"Do not expect too much of the end of the world."

---Stanislaw J. Lec

2523 A.D.
Islam, 1897 A.D.: The Greeks try to take Crete from the Turks.

2525 A.D.
Rome, 398 A.D.: Alaric the Visigoth plunders Athens.

2534 A.D.
Islam, 1908 A.D.: The Young Turks take control of the empire in a coup.

2535 A.D.
Islam, 1909 A.D.: The Young Turks install Mohammed V as Sultan.

2537 A.D.
Rome, 410 A.D.: Alaric sacks Rome.

Islam, 1911 A.D.: The Italians defeat the Turks and take Tripoli and Cyrenacia.

2538 A.D.
Islam, 1912 A.D.: The empire loses further ground in a general Balkan war.

2539 A.D.
Islam, 1913 A.D.: The empire somewhat recoups its position in a second Balkan War.

2540 A.D.
Islam, 1914 A.D.: The First World War begins, and the empire fights with the Central Powers of Europe.

2544 A.D.
Islam, 1918 A.D.: The Central Powers lose the war. The empire suffers dismemberment by the victorious European alliance.

2546 A.D.
Rome, 419 A.D.: Minority of Valentinian III under the regency of his mother, Galla Placidia.

2548 A.D.
Islam, 1922 A.D.: Mustafa Kemal declares a republic in Anatolia, ending the empire.

2552 A.D.
Rome, 425 A.D.: Barbarians overrun the West, mostly to settle.

2556 A.D.
Rome, 429 A.D.: Gaiseric founds a Vandal Kingdom in North Africa.

2560 A.D.
Rome, 433 A.D.: Attila becomes king of the Huns.

2563 A.D.
Rome, 436 A.D.: Last Roman troops leave Britain.

2565 A.D.
China, 265 A.D.: Northern China is overrun by barbarians.

2582 A.D.
Rome, 455 A.D.: Vandals sack Rome.

2587 A.D.
Rome 460 A.D.: Cologne captured by the Franks.

2602 A.D.
Egypt, 945 B.C.: Sheshonk I of Libya establishes the Twenty-Second Dynasty. A raid is made into Palestine.

2603 A.D.
Rome, 476 A.D.: The child emperor Romulus Augustulus abdicates, ending the empire in the West.

Maybe, but such a view is antihistorical, imposing the perceptions of later times onto the people of the past. For themselves, the Chinese and the Romans and the Turks knew that the world was going to Hell in a handbasket, dammit. What they valued in their world was not always what we value in it, but still they saw there was less and less to be proud of in their age. The date that is picked for "the end of the empire" is always somewhat arbitrary. It is generally a political marker for a transformation in demographics, the economy and the spiritual state of mankind which takes several decades to occur. Indeed, as skeleton civilizations, what Spengler called "fellah societies" (after the fellahin peasants of Egypt), universal states may go on indefinitely.

The Egyptian civilization never ended. At least another eight dynasties can be named from the histories of the region, until it became a province of the Roman Empire. Even then, Egypt never completely ceased to be Egypt, though language and even the ethnic makeup of the country changed more than once. However, after the phase under examination here, the dynasties are more and more of foreign origin. Even when natives ruled, they were interested in business rather than sovereignty, since Egypt soon became the great factory and breadbasket of the Mediterranean world. With few exceptions, these pharaohs were vassals of powerful empires to the east, and the indigenous culture the pharaohs promoted was a mummified replica of the art and architecture of the Old Kingdom. From this point, there was no special story in what was going on. To the extent that Egyptian history was meaningful thereafter, the meaning was provided by its relationship to still vital societies.

The Ottoman Empire was perhaps unique in precipitating its own end and primarily through the folly of its rulers. The Westernizing Young Turk clique was trying to do the impossible, to make a modern European nation of an ancient universal state. Themselves half-westerners, cultural hybrids of the sort who would do so much harm to the so-called "Third World" during the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries, they despised their own culture without having a particularly profound grasp of their acquired one. When put to the test in the First World War, the haphazardly-modernized empire flew into roughly the components from which it had been assembled five hundred years before. Unlike the case in other post-imperial periods, there was no particular nostalgia among the empire's former subjects for its return. Even to people living in the Magian heartlands, to Greeks and Jews and Armenians, the empire was always a Turkish affair, the possession of another people. This was the nature of Islamic statecraft, to maintain distinctions among nationalities. On the other hand, precisely because the Turks had kept themselves distinct, they were also unique among post-imperial peoples in achieving a new type of political cohesion on a more modest scale. The Republic of Turkey, however, is really a creature of Western civilization rather than Islam.

The end of Han China was sad and confused. The empire as a whole, with its Great Wall and strategic passes, was perhaps defensible against the barbarians from Central Asia; certainly that had been one of the chief preoccupations of the imperial government since before the Latter Han period began. The feuding successor states, with their pretensions to be the true heirs of the Han, were not defensible. The ancient centers of Chinese civilization in the north were depopulated by war, famine and disease. The south was wealthier and often able to maintain an effective defense, but there was no possibility of reconstituting a universal order. Civilization and barbarism mixed, as they have in many places and many times. This cycle of human experience came to a fairly decisive end.

The end of the Roman Empire offered a Vandal's delight of portable booty and former imperial citizens perfectly willing to be enserfed. In these last decades, one may speak of true "invasions" and "campaigns" by the barbarians. They were no longer infiltrations and piratical raids by primitives. The later barbarian hordes were at least as competent as the Roman armies sent to oppose them, and in fact made up of much the same ethnic mix of people, since the empire had long since taken to doing most of its recruiting among accommodating newcomers. More to the point, the barbarians had a clear strategic plan: they had come first to rob and them to settle, and they had a fair notion of where they wanted to do both.

As was the case in China, half of the empire, the east in this case, was able to put up substantial resistance, at any rate enough to prevent the establishment of barbarian kingdoms in the hinterlands of Constantinople. Indeed, as we have noted, this eastern (or Byzantine) empire was to become the beginning of a story that ended only with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire 1500 years later. The story at hand, however, the one told by the civilization which began with the Trojan War and extended to the fifth century A.D., ends on an inglorious note. In the final phase of the Western Roman Empire, the emperor never stirs beyond the heavily defended city of Milan if he can help it, while one after another of the great cities of the West fall to societies of organized bandits. In the end, the Church comes to provide what there is of civil administration as the imperial government loses even nominal control of the provinces. Because the imperial office has long been a mere front for generals of barbarian origin, the end can be undramatic; there is no need to make a fuss over the forms when the substance has long leached away. The guardians of a child emperor simply decide that it would be safer just to abdicate than to go through the motions of another long regency.

The end of the Empire of the West in the early twenty-seventh century was attended by a slogan: "Cutting the losses." Everywhere, there were great stretches of continent that had passed out of civilized life altogether. The regime's guiding policy was to prevent the extinction of the species, and to ensure the survival of the classic books and the cannon of science. Wherever possible, it encouraged the concentration of population by those living in lightly-peopled countries, a description which fit most of the planet. There was no coercion in any of this; the imperial government had neither the power nor the heart to ever coerce anyone ever again. Their theory, probably correct, was simply that civilized life required a certain density of people.

The regime in its final stages maintained a dozen or so "cities," really fortified schools and trading posts, constructed in the delicate Twilight Romanesque of the lattermost West. Except to the extent that it pursued the bands of terrible New People, created at the whim of the mad Emperor Friedrich in the twenty-fourth century, the government did not even attempt police functions beyond its own facilities.

Indeed, it appeared that, having lost the whole world, Earth's ostensible rulers were intent upon saving their own souls. The imperial government itself had lost its military character, since every conceivable organized enemy had ceased to exist. The leadership of mankind had become a purely ceremonial post. The Western emperors had in fact been powerless for almost a century. Latterly, the office had tended to devolve on some scholar or member of the imperial civil service, coincident with his retirement. The administrative apparatus developed a character like that of a religious order or a university faculty. Indeed, it eventfully did become largely clericalized: the fossil West had returned to the ancient image of politics as a dialogue between pope and emperor.

Partly because of the Joachite Wars, and partly because of the natural decrease in population, there were fewer than a quarter of a billion people on Earth by the year 2600. There were perhaps three hundred thousand in all the surviving planetary colonies put together. In this epoch, the population of Luna City, always essentially an appendage of terrestrial society, was evacuated to Earth. A scattering of human settlements around the ice mines of the lunar north elected to remain, despite the fact Earth's rapid loss of space technology would surely make the decision permanent. The almost purely scientific outposts on Mercury, and the troubled colonies in the treacherous environment of Mars, never had the option of returning.

The Last Emperor of the West, in active life a teacher of comparative mathematics and systematic theology at the University of Chicago, died in his sleep in the year 2601 A.D. The College of Electors gathered from the four corners of the world for the last time to consider the choice of a successor. They adjourned without taking action, sine die.

The last line rolls up and off the screen, which for a moment remains blank. Then, quite without prompting, another line of text appears:

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