Gregory Aldrete: belief

Transcript context

…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, 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 of 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 Bosporus, which becomes Constantinople. He names it not very modestly after himself, and that now is really the dominant city for any of the Roman Empire’s eastern or western. So if you’re actually living in that century, the 5th century, it’s kind of like the Western Roman Empire dies with a whimper. It’s not like-…

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