History questions not worth their own thread II

[Dachs]

Other than ecclesiastical authority, I got nothing.

 

[bombshoo]

I know that after Trajan died, Hadrian pretty quickly gave up at any attempt to control the recent Roman conquests in the Middle East but what happened with these provinces? Were they returned to Parthia? What all was returned? I Know I've seen maps where a large part of these conquests were still controlled by the Byzantine Empire up until the Muslim conquest. Were they simply reconquered or was only part of the area given up? Was Roman Mesopotamia relinquished simply because it was were too hard to administer, because from what I've read Trajan whooped Parthia pretty good and the Parthians don't seem as though they would have been able to recover enough to be a threat for at least a while.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Non-Civ question, with respect to ACW:

How much of General MacClellan's timidity/indecisiveness was strictly due to his own personality flaws? E.g. His just standing behind his defenses when in Virginia (IIRC).

How much of it was due to issues beyond his control? E.g. lack of national committment to decisive battles, poor morale of troops, poor logistics, etc...

I gather that towards the end of MacClellan's term Lincoln simply wanted a general "who fights", but I'm just wondering if MacClellan's behaviors weren't partly reflections of externalities.

MacCellan was an example of a general who loved his men too much. He served as a foreign observer during the Crimean War, and had personally witnessed many of the foolhardy charges against dug-in troops into oblivion. Determined not to recreate Balaclava with his own men, he always erred on the side of caution, afraid to be too aggressive for fear of over-extension or wandering into a fortified death trap. We see this at the Seven Days' Battles, when he hesitated to charge into the demolition crater, and at Antiedam, where he failed to give chase to the whalloped N. VA Army. Military historians are ever so fond of decrying the man for fearing to make men die in war, but personally I think he is one of the more admirable generals in history for choosing prudence over bloodlust.

That'd be interesting but what would be the final victory? Fall of Byzantine? Plant the Green Cresent in Rome? Prempt the HRE?

I suppose surviving the Mongol invasions. It would have to be a timed scenario. Or maybe a sort of Silk Road substitute for the Spaceship, like in The Ancient Mediterranean, would do.

 

[Dachs]

I know that after Trajan died, Hadrian pretty quickly gave up at any attempt to control the recent Roman conquests in the Middle East but what happened with these provinces? Were they returned to Parthia? What all was returned? I Know I've seen maps where a large part of these conquests were still controlled by the Byzantine Empire up until the Muslim conquest. Were they simply reconquered or was only part of the area given up? Was Roman Mesopotamia relinquished simply because it was were too hard to administer, because from what I've read Trajan whooped Parthia pretty good and the Parthians don't seem as though they would have been able to recover enough to be a threat for at least a while.

Traianus, first of all, didn't really kill the Parthian state. He basically took advantage of a civil war and marched with scanty opposition all the way to the Persian Gulf. There was very little weight behind his conquest of Parthian Mesopotamia, and as soon as the Parthians finished their civil war they would be able to fully oppose the Romans militarily. In addition, he had left several sizable and defensible cities unconquered in his rear, threatening his lines of supplies. It was in besieging one of these, Hatra, that he ended up dying. Hadrianus correctly realized that the conquests were unsustainable and prudently withdrew from virtually all of them, returning the frontier to more or less the line of the Euphrates. Armenia was returned to semi-independence as well, with a Roman-installed puppet ruler in charge.

Several wars were fought between the Parthian state and the Roman Empire after the reign of Hadrianus. During the reign of Marcus Aurelius, for instance, his co-emperor, Lucius Verus, fought against the Parthians, a war which saw some minor successes for the Romans but which was interrupted by the famous Aurelian Plague. Septimius Severus, in the 190s and 200s, landed the most decisive defeat in Roman history on the Parthians in a more sustainable way, conquering essentially all of Assyria (province of Roman Mesopotamia) up to the great fortress of Nisibis. He sacked Ctesiphon as well. His son Caracalla fought another war in the 210s and had some military successes, but was assassinated. Caracalla's successor, Macrinus, was defeated by the Parthians and forced to come to terms.

After the Sasanians basically usurped the Parthian confederal empire, they ended up being more militarily protagonistic. Roman Mesopotamia was pared down somewhat in a series of repeated wars that saw Sasanian armies raid heavily in Syria and even into Anatolia at some junctures. Just as the Romans had taken advantage of Parthian civil wars to temporarily occupy Ctesiphon under Traianus, Šābuhr I took advantage of the civil wars associated with the "Crisis of the Third Century" to sack Antiocheia. The Sasanians temporarily evicted the Romans from the eastern part of Roman Mesopotamia - though the Romans still maintained control of some territory on the eastern banks of the Euphrates. But the pendulum shifted again and the Romans smashed the Sasanians under Galerius and Diocletianus at the Battle of Satala in 298. In the ensuing peace the Sasanians gave up all the territory they had lost to Septimius a century earlier, plus were forced to devolve control of much of the actual frontier to local authorities, as a way of preventing the Sasanians from fortifying the area heavily.

Pendulum swung again after Constantinus I died in 337. His successor Constantius II spent basically his whole reign fighting against Šābuhr II with mixed success. When Iulianus launched his little usurpation in 361, he inherited the eastern war. He promptly amassed a colossal army that marched to Ctesiphon, roundly beat up the Sasanian army in a field battle, and accomplished precisely nothing outside of that. We're not entirely clear as to why, though inadequate staff and supply arrangements on the part of the Romans, and perhaps too large an army. Anyway, Iulianus was forced to turn around, got his dumb ass killed, and his successor Iovianus was saddled with the unhappy responsibility of surrendering Nisibis and Singara (two major fortress-cities in eastern Roman Mesopotamia) and withdrawing from Armenia. Šābuhr II then invaded Armenia and divided it up with the Eastern Emperor Valens in the 370s.

Fifth century was mostly peaceful, apart from two crises that amounted to little more than border skirmishes. The Romans were busy with the Balkan frontier, and the Sasanians had to deal with the Hayāṭila of Central Asia. That all ended with the Anastasian War of the 500s, which inaugurated another century of Roman-Sasanian warfare. This handy map shows the situation at the end of that century, in 600. It's a little skewed towards the Roman side, since the Romans had just scored one of their largest victories ever. Emperor Mauricius had employed a civil war in the Sasanian Empire (funny how that works), invaded to restore young Xusrō II To His Rightful Throne, and took a sizable slice of Armenia into the bargain. Mauricius got knocked off his throne by a revolt and civil war, which gave Xusrō an opportunity to invade and snag some loot, which kicked off the Last Roman-Persian War (602-628), about which I will write a history article eventually, which saw the Romans get the living crap beat out of them for twenty years, then an astonishing comeback (utilizing - what else? - a Sasanian civil war in part) that saw them regain all of the territory they had had under Mauricius.

In sum. The Romans didn't really have the resources to kill the Parthians, and couldn't even score significant successes against them without employing Parthian civil war. Holding all of Iraq, like Traianus, tried to, was improbable and untenable. Western Kurdistan and Syria were reasonable goals, but more was unlikely. By the same token, though, the Sasanians were even less likely to score major military successes against the Romans unless civil strife or exogenous shock (like plague, or an invasion on another Roman frontier) intervened in their favor. Rome was clearly more powerful than the Parthians and Sasanians throughout their entire relationship, but not that much stronger.

That answer your question?

 

[GoodGame]

In my search to answer my own question (most interesting time in human history) I had some inspiration to google "largest outliers in history" and came up with this little factoid:

http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt1.html

The section comes from Chapter 2, immediately after a list of the seventy-five richest people in history.

Of the 75 names, an astonishing 14 are Americans born within nine years of each other in the mid 19th century. Think about that for a moment. Historians start with Cleopatra and the Pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.

Spoiler :

Here's the list:

01. John Rockefeller, 1839.
02. Andrew Carnegie, 1835.
28.Frederick Weyerhaeuser, 1834.
33. Jay Gould, 1836.
34. Marshall Field, 1834.
35. George Baker, 1840.
36. Hetty Green, 1834.
44. James G. Fair, 1831.
54. Henry H. Rogers, 1840.
57. J.P. Morgan, 1837.
58. Oliver Payne, 1839.
62. George Pullman, 1831.
64. Peter Widener, 1834.
65. Philip Armor, 1832.

In the 1860's and 1870's, the American economy went through perhaps the greatest transformation in its history. This was when the railways were built, and when Wall Street emerged. It was when industrial manufacturing started in earnest. It was when all the rules by which the traditional economy functioned were broken and remade.

So timing is everything (the ACW and Reconstruction contracts probably helped too).

How about these two decades in which your civ is actually a capitalist entrepreneur trying to make a living during your nation's civil war and reconstruction?

I was honestly thinking of a ACW mod, but couldn't imagine a way to make it "fun" without adding layers of optional What If's all the way to the extreme of steampunk. What's exactly fun about a mostly foregone conclusion (i.e. the South would loose)?

 

[Louis XXIV]

Control by any means.

By that definition, no.

However, Roger Guiscard was technically a vassal to the Pope. He basically ensured Ecclesiastical authority over the island was Rome and not Constantinople from then onward.

Aside from that, not really. Guiscard wasn't really that good of a vassal.

 

[spryllino]

Well, all the mediaeval kings of Naples and Sicily held their kingdoms as Papal fiefs, but that had no bearing to speak of on those kings' independence.

 

[Louis XXIV]

True, but ecclesiastical authority is still something of note. The Pope was the final court of appeals in Europe and, if the Normans hadn't decided to support the Pope, it's possible that the Greek church would be dominant, not the Latin one.

But, yeah, Sicily was never a part of the Papal states. The Pope's authority was never a direct one.

 

[vogtmurr]

....Roger Guiscard was technically a vassal to the Pope. He basically ensured Ecclesiastical authority over the island was Rome and not Constantinople from then onward.

Aside from that, not really. Guiscard wasn't really that good of a vassal.

I'll say. It was more like the other way around. Guiscard had the pope in his pocket most of the time. He had to sack Rome once to remind everyone of that, after the 'real' Holy Roman Emperor beat a hasty retreat.

 

[Louis XXIV]

Yeah, it's kind of ironic that we feel Gregory VII won the Investiture Controversy when he died in exile after his only remaining friends sacked the city he loved.

 

[bombshoo]

That answer your question?

Yes, Dachs answers are always the best answers.

But for a couple of follow up questions, what made Trajan (I'm not enough of a Latinphile to call him Traianus ) confident enough to think he could hold Mesopotamia? I assume it was a long term plan since he made the conquered area into provinces.

And for another, how much did the Kitos War actually effect the Parthian War that was going on? Did Trajan withdraw pretty much everything from the area to deal with this or only send back a minor force, since I read he only basically thought of the Jews as a minor threat to his grand strategy.

 

[LightSpectra]

If it wasn't Brusilov himself, who was it on his staff that recommended the innovative offensive tactics used in the Brusilov Offensive, and why isn't he more well known?

 

[Dachs]

Yes, Dachs answers are always the best answers.

But for a couple of follow up questions, what made Trajan (I'm not enough of a Latinphile to call him Traianus ) confident enough to think he could hold Mesopotamia? I assume it was a long term plan since he made the conquered area into provinces.

I have no idea. Maybe he really thought he could keep Parthamaspates down. Delusions of grandeur and all that.

And for another, how much did the Kitos War actually effect the Parthian War that was going on? Did Trajan withdraw pretty much everything from the area to deal with this or only send back a minor force, since I read he only basically thought of the Jews as a minor threat to his grand strategy.

I think he didn't effectively respond to any of the rear-area threats, including the Jewish revolt, until after he reached the Gulf. Not sure about how much the Jews were able to divert before the emperor died, though.

 

[ParkCungHee]

why isn't he more well known?

You really don't know the answer to this after all your study of history?

 

[LightSpectra]

You really don't know the answer to this after all your study of history?

Not amongst popular circles, but amongst military historians that comment on the skill of commanders. The tactics used in the Brusilov offensive were then copied by both the Germans (Oskar von Hutier, Georg Bruchmüller) and the Allies in the later periods of the war, which essentially makes Brusilov (or his amazing staff, or perhaps one particular person on his staff) the best commander in the war.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Not amongst popular circles, but amongst military historians that comment on the skill of commanders. The tactics used in the Brusilov offensive were then copied by both the Germans (Oskar von Hutier, Georg Bruchmüller) and the Allies in the later periods of the war, which essentially makes Brusilov (or his amazing staff, or perhaps one particular person on his staff) the best commander in the war.

Really? I'm not even familiar with this subject, and I'm pretty sure I can give a firm answer:
Because Brusilov had a nifty hat and was the guy in charge, while the anonymous guy on the staff was an anonymous guy on the staff.
This is the same way MacArthur got credit for Incheon.

 

[LightSpectra]

Really? I'm not even familiar with this subject, and I'm pretty sure I can give a firm answer:
Because Brusilov had a nifty had and was the guy in charge, while the anonymous guy on the staff was an anonymous guy on the staff.

Then perhaps at least somebody's memoirs on the staff would've pointed out who the real brains were?

 

[ParkCungHee]

Then perhaps at least somebody's memoirs on the staff would've pointed out who the real brains were?

Yes but who cares what those nobodies have to say?

 

[Dachs]

Not amongst popular circles, but amongst military historians that comment on the skill of commanders. The tactics used in the Brusilov offensive were then copied by both the Germans (Oskar von Hutier, Georg Bruchmüller) and the Allies in the later periods of the war, which essentially makes Brusilov (or his amazing staff, or perhaps one particular person on his staff) the best commander in the war.

I don't think you can call Bruchmüller artillery schemes "copied". Some of the essentials from Brusilov's planning, such as initial short duration, stayed, but Bruchmüller heavily modified the concept by introducing various shell mixes for different situations and altering bombardment lengths. Certainly "inspired", but not "copied".

 

[Masada]

For every good suggestion put forward there's 10 you have to discard. Big part of leadership is picking the right one.