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Emperor Goblinus

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Everything posted by Emperor Goblinus

  1. Emperor Goblinus

    How romanized was northern Gaul?

    I know that the Franks adopted Latin, but much of the political culture of northern Gaul moved away from the civil office-based, senatorial world of the Mediterranean to one that revolved around the Frankish monarchy. I was just wondering if there were not pronounced differences between the regions before the coming of the Franks.
  2. Emperor Goblinus

    Greatest Roman Figure??

    I think Aurelian needs mentioning. Conquering two schismatic empires is no mean feat. Had this not happened, the Middle Ages may have come two hundred years earlies. Also, the Aurelian Walls protected Rome for over a millenium and a half.
  3. Emperor Goblinus

    Primary Source for composition of Senate?

    Livy tells a great detail about the Senate, although I can't say offhand if he gave the actual size of the Senate as the centuries progressed.
  4. Emperor Goblinus

    Oaths of Strasbourg

    Yeah, the Oaths are pretty fascinating, a good look at proto-French and proto-German. One thing that's always bugged me about the early Middle Ages is the lack of large bodies of vernacular Romance texts. I think it would be fascinating to trace the development of any of the Romance languages through primary sources, but people were often just too concerned with writing things in Latin at the expense of the vernacular (with the exception of Alfred's England). Does anyone know which Gallo-Romance language the Oaths were in?
  5. The ruler might be bad, but the legionaries would still be forced to cut up their comrades who probably had absolutely no say in the politics of the time. That probably was not a pleasant experience.
  6. Emperor Goblinus

    Emperor and Titles

    Which just showed how ignorant Liutprand was of Byzantine regional politics. The Bulgarians were given precedence because they were in closer proximity to the empire, and were more closely aligned to Byzantium culturally than to the German Empire. And I think that the Byzantine emperors didn't start using the official term "Emperor of the Romans" until after Charlemagne. Before then, it had just been a given. Afterwards, they felt that they needed to defend their romanitas against the Franks and Germans. Ironically, their eastern enemies continued to refer to the Byzantines as "Romans" up until the empire's collapse, with one of two exceptional instances. It as only in western Europe where Byzantium's status as the heir to the Roman Empire was questioned.
  7. Emperor Goblinus

    Greatest Roman Generals?

    Scipio is definitely up there, as well as Caesar. For later individuals, I might put down Aurelian. He may not have been Rome's greatest military mind, but he just may have saved the empire from a permanent split. Also, Belisarius was a military genius, though I argue in my Justinian thread that his Italian campaign may have been the most disastrous that Rome ever undertook.
  8. Emperor Goblinus

    Roman Battlefield Found In Germany.

    That's a real possibility; it may explain why they didn't take any territory even though they pierced so deeply into Germania. We may not be ever sure, but it could possibly been one of Rome's first encounters with the large Germanic confederations that plagued the empire from the third century onward. The Romans may have expected only scattered resistance from various tribes, but ended up biting off more than they could chew.
  9. Emperor Goblinus

    The East of the West

    I believe that a portion of Illyricum was ceded to the Lombards after they aided Narses in Italy. During the Gothic Wars, there were a number of confrontations in that region, but most battles were in Italy. Also, some cities near the Danube were briefly ceded to the Avars during the reign of Maurice in the late sixth century, but I couldn't give you anymore information beyond that.
  10. Emperor Goblinus

    Resurrection of a Dead Language?

    I was a beast at the National Latin Exam. Sadly, I think that much of the language has gone out of me. I did thoroughly enjoy Latin until about eleventh grade. That year, all we had to read were the tediously idiotic poems of Catullus, and that killed my interest in the language for the next few years.
  11. Emperor Goblinus

    Why didn't the Arabs conquer Asia Minor in the 8th century?

    I'm not referring to later when the Turks invaded, but in the eighth century when the Arabs had conquered most of Byzantium, and were raiding deep into Asia Minor. Even though they caused alot of damage, leaving it in Byzantine hands allowed the Byzantines to put together an effective army and stop the Arabs. I'm just curious as to why the Arabs didn't take the region in the same period that they took Judae, Syria, Egypt, and Africa?
  12. Emperor Goblinus

    Avatars And Signatures

    Why did you choose the current avatars and signatures that you have? For me, the avatar is just something I found when I Googled "emperor avatars." It's dark and mysterious and is reminiscient of Star Wars' Palpatine, but not too blatant. As for the signature, this famous picture of Justinian was in my 10th grade Western Civ textbook, when I first became interested in Roman history. The quote is what Justinian alledgedly said when he saw the inside of the completed Hagia Sophia.
  13. Emperor Goblinus

    The Deterioriation of Rome after 312 A.D.

    It looks like the inscriber started out quite well, but then started to screw up. He probably wasn't paid too well, and started drinking.
  14. Emperor Goblinus

    The Deterioriation of Rome after 312 A.D.

    Thank you so very much for this information. Very enlightening indeed.
  15. Everyone knows that from the seventh century onwards, the pope was increasingly the chief secular official in Rome. But besides him, does anyone here know anything about the civil administration of the city during the Middle Ages? I'm not talking about the outisde Byzantine or German imperial officials, but the day to day bureaucratic mechanisms of the city. I know that the Senate never fully recovered from destruction Justinian's reconquest, but the pope could not have run the city entirely by himself. Can anyone illuminate what other civil officials managed the city?
  16. Emperor Goblinus

    Nubians

    Wasteland. It just was not worth it. Anyway most emperors had a anti-conquering mindset by the empire with a few rare exceptions like Trajan. An emperor generally didn't have anything to prove like Roman Republican statesmen did, and was more interested in maintaining the status quo. Spending money and allocating troops to dubious annexations of empty lands full of myth and barbarians endangered that status quo. Claudius certainly didn't think so regarding Brittania; neither did Augustus regarding Nubia, where he actually pushed further south. Judging by his Res Gestae Divi Augusti, he had a lot to prove, dubious annexations included (cp. XXVI): Meo iuss
  17. Emperor Goblinus

    What did the Greeks ever do for the Romans?

    It's probably a topic in its own right, but I'm skeptical the Northern tribes could have developed a culture as advanced as the Hellenistic world, due to their differing cultural values and experiences. It might have taken a bit longer, but it's not impossible. There have been a number of non-hellenic ancient civilizations which were as advanced as the Greeks and Romans, such as the Chinese, Persians, the Kingdom of Kongo, and the Aztecs. I don't see why the northern Europeans might not developed their own advance cultures. If I'm not mistaken, right before being by Rome, Gaul and Britain were starting to progress. Although they moved along more rapidly as Roman subjects, I think that it's somewhat sad that they weren't allowed to develop their own unique cultures. Gaul especially seemed to have potential.
  18. Emperor Goblinus

    The secular administration of medieval Rome

    As a general pattern there was a progressive shift of administrative and executive functions toward the Church all along the Western Empire during its last days; eg, the appointment of provincial governors was committed to the bishops. Paradoxically, the Germanic conquest improved the administrative status of the still extant Roman Senate, as a real partner and helper of the barbarian chieftains/kings at Ravenna, like the Heruli Odoacer and the Goth Theoderic (always as patricians under the nominal Imperial authority from Constantinople), presumably largely because those Arrian kings didn't trust the regular Christian clergy. As you rightly pointed out, the fierce subsequent struggle between the Germanic kingdoms and the Empire ravaged all that; there are only four known references to the Roman Senate after the restoration of the Imperial rule on Italy, mostly reduced to a municipal status. Both sides now considered Rome and its region as an early feudal administrative unit, a "duchy". The last senatorial decree ever was a 603 acclamation of the emperor Phocas and wife's statues, where it was made clear the real power at Rome was then Pope Gregory I. It is not known when the Senate actually disappeared. During the first half pf the VII century, the lessened Imperial influence was nevertheless still extant, and most Popes were actually Greek. We're now talking on the darkest of the Dark Ages. The administrative status of the city of Rome seems to have been nothing less than chaotic most often than not; the general impression given by ecclesiastical sources is the gangs and mobs' rule. That's interesting. I knew that outside of the city, there was much chaos, with Lombards and Arabs ravaging the countryside. Inside, the only real violence that I've read about was the power jockeying between those who wished to be pope, and those who supported them. I've also read that the nobles of the city were in constant competition with each other (which, if you think about it, was nothing new to Rome), but that it was centered arund the papacy. The nobles would sometimes use mob violence against popes that were disgreeable to their interest. While it never grew as bad as in places like Renaissance Florence, it did cause noticeable disturbances. As to the popes being Greek, that's correct. As John Moorhead's The Roman Empire Divided: 400-700 points out, the seventh century was indeed the papacy's most "oriental" century. Since these Greeks were probably more beholden to the Byzantine emperor than to the Italian nobility, there probably wasn't as much jockeying around the papal throne. That only seemed t really settle in during the ninth and tenth centuries. You mention that Rome became a duchy of both the Byzantine and Holy Roman Empires, but wasn't that a creation of Late Antiquity, not the Middle Ages, since it was Diocletian and Constantine who created the position of duke, and was originally not supposed to be feudal at all? I'm just wondering. Also, while Rome was an imperial territory, it was not like other provinces. Since the time of Pepin, the papal lands had a certain amount of autonomy not granted to other regions. Yes, Rome was subject to imperial domination, such as when Otto blockaded it when a pope was appointed that he didn't like, but it still as just not another imperial possession, and had ot be dealt with carefully. Also, I think that the Roman militia was not directly under imperial control. I do remember that in the tenth century, there was a secular position called the Senator of Rome. Despite the name, his duties were very different than that of a classical senator. He was basically in charge of the city guard and militia. I remember reading about this position in a book about the Ottonian dynasty where Pope John IX apparently fell dead while banging the Senator's daughter in a back alley. The book didn't say much, only that he was the head of the city guard, that he was close to the pope, and that it was a coveted position. Beyond that, I don't know much about the city's medieval magistracies, and like DDickey, was wondering if their were any holdovers from antiquity.
  19. Emperor Goblinus

    What did the Greeks ever do for the Romans?

    While I see what you're getting at, and while the world would definitely be more empty without Greco-Roman culture, whose to say that those Celts and Germans wouldn't have been able to create their own separate cultural legacies that might have become something just as advanced as what the Greeks and Romans created? A Europe without classical culture would definitely have been radically different, but whose to say that it would have necessarily been doomed to perpetual barbarism?
  20. Emperor Goblinus

    Which Roman Emperors never did battle?

    Regarding the aforementioned period (450 to 582) here are some other exceptions (please note that information on many "shadow" emperors is too scarce to define if they actually were or not at the battlefront): WEST: Constantine III (407-411) was described by Orosius as a soldier. Constantius III (421) defeated the previous one. Avitus (455-456) had a distinguished civil and military career previous to 455. EAST: Marcian (450-457) served as personal assistant (domesticus) to the emperor's commander-in-chief (magister utriusque militiae) before 450. Leo III (457-474) had reached the rank of tribune in the regiment of the Mattiarii by 457. Zeno (474-491) had a military career under Leo III. Justin I (518-527) in 518 was commander of the excubitors. I didn't know about that, but were any of them of them military leaders while they were on the throne. I'm not knocking their accomplishments, but I was under the impression that the original poster was referring to miltary experience while on the throne.
  21. Emperor Goblinus

    Which Roman Emperors never did battle?

    After Theodosius I and until Maurice, which was about the end of the fourth century until the late sixth, there was a long line of emperors who did not go into battle. This was especially detrimental to the western empire, as the emperors increasingly became detached from the workings of the government and became figureheads, with the real power falling into the hands of Germanic kings and generals. Majorian was an excepction, but despite his best efforts, he couldn't accomplish do much. In the east, the Romans were able to expel the Germans, rely on a native army, and the emperors effectively ruled from the throne, even if they didn't go into battle. You mention Justinian. He never led an army personally, but he had a number of top notch generals that were highly effective, and he was always in total control of the government through his active governance. Maurice was the one who gradually brought back the habit of soldier emperor by leading his men in some expeditions against the Avars. His almost-immediate successor, Heraclius, was a full-time soldier emperor, who spent most of his reign fighting relentlessly against the Persians. After that, most emperors did do campaigning of some sort, mostly out of bare necessity, since the empire was almost in constant danger from then on. As for earlier emperors, some sort of victory on the battlefield was usually necessary for an emperor to keep the respect and loyalty of his soldiers, especially during the third century. Elagabalus was one emperor who did not campaign, and because of that, the soldiers rebelled against him for his supposed weakness. Commodus also largely ignored the battlefield, and he too did not meet a nice end, although not all because of that. Basically, except for the two hundred year period, it was generally expected for an emperor to lead an army into batlefield. I would argue that while he technically was in control of every aspect of the empire, the emperor's most important job was keeping the borders safe. Some sources that you might want to look at are: From Rome To Byzantium by Michael Grant The Severans: The Changed Roman Empire by Michael Grant Commodus: An Emperor At The Crossroads by Olivier Hexter The Emperor Justininian and the Byzantine Empire by James Allan Evans A History of Byzantium by Timothy Gregory
  22. Of the later Roman emperors, Diocletian was undoubtedly one of the best. The only big black mark on his career was the persecution of the Christians. Due to the quick rise of Christianity after Diocletian, I think that he's gotten unfairly painted as a "bad" emperor. If it hadn't been for this, I do think that he would have been seen as an equal of Trajan or Marcus Aurelius. Does anyone else here agree with me?
  23. Emperor Goblinus

    Had it not been for the persecutions...

    To a certain extent, that's true, although non-Orthodox Christians were never fully taken out of the empire until the Arab conquests of Syria and Egypt. Also, the Orthodox persecutions of the non-Orthodox were not the same type of persecutions that the pagan Romans used against the Christians. While they somewhat varied over time, Christians who were caught be the authorities were usually given the choice of recanting or death. Certainly not all Christians were chomping at the bit to die, but there was a great appeal in martyrdom, and thus the pagans' simplistic efforts failed miserably. Some Orthodox Christians even moved Persia after Consantine legalized their religion in order to be martyred, since the Persians then saw the religion as possible Roman infiltration. The Christian persecutions of other Christians was somewhat different. While there was violence and death as you mentioned, there was not so much the outright slaughter of earlier days. Pagans and non-Christians had many of their rights taken away, were banned from serving in the army and higher levels of government, and sometimes exiled from the empire. But there wasn't the straight forward "Throw them to the lions!" mentality which had characterized earlier persecutions, and other religions were suppressed mainly through bureaucratic strangulation, loss of political rights, and social ostracization from mainstream Roman society, something that in the long run was far more effective than just pure violence. And as I said before, even that didn't fully work, as theological divisions caused major problems for the empire up through Heraclius' reign. In his personal life, yes he was. I never said that he made it part of his official duties. No, I'm not kididng. Yes, he was full-fledged bully who used the power of the state to persecute religious minorities. But I've read nowhere that his objection to the massacre was simply because the inhabitants were Christian, but just that it was a terrible thing to do. Ambrose was a bad guy in a numebr of ways, but he did not advocate senseless slaughter. The massacre was not a religious affair, it was a matter of the emperor acting arbitrarily for no good reason in a manner contrary to Christian values, and Ambrose did not believe that a person who committed such an act should get communion just because they were the emperor. Christianity's negative impact on Roman culture was not necessarily natural or inevitable. Except for those isolated riots that I mentioned earlier, the real problems only occurred when emperors openly started promoting Christianity, spending massive amounts of public money on churches, giving bishops political power, and making orthodoxy a matter of national unity and patriotism. None of this is in the Bible, and while Christians had been proselytizing for centuries, it was in both theory and practice, a pacifistic religion that, while it was against a number of Roman cultural practices that were deemed "sinful," nearly all Christians were loyals Roman who lived out their lives like everyone else. Then a western Caesar suddenly sees a cross in the sky, paints it on the shields of his men, wins a battle, and then Christianity suddenyl becomes a tool to achieve the politcal unity that had been so damaged by the third century crisis. Of course that plan never started really working until the late seventh century, when the Monophysites were all under Muslim rule. But Constantine's senseless manhandling of a religion that was never meant to be heavily poltical. This misuse of the religion perpetually opened the door to bigots like Ambrose getting into power, less-than-devout Roman nobles manipulating their way into the clergy in order to gain immunity from public service, and ultimately, unbending orthodox emperors who ravaged much of classical culture because of personal beliefe and an idea in "uniting" the empire. The Christians before Constantine shouldn't be blamed for this and didn't deserve to be persecuted. The blame should fall on Constantine and his successors who warped Christianity for their own ends, and made it just as militaristic and class-concious as the rest of Roman society. Were their Christian bigots before Constantine who would have gladly smashed up pagan temples and burned classical documents? Of course there were. But if Christianity had just been left alone, with no support or persecution from the government, the Orthodox coup that occurred might never have happened. If anything, the persecution of Diocletian and earlier emperors just solidified Christians' faith, unity, and sense of purpose, at least for a time. If the emperors had not bothered with Christianity, it might have developed into a handful of separate, theologically diverse segments that couldn't have gotten any traction over the others, at least through official channels. As it was, the emperors handed the Christians martyrs which they could look up to and a common adversary, and then made it just another instrument of the state, just like the army, which ruined some of the core aspects of the religion, and caused it to fall into the hands of unscrupulous, undevout politicans, and power-hungry fanatics.
  24. Emperor Goblinus

    Had it not been for the persecutions...

    No, no one did force him. But as I said before, if you look at the way that people approached their personal spirituality back then, he may have been genuinely afraid of going to hell. Again, that's no excuse, but the ancient mindset has to be taken into account. Yes, he was proud of what he did, but like I stated before, it's not like he immediately started persecutions once he was crowned. On one occassion, when Ambrose was involved in mob violence which led to the destruction of a synagogue in Milan, he ordered them to rebuild it. Sadly, Ambrose's strong will plus Theodosius' orthodoxy caused him to go back on that, but it does show that he wasn't one hundred percent in favor of bulldozing other religions, at least in such a violent fashion. And yes, his strong Christian stance is why he got the title "the Great", since he certainly didn't earn it on the battlefield. With the Thessalonian massacre, Ambrose excommunicated him because he slaughtered innocent people, period, not just because they may or may not have all been Christians. With the canonization issue, the same thing happened to Constantine, whom the Catholic Church did not canonize because of his violence (though the Orthodox Church did), and most of the people that Constantine killed, both in his civil wars and against foreign enemies, were undoubtedly almost all pagan. Charlemagne was also not canonized because of his brutality. Ambrose, while I don't agree with many things that he did and stood for, excommunicated Theodosius to send the message that the emperor couldn't have people killed just because they defaced some imperial statues. While it was a step towards the pathetic and tragic situation seen in the Middle Ages of the church being above the state, Ambrose at the time was simply sending the message that emperors could not so flagrantly disregard Christian injunctions against killing and basic conducts of decency, and had to be held accountable for their actions like everyone else. As for my source on Theodosius, it's Theodosius: The Empire At Bay by Gerard Friell and and Stephen Williams. I can't directly quote from it since I don't have it with me. That didn't stop Constantine from destroying some pagan temples or actively moving againt the Donatists. While he was far better than later emperors, he did set a number of ugly trends. I never said that they weren't. Yes, that is very sad. I never tried to make the argument that he was another Marcus Aurelius. He was very bad, but his colleagues, Gratian and Valentinian II, were not that much better. Valentinian banned a number of outward displays of pagan worship. Gratian stopped the funds to the ancient city cults in Rome by giving up the title of pontifex maximus, a title which ws, at least unofficially, taken up by the pope. It's just that they were weaker personalities than Theodosius, or in the case of Valentinian, dominated by a magister militum. Theodosius had no such impairments, and thus acted with a stronger hand, to the great detriment of classical culture. Also, while it was a bad time form non-Christians, the persecutions under Theodosius do not compare to the sadism of the Inquisition. The Romans could be unbelievably bloody, but when it came to suppressing non-Orthodox Christians, they did not come near the scale of the Inquisition.
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