History Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread VII

[Ajidica]

From what I remember, the sixth century wars were explicitly reconquests.

You're right that initially Odovacar and then Thiudareiks employed the legal argument that they were effectively viceroys for the Emperor, although they called themselves kings, which didn't technically mean that they weren't viceroys but kind of made it seem like they weren't. Thiudareiks also apparently referred to himself as Augustus in limited contexts, especially after he organized a protectorate over Visigothic Gaul and Iberia following the Visigoths' defeat by Clovis in the Battle of Campus Vogladensis, making him more or less as powerful as the Western Emperors of the fifth century. This legal argument was not employed by the Vandals and Alans in Africa, as far as we know, which we don't really, because Victor of Vita is the main textual source for Vandal Africa and he was way too salty about their heresy to be all that reliable. You can tell that the heretics were getting at least some, uh, "converts" because of his shrill imprecations against heresy in the text.

I think it's better to say legal "argument" here instead of "fiction" because the Empire still remained, culturally, the center of the world. Things changed in the Ostrogothic lands, to be sure, but they didn't change that much. It's very easy to read Thiudareiks' reign, for example, as basically that of an Emperor - his squabbles with annoying aristocrats, military victories on the frontier, a passel of reform schemes for the military, and so on and so forth. The Goths were apparently mostly Arians but there had been Arian Emperors too. They were not that far in dress and armament and style from the late Roman military. Thiudareiks clearly ran Italy as a sovereign, even though officially he'd conquered it in Emperor Zenon's name. The imperials squabbled with the Goths a bit over ceremonial things, and over who was really supposed to rule Sirmion in the Balkans, but otherwise they had more or less normal relations until the early 530s and the crisis in the Italian monarchy. I can't say if Ioustinianos was secretly plotting to reconquer Italy before Amalasiuntha offered to flee with her treasury to Constantinople, but what little I know about their official relations was that up to that point they had been basically correct.

What changed that, on the argument of some late antiquarians, was the Byzantine conquest in the first place. Ioustinianos' propaganda differed from the fifth-century line; instead of the Ostrogoths, Gepids, Visigoths, Franks, and Burgundians being basically Roman military gentry sliding neatly into governing roles throughout a still-intact Roman Empire, he told a story of barbarian conquest from outside to justify a war to get it all under his control. The western rulers had always been somewhat distinct, but not in a way that was fundamentally irreconcilable with being "basically" Roman, too; Ioustinianos changed that, first with his propaganda, and then with his wars. Guy Halsall has written about transformations in the West around the year 600, and while some of these transformations are associated with economic and social forces, or with political developments having little to do with the Emperor, Ioustinianos' story is crucial to understanding a great deal of it.

Interesting, thanks.
Besides Halsall, can you recommend any authors for late Roman/ post-Roman Europe (450 to 1000 roughly)? I'm really suffering without access to a university library and I'm not earning quite enough to purchase all the books off Amazon. (Stingy library system requires me to pay an "alumni fee" to check books out now that it has been more than 6 months after graduation. Never mind how much I paid them in tuition fees.) The best my local library can do for that time period is Peter Heather, Norwich, and some authors who wrote back when people thought decriminalizing homosexuality was a racy topic. From what I can tell not a single public library in Minnesota owns a book by Halsall. Any suggestions?

 

[Dachs]

Firing buckshot here, but something like: Walter Goffart, Walter Pohl, Michael Kulikowski, Peter Brown, Patrick Geary, Jonathan Conant, Pat Southern...Chris Wickham's Framing and Inheritance are important in different ways...ugh, I'm sure I'm missing approximately a zillion people, and that's not counting all the journal articles, most of which I haven't read and only some of which I have, and (it feels like) about 40% of which are in French anyway. You should read Heather, especially The Goths, because he does have a lot of important stuff to say, even if by Empires I feel like he lost the plot...

I'm sure an actual trained medievalist, late antiquarian, or Church historian would be able to throw out a lot more than that.

 

[Ajidica]

So Heather is sort of like a historian version of Heinlein? His early stuff is important but his later stuff is his dirty old man phase can I make my dislike of immigrants any clearer phase?

 

[Dachs]

It's not that bad, from what I remember. It's not, like, Ward-Perkins bad. But it's still pretty bad, yeah.

The funniest part about the whole "you got extensively quoted by UKIP Daily and are apparently okay with it" thing was that Ward-Perkins may now be shut out of a database construction initiative for saints' lives due to Brexit.

 

[Ajidica]

I dunno. I just finished Fall of the Roman Empire and it may just be my limited knowledge of late antiquity but the use of the word immigrant seems rather anachronistic. That, when coupled with constantly referring to the Goths and Vandals as "immigrants" and banging on about the role "uncontrolled immigration" played in the fall of the Roman Empire leaves me with a slightly dirty feelings, as if he is trying to draw a parallel between organized armed groups and a bunch of Poles and Bulgarians moving to the UK.

 

[Dachs]

Yeah, but conservative stances on immigration weren't nearly as weird and gross back in 2005 when Labour was nearly as obsessed with the illegal immigrant thing as the Tories were.

 

[Agent327]

I dunno. I just finished Fall of the Roman Empire and it may just be my limited knowledge of late antiquity but the use of the word immigrant seems rather anachronistic. That, when coupled with constantly referring to the Goths and Vandals as "immigrants" and banging on about the role "uncontrolled immigration" played in the fall of the Roman Empire leaves me with a slightly dirty feelings, as if he is trying to draw a parallel between organized armed groups and a bunch of Poles and Bulgarians moving to the UK.

Heather's Fall dates to well before the EU 'immigration crisis'. I think it's fair to remember that he dates from the era when the barbaric invasions were still actually presented as 'mass immigrations' (the whole 'peoples migration' stereotype), and while he knows this is no longer appropriate (or supported by fact), some remnants of that thinking still slip in inadvertently. I don't think he's doing it intentionally, really.

For instance, when discussing the Vandals crossing into North Africa (which apparently went unnoticed at the time), he's presenting a whole complex plan on how this might have happened. The key problem in his narrative, however, is the idea that there were 10,000 Vandals crossing. This obviously requires quite a lot of boats. So he suggests they ferried across bit by bit. Oddly, this makes it far more difficult to explain why the whole crossing went unnoticed than when the whole bunch simply crossed in one go. But this is made rather impossible by their supposed number of 10,000. Then they all did get across and... stayed in the same place for months. The whole enterprise becomes more incredible as time moves on. Fighting only occurred when they moved east, towards Carthage. But in the end, they took over the Africa and adjacent provinces relatively easy. The question then is, did they need 10,000 (fighting) men for that? Possibly not. Because at the time of the Vandal crossing the Roman military had been in decay for some time. Auxiliary units were 'promoted' to regular ones to make up for loss of actual fighting power, for instance, due to a serious financial erosion which made the maintenance of all existing military impossible to sustain. And this may explain the North Africa disaster more easily then a mystery crossing of 10,000 Vandals. Now, Heather actually mentions this erosion of imperial finances, and it's even a key argument of his. He just doesn't apply it consistently.

 

[Pangur Bán]

David Rollason, Early Medieval Europe 300-1050: The Birth of Western Society, is very good at teaching the topics and methodologies explicitly--lots these books expect you just to jump in and figure everything out on your own, which makes Rollason's work stand out.

 

[Traitorfish]

A thought crossed my mind recently that part of the planter class social system was an attempt at recreating the rank and privilege of the peerage in the absence of the legal existence of actual rank. They got almost all the perks and prestige of being titled nobility. Absolute masters of all they surveyed.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. That's partly why the Southerner aristocracy were so obsessed with military ranks, they were the only titles of distinction routinely granted in the colonies, and one of the few socially acceptable titles after the Revolution. (Not everyone can be a senator at once, after all.) Most of them even maintained coats-of-arms like proper English gentlemen- over half of the signatories of the declaration of Independence had them, representing basically the entire Southern contingent and a few of the more lordly Northerners- until the Revolution made explicit claims to aristocracy a little unfashionable.

Heather's Fall dates to well before the EU 'immigration crisis'.

There's a certain strain of conservative Briton who thinks the "immigration crisis" began in 1847...

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Is that what an empire - or Empire, or imperium, or Reich - is? Was it what it was back when the HRE existed, or when Voltaire made his joke in 1756?

Well, ISTR the HRE had finally folded 41 years before -unless I'm off by 100 years early- and I can't say I'm familiar with the actual context in which Voltaire said it. Surely he didn't have the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne and over 900 years previous in mind? The remark certainly resembled the rump state German confederation around more recently.

And [shrugs] I provided a definition to be clear in my own remarks, but it's no hill I'd care to bother defending. What is an Empire, then? Merely a state ruled by an emperor?

 

[Arakhor]

The HRE folded around the time of Napoleon, most of which became the German and Austrian Empires.

 

[Dachs]

Well, ISTR the HRE had finally folded 41 years before -unless I'm off by 100 years early- and I can't say I'm familiar with the actual context in which Voltaire said it. Surely he didn't have the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne and over 900 years previous in mind? The remark certainly resembled the rump state German confederation around more recently.

And [shrugs] I provided a definition to be clear in my own remarks, but it's no hill I'd care to bother defending. What is an Empire, then? Merely a state ruled by an emperor?

The HRE was disestablished in 1806. In the last century of its existence, most of its institutions continued to work reasonably well, but many inhabitants of Germany conceded that they required reform. The Empire might have been sick, but, in Peter Wilson's words, it was hardly on life support. That ended up not mattering, because Napoléon's military onslaught and political offensive destroyed the Empire anyway. The widespread perception among intellectuals outside the Empire that the Empire was useless and moribund were generally untrue.

Does that qualify it as an "Empire"? My intention, when asking the question, was to draw out how little agreement there is on what constitutes an Empire, or empire, in the first place. I think the most reasonable way to say whether a state is an Empire is to see what it calls itself; if its leader is an Emperor/ess, then it's an Empire, whether that leader is Jean-Bédel Bokassa or Aleksandr Romanov. It's not a universally intersubjective definition, but I think it's the one that's easiest for everybody to agree on.

It's a lot harder to agree on what an "empire" is.

Size isn't a particularly good criterion, because extremely large states like Canada are pretty much never called empires despite being vastly larger than states that are usually agreed to be or have been empires like Sasanian Iran or Augustan Rome. A definition like saying that an empire has propagandistically limitless size is probably closer (because universality has been a common feature of many empires, from Rome to China to, indeed, the HRE) but does not apply to more modern empires, most of which have made little to no pretense at universality. Others emphasize a claim to rule over many diverse peoples, but this is not always true (e.g. in the example of some of the Iranian regimes) or is demographically insignificant (many Chinese empires, medieval Byzantium).

Neither is longevity. The "Augustan threshold" is a real item of historical interest - can an empire meaningfully outlive its founder? - but whether it actually defines empire is another question entirely. Neither Alexander the Great nor Napoléon I created a durable regime, yet both are almost always referred to as having created empires. The HRE would win full marks on this particular criterion, but I'm not sure that it's all that useful either.

Colonial empires also muddy the waters, since in some cases these were run by democratic countries (e.g. France, or the United States) and while they were usually large and included diverse peoples they rarely lasted all that long. I think it's difficult to dismiss these as having unquestionably not been empires, because everybody called them empires and they gave their name to the Age of Imperialism, but they make the discussion more difficult.

Other scholars emphasize regionalism, with a central imperial hub controlling an assortment of peripheral areas connected to the hub but not to each other, in a kind of "rimless wheel". Again, this works for some regimes (many classical empires, for example), but not for Napoleonic France, or for the German Kaiserreich, or for China. Empires were sometimes centralized, but not always (centralization in classical regimes was remarkably low due to the technological constraints of the time). Anyway, the relevance of centralization is often dramatically exaggerated because of twentieth-century historians' obsessions over the subject and attempts to fit every national history into a model based on a somewhat unhistorical reading of the history of France. What centralization actually meant is difficult to articulate and agree upon in any era.

Notably, the HRE meets several of these criteria. It didn't possess a colonial empire, but it lasted pretty long, was fairly large, can be structured into a core and periphery (although which areas were which depended on who was Emperor at the time), and made propagandistic claims to universality.

Whether it was "Roman" kind of, again, depends on what you think "Roman" means. The people of the Empire didn't live in the city of Rome, nor were they governed from it, but the people of the OG Roman Empire itself didn't meet either one of those criteria as early as the third century AD, with still 200 years of unquestioned Rome-itude left to go. The HRE didn't control Rome, but then again, modern Macedonia doesn't control ancient Macedonia either, but we don't go around calling Macedonians "Paionians" or something similarly insulting. (Unless you're Greek, I guess.) By the eighteenth century, few people outside of imperial institutions (including the imperial church) spoke or wrote in Latin, but again, y'know, that's also true of OG Rome in the time of Augustus. Romanness and the Roman legacy did mean something in the HRE, even if it didn't extend to the inhabitants ever referring to themselves as actual Romans.

You can very easily make a claim for "holy", too. The Empire was not an actual saint, but the Christian religion was inextricable from its existence. The most important institution in the Empire save perhaps the Emperor himself was the imperial church, over which he had pretty firm control for most of the Empire's existence. Confessionalization was incorporated into other imperial institutions as well (when it made sense to do so), a process that was actually accelerating in the late Empire when Voltaire was writing. The founding Emperor was endorsed by a pope, as were many others. Many of the early Emperors have even been described as running things via a "sacral monarchy".

I mean, the original Voltaire quote works best as a joke. It does not really work for a decent description of the Empire, either in the distant past or in Voltaire's present. There are grains of truth to it, but it is mostly just silliness. It would be fine if it were usually repeated as a joke and only as a joke, but instead people usually say it because they don't really know much about the Empire at all, and so use it to dismiss the whole entity as something farcical and anachronistic.

 

[Mouthwash]

Size isn't a particularly good criterion, because extremely large states like Canada are pretty much never called empires despite being vastly larger than states that are usually agreed to be or have been empires like Sasanian Iran or Augustan Rome. A definition like saying that an empire has propagandistically limitless size is probably closer (because universality has been a common feature of many empires, from Rome to China to, indeed, the HRE) but does not apply to more modern empires, most of which have made little to no pretense at universality. Others emphasize a claim to rule over many diverse peoples, but this is not always true (e.g. in the example of some of the Iranian regimes) or is demographically insignificant (many Chinese empires, medieval Byzantium).

Neither is longevity. The "Augustan threshold" is a real item of historical interest - can an empire meaningfully outlive its founder? - but whether it actually defines empire is another question entirely. Neither Alexander the Great nor Napoléon I created a durable regime, yet both are almost always referred to as having created empires. The HRE would win full marks on this particular criterion, but I'm not sure that it's all that useful either.

Colonial empires also muddy the waters, since in some cases these were run by democratic countries (e.g. France, or the United States) and while they were usually large and included diverse peoples they rarely lasted all that long. I think it's difficult to dismiss these as having unquestionably not been empires, because everybody called them empires and they gave their name to the Age of Imperialism, but they make the discussion more difficult.

Other scholars emphasize regionalism, with a central imperial hub controlling an assortment of peripheral areas connected to the hub but not to each other, in a kind of "rimless wheel". Again, this works for some regimes (many classical empires, for example), but not for Napoleonic France, or for the German Kaiserreich, or for China. Empires were sometimes centralized, but not always (centralization in classical regimes was remarkably low due to the technological constraints of the time). Anyway, the relevance of centralization is often dramatically exaggerated because of twentieth-century historians' obsessions over the subject and attempts to fit every national history into a model based on a somewhat unhistorical reading of the history of France. What centralization actually meant is difficult to articulate and agree upon in any era.

Notably, the HRE meets several of these criteria. It didn't possess a colonial empire, but it lasted pretty long, was fairly large, can be structured into a core and periphery (although which areas were which depended on who was Emperor at the time), and made propagandistic claims to universality.

The term simply refers to a single state or entity which subordinates a previously external political system. The HRE does not meet this definition; arguably it was an international system in its own right, and even if this were contested the claim of the Emperor to be some sort of sovereign was as spurious as Theoderic's title of Roman consul. Ask yourself this: what sort of new political entity could arise, in the modern era, that would cause you to refer to it as an 'empire?'

It seems also possible for something to be dubbed an empire if it possesses continuity with something else which was also an empire; for instance, the Byzantine empire once indisputably deserved the title but had no other identity to revert to (unlike the European empires, which were always governed by a core homeland) when it was reduced to its capital and southern Greece. The same goes for Iran, whose rulers presumably claimed to hold the position of earlier Persian emperors. You can't blame them- the idea of a united Persia began as an imperial project in the first place.

Now I think that using a legalistic, rather than geopolitical, definition is a terribly flawed way to go about anything in history. But I also recognize that this concession isn't likely to cause confusion, and the alternative is rather nonintuitive.

I also have a much lowered opinion of academia after reading what purported scholars have to say in your post. Empires have a 'core' and 'periphery?' They all made claims to 'universality?' Hey, my dog eats regularly, and I've noticed that the dogs of other people eat too. So one of the identifying characteristics of dogs must be their ability to eat!

Whether it was "Roman" kind of, again, depends on what you think "Roman" means. The people of the Empire didn't live in the city of Rome, nor were they governed from it, but the people of the OG Roman Empire itself didn't meet either one of those criteria as early as the third century AD, with still 200 years of unquestioned Rome-itude left to go. The HRE didn't control Rome, but then again, modern Macedonia doesn't control ancient Macedonia either, but we don't go around calling Macedonians "Paionians" or something similarly insulting.

There's still the argument from continuity: the Roman Empire was based around and created by a central political core in Italy, which was in turn created by the city called Rome. Its armies were directly descended from that city's citizen militia. Its legislative system and its ruling class were still thoroughly Roman by Augustus's time. That didn't remain the case, but we cannot define when and how the empire stopped being Roman; this is an unavoidable conceptual limitation. In my opinion there is a case to be made that the Roman Empire deserved its title while the HRE simply abused the term to undergird its claim of universality.

 

[Dachs]

The term simply refers to a single state or entity which subordinates a previously external political system. The HRE does not meet this definition; arguably it was an international system in its own right, and even if this were contested the claim of the Emperor to be some sort of sovereign was as spurious as Theoderic's title of Roman consul. Ask yourself this: what sort of new political entity could arise, in the modern era, that would cause you to refer to it as an 'empire?'

It seems also possible for something to be dubbed an empire if it possesses continuity with something else which was also an empire; for instance, the Byzantine empire once indisputably deserved the title but had no other identity to revert to (unlike the European empires, which were always governed by a core homeland) when it was reduced to its capital and southern Greece. The same goes for Iran, whose rulers presumably claimed to hold the position of earlier Persian emperors. You can't blame them- the idea of a united Persia began as an imperial project in the first place.

Now I think that using a legalistic, rather than geopolitical, definition is a terribly flawed way to go about anything in history. But I also recognize that this concession isn't likely to cause confusion, and the alternative is rather nonintuitive.

I also have a much lowered opinion of academia after reading what purported scholars have to say in your post. Empires have a 'core' and 'periphery?' They all made claims to 'universality?' Hey, my dog eats regularly, and I've noticed that the dogs of other people eat too. So one of the identifying characteristics of dogs must be their ability to eat!

Your "subordinates a previously external political system" is extremely idiosyncratic (or it's a really freakin' purple way to say "conquers territory"), it does apply to the HRE (exhibit A: Bohemia), and it also applies to a ton of other countries in the world that pretty much nobody actually calls "empires". Your use of the term "international system" is as meaningless here as in the other threads in which you've used it.

Continuity with other regimes is not a useful criterion, because it leads to some weird places (the Republic of Turkey being an empire, for example), and because it all is really does is add a bunch of false positives to a criterion that's already perfectly fine, which is "do they call themselves an empire or don't they?" And there's also the whole bit about what continuity even means, and when it applies and when it doesn't, and frankly that's a set of arguments that really aren't appealing at all! I don't even know what you mean by "imperial project" unless that also means "conquer territory", despite the fact that it sounds like making a papier-mâché stormtrooper helmet in middle school.

I don't know why you think either of those definitions is "legalistic", unless that means "based on a very silly rule that has no relationship to how people use the word in real life", and I don't know what a "geopolitical" definition of the term would even look like, let alone mean, unless it's Halford Mackinder talking about how Central Asia is an empire because it's gonna conquer the world in the age of railroads. I'm sure the modern academics you so casually dismiss would be extremely concerned that somebody made a largely incomprehensible word-salad post on a message board suggesting that he knows better.

My opinion on what "real Romans" were is pretty consistent: they could call themselves what they wanted to call themselves, and most people who try to come up with some sort of alternative definition either arrive at it via objectively wrong facts or use criteria that don't actually narrow the field in the way that they think. Your example has both of those. Cicero, Pompey, and Sulla were apparently "Roman" despite not actually being born in Rome, because they were Roman citizens and spoke Latin and participated in Roman politics and called themselves Romans...but apparently the rulers of the later Empire, who were also Roman citizens and spoke Latin and participated in Roman politics and called themselves Romans, "weren't". The HRE began in Rome just like Augustus' Empire did, and Italy was intermittently part of the "political core" for a long time after the beginning of the Empire. I mean, it just goes on and on.

 

[Mouthwash]

Your "subordinates a previously external political system" is extremely idiosyncratic

I'm not an academic, sorry. I have my own words for things.

(or it's a really freakin' purple way to say "conquers territory"),

Well, not strictly. An empire could be formed by a willing unification of states, though that (obviously) wouldn't usually happen.

it does apply to the HRE (exhibit A: Bohemia),

Well, what kind of control did the Emperor have over Bohemia? My knowledge of the Holy Roman Empire (from Wikipedia and EUIV- I don't pretend to know this stuff) tell me that the members were mostly or completely autonomous- it couldn't even be called a confederation, properly. That wouldn't meet my definition.

and it also applies to a ton of other countries in the world that pretty much nobody actually calls "empires".

Yeah, I think we're talking way past each other... the ancient Near East, the Warring States of China, nineteenth century Europe- these all qualify as international systems to me. The definition is inherently subjective. For instance, we refer to Periclean Athens as an empire because it tried to dominate independent city-states of Greece, but we don't apply the same label to modern Greece, which controls much more territory in a more centralized fashion.

Your use of the term "international system" is as meaningless here as in the other threads in which you've used it.

I can't recall how I've used it. But it would be helpful if you could give me your definition of it. Or does your reading of history not leave room for silly 'geopolitical' balderdash like that?

Continuity with other regimes is not a useful criterion, because it leads to some weird places (the Republic of Turkey being an empire, for example),

No, that's pretty straightforward. The empire was abolished and Turkey was made into a ethnostate along Westphalian lines. From a legal standpoint, there's a clear dividing line.

and because it all is really does is add a bunch of false positives to a criterion that's already perfectly fine, which is "do they call themselves an empire or don't they?"

I can get the mods to change my username to Exalted Emperor Listerine III. Doesn't mean historians have to consider whether to recognize the title. (And if your criterion is how people thought of themselves, I have to question why you find it relevant to political history at all?)

And there's also the whole bit about what continuity even means, and when it applies and when it doesn't, and frankly that's a set of arguments that really aren't appealing at all!

I agree, but I also find them way more appealing than any in your response to Buster's Uncle.

I don't even know what you mean by "imperial project" unless that also means "conquer territory", despite the fact that it sounds like making a papier-mâché stormtrooper helmet in middle school.

OK, stop making fun of my language! Even if it is deserved...

I don't know why you think either of those definitions is "legalistic", unless that means "based on a very silly rule that has no relationship to how people use the word in real life",

I use the word to refer to concepts and identities that were 'on paper' and not reflections of reality. The sovereignty of the HRE, the status of the later Byzantine rulers as emperors, etc.

and I don't know what a "geopolitical" definition of the term would even look like,

I mean something that translates into political reality. Judging an empire by size or, as you suggested, "a central imperial hub controlling an assortment of peripheral areas"- those are what I'm talking about.

let alone mean, unless it's Halford Mackinder talking about how Central Asia is an empire because it's gonna conquer the world in the age of railroads.

OK, now I can say that you aren't using terms correctly. Geopolitics refers to any relation of politics and geography. MacKinder represents geopolitics like Edward Gibbon represents history.

I'm sure the modern academics you so casually dismiss would be extremely concerned that somebody made a largely incomprehensible word-salad post on a message board suggesting that he knows better.

Believe me, I'm not interested in their opinion.

My opinion on what "real Romans" were is pretty consistent: they could call themselves what they wanted to call themselves,

Take that logic to its rightful conclusion.

Your example has both of those. Cicero, Pompey, and Sulla were apparently "Roman" despite not actually being born in Rome, because they were Roman citizens and spoke Latin and participated in Roman politics and called themselves Romans...but apparently the rulers of the later Empire, who were also Roman citizens and spoke Latin and participated in Roman politics and called themselves Romans, "weren't".

In the later empire citizenship was extended to all freedmen, Roman politics were less ethnically insular, and a much higher proportion of people thought of themselves as Roman.

This is the consequence of discussing conceptual things as if they were ontological realities. You either wind up with purists using one arbitrary definition of continuity (race, culture, religion, etc.) to tie to political terms or relativists who think apparently think that believing something makes it fact (I wonder, though, if you'd also apply this standard to modern-day nationalists).

Both of them are somewhat right. It's sometimes psychologically reasonable to regard some entities (e.g. failing Byzantium) as being the same as what went before, but we couldn't talk about states or empires without some kind of wholeness, or continuity. The definition of continuity I am using is that of politics: that the Roman Empire of the third century grew directly from the state and institutions of the city of Rome. There is no other definition that works. The sorites paradox makes splitting up those two entities impossible, but it allows us to cleanly split them from the HRE.

The HRE began in Rome just like Augustus' Empire did, and Italy was intermittently part of the "political core" for a long time after the beginning of the Empire.

Yeah, so? Rome as an entity did not play any role in the creation of the HRE; Charlemagne was simply crowned there. It doesn't deserve the brand name.

 

[Agent327]

Notably, the HRE meets several of these criteria. It didn't possess a colonial empire, but it lasted pretty long, was fairly large, can be structured into a core and periphery (although which areas were which depended on who was Emperor at the time), and made propagandistic claims to universality.

Really? What empire has its 'core and periphery' jump around with whoever happens to be monarch? Doesn't that simply mean there was neither core nor periphery? And I'm not sure what 'claims to universality' the HRE made.

Whether it was "Roman" kind of, again, depends on what you think "Roman" means. The people of the Empire didn't live in the city of Rome, nor were they governed from it, but the people of the OG Roman Empire itself didn't meet either one of those criteria as early as the third century AD, with still 200 years of unquestioned Rome-itude left to go. The HRE didn't control Rome, but then again, modern Macedonia doesn't control ancient Macedonia either, but we don't go around calling Macedonians "Paionians" or something similarly insulting. (Unless you're Greek, I guess.) By the eighteenth century, few people outside of imperial institutions (including the imperial church) spoke or wrote in Latin, but again, y'know, that's also true of OG Rome in the time of Augustus. Romanness and the Roman legacy did mean something in the HRE, even if it didn't extend to the inhabitants ever referring to themselves as actual Romans.

So in conclusion, while the inhabitants of the HRE didn't consider themselves Romans (or Germans, for that matter), this is actually an argument for being Roman?

You can very easily make a claim for "holy", too. The Empire was not an actual saint, but the Christian religion was inextricable from its existence. The most important institution in the Empire save perhaps the Emperor himself was the imperial church, over which he had pretty firm control for most of the Empire's existence.

Not really. There was this little thing called the investiture struggle - which the emperor lost. Not only that, but the emperor effectively lost the support of the empire's nobility, who eventually supported the pope against the emperor. The result was an elective monarchy, a church controlled not by the pope, but by the ruling nobility, and an empire nipped in the bud. (Not to mention that by the definition '' the Christian religion was inextricable from its existence' any Christian country might be called holy. Not even the papal state was that arrogant.)

It would seem then, that Voltaire's quip was actually quite accurate. Ad rem, as it were.

 

[Pangur Bán]

No Agent, Dachs is correct. You need to understand that for medieval Europeans, Romanitas and Christianitas are virtually indistinguishable. They don't really know or care about Cicero or Roman citizenship or togas (aside from a few very nerdy monks), they know about Constantine the Great and Justinian and the Hagia Sophia and Heraclius and the Popes and church councils and Roman law and canon law, etc. The logic is that the emperor, the leader of the Romans, is God's favourite ruler--he is the to Christianity what the kings of Israel and Judah were to Judaism, and he sits at the head of a sacral order that underlies the legitimacy of all political and legal institutions. That doesn't mean everyone believes or internalizes this doctrine, but that is the logic (and yes, he is conceived of as a kind of priest). The German king/emperor built up his power by using bishoprics and monasteries to gain an inalienable political ascendancy (Otto, for instance, was otherwise just a ruler of the Saxons), which is one of the reasons the Investiture Dispute was so damaging--even though that didn't, as you suggest, lead to the independence of German prelates or their appointment.

By the time you get to Voltaire, Romanitas was being recycled as the classical pagan civilization we know from the movies--in part because there emerged a new class of clerks in Italy who lacked Church education and used the alleged superiority of 'classical' Roman learning to persuade patron types to give them jobs.

 

[Mouthwash]

That.. makes a great deal of sense.

 

[Traitorfish]

The term simply refers to a single state or entity which subordinates a previously external political system.

What about the First British Empire? The British didn't really bother subordinating existing political structures until they reached India and realised that there's no way an island can rule a subcontinent without a little compromise. In Ireland, the Scottish Highlands and in the Americas, they cheerfully destroyed the indigenous political system of chieftainly confederations and planted bureaucratic English-style governments in their place. So is the usually classification of the empire as an empire mistaken?

 

[Buster's Uncle]

Okay; this is fascinating conversation and I'm glad Owen asked the question - but doesn't it end up boiling down to something I said in the first place?

Strictly speaking, it not an empire without an Emperor, just as you call a country without a king something besides a kingdom.

Notwithstanding my typo, we don't really have a more useful definition of any precision, do we?