I focus on why the competition for power among senatorial, imperial, and military elites that had stimulated the recovery of the city of Rome in the face of multiple civic and military crises no longer was effective in the later sixth and early seventh centuries. The end of Rome’s political senatorial aristocracy and its political body, the Senate, is the final “fall” of Rome. In its place, a papal-focused city dependent on Byzantine military might would emerge in the seventh century.

My focus is on elites who competed for influence in the wake of events that the Romans themselves characterized as “crises.” In narrating these five crises, I emphasize the critical role in Rome of senatorial aristocrats and the slow growth of the influence of the bishops and clergy of Rome, two segments of Roman society whose continued focus on the city provides a key thread through these centuries. Although generals and emperors came and went, the institutionalized presence of the senatorial aristocracy, the Senate, and the church persisted. After each crisis, senators reinvested in the city, fueling its resurgence time and again. The bishops, too, returned to the city to restore Christian communities.

After thirty years of Ostrogothic rule in Italy (493–534) that ended with the ensuing destruction of the Gothic War (535–54), the eastern emperor Justinian sought to reassert direct control over Italy. The sixth-century Wars of Procopius vividly describes three sieges and two sacks of Rome during the course of this war. But the focus of this chapter is rather on Roman recovery in the aftermath of the war. I emphasize the constitutions in an underappreciated document from this period, Justianian’s Pragmatic Sanction. These enactments, along with texts and material evidence, show how damaging the Justinianic reconstruction of Italy was to Rome and senatorial aristocratic society. In this vacuum, the popes of Rome took on an ever-greater secular role, as the letters of Pope Pelagius show.

The Persian invasion in the early seventh century weakened Roman rule in Egypt, particularly the wealthy governing class. Only a decade after the Roman recovery of Egypt it was again invaded, by a two-pronged Arab army that took control of the country and, after a siege, of Alexandria. In many ways Egypt after the Arab conquest continued as it had been, with local elites and administrations running things on behalf of the small occupying force. If anything, elite power and rural dependency were reinforced by the new taxation system. Coptic language and literature flourished, with the gradual erosion of Greek as an imperial language, and the anti-Chalcedonian church of Egypt developed a distinct Coptic cultural and religious identity. Over time, however, a series of pressures and developments led to a wider use of Arabic in administration and in daily life, a decline in Coptic, and eventually to widespread conversion to Islam.

This focus on the senators and the clergy is important because, in my view, too much of the discussion of Rome in late antiquity has focused on either the catastrophic impact of barbarian invasions or the baleful influence of weak emperors and strident generals. Although I am not the first to recognize the vital role played by senatorial aristocrats nor to show the limited influence of the bishops in Rome, new information about the city in late antiquity, new scholarly work on its history, and a new appreciation of the role of the bishops of the city require a new perspective on the very old topic of the “Fall of Rome.”

The processes launched at the start of Roman rule continued to support the development of cities and their elites. The 150 years from Hadrian to Diocletian saw enough violence to do severe damage to some of those cities, particularly Alexandria, and occasional revolts disturbed the peace, including one in the Delta at the time of the great plague (smallpox) under Antoninus Pius, which led to the depopulation of many villages. A loss of workers to the plague may have intensified the concentration of landholding in the hands of the wealthy, who could invest in both machinery and capital-intensive crops such as wine. This period also saw the decline of the temples and the beginning of Christianity as a visible (and occasionally persecuted) movement, with the emergence of bishops of Alexandria and the countryside. The Egyptian language acquired a new means of expression in the Coptic alphabet, largely derived from Greek.

That the millennium and a half from the time of the Persian Empire to Fatimid rule in Egypt witnessed much change in the land of the Nile will not surprise anyone. Empires and their dynasties came and went, and Egypt experienced two major religious transformations. With the Ptolemies and Fatimids, Egypt was in a sense independent, although the dynasties were not indigenous. With the Persians, Romans, and the early Arab regime, Egypt was part of a larger empire.

But these changes and many more coexisted with a number of continuities that helped to shape early medieval Egypt. These continuities do not point to an unchanging or “eternal” Egypt, as it has sometimes been depicted to the wider public. But they do suggest some important traits that helped to shape change.