What was Western Rome like in the last hundred years or so before it fell?
had a lot of germanic refugees
>>792008
Like Yurop today
>>792008
Harsh taxes on the poor, widening gap between rich and poor, settled foreigners in your local town, Christianity going from just being that of the urban poor to even people out in the countryside, walls being built around all the towns again, soldiers being stationed on the walls with heavy artillery, peasants being tied to the land in a form of proto-serfdom.
>>792008
The last election between Donidus and Hillarius was quite interesting.
Donidus wanted to build a wall to wall off the Germanic people and make them pay for it and Hillarius wanted to conquer them
>>794341
You mean Hillarius wanted the Germanics to conquer the Romans, since the empire stood to gain so much from a rich and diverse culture.
>>794359
>Hillary Clinton
>not a radical jingoist
You're thinking of Merkel
>>794327
All of these things had already taken place well before the last 100 years of the WRE's existence. There was no "widening gap", the gap was gone: the working poor were now serfs legally bound to work the land of powerful land-owners in exchange for food and shelter. These powerful land owners had their own private armies called bucellarii and had little loyalty to the central Roman state.
Most of the Roman infrastructure was still intact, though it was crumbling, neglected, and would be mostly destroyed during the Gothic War, which ravaged and depopulated Italy after the WRE's fall.
Federated Germanic soldiers were the only thing holding it together. Imperial finances were nonexistent and the only real asset that the WRE Emperors possessed was land, which was mostly depopulated and fallow after centuries of Pax Romana ("they make it a wasteland and call it peace") which the Emperors leased to autonomous Germanic tribes in exchange for protecting the frontier, while powerful, charismatic generals like Stilicho kept all the tribes marching under a single banner.
September 4, 476 CE was just another autumn day for the overwhelming majority of humans
>>794418
>Stilichoboo
Guy was a tard. His obsession with competing with the Eastern Roman Empire and trying to get control over it distracted him greatly, and instead of destroying the 406 AD migrating armies sent half his troops to Greece.
>>794614
And after Stilicho it was Flavius Aetius, the so called "last of the Romans"
>>794766
Aetius was far superior tbf.
>>794614
>>794869
And the greatest irony was that Flavius Aetius, the "last true Roman", was not a Roman at all but a German (Scythian, or eastern Germanic)
>>795091
Starring tom cruise.
>>794418
>the working poor were now serfs legally bound to work the land of powerful land-owners in exchange for food and shelter. These powerful land owners had their own private armies called bucellarii and had little loyalty to the central Roman state.
So, everything was set for feudalism, yes?
>September 4, 476 CE was just another autumn day for the overwhelming majority of humans
Rome suffered a massive population decline, though. Didn't Rome use to be the biggest city around?
>>795151
The population decline had already started with the fall of North Africa, exacerbated by the Vandal sack in 455(?), but the biggest blow would ironically be the Roman reconquest under Justinian, which was essentially a total war.
>>794327
So what is that random marble pyramid doing in the middle of the wall?
>>795151
>So, everything was set for feudalism, yes?
It was at its core a multi-century long transition in the way that labor was organized, away from the previous and unsustainable slave-based cultures of antiquity, and towards the feudal model that they imported from the Sassanid Persians, as this model of labor arrangement had proved incredibly resilient against repeated Roman invasions, the finest army that the ancient world had ever seen repeatedly humiliated every time a would be Alexander the Great could could cobble together enough gold to build his army.
But because the Roman status quo was tied so closely to the previous model, when the transition began in earnest (starting really in the 3rd century CE after the devastation of the Antonine plague) their's were the ones who saw their power base concentrate into fewer and fewer hands before ebbing away to nothing.
>Rome suffered a massive population decline, though. Didn't Rome use to be the biggest city around?
It did, during the second century when it was struck by the Antonine plague, and again in the third century when trade routes broke down due to repeated internal conflicts, but the worst devastation that Italy would face in late antiquity was what this anon said:>>795194 the attempted reconquest of Italy by the Byzantines under Justinian the Great, the so called Gothic War. The cruelest irony was that Italy was actually flourishing under the rule of the cosmopolitan Ostrogoths, and the destructiveness of Beliarius and Narsus's campaign led to the invasion by the primitive Lombards. Italy would not recover until the renaissance.
>>794418
Sounds like todays germany
>>792008
brigands everywhere because the ridiculous taxes made it more profitable to go out raiding than it was to be anything else for a peasant
lots of germanic migrations.
With the fall of North Africa, lots of starvation as the breadbasket of the Empire was lost.
>>792008
Collapsing in on itself.
The city of Rome itself was but a shadow of its former self. The interior of the city decayed to literally be isolated villages all sharing the old city walls.
>>797076
The truth is vastly more complex than that. The total tax revenues that the empire was collecting in late antiquity was a paltry shadow of what it had once been, before deflation and war desolation had reduced vast swathes of territory to abandoned ruins, and impoverished feudal estates presiding over what remained. And while highwaymen and brigands were always a problem, "raiding culture" was a uniquely pagan phenomenon, one that Romans stamped out where ever they went, and a practice that Christians discontinued wherever that religion took hold.
And the concept of a "peasant" first evolves in this time period, meaning someone who was legally obligated to work the land they lived on. It was far from ideal but it was a hell of a lot better than the system that it replaced, where your Lord actually owned you and marched you out to the fields or the quarry in chains. Their presence was an important evolution in the way humans arrange labor. Even Germanics and Scandinavians eventually settled down and adopted this model, and after the great migrations ended these proved to be some of the most peaceful centuries in Europe's history, far from "dark".
So the forum cultures (public baths, games, etc.) was dead by the point right
>>798203
>It was far from ideal but it was a hell of a lot better than the system that it replaced, where your Lord actually owned you and marched you out to the fields or the quarry in chains. Their presence was an important evolution in the way humans arrange labor.
Not really, most free men and plebs were totally free to work the land in exchange for cash before Diocletian's reforms and slaves were never much more than 20% of the population. Diocletian's reforms, which would eventually lead to serfdom, were because runaway inflation had made collecting tax in coin virtually impossible. The development of serfdom was mostly because Diocletian basically made it illegal to not do whatever it was your job was, trying to freeze the reduction of skilled labor and agriculture, and the fact that his tax laws made it made it more financially sound for landowners to make their lands as self-sufficient as possible. This all lead to serfdom as we know it today, but it was never set in stone to happen, and slavery persisted in Europe for quite a long time despite serfdom, and really the slave economy of Rome was only due to their constant wars and taking of slaves, wealth, and land, and the failure to properly distribute those items to create a properly functioning economy.
>>798226
Nope. Chariot Races had replaced basically all games though, however the forums and baths still existed and were still the centers for society for centuries after.
>>798276
You're grossly overstating Diocletan's influence. His policies had little reach outside of the major cities and its unclear how long they persisted after his death. His lasting reforms were importing the Persian feudal model which the Persians had used to successfully defend their land from bloodthirsty Romans for centuries, and his importation of Persian despotism was simply making official what had been the de facto rule in Roman society for much of the Imperial period, their democracy being a bloated mess even in the best of times, and a hypocritical farce in this one.
You're also glossing over the influence that slavery would have had on their economy. Even at only 20% of the population it made it so that their economy was dominated by Latifundia long before Diocletian lived and died. Romans were being squeezed off their lands and into the throngs of the working poor long before his policies exacerbated the problem. And slavery more or less ceased to exist after the rise of Christianity and would only resurface later during the colonial era, and always under the guise of some kind of justification (typically racial). And Rome's slave-based economy ultimately proved unsustainable when they ran out of people worth conquering in the end of the second century, which is right around the time things started unraveling.
