Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
They still had slaves while Christian. The Empire also lasted 150 years after the Edict of Milan (in the west. It lasted over 1000 years more in Constantinople).
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History questions not worth their own thread IV
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That's correct - it took a long time for slavery to be abolished in Europe - not until the tenth or eleventh centuries. After most of Europe was Christianised people did generally take a fairly dim view of slavery, and it did diminish, but certainly not in one fell swoop.
LightSpectra
me autem minui
The western empire was destroyed by civil wars due to belligerency between the Gallo-Roman nobility and traditional Italian nobility that ended with the collapse of central authority in the name of the Romans.
Older narratives about the 'fall of Rome' will emphasize that Germanic barbarians invaded and overwhelmed the empire, though from recent re-evaluations and archaeological data has made it evident that what we were calling 'Germanic barbarians', weren't really socially disparate from the other parts of the empire.
You'll also hear lots of weird theories, such as that lead in the drinking water or aristocratic inbreeding let to a collective loss in administrative skill, but those are generally bunk.
good thread on the issue
Older narratives about the 'fall of Rome' will emphasize that Germanic barbarians invaded and overwhelmed the empire, though from recent re-evaluations and archaeological data has made it evident that what we were calling 'Germanic barbarians', weren't really socially disparate from the other parts of the empire.
You'll also hear lots of weird theories, such as that lead in the drinking water or aristocratic inbreeding let to a collective loss in administrative skill, but those are generally bunk.
good thread on the issue
Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
Until they had colonies and pagans from Africa to enslave. Then it made a triumphant comeback (thanks in part to Muslims who also figured out this loophole of not enslaving those of the same religion).
History_Buff
Deity
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And there was plenty of indentured servitude and serfdom in between.
If a teacher told you that, I would suggest forcing them to undergo a vasectomy or hysterectomy for the good of the species. That is so, so wrong.
Well that answer is most certainly wrong. There are people here who can give a better answer than I can, but I'll give it a shot. What someone told you seems like some sort of odd Gibbon fusion (Edward Gibbon was an extremely influential Enlightenment historian who blamed the fall of Rome on its adoption of Christianity. It was awfully shoddy history, and owes a great deal more to a general 18th century antipathy towards Christianity than any real history.) Certainly slaves were not given up in the late empire, and Christian slaveholders have always found pleasant ways to work around the moral contradiction. The bible even kind-of-sort-of condones slavery at points. The current scholarly consensus, or at least from the author's popular around here, is that the interests of the regional elites no longer coincided with the empire AND the increasing power invested in magnates around the fringes of the empire made it increasingly difficult to rule, with jumped-up generals cum emperors abounding. No one purposefully tried to end the empire, it rather "committed suicide by accident." The actions of various people across a century or so resulted in the destruction of western imperial authority.
Recommended reading: http://www.amazon.com/Barbarian-Mig..._B001HD1NSC_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1343103505&sr=1-2
It totally condones it. There's no direct biblical case against slavery as far as I know - where Christians have condemned slavery they haven't directly based their case on the Bible.
"Do to others as you would have them do to you". 
I have a recollection there's something in the OT that you can keep slaves as long as they are from other tribes.
I have a recollection there's something in the OT that you can keep slaves as long as they are from other tribes.
SS-18 ICBM
Oscillator
By "bunk" do they mean "did not contribute at all" or "wasn't a major factor"?
Those specific cases can be said to not have contributed at all.
LightSpectra
me autem minui
Yeah so I don't want to make a new thread quite yet but I was considering making an 'archive of historical misconceptions' for this forum. It would essentially consist of a commonly believed trope, followed by a short rebuttal and links to threads in the past two years or so that had long discussions about the issue.
It wouldn't be for very simple matters (e.g. that it was believed in the middle ages that the Earth is flat), but rather mostly historiographical lunacies that haven't quite faded away in the popular imagination. A short list of ones that come to mind below, in no particular order:
1. The Huns were probably the Xiong-nu people.
2. The Battle of Britain could have been won by the Axis had it not been for strategical blunders as a result of Hitler's micromanagement.
3. Operation Barbarossa failed because it was launched in the wrong month/because the Japanese did not assist against the Soviets/other often attributed reasons that are basically nonsense.
4. The Confederates seceded from the United States because of tariffs/'states' rights'/a matter of honor and not to preserve the institution of slavery. / The United States government was the aggressor that caused the American Civil War.
5. Napoleon Bonaparte was a brilliant politician and statesman whose ultimate goal was to unify Europe and/or liberate the oppressed lower classes from aristocratic oppression, but was never accepted by politicians outside of France because Bonaparte himself was not from a traditional dynasty or 'blue-blooded' high-society aristocratic family.
6. Herbert Hoover was a 'laissez-faire' ideologue that opposed government regulation and intervention in the U.S. economy before and during the Great Depression.
7. The Roman Empire was destroyed by Germanic barbarian hordes that flooded across the borders and systematically conquered imperial provinces.
8. History, particularly technology and scientific innovation, are inherently 'progressive' (i.e. the Whig historiography).
9. After the 'fall of Rome', western Europe fell into a 'Dark Age', where intellectual oppression on behalf of the Catholic Church resulted in the destruction of old knowledge and inhibitions on new discoveries.
10. The Crusades had a singular motive on 'both' sides of the conflict.
11. The Hundred Years' War was some sort of nationalistic conflict between England and France.
12. World War I was caused by the German 'blank cheque' to Austria-Hungary / a German grab for world power, through an operational necessity by Germany to occupy Paris by M-42, known as the 'Schlieffen Plan'. Also, the U.K. intervened in the war as a result of their moralistic benefaction to Belgium.
13. Sonderweg; i.e. that Germany's path in the 19th and 20th centuries were basically inevitable due to the social and political groundings for Germany that stretched all the way back to the middle ages.
Thoughts, comments, additions?
It wouldn't be for very simple matters (e.g. that it was believed in the middle ages that the Earth is flat), but rather mostly historiographical lunacies that haven't quite faded away in the popular imagination. A short list of ones that come to mind below, in no particular order:
1. The Huns were probably the Xiong-nu people.
2. The Battle of Britain could have been won by the Axis had it not been for strategical blunders as a result of Hitler's micromanagement.
3. Operation Barbarossa failed because it was launched in the wrong month/because the Japanese did not assist against the Soviets/other often attributed reasons that are basically nonsense.
4. The Confederates seceded from the United States because of tariffs/'states' rights'/a matter of honor and not to preserve the institution of slavery. / The United States government was the aggressor that caused the American Civil War.
5. Napoleon Bonaparte was a brilliant politician and statesman whose ultimate goal was to unify Europe and/or liberate the oppressed lower classes from aristocratic oppression, but was never accepted by politicians outside of France because Bonaparte himself was not from a traditional dynasty or 'blue-blooded' high-society aristocratic family.
6. Herbert Hoover was a 'laissez-faire' ideologue that opposed government regulation and intervention in the U.S. economy before and during the Great Depression.
7. The Roman Empire was destroyed by Germanic barbarian hordes that flooded across the borders and systematically conquered imperial provinces.
8. History, particularly technology and scientific innovation, are inherently 'progressive' (i.e. the Whig historiography).
9. After the 'fall of Rome', western Europe fell into a 'Dark Age', where intellectual oppression on behalf of the Catholic Church resulted in the destruction of old knowledge and inhibitions on new discoveries.
10. The Crusades had a singular motive on 'both' sides of the conflict.
11. The Hundred Years' War was some sort of nationalistic conflict between England and France.
12. World War I was caused by the German 'blank cheque' to Austria-Hungary / a German grab for world power, through an operational necessity by Germany to occupy Paris by M-42, known as the 'Schlieffen Plan'. Also, the U.K. intervened in the war as a result of their moralistic benefaction to Belgium.
13. Sonderweg; i.e. that Germany's path in the 19th and 20th centuries were basically inevitable due to the social and political groundings for Germany that stretched all the way back to the middle ages.
Thoughts, comments, additions?
Good list, and I'll think of some additions later. Only two problems:
#3: Obviously Hitler, 99 times out of a 100 does not succeed in operation barbarossa. But we ought to be careful to make clear it wasn't impossible. If Hitler could have had a perfect storm of conditions (Better time-table and Japanese aid and victory at Stalingrad, etc.) victory may have been achieved.
#8: Of course classical civilization did not vanish for 1000 years and resurface magically during the renaissance. But it's important to remember the first few centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire marked legitimate technological and societal backpedal in Europe. I would much rather live in (west) Europe from 0-400 than from 400-800!
EDIT: An addition
#14: Life for the majority of people in the USSR was something straight out of 1984. One doesn't need to be a communist or claim that the country was some idyllic worker's paradise (or even one who sympathizes with communism) to be able to admit life in the USSR was not nearly as black as the picture we in the West receive.
#3: Obviously Hitler, 99 times out of a 100 does not succeed in operation barbarossa. But we ought to be careful to make clear it wasn't impossible. If Hitler could have had a perfect storm of conditions (Better time-table and Japanese aid and victory at Stalingrad, etc.) victory may have been achieved.
#8: Of course classical civilization did not vanish for 1000 years and resurface magically during the renaissance. But it's important to remember the first few centuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire marked legitimate technological and societal backpedal in Europe. I would much rather live in (west) Europe from 0-400 than from 400-800!
EDIT: An addition
#14: Life for the majority of people in the USSR was something straight out of 1984. One doesn't need to be a communist or claim that the country was some idyllic worker's paradise (or even one who sympathizes with communism) to be able to admit life in the USSR was not nearly as black as the picture we in the West receive.
Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
So you say that Hitler could succeed in Operation Barbarossa if not his defeat at Stalingrad?
But mate, the battle Stalingrad was part of another strategic offensive operation - not of Operation Barbarossa.
Operation Barbarossa lasted from June 1941 to early 1942 and that strategic German offensive ended with the battle of Moscow and the Soviet counteroffensive which started in December 1941. The German offensive in 1942 was another thing and was called Operation Braunschweig:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_Blue
And that Operation indeed ended with the German failure at Stalingrad and the successful Soviet counteroffensive.
And what picture did / do you in the West receive? Then maybe I can help verify if your picture was / is true.
LightSpectra
me autem minui
That's not what the myth is. The myth is that it was the Soviet winter that set ruin to the invasion. In reality, Barbarossa had already failed before the frost had even hit. There's also the apparent misconception that the Japanese did not engage the Soviets; truthfully, they were merely curb-stomped when they tried. It's something of a forgotten front in the war from popular perspective.
No, it didn't. Pray tell, why is it that you think there was a 'technological and society backpedal' during the time when innovations in medicine, agriculture, literature, military, education and music were all occurring?
That's not a historiographical myth.
Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
Seems quite controversial. Could you elaborate more on this?
Actually when it comes to living standards of "average Joes" - anthropologists while researching burials & human remains / skeletons from times before and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire have concluded that people who lived in Western Europe during the so called "Dark Ages" were on average taller, better-nourished and also of relatively better health than people who lived in earlier times. First of all, there was on average more meat in their diets.
This could have something to do with population decrease which occured during the fall of the Western Roman Empire, though.
As well as with people abandoning cities and moving to countryside.
That seems excessive. The disparity in forces during Taifun wasn't very great, and the Germans stood a reasonable chance of capturing Moscow. That they didn't wasn't really due to the winter, sure, but they can hardly be said to have had no chance of succeeding by the time winter hit.
Stating that the capture of Moscow would not have resulted in victory, either immediately or eventually, is probably true, but not trivially true. It was by no means a certainty that the Red Army would continue to hold under pressure after the dismal failure of its many, many other defensive operations and counterattacks over the course of the campaign. Regardless of how many fresh troops the Soviets managed to raise, they still had not managed to stop a German breakthrough before it reached operational depth, they still could not successfully make an offensive impression on even attenuated, strung-out, tired German troops (something that cannot reasonably describe most of the forces that took part in Taifun, which had rested for quite some time after the battles of Smolensk and the diversion of attention southwards to the Kiev pocket), and they still had no way to claim air superiority. If they had lost the Battle of Moscow, who knows? It could've been a tipping point for morale, and it certainly would've done fairly significant harm to command and control and efforts at a counteroffensive.
I guess you could say that by this definition Barbarossa failed, because it had to be followed up by a succeeding operation, but that's sort of a pointless distinction to make, since most people just conflate the whole 1941 offensive into one big German lunge into the Soviet Union and when they - the uninitiated - claim that it was the winter that stopped Barbarossa, they really mean that it was the winter that stopped the Germans. They're still wrong, but you and I would disagree on the reason why they are wrong.
LightSpectra
me autem minui
The German failure to breach Moscow's defense lines by 29 October 1941 is when Barbarossa could no longer have succeeded. The objective of the operation wasn't merely tactical-strategical, but also psychological-economical in that it was anticipated by the German General Staff and Hitler himself that the Soviet economy would have collapsed after a rapid occupation of Moscow. As it turned out, the Mozhaisk defense line slowed the German offensive so much that taking the city was impossible; such that I would say the impending frost was helpful to the Germans insofar that it convinced them not to send their tanks inside the city, lest they get trapped there by the frost.
Source: The Wages of Destruction: The making and breaking of the Nazi economy (2006) by Adam Tooze. London: Penguin Books.
I object to nothing in your post, but the myth being refuted here is that the winter/frost was the cause of the failure of Barbarossa. As both of us have pointed out, the reality was far more complex than that, and the frost had very little to do with the outcome.
privatehudson
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I like the idea, unfortunately the only things I can think of at the moment to add to these tend to be myths that are only popular amongst minority extreme groups such as the "Lost Cause" nuts and holocaust deniers. Or perhaps others that are just not so well known outside of those with an interst in that specific battle, such as several Market Garde myths, or some of the more obscure myths about Waterloo.
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