|
Now it's Istanboo.
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 16:41
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 10, 2024 09:41 |
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Not Constantinoboo? Constantinopolis > Stamboul > Istanbul It’s the same name, just mangled a bit.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 16:45
|
|
|
Here I fixed the chart
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 16:45
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Can I be a Byzaboo Mantis42 posted:^Beau-zyntine
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 16:48
|
|
|
Zopotantor posted:Constantinopolis > Stamboul > Istanbul That sounds like it's more the Turk's business than it is mine actually that's neat thanks
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 16:53
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:That sounds like it's more the Turk's business than it is mine I don't think I've ever once said the word constantinople without someone in the room quoting that song
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 16:54
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:That sounds like it's more the Turk's business than it is mine i think you mean The City?
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 16:57
|
|
|
remusclaw posted:So, having reached page 420 I have come to realize I will probably never catch up to this thread, and I will be forever doomed to chase after the current day, unable to make comments or whatnot if I continue on this track. So... This is an interesting question. Late imperial leaders tended to be quite insecure and have a rather poor hold over the political elite, certainly compared to guys like Sulla/Marius/the triumvirate who had everyone under their thumb. They instead spent a lot of time killing government bureaucrats. Imperial notaries like Constantine II’s agent Paulus Catena were dispatched to find people connected to attempted usurpations and purge them. Ammianus says that Paulus was infamous for accusing innocent people the better to liquidate them, and while he makes clear that this was considered excessive and fraudulent behavior (as soon as there was a change of emperor, he was burned alive) it does seem to have been a quite common practice for membership (or attempted membership) in imperial administration (or attempted imperial administration) to open you up to getting killed and having your property seized. As to why the emperors still all had no money, that’s a bit harder question. I guess it may be related that the truly super-rich at this point were the relatively apolitical senatorial families, who were less likely to get in the line of fire, and wealthy because of their huge amounts of land more so than because of anything you can quickly and easily steal.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:00
|
|
|
remusclaw posted:So, having reached page 420 I have come to realize I will probably never catch up to this thread, and I will be forever doomed to chase after the current day, unable to make comments or whatnot if I continue on this track. So... I can think of a lot of changes could relate. Just speculating, but it could be that as the empire decentralized and rich aristocrats retreated to their fortified estates, it was harder to target and rob them than when they were all in Rome jockeying for the consulship. At the same time the rich elite became less politically threatening as power was concentrated in the army, so the Emperor had less interest in making examples of enemies to keep the rest in line. Or as the Imperial bureaucracy became more systematized and professional there less need for such irregular and inconsistent revenue streams.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:05
|
|
|
I assume wealth was more spread out geographically and thus harder to seize in a single purge
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:06
|
|
|
That does make a lot of sense, I hadn't really put two and two together as to how being removed from the day to day governmental process would allow the richer members of society to just remove themselves physically from the inherent threat of being in power. That said, the Emperor at least nominally had control of armies, at least when they could pay them, and I cant imagine a fortified estate is too proof against that. Though of course, the fact that the riches these folk held were in land rather than in coin also answers why it might not have been all that profitable in the first place.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:11
|
|
|
There's a big difference between hiring some thugs to assassinate a guy and steal his stuff and sending in the army to assault a fortified estate. The latter might not even be profitable
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:17
|
|
|
The Legions were also of course, by that point, the cause of and solution to, all of life's problems.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:20
|
|
|
Boozantine- a byzantophile or a spooky Halloween-themed Eastern Empire?
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:28
|
|
|
A Byzantine-themed cocktail.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:34
|
|
|
remusclaw posted:That does make a lot of sense, I hadn't really put two and two together as to how being removed from the day to day governmental process would allow the richer members of society to just remove themselves physically from the inherent threat of being in power. That said, the Emperor at least nominally had control of armies, at least when they could pay them, and I cant imagine a fortified estate is too proof against that. Though of course, the fact that the riches these folk held were in land rather than in coin also answers why it might not have been all that profitable in the first place. Armies tend to be busy with barbarian hordes and pretenders to the purple so sending them to muscle on rich jerks carries an opportunity cost. Also another some other things I just thought of: maybe they didn’t really go away, they were just not as well recorded because our sources get worse. Alternatively they continued, but they just started calling them something different. I remember Emperors still confiscating the property of accused and real rebels in the Byzantine period, but the context has changed a lot so it’s hard to say if it’s just an evolution of the same thing or something completely different.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:40
|
|
|
I wonder how many of the army-elevated emperors and would-be emperors turned corpses heard the news with an "oh gently caress" and a getting their will in order.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:49
|
|
|
Hieronymous Alloy posted:Can I be a Byzaboo Only if you pronounce it so it sounds like "Bees-a-boo"
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:51
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:Boozantine- a byzantophile or a spooky Halloween-themed Eastern Empire?
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:55
|
|
|
Edgar Allen Ho posted:I wonder how many of the army-elevated emperors and would-be emperors turned corpses heard the news with an "oh gently caress" and a getting their will in order. If they didn't have that look to start they did once they saw the treasury. It amazed me how much my attitude toward the Romans changed as The History of Rome Podcast went on, I mean they were an awful people from the start by any modern standard but they still felt worth rooting for at first. Within a couple hundred years of the end of the West it just felt like they deserved everything they got and more. Every problem they had by the end was a direct result of their own success beforehand. Rome screwed Rome.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 17:58
|
|
|
I imagine that the political pushback against seizing wealth would also really muck up the gears of the empire, and you can only storm so many private estates across the entirety of Europe, and only so many emperors even willing to dig into the minutia of how much they could take from who, and trying to prune back a thousand wealthy families is too much to ask.CommonShore posted:I stole this from the bad charts thread and that thread stole it from c-spam It's a neat chart, I guess. I wonder what one of these things would be like if it was anchored to some kind of objective data, like I dunno, divvying up continents by objective measurements of landmass or amount of arable land rather than giving every place other than Europe two or three regions. Width of a culture within a region means...something, but it's not clear what. The chart only really makes contiguous empires look impressive, but the Ottoman Empire gets split up because it didn't have dominion over Poland. I guess Egypt never had influence in East Africa and the Papal States are the same as the Kingdom of Sicily. Armenia is folded into Rome, but briefly independent political splinter-states...don't count? What is this charting exactly? I guess the premise in the first place of putting all the "big name" cultures on a chart like this is flawed from the beginning, since it makes it look like most of the world is totally uninhabited. Germanic peoples in the ancient era are nonexistant, all celts disappeared by 500 BC, Scandinavia straight-up doesn't exist.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 18:00
|
|
|
In the Byzantine era, you had Emperors taking back land to put into the theme system, which made the nobility mad and they would undo it once they asserted control. I suppose the lesson is that if you're going to seize assets, half or quarter measures aren't going to do it. Better to go all the way.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 18:04
|
|
|
remusclaw posted:Rome screwed Rome. I feel about the fall of Rome a lot like how I feel about Game of Thrones. Should I really be that worked up about the downfall of a bunch of terrible aristocrats who couldn't do their one job and got hoisted on their own petard? Especially when so many social institutions remained intact, and so many of the non-ruling class saw little change.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 18:41
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:I feel about the fall of Rome a lot like how I feel about Game of Thrones. Should I really be that worked up about the downfall of a bunch of terrible aristocrats who couldn't do their one job and got hoisted on their own petard? Yeah, a lot of the way it felt has to do with the inevitable focus on the "Great Men" that any historical narrative makes, if only due to a lack of sources on everyone else. The best episodes of the podcast are probably the ones where he went out of the way to focus on the lives of people in the empire at a particular time. An apocalyptic feel starts to set in as these viewpoint characters keeps seeing setback after setback while everyone else just keeps on keeping on in general.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 18:46
|
|
|
Off topic but since I've also seen it in other threads once or twice; what's wrong with the term 'Byzantine'? I don't really know that much about the Eastern Roman empire/Byzantine/whatever at all (obviously).
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 19:36
|
|
|
big dyke energy posted:Off topic but since I've also seen it in other threads once or twice; what's wrong with the term 'Byzantine'? I don't really know that much about the Eastern Roman empire/Byzantine/whatever at all (obviously). Nobody at the time called it byzantine. It was the Roman Empire to everybody at the time. The term was invented later to clarify that you're talking about the part of the timeline after it lost the western half of the empire. The term is derived from Byzantium, the name of the city before it was called Constantinople, which is kind of a dumb thing to call it imo even if I agree in principle that a shorthand name is handy
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 19:39
|
|
|
big dyke energy posted:Off topic but since I've also seen it in other threads once or twice; what's wrong with the term 'Byzantine'? I don't really know that much about the Eastern Roman empire/Byzantine/whatever at all (obviously). It was invented by Germans in relatively recent times specifically to denigrate the east and support the Holy Roman Emperor's claim to be the actual Roman Empire. The Romans continued calling themselves Romanoi until after 1453, with pockets retaining Romanoi identity into the 20th century, and they called their state Romania. Calling them anything else would get your envoys booted out of Constantinople. In the 1400s they became so desperate for help that they offered to give up the title of Romans and allow the west to call them Greeks in exchange for military aid against the Turks. That was an enormous reversal of policy, as up to that point "Greek" was used exclusively as an insult and the Romans took it as such.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 19:44
|
|
|
I thought that calling themselves Greeks came into fashion during the Latin empire, out of a sentiment of "if that French guy is the Roman emperor, I don't want to be Roman"
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 19:50
|
|
|
There were people calling themselves "rhomaioi" into the 20th century.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 19:54
|
|
|
i made friends with a turkish dude who spoke no English in a youth hostel a few years ago and when i tried to talk about myself i ended up pointing at my chest and yelling "rum!" for a while
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 20:03
|
|
|
Any good academic is like 90% booze so you are not wrong.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 20:08
|
|
|
Squalid posted:I started trying to explain the forces controlling dispersal across islands but it started turning into an unwieldy rant of my own summarizing all of island biogeography. Sorry just saw this, yeah I think we sorta agree with each other on this but the arguments just kinda got unwieldy. I totally argee about the increasing scale of difficulty as distances increase.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 20:11
|
|
|
HEY GUNS posted:i made friends with a turkish dude who spoke no English in a youth hostel a few years ago and when i tried to talk about myself i ended up pointing at my chest and yelling "rum!" for a while We had a turkish dude as a foreign exchange in high school my junior year He joined our dumbass edgy band kid nerd group, but one day everyone was making jokes about the song, and him being from Istanbul, he went "I don't like when you call it "Constantinople" with this icy death glare I never saw before or after. We stopped We all drank rum shortly after that, dunno if it helped
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 20:15
|
|
|
If there's anything I learned in my semester of art history, the Romans produced a lot of great art while the Byzantines produced a bunch of garbage, so I think the distinction is warranted.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 20:55
|
|
|
big dyke energy posted:Off topic but since I've also seen it in other threads once or twice; what's wrong with the term 'Byzantine'? I don't really know that much about the Eastern Roman empire/Byzantine/whatever at all (obviously). Just a term used to separate the change over to a Constantinople focused empire. I'd argue the hard break point for that change over being the assassination of Maurice. As he was the last emperor to hold court in Latin and the decades of war to come afterwards would fundamentally change the empire both culturally and geographically. Even after the persian/arab conflicts they the "Byzantines" and other peoples would refer to them as Rome proper however eventually this got downgraded to Kingdom of the Romans some centuries later. Though they themselves held onto the Rome title for as long as possible maybe up into the mid 1300's? Been awhile since I've done reading on that era.
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 23:00
|
|
|
Did the contemporary Western Europeans ever stop referring to the ERE as Romans? Like I know that to them and the people around them, they were just the Romans, but I could totally see a Western monk in like 1100 saying "um actually those are Greeks they're definitely not Romans"
|
|
#
?
Oct 3, 2018 23:59
|
|
|
Elyv posted:Did the contemporary Western Europeans ever stop referring to the ERE as Romans? Like I know that to them and the people around them, they were just the Romans, but I could totally see a Western monk in like 1100 saying "um actually those are Greeks they're definitely not Romans" Yes and it was a big bone of contention. The starting point is when a bunch of illiterate Germans with large knives decided to "restore" an Empire that never fell because they were puppets of a greedy bishop of some backwater town that hadn't been the capital of anything for 500 years.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2018 00:23
|
|
|
Calling it the Greek empire would make more sense than calling it the byzantine empire
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2018 00:26
|
|
|
Elyv posted:Did the contemporary Western Europeans ever stop referring to the ERE as Romans? Like I know that to them and the people around them, they were just the Romans, but I could totally see a Western monk in like 1100 saying "um actually those are Greeks they're definitely not Romans" They frequently called them the Greeks or the Kingdom of the Greeks. At least one western diplomatic mission is recorded as being thrown out of Constantinople because the letter they brought referred to the emperor as King of the Greeks and he immediately told them to get the gently caress out.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2018 00:40
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 10, 2024 09:41 |
|
|
For the purposes of history, there has been a state calling itself Rome for over 2000 years, a sometimes more than one. It seems fair to divvy up periods of history into big chunks with easily recognizable terms. For the purposes of nationalism, which is what a lot of history-teaching is about, especially at the high school level, there's the contention that the Rome of Tsarigrad wasn't the Rome that most of Europe west of the Balkans traces itself back to. Although there's always something to argue about with nationalism, and the entire concept is all about puffing up your history to look as big and mean as possible like a cat getting into a fight. There's a lot of dipping in and out of the name for the slab of land, the name for the people, the name of the religion, and honorifics/prestige going on. Turns out that a couple of millennia of talking about what hot poo poo Rome is leaves a certain amount of ambiguity.
|
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2018 00:50
|
|