Recent comments in /f/history

_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_ t1_it6htj1 wrote

A lot of the time (including today) people don't really think about what their names mean, they're just names. And a lot of the older Roman names (Ceasar, Antony, Vincent) have no definite origin, but here goes:

Elephant of Light the Seventh Severe Pious Obstinate Majesty
Elephant of Mars the Golden Priceless Pious Lucky Majesty
People's Seventh Geta
Light's Conqueror the Pious
Rejoicing Strongman the Shy

Geta isn't Latin or Etruscan, but appears to refer to an ancient Romanian tribe.

Ordinal names (e.g. Seventh) were traditionally used for numbering siblings, not in the way we use Jr. or III today.

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AnaphoricReference t1_it6g2bg wrote

The Romans had by the time of the official "fall" of the Western empire already introduced the practice of stationing Germanic mercenary cavalry directly with landowners and towns in Italy, so that the mercenaries could collect their own wages directly as taxes. This feudal societal organization would basically remain unchanged in the Ostrogothic and Lombard kingdoms. Landowners and mercenaries had a shared interest in preventing the peasants/commoners under their control from leaving if that impacted income, and would be definitely capable of hunting them down if they did.

I do not have the impression, if you look at the sources covering later attempts by the Eastern Roman empire to expand their influence in Italy at the expense of the barbarians, that they had much popular support for doing so. On the contrary: small Lombard feudal armies for instance regularly defeated larger but very low morale locally sourced (Eastern) Roman armies. And parents complained about their children dressing as barbarians to look cool. That doesn't give the impression that the average former Roman was willing to risk his life to be able to live under an emperor in Italy. At best you could describe it as an attitude of apathy.

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Domeroni t1_it6e3cq wrote

You're correct for relatively short timescales but medieval Islamic glass was mostly of the soda-lime-silica type. On the shelf of a medieval castle it'd last a few lifetimes. But in wet and acidic conditions we find that the soda and lime components of the glass on the outer layers would react and change the structure of the material.

Glass has an impure and uneven lattice (which is good because it allows us to mould it at high temperatures), meaning water molecules can seep into gaps in the lattice and draw away structural components such as the lime. This happens incredibly slowly since the structural bonds are really strong. But over the course of centuries sitting in a peat bog we see that lime reacting away, leaving a brittle and opaque product.

The process is called weathering and I'd really recommend the book "Ancient Glass" by Julian Henderson if you're interested and want to read more

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Relevant_History_297 t1_it6a9r7 wrote

If you are interested in an in-depth discussion of societal changes and migration patterns during and after the decline and fall of (Western) Rome, I suggest Patrick Whyman's Fall of Rome podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/the-fall-of-rome-podcast/id1141563910 He actually did some scholarship on the topic, so he knows what he is talking about

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blonardo t1_it68ev1 wrote

Dan Carlin has a bunch that are wonderful:

Punic Nightmares (about the punic wars) Celtic Holocaust (rome and the Celts) Death Throws of the Republic (great set about the fall of the republic and rise of the empire and lots of info on causes. Thors Angles - basically it's about the 'dark ages' but covers a lot of the fall of Rome's influence etc.

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ungovernable t1_it681ro wrote

There's a lot of junk conjecture in this thread, so first, I'm going to repost a link that a mod posted further down the line that I think will shed a lot of light on the subject:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period

Second, while the "sudden collapse" way of thinking about the Western Roman Empire (i.e. that in 475 there was a prosperous empire, and that by 477 "here thar be dragons") is severely outmoded, the idea that the collapse and the decades that followed represented some sort of "smooth," barely-noticeable administrative change is complete fantasy.

For example, the city of Mediolanum (Roman-era Milan) was utterly obliterated in the Gothic Wars in 538, and the majority of its inhabitants were either killed or enslaved. Hardly a mere change in the process of government to see the second-largest city in the Western Empire bludgeoned out of existence.

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