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JJ said pretty much everything I wanted to say in a more to-the-point manner than I would have. Just wanted to add a few more things:quote:Well, after a while they managed to not kill the Emperor every few years, that was a big deal. A new Senate was created whole cloth, and with the Empire shrinking they shed a lot of the provincial governorships. The army got reformed as well, I believe. Anyone more up to snuff want to jump in, feel free. There's also the whole thing about the (post Komnenian) pronoiai, which were as far as I know a very quasi-feudal thing and a method of containing the nobility often seen in contemporary Western Europe. Before that, the Thematic system was also a lot different from the WRE/early Imperial Rome provincial system. quote:They spoke Greek and worshiped different gods. Arguably, medieval England was more Roman at this point since their rulers at least spoke a Romance language. Take a 0 AD Roman and dump them in 1200 AD Rome or Constantinople, and either way they'd be loving lost. I'd say one thing should be answered first before tackling the ethnicity question. How do you define a "Roman"? Do you mean a person born and raised in Rome and Latium? A citizen of the Roman Empire before the split? Or just about anyone whose parents and grandparents lived within the border of the Empire? What is your stance on this, pray tell? quote:If I had that sort of free time I wouldn't be trying to learn history from people on the internet. C'est la vie. You'd have to give me that arguing history online is an excellent pastime.  quote:So, when was the first recorded use of a coloured uniform for organisation and identification in battle in both European and Asian histories? I know that by the time the Warring States period in China came to a close (at around the 4th-3rd century BC), the Kingdom of Qin was well known to be dressed in solid black uniform like your stereotypical evil empire minions, so there is that. I am quite sure that would have dated far back, but I don't know exactly how far. Dunno about the West, though.
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Nov 4, 2011 05:28
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Amused to Death posted:like I never knew English had one of the largest vocabularies of any major language due mostly to the fact of the language's ability to constantly absorb words from other languages. I know I said I'd stop, but I'm going to sheep-dog this just a little bit more because it's a sore-spot. This is not true. There has never been an agreed-upon means of measuring vocabulary cross-linguistically. And, even if we count the relatively less crap ones, they still don't show English coming far ahead. Comparing languages is a really, really, really complicated thing and I get really pissed off when people spread lies about it. It's the same poo poo with the American Army's CAT System where they say English is the hardest language in the world to learn. Excuse me, Icelandic, Fula and Maori want to have some words.
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Nov 4, 2011 05:35
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SeanBeansShako posted:So, when was the first recorded use of a coloured uniform for organisation and identification in battle in both European and Asian histories? Do you mean specifically for identification in battle, ruling out uniforms meant for identification during peace time? Uniforms cost lots of money before industrialization (and even after that), especially the nice bright coloured stuff. I would suspect that the need to be able to distinguish men in the battlefield by their uniforms only became really important with much larger armies, and also only became practical in such scale once fabrics became more affordable. Until then, the hoi polloi that formed the majority of the forces would die in their rags while the elite, usually cavalry, would be wearing their finest silks and heaviest armour and look so dashing. I think it was a gradual development, and not always just for identification in battle, you had the regimental banners for that purpose. If the uniforms cost a lot of money, there had to be a really good reason for someone to be doling the cash for them. The most likely reason, then, would be a case of conspicuous consumption by a prince wanting to impress others. So Prince Snortfork would give his bodyguard pretty pink dresses so that they would impress both his subjects as well as his opponents. "Prince Snortfork must be really powerful to be able to afford to dress as many as TWENTY men so flamboyantly! I better not step in his way!" Potentially this could result in avoiding battles with you altogether. Unless it made others envy your wealth.
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Nov 4, 2011 05:36
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Rycalawre posted:Even before William came over there was already a complete mess of people living in the British Isles so adding Norman to the mix wouldn't have caused that much more trouble than there already was. Plus the Normans were really cool. Ethnically true, perhaps, but with regard to England in particular not linguistically. Everyone spoke Anglo-Saxon, which was pretty much as homogenous a Germanic language as Dutch or, well, German. A bit of influence from Norse, but that's about it, and it had regional variations, but again, it's not like you don't see that in German too. Absent the Norman Conquest, and come the invention of 'spelling' and 'dictionaries' and such like in the 18th century, I imagine it'd be as regular as and rather similar to modern Dutch. As for calling the Normans cool - well, if you find a bunch of really vicious jackbooted psychopathic thugs cool, sure.  Seriously, they pretty much razed the North to the ground.
feedmegin fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Nov 4, 2011 |
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Nov 4, 2011 18:13
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Deception posted:Also Greek wasn't the official language of the empire until the 10th century if I remember correctly and all of it's laws were written in Latin. e think I'm a byzantine fanatic, which I proudly say I am! It's also worth pointing out that the eastern half of the Roman Empire spoke Greek from long before the split between East and West (hell, clear back to Alexander's time before Rome was a power at all) - there's a reason the New Testament is written in Greek not Latin. Any educated man in Rome also spoke Greek. The Greek/Latin divide isn't really as big a point of delineation between the two periods as you might think.
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Nov 4, 2011 18:21
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Nenonen posted:Uniforms cost lots of money before industrialization (and even after that), especially the nice bright coloured stuff. I would suspect that the need to be able to distinguish men in the battlefield by their uniforms only became really important with much larger armies, and also only became practical in such scale once fabrics became more affordable. Until then, the hoi polloi that formed the majority of the forces would die in their rags while the elite, usually cavalry, would be wearing their finest silks and heaviest armour and look so dashing. It's on a tangent to the question, but the first time English armies wore a uniform in this manner was the New Model Army, formed in 1645 during the Civil War. Before this, armies were formed from regiments recruited by local magnates, who'd each dress their regiment in uniform colours, but in whatever colours they felt suitable. The New Model centralised the 'procuring uniforms' stuff and bought coats in the cheapest dye they could find, which happened to be red. Hence the first redcoats. (The Scots also did the cheapest-possible-centralised-clothing thing for their armies; in their case cheap ended up being Hodden grey).
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Nov 4, 2011 18:34
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This isn't strictly military history but since a lot of y'all know about Prussians: I was thinking about how German's call Germany Deutschland and themselves the Deutsch. What did Prussians call themselves? Did they call the language they speak Deutsch?
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Nov 4, 2011 18:50
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zoux posted:This isn't strictly military history but since a lot of y'all know about Prussians: Preußen and yes - assuming you're talking about the Germans in Prussia and not this lot - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Prussian_language
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Nov 4, 2011 18:53
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zoux posted:This isn't strictly military history but since a lot of y'all know about Prussians: Prussia was a geographic area that had many cultures. The majority were German and called themselves Deutsch, but there were also millions of native Prussians who called it Prusy and spoke Polski.
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Nov 4, 2011 19:08
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feedmegin posted:Ethnically true, perhaps, but with regard to England in particular not linguistically. Everyone spoke Anglo-Saxon, which was pretty much as homogenous a Germanic language as Dutch or, well, German. A bit of influence from Norse, but that's about it, and it had regional variations, but again, it's not like you don't see that in German too. Absent the Norman Conquest, and come the invention of 'spelling' and 'dictionaries' and such like in the 18th century, I imagine it'd be as regular as and rather similar to modern Dutch. No, England was a mess. There were several vastly different dialects that were barely mutually intelligible. Also, you picking German and Dutch as examples undermines your point considerably : both of those languages have an insane amount of variation in them, including even a dialect continuum between them. The only reason that languages are ever stable is because of unification of a prestige dialect. It's unclear why English is the odd-man out, so to speak, in comparison to its sister languages (Dutch, Frisian, etc.) but it's not as simple as the Norman Conquest. There's a decent argument to be made for influence from Gaelic languages from a typological perspective, and there's been a lot of ink spilled over this. In addition, you're downplaying the effects of Norse when they were massive, and most likely directly led to the erosion of most of the case-morphology from nouns. Seriously, read the literature. English prior to the Norman Conquest was a highly varied language, and the impact of it is arguably quite small. McWhorter's Our Bastard Tongue is a pretty good explanation for laymen, and his The Power of Babel is a good exploration of diachrony in general.
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Nov 4, 2011 19:14
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Xiahou Dun posted:No, England was a mess. There were several vastly different dialects that were barely mutually intelligible. Also, you picking German and Dutch as examples undermines your point considerably : both of those languages have an insane amount of variation in them, including even a dialect continuum between them. The only reason that languages are ever stable is because of unification of a prestige dialect. That's fair enough, and I acknowledge I'm not an academic linguist so I guess I bow to your authority on this one - but would you acknowledge that modern standard German for instance does have a fairly regular orthography, which is not present in English? I mean, I acknowledge that there are huge differences in dialects, perhaps I didn't make that point enough in my post - but written standard German for instance is generally pronounced how it looks according to regular rules, which is not the case in English. Absent the Norman Conquest, why would this not have happened in England too? Again, not an expert, but it seems part of the problem to me is that our 'prestige dialect' for quite some time was French. Edit: 'Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue' looks pretty drat interesting though, I'll have to pick it up. Thanks for mentioning it. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Nov 4, 2011 |
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Nov 4, 2011 19:22
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People realize that any decent Roman knew both Latin and Greek right? That every single person of worthy in both the western and eastern part of the empire could speak Greek like most Europeans speak English? The only thing that might've felled were cities, Rome fell, Constantinople fell, Paris and Berlin fell. It's absolutely retarded that an Empire fell when the "falling" process took generations to complete, and the eastern part was as roman as the western, if not more. The luxurious trade from the orient came to the eastern merchant towns. Religion, philosophy, education, everything came from the east. To say that the state that supplied it's western counterpart with most of it's resources is not Rome is simply a falacy of the greatest kind. Are the Omayyad and Abbasid Empires not Islamic empires simply because of geographic shifts?
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Nov 4, 2011 19:29
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French had very little influence on English outside of a crapload of loan-words. The reason why our spelling is so crap is because our standard spelling is really, really old and the how the words are pronounced has changed ; at the time that it was standardized, it was just as phonetic as modern Standard German. Note your qualifiers in 'Modern Standard German' : German spelling was updated much more recently than English, and that's why it's so regular. People actually working and making it so, and teaching it to everyone as they learn the prestige dialect. (NB, 'prestige dialect' is a technical term for the 'standard' dialect. French never had enough speakers to be called this in England, it was just the language that had the most prestige.) A large amount of Germans, if you ask them to read something in a sufficiently casual context will end up pronouncing them in their native dialect, and the spelling will no longer be helpful. Try it with a Bavarian, and ask them to say 'little', 'woods' and 'glasses'. This is a problem of language standardization ; French had basically nothing to do with this.
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Nov 4, 2011 19:39
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zoux posted:This isn't strictly military history but since a lot of y'all know about Prussians: I'm not an actual expert, and this really is a de-rail, but... Deutsch, but note that most languages were a much more diverse bunch than they have become after nationalism, public school system and mass media. And then you had minorities speaking some kinds of pidgin, like Yiddisch. Most national languages have become much more uniform in the last two centuries, but there is still a clear distinction between Low German in the north and High German in the south. It's hard to say if they should be considered to be separate languages or just dialects of one language - for the forces driving for German unification, the answer obviously was that they were just dialects that should be eradicated. Note that 'Dutch' originally stemmed from the same word as Deutsch, but due to historical reasons we now see Dutch as a genuinely separate language (Nederlandsch), rather than a form of Low German. The same happened elsewhere, like in France (dozens of small local languages) and Yugoslavia (see: Serbo-Croatian). That last one didn't work so well.
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Nov 4, 2011 19:42
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Pidgin specifically means a not fully-formed language, and it's pretty offensive to call Yiddish one. I figure you didn't really mean it, so it's fine, but for future reference, it makes you sound pretty anti-Semitic. The rest of your post is good, though. See also : Chinese and Italian as good examples. Although, at this point, I think any more discussion should go over to the Ask Linguists thread. (Go there! Ask! I love that thread and it could use a bump!)
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Nov 4, 2011 19:55
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Mans posted:People realize that any decent Roman knew both Latin and Greek right? That every single person of worthy in both the western and eastern part of the empire could speak Greek like most Europeans speak English? Sure, but below that level Greek became primary, and as noted even the elites bowed to reality. quote:The only thing that might've felled were cities, Rome fell, Constantinople fell, Paris and Berlin fell. quote:It's absolutely retarded that an Empire fell when the "falling" process took generations to complete, quote:and the eastern part was as roman as the western, if not more. quote:The luxurious trade from the orient came to the eastern merchant towns. Religion, philosophy, education, everything came from the east. Setting aside the weird nationalistic vibes I'm getting, I agree. So it wasn't Roman, religion, philosophy, education, everything was different. quote:To say that the state that supplied it's western counterpart with most of it's resources is not Rome is simply a falacy of the greatest kind. And I'd say that Rome supplied the Roman Empire with a certain Romaness and that I agree with you, the unified Empire as it was under Augustus was a fundamentally different beast than the structure the rose in Constantinople. quote:Are the Omayyad and Abbasid Empires not Islamic empires simply because of geographic shifts? Well yeah, but just because the Ottoman's claimed to be the rightful caliphate until Ataturk doesn't mean I don't can't talk about the fall of the Abbasid Empire when some guy got wrapped in a rug and trampled by Mongolian horses. Likewise the ERE was (loosely) Roman, but it was fundamentally not the same as THE ROMAN EMPIRE!!!11!!!1! Thus, using the term 'the Fall of Rome' is a perfectly legitimate way to discuss the general decline of the Empire, Diocletian's split, the mass migrations, the breakdown of centralized political power in the West, and the failure of the Emperor in Byzantium to return the lost west to the fold.
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Nov 4, 2011 19:56
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feedmegin posted:As for calling the Normans cool - well, if you find a bunch of really vicious jackbooted psychopathic thugs cool, sure. Really? The Harrowing of the North was genocidal, absolutely, but treating the Normans as a race as somehow responsible is just ridiculous. What's more, the coolest Normans ever, William Rufus and Roger II of Sicily, were uninvolved. Though I do not mean to imply you subscribe to it yourself, it is worth mentioning that the of the 'Norman Yoke' harped upon by Thomas Paine and other enlightenment thinkers was an invention of English nationalist writers centuries after. On another note, the Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Danish tradition of warfare was genuinely more brutal. Whereas the Normans would capture, humiliate, and/or impoverish their rebels, their predecessors in England were much more fond of mass execution. Enemies of other nations, primarily but not exclusively knights, could be captured rather than killed. It wasn't until the Angevin kings that the English attitudes toward the Celtic nations changed to treating them as, in practice, heathens, and slaughtering them wholesale. The Latin Church's perspective was really hosed up by the 12th century, though, and it translated into secular life. Rodrigo Diaz fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Nov 4, 2011 |
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Nov 4, 2011 20:45
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People should stop projecting their anachronistic/nationalist/statist ideas on Rome itt. You can talk about the fall of Rome, when talking about the city, but otherwise it's the fall of the Western Roman Empire - and even that's debatable, seeing as it was more of a transformation than a total break. Feel free to blame the early humanists and Renaissance dudes for that perception. In the last few decades, the term Late Antiquity has been getting more and more commonplace.
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Nov 4, 2011 20:57
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Really? The Harrowing of the North was genocidal, absolutely, but treating the Normans as a race as somehow responsible is just ridiculous. Well, I was replying to 'Even before William came over there was already a complete mess of people living in the British Isles so adding Norman to the mix wouldn't have caused that much more trouble than there already was. Plus the Normans were really cool. ' - so I took him to be talking specifically about William and his pals rather than, I dunno, Angevin Sicily. But yeah, I wasn't trying to imply all Normans everywhere are literally  or anything. Nor did I mean to imply they were generally worse than the Anglo-Saxons or Vikings or whoever, who were as you point out also perfectly capable of all sorts of unpleasant things.
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Nov 4, 2011 21:00
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quote:Fallen, or been felled possibly. Certainly, the sack of Rome as a city is a big deal in and of itself. Rome didn't mean much in economic or administrative terms even in the Italian specter of things. Ravenna and Milan where much more important centers in Italy and this is just from the top of my head. And what sack? That city was sacked various times. Rome had it's value and whenever it was sacked it was a tragedy, but none of it's multiple sacks meant it doomed the empire. quote:How? Define 'Roman'ness. I'd define it around, I dunno, Rome. The language was different, the religion was different, the culture was different. Then by that logic the edict of Thessalonica killed Rome. It removed Roman religion in favor of Christianity, turning the later parts of the empire incomparable to the previous empire. The transfer of the capital to any of the various cities in Italy also killed the Roman Empire because Rome was no longer the center of the state. Do you consider the Monarchy period of Roman history to be part of Roman history? They where Etruscan in culture, they used hoplites, they even had kings! What does that era have to do with the Republic? Nothing! And what does the republic,with it's senate and consuls, completely in love with the Hellenistic world, with it's military reforms and massive land expansions and with it's new enemies have to do with the monarchy period? Nothing. Time changes people, it would be obvious that a state changes itself as time passes by too, especially the almost two thousand year old entity that was the Roman empire. quote:Setting aside the weird nationalistic vibes I'm getting, I agree. So it wasn't Roman, religion, philosophy, education, everything was different. Roman history and philosophy of life changed. 4th century B.C. Romans would be baffled with the way 1st century B.C. life was. Rome changed when it entered into contact with the east, like the Greeks did when the Persian gates opened themselves due to Alexander. quote:And I'd say that Rome supplied the Roman Empire with a certain Romaness and that I agree with you, the unified Empire as it was under Augustus was a fundamentally different beast than the structure the rose in Constantinople.[quote]  But that was a different situation, the Abbasids, even if they where extremely reduced in their political sphere, ended with the fall of Bagdad. There was no equivalent term in Roman history expect the fall of Constantinople, which truly ended the Roman state. quote:Likewise the ERE was (loosely) Roman, but it was fundamentally not the same as THE ROMAN EMPIRE!!!11!!!1! Thus, using the term 'the Fall of Rome' is a perfectly legitimate way to discuss the general decline of the Empire, Diocletian's split, the mass migrations, the breakdown of centralized political power in the West, and the failure of the Emperor in Byzantium to return the lost west to the fold. The Roman Empire wasn't focused on Rome for quite a while, since the split the eastern part was clearly the strongest part, and they clearly led the Roman legacy until the 15th century.
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Nov 4, 2011 23:41
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Mans posted:Rome didn't mean much in economic or administrative terms even in the Italian specter of things. Ravenna and Milan where much more important centers in Italy and this is just from the top of my head. And what sack? That city was sacked various times. Rome had it's value and whenever it was sacked it was a tragedy, but none of it's multiple sacks meant it doomed the empire. This. I was basically trying to say that in my sleep deprived state last night but wasn't able to string two sentences together. My old thread got some love but it's in archives now, I'd bring it back up if enough people were interested in talking Rome!
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Nov 4, 2011 23:46
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Deception posted:This. I was basically trying to say that in my sleep deprived state last night but wasn't able to string two sentences together. My old thread got some love but it's in archives now, I'd bring it back up if enough people were interested in talking Rome! Very much so. I've been learning Latin since I'm interested in mediaeval history, but I'm finding that's also making me much more interested in the classical period. It helps that Wheelock tends to use passages describing real historical events.
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Nov 5, 2011 00:10
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Mans posted:Rome didn't mean much in economic or administrative terms even in the Italian specter of things. Ravenna and Milan where much more important centers in Italy and this is just from the top of my head. And what sack? That city was sacked various times. Rome had it's value and whenever it was sacked it was a tragedy, but none of it's multiple sacks meant it doomed the empire. quote:Then by that logic the edict of Thessalonica killed Rome. It removed Roman religion in favor of Christianity, turning the later parts of the empire incomparable to the previous empire. The transfer of the capital to any of the various cities in Italy also killed the Roman Empire because Rome was no longer the center of the state. Do you consider the Monarchy period of Roman history to be part of Roman history? They where Etruscan in culture, they used hoplites, they even had kings! What does that era have to do with the Republic? Nothing! And what does the republic,with it's senate and consuls, completely in love with the Hellenistic world, with it's military reforms and massive land expansions and with it's new enemies have to do with the monarchy period? Nothing. I agree and I don't. I'm not saying and never said we shouldn't study the ERE or Byzantine Empire as part of Roman history, just that using the term 'the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' to refer to the general events starting with, well, possibly the first time the Praetorian's auctioned off the Empire up through the dissolution of the WRE and on to the Turkish capture of Constantinople is a 'fair' (or whatever, adequate) way to talk about it. I talk about the Byzantine (byzantine?) Empire as separate from the 'original' or 'real' or whatever Roman Empire the same way I consider the Republic different than the Empire, even though they both had a senate. Because the situation had fundamentally changed. quote:Time changes people, it would be obvious that a state changes itself as time passes by too, especially the almost two thousand year old entity that was the Roman empire. Good, we agree. quote:Roman history and philosophy of life changed. 4th century B.C. Romans would be baffled with the way 1st century B.C. life was. Rome changed when it entered into contact with the east, like the Greeks did when the Persian gates opened themselves due to Alexander. Again, I don't totally disagree. quote:Poor Al-Musta'sim E: I guess this is my big point. Lacking (until the ERE settled down) clear dynastic eras, my problem is this jankedy semantic mess. quote:It's much more reasonable to say "the fall of the western empire", Odoacer didn't end the western empire when he captured Rome, he had to go to Ravenna to tell Romulus Augustus to piss off. Here's the crux of the issue. I think this is silly. By the time you split it in two the Roman Empire, as it was, is gone. Suddenly we must talk about the WRE and the ERE but the RE proper is no longer really an entity. I'm not saying that Diocletian ended Rome, because despite the proliferation of purple the Empire remained in many ways unified culturally, politically, religiously, administratively, conceptually, whatever. After this, you talk about the WRE and the ERE and the HRE and the Holy See and all sorts of things that are like and have varying claims to the history of Rome, but the Empire had changed. quote:The Roman Empire wasn't focused on Rome for quite a while, since the split the eastern part was clearly the strongest part, and they clearly led the Roman legacy until the 15th century. 'Leading the legacy' is a weird, subjective issue. the JJ fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Nov 5, 2011 |
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Nov 5, 2011 00:33
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We seem to agree on almost everything but a few nitpicks that are almost full blown 'spergims, i say we agree on the (quite various) things we agree on, and disagree (on the quite few) things we disagree on. The byzantine empire referred to themselves as Romas as did, for example, the muslims, but since we're not having an official argument or thesis we can calmly mention them as the byzes for clarification purposes.
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Nov 5, 2011 00:58
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You fail to mention that Diocletian also ruled with 3 other emperors including Constantine's father. The WRE and ERM are not only split into two entities, but by 4 during Diocletian's time. It was improbable for a land mass the size of the roman empire to be ruled by one single emperor even by Augustinian standards. Constantine tried and still had problems when he unified the empire, Justinian failed miserably and squandered the treasury when he tried to reconquer lost territory. My main point is, I find it difficult not calling the byzes roman and the argument I am making is that they should be labeled as Romans, not byzantine. Geographically it's OK to separate the empire into an eastern and western theme, but not to separate the empire from roman to non roman, because the empire shifted east. That's been my major point, and many historians are trying to change this idea in modern historic research and revisiting of the time period.Mans posted:We seem to agree on almost everything but a few nitpicks that are almost full blown 'spergims, i say we agree on the (quite various) things we agree on, and disagree (on the quite few) things we disagree on. The byzantine empire referred to themselves as Romas as did, for example, the muslims, but since we're not having an official argument or thesis we can calmly mention them as the byzes for clarification purposes. While I agree with you, it's the clarification of 17th and 18th century authors that got us on this road to calling them byzantine in the first place. Call me crazy, but it's one of my passions as a historian to change how people look at the empire as dead in 476. It's little brother is not the Eastern Roman empire, it is the Roman empire, and I think you agree with me. Changing peoples outlook on who and what they are will be a huge step in making their history more important, this is my take on the subject. I feel like to many people find the subject full of backward emperors trying to force orthodoxy down peoples throats and silly assassinations ect. When I was in high school I hated that I didn't even know who or what the empire had become after 476 because we didn't even learn about it! I had to get deep into college studies before truly embracing where the Roman empire began and ended. Just my take. Deception fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Nov 5, 2011 |
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Nov 5, 2011 01:05
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I agree with you, i'm just trying to steer the conversation away from this because i know that while this discussion is interesting to us, it's almost certainly being skipped over by the majority of the readers of this thread.
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Nov 5, 2011 01:39
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The Roman Empire ended in 1461 - wrap it up Palaiogailures.
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Nov 5, 2011 02:27
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Deception posted:You fail to mention that Diocletian also ruled with 3 other emperors including Constantine's father. The WRE and ERM are not only split into two entities, but by 4 during Diocletian's time. It was improbable for a land mass the size of the roman empire to be ruled by one single emperor even by Augustinian standards. Constantine tried and still had problems when he unified the empire, Justinian failed miserably and squandered the treasury when he tried to reconquer lost territory. I'm a bit confused here, Augustus, the 5 Good Emperors, and Claudius all did a fine job of managing the gigantic Empire. Do you mean the situation became untenable in the later periods? Also can I safely assume that everyone here loves taking the Byzantines to glory in Total War games?
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Nov 5, 2011 04:17
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Deception posted:You fail to mention that Diocletian also ruled with 3 other emperors including Constantine's father. The WRE and ERM are not only split into two entities, but by 4 during Diocletian's time. It was improbable for a land mass the size of the roman empire to be ruled by one single emperor even by Augustinian standards. Constantine tried and still had problems when he unified the empire, Justinian failed miserably and squandered the treasury when he tried to reconquer lost territory. Ignoring that I find this part of the argument somewhat irrelevant to the latter half of that paragraph, let me try to expand this part further using what I know. The argument I want to say here is, exactly what would make the Roman Empire's landmass impossible to rule well with one emperor? There are, IMO, a few key difficulties in managing such a huge empire. The first among those is defense. A huge landmass means a long border that needs garrisons, a large number of settlements that need defenders, and a myriad of other national security issues. All of these needed money, soldiers and attention from the emperor and imperial officials, something that was not really an issue in Augustan and the early emperors' time - the Roman legion was at its peak, Rome and its coffers were full, and court conspiracies and factionalization were kept in a controllable level. In the late Roman Empire era, not only were those advantages no longer holding - the army was on the decline, the Roman economy failed, the emperors were dying left and right to conspiracies like animals - the barbarian threats at Rome's gate grew stronger. The Goths, for instance, was literally an entire people driven to the sword by destitute and would do anything to survive. The Huns possessed a military doctrine and style unlike anything the Romans had seen before. A combination of those two things meant that the landmass that used to be well-defended previously no longer could be. The second is the sort of power border legions and generals would hold. As discussed above, the larger the landmass, the greater the need for border garrisons. The greater the need for border garrison and the greater the foreign threats, the greater the de facto power the generals outside the court held. Without a scheme to effectively control and curb ambitious generals from just waltzing back into Rome with an army, kick out the emperor and assume the throne for themselves, the emperor's very life would be at stake, a factor that would add a great deal to the unrest factor. See the Year of the Four Emperors for the most typical illustration. In the reign of Augustus or the Four Good Emperors, this was less of an issue, since they were authoritative enough to stop the border legions from having second thoughts. This, again, was hardly the case in the latter reigns. The third, and in my opinion the most important one, is the fact that the authority of a monarch, regardless of time, tends to dissipate with distance from his seat of power. In other words, the further a province is from Rome, the less the power of the emperor mattered. (If you guys are interested, my mother tongue has a saying that goes "The king's law is second to the village rules". Same deal here.) A corollary to this is that the larger the empire, the higher the chance that the furthermost corners of the empire were de facto autonomous to an extent. This, in my opinion, is also the reason why at certain point the empire was so easily split into four parts. Now, contrary to the above, this has also been a source of problems since the earlier periods of the Empire, what with the various revolts at the furthest edges of the Empire, like, for instance, the Semitic Revolts. It only grew worse at the latter time. So that is my reasoning as to why the Roman empire was not unbearably huge to the earlier emperor, and yet posed to be too troublesome to maintain in later reigns. WoodrowSkillson posted:Also can I safely assume that everyone here loves taking the Byzantines to glory in Total War games? Nah. In M2TW, AFAIK, the Byzantine Empire is a huge gamebreaker in the hands of a player who knows what he's doing. Even in the hands of the AI, the Byzes consistently grabs the "Most advanced civilization" title. I guess that is the game giving the ERE its due respect.
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Nov 5, 2011 06:17
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Trouble Man posted:The Roman Empire ended in 1461 - wrap it up Palaiogailures. It died when Constatine died. His death couldn't be more mysterious. It sounds like something straight out of an epic ending to a movie.
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Nov 5, 2011 06:33
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The Roman Empire ended in 1917 with the execution of the last Romanov Emperor. 
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Nov 5, 2011 11:35
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^ You, sir, deserve a cookie. I seriously cracked up But, but, AFAIK a Russian Romanov princess or descendant thereof still survives to this day. Does that mean the Roman Empire is still alive and well?
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Nov 5, 2011 11:42
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Cataphract Paladin posted:^ You, sir, deserve a cookie. I seriously cracked up Yes, in Switzerland. Or Madrid. The leadership of House Romanov is kind of disputed. Surprisingly enough nobody has invited them to take the Russian throne back...
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Nov 5, 2011 12:18
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As much as monarchists would like to say otherwise, I'd just chime in that the Romanov's last years were worse than Gaddafi's reign - an autocracy that doesn't shy away from mass murder to get its point across while the rest of the peasantry starve. Then again, I realize this topic is a sensitive one. Let's walk the other way while we could, no?
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Nov 5, 2011 12:29
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The Houses of Hohenzollern and Habsburg are also alive and well - Habsburgs in particular have been active in European politics. They also consider that since their forefathers never voluntarily abdicated, they are the rightful heirs to the titles of Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary etc. for Habsburgs and Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia etc. for Hohenzollerns. Good luck with making good of those claims, I guess.
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Nov 5, 2011 12:39
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Cataphract Paladin posted:As much as monarchists would like to say otherwise, I'd just chime in that the Romanov's last years were worse than Gaddafi's reign - an autocracy that doesn't shy away from mass murder to get its point across while the rest of the peasantry starve. Sensetive? I thought everyone but the Russian neo-monarchists could agree that a regime which fired field artillery and sent cossack cavalry against unarmed demonstrators was a pretty lovely one - not to mention that unlike the Libyan regime it didn't even pretend to believe in some kind of equality and democracy. E: Hell, during WWI the British and French were real uneasy about cooperating with the Russians, because the country was perceived as an anachronistic tyranny. Also, can we please move away from the spergfest over Byzantine? I realize that some people feel very passionately about this topic, but the last few pages have basically been "Byzantine is the roman empire!" "Is not!" "Is too!" "Is not!" "Is too!" ad nauseum. We've even started skirting some weird ad hominem territory, where the argument is no longer about facts but about the other person's world view. Mr. Sunshine fucked around with this message at 13:00 on Nov 5, 2011 |
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Nov 5, 2011 12:53
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You know, at least this cat-fight made me think of something. Just how did the European powers manage to hold on to their colonies in such a stable way? Most countries ended up losing their colonial land due to revolt, but we're talking about, for example, almost 500 years of colonial Portuguese, English and French states. It amazes me how Empires evolved from barely being able to hold on to territories a hundred kilometers away from them to being able to control over seas lands, very rich lands actually, without anyone saying "you know what? I'm going to take it all to myself." The Persians managed to hold on to their empire through bribes, descentralized organization and acceptance of their multicural holdings. The same could be said about the islamic empires, but the western powers were anything but this. If someone who knows more about this particular situation wants to drop a line or two or thirty I'd appreciate it.
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Nov 5, 2011 13:59
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Brutal loving oppression.
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Nov 5, 2011 14:50
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When the locals couldn't just be wiped out, most of it was just enabling the local elites to keep on oppressing the local poors, with all the benefits of being co-opted into the European colonial system with newer and more efficient organization and resources.
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Nov 5, 2011 14:55
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I was hoping there was more to it than what i knew. There's really nothing positive about the colonial age isn't it?
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Nov 5, 2011 15:04
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