Queequeg's 'Special' Threads: Roman-Persian edition

[Malthus]

To what extent this trend was inspired by the fear of having any serious military force not under the emperor's own thumb

I am pretty sure it was done to stop generals from trying to make themselves Emperor all the time.

Certainly that was a major factor. But one should not discount the effect of basic corruption - in the late empire it is possible that the ability to have in place substantial military forces under the control of the empire in places where the emperor was not physically present may simply have been lacking.

There is from the records a sense that the later empire was sort of like Hitler in his bunker at the end of WW2 - sending out orders to distant provinces was pointless, the units that existed in the imperial records just did not exist in reality, except and to the extent that the emperor (or someone) was able to pay for them, and ensure the collection of taxes and payment were both more or less under his eye - otherwise the money was sure to be diverted.

Hence the desire to multiply the number of emperors, such as the division by Docitlan into two "Augusti" and two "Ceasars". Of course, that set the stage for them to fight among themselves ... the problem of both having military force and controlling it proved in the end unsolvable.

[Queequeg]

A better way to look at the rise of feudalism in the West than the rise of cavalry is the reaction of large landowners to taxation and forced service.  The shift to near-independent demesnes and infeudation owes a lot more to the breakdown of authority and trade in the West than the rise of cavalry.

Hmm.  This makes sense, I suppose; the two developed parallel systems for different reasons.  But why did feudalism (at least of the heavy cavalry dependent variety) crop up only centuries after the Barbarian invasions and the Muslim expansion leading to a decline in pan-Medditeranean trade? 

[Viking]

For example, the emperor Julian lead just such a successful revolt, in the generations after Constantine.

Well, the exception that proves the rule

But his revolt was "involuntary" and ultimately a barracks mutiny when the Gallic Army refused to allow half of it's number to be sent off to Syria as they were perfectly happy fighting against the Germans.

[Viking]

I'd just like to point out the political aspect of Constantine's army reform (where the army was split into Comitatenses and Limitanei).

Correct me if I am wrong but wasn't that Diocletian's reform?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitanei

History

Historians believe that the final set of military reforms in the Roman Empire prior to its fragmentation, were begun in the late third century by Diocletian. In all respects however, the Limitanei owe their existence to the reforms of Constantine the Great, the first Christian Roman Emperor, who divided the Roman military into two types of soldiers in 300 AD. Henceforth, the all Roman Cohorts were characterized as either frontier garrisons to police border provinces and keep the peace in fringe settlements or mobile field armies to confront the enemy in mass engagements. The first written reference to limitanei was recorded in 363 AD.

[Viking]

One pet peeve of mine from the period. The Ramp at Masada is NOT THE SIEGE RAMP. It was built for the TV Miniseries. This, however, does not stop pretty much everybody labelling the TV Ramp still at the Site as the Roman Ramp itself.

[Malthus]

One pet peeve of mine from the period. The Ramp at Masada is NOT THE SIEGE RAMP. It was built for the TV Miniseries. This, however, does not stop pretty much everybody labelling the TV Ramp still at the Site as the Roman Ramp itself.

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. Do you have a cite for this?

For one, the ramp is freaking huge. Seems way too big to be built as part of a movie set. For another, I find it hard to believe that the Israelis, who are mad about Archaeology, would allow movie-makers to permanently change one of their most significant sites.

OTOH, you could still see some stuff from the mini-series on the site, like some faked seige engines.

[saskganesh]

A better way to look at the rise of feudalism in the West than the rise of cavalry is the reaction of large landowners to taxation and forced service.  The shift to near-independent demesnes and infeudation owes a lot more to the breakdown of authority and trade in the West than the rise of cavalry.

Hmm.  This makes sense, I suppose; the two developed parallel systems for different reasons.  But why did feudalism (at least of the heavy cavalry dependent variety) crop up only centuries after the Barbarian invasions and the Muslim expansion leading to a decline in pan-Medditeranean trade?

while the late Romans did not "need" feudalism per se, as they still had a semblence of an administration and bureaucracy, the successor states did not have such infrastructure and were not as centralised, and so developed feudalism (land grants for military service) in response to the "second" barbarian invasion (arabs, moors, lombards, avars magyrs, vikings).

this goes hand in hand with castle building. Charlemagne tore down all the forts but his successors had to allow them to built them up again.

of course, England did not have feudalism until the Conquest. the modern problem with understanding feudalism was that it wasn't uniform and had numerous exceptions, because it was a localised response to the problems of government and war.

[The Minsky Moment]

A big factor which I did not appreciate is that for the later Roman empire it is almost impossible to get any good sense of the actual size and composition of the Roman army. This is because, as things broke down, lists of army units became - highly theoretical. Adam Goldsworthy points out in The Fall of the West that the actual "army" tended, in the later empire, to be concentrated around the actual person of the emperor and that "army units" allegedly located elsewhere were very often more or less non-existant, or rather existant only on paper. This meant that any serious barbarian-expelling had to be done by the emperor in person. Or on one of the sub-emperors appointed for this purpose, as by Docitilan ...

Very generally speaking there was a tendency in the later empire to downgrade the quantity and quality of the border garrisons.  At the same time, the Romans relied on formal and informal arrangements with the barbarians on the borderlands to secure the frontier - and relied on the mobile armies to deal with major incursions.

There is a certain natural tendency looking back to focus on the episodes where the treaty arrangements went awry - what is more interesting historically was that the more typical norm for much of this period was they worked rather well.  In fact, one might go so far to say was that the problem for the later Empire was not that their arrangements with the border barbarians failed, but that they succeeded to well.  Goths and Franks became so well integrated within the Roman system that they became a part of it.  Only when barbarian warlords turned Roman generals took part in the contact sport of late Roman intrigue and civil war, it inevitably embroiled the barbarian soldiers on the other side of the border.  Until the point was eventually reached where the very distinction of the border became obsolete, and it was hard to distinguished the barbarized areas of the Roman Empire from the romanized areas of Germania.

[grumbler]

I'm pretty sure this isn't true. Do you have a cite for this?

For one, the ramp is freaking huge. Seems way too big to be built as part of a movie set. For another, I find it hard to believe that the Israelis, who are mad about Archaeology, would allow movie-makers to permanently change one of their most significant sites.

OTOH, you could still see some stuff from the mini-series on the site, like some faked seige engines.

A quick search shows some scientific research done using data from the ramp to calculate rainfall when it was constructed.  Nothing I have seen supports the allegation that it was built in 1981.

This is a nice tidbit from Wiki:

The Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Moshe Dayan, initiated the practice of holding the swearing-in ceremony of soldiers who have completed their Tironut (IDF basic training) on top of Masada. The ceremony ends with the declaration: "Masada shall not fall again." The soldiers climb the Snake Path at night and are sworn in with torches lighting the background.

(Okay, this is atrocious writing, but the concept is cool).

[Queequeg]

Was just thinking about that today; interesting that after the fall of the Roman Empire, the borders of "Europe" shift dramatically; most of Spain is lost, but Germany and increasingly the Slavic and Norse countries are integrated into the post-Roman political and cultural world. 

Minsky, I seem to remember you posting a bunch of reviews of books on Dark Age history, actually I seem to remember I first heard of The Early Slavs in one of them.  Any reccomendations? Obviously my interests tend towards the east (anything on the Sarmatians, Huns, Iazyges, or Romano-Persian rivalry would be best).

[Queequeg]

This is a nice tidbit from Wiki:

The Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Moshe Dayan, initiated the practice of holding the swearing-in ceremony of soldiers who have completed their Tironut (IDF basic training) on top of Masada. The ceremony ends with the declaration: "Masada shall not fall again." The soldiers climb the Snake Path at night and are sworn in with torches lighting the background.

(Okay, this is atrocious writing, but the concept is cool).

That's actually kind of scary.  Pre-Dark Age Jews could be pretty vicious, especially as they tended to take the defense of Israel and their Messianism pretty seriously.  IIRC, they helped the Sassanids purge Jerusalem as late as the 7th Century AD.  Weirdly enough, the Palestinians (with their endless self pity, hatred of foreigners, violence and Messianic tendencies) have more in common with Palestinians than modern Israelis.   

EDIT: Don't know why I never thought of that before.  Seems so obvious and ironic. 

[The Minsky Moment]

There is from the records a sense that the later empire was sort of like Hitler in his bunker at the end of WW2 - sending out orders to distant provinces was pointless, the units that existed in the imperial records just did not exist in reality, except and to the extent that the emperor (or someone) was able to pay for them, and ensure the collection of taxes and payment were both more or less under his eye - otherwise the money was sure to be diverted.

I don't think that analogy quite works.  Take the example of Honorius' rescript - the problem was not that Britain had been entirely denuded of troops by Constantine III.  On the contrary, Honorius' instructions presume that Britain still had some means of defense and the little information we have suggests that the Britano-Romans were able to hold off various threats for decaded on their own resources.  It is a simple question of triage - the emperor was still coping with the aftershocks of the crisis of 408 and making a short-term decision not to focus limited mobile force resources on a peripheral front. 

The Roman empire was never a modern centralized state like the third reich - even after Diocletian's reform.  The empire always depended on a sort of horizontal cooperation between local urban elites - all of whom had a powerful interest in maintaining some connection to the "roman" center.  But the problem is the one you identified earlier - if the emperor sitting in Rome seemed weak or indecisive - there was always a temptation for the local elite in a far-flung province to turn to the man on the spot to make good on local concerns by seizing power himself.  So it is not a matter of troops and formations not existing.  It is more of a problem of the practical limitations of central control.  Note that this was ALWAYS a problem for Rome - going back to the times of the Late Republic.  What changed in the Late Empire was the interaction of this familiar dynamic with the arrival on the scene of more sophisticated, Romanized barbarians on the frontier who were dragged into or willingly joined in playing this traditional power game.

[Malthus]

This is a nice tidbit from Wiki:

The Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Moshe Dayan, initiated the practice of holding the swearing-in ceremony of soldiers who have completed their Tironut (IDF basic training) on top of Masada. The ceremony ends with the declaration: "Masada shall not fall again." The soldiers climb the Snake Path at night and are sworn in with torches lighting the background.

(Okay, this is atrocious writing, but the concept is cool).

That's actually kind of scary.  Pre-Dark Age Jews could be pretty vicious, especially as they tended to take the defense of Israel and their Messianism pretty seriously.  IIRC, they helped the Sassanids purge Jerusalem as late as the 7th Century AD.  Weirdly enough, the Palestinians (with their endless self pity, hatred of foreigners, violence and Messianic tendencies) have more in common with Palestinians than modern Israelis.   

Actually, what impressed me more on visiting Masada was the ruthless energy of the Romans. As a fortress, Masada is pretty well impregnable. It is in the middle of a desert and in order to take it, you must go straight up a huge cliff - all the way around. A troup of boy scouts could hold off an army there in pre-modern days. Masada was supplied with water from giant cysterns: there is no water anywhere near, otherwise.

The Romans surrounded the place with military camps and a wall, and then built that huge ramp - it must have been a truly incredible feat of logistics.

[Queequeg]

Actually, what impressed me more on visiting Masada was the ruthless energy of the Romans. As a fortress, Masada is pretty well impregnable. It is in the middle of a desert and in order to take it, you must go straight up a huge cliff - all the way around. A troup of boy scouts could hold off an army there in pre-modern days. Masada was supplied with water from giant cysterns: there is no water anywhere near, otherwise.

The Romans surrounded the place with military camps and a wall, and then built that huge ramp - it must have been a truly incredible feat of logistics.

So we have a fantastically well organized, disciplined army that is the envy of the world and a huge part of their society up against a messianic band of indigenous religious zealots who prefer death to surrendering their land..........the ironies here just keep building up. 

[The Minsky Moment]

3) Cavalry men, completely covered in armor and wielding a deadly long lance, who own small plots of land (for which they have various specific insignia and color associations), and whose relatively barbaric warrior ethos is tempered by a strict devotion to a more martial variant of one of the credal religions.   . . . did the European nobility somehow merge with or adopt some of the older Persian-derived traditions, or is this just one bizzare example of convergent evolution, like dogs and thylacines?

If you are talking about high feudalism, this does not arise until centuries after the traditional dating of the "fall" of Rome, and IMO is driven by responses to localized phenomena - certainly not any conscious or even unconscious adaptation of traditional Persian forms.