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Explanation: As Rome declined, so too did its fearsome military. From full-time, highly trained, well-equipped, well-paid professionals in self-sustaining units serving for set periods of time, to unpaid lifelong farmer-conscripts split into penny packets to be overrun and destroyed by invading barbarians. Legions, pls go back
Money and wealth … the root of all evil and the Achilles heel of ancient Rome
As the empire expanded, wealthy benefactors grew more wealthy with every successful campaign. More wealth meant bigger armies, bigger armies meant more men, more men meant more citizens fighting, more citizens fighting meant citizens had to choose between fighting or farming, citizens then sold their lands in order to fight longer, citizens selling their land meant wealthy people could buy them for cheap, now citizens had no land, no wealth and had to fight; wealthy people became more wealthy while not doing any fighting and could finance more war, now those living in Rome wanted more war while those that didn’t live in Rome had to fight more, as Roman soldiers died, there was no one to replace them from the old country because there was only rich people there who didn’t want to fight, they started getting people from outside Rome to become citizens and fight for Rome, now you have rich people living in Rome wanting more war using people they called Romans who had never seen Rome … let this all fester for about 200 hundred years and now you have too many wars, a rich empire funding wars, using people that didn’t know what they were fighting for, rich people who wanted more war to get more money to fund more war, debts rising and the only way to finance everything is through war. Once the money ran out, soldiers got less pay, less equipment, less fighting force, and a military full of people that didn’t care about what they were fighting for any more.
Everything collapsed and then you had that Roman guy bending back yelling ‘Absolutely Barbaric!’
Not like we are repeating history or anything.
I mean, you’re right about the rich getting richer being a problem (and the citizen/land problem, though only relevant in the Late Republic, not the Empire), but wars were a net drain on the Empire’s finances. A few men got very wealthy from them, but they were largely unessential to the Empire’s economy and tax base.
A lot of the problem was not only a declining tax base from increasing mismanagement and unchecked barbarian incursions in the 3rd century AD, but skyrocketing costs from the Emperor’s court, which slowly discarded the previous power-sharing arrangements with locals and Senatorial elites in exchange for a more monarchial system in which the Emperor controlled access to all the levers of power, funding unspeakable luxuries for the ‘majesty’ of the office, and a massive army of incredibly corrupt bureaucrats with very little actual power, who nonetheless made themselves indispensable by eliminating all alternative forms of running the Empire.
I’m just an amateur armchair historian that likes to read books. I love reading and learning about Roman history and I thoroughly enjoy being able to talk to others more knowledgeable than me about these things.
The ‘Absolutely Barbaric’ guy is historically accurate though.
I’m just an amateur armchair historian that likes to read books. I love reading and learning about Roman history and I thoroughly enjoy being able to talk to others more knowledgeable than me about these things.
I always love seeing your comments!
The ‘Absolutely Barbaric’ guy is historically accurate though.
Oh, definitely!
Didn’t the eastern Romans keep a professional force for a good long time?
Kind of. Both the Eastern and Western Empire maintained smaller forces of Comitataneses and Palatini/Scholae (Field armies and something akin to Guards formations) troops which were still full-time professionals. But the majority of troops in both by the 5th century AD were limitanei, border troops of the sort described. The Eastern Empire went through a number of different systems of varying professionalism in the next 1000 years it survived.
