About how fucked was Italy after the wars of Belisarius and Narses? Were all the cities depopulated? Did Rome get abandoned? I've heard the entire land became a desert but that can't be true can it?
bump
I can't give you any exact data but on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being Rome under Augustus and 10 being a Mad Max wasteland, lets go for a 6.5/10.
The WRE had fallen but Italy was still Romanesque by the sixth century. The Gothic War fucked it up and divided the peninsula between Byzantines, who were too distant to govern well, and Lombards, who were barbarians. Arabs showed up a century later and raided the place.
>>334964
>Rome under Augustus
Rome under Augustus wasn't Mad Max wasteland but it was pretty badly off in some ways. Civil wars had been running on and off through Italy for like 25 years before he finally secured the supreme power. In the end he won because all his major political opponents were dead and every military that had supported them had either defected or been broken. The Roman obsession with crazy ass civil wars for supremacy every time the top dog died really fucked Italy's shit up good, the army sizes in the last wars of the Republic surpass most of those in the principate and the amount of Italian deaths this caused is as important as any other factor in the series of events that would eventually lead to the provinces developing their own localized cultures and hundreds of years later breaking away from Roman hegemony.
>>335021
But >muh city of bricks into marble
>>335064
And
>Muh Pax Romana
>>335021
>The Roman obsession with crazy ass civil wars
It's really incredible how many there were and how many people died in them. I'd love to see a tally of casualties or some other statistics about the wars compared to their foreign conquests.
It should also be noted that Augustus struggled to feed the people of Rome. There were a million people there, or whatever, who were almost entirely dependent on the state delivering food to the city. When it didn't they would starve and riot and blame people. I can't even think of something comparable to this happening to a modern city
>>334964
>who were too distant to govern well
I thought that was the Exarch in Ravenna had done a decent job at this, what with it surviving a pretty good while despite the Lombards until they suddenly got weakened early in the 8th century with the pro-iconoclasm emperor realocating some of their income away.
Justinian's reconquests in the West were a long term strategic error. I can see North Africa-it fell with minimum resources and had a solid economic base. But the Italian war was really all about ego
It was a tremendous drain on resources and manpower. History shows Justinian would have been better served solidifying the frontier in the east.
>>332683
>time of Belisarius
>Greek writing on that shield
Is that historically accurate? Latin was the official language, but it was already dying by that time. Would the army have shit written in Greek like that?
>>336657
Justinian was the last roman emperor to speak Latin as first language, and even then it was getting slightly archaic.
>>332683
The North was. That's why the lombards sneaked in afterwards.
>>336555
To be fair it also brough the pope in Rome under the byzantine sphere of influence, at least while they retained effective control in there. They opposed enough imperial policies afterwards even knowing it would only get them deposed from their see.
>>336657
What is that thing even saying?
>PQLNXLPLNS
>POINXIPINS
>>337025
Also why the north easterners completed their flight to live on mud islands in a giant marsh
Italy was good before the Gothic wars.
Then came the wars.
Then came the Lombards swine
Then came the Arab swine
Then Italy was kill and no longer resembled the ancient world.
>>339980
Since Odacer did fine ruling Italy, what ever happened to Augustulus Romulus?
>>340125
Who cares, guy was irrelevant. The "Fall" of the Western Roman Empire wasn't even a big deal. It had been dead for a while, plus in most of western Europe there was a continuity of sorts. "Barbarians" weren't really such, they were romanboos of sorts. Arabs fucked things up.
Maybe I just say this because I've just read Mohammad and Charlemagne by Henry Pirenne, so maybe someone else can chime in.
>>340147
Henri Pirenne thesis are outdated by I like his point of view so I give him my seal of approval anyway.
Also, I wouldn't put in all barbarian in the same pot... Franks (salians) and Visigoths were more advanced and romanboos; Ostrogoths were advanced but fugg romans; Burgundians were cuked before getting to have an opinion; anglosaxons were absolute niggas; lombards cheeky opportunists...
