When the Earth Shook: Disaster, Decision, and Division in the Late Roman World

The fifth century has traditionally been understood as a moment of divergence between the collapsing Western Roman Empire and the enduring Eastern Empire, a dichotomy typically attributed to institutional resilience and strategic choices in the East. This paper reconsiders that narrative by foregrounding the role of natural disasters, particularly seismic activity, famine, and epidemic disease, as significant structural constraints that inhibited the Eastern Roman state’s capacity to provide substantive support to the West during its most critical phases of decline.
Drawing on a range of Greek and Latin sources, including the works of John Chrysostom, Socrates Scholasticus, the Chronicon Paschale, and Marcellinus Comes, this study reconstructs a sequence of environmental disruptions that severely impacted urban infrastructure, public finance, and demographic stability in the Eastern Mediterranean. Events such as the early 5th-century earthquakes, the devastating Constantinople quake of 447, and the destruction of Antioch in 458 required substantial imperial intervention and resource reallocation. While these natural disasters were by no means the sole determinant of Eastern Roman policy, they exerted considerable influence over the empire’s strategic options. This paper argues that the Eastern Empire’s limited engagement in Western affairs should be interpreted not solely as political calculation, but also as a function of environmental contingency. Integrating environmental crisis into the historiography of Late Antiquity, the study offers a revised framework for understanding the fragmentation of imperial unity in the fifth century.