History in Books

[Zorral]

Pandemics, climate change and poor health/famine = depopulation beginning in the 3rd and 4th centuries -- all of which didn't happen during the Roman Optimum Climate era.  The Romans, and the earlier Empire, seldom, if even had to troll/conscript for their really big professional armies before that.

The labor force wasn't reduced only for the army, but for everything else too -- archaeology has shown even entire silver mines closed down after the end of the ROC and the Antonine and Cypriot pandemics and the others that followed in close succession.  By the time of Justinian and after the arrival of the Bubonic Plague, populations begged for labor, and in the west particularly, often just couldn't find it.  Not to mention the toll of endemic poor health due to malnutrition and exposure -- this really pushed the demand for slave labor.

 

[Zorral]

However, the 14th century, Spain, France, England, the Germanies and the eastern states, do not get points of any kind concerning slavery and serfdom.

Serfdom had been essentially abolished in Spain.  But due to labor shortages after the Great Mortality, serdom was again re-instituted. In France, England, Central Europe, Poland, etc., lords raided each others' villages to kidnap entire villages and remove them to their own estates. This went on everywhere, along with the laws that no one could pay anybody any higher wages than before the Great Mortality, could not poach or offer wages and freedoms and so on.  A lot of that was observed in the breach in the years right after the first two big waves of Bubonic Plague, but a lot of the vaunted progress of the European laboring classes was rolled back sooner, even, often, than later.

Shortage of labor doesn't automatically bring better conditions and higher wages, because if there is anything an employer throughout the ages will not stomach is that.  Slavery will be an improvement, thus the massive growth of slavery in large parts of the world, which didn't leave out Europe, even in the hinterland far from the Mediterranean.  And the Ottoman Empire, in very much the same way the Roman Empire was, was a massive slave state that ran on slave labor.

 

[Toth]

5 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Pandemics, climate change and poor health/famine = depopulation beginning in the 3rd and 4th centuries -- all of which didn't happen during the Roman Optimum Climate era.  The Romans, and the earlier Empire, seldom, if even had to troll/conscript for their really big professional armies before that.

To be fair, the Romans also had to deal with the issue that many signed up for the army to get citizenship and property in colonies in conquered territories. With the Roman citizenship gradually having been extended to include pretty much everybody, the former factor ceased to be much of an incentive and the latter stopped as well when Rome stopped conquering stuff and ended up fighting mostly defensively against raiding hordes. Not to mention all the freaking civil wars all the time making the job a severe health hazard. Meaning as the standing army got serious recruitment issues, it became more and more practical to just bribe those raiding hordes with land and political influence in order to make them fight for Rome instead.

Interestingly I read up on the legislation behind Rome's slavery recently and found it interesting that due to the influence of Christianity more and more laws were passed to restrict total abuse of slaves, while at the same time laws were implemented putting tight quotas on freeing slaves, due to that shortage you mentioned. With no further wars of conquest the supply of new slaves was running dry and the emperors recognized with panic that a core pillar of the Roman economy was breaking down if people kept freeing their slaves at the rate they usually did, so they simply introduced laws against it (with the intention being a troubling parallel to American slavers 'breeding' slaves once the import of slaves from Africa was banned, just in this case with the roles of government and slavers being somewhat reversed).

Though odd you mention the closing of silver mines as a result of labor shortage. That... doesn't sound right. I had read up quite a lot about the inflation from the end of the second century onwards when I ended up getting a couple of coins from that time of my own. And everything I read indicated that the mines simply dried out and it became technologically infeasible to dig deeper. While at the same time the emperors needed more and more money to keep the armies happy, so they melted down and re-minted the coins again and again and again, stretching the silver portion thinner and thinner with every new generation since they simply didn't have more silver than what was already in circulation (and probably even less and less, since people started hoarding more valuable older coins once they noticed what was up).

[Zorral]

The record of Constantine's changes and ;reforms' concerning all the above don't quite jibe with what the scholarship you read states.

Somewhat before that Rome went off the thousand year enduring silver = money, to the gold standard.  The troops. many Goths etc. were getting paid in gold.  Also to keep them in the army, keep them loyal, keep them electing ME ME ME the barracks emperor.

Really, they were having a hard time finding enlistees, even conscriptees. The archaeological records shows too, the average health, going by the shrinking height (and Romans never were that tall due to the constant diseases that the City of Rome in particular meted out -- the average life expectancy was always low, and now it was even lower, and there were fewer Romans.  While, of course! the equivalent of the 1% continued to acquire more and more and more of the land -- demanding ever greater labor forces, most of whom were enslaved.

The record in the ground of the silver mines in Spain and in the east was that they closed down, not that they ran out of silver, as they began to be mined again when things got more settled, i.e. more slaves.  A great deal disappeared and didn't return already in the crisis of the third century, and then in the 4th, the fifth, and surely in the 6th.  Shoot, Rome itself was no longer the capitol, while in the East they did manage to weather the 6th century, despite a lot of the stupidities of Justinian and some others.

Also, regarding 'slave breeding' in the US -- that didn't start because the African trade was prohibited in 1808 -- it was to PROTECT the domestic, more expensive trade, which already by the time of the War of Independence was about all keeping a lot of the Virginia gentlemen, gentlemen.

 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Zorral

[Clueless Northman]

On 8/10/2022 at 5:21 PM, Toth said:

When I was writing it, I just couldn't see the Greeks being able to live off the immediate area surrounding Troy for 10 freaking years, so I portrayed them more as various marauding hordes wandering up and down the Meander, leaving Troy unmolested for prolonged stretches of time, but turning the whole country into a barren no man's land full of torched ruins. Therefore Barker's portrayal of the Greek camp as a number of compounds with wooden huts for prolonged use struck me as an odd decision that plays directly into the idea that they've truly camped there for 10 years. Heck, even the Iliad suggests that they set up camp in front of Troy only in the last year because of that very reason.

10 years of siege never made any sense. 10 years of war just for Troy don't make much either, actually. One can assume there were preparations and deliberate taking or razing of nearby towns, but still.

As you said, when the Iliad begins, it's basically like if the Greeks had come a couple of months earlier at best. It might of course be a mere literary device, but you have Helen actually having to explain to Trojan leadership who's who down there in the Greek ranks.

Or it's just that Troy is the only name and place that remained in the collective memory, of a far wider war against the Hittite Empire - in which case one would have to wonder if the long siege and sack of Troy wouldn't actually have been the fall of Hattusa instead.

[Toth]

9 hours ago, Zorral said:

The record in the ground of the silver mines in Spain and in the east was that they closed down, not that they ran out of silver, as they began to be mined again when things got more settled, i.e. more slaves.

Where would those slaves come from, though? Aside that, Rome usually used criminals in the mines due to the inherent danger, with there even being some legislation exempting 'regular' slaves from working there. Graffiti within some mines also suggest that privately owned mines increasingly had to hire free citizen in the later Empire.

In any case, I don't really know what your problem is with my take on the inflation. During the crisis, coins were minted solely for and put into circulation by paying public servants and soldiers. If the administration keeps bloating, the armies get bigger (Diocletian had more than double the troops than Augustus had) and their pay got increased (because money had to be used as an incentive rather than citizenship), the coins got to be coming from somewhere, so they were forced to decrease the silver portion. Yes, Constantine switched to a gold standard, but I was arguing more about Diocletian because all of my own coins are follis and antonianii and I naturally researched more about their history^^.

8 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

10 years of siege never made any sense. 10 years of war just for Troy don't make much either, actually. One can assume there were preparations and deliberate taking or razing of nearby towns, but still.

To be honest, there were some stupidly long sieges in history, so that part I can kind of believe thanks to how impossible it would have been to starve out or assault Troy. You have to keep in mind that the Iliad doesn't mention any sea combat or siege equipment. Battering rams, siege towers and the like didn't really exist yet and Troy is described as an impressive citadel with high walls that seemed absolute overkill for the time period. Then again, I suppose they learned from bad experience. Priam's dad was killed when Heracles sacked the city and dragged away his sister Hesione (Paris' mission that ended with the taking of Helena was actually about getting her back home). Looking at the map I also found it odd that the Greek encampment was on a thin land strip on the opposite side of the city's road connection and the river Scamander between them. In order to intercept people entering the city, the Greeks had to cross the killing field where all the battles against Trojan sallies took place. Meaning they couldn't just easily block supply caravans or reinforcements, which checks out with how easily far flung allies like Memnon or Penthesilea could just casually stroll into the city without encountering Greek resistance. Not to mention the Greeks seem to have been unable to intercept any ships heading for Troy's harbor. It seems all the Greeks could do was burn down the countryside and hope Troy would at some point run out of money and allies to buy supplies or exhaust itself in their attempts to drive them back into the sea.

Really, if you look at all this, it's kind of a miracle they actually won. And then again, they only won through cheating in the myth.

8 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

Or it's just that Troy is the only name and place that remained in the collective memory, of a far wider war against the Hittite Empire - in which case one would have to wonder if the long siege and sack of Troy wouldn't actually have been the fall of Hattusa instead.

Amusingly, I have read some speculation that the mythological siege of Troy coincided with the region declaring independence from the Hittite Empire. So if there was a Greek expedition, the city would have been more or less on its own.

Edited August 12, 2022 by Toth

[SeanF]

There were some very lengthy sieges of Constantinople, and Nicomedia took six years, before surrendering to the Ottomans, in 1337.

But, rather than the modern concept of a siege, with ordered lines surrounding a city, this was more like constant raiding of the hinterland, combined with intermittent attacks on the city.  That may have been what took place at Troy.

[Zorral]

23 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

n which case one would have to wonder if the long siege and sack of Troy wouldn't actually have been the fall of Hattusa instead.

But you know how the Hellenes roll: it's always all about the greeky-greeks, even if it wasn't!

Also, landscapes changed . . . .

 

15 hours ago, Toth said:

Where would those slaves come from,

Goths, 'Huns', northerners, trade routes stayed in action.  Not to mention how many people sold their children into slavery in order to feed themselves and the other children. Trust me, babee, who has been studying slavery for decades: slaves can always be got. 

[SeanF]

On 8/12/2022 at 12:21 AM, Zorral said:

However, the 14th century, Spain, France, England, the Germanies and the eastern states, do not get points of any kind concerning slavery and serfdom.

Serfdom had been essentially abolished in Spain.  But due to labor shortages after the Great Mortality, serdom was again re-instituted. In France, England, Central Europe, Poland, etc., lords raided each others' villages to kidnap entire villages and remove them to their own estates. This went on everywhere, along with the laws that no one could pay anybody any higher wages than before the Great Mortality, could not poach or offer wages and freedoms and so on.  A lot of that was observed in the breach in the years right after the first two big waves of Bubonic Plague, but a lot of the vaunted progress of the European laboring classes was rolled back sooner, even, often, than later.

Shortage of labor doesn't automatically bring better conditions and higher wages, because if there is anything an employer throughout the ages will not stomach is that.  Slavery will be an improvement, thus the massive growth of slavery in large parts of the world, which didn't leave out Europe, even in the hinterland far from the Mediterranean.  And the Ottoman Empire, in very much the same way the Roman Empire was, was a massive slave state that ran on slave labor.

 

In England at least, I think the upper classes wanted to keep serfdom and hold down wages, after 1350, due to labour shortages, but they found it was just impossible.  Kate Barker's book on the Peasant's Revolt is very good about this.  Landowners were flouting the very laws they were meant to be enforcing, in order to keep their estates viable.  Real incomes per head were probably about double the level of 1350 by 1400, a rate of progress that had never been seen before, and would never be seen again until the 19th century. 

The Peasants' Revolt is a good example of a revolt that took place because things were getting better, rather than worse.  More of the peasants were literate, and with more income, they could club together to hire lawyers who would study the charters of manors and abbeys, and  challenge labour service and fedual dues that were not actually legal. Interestingly, quite a lot of the lesser gentry also took part in the revolt (Peasants' revolt is a bit of a misnomer) because the magnates were putting the squeeze on them as well.  The upper classes were themselves divided between the lords, abbots, and super-rich landowners on the one hand, and the people who owned a single manor, town burgesses, guildsmen etc., who resented those above them as much as the peasants did (the lesser nobility/rising bourgeoisie were exactly the group that would spearhead the French Revolution, hundreds of years later).

In the end, sheep-rearing took the place of subsistence farming, in much of England, as it could be done with far fewer people, and generated a good income.

Edited August 13, 2022 by SeanF

[SeanF]

On 8/12/2022 at 12:33 AM, Toth said:

To be fair, the Romans also had to deal with the issue that many signed up for the army to get citizenship and property in colonies in conquered territories. With the Roman citizenship gradually having been extended to include pretty much everybody, the former factor ceased to be much of an incentive and the latter stopped as well when Rome stopped conquering stuff and ended up fighting mostly defensively against raiding hordes. Not to mention all the freaking civil wars all the time making the job a severe health hazard. Meaning as the standing army got serious recruitment issues, it became more and more practical to just bribe those raiding hordes with land and political influence in order to make them fight for Rome instead.

Interestingly I read up on the legislation behind Rome's slavery recently and found it interesting that due to the influence of Christianity more and more laws were passed to restrict total abuse of slaves, while at the same time laws were implemented putting tight quotas on freeing slaves, due to that shortage you mentioned. With no further wars of conquest the supply of new slaves was running dry and the emperors recognized with panic that a core pillar of the Roman economy was breaking down if people kept freeing their slaves at the rate they usually did, so they simply introduced laws against it (with the intention being a troubling parallel to American slavers 'breeding' slaves once the import of slaves from Africa was banned, just in this case with the roles of government and slavers being somewhat reversed).

Though odd you mention the closing of silver mines as a result of labor shortage. That... doesn't sound right. I had read up quite a lot about the inflation from the end of the second century onwards when I ended up getting a couple of coins from that time of my own. And everything I read indicated that the mines simply dried out and it became technologically infeasible to dig deeper. While at the same time the emperors needed more and more money to keep the armies happy, so they melted down and re-minted the coins again and again and again, stretching the silver portion thinner and thinner with every new generation since they simply didn't have more silver than what was already in circulation (and probably even less and less, since people started hoarding more valuable older coins once they noticed what was up).

My understanding is that the imperial government tied people to the land, as colonii adscripti, and imposed hereditary obligations to serve in the army.  That's not the same thing as chattel slavery, although it is a state of unfreedom.  They tried imposing similar regimentation further up the social ladder, by forcing landowners to serve as town councillors (an expensive obligation) which many of them escaped by joining the Church.  Town councils gradually disappeared in the West in the Third and Fourth Centuries, and in the East, in the Sixth and Seventh.

Even for the upper classes in the West, life became steadily less good, after 230 or so,  with a bit of a recovery in the Fourth Century, but a steep drop after 410.  By the late 6th century, the qualification for the Roman Senate was 30 pounds of gold, a laughably small sum to a senator in 200.  By way of comparison, that amount of gold would have been worth about £800 in 1400 England.  An English earl would enjoy an income of £750 to £3,000 at that point.  A fortune of £800 in 1400 England would be the worth of a mid-ranking knight, not a baron, let alone an earl.

The Roman upper classes dug their own grave.  "Barbarians" usually kept to the terms of the agreements that they made, which were sealed with oaths they did not give lightly. Upper class Romans treated oaths lightly, betrayed each other relentlessly, and bribed the tribes to fight fellow Romans.

Edited August 13, 2022 by SeanF

[Zorral]

 

... the actual spartiates would have despised nearly all of their boosters with sole exception of the praise they got from southern enslaver-planter aristocrats in the pre-Civil War United States.

- - -  Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Retrospective

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-retrospective/

Quote

 

.... That hazy vision in turn was continually reflected and reified in the popular image of Sparta – precisely the version of Sparta that Nick Burns was mobilizing in his essay. That’s no surprise, as the Sparta of the undergraduate material becomes what is taught when those undergrads become high school teachers, which in turn becomes the Sparta that shows up in the works of Frank Miller, Steven Pressfield and Zack Snyder.2 It is a reading of the sources that is at once both gullible and incomplete, accepting all of the praise without for a moment thinking about the implications; for the sake of simplicity I’m going to refer to this vision of Sparta subsequently as the ‘Pressfield camp,’ after Steven Pressfield, the author of Gates of Fire (1998).3 It has always been striking to me that for everything we are told about Spartan values and society, the actual spartiates would have despised nearly all of their boosters with sole exception of the praise they got from southern enslaver-planter aristocrats in the pre-Civil War United States. If there is one thing I wish I had emphasized more in This. Isn’t. Sparta. it would have been to tell the average ‘Sparta bro’ that the Spartans would have held him in contempt.

And so for years I regularly joked with colleagues that I needed to make a syllabus for a course simply entitled, “Sparta Is Terrible and You Are Terrible for Liking Sparta.” Consequently the TNR essays galvanized an effort to lay out what in my head I had framed as ‘The Indictment Against Sparta.’ The series was thus intended to be set against the general public hagiography of Sparta and its intended audience was what I’ve heard termed the ‘Sparta Bro’ – the person for whom the Spartans represent a positive example (indeed, often the pinnacle) of masculine achievement, often explicitly connected to roles in law enforcement, military service and physical fitness (the regularity with which that last thing is included is striking and suggests to me the profound unseriousness of the argument). It was, of course, not intended to make a meaningful contribution to debates within the scholarship on Sparta; that’s been going on a long time, the questions by now are very technical and so all I was doing was selecting the answers I find most persuasive from the last several decades of it (evidently I am willing to draw somewhat further back than some). In that light, I think the series holds up fairly well, though there are some critiques I want to address.

 

 

[SeanF]

30 minutes ago, Zorral said:

 

... the actual spartiates would have despised nearly all of their boosters with sole exception of the praise they got from southern enslaver-planter aristocrats in the pre-Civil War United States.

- - -  Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Retrospective

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-retrospective/

 

It’s a while since I read Cartledge, but I never had the impression that he was hostile to Sparta (he didn’t glorify it, either).

Sparta sounds pretty horrid, but the same was true for most ancient societies.

[Zorral]

Yet it is the spartan way with the helots that the USian slaveholders who made the War of the Rebellion they admire.

4 hours ago, SeanF said:

Sparta sounds pretty horrid, but the same was true for most ancient societies.

This says something very important in history of slavery and authoritarians stateism.

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Yet it is the spartan way with the helots that the USian slaveholders who made the War of the Rebellion they admire.

This says something very important in history of slavery and authoritarians stateism.

I think that in terms of overall cruelty, and the infliction of misery, the last 150 years of the Roman Republic outdid Sparta by a fair margin.  

[SeanF]

Overall, I’d say Rome and Macedon succeeded, where Sparta failed, by enrolling the lower classes into their armies, and directing aggression outwards.

Sparta’s Army was essentially an army of occupation, to hold down the helots.  Then they tried to use it, during and after the Pelopennesian War, to conduct an imperial foreign policy, for which they had nothing like sufficient numbers.  They were one defeat away from disaster. 

[SeanF]

13 hours ago, Zorral said:

Yet it is the spartan way with the helots that the USian slaveholders who made the War of the Rebellion they admire.

This says something very important in history of slavery and authoritarians stateism.

And, paradoxically, as Devereaux argues, the Spartans would have despised them.  They would have seen them as boastful, thuggish, extravagant, profligate, selfish, and lacking in true discipline and courage.

The ephors annually declared war on the helots.  I know of no other group of slavers who were honest enough to admit that slavery means constant war against the slaves.

[illrede]

On 8/21/2022 at 9:30 AM, SeanF said:

And, paradoxically, as Devereaux argues, the Spartans would have despised them.  They would have seen them as boastful, thuggish, extravagant, profligate, selfish, and lacking in true discipline and courage.

The ephors annually declared war on the helots.  I know of no other group of slavers who were honest enough to admit that slavery means constant war against the slaves.

The never-to-be-sufficiently-damned John C. Calhoun. There was path out right up until the point people got out of their cognitive dissonance by threading the needle of self-loathing through convincing themselves it was all to the good in the best of all possible worlds. Even Jefferson's "This sucks, I can explain why, but I can't see a way out or have the guts to do anything about it." is vastly preferable.

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, illrede said:

The never-to-be-sufficiently-damned John C. Calhoun. There was path out right up until the point people got out of their cognitive dissonance by threading the needle of self-loathing through convincing themselves it was all to the good in the best of all possible worlds. Even Jefferson's "This sucks, I can explain why, but I can't see a way out or have the guts to do anything about it." is vastly preferable.

Again, most ancient writers were quite honest that being a slave was a bad thing.  They defended the institution on grounds of necessity, or right of conquest, or as a consequence of sin.  They did not claim that it was a “positive good” for the slave.

[Zorral]

On 8/21/2022 at 9:30 AM, SeanF said:

Devereaux argues, the Spartans would have despised them.

Actually Deveraux says that it is ONLY the Dixie slaveholders they would have admired.

[SeanF]

7 hours ago, Zorral said:

Actually Deveraux says that it is ONLY the Dixie slaveholders they would have admired.

Okay, I misread that.

I think he’s wrong, for the reasons I’ve listed.