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Stilicho didn't get axed until 408, and before that he wasn't necessarily going to be. Just because it did happen doesn't mean it was the only possibility. The empire had been in bad places before.
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Nov 10, 2016 00:35
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Is there a point, then, in any history, where we can find a state in decline?
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Nov 10, 2016 00:43
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Arglebargle III posted:Is there a point, then, in any history, where we can find a state in decline? The Something Awful forums in 2016.
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Nov 10, 2016 00:43
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Chichevache posted:The Something Awful forums in 2016. Ironically, because Lowtax prioritizes principles over cash Otherwise he'd be filling up on that sweet sweet hillary toxx money
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Nov 10, 2016 00:47
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Arglebargle III posted:That's an interesting perspective. So you take the Western Roman Empire in the year 400. You can't point to that as a state in decline? Depends on who you are. If you're some guy trying to move out of Germania and into some abandoned corner of Gaul due to a combination of population pressure and your rear end in a top hat neighbors, your world is expanding and getting more complex.
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Nov 10, 2016 00:54
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Arglebargle III posted:Is there a point, then, in any history, where we can find a state in decline? History doesn't repeat itself.
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Nov 10, 2016 00:57
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Cyrano4747 posted:Depends on who you are. If you're some guy trying to move out of Germania and into some abandoned corner of Gaul due to a combination of population pressure and your rear end in a top hat neighbors, your world is expanding and getting more complex.
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Nov 10, 2016 01:05
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HEY GAL posted:since the vast majority of the dead were civilians (and many of those were children), it's probably about 50:50 by sex I thought targeted extermination of adult men of the wrong religion and "just" raping the women was common during sacking of villages?
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Nov 10, 2016 01:53
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Friendly Humour posted:I thought targeted extermination of adult men of the wrong religion and "just" raping the women was common during sacking of villages? no. nobody cares what religion a civilian follows once you're inside the city, either. flippancy aside, almost everyone who died as a result of that war died from disease or food disruption, not the direct effects of fighting. this isn't like 20th century war, which cover vast areas--if you are not where an army is at the moment (and armies are pretty small compared to later) you might never see hostilities. your economy will suffer though, and your ability to eat, and you might get sick. hell, you might get sick because an army you will never see was a disease vector into your area. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Nov 10, 2016 |
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Nov 10, 2016 01:56
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Stop owning me. But thanks.
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Nov 10, 2016 01:57
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Friendly Humour posted:Stop owning me.
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Nov 10, 2016 01:58
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Cyrano4747 posted:Depends on who you are. If you're some guy trying to move out of Germania and into some abandoned corner of Gaul due to a combination of population pressure and your rear end in a top hat neighbors, your world is expanding and getting more complex. This doesn't so much move the goalposts as erect a completely new set of goalposts and triumphantly kick the ball through them. Nobody asked about spooky scary barbarians going völkerwanderung, they're talking about the Roman Empire, conceived of as a state with a government. One can make the case that the western empire was doing okay in 400, but to make the same claim about 450 is to my mind fatuous. In 400 the Roman government controlled Italy, Britain, Africa, Spain, and Gaul. In 450 the only one of these areas that the government firmly controlled the entirety of was Italy. They had no effective control in Africa or Britain, while Spain and Gaul were both nominally under their power but increasingly dominated by regional interests that the central government did not have the bureaucratic, military, or political force to effectively manage. The fact that there was a considerable degree of continuity between Roman Africa, Spain, and Gaul (Britain a bit less so) and sub-Roman Africa, Spain, and Gaul, doesn't fundamentally change the fact that the state at one point controlled those territories and it then ceased to do so. Fact is, the extent of the territories the western Roman government controlled declined, and this coincided with a decline in its ability to deploy armies, a decline in its ability to collect and spend tax, and a decline in its perceived legitimacy and importance. The fact that this decline would turn out to be terminal wasn't a fait accompli but that doesn't mean it was any less of a decline.
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Nov 10, 2016 02:05
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skasion posted:This doesn't so much move the goalposts as erect a completely new set of goalposts and triumphantly kick the ball through them. Nobody asked about spooky scary barbarians going völkerwanderung, they're talking about the Roman Empire, conceived of as a state with a government. One can make the case that the western empire was doing okay in 400, but to make the same claim about 450 is to my mind fatuous. In 400 the Roman government controlled Italy, Britain, Africa, Spain, and Gaul. In 450 the only one of these areas that the government firmly controlled the entirety of was Italy. They had no effective control in Africa or Britain, while Spain and Gaul were both nominally under their power but increasingly dominated by regional interests that the central government did not have the bureaucratic, military, or political force to effectively manage. The fact that there was a considerable degree of continuity between Roman Africa, Spain, and Gaul (Britain a bit less so) and sub-Roman Africa, Spain, and Gaul, doesn't fundamentally change the fact that the state at one point controlled those territories and it then ceased to do so. Fact is, the extent of the territories the western Roman government controlled declined, and this coincided with a decline in its ability to deploy armies, a decline in its ability to collect and spend tax, and a decline in its perceived legitimacy and importance. The fact that this decline would turn out to be terminal wasn't a fait accompli but that doesn't mean it was any less of a decline. history isn't a civ game
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Nov 10, 2016 02:09
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I think the point is that the Roman Empire's political power and ability to project force and so forth was diminished, but I guess that's maybe not the same as saying the empire Elyv fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Nov 10, 2016 |
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Nov 10, 2016 02:11
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it is unless you get off on being needlessly smug
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Nov 10, 2016 02:13
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Hogge Wild posted:history isn't a civ game bizarre response frankly. It's not like I'm saying they had 1000 less military points in AD 450 or someshit, it's a matter of historical record that the Roman government ceased to control territories and reserve powers that it formerly controlled and reserved, and this process continued until it came around to controlling nothing at all and other, more or less related powers replaced their government. If you don't consider this a decline in the power of a state then I don't know what you would consider a decline.
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Nov 10, 2016 02:25
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I would agree that the elites wholesale deciding to loot the place for their benefit at the expense of the state is a good sign that things are lovely. It's not necessarily unrecoverable at that point but it's a symptom of serious problems. As for the western empire's decline I think there's a communications issue here. The Romans as a society were not in decline, but the empire certainly fell apart in the west. There's no real way to argue that, since there stopped being a Roman Empire in the west at some point. There were a slew of new states picking up the pieces and in large part continuing the same culture and many of the same traditions and legal institutions and whatnot, but the empire did not survive. The elite power base of the Roman state started an abandonment of the western empire when they divided it and moved the important administration to Constantinople and it ended post-Justinian when the empire said "welp, good luck have fun" and pulled out of their reconquests. None of this was necessarily based on bad decisions, either.
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Nov 10, 2016 02:29
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as a proud citizen of Ur I believe that statehood is intangible and that the delineation of history was a mistake that muddies our understanding of the human condition.
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Nov 10, 2016 02:37
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Arglebargle III posted:Is there a point, then, in any history, where we can find a state in decline? What criteria defines "decline"? If I can try to restate what I think is being argued -- we could probably come up with a lot of different criteria and find examples from history which vindicate each of them. But those are criteria we invented and we're agreeing to call "decline" based on our own concerns, not the expression of some impersonal Law Of History which says that these criteria mean "Rise" and these other ones mean "Decline".
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Nov 10, 2016 03:02
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How do you win History?
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Nov 10, 2016 03:38
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:How do you win History? you have to keep things interesting enough that god doesn't get bored and turn the game off
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Nov 10, 2016 03:42
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:How do you win History? Be a Great Man and conquer some place and kill a bunch of people directly or indirectly.
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Nov 10, 2016 05:06
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:How do you win History? Write it.
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Nov 10, 2016 05:11
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I don't know, I think moderns from the Anglophone West could come up with a set of criteria that define states doing well and states doing poorly and agree on most of them without even comparing notes beforehand.
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Nov 10, 2016 05:33
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I'd say the best ancient Roman parallel to what just happened in the USA is the ascension of Maximinus Thrax, and that totally worked out fine.
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Nov 10, 2016 05:48
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You can take either the division or continuum arguments to a ridiculous degree either way. You can make a reasonable argument that the majority of the planet today is Roman if you really want to, but there's no utility to that way of thought. The Roman Empire ending in the west is a big break point that changes a lot of things, and there's also a lot of continuity. It's best to narrow to specific topics. The church? Nothing really changes. International trade? Huge changes. State structures? Depends which state. On and on.
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Nov 10, 2016 05:49
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so when did it transition from Rome (what's left) to the Italian city states.... or whatever? come to think of it, i don't really hear a lot about that phase of history for the Italian peninsula
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Nov 10, 2016 05:52
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Italy's complicated. At first it's all a Germanic kingdom, then the Romans show back up and reconquer most of Italy, then they gently caress back off to the east and leave in place local governments. This is where you get the best named country, the Exarchate of Ravenna. None of these do very well or last for long. The major Roman cities form the core of the new city-states, though in some cases like Venice this happens when people abandon the old city and start a new one. Writing this out I've realized I don't really know any details of how the transition happened either.
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Nov 10, 2016 06:06
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Roman Italy got reorganized into the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy (early to mid 6th century), which then got the absolute poo poo kicked out of it by the Byzantine wars under Justinian. Completely apocalyptic economic disruption/infrastructural failure to say nothing of a whole bunch of people getting killed by violence and plague. Byzantines more or less won but the relative power vacuum led to invasions by the Franks, which failed, and the Lombards, which didn't. Byzantines retained some territory in the peninsula but most of it was reorganized into duchies under the Lombard kingdom (mid 6th to late 8th century). The northern half of Lombard kingdom eventually fell under the rule of Charlemagne and was passed down among the Carolingians (except for some bits which Charlemagne gave to the popes), while the southern half had a few Byzantine enclaves and a Lombard successor state. When the Carolingians petered out (late 9th century) there was no firm leadership of the whole peninsula and power struggle between local feudal leaders, popes, and holy Roman emperors began. The cities also had recovered from the devastation of past centuries and grew to dominate a lot of Mediterranean trade. That wealth & accompanying political organization led the city-states to become the primary political unit for a bit although power struggle with the emperors continued all through the High Middle Ages. This is a really short version of 500+ years of pretty complex and not super well attested history that mostly ignores the influence of the emirs of Sicily/later Norman conquest which was a big deal but I don't know poo poo all about it. The really really short version is that Italy got seriously hosed up post Roman rule, nobody could ever be bothered to completely conquer the whole peninsula, and for quite a while it was ruled from France/Germany which encouraged development of a lot of small local powers rather than a central state.
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Nov 10, 2016 06:32
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I also think sometimes the idea that Italy was unique is overstated. Throughout the middle ages really all of Europe is organized around small city/county level governments that have a great deal of autonomy, it's just that in Italy there was no single king or Holy Roman Emperor able to gain the fealty of all these local governments, unlike France or the HRE or wherever. But when we call the French king's domains in 1100 "France" we're kind of being anachronistic. Italy did maintain a distinct republican tradition though. I don't believe there were any republics outside Italy until late middle ages/early modernish times.
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Nov 10, 2016 06:40
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thanks for the rundown
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Nov 10, 2016 06:42
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That's sort of the time period where the narrative most people follow splits away from Italy and Rome and people follow their own respective countries so that they can join up with national mythmaking. After the western roman empire is "over" so many people lose interest in the area, and it's much less complicated to not work out what all these Germans were doing tromping about the peninsula. I imagine even the Italians might downplay that part of their history in favor of further down the line when some of the renaissance stuff starts happening. It's weird to start thinking of the narratives that were being written into history books, but once I start, it just explains so much about how I learned what I learned.
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Nov 10, 2016 07:02
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Grand Fromage posted:Italy's complicated. At first it's all a Germanic kingdom, then the Romans show back up and reconquer most of Italy, then they gently caress back off to the east and leave in place local governments. This is where you get the best named country, the Exarchate of Ravenna. None of these do very well or last for long. The major Roman cities form the core of the new city-states, though in some cases like Venice this happens when people abandon the old city and start a new one. Writing this out I've realized I don't really know any details of how the transition happened either. Didn't one of the Italian cities continue to have its own Roman-style senate for a number of years before/up to the formation of the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy? I can't remember if this existed or not but I'm pretty sure it did at some point around that time.
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Nov 10, 2016 07:15
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RZApublican posted:Didn't one of the Italian cities continue to have its own Roman-style senate for a number of years before/up to the formation of the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy? I can't remember if this existed or not but I'm pretty sure it did at some point around that time. Yeah it was called Rome.  No one knows when the Senate stopped meeting but it continued into the 600s for sure and probably/maybe the 700s?
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Nov 10, 2016 07:45
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah it was called Rome. Yeah that was a kind of a dumb question It does raise the question though about what the post-empire senate did though. Did they try to assert pointless and impossible power over what would have been the empire or did they just run what consisted of the city and whatever territory it controlled around it.
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Nov 10, 2016 07:51
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I've always pictured it as a bunch of angry old men getting together in the senate house to drink and complain about kids these days wearing pants and walking around with mustaches. I have no idea if they exercised any authority. If they did it wouldn't have gone beyond the city.
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Nov 10, 2016 07:53
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HEY GAL posted:i think some poster here said that the only place you can really see the western empire "falling" is britain, with the pullout. everywhere else it looks like a transition from one thing to another, and the new thing retains a lot of elements of the old I recently watched a TV docco with Francis Pryor and it seems like current research is going more towards the "the pullout wasn't all that" since at the time, most of the Roman soldiers and dudes in Britain were locals who didn't go anywhere. The Hadrian's Wall forts keep being manned for a long while after the pullout. Local authority became a thing, probs.
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Nov 10, 2016 09:15
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Grand Fromage posted:Italy did maintain a distinct republican tradition though. I don't believe there were any republics outside Italy until late middle ages/early modernish times. There were a few other medieval republics of various sorts. Pskov and Novgorod in Russia, before the rise of Moscow. Germany had self-governing cities that were effectively republican, though they theoretically answered to the Emperor. There's Switzerland, of course. And there's Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in southern Croatia, that survived the middle ages, becoming an Ottoman subject until Napoleon finished it off - though admittedly, it was as much Italian as anything else, despite its Balkan location.
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Nov 10, 2016 11:04
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Italian history between Theodoric and Charlemagne is incredibly interesting! The Romans reconquered the Italian peninsula and ruled the good parts of it uncontested for nearly 200 years. They did this through two ways: the temporal authority of the Exarch of Ravenna, and the spiritual authority of the Pope. Both were directly appointed by the Emperor in Constantinople. Remember that the last addition to the forum in Rome, a monument bearing a Latin inscription honoring a Roman Emperor, was dedicated in 608, and that the Senate was meeting and doing stuff around that time as well.
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Nov 10, 2016 11:33
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Angry Salami posted:There were a few other medieval republics of various sorts. Pskov and Novgorod in Russia, before the rise of Moscow. Germany had self-governing cities that were effectively republican, though they theoretically answered to the Emperor. There's Switzerland, of course. And there's Ragusa (Dubrovnik) in southern Croatia, that survived the middle ages, becoming an Ottoman subject until Napoleon finished it off - though admittedly, it was as much Italian as anything else, despite its Balkan location. Also, Iceland.
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Nov 10, 2016 15:03
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