Is the "fall" of the Roman Empire a myth? The Rise and Fall of the Ostrogoths

tonight we are going to talk about the rise and fall of the ostrogoths who i don't know how familiar you are even with the name ostrogos what are ostrogoths so we've had before and we're going to talk about goths we talked about these same goths when we were talking about gothic architecture which i lecture a little bit of them i like these guys because they're cute anyway so they're very scary right so the costs are scary so our goss that we're talking about tonight have absolutely zero relationship with 20th and 21st century teenagers with 12th century and beyond uh architecture that goes by this name gothic or even in fact the 12th century uh font and writing style that you might be familiar with kind of gothic text maybe even think of it like that as being sort of how german used to be written in english or old english yeah so we have that same font that i was able to pull you know just kind of like a um called a gothic font in point of fact um none of those things gothic architecture the gothic writing or goths have anything at all to do with actual goths and so um the gothic architecture is is created what we now call gothic it wasn't called gothic until the modern era uh and it has nothing to do with the tribe of the goths which was totally extinct centuries before that was created likewise the writing style and of course the you know the gospels today you know which are inspired by the architecture not by the uh barbarians so i thought you were commenting okay just a reminder uh that if there are any questions in the house quick questions uh john will repeat the questions and if it's a lengthier comment an urgent we'll bring the microphone to you absolutely and if you've got any people online where i have a question you can write type it in i will voice the questions for people watching on facebook beautiful so please do ask and uh your questions and do tell us your comments so this is one of a bazillion fun maps and charts that we have tonight we don't have to memorize this entire thing this is one of the things one of the types of goth that we are talking about one of the ways of gothic that where that is a thing that we are talking about tonight is gothic the language group uh and so the gothic language which is as you might know if you don't know about the language families that in the same way that um french and italian and spanish and portuguese and romanian those are all descendants from latin which is the language of the west roman empire but that over time languages evolve and now they've diverged and they're their own different languages from each other likewise um the old germanic or proto-germanic language ultimately evolved into plenty of other different um germanic languages and so if we start at the original old germanic then that splits into kind of a linguist divide geographically to an eastern branch a western branch and a northern branch the northern branch northern germanic is called old norse and so that's that language that we have like all the viking sagas and everything like that are all in that and that divides into different air regions that become essentially uh east old norse becomes danish and swedish and uh the west becomes norwegian and icelandic and then you know some of these other uh languages for example like greenlandic that means it's extinct right so red here is extinct and the green ones have lived on yellow means that this map got this chart got stolen from dutch people and so they were just showing that them how important it is to get to dutch right but anyway it just means that those that these are extinct and dutch is the living language of which dutch has a child language afrikaans down in south africa that is also a living language anyway that's part of the the big western branch the western branch includes everything from anyway this thing that became dutch which is the franconian branch the old high german branch that becomes a burnt central german it becomes essentially standard german is derived from that as well as austro-bavarian and swiss german with so anyway the different kinds of german that are spoken together and then there's this um also in that same western group is anglo phrygian and that gives us old english and i'm sorry old english and old frisian and so phrygian is um this language of the northern part of the netherlands that continues to be exist it's english's closest relative right other than scott's english right so this is essentially the living language so yola was it's a pigeon i think it's a between english and something else maybe um and it's extinct but i maybe i'm i might be for i always look it up what it is someone can look up yolo and tell us anyway so those are this is a big complicated branch but we noticed maybe that there's a whole branch here northwest branches are still alive but there's this other branch called the east germanic languages which are all extinct and these include things like burgundian vandal and gothic including crimean gothic which is a little bit different from the rest of gothic because it's it only went extinct much more recently so that's you know those people the goss were still hanging out in crimea of all places anyway they're gone now but that was a little that's that eastern branch so that kind of gives you a sense it's a language group and it's one of the ones that is part of germanic from 2000 years ago uh and of which now they're all extinct so now that's incomplicated there's gonna be a lot of these okay so if this is kind of a map that is uh looking at um the roman empire you can kind of see the territory of the roman empire and this kind of frontiers are shown here um as it is in collapse when the huns come in and put all this pressure on all of these german uh tribes these tribes like the goths who've been living here they're part of that eastern branch remember they've been living here and they're splitting into eastern goth and western goth which is to say ostergoth and visigoth they are pressured and go into the territory of the empire as do other confederations that we're maybe familiar with the franks who cross into now giving their name france the alimony you may be no you might know that the french people and the spaniards call germans right they because they are the these are the germans that stayed on the other side you know of you know west germany as far as the franks are concerned and so they give their name to that places like the bright the people like the burgundians they go to where it's now burgundy right and the lombards ultimately end up in lombardy uh tribes like the suevi make it down to here and then we don't think about them those vandals who are uh get where they start uh see where the vandals are coming from but anyway there's something from up here somewhere so the vandals are the ones they get they they're known for vandalizing rome which is why we their name has become the word for vandalizing they end up in tunisia of all places anyway so these guys are all on the run and of course very famously in uh english history the anglos the saxons and the jutes make their way into uh england to create what you know angel angles make angle and saxons make you know wessex and essex and all those places right so those are kind of the how it's working yes question can we get where did the huns come from is the question so you can kind of see huns here right so they came from essentially mongolia and so um they are part of this long uh uh tradition um that goes all the way up until the mongols the mongols are kind of the last hurrah of this and they do very successfully in the later middle ages the mongols create a large confederation that uh conquers china and goes all and conquers the middle east and goes very far towards actually putting a lot of pressure on europe even too and so that's like the biggest one of these let's say step um nomad confederations where people who are natural herders and who also are doing everything on horseback they have a particular kind of of warfare which settled peoples so people who are living in civil what we call civilization where because we usually think of this from the we don't don't have the nomad perspective someday we'll do a lecture and we'll give the nomads perspective so anyway from our perspective um they're barbarians so and we are in civilization and so which is to say we live in cities and how do agriculture and things like that uh and so and we also you tend to have a bunch of infantry and one of the things that's a mess for um settled peoples is that the um the nomads when they come in with their light uh cavalry they charge at you real fast with on horseback they have these really um arrows and they just shoot everybody and kill everybody and as the troops are trying to get up to them they turn around and go go away and they just do that relentlessly until you are dead and so it's very hard um it's been very hard for like 2 500 years to do anything about it and so the huns are one of these confederations they are speaking a uh turkic language and they um um anyway so they're they come from that central asia and they make their way through to what's now um ukraine and then ultimately their empire they conquer all those germans and so at a certain point under attila the hun their empire includes all of this northern part northern and eastern part of europe and underneath them are the germans of the slavs so the hungarians are unrelated to the huns so the reality is is that um the huns were pretty scary you know and everybody remembered the huns and they remembered the huns are those guys on the horses that come from the steps hungarians are uh actually related to people from finland so they're ultimately um a people that are from finland they speak a language that is related hungarian is actually it's a language is magyar and the people are called magurus we call them hungarians but anyway the magyars are related to finnish and they were just like every other finn that's up there at a certain point but they live next to these step nomads and so they stay adopt their culture and so they start to do those same things with the herding and the and the horses and the archers and things like that and so then long time after the huns are destroyed um the hungarians the magyars come in in the central middle ages and they live in that place this place right here the romans call it pannonia what we call it hungary uh and they they set up their kingdom there and it's just where the huns had been it's where the avars had been it's where all these step guys come and live because it's this little piece of step that exists in the middle of europe that you can use to raid everybody else and so uh that's why we call them hungarians not related at all to the huns although they look back on hungarians look back on it as kind of like a little bit of a pride and they think of the huns maybe as they've got like the sword of attila and stuff like that they think i don't know anyway so okay so um by the fourth century then by the time the huns are getting there the goths are in two major confederations which we call the ostrogoths and the visigoths and that's from their own word for east and west so austral you can kind of hear east in that and visa you can kind of hear west in that since gothic is english is a germanic language just like gothic although it's not closely related and so with that arrival then the visigoths who have been in a lot of contact with the romans so a lot of we think of these germanic tribes as being you know the romans called them barbarians and things like that they are living on the opposite side of the roman border and have been trading with the romans and and and kind of getting roman goods and services and things like that for let's say 300 years and so they have already imbibed a lot of the kind of uh culture and civilization that's on the roman side of the border uh and meanwhile by this time uh romans the roman empire has also undergone all lots of plagues and there's reasons why it's become um radically depopulated so its population has gone down substantially from when it's at its peak and so the barbarians as the huns get there and nobody wants to live with the huns so nuns are very scary they ask the emperors can we please come across the border and uh and be federates can we be allies uh in the romans and help defend the roman empire against these huns and so they get permission to do that they cross the danube which is the frontier between germany and or the magna germania this area where all the german tribes are and the empire and they settle in thrace which is modern bulgaria the bulgars are another one of these people that come from the steps originally although now they're slavs anyway we can't go into that so um after fighting wars uh in the uh against the east romans so while they're in there it doesn't it isn't a particularly immediately happy thing so there's a bunch of you know semi-romanized barbarians that are now living in the empire the empire doesn't want to give them food or money and things like that and so they end up having to take matters into their own hands at a certain point and so there are gothic wars at a certain point then the eastern emperors who are in constantinople which is quite close to bulgaria um encourage the uh goss to visit us hey wouldn't it be nice there's so many more better places for you to raid in the western part of the empire why don't you go to italy and so they take that hint and they go west we have here kind of a an interesting third century roman depiction of what goths what they felt gods at the time look like as they're having a big battle here against the romans you can kind of see a legion here there's a gothic guy here so he's not don't have a shirt but he's got pants and so that's one of the big differentiators between um uh romans who you know don't wear pants and these german barbarians who do that's where we get pants so okay okay so the visigoths so on their way west the visigoths quite famously sac rome uh in 410 but as every once in a while they also start allying with the romans and so they will occasionally get bought off by the western emperor and things like that but also occasionally a lie with them and so for example they form an alliance with the romans as federates and inflict actually a major defeat on the huns in france in 451 a.d but in the meantime um the visigoths anyway from you know their time in italy they've made their way first to aquitaine where they create which is southwestern france they create a um a kingdom of their own there and then over time they conquer from other barbarian tribes spain and because spain is bigger than aquitaine they kind of start moving down here and so toledo toledo becomes their um capital and so that becomes the capital of the visitor gothic kingdom and the visigothic kings then rule spain from the year for uh from well their kingdom anyway from 416 and down in spain down to 7-eleven when um they are conquered by a muslim expeditionary party uh led by tariq so the guy for whom gibraltar is named and so that is the end of the visigots who go extinct then at 7-eleven meanwhile their cousins the ostrogoths were slower in entering the empire but they ultimately do so they are hanging out in that area that pannonia that i keep talking about where um where eventually they're getting displaced by the huns and things and so they want to get out of there so they're following and when they cross into the empire they conquer the area that is rome itself and italy and they create a kingdom for themselves uh that is in italy the surrounding provinces of the adriatic here and so then the ostergast continued to rule italy until a successful invasion by the eastern roman emperor the emperor justinian the great he retakes italy for the empire after which the ostrogoths then also become extinct so this is why this entire language family that included vandal and ostrogothic and burgundian this east germanic language group is all extinct because all of these guys got wiped out eventually okay so tonight's story is entitled rise and fall of the ostrogoths but it's also a lot about the fall of rome as you can imagine since this is all happening in the wake of the fall of the western empire this is that same sarcophagus that included we saw that the goth over here right with the pants and you can see all these romans that are fighting goths and everything like that as a very i think it's an emblematic of the time because it's very chaotic time period for the roman empire as they are struggling against all of this incursion of all of these uh peoples across their frontier so i'm a star trek fan i've mentioned a couple times there is kind of a moment in the old star trek show then star trek the next generation there's this moment when the earth and you know their their federation of planets is is about to fall potentially uh to this very scary aliens called the borg and while he's doing it the kind of shakespearean actor captain captain picard muses i wonder if the emperor onorius watching the visigoths coming over the seventh hill could truly realize that the roman empire was about to fall this is really just another page of history isn't it will this be the end of our civilization so he's remembering this story of rome and i just quote that not because star trek matters in this case but because in the popular imagination the way we think of especially this era is in this framework of rise and fall and especially decline and fall of the roman empire according to the way we usually kind of tell this story i've probably is a thumbnail used 476 a million times in all these lectures as kind of a traditional or working or historian's date for when the western roman empire falls what happened in 476 in that year the 16 year old uh emperor a guy named romulus augustus who's usually referred to as romulus augustolus which means little little emperor as opposed to um you know anyway so it's a diminutive and also um a smear uh is deposed by the general of his armies so uh his own uh technically subordinate the person who is the magus megista militant the the head of the armed forces of the west uh odawasser who is a himself a germanic warrior i think he's half half vandal maybe so by this date however uh so even though we kind of call this the fall of rome by this date the city of rome had already been sacked by the visigoths in 410 and by the vandals in 455. it's not like it was depopulated entirely or anything like that it was you know still ongoing but it had been already fallen a little bit although the city of rome this was the western roman empire in 395 although it continued to have symbolic importance and rome was by far and away the most populous city in the west and indeed it indeed it still relied on massive imports of grain from sicily especially but also north africa in order to feed as many people as we're there it had been a very long time since the capital of the western empire had been moved so in 286 it was moved first to milan and then afterwards milan actually even though it's a good place to defend against all these alpine passes through which all the barbarians keep coming it's way less defensible than ravenna and so in 404 i was moved to ravenna which is where that's this that last nominal emperor romulus augustulus is ruling in 475 476. okay so what's ravenna so this is ravenna is like a 5th and 6th century venice and so we wouldn't even know it to go there now because the river has entirely silted in and so this all of this uh the river moved so the mouth of the river doesn't even put po doesn't even make it down here anymore and meanwhile then all of this became a marsh and it's all silted in there's one little um canal channel and things like that that's kind of left i think and it's otherwise mostly all just surrounded now by land and so you have like essentially what was essentially a little venice uh in antiquity but if you then filled in all the land around venice like it is right now and it just had a city around it now which is what ravenna has and so ravenna has its own little kind of um living city that's even kind of like an industrial city and that kind of a thing so it's it's kind of interesting because it has this ancient core that was on islands but it's now surrounded it had two different little parts so there's the main city and there's the port and so there's a reason therefore you can imagine why this is very defensible you know this is a natural moat the same way venice is you know and it has walls and things like that and also very advantageously you have all of the support of the empire that you can get via water right and so they can bring the navy up to there and they can supply from uh the western provinces and you also have a very direct route to get to the eastern empire to get to constantinople so that's what modeled somebody it's a painting i think it's an artist's rendition it would be super cool if somebody makes a 3d model of this that's because it's really neat because i'd like to be able to zoom in and see whatever everything exactly is but that's the image okay so you may not have heard even a lot of people i've talked to when i said i were going to ravenna they hadn't even heard of ravenna they're like what are you going to wear but you might have seen this picture before so this is a fairly famous mosaic and so if you ever are seeing for example um byzantine or you know east roman empire empire mosaics of the earliest ones um a huge proportion of them including this one of justinian that eastern roman emperor who conquered reconquers italy in the west uh along with his generals who also helped generals over here on this side who helped him do it and his troops and his bishops over here on the other side we're conquering it for um orthodox christendom uh justinian's picture is here as is his wife theodora her eunuchs and her ladies um other mosaics that you that show actually a contemporary picture so this is actually what the city of ravenna looked like emphasizing though the palace so from the picture of the palace you can see the city behind here with all of its kind of wall and that sort of thing as well classes it's ports you can see over here it says classes and so this is that port that ravenna has which again is walled and you can see it's got access to the sea in the navy this is a picture i've used before which because i think it's pretty interesting and we i talk about how in so many ways that christianity is very roman you know and especially then when it becomes a religion of the roman empire in the west in the fourth century um we don't often picture moses as looking like this i think of him as looking like charlton heston i guess but anyway he's certainly not usually wearing let's say have haircut like a roman and wearing a toga and stuff like that you know but you can see here this is moses right and it's because um at a certain point when christianity becomes the religion of the roman empire everybody saw themselves and they see every all the bible characters as being like them and so moses and all of the other prophets are always dressed like uh late roman philosophers and so they were the clothing of late roman philosophers uh likewise um you know who's this jesus right so we don't usually do jesus without a beard nowadays and and um but he's wearing here the purple robes of a late roman emperor again kind of a purpley toga thing you can tell it's jesus because he got the cross behind him right um and uh he's got a byzantine crown here or a lake broman a west roman crown and it byzantine probably anyway and then he's got angels and and uh generals and and uh nobles right bishops so uh this is um anyway how then uh the empire and christianity has already gone very much and been very much romanized in a synthesis of all kinds of uh greco-roman culture that it's totally intermixed with so oh yes all of these conquerors puns and so forth have gradually taken speaking a more latinized form of language right so the question is i'm going to i'm going to do that so the question is um if all of these um countries you know we saw how the roman empire in the west falls and so we have the visigoths and the franks and the ostrogoths and the huns and they and they all speak different languages so the huns have a turkic language and all those other people have germanic languages visigothic frank so we think of french people we don't think of them as speaking a germanic language right we think of them as speaking french which is a descendant albeit a little you know weirded up one but anyway compared to italian but it's a descendant of latin right but it's because what it what happens is um as these relatively unpopulous tribes so there's there's only a few hundred couple hundred thousand um in any one of these confederations when those people move into that territory that has let's say a couple million romans in gaul over time it's they they you could assimilate the other way if there was a strong cultural reason for doing it but the germanic tribes do not do that and so in every case they lose their language and they speak the language of the people that they've conquered and so that's why french has descended from latin italian is descended from latin spanish is descended from latin the same thing happens for turkic peoples like the the serbs the croats and the bulgars who all speak slavic languages they don't speak turkic languages anymore and so they assimilate those things and so that happens often when a for example when a it doesn't always this case but this is a rule of thumb so if if people who are culturally uh you know less sophisticated take over a more sophisticated or people who are poor take over a richer society they often the the existing society's language and customs and law have a much better chance of surviving and that's what's happened here it doesn't always happen more numerous especially if they're much more numerous although it's completely possible for it to go the other way so an example is turkey so in the case of turkey all of those people in turkey when the turks got there just a couple hundred thousand people again uh in an area that had millions of inhabitants they all spoke greek but they all assimilated uh into certain learning turkish and so it can go the other way and that happens for example in england where latin is is largely um lost and so more or less lost the angle since the local people learned either revert to their celtic language if they were already kind of mostly speaking that so they become speaking welsh and and gaelic or they assimilate and they start speaking angle and saxon and that becomes english so it can happen either way so anyway in this particular case so han is gone physiogothic is gone ostrogothic is gone all those things frankish is gone um but one thing that has survived you know is just and one of the things we kind of realized is just this remarkable survival of all of these um buildings from the end of the roman empire uh these vast uh churches and other government buildings mausoleum and things like that and in what amazing state so just filled with all of these um i mean frescoes even but especially mosaics and certainly their floors and everything like that they've all survived you know remarkably intact and so it is a little bit of a different narrative than we sometimes think when we think of the roman empire as just being completely wiped out and gone there's actually lots of stuff from the later part of the empire that has survived especially in a place like ravenna and we'll talk about why it has so i want to talk about though this framework that we have of survive and fall when we um when we come to understand things through the lens of history we think of maybe history as being about uh just a bunch of facts and things like that and it's maybe more scientific than um or we'd like to think of it as more scientific than maybe it is but there is a lot about history where the word story is definitely um important and related to it uh and that is because history involves not just those kind of facts but also um narrative as historians construct narratives to explain uh what's important and so there's inherent bias in deciding what's important listening to uh you know what sources what are we thinking about and then when we say that what happened and why then that involves also biases in terms of survival of evidence and that kind of a thing but one of the things that we might not be aware of in terms of historiography is we have a truism that history is written by the victors but is actually written by the first person who ever wrote it down and so in generally speaking if a historian writes the narrative or creates that original story that becomes that story is really hard to wipe out and replace with a different story and so generally speaking even if you have people talk about and often decry and dislike what they call revisionist history every single time you write history that's revision so there's no i mean all history is continual revision but if a historian for example even completely overturns the conclusions of a historical narrative they often are still completely dependent on the narrative itself an example uh uh in in my particular one of my fields of expertise in in church history in the history of the restoration the history of mormonism um there is this kind of beginning biography of joseph smith where this uh which was uh written by fon brodie in the middle of the 20th century and it was just decried by everybody who was a believing mormon because she just destroyed you know she was an attack and a blasphemer and all these kind of things they didn't they really hated everything that she said but if you go through her story and her narrative it almost is exactly using exactly the same sources as the official histories of the churches that have been written as the first narrative it just has a different conclusion and different interpretation so it's almost using the exact same narrative likewise here in terms of this framework we have of decline and fall of the roman empire there is in fact a reason why that's our view vantage and that is because we have a very venerable historian who is at the beginning of this framework for us edward gibbon whose history of the decline and fall of the roman empire is also itself among the most important books in the history of history as a result of it being so important what gibbon wrote has really affected all of how we view this history ever after and so for example as a result of that one of the things that we know about um late antiquity is the roman empire declined and fell and that's one of the um one of the frames that we then view everything through um in great port then um though even though he has had that and we've inherited it this narrative would actually surprise people a lot in the middle ages they would not have ever thought of the rome as actually declining and falling certainly if we go to the eastern part of the roman empire which continues on it survives with very significant continuity the state continues to exist until the 15th century and we can say anyway that gibbon kind of agrees because he actually does follow the history of the east roman empire until the fall of constantinople to the turks in 1453 we call that whole time period we call it byzantine history but the people themselves did not use that term they called themselves romans the whole way um so from the perspective of the east you know this was the new rome hey we're still the roman empire so there is no there was no fall as far as they were concerned but even in the west there was actually very little sense that the empire was gone so in that time period after romulus augustus initially what happens and this is a picture of one of the one of the germanic masters of the military um who uh continues to rule italy after and you can see he's dressed in a very i don't know he's not he's still maintaining this kind of roman background that he does even though he's got you know his beard and modern his modern barbarian sensibilities he is still uh even though he's a king of the germanic tribe he still is making um the claim uh for centuries that they are nominally subject to the roman empire of the east and so the so they go through all the different ways in the forums where they use in latin they use the title petrichus they are patricians of the empire they understand that the sovereignty is coming from constantinople and they're that actually has effects and so they don't concede themselves as having had a fall in the empire and there's ceases there simply ceases to be a western emperor um in the meantime at a certain point the eastern emperors we saw when justinian made the ostrogoths go extinct so here's justinian the eastern emperor's return to ruling parts of italy until 1071. so again uh active active involvement of the roman state continues until the 12th century uh in italy for example and meanwhile by the time of the 12th century it had already been many many centuries that there had been a revived emperors of the west when the pope started crowning the kings of the france franks charlemagne and his successors and then later his successors the kings of what we call germany as emperors we say holy roman emperors but they didn't use that phrase at all they just called themselves roman emperors so they saw that as full continuity until the abolishment of the holy roman empire in 1806 which is to say after gibbon so so in point of fact most of the people even in the east or the west are not seeing it the way gibbons saw it doesn't mean that there was no decline or fall of the roman empire it's just that that idea hadn't taken hold until again so to answer that question that picard asked which is i wonder if the emperor honorius watching the visigoths coming over the seventh hill could cru truly realize that the empire was about to fall the answer is no absolutely not he did not uh envision that um nobody had that framework so here's honorius the emperor honorius who reigned in the west from 395 to 423 he does not know what you mean by the fire is about to fall uh this is gold solely this is coin okay this is the coin from charlemagne he looks kind of roman you know in this coin um they are still this is a a denarius this is a roman um unit of of coinage here and uh you can see that it's written in latin careless imp just to say imperator augustus so roman empire is still going on as far as everybody is concerned you know again what do you mean fall you know these guys are not they're not seeing it that way right so let's look at what did happen though because we do know that for us when we do things for example when we look at everything map wise they didn't have maps like this as of 395 which is the last time period when the whole empire is unified under a single emperor theodosius the first who's ruling both the eastern and western halves whose capital at the time are constantinople and milan but you can see the huns are right here ah the ostrogoths of the visigus if you just go to 526 it's a very different looking map right so we have the eastern roman empire making incontinuity but now we have again those uh what we think of as the barbarian kingdom so the ostrogoths centered on ravenna the visigoths in spain the francs up here and what's going to be france the vandals hanging out in tunisia and the anglo-saxons and just back here in pannonia being scary waiting their time the lombards right and so when we look at the difference between these two maps you know the one is all roman empire and it's all it's all uh like it's always been as as of as late as 395 but it's the roman empire has already suffered uh as valerie says um this the series of vast number of plagues it's had a big economic slump it's been had all kinds of internal civil wars it has also suffered from just rampant income inequality as the especially in the west um the senatorial elite have vast estates that uh just have tens of thousands of slaves uh that are working it instead of uh back when the roman empire was very strong and it was growing at the time of caesar when there are in fact lots of small farmers who own their own plots of land and who then can go and become a legionnaire and go and fight the wars as kind of a part of the kind of citizen soldier of the roman republic this is ceased to be possible by the time we get here to theodosius because there are no more of these kind of citizen farmer legion guys instead we are having to recruit the roman government central government is having increasingly to rely on germanic federates to bring across and recruit into their armies because the the population area on this side of the border has vastly decreased at the same time there's been a population growth over here in the germanic tribes that are um are enhanced by all the trade and everything like that that they've had with the civilization and so therefore they come across and that's why at this point even theodosius is working with dramatic mercenaries more or less as his military as he's holding off people like germanic tribes and the huns so anyway in that sense there is less much of the change has already happened and our map doesn't show it and so that's why this to this is so you know crazy different and yet what also doesn't show here is how much of the state apparatus has absolutely survived and is still functioning here in the ostrogothic kingdom especially but to an extent also the frankish kingdom especially down here and the visigoths so there is actually a lot of state survival in all of these as we'll begin to see and so even though the map has shown now just this 100 change in point of fact um it's there's less change underneath this than this than we imagine whereas before there was more change than what we did what we'd seen okay so this is going to be done very quick this part but just as a little bit of context why is there why are there two roman emperors right so we're talking about the fall of the empire in the west and i've been talking about the empire of the east so at a certain point in these crises of the third century it just became the size of the roman empire seemed to be too much to be even governorable and so one of the first strong emperors in a century diocletian re-um jiggled the entire array of the empire and divided it into essentially four pieces but specifically two halves with uh the east and west and uh within them a senior emperor a an augustus in both of these which are these two and the junior emperor who's called a caesar or kaiser and so that is the split becomes east and west and that ends up i can't go through all these either but essentially we end up going from diocletian himself who chooses maximian as a as his partner emperor that goes fairly quickly into the succession into bringing in constantius and his son constantine who is again one of the emperors in the west but constantine succeeds in conquering it all and so bringing it all back together but once it's been divided once there are divisions between west and east and so we can see here like when it has both he's the he's the fifth eastern emperor and the sixth western emperor and the first one of these with a cross here that's christian but you can see that a lot of them after him are not east and west they're just east or west anyway so then that continues as the uh when there's essentially more crises and sometimes weaker emperors they'll they'll split if they've got sons they'll maybe split the empire into two pieces or that kind of thing will happen it becomes permanent after theodosius so theodosius is the last empire emperor that's that map i showed you before of what the empire looked like unified he uh when he dies his younger sons his young sons become eastern and western emperor so anorius the western emperor arcadius the eastern emperor and so then that division then becomes permanent between the two courts the one in constantinople the other one initially in milan but quickly moving to ravenna for defense so when we get rid of uh romulus agustalis what's the obvious change if the state most like mostly is functioning the same way it's that there's no more emperor in the west and so after theodosius then that last emperor who is emperor of the whole thing dies i've said like i said his empire split between his sons honorius um already at this point then his son in the west is militarily dependent on his chief general who is a guy of dramatic descent so a dramatic romanized germanic warrior named silico stiliko is essentially running the show but while um stiliko is away in constantinople visiting conferring with the eastern emperor um people whispered in arnorius's ear and said that he's going to betray you and this kind of thing and so he anorius decides to have him arrested and assassinated uh and in so doing there's a major rebellion among the entire germanic military of which then anorius has to kill a whole bunch of their leaders and then all of the followers in the army defect to the goths and so this is one of the reasons for then the collapse in the western empire so as i mentioned we're having less capacity in rome to make and grow your own homegrown legions and so instead they've been recruiting german confederates and so we get these titles in latin like comeys which means companion to the emperor and dukes which is latin for leader and those ultimately evolve into things like count and duke in english okay so after honorius things go down actually pretty rapidly one of the things that's uh unstable about monarchy often is if for example if you have a succession of child um leaders in the dynasty um then you you're reliant on whoever the advisor is and it can fairly quickly happen that the the monarch and the monarchy loses power to some other office and in the western empire that office is the head of the military so with the continual threat of these invasions so germanic tribes confederations keep crossing the border and raid and the huns are ever present they also cross the borders and raid the western empire is completely unable to reconcile the fact that the essential military function of the emperors has now passed to these germanic generals who themselves though because they're german barbarians are disqualified from be being emperors excuse me and so therefore being on top of the the civil bureaucracy and so so unfortunately whether this can't be reconciled so the real power is in the hands of the military because it's a continual military crisis but the civilian government that has all the legitimacy um is essentially can't be in the same power and so they're always constantly conspiring against each other and trying to um the two forces are essentially trying to off each other and often do so there's a succession then of roman civilian figureheads that are occupying the throne themselves while people like ryzem are here see very similar here this is a modern statue held the actual power um for example under two of the later emperors uh in the late 400s so as the emperors in the west become extreme exceedingly reigns so these are the last emperors number 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 and 27 so you can see here maximus he's only emperor in the course of 455 right averages between 455 and 456. so it's very couple well mostly just a couple years right and so when that's happening as you can imagine the office itself is is radically losing its capacity or its power its control over anything so um the real power starts to be in the um in the rank of the magister militant which is to say the chief general of the army and those are people like stiliko atheists resimmer so um otto uh in 476 uh a german named uh otto ottawasser becomes magister militant and he turns on the civilian government so he goes with the army he captures the city of ravenna and he captures romulus augustolus who he gets to agree to abdicate and is dethroned the guy is actually very luckily not killed this is a very rare you generally speaking you do but he gets sent off to campania where he can live in a villa for the rest of his life with a nice pension so sometimes that happens but anyway in any event um what's happened now is that the in the main thing that's happened is this um figurehead of the emperors all these last guys who really aren't accomplishing anything uh has gotten rid of and the place where the real power is the magister militant is ruling out right so again although modern maps here are going to show a very dramatic change so now this is no longer the empire roman empire it's now called the kingdom of odawasser the primary change here is simply reuniting then that position of the head of the military with the head of the government so he's not like all the romans are suddenly killed or something has happened auto assara doesn't even lead a dramatic confederation he is simply the head of the roman military which is largely made up of germanic um mercenaries and he rules uh with the support then of the local roman aristocracy the senators and he also recognizes the suzerainty of the eastern emperor so essentially what they've done legally is they said okay we're just abolishing the existence of the western emperor ship and so now all of the territories that were subject to the western empire they're now now under essentially the eastern sovereignty as far as everyone's concerned so we all look to constantinople now as the place of the emperor nevertheless uh in in fact um it's functionally independent so ottawa uh doesn't have to send them taxes or anything like that because the western empire and the eastern empire haven't been sharing taxes for centuries here so um he continues then to um nominally uh i mean the empire is more or less there's no no one's getting post posters up there saying this is the kingdom of odawasar now it's still the roman empire he's now a patrician is what he rules but he also has the title among his own men rex so king of italy okay so owasser is nominally ruling for the emperor zeno in constantinople um but one of the weaknesses of the division of the empire is is that the two courts never get along and often um intrigue with each other and so they quarreled uh there was a bunch of uh even fighting in the on the frontiers and ultimately at a certain point zeno wanting to get rid of oto ussr talk to is one another one of these confederates uh theoderic who's the king of the ostrogoths who is up there on the frontier in pannonia and he says hey i'm gonna make you king of italy now and so and so the eastern empire emperor in whose name odawasser is ruling um has now decided you know to use his legitimizing power and giving giving that crown to somebody else who doesn't actually own italy or anything like that but that was all the encouragement that theoderic and the ostrogoths needed to to leave pannonia to leave hungary and decide to go into italy which is much richer so the ostrogoths invade they actually got some support from their cousins the visigoths who were hanging out in spain and by 490 they'd really captured most of italy from ottawa who was still hanging out in ravenna theoderic invites him to kind of a banquet of reconciliation you should never go to these so guess what happens you know so that's the end of ottawa sir so as he gets killed at the banquet so who are these ostrogoths who is the otteric who's now um in charge of italy who's now king of italy so the otter case is called the great um uh in some ways then the he's the last um ruler of a unified italy until the modern era although he is a last significant or last good i mean effective ruler although he's a barbarian as far as the romans are concerned the otter gate actually had a lot of exposure to roman culture so we have seen that the the goths have been hanging out on the side of the frontier for centuries right so they are very aware of roman culture he's uh theatric himself is a nobleman so he's from uh a dynasty that has been the ruling house of the ostrogoss and in the year 454 as a kid age 8 he's sent as a hostage to constantinople this is just a standard procedure when you have allies that you don't trust in antiquity which you never trusted these guys but anyway these barbarians and so what you'd do is they'd have to send their their sons and things like that the sons of the kings and things so that those guys could come and be hostages in constantinople and if the visigoths sorry the ostrogoths did anything bad then they'd get executed right anyway while he's there though growing up he's quite classically educated and so he's able to learn greek and latin and read and write and and also met doing arithmetic so anyway he's not not your average barbarian although he also is trained as a germanic warrior which he continues to be he becomes king of the visigoths uh while they're still up there in pannonia in hungary and like i say zeno recognizes them as this category of federate which means ally who's kind of like a mercenary of the roman government so legitimized uh legitimized as kind of now you're the roman army now you're our p you're you're our germanic barbarians now and you must do the kind of things that we want you to do although they didn't always do that all right so from that point then as i said he invaded italy and ultimately conquered ravenna and so now ravenna becomes uh the capital of the ostergast so it had been um the the seat of those last straggling west roman emperors it had been then the kingdom of ottawa so that germanic uh leader of the roman military who gets rid of the emperors and just rules himself he's ruling from ravenna uh now it becomes theatrics capital um and when i showed you this before um this picture of ravenna and this um uh it's this palladium here so this palace so this in fact is in a in a chapel that is part of the palace complex this mosaic and uh this was a ca it's the palace that is built by theodoric and the ostrogoths including this chapel including these roman mosaics so there's an ongoing use in roman forms of architecture roman artisans and indeed there's very vast building projects for the first time which is why ravenna has all of these wonders as the ostrogoths get the state back going and so you can kind of see here this looks pretty roman right so there's all these columns and arches and and tile roof and everything like that what you also notice from this is there's a colonnade and each one of these has a curtain in front of it right but what you see if i can see it here but what um it's not i need to zoom in but like if you can see right here over top of the column there's something in front on top of the column here in fact in several of these columns there's something and that's hands and so what's happened here is after the byzantines after the east romans take ravenna over and extinguish the ostrogoths they take out all of the images that had been here which was probably theodoric and all of his leading ostrogothic warriors and officials and they were they just covered them over and they put curtains but they kept they didn't they didn't do it properly so you can still see the hands see anyway so that would have been you know a portrait then uh of ostrogoss so um ravana so anyway i've just brought this map back so we can be reminded essentially um the ostrogoths then are controlling this component of it and they are in very direct contact with the eastern empire still okay there is a lot of continuity before and after the fall so-called of the roman empire so for example roman law continues so theodoric asserts and and guarantees to all of his subjects who are romans that they will continue to be subject to roman law and indeed because he is even a um not an emperor he actually can't create um new laws and so he's only able to make edicts uh which allow you to essentially clarify existing roman laws all of the all the ostrogoths continue to be ruled according to ostrogothic custom and ostrogothic law uh but that is now held side by side uh with roman law uh likewise the land ownership so there had been a thing under the earlier german uh uh mercenaries that essentially a third of the land in italy needs to be given over to the germanic milita military in order to have the support of the army and that continues but by and large you can imagine it's poor landowners and middle class who suffer the most on those kind of things and so the really rich senators continue to be super rich in this kingdom and so land ownership has its ongoing continuity that doesn't get wiped out or anything like that under this barbarian kingdom so there's still the same senatorial aristocracy that there's always been one the only difference is that in contrast to all of those uh late and ineffective roman emperors who could not get those senators to pay their taxes the ottawa is able to get them to pay their taxes and that's why he's able to build all of these things and so it makes the state more effective where can we get one of those guys who makes billionaires pay taxes yeah we need to find some barbarians to invade right we might get it we'll see anyway so um uh it might have a fall in our own way that it's different from the way the romans latin continues to be the language of the government and of scholarship and everything in the west um art and architecture as we see customs like public bathing continue even the religion continues so already for a century the state religion of the roman empire theodosius makes christianity the state religion and persecutes paganism and so all the romans have become christians except for jews there's a couple of pagans and things like that but very few relatively they've been quite persecuted the jews have faced some persecution recently but actually under the auditoric he writes very clearly that he renews to the jews of italy their ancient customs so he gives them an addictive toleration because he says it's not for him to make laws that can dictate what people believe so in fact because he's not everybody agrees with that later but for certainly under the barbarians here that continues to be the policy the barbarians are christian but they are heterodox which we'll explain so in other words to say they're not mainline christians they're not the same they're they're in sysm from the their roman subjects um even though as we've seen the use of the germanic military that's total continuity because before and after the fall of the roman empire they're already uh using that um so what are they um what is their kind of christianity so the idea of it is that the we've talked about how complicated the trinity is many times and so um the orthodox and catholic uh position of the roman empire and i say both because they're not in schism yet the orthodox catholic position is trinitarian which is as we always say quite complicated to explain but it means that there is only one god so the christians are a monotheist but nevertheless that god is uh exists in three persons and so for example those persons are the father the son and the holy spirit the father is god the son is god and the holy spirit is god but the father is not the son the son is not the spirit and the spirit is not the father right uh it's so ex it makes so much sense right nobody had any problems with this well it turns out that lots of people had problems with this and one of the people that had problems with it um is the visigoths uh who are not trinitarians and in fact um they don't see for example they do not see jesus as being the same power of god as the father so god is really god as far as the aryans are concerned as far as the visigoths and all the other germans who have this different non-trinitarian kind of christianity or concern so god is god and and jesus um becomes kind of divine but isn't the same as the one god you know and so uh and the moment that that happens is actually at the moment of the baptism of jesus and so we'll explain how that works this is in fact a another building in ravenna made by the ostrogoths and it's called the aryan baptistery which is because they're they're aryans and they made this building to get baptized in as one of the uh sacraments of christianity and so at the middle of it here we've seen this picture probably before because it's pretty famous but it's a baptism of jesus you can see it's a very androgynous jesus naked androgynous jesus long hair and no beard not broad shouldered or anything like that he's being baptized by john the baptist here and the holy spirit is kind of doing something you know coming descending in the form of a dove who's this god god it's the river jordan of all things and to see like how this pagan forms have really taken over right and so essentially um essentially in in pagan art rivers are always portrayed as like you know you know embodied gods you know so river tiber or you know any one of these rivers and so that's the jordan why we don't i don't want anybody why should that be but anyway that's what it is um and so one of the ways then that um we'll see why why that anyway why this is an important thing to depict for them so there's like i say a kind of a zoom in of the kind of androgynous jesus here no beard so for the aryans they uh rely on an earlier and probably the earliest and more correct reading from the canonical gospel of luke there's a moment where the evangelist luke is describing the baptism scene and after jesus is baptized a voice came from heaven you are my son the beloved i have begotten you today and so this is very different from the way it's read now the text that we have the new version that we have is uh this is my beloved son in whom i am well pleased i think is how it goes um and so this is uh the idea of it the aryan reading of this is that it's only at this moment that this perfected human guy jesus you know is becomes the begotten son of god and so this is when he's kind of become divine at this moment when heaven opens and god god so and declares it so the idea of it though is and it's very important theologically is that if christ is um not um co-eternal with the father um that means if anything that is co-eternal with god in in christian metaphysics is god and so if anything that is not co-eternal and so that there's a moment in time where in time christ existed and before that there was no christ then that means christ is a creation and so there's a big theological difference there and this is the this is the complaint i've had occasionally with when i'm asking about in islam about quran being co-eternal with god because that means in christian theology that koran is another person of uh a divinity you know did not it's a duality you know not a trinity so essentially there would be the creator and um quran shaheen has a point though to make maybe regarding that there's also a lot of disagreement between different muslim groups as to the createdness of the quran the more orthodox position is that it is an eternal book that exists with god that was sent down yes but there are other groups notably the mutasa lights who said no it appeared in time it is therefore created in time and is not eternal okay so there's you can imagine why theologically this is is something that people would argue about both in islam and christianity yes yeah i've sometimes wondered why there were such uh luciferous and bitter disputes over um you know what is the nature and substance of the christ and i'm wondering did it also unpack into the way the law and the edicts were seen because if something is not eternal if it's created in time then it's not um let's say maybe as potent the truth as something that is eternal yes it's not forever right so yeah anything that i mean generally speaking if we go back to our platonism which is what this is all based on right yeah yeah so anything that's eternal in the forums those are um you know those are forever and everything else is the perishable right yeah so i was wondering yeah then what the status of the various truths and and dicta and and and sayings and you know beliefs if they're not eternal right exactly well especially then even for christians the second person of the the trinity right because if it because so for the people that ha that come up with the nicene creed which becomes mainline the mainline christian position then um all the persons of god are co-eternal and all of for example plato's forms uh become eternal because those forms are simply the ideas in god's mind right and so those things are all the imperishable those are the eternal things goodness love all those things but the things that are our creations are all perishable and so this is a thing that um especially the greeks but even the latins could get a hold of this in terms of some of the idea of it we're very theologically informed and we're very argumentative about the germanic guys i'm not sure that every one of these ostrogoths is really you know figuring out the the difference on a platonism level here of this but what they were aware of is that it pissed off um their subjects that they had their own special gothic way of understanding this and they were able to use that in order to not be subordinated religiously to the different bishops in the empire right and so they were christians and they were um you know in charge of you know of italy but they didn't have to listen to the pope you know who was also hanging around in italy because he is in chasm from them right so they he they're aryans they know how christianity is really supposed to work he's an orthodox guy like he's wrong i'm just wondering uh how they manage to square uh the idea that uh jesus becomes the begotten at the moment of baptism uh with the account of his birth right yeah didn't they i and so exactly so it's so so the question so even though this reading exists in luke and it's probably the correct reading that doesn't mean that luke is an aryan you know you know so which is to say that that doesn't mean that luke has this idea because luke has a lot of other things the in the in that account um you know of the uh essentially the angels talking to mary you know and this kind of very divine birth kind of scene that occurs in that same gospel so it's not like um you know there was an earlier reading of the gospel of luke that totally works for the arians nevertheless neither one of these conceptions arianism nor nicene trinitarianism neither of those conceptions existed in the first century and so the gospels the gospel writers are not nicene theologians and they are not aryan theologians and they say a bunch of stuff that you can use to to argue for either position which is one of the reasons why uh christians did argue about it for you know five or six centuries and now they do it again now in the modern times that people are again are not all nicene christians so um jehovah witnesses for example have a more aryan position again than um than mainline christians okay um uh and in terms of the begotten thing begotten doesn't mean um it's a weird word but begotten doesn't mean born so anyway it's a it's a special technical term in the in the philosophy here okay so so we've looked at all this i want to look at a little bit a couple people on the ground so we talked about the senatorial aristocracy we had last year a um a whole lecture on the consolation of philosophy which is one of the most important books in western literature so this guy boethius is from this exact time period so he's the author of that he's an influential western philosopher christian philosopher whose goal is to translate actually all of aristotle into latin and if he had been able to live and accomplish that all of western history would be wildly different um he as it was he was only able to get a couple uh things done including though a bunch of aristotle's work on logic and so that was like the whole framework for logic in the west until um westerners in the central middle ages um got a hold of uh the translations that came through arabic um so who is this guy boethius he's a senator anikius manlius of marinus boethius you can tell it's getting more and more decadent time period right you get more and more names um so he's a member of the roman senate he's from an extremely wealthy patrician family he himself has served as one of the two consuls um if you remember back about how the roman republic works the chief magistrates are elected for one year at a time are both called consul and they they can check each other's power and that's why the how the roman republic works but it's also the way that romans knew what year it was so they would say in the year that uh that pompey and caesar were consoled together and so they would always date everything that way that continued so that tradition goes on and on and they pick a console one representing symbolically the west empire once representing the east and so uh in the year 5 10 boethius was the consul one of the consoles and so that's a huge honor so ever after any time in the anytime anybody in the roman empire said what year that was when we're talking about 510 they didn't use the 510 didn't nobody called that yet that's that's invented later um they said in the year boethius and whoever you know his fellow consul was was consul and he himself says that his the greatest honor that he ever achieved is when his two sons were simultaneously consuls in the year 522 and you can imagine for that to happen it's a time period when the ostrogoths are getting along pretty good with the byzantines if they are able to pick both of the consoles for that year as being westerners so boethius held all of the offices of this what's called the cursus honorum which is to say the ancient republican nobleman's set of civic offices that leading up to consul and he enjoyed like i say the revenue from those vast estates he himself mingled with the senatorial elite he lived by roman law and yet the guy is born in 477 in other words one year after the date of the traditional fall so in many ways what he's doing in his life kind of shows well there's not a lot of fall around him as far as as far as he can tell there's been a lot of things that have happened in centuries but in many ways there's a lot of continuity that is ongoing after the fall so if you're on the ground and we're asking ourselves you know the map changed very radically um but uh from western empire to barbarian kingdom but if you were really living living in ravana in 470 under the western emperor and then in 495 under the king of the ostrogoths what's you know what's really different right so um one of the things then that happened then under the ostrogoths to kind of bring the story all up and summit together is um that theoderic was able to do that thing that none of those last roman emperors were able to do which is thread this needle he was largely able to rule with the support of the roman senatorial aristocracy and he especially could get their support when the popes were also fighting with the eastern empire so between the years 484 and 519 there was another one of these christological controversies so the the ostrogoths and the visigoths and the vandals and everybody they're all aryans and the pope is a nicene christian but of the chalcedonian variety and so then there's this moment when um when the eastern emperors decide that they're gonna they're gonna figure this thing out and um and get back together with the monophysites who are in egypt and syria and so they create this thing where it's between due officiatism and monophysitism called maya physicism which nobody liked at all so the greeks didn't like it the syrians the egyptians the romans didn't like it but the emperors continued to have that be their policy in the east for you know all those years anyway when that's happening then the popes hated the um the constantinople patriarch more than they hated the aryans who were in charge of them and so that worked pretty well for theodoric when that's happening just a bunch of the complexities however um the easterners caved everybody went back to nicene standard nicene christianity and then when that happened part of the problem was when you are constantly doing this thing where you are nominally ruling um for a sovereign that is kind of your rival so even though the emperor in the east you know you kind of acknowledge him you make coins in his name you say his name as you know as a in honor you know as the leader of the empire even though you have total control uh uh locally um nevertheless that's always a source then for disruption so and monarchies aren't inherently monarchies are inherently unstable especially at a moments when um uh when there's a dynastic you know sorry when there's a succession so when theodoric is going to get to you know to die it'll he has to have a system um anyway where in place where he can hold up against that deli potentially delegitimizing force and so one of the things that is always able to happen is all those senators who consider themselves romans and that whole court that they're related to in constantinople who they consider to be their superiors and they also like to intrigue they can get conspiracies a lot and so for example boethius as we know the reason why he wasn't able to do that thing where he translated all of aristotle into latin is that he um from the position of being prime minister of italy under theodoric he is accused of of having a conspiracy with other senators to eliminate the ostrogoths and to invite uh the byzantines back in to rule the western empire directly and so the whole idea the whole reason why then he's sitting in jail and has lost everything and has lost his wealth his power his reputation and everything like that and he has to um has to be consoled by philosophy and write this whole text of the consolation of philosophy is because he was part of probably he probably was guilty we don't know anyway he was probably anyway he was either guilty of or it was a credible accusation that led to him ultimately being executed uh for intriguing with constantinople and so that was always a threat then to theodoric's legitimacy but he himself because of his tight reins over the military was able to hold that in check while he's alive however you can see here's a mausoleum of him so he doesn't live forever no king can live forever and so um theoderic in his lifetime was still a warrior king right so he had that education as a child in uh constantinople but after his death his heirs all suffered from that same fate that the final western emperor so in other words they're all raised and educated as as western philosophers they're all educated by the church they are all you know christians and and sophisticates they're not germanic warriors they're increasingly uh even though they're the princes and ultimately the kings of the ostrogoths they don't particularly like going around and living like germanic warriors and the germanic warriors that are still trying to maintain their customs and lifestyle uh in italy they're increasingly alienated from them themselves and so they have that same um detachment between the civil government of the kings and the actual military and so beginning in 535 there's a new and strong dynasty in the east the dynasty of justinian justinian the great who took advantage of the weakness in the austrogothic kingdom and sent a huge bunch of troops over and began a vast invasion of italy and that's why for example we see justinian's portrait in ravenna because ultimately after decades of fighting the east romans are able to conquer ravenna and extinguish the ostrogoths although in so doing they caused much more devastation in the gothic wars of retaking italy than italy had faced when uh the goss took it over to begin with and so now um italy is not rejoined in the empire as a full component like it always had been the center of the roman empire it now essentially becomes kind of a poor frontier colony of the eastern empire ruled again still from ravenna which for the next several centuries is the um the outpost or the capital of the byzantine province uh of italy and so in so doing where is this so this is this um mosaic like so many of the others that we've seen as in this church that is built by uh theodoric but it is finished at by the byzantines including by justinian with all the mosaics and things like that which is why he's in there this is made 10 years before hajiya sophia and it actually you can look at it looks kind of like a byzantine church or even later turkish mosques and things like that and this is because this form is something that the romans couldn't actually make engineering wise uh centuries before and in the age of augustus or anything like that so science technology engineering is ongoing and this is made ten years completed ten years before hajiya sophia and so um parts of the structure uh are a model for that great church of christendom built by justinian in the eastern capital we also remember that baptistery so when the orthodox take over ravenna they had to make their own baptistery too you can see it on the on the right here that little octagon thing and that has survived from the 5th century so we had the aryan baptistery with a kind of a more androgynous jesus as we saw before so over here in the orthodox baptistery it's it's remarkably similar so yeah you know given that given that they're really trying to say something very different you still have jesus he's got a beard now um it's a little off center so john the baptist is more in the in the middle of it for some reason but the holy spirit is still kind of it's not not maybe spitting on him this holy power or begotten power or something like that but it's still descending and look who's here the river typers still so i'm not typing jordan's still the jordan river so the god of the jordan river is still there too anyway so for whatever reason i even though they have a very different theology the forms are still quite similar so but they had to make their own baptistery because they didn't want to use the aryan one so all right so after boethius is fall just to wrap up here um the person who took it over as easter fichioram which is to say the prime minister of the you know not the military leader so we have the master of the military and this is the master of offices right and so um boethius had been master of offices now cassiodorus becomes that cassiodorus is the guy who essentially formulates the seven liberal arts and creates the entire medieval and later educational system for the west the trivium the quadrivium he however is too associated as far as the as far as the byzantines are concerned with the gothic faction of the roman senate so he is forced to retire and not be part of this new kind of byzantine provincial italy and so he goes uh and goes back to his villa which he termed uh let's see if we can find here which he turns into a monastery and so he actually creates the first monastery which is in charge of copying books and collecting books and indeed he's the person that founds that as a thing for monks to do and so as time goes on in the west as there's continual collapse what happens is people follow that casiodorian model as the roman nobles retreat into their kind of monastic sanctuaries and bring classical literature with them did you really live a century uh no i'm sure not i don't know he lived a long time according to this but yeah if i get those dates that's what it says right where'd where is it oh this one well it says so it seems unlikely maybe i've got the dates wrong anyway we don't know um we'll look it up so justinian ultimately from constantinople is able to conquer italy he also wipes out the vandals he doesn't beat the visigoths but he's able to kind of subdue them and take over cartagena anyway in this kind of area down here and so sort of revives the empire as it sort of seems anyway in 565 but in doing it he really sapped all of the energy out of the eastern empire and created colonies that mostly cost money and don't actually aren't actually doing much so you've got to send troops they're not actually helping too much in terms of the defense of the empire and so a century later with the rise of islam and the eruption out of arabia uh the destruction of the persian empire there uh the byzantines aren't in much of a position to uh hold syria and egypt who in any event or in schism from the orthodox position of nicene christianity and the center meanwhile the slavs have come in and taken over much of the balkans and the lombards have taken almost all of italy except for again this kind of narrow section so with that little exception of time when justinian owns all of italy italy then is never unified again until the modern age because the lombards aren't able to successfully conquer the whole thing there's always these little roman outcroppings and things like that that survive until anyway until it gets even more chaotic later uh it doesn't take too long for the even though the romans are kind of hanging on to this stuff it doesn't take too long for the arabs again to take all this out including to visit us so we'll wrap it up so the decline of the eastern empire the loss of most of italy to the lombards led ultimately then to the roman popes to turn their allegiance from constantinople to a much more effective ally so they looked north to the franxx and we kind of have a map here so you can see after justinian knocks out um you know ostrogoths and makes the visigus humbles the visigoths the franks are the big victors here right so they suddenly become much more powerful and they become the main force that's left in the west and so the pope's ally with the leaders of the franks charlemagne who is that great leader of all the franks marches to italy at the pope's request and destroys the lombard kingdom and then in 800 in response um pope leo crowns uh uh charlemagne as roman emperor reviving the roman empire in the west centuries after the last deposition of romulus augustus um when charlemagne is looking to revive a roman empire indeed he doesn't necessarily think that that's ever fallen he's not looking at ruins and fallen and what we kind of think of is this ancient pagan empire rather he is considering essentially the continuity of rome as it had existed and so he goes to ravenna the last capital and takes a look at um what uh rivena looks like and he takes a look at san vitale here again this completed by justinian started by theodoric this model for byzantine churches and charlemagne then when he goes and builds the first major new structure north of the alps creates his own chapel which you can see is based very much on san vitale and ravenna including the interior which is meant to look just like it so what's the legacy so so what i'm kind of trying to show in this although we have that framework of decline and fall and we certainly um because of give and see the late antiquity has a story of the decline and fall of the roman empire uh in many many many many ways the legacy of rome lived on in all sorts of continuity rome the roman empire emperors ceased to exist although there were revivals and so there's no direct continuity there but other things that for there are plenty of other things for which there is total continuity including uh cities like ravenna the reason why there's those eight unesco world heritage sites that are largely just undespoiled and are amazingly preserved is ravenna just kept chugging along and that was true for um something like 70 percent of the cities in italy uh of any significance have roman um are roman cities that have just continued a bunch of them like venice are new creations of the middle ages but um but it's surprising how much continuity there is and that's also true in provence and some other places in spain and and france and so although rome lives on and indeed um the later barbarians who come in after the visigoths were wiped by the byzantines the lombards the lombards have left all kinds of uh legacy including the whole name lombardy uh uh nevertheless the goths have just disappeared you know almost without a trace they uh the only thing that is more or less left of the gosar of what might have been so if the ostrogothic kingdom had been able to survive hadn't been invaded by the east romans all of history would have been different italy might not have had this vast time period of being uh completely disunified that might have been able to maintain itself as a as a strong uh kingdom through the middle ages um who knows so what might have been the only other thing that survived is that seems quite gothic is this mausoleum which is a very interesting weird thing so whereas as we saw those chapels the different palaces the different basilicas that are the rest of the remnants of of uh ravenna even that aryan baptistery which is almost the same as the orthodox baptistery those are all built very roman but this mausoleum is is very weird so unlike the others this is built it's not built on brick like like they mostly all are it's built of these giant um uh stones of istrian stone and so it's all put together it is a nanogun so normally things like um san vitali they're octagons it's it's easier to make an octagon you know and there's all kinds of things that it may go octagon it's good this is a nine-sided thing and we had to go around it twice counting to make sure that was we're like this is a non-again this is very weird and then um of of all the weird things this is up on the top is one piece of stone this weighs something like something like i don't know whatever 300 tons and so it's like carved there's one piece of stone that's a dome on top yeah they get it up there [Laughter] so they they would have had to have had a ramp i guess you know where they would they went to or maybe they had a big do you think they had romans romans had cranes wow i don't know it's really heavy so i don't know exactly how they made it but anyway it's a very neat and weird thing um the mausoleum of theodoric the great the last um effective uh ruler of a unified italy i think that i mean i guess still mussolini i don't know so mussolini was he effective anyway so possibly the last one period so anyway this is very interesting so the rise and fall of the ostriches [Applause] i have one question that came a while ago yeah from alex beckman uh and actually this is a good time to address this question because that we were talking about this uh aesthetic changes in the architecture yeah uh that you know there's this slide a view in front of this roman temple or a greek greek temple in sicily yes and we go from that to san vitale yes now could you maybe talk a little bit more about like art like this depictions all these things that we see in this mosaics especially in in during the time of the ostrogoths and like this uh this new art that is emerging in this era so so we have this tendency when we think of um roman things and the reason why i think that uh half the time when people go to rome they say they're quite disappointed by rome right they go there and they say boy rome wasn't what i wanted it to be at all so they have all these expectations that i think are as largely probably based of watching movies like cleopatra or or ben hur or um covadas or something like that which is to say they want to see those greek style temples and they want to see like a lot of marble and greek and everything like that in that kind of a triangle with columns but those are already very archaic buildings by the time that rome is really even taking off by the time rome really what the empire happens and so whereas although they still are building those and they still have a bunch of those that are dating from the time of augustus the new form that has been created by the romans for their kind of public buildings is called the basilica and so and so they already exist as public buildings uh you know at the time of caesar and augustus and so that early part of the empire so we don't think of those we think of basilicas as being like a christian thing it's a it's an entirely pagan roman building form from the imperial era which is just the buildings that are around everywhere and so christians inherit those and they think of how to have them be churches it's not something that christians created in order to make it have a church it's a it's something that that's what roman stuff is from the later empire and so even though we want them to have these kind of greek style temples nobody was ever in a greek style temple except for the god themself and so that was a form of a an older form of worship where um the god's house is the sacred precinct and you come and sacrifice uh cattle in front of it and that kind of thing but nobody's actually in there for an actual building that you're gonna have a meeting in so that the roman court or any other thing that's gonna happen it's gonna have been a basilica already and so that's like a central roman form the other form that we've seen with san fetale is this form that is uh it's a domed form right and so it's in this case an octagon that has a dome on the top of it that also goes all the way back so domes romans are engineering marvels and so these um the time period of hadrian if you think of if you know the guy is a big builder so you know hadrian's wall uh in in britain so you build a whole wall to to keep it's not the scots but to you know keep the other the pics on the other side of the wall you know just like in game of thrones so hadrian builds that wall uh but uh he also builds the pantheon uh so it says on the front of the pantheon marcus agrippet may fake it you know says marcus agrippa made me but that's a joke it didn't agrippa didn't make the pantheon it was he made the front of it anyway the dome is made by hadrian and that's an amazing marvel so the romans have these two major forms that christians are are kind of inheriting and that's the basilica that's kind of like it's what a church looks like and then the other one is the um the domed structure which is like the baptisteries we've seen and so san vitale is like that and so the byzantines end up running with the san vitale style sahaja sophia and everything like that that becomes kind of what we think of as eastern churches eastern orthodox churches and ultimately mosques from that era anyway and so there's the dome of the rock for example um but the uh um but the west they continue to primarily use basilicas and then christians add a a transept to them to make it look like a cross but anyway that's where uh but that's a later idea uh when they come up with that it's essentially inheriting that form so the other thing is that um one of the things that they develop over time in the in the roman period is um they make mosaics and so it's a roman art form that goes all the way back to um anyway the again the center of the empire uh it becomes more and more detailed and more more lavish and so that's why this um this form is continuing to exist and it continues all the way until the fall of the eastern empire they're still doing mosaics in the medieval west too so mosaic is a form and it's one that survives they're also doing frescoes but the thing about frescoes is that at a certain point they they fade or or get covered over or gone whereas tile kind of these little stone tile things last forever and so uh if you don't you know you can ruin them but if you if you keep you know they last pretty good so actually all the floors in ravenna are all still there it's amazing the floors the floor work and then these mosaics this was part of the question there's all these depiction of clothing what people were wearing which is not what usually in in our popular imagination we think of romans right so roman style had also evolved so it's like it's not frozen in fashion from what caesar and augustus are wearing so caesar and augustus have the that kind of choga that you see in the roman movies you know and so but over time uh by the time you get to the third and fourth century there's just tokens are actually hard to keep up so it's actually quite a complicated thing and it's a simple but it's also kind of a simple thing and so one of the um one of the things that happens is as people get richer they get fancier clothes that are more detailed and harder to sew and they have access to silk and and they have access to more purple dye and so there is fashion inflation and so the eastern eastern emperors even the pagans are going to look way more like you think of the pope looking than they're going to look like than you think of caesar looking because fashion just evolves you know and so again we have these senses of roman-ness that's kind of frozen in the year 44 bc but rome continued to live as a thriving society all the way up you know to through the end fifth century and the fashion and everything goes on and on uh even into the fall so fashion doesn't stop just because society collapses so anyway what is the origin of the romanian people the question is what is the origin of the romanian people and so romanians are one of a bazillion people who um look back to the rom to rome and use that term so romania romania um just means land of the romans and so we often we're very specific we say roman empire or west roman empire or east roman empire byzantine empire we use words like that but in fact actually what was often said is romania so romania means lands of the romans and so um so the area around ravenna in italy is still called emilia romagna right so that's here and amelia is just the road the via amelia and so it's called romania which is to say romania and the reason why the area around ravenna is called romania as opposed to lombardy which is where the lombard settled uh is because that byzantines were still owning it but they weren't called byzantines they were called romans so so it was still this area late in the middle ages that was called romania likewise what we call turkey because of the turks that lived there anatolia or asia minor that land because it was so owned for so long by the east roman empire was called romania and so when we talked about for example the muslim poet rumi that means the roman his name is the roman because he's from turkey you know in other words he's from that romania which is what they would call that and the sultans the turkish sultans there were called the sultans of rome which is to say they were the sultans of the romans because that's romania well so romania now you're talking about let's talk about the country romey yeah so so that area in the in the roman empire was called dacia um it was a a roman province that is beyond the danube uh frontier uh but the romanian people um consider themselves to be descendants from uh west roman legionary uh people so people who still spoke latin even though they were kind of on the eastern uh side and they have a point because their language is descended from latin and so romanian is a descendant so culturally it has survived the latin language has survived among the uh the moldavians and the latches and so those are the romanian peoples that speak that latin-derived language and so it's called romania because they're considering themselves to be still the romans the area that's now called around bulgaria was called romelia you know all of those places are called rome rome rome because of the because the name rome survived so much the greeks never called themselves greeks in the middle ages they called themselves ramayoi they're the romans um it's the westerners as we westerners who call them greeks the germans called themselves we call them germans so again their their kingdom was called the roman empire right so they were called the they understood themselves to be um saxons or uh alemans or whatever they are but they are also their their their kin their leaders were called the emperor the romans do you have a question or no you're just holding the mic any other questions all right guys thank you [Applause] you

Channel: Centre Place

Views: 191,970

Keywords: history, lecture, history lecture, ancient history, medieval, medieval history, middle ages, ostrogoth, ostrogoths, ostrogothic empire, italy, ravenna, heretics, heresy, theodoric, teodorico, history of italy, late antiquity, early middle ages, barbarians, fall of rome, fall of roman empire, barbarian kingdom, byzantine empire, barbarian invasions

Id: Di5erb47ry4

Length: 105min 29sec (6329 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 14 2019