Anthony Kaldellis: belief

Transcript context

…So in 753 BC, Rome, a small city state, is founded, and in 509 BC, the kings are overthrown, and the Roman Republic is born. 390 BC, the Gauls sack Rome, and this, I believe, among other events throughout its history, is a formative trauma that hardens Rome’s security obsession. It turns out, throughout its history, people want to attack from different directions, and so you have to defend. So there’s two wars, as we’re actually saying off mic. There’s two kinds of military operations. One is wars of conquest and expansion, and one is more defensive. And we’ll talk about how the military changes throughout its history to allocate more effort to one versus the other. In 264 to 146 BC, the Punic Wars and the survival against Hannibal transform Rome into a Mediterranean superpower. Then, like you mentioned, Caesar in 49 to 31 BC, Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon to assassination of Caesar to the Battle of Actium, and then the Civil War dismantles the Republic and concentrates power in a single ruler, Octavian, AKA Augustus, the first Roman emperor, let’s say. Then 27 BC, Augustus founds the Principate, really low-key monarchy. And so officially, that ends the Republic, and then that begins 27 BC to 180 AD, the Pax Romana, which is a period of relative peace and stability. And a lot of the emperors we know of, the sexy, popular emperors all come from that period. Marcus Aurelius, who I’m a big fan of, from that period. Then that takes us to 284 AD, the guy we mentioned, Diocletian, who rebuilds the state. Emperors drop the first citizen mask, this perception of the way, and we’ll talk about this, the, the persona that’s presented by the state. 312 AD, Constantine defeats Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge to become the sole ruler of the western half of the empire, and then founds Constantinople in 330 AD. East and West are split in 395 AD. Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD. The West falls in 476 AD as the last Western emperor is deposed. And then we sort of focus more on the East Roman Empire with 527. In the 6th century, Justinian’s reign. In the 7th century, Heraclius defeats Persia and then loses against the Arabs. There’s the Arab conquest continuing in the 7th century. In the 8th, the Arab siege of Constantinople fails. There’s the Macedonian dynasty that you have an excellent book about. And then the Crusades, and then eventually leading to Constantinople falling in 1453 AD. As a person who understands the full journey of it with a focus on East Roman history, is there obvious glaring holes or incorrect things in what I just said? No, nothing incorrect. I would say if you wanted to produce a sort of very swift timeline of its history, it’s obviously important to focus on the moments when lots of territory was lost to foreign invaders, and these are actually three main moments. There’s the Arab conquests in the 630s. This is a decade. In a decade, that war was lost. It is the Seljuk Turk conquest of Asia Minor, modern Turkey, in the 1070s, and that was very swift and partly reversed afterwards, but only partly. And then there’s the Fourth Crusade, 1204, when the armies from mostly France sack, conquer Constantinople, and dismember the empire as much as they could. It didn’t last that long. The Romans managed to regroup and recover, but those are the three main crisis points. They are very swift, but they cause incredible damage. For all the rest of its history, it is a state and society that is generally sort of consolidating, you know, regrouping, and generally engaged in slow but steady economic growth, territorial expansion on a small scale, but steady. So we can talk about this. It’s… I think it’s an important thing to keep in mind about the big picture, that the defeats were swift and kind of, you know, terrible but most of its history is one of slow growth. There’s some traumatic events that have a big impact, but a lot of the developments we’ll talk about it might seem or feel like there’s a particular moment when those developments or changes in the way the government or the military is structured arise, but really it’s a gradual process.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.