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systems. Love of God is the most precious of values. Only the church — and incidentally the rulers who are its subjects — may accumulate wealth, which is intended solely to help everyone prepare his own salvation.
    Through the sole power of its philosophy, Christianity garners an increasing number of believers in the Roman Empire. This should now have led to a retreat by the mercantile order, by freedom and individualism, to the benefit of brotherhood, equality, nonviolence, frugality, and humility. But this does not come to pass. Lesson for the future: no matter how influential, a religious doctrine fails to slow the march of individual freedom. In fact, to this day, no religious or secular power has succeeded in durably slowing its course.
    Unlike preceding empires, Rome at this juncture has no rivals, merely enemies. Tribes coming in from the East, eager to benefit from the Mediterranean’s wealth and climate, assail it from every quarter.
    Rome is therefore obliged to garrison increasingly costly armies on its frontiers. It has to accommodate the multiple languages and beliefs of its soldiers, manage the burdens of logistics, deal with the challenge of meeting the costs. The emperor Marcus Aurelius goes so far as to spend twenty years, from 160 to 180, on the frontiers of the empire.
    But all efforts fail. Under the hammer-blows of Germans and Slavs, themselves harassed by Turks and Mongols, Rome retreats and grows weary, and is soon to find rivals in other cities of the empire, such as Byzantium in Asia Minor.
    In 284, the emperor Diocletian tries once again to collect for Rome taxes that are now increasingly rejected. In vain. The empire no longer has the means to finance its defense. In 313, the emperor Constantine, striving to regain the support of his people and nobility, grants freedom of worship to the swelling number of Christians through the Edict of Milan. Once again in vain. In 320, Constantine defeats Maxentius and converts. On the death of the emperor Theodosius in 395, the Roman Empire, unmanageable from a single center, permanently splits into two parts with two capitals, Rome and Byzantium (now called Constantinople). The Roman Empire of the East begins. Europe distances itself from Asia.
    A host of Indo-European tribes (Goths, Franks, Vandals, Slavs, Alamans, Lombards, Teutons, Huns, and Mongols) together fall on what remains of the RomanEmpire of the West. These invaders dream only of becoming Romans — in fact, Christians and Judeo-Greeks — in their culture and way of life. In 406, nomad hordes cross the Rhine and penetrate the Roman Empire: the Huns push the Visigoths toward Rome, but they pull back within an ace of delivering the deathblow.
    Yet the end soon comes. In 476 the last emperor of the West, Romulus Augustulus, is replaced by a Herulian king, Odoacre. The Roman Empire of the West disappears. For the first time, an empire is conquered without leaving a successor. It will not be the last.
    Constantinople remains the center of a virtually intact Empire of the East. In the West, by contrast, bishops, princes, and townships organize themselves into small autonomous powers. In 496, like many other Western rulers, Clovis, king of the Franks, is baptized a Christian and detaches himself from the last shreds of the Roman Empire. All Europe, overrun by brigands and wanderers, builds itself around tiny kingdoms, Gallo-Roman villas, and convents — rare protected species.
    Meanwhile, in Asia, America, and Africa, other empires crumble when their leaders — as at Palenque in Mexico — fail to compensate for the disappearance of natural resources. Or they survive when a monarch organizes the move from his capital in time — like the abandonment of Amber in Rajasthan, later replaced by Jaipur. Dynasties also succeed one another in China, without managing to reunify a country that has been fragmented since the collapse of the Han dynasty at the beginning of the third century of our era. Only in