Anthony Kaldellis: prediction

Transcript context

…So zooming out and asking once again, the old—we’re getting a little close to last call at a bar, I’m gonna ask you the big question. We asked it before about the collapse of the West Roman Empire. When did the decline of the East Roman Empire begin for you? Throughout these loops, when, if you were to predict, would you be able to say where this is gonna be over? And what led to that decline and the collapse? So of course, the collapse is finally in 1453 AD. Right. That’s actually a very good question. In other words, not looking at all of the previous crises that caused loss of territory, like, you know, you lose Egypt, you lose Syria, you lose Palestine, you lose Eastern Asia Minor, you lo- right? But at what point could you say there’s no coming back from this? Right? I would say early 14th century. Somewhere between 1300 and 1350, the sources of resilience begin to dry up, and you have a number of setbacks. They lose Asia Minor to the Turks by 1300, roughly, which means that you can now no longer draw upon the two wings, as it were, the European side and the Asian side, which they could always do. They’re confined to Europe. And then you have a series of civil wars, you have the Serbian expansion and you have the Black Death, and they never recover from that. In 1300, you think of this, you look at it and you think, “That’s a tiny little Balkan state.” Okay, it goes from Constantinople to the Adriatic in this just sort of ribbon, right, this corridor that just stretches across the Balkans. And yet, it’s not that much smaller than England and has about as much, if not more, revenue, because they’re still able to raise cash, because taxes. Right? So the emperor’s still able to pull in a lot of gold. And his territory is not, you know, completely insignificant. It’s not what, you know, the Roman Empire used to be. But I don’t think that it’s completely lost. Then they have some civil wars. Then one emper- a rebel makes a deal with the Serbs, surrenders half that territory. Okay, after that, game over. What’s surprising is it takes the Turks that long. 1453, that’s another century. Right? It didn’t need to be. It looks like they might have had it wrapped up like 50 years aft-, you know, like by 1400. But then accidental events happened. This is Timur, Tamerlane comes- … from Central Asia, trounces the Turks, breaks up their empire. So they go into a cycle of, you know, rebuilding, and so that’s why it takes another 50 years. Anyway, but I’d say by the 1340s, game over. And so why did it collapse? What are the things in the ground, when you zoom out, the thing that ate away at the, I like this term, sources of resilience?…

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