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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. many of the wealthy essentially transitioned to a proto-medieval economy after the crisis of the third century, where they retreated into rural self-sufficient manor estates. long before deurbanization hit the west, the wealthy were already removed from the broader economy to some extent. the late imperial economy was also relatively rigidly managed by the state, and not always very well. the late republic/augustan norms of wealthy urban aristocrats who spent heavily on infrastructure and politics to gain power were mostly gone for centuries before the western empire fell.
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Oct 4, 2018 01:05
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What exactly was the interplay between people who were just individually wealthy and had "private" control over a bunch of land and official, political control? Was there a point where the wealthy started to either be able to buy or schmooze their way into official titles? Because I thought Diocletian tried to avoid that sort of thing. Also, how did the Papacy wind up seated in Rome after the city had been politically irrelevant for centuries? Did Charlemagne just want northern Italy for himself, or did the Pope prefer Rome to Milan?
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Oct 4, 2018 01:49
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:There were people calling themselves "rhomaioi" into the 20th century. Grand Fromage posted:with pockets retaining Romanoi identity into the 20th century, Is this actually true? Isn't there just one relatively biased source which claims that?
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Oct 4, 2018 01:50
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SlothfulCobra posted:What exactly was the interplay between people who were just individually wealthy and had "private" control over a bunch of land and official, political control? Was there a point where the wealthy started to either be able to buy or schmooze their way into official titles? Because I thought Diocletian tried to avoid that sort of thing. "The Papacy" wasn't a formal institution until around the eleventh century. He was the bishop of Rome, which carried extra weight but the office couldn't have been moved because it was tied to the location
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Oct 4, 2018 01:51
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SlothfulCobra posted:Also, how did the Papacy wind up seated in Rome after the city had been politically irrelevant for centuries? Did Charlemagne just want northern Italy for himself, or did the Pope prefer Rome to Milan? The pope is, by definition the Patriarch and Bishop of Rome. That's what makes you Pope. It doesn't mean the Papacy was always in Rome....the Popes were in Avignon for a while, when political control of the Papacy by the French and unrest in Rome made it unsafe for the Pope to be there, but that was the title that gave the Pope legitimacy.
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Oct 4, 2018 02:00
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SlothfulCobra posted:What exactly was the interplay between people who were just individually wealthy and had "private" control over a bunch of land and official, political control? Was there a point where the wealthy started to either be able to buy or schmooze their way into official titles? Because I thought Diocletian tried to avoid that sort of thing. There were large imperial tracts of land that only got larger as personal properties were confiscated through various excuses like non-payment of taxes and treason. In the West, these helped the growth of feudalism because the "barbarians" took over imperial authority and redistributed those many acres of government property to their buddies, who were then indebted to them in a variety of ways.
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Oct 4, 2018 04:14
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Beamed posted:Is this actually true? Isn't there just one relatively biased source which claims that? Well Roman was for a long time just the word the Ottoman's used to refer to any Greek Orthodox peoples within their empire, and Roum was one of the names the Arabic speaking Christians used for their communities in the Levant. Of course they also called themselves other things, like Melkite, which complicates the picture. These terms only started changing with the end of the Ottoman Empire and the popularization of Arab nationalism so I'm pretty sure it stayed in use into the 20th century, I wouldn't be surprised if the term is still used today in certain contexts to refer to Christians in the Muslim world. Also while double checking some things on wikipedia for this post I found this amusing bit of speculation on the modern successors to the legacy of Rome, courtesy of Islamic eschatology: quote:There are differing opinions among Islamic scholars regarding the identity of Rûm in the modern day. Various books have been written on the topic and the relevance of the identity of Rûm in Islamic eschatology caused much debate to take place regarding the issue.[citation needed]
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Oct 4, 2018 05:31
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Beamed posted:Is this actually true? Isn't there just one relatively biased source which claims that? There's one source I know of offhand. I have no reason to think he's a liar. The idea that Roman identity could survive 500 years in relatively isolated islands isn't much of a stretch. There are remnants of Magna Graecia in the southern tip of Italy to this day and that identity is well over two thousand years old. Still people calling themselves Assyrians, etc.
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Oct 4, 2018 05:39
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Can any of y’all recommend any interesting books or articles on the Late Western Roman Empire (extremely late, like 4th and 5th centuries) and/or the process of “deurbanization” that decimated the great cities of classical antiquity? I know a lot of that deurbanization occurred as a result of the crisis of the 3rd century, but I’m really interested in the fates of the cities afterwards too.
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Oct 4, 2018 06:56
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:We had a turkish dude as a foreign exchange in high school my junior year this guy was cool. we communicated by typing poo poo into google translate and hitting the translate button, and yelling a lot.
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Oct 4, 2018 07:18
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Delthalaz posted:Can any of y’all recommend any interesting books or articles on the Late Western Roman Empire (extremely late, like 4th and 5th centuries) and/or the process of “deurbanization” that decimated the great cities of classical antiquity? I know a lot of that deurbanization occurred as a result of the crisis of the 3rd century, but I’m really interested in the fates of the cities afterwards too. What im curious about is, why didnt the same thing seem to happen in the east? Or did it also happen in the east?
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Oct 4, 2018 17:02
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Cities in the east were older, bigger, more numerous and often less exposed to violence and the absence of state power (in the two centuries following the Gothic war in the Balkans, the western empire lost all of its territory and ceased to exist, while the eastern empire lost only a small slice of territory in the upper Balkans). The only city of any particular size or antiquity in the west besides Rome was Carthage. There were couple of third-tier cities in Italy and Spain and maybe in France, but absolutely nothing along the lines of the major Hellenistic cities like Alexandria and Antioch in the east. The west did not exactly “deurbanize” because it was only ever slightly urbanized in antiquity; I don’t think you could say there was a really big city there other than Rome or Carthage until Córdoba under the Umayyads. I recommend reading Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome, Framing the Early Middle Ages, and/or Medieval Europe about these sorts of topics.
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Oct 4, 2018 17:32
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The Byzantine empire definitely started to deurbanize later on. The Sasanids sacked Antioch and a bunch of other cities in the east, the Avars and Slavs hit the balkans and finally the Arabs swooped in. My understanding is that by 700s they didn't have any large cities besides Constantinople.
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Oct 4, 2018 17:45
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Antioch got especially hosed because Khosro deliberately deported its population to Khosro’s Better-Than-Antioch. Alexandria was still a very big city when it was conquered though, and afterwards for that matter — not as big as at its height, and definitely not as big as Constantinople or even Rome, but bigger than any other city in the eastern Empire.
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Oct 4, 2018 18:04
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I mean, everywhere got deurbanized to some degree after Justinian's Plague.
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Oct 4, 2018 19:30
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Dalael posted:What im curious about is, why didnt the same thing seem to happen in the east? Or did it also happen in the east? In addition to the posts already made, cities require a huge amount of infrastructure to maintain. Large cities can't feed themselves and need trade networks to get their food supplies. They also need functional aqueducts for water, sewers are great if you can dig them, etc. Also, in antiquity cities required constant immigration. We only have really good stats for Rome, but their death rate was much higher than the birth rate (mostly due to disease, which is much more common in cities for obvious reasons) and so there was a constant influx of people maintaining the population. All of these systems failed in the west. In the east, they did not since the government remained functional. You start to see hollowing out of eastern cities after the Arab conquests as they lose access to things like the Egyptian grain ships, but even then it's not as severe since the system, stressed as it was, remained functional. Constantinople shrinks but still remains the biggest city in Europe by a huge margin until the Fourth Crusade wrecks the place. Thessalonica was the other big city of the east after the Arab conquests lost places like Antioch and Alexandria.
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Oct 4, 2018 19:56
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Somewhere is a better alternate universe where the Fourth Crusade doesn't happen, the Ottomans are somehow held off, and Constantinople never falls to foreign invasion. The people recognize the value of their history and preserve everything within the original walls, and today you can go visit the last completely intact, preserved city from antiquity.
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Oct 4, 2018 20:06
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somewhere a white supremacist just got a boner
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Oct 4, 2018 20:11
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Grand Fromage posted:In addition to the posts already made, cities require a huge amount of infrastructure to maintain. Large cities can't feed themselves and need trade networks to get their food supplies. They also need functional aqueducts for water, sewers are great if you can dig them, etc. Also, in antiquity cities required constant immigration. We only have really good stats for Rome, but their death rate was much higher than the birth rate (mostly due to disease, which is much more common in cities for obvious reasons) and so there was a constant influx of people maintaining the population. The Ottomans loved poaching engineers from Serbian cities they conquered after the fall of Constantinople, just in case they knew something important about maintaining Constantinople's infrastructure.
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Oct 4, 2018 20:15
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peer posted:somewhere a white supremacist just got a boner and a thousand grey wolves had a flash of indescribable anger
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Oct 4, 2018 20:15
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I like how modern Istanbul is a mixture of modern and ancient. Could do with a higher percentage of ancient though
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Oct 4, 2018 20:16
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peer posted:somewhere a white supremacist just got a boner Venetians are white and it's their fault, so.
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Oct 4, 2018 20:17
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A lovely as the Fourth Crusade was, nobody ever talks about the massacre of the Latins. Also the Byzantines had been complete dicks to the crusaders for the past century.
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Oct 4, 2018 20:31
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peer posted:somewhere a white supremacist just got a boner get the gently caress out of here with that poo poo
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Oct 4, 2018 20:32
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OctaviusBeaver posted:A lovely as the Fourth Crusade was, nobody ever talks about the massacre of the Latins. Also the Byzantines had been complete dicks to the crusaders for the past century. Yeah both sides were huge dicks, there's nobody good in the story. Anthony Kaldellis also makes a solid argument that the root problem was the Crusaders and the Romans had very different, incompatible views about the First Crusade. The Roman emperor viewed it as foreign mercenaries sent under Roman command to retake Roman territory, much like they had been hiring assorted barbarians like Bulgarians and Avars and whatnot for centuries. The Crusaders thought they were on holy war under their own command and the Romans were not helping/trying to take control of the crusade and force it to their political ends. The disagreements during that started the bad blood between the two sides that would continue getting worse until the culmination in the Fourth Crusade and the struggle between the Latin Empire and the remaining Roman court in exile.
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Oct 4, 2018 20:48
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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). To me it reeks a bit of a very western-euro-centric historic narrative. Western civ narratives generally focus heavily on Rome up until around the time the west half collapses. While the remaining east gets largely ignored. It's why in casual conversation you have people running around talking about the fall of Rome as strictly the end of the western half. Then the narrative shifts toward Charlemagne, and it gradually becomes the history of Catholic/Protestant Europe = Western civilization henceforth. Using Byzantine just keeps contributing to the idea that the eastern empire was something else other than Rome, or it was a pseudo Rome. And contributes to this marginalization of eastern european and middle eastern history even though they are closely and directly connected to developments that made "the west".
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Oct 4, 2018 21:11
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Grand Fromage posted: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. cheetah7071 posted: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" Greeks were calling themselves Romans (and being called that by their Muslim neighbors) until pretty much modern Greek nationalism, just not by western Europeans (similar to the Persia/Iran thing). With nationalism "Hellenes" and "Greeks" picked up steam instead for their connections to the big glorious antiquity stuff. OctaviusBeaver posted:Also the Byzantines had been complete dicks to the crusaders for the past century. Imagine being a dick to invading bloodthirsty shitheads who see you as worthless heretics. Talk about rude. Grape fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Oct 4, 2018 |
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Oct 4, 2018 21:14
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Is there any decent reading to be done on the history of Rome, the city, from the fall of the west up until it's later reemergence as either a church headquarters or as part of the general Italian renaissance?
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Oct 4, 2018 21:36
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OctaviusBeaver posted:A lovely as the Fourth Crusade was, nobody ever talks about the massacre of the Latins. Also the Byzantines had been complete dicks to the crusaders for the past century. I don't think thats entirely accurate. The Byzantines and the crusaders had disagreements but they also cooperated. The peace treaty between the crusaders & the Arab states fell apart because of the crusaders, and the Byzantines were allied with the crusaders until like, the 1190s.
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Oct 4, 2018 21:39
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remusclaw posted:Is there any decent reading to be done on the history of Rome, the city, from the fall of the west up until it's later reemergence as either a church headquarters or as part of the general Italian renaissance? It never really had a point where it wasn't a church headquarters in that time span, to my understanding. They even had the old aristocrats still meeting in the senate till the 600s, if I'm remembering right.
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Oct 4, 2018 21:42
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Until around 1000 the pope was merely the most important western bishop, rather than their boss and leader though so I dunno about church headquarters
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Oct 4, 2018 21:43
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:It never really had a point where it wasn't a church headquarters in that time span, to my understanding. They even had the old aristocrats still meeting in the senate till the 600s, if I'm remembering right. I was thinking more, it's emergence as The Headquarters of the Church in general. I remember hearing anecdotes about people of the "Dark Ages" camping out in Roman monuments and speculating on the giants who must have lived there. That sounds real hyperbolic to me, but I don't know.
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Oct 4, 2018 21:46
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ThatBasqueGuy posted:It never really had a point where it wasn't a church headquarters in that time span, to my understanding. They even had the old aristocrats still meeting in the senate till the 600s, if I'm remembering right. Yep. It continues declining, and after the Plague of Justinian we think Rome maybe had twenty thousand people left and stays about that size for a while. The Pope is not completely the Pope yet, but Rome was always one of the five most important patriarchs along with Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. Rome, being the only one of those in the west, naturally slid into the role of the western opposition to the eastern church once the two started drifting apart and fighting over who would be in charge.
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Oct 4, 2018 21:57
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remusclaw posted:I was thinking more, it's emergence as The Headquarters of the Church in general. I remember hearing anecdotes about people of the "Dark Ages" camping out in Roman monuments and speculating on the giants who must have lived there. That sounds real hyperbolic to me, but I don't know. A stock poetic way of referring to Roman ruins in Anglo-Saxon was ”eald/orþanc enta geweorc”, that is “old/cunning giants’ work”. I doubt anyone actually from Rome would have used a like turn of phrase though.
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Oct 4, 2018 21:58
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skasion posted:Cities in the east were older, bigger, more numerous and often less exposed to violence and the absence of state power (in the two centuries following the Gothic war in the Balkans, the western empire lost all of its territory and ceased to exist, while the eastern empire lost only a small slice of territory in the upper Balkans). The only city of any particular size or antiquity in the west besides Rome was Carthage. There were couple of third-tier cities in Italy and Spain and maybe in France, but absolutely nothing along the lines of the major Hellenistic cities like Alexandria and Antioch in the east. The west did not exactly “deurbanize” because it was only ever slightly urbanized in antiquity; I don’t think you could say there was a really big city there other than Rome or Carthage until Córdoba under the Umayyads. Thanks, I’ll check one of these out. Could you also recommend anything that focuses on the ~4th to 5th century Western Roman Empire itself?
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Oct 4, 2018 21:59
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The first book of Inheritance of Rome is all about that; Guy Halsall’s book Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568 is very good as well although, obviously, focused on the effect of the rise of barbarianness more than other factors.
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Oct 4, 2018 22:03
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skasion posted:The first book of Inheritance of Rome is all about that; Guy Halsall’s book Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568 is very good as well although, obviously, focused on the effect of the rise of barbarianness more than other factors. Cool I’ll check out that first one then. Ok, one last topic- I’ve never read a really compelling treatment of the crisis of the 3rd century, it’s effects and repercussions, it’s resolution with Diocletian etc. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
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Oct 4, 2018 22:16
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Grape posted:To me it reeks a bit of a very western-euro-centric historic narrative. Western civ narratives generally focus heavily on Rome up until around the time the west half collapses. While the remaining east gets largely ignored. It's why in casual conversation you have people running around talking about the fall of Rome as strictly the end of the western half. What does that mean, though? In the context the history of western Europe, the empire post-Lombards is a very distinct entity from the Rome that features in their histories. The Rome that ruled the territory of western Europe, spread the Latin that seeded the languages people speak there now, built the institutions that laid some of the foundation for those nations, spread the religion to the whole area, and to whose legacy every drat feudal leader aspired to, was not the same Rome that saw all the west as barbarians to be manipulated during the intervals when they weren't actively attacking. What is the value of the semantic refusal to differentiate them and their era from the rest of Roman history and the two other contemporary entities calling themselves Rome? It feels like attempting to defend the nationalistic prestige of a dead state. I don't even know if they really get that short-shrifted treatment in history. I have a fair amount of gaps in my knowledge, but that's more from not having leaned of history in the context of that geographic area, same as how I have gaps in my knowledge of China's history. The people I feel like I should know more about are the muslim societies that keep popping up all over western European history, but people rarely talk about.
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Oct 4, 2018 22:33
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SlothfulCobra posted:I don't even know if they really get that short-shrifted treatment in history. They really do. My very useful history degree was Rome focused and everything I know about the "Byzantines" is from my own post-college reading and listening to the History of Byzantium podcast. They were also never mentioned in any of my medieval history courses, despite being the most powerful European state for most of the middle ages. A lot of the books on the Crusades I've read somehow barely mention them. I've been reading a lot more in the past year or two and I'm still surprised at the massive quantity of primary sources sitting around for these people who a decade ago I barely was aware existed. General European history post-476 is very poor at covering anything east of the Holy Roman Empire. It's not just Rome. One of the great empires of the later middle ages and early modern period was the various incarnations of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and how often does that get mentioned outside of internet nationalists demanding winged hussars in every game? Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Oct 4, 2018 |
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Oct 4, 2018 22:48
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The notion that Byzantium sucked a barrel of dicks and wasn’t really the Empire and should always be referred to by another name so no one confuses it with Good Rome has pretty deep roots in English historiography. Like Edward Gibbon deep. Gibbon really didn’t think much of Byzantium compared to even the late West, let alone the empire under the Antonines which he describes in about so many words as the best state ever to exist. When the west falls he overtly states that he’s going to skim over a lot of Byzantine history because it’s bad (although he does not go so far as to ignore it, and his book ends with 1453 and not 476) and this trend of treating the eastern empire as an afterthought was followed by the majority of English historians who followed him. Serious reaction against this point of view in English language scholarship wasn’t a thing until the 20th century really. You’re not wrong that the Islamic part of the subroman world got traditionally short shrift too, but it’s a relatively recent development for historians take to the ERE seriously.
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Oct 4, 2018 22:50
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