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I thought it was pretty well established that the Black Death was caused by fleas that were attached themselves to rats. Not sure what the specific disease was called, but the fleas were the carriers.
Did the feudalism of the Middle Ages have its origins in landlord-tenant laws passed under the Emperor Diocletian? Diocletian (and later, Constantine) needed to find a way to get users of land to pay their taxes, but because so much land had become abandoned, he forced them by law to stay on their land. Eventually, power was given to landlords over tenant farmers to collect those taxes on behalf of the empire. You can see how this could develop into feudalism.
In my opinion, I dont think there was any avoiding it (especially after he was elected), maybe Lincoln could have set something up that would have let slavery play it’s course and died at some point down the road. But the war had been coming for decades, and not just over slavery.
I’m reminded of the Confederates who took up and moved to Brazil to carry on their way of life. There may be another thread on this forum about the group, which I believe numbered in the thousands. For them, slavery eventually faded away.
This might be the case with some defunct government buildings other than post offices. With the closure of unused buildings per the recommendations of DOGE, it’s not bad to find new purposes for old buildings to retain their lifespans.
I think the Romans could have been strengthened through some sort of exploitation of international trades routes to an even greater degree. To be honest, I don’t know all of what Rome did and did not do in this regard, but I do know that nation-states that seem to punch above their weight are those that don’t rely so much on their military prowess as they do on their economic ingenuity. Think Amsterdam of the 17th century, or even England or the 18th century. Yes, Rome enjoyed the spoils of war (e.g. the conquering of Dacia under Trajan) but this sort of success only lasts for so long.
I will add to this that Diocletian’s division of the empire into East and West actually bought it a few hundred years of extra time. It wasn’t enough in the end, but it helped. Just think that in the 50 years leading up to Diocletian, there was a string of 25 different emperors who reigned. So in addition to internal strife, the Romans had to battle barbarians to the north and Persians to the east. All of this on top of devalued currency….something had to be done.
Another update. After I quit my old gym in summer 2022, I joined a golf club and did that for workouts for about a year. I’d walk 18 holes usually at least twice a week, which is more of a workout than it sounds. I got pretty good at golf, but unfortunately it was expensive and had to stop.
I then joined a new gym in fall of 2023, but it never really worked for me. I don’t know what it was, but I felt like whenever I worked out there, I wanted to leave, and so I was always doing workouts to go through the motions instead of lifting hard to get gains. I ended up quitting it sometime around late summer or fall of 2024. I was totally out shape for the next few months.
Finally, by December of last year, I wanted back in, so I joined a new club again that I hadn’t been to. It’s a 24-hour access club, and I’m at about my six month anniversary there. For whatever reason, it’s felt like a better home for me and I have been able to do workouts on a more regular basis. Even so, increasing my bench press has been slow, and so it took me all these months to finally put up some decent weight (benched 275 lbs. last weekend).
I think I didn’t progress as fast because I had been using the standard bench press station without a spotter for a long time. That makes it scary and I play it safe rather than trying to bench to failure, which is where real benefits lie. Eventually, I realized I could do bench under the squat rack which has moveable safety guardrails on it. This works perfectly and allows me to bench as much as I want without a spotter. Today I benched 225 lbs. I think nine times, which is the most reps I have done in a while. I’ve also been able to dumbbell bench press with 90-lb. weights for about 6 reps, but hopefully I can move up to 95 or 100 lbs. soon.
It feels good to be getting back up there after all these years.
When you guys say that the use of barbarians in the military was one of the reasons for the decline of Rome, do you only mean at the end? It seems those who integrated in Empire, at least up until the 3rd or 4th century, were quite romanized and very successful at keeping the Germani, Persians, and other enemies at bay.
This kind of leads to the other reason what Gibbon blamed the fall of Rome on – Roman apathy. Success led to apathy on the part of Romans, so much so that they were unwilling even to fight, which in turn led to the use of barbarian mercenaries.
But as for Gibbon’s main thesis, could it have been the case that he was simply wrong about his assumption that Rome fell in the fifth century? The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne argued that life in the territory of the western empire stayed relatively the same after 476 A.D. and that the real end only came about with the isolation of Europe with the rise of Islam in the seventh century.
The points to consider that have not been brought up is that “Dark Ages” might not be a pejorative used to describe the lack of intellectual or social progress during this time (c. 500-1000), but instead to describe the lack of academic knowledge we have of it. It’s vastly easier to study civilizations and people when they produce much written or visual content, but not so easy when they don’t leave as many permanent testaments to their way of life and their thinking. Quite obviously, the people of the Early Medieval period left us plenty, but compared to other periods, it likely contains more gaps in our knowledge and leaves us with more unknowns.
Hence the descriptor, “dark”.
In general, yes – but from what I understand, his memory may have been suppressed because he was an unpopular emperor among the different factions of the empire.
