic volcano blew up in 1784 which was just four years before the financial collapse of the French monarchy. Now coming back to the sixth century you have adverse general climatic conditions and a number of an accident the nature of which we are unable as yet to determine. In 542 bubonic volcano blew up in the empire and, as far as we can tell, extrapolating from what we know of the next pandemic in the 14th century, about a third of the entire population died, perhaps a third of the world's population died, we're told that 10,000 people a day died for 100 days in Constantinople. The effects of the plague was devastating, it shattered the economic and social fabric of the empire. Now if you attended the 207 conference of the proper freedom society, you'll remember I spoke about the demographic effects of the Justinian plague. These included the disappearance of Greek-speaking elites from the cities of Egypt and Syria, and their replacement by new, cynic and non-reformist elites. And Halibas may have had some effect on the inability or unwillingness of these regions to resist first the Persian and then the Arab invasions. But the effects of the plague go much further than that. In the 6th century, in the 6th and 7th centuries, the medieval Roman Empire had suffered three interlocking crises. There was the southern appearance in the north of New and much more savage races of barbarians that had so far revealed themselves. The Avars and of course the Slavs who ruined the Danubian provinces and who burned and pillaged all the way south as far as Corinth. You have the emergence of militant Islam which stripped the wealthiest provinces of the empire away in a campaign of just a few seasons. You have an internal collapse of population. Any empire which can justly be described as a zombie state would have died in six months. The medieval Roman Empire survived and it survived by pulling off what you may regard as the miracle of internally reforming itself in the middle of three separate, though interlocked, existential crises. It is very difficult to find a comparable story in history to what happened in that empire during the 6th and 7th centuries. If you look below the glittering surface, the ancient Roman Empire, the one that we know, the Caesars, Augustus, Iclaudius, all that sort of thing, if you look below the glittering surface, the ancient Roman Empire was a ghastly place in which to live. Below a very, very thin veneer of civilisation, most people lived on the edge of utter destitution. Indeed, most people lived in the countryside and were either outright-owned chattel slaves or various kinds of tax-slave or semi-surf. The empire was often a vicious incompetent, the ruling class, the upper class, the Senesas. They kept high culture going, but they were a thoroughly parasitic lot, grabbing every penny of rent they could extract from their tenants, and every penny in various kinds of semi-feudal dues they could extract from the peasants under them. You had a vast and parasitic bureaucracy trying, though not always succeeding, in controlling every aspect of the empire's life. The achievement of the medieval emperors is to scrap the entire ancient legacy. Most of the bureaucracy was shut down in a couple of years. Taxes were cut. The silver coinage was stabilised in 615 in the year that the empire lost Syria in the middle of a vast military crisis. The empire stabilised its silver coinage, which remained stable at that rate for many centuries to come. The whole body of commercial regulation was either scrapped or made into annulity by the dismissal of the relevant officials. Above all, the great senatorial land holdings were broken up and were given to the peasants. They were given to the peasants on various kinds of military tenure. The deal was that the people got the land. The land was inalienable, it couldn't be sold, it couldn't be mortgaged. There was no way for nasty people in the big cities to come and do cunning deals with the peasants and end up with the land in their own hands. It was inalienable. In return for that, the people did military service. They armed themselves and they defended the emperor. They defended the empire. They defended their country and they defended their established orthodox faith. This is the great difference between the medieval and the ancient Roman empires. In the ancient Roman empire at the end, bands of barbarians in Gaul and Spain and Italy, wandered past indentured tax slaves who barely looked up from their plows to see who their new masters were about to be. In the medieval Roman empire, the armies of the Caliph crashed again and again against a wall of armed freeholders and again and again they were thrown back. That explains the reason for these maps, the fact that this apparent zombie state, this driveling afterthought to the glory that was Rome, not only failed to disappear but survived for century after century after century and is burned deep into the historic memory of our ancestors even if only indirectly. Now, what is the moral of this? The moral is that climate can be destiny and demography can be destiny. But courage and determination in the face of forbidding and apparently overpowering odds can also be destiny. It worked for these people and perhaps it will work for us. Now, that's all I have to say. Thank you very much.