Gregory Aldrete
speaker
587 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Just to interrupt you, I hate wishy-washy answers, which is what I kind of said. So I will give you this. I think by the end of the 5th century AD, the Western Roman Empire has transformed into something different. So I don't know what date I can pick for that, but I can say by around 500, I don't know that we can call whatever exists there the Roman Empire anymore.
really tricky to say, yeah, who's a Roman, who's not, and at which point did it, like— And barbarians have been forming large parts of the Roman army for centuries, you know. Yeah, it's extremely fluid and not at all just clear sides here. So it's a mess.
There was a military strategist, a guy named Edward Ludwock, who wrote this book, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, which was basically about frontiers and how did the Romans define their frontier. And everybody's jumped on this and argued about it and says it's wrong and all, but started this debate among Roman historians about – Yeah. What does frontier mean to the Romans?
Did they conceive of their empires having a border or was it always expanding or what? And did they have a grand strategy? I mean, today, militaries have a strategy where we want to achieve this. We want to exert force here. We want to protect these areas. Did the Romans even visualize their empire in that sort of grand strategic way? Yeah. And it's a real debate.
I mean, there's some things that suggest, oh, here they tried to rationalize the border and shorten it by taking this territory. Other people see it as just kind of random. So that's an interesting take is how do the Romans conceive of empire? I mean, if you look back at someone like Virgil at the time of Augustus, he said, well, the gods granted Rome empire without end. Yeah.
So it's that open-ended thing. But even under Augustus, he seems to be pulling back and saying, well, I'm going to kind of stop at the Rhine. I'm going to kind of stop at the Danube. We don't need to keep expanding forever in the way we've been doing. So, I mean, that's an interesting concept of how do the Romans see their empire? Does it have a boundary? What are those boundaries?
What does that mean?
Right. And again, the other fun debate is were these invasions, you know, when the Visigoths cross the Danube and come into the Roman Empire, is this an invasion as it was originally described or is it a migration as some scholars have started calling it? because the Visigoths were fleeing pressure from another Gothic group, and they were fleeing pressure from the Huns.
And I mean, a lot of the early Gothic peoples who come into the Roman Empire are basically seeking asylum. They're saying, will you give us a piece of territory to live on within the boundaries of the empire? And in return, we will fight for you against external enemies. And the Romans make these deals with some of the Goths. In fact,
They made a pretty good deal with the Goths, one group of Goths to do exactly that. Like you can settle within the boundaries, we'll feed you, we'll give you a certain amount of stuff and you fight for us. And then the Romans treated them really badly. They kind of didn't supply what they had promised and so they turned against the Romans with good reason.
So the Romans blundered in these things too.
Some of them did. So again, there were various groups on both sides of those battles. So Attila is the famous Hun, and he comes into the Roman Empire and seems to be heading right for Rome to knock it off.
and everybody is so scared of the Huns that this weird coalition comes together of the Romans plus various barbarian groups against Attila in league with some other barbarian groups, and they fight a huge battle, and it's more or less a stalemate. So Attila gets stopped, and he says, all right, we're going to just rest up for a year. Next year, we'll go finish off the Romans.
Next year comes, he heads down into Italy, he's heading straight for Rome, and the Pope goes and meets Attila, and they have lunch together at this river. And at the end of the lunch, Attila goes back and says, eh, I changed my mind. We're going to go back up to France, hang around for another year. We'll finish off the Romans later.
And Christian sources say saints appeared in the sky with flaming swords and scared away Attila. Some other sources say, well, the pope gave Attila a huge bribe to go away for a while. Believe whichever you like. But then Attila ends up dying on his wedding night before he comes back under mysterious circumstances. And so that never materializes. And the Huns kind of fragment after his death.
So what was the definitive blow by the barbarians, by the Visigoths? The barbarians are so many different groups. And weirdly, I think an important one that sometimes people tend to focus on the Huns and the Goths, the Vandals end up going to Spain. Right. conquering Spain and then crossing over into North Africa and kind of conquering North Africa as well.
And Spain and North Africa were some of the main areas that food surpluses were collected from and sent to Rome to feed the city of Rome. And it's after those Vandal invasions and the takeover of those areas that the population of Rome plummets. So I think that's an interesting moment where the city of Rome had always been this symbol, and already it was no longer the capital.
The emperors had moved to Ravenna a little bit north because it was surrounded by swamps, so it was more defensible. But there is something important about that old symbolic capital now just collapsing in terms of population, numbers, really no longer having importance because literally its food supply is cut off by losing those areas of the empire.
And of course, the capital, Constantine had founded a new second capital at what used to be Byzantium, a Greek city on the Bosphorus, which becomes Constantinople. He names it not very modestly after himself. And that now is really the dominant city for any of the Roman empires, Eastern or Western.
There's a lot of moments you can pick. There's an earlier one in the 300s when the Roman Empire – the Romans lose a big battle to some barbarians that symbolically is important. But yeah, I don't think there's one clear-cut moment. And again, I don't know that it is the barbarians that cause, quote, the fall of the Roman Empire. I mean this is the other game.
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