My family history, for example, have always seemed weird in that regard. Genealogy up until 11-12th century is pretty straightforward and documented, with notable rabbis and doctors, but then it jumps straight to legends and familiar family names from antiquity, without any information from Dark Ages straight out missing from any records. And other old Jewish families I know are very similar: all genealogical information just vanishes for these centuries, even if there are older reliable sources picking up the story from antiquity and beyond.

The only reason for this is that power changed from Romans to tribes in Northern Europe. If you trace genealogies, you'll see that modern families descend from tribal leaders in Northern Europe, and these ancient kings had nothing to do with the old power elites of Rome. Of course, the thing is not so simple, because with the help of Catholic Church there were some marriages arranged between the so-called barbarian rulers and noble families in Rome. So the powerful Roman families still survive in some way, but not in a direct lineage like it was before the fall of Rome.

That’s not societal breakdown, that just means the inbred aristocracy doesn’t go back to antiquity. Society and its rulers are not the same thing.

Still, there were families in those days with unfathomable wealth. If memory serves me well, one was so wealthy that when they sold their land after becoming Christians they caused a real estate crisis across the Roman Empire. (Source: The inheritance of Rome, Chris Wickham, one of the early chapters.) And just a few centuries earlier, Julius Caesar arguably was one of the richest to have ever lived on earth. It's sensible to expect that families with that kind of wealth to leave a trace in their ancestry. And yet with rare exceptions they did not.

The concept of wealth fundamentally depends on the society its created in.

If I am the last person on earth, i effectively "own" the entire earth, but it means nothing.

Same for a man staving to death on top of a mountain of gold.

Which makes this billionaire New Zealand apocalypse compound trend all the more ridiculous, if society collapses, being a billionaire is going to mean absolutely nothing, you would think the money would be better spent ensuring that doesn't happen in the first place

More amusingly as the billionaires hide out in their bunkers someones going to be at a Goldman Sachs terminal zeroing out their wealth.

> It's sensible to expect that families with that kind of wealth to leave a trace in their ancestry.

The ancient patrician families had trouble with going extinct. Their decline started long before the imperial period.

Later European kings had the same problem, sometimes just failing to produce any heir. It only takes a single generation and the family is gone.

If anything, I'd attribute family extinctions like this to monogamy. The two standard defenses against a failure of this type are (1) letting a man marry into the family by wedding a family daughter (as opposed to having the daughter marry out into the man's family); and (2) taking more than one wife, which offers dramatically greater opportunity to reproduce.

Well, wealth during that period was determined by military power, not by an International system as we now know. Without a good army there was no way to maintain land ownership, for example. Similarly, slaves could only be maintained by the threat of armies. Therefore, all the fabulous wealth of Roman families declined to practically nothing with the end of the Roman Empire.

Sort of off-topic; what was your overall impression of Wickham's book (or the greater series that his is a part of, if you've read them)? Do you think they're generally humble overviews of their respective periods?

Wickham's book is extremely hard to read - and as a matter of fact, I've never pulled off reading it to the end, even on the 3rd try. The issue is he's extremely meticulous, and goes on ad nauseam on methodology, on what to make of the sources he's referencing, and so forth. This is all extremely interesting, mind you. But the amount of methodological asides is such that you rapidly lose track of where you were in the narrative, and it's easy to go through a chapter without remembering what the first few pages were about, or indeed anything at all.

For the others in the series I've no idea. They've been on my reading list forever.

Is it a sensible expectation though? I would fully expect the richest/powerful to bear the brunt of retaliation as a civilization crumbles. The sins of the father and all that.

Would you want to be related to Trump if the economy tanked and social services started breaking down?

The heirs to the German Kaisar seem to be doing well for themselves. Then again, Kaisar Wilhelm was only forced to abdicate and exiled.

> Society and its rulers are not the same thing.

I wanted to make that point when I read this line:

>> But the Avars ruled Central Europe for over two centuries, and it is not a given that their civilization had no worth and did not represent a future we would have flourished in.

A civilizations worth is always measured by those who might seek to control it. You could have a bunch of people getting on just fine, living out perfectly normal lives. But if there isn't any way for them to produce excess - be that labor output or extraction of natural resources - then they are not seen as valuable and will not be written about.

Do we know, is this because of a change in society, such that it became difficult or less important to track these things? or is it because of a change in the people, for example people of Roman descent mixing with local tribes, like the Franks, and the local tribes didn't have the traditions of tracking the things that would allow us to trace this back?

Tribal cultures tend to have long and complex, even tedious oral histories and initiations into them. With a knowledge keeper, shaman, druid, healer etc. Could be that the old druid power structure was in decline and so the typical transmission of information was interrupted. We know a similar thing happened later to the midwives/fertility women who were persecuted as witches with I suspect dire consequences to infant mortality rates. Originally it's hard for me to believe that people could be that stupid, but if pre-romans you had a loose confederation of naturalist-priests which kept practical knowledge shrouded in magic ritual as a means of exerting power any intergenerational disruption would be catastrophic. I think the Scandinavians have a slightly clearer picture of their descent due to the later expansion of the new religion into their territories. If reading declines I wonder if people will move back to a digitally transmitted oral history as a type of living memory which quickly becomes too vast to comprehend and may lead to similar transmission problems in the future with historians studying unimportant but vast repositories of codebases, the clay tablets of our day to piece together what went wrong with the C++ culture.

> I think the Scandinavians have a slightly clearer picture of their descent due to the later expansion of the new religion into their territories.

Not really, the oldest Scandinavian kings that historians are pretty certain were real people were Harald Fairhair who was king of Norway around 900CE, Gorm the Old who was king of Denmark around 930CE, and Eric the Victorious who was king of Sweden around 970CE.

And the sources we have for the ancient kings were usually continental scholars, monks, bishops, or missionaries, who most probably had an agenda, and an antagonistic view of the pagans up north. And likewise, when the Scandinavians told their history to the weird people from the south, they probably embellished their stories.

...unlike for example Charles Martel and early French dynasties, who were 200 years earlier than the known Scandianavians.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but Scandinavia was a completely uncivilized backwater. :-)

That's a good point. Unfortunately this leads to another cause of destabilization at the end of the Roman Empire: Christianity. You see, Christians precipitated the destruction of the pagan culture, which was the only culture shared by all people in Europe. Not only Roman history and culture was almost erased in that change, but also the oral traditions of nations around the Roman Empire that were also converted by the Christian Church. Of course, the ascension of Christianity as a power is also a result of the decline of Rome itself, so it is not like Christianity caused this, but it was a big factor in the cultural destruction that occurred at that time.

"Christians precipitated the destruction of the pagan culture, which was the only culture shared by all people in Europe."

? 'Pagan culture' is not some unified set of cultural norms. Rather, it's a broad category of possibly totally unrelated activities. Some of them codified via Rome (but those were adapted to Christianity) and then other, local ones.

The Christians in 300 CE were the most organized group on the continent, which was part of the reason the Emperor adopted Christianity.

An organized group of busy bodies might cause the decline of some thing (i.e. paganism) but certainly not the decline of the written word, education, governance etc. just the opposite.

One might argue that with the failure of Imperial Order, and the onset of tribal wars, it was the monks that carried most of the flame of civilization, which eventually led to the renewal of civil order and the reasonable ability to establish something approach civility.

Which is maybe close to the classical 'dark ages' narrative. Now of course maybe it was not as dark as we thought, but we certainly don't have a lot leftover from that time. Hence the historical narrative.

I am not saying the Christianity lead to the decline of the written word, education, and governance. I am saying that it contributed to the end of oral traditions that were the only form of history known by non-Romanized pagans. It also lead to the destruction of many monuments and collections of books associated to pagan traditions in Rome.

I also don't believe that Christianity had the power to destroy civilization. They were just the result of the decay of economic power of Rome, which lead the people to organize around something other than the traditional government structure. It also had to do with the idea that the old gods were failing to defend Romans, so why not joining this new cult that seems to protect the poor and dispossessed.

There’s a funny story about history of the Slavic tribes as it relates to this. Since Slavs didn’t write, the only reason we know their migration pattern into eastern europe and the balkans is by tracking when catholic churches stopped reporting back to HQ.

So at least on that end another reason for the break in history and lineage is that the people are completely different and in fact have no lineage back to Roman times.

Even though centuries later they converted to Christianity and started wondering why they don’t feel as Roman as they should.

Very interesting, I hadn't heard of this issue.

Others have reported issues with archaeological and historical evidence from this same period, proposing that up to 700 years of mainstream chronology shouldn't be there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19745763

Especially interesting from your link is that all the royal lines of Europe trace their origins to Charlemagne, who according to these alternative chronologies was probably a myth.

Thanks for that link.