“I can’t believe Africa hasn’t fully recovered from having every major polity on the continent shattered and looted, smh. European societies would never spend more than 50 years recovering from a crisis like that!”

[6th-8th centuries AD smolder quietly]

Wanks as high as any in Wome 🙏

Me when I was young: “Waoh Jefferson writes really prettily about liberty he must be a good guy”

Me getting into history and politics in my mid-teens: “What the fuck”

Fucking Jefferson. Fucking slavers. Fucking racists.

Trade resumed with Haiti in 1810, though. It was diplomatic recognition (previously cautiously extended by the Adams administration) that really lagged.

Fun Fact! While in the modern day, it is sometimes considered that the Romans referred to homosexuality as ‘Greek love’, I read a series of works recently that suggest that disdainful Roman references to ‘Greek love’ referred to excessive affection of any romantic kind, including heterosexual married affection.

What, you prefer your LOVER over your DUTY!? Fucking barbarian, smh.

Unfortunately, Christianity’s rise in the Late Roman Empire would destroy the relative tolerance of LGBT folk previously enjoyed, as the Abrahamic origins of Christianity include some pretty core anti-homosexual injunctions.

Explanation: During the Migration Period which presaged the disintegration of the Western Roman Empire, hundreds-of-thousands of Germanic tribesmen flooded into the Roman Empire, on the run from political disruption caused by foreign nomad incursions (like the Huns) as well as climate change.

Whenever the Roman Empire was reluctant to let them in, the Germanics made it very clear that they were not just politely asking.

Dunno about that. I’ve seen what Ridley Scott does with a blank check.

Our dictator is busy fucking jizzing money into İstanbul Başakşehir to fund the propaganda pieces properly.

Well, I suppose as far as embezzling, corrupt, incompetent, backwards strongmen go, wasting public money on playing dress-up with toy soldiers is one of the less-bad outcomes for one’s lira. Better than just being stolen, or being blown on a half-a-billion dollar desecration of a national park for the Sultan’s palace. :/

Also, the rest of the budget went to censoring the cigarettes and alcohol in more secular productions.

Next Ataturk biopic will just be a censor bar wherever Mustafa Kemal would be 😭

He goes by Joji now. Still makes music, I think.

Exact economic numbers are hard to reconstruct, and always deeply contentious, but it was much the same in principle back then - something to the tune of ~100 miles by cart being more expensive than ~1000 miles (roughly the distance from Egypt to Rome) by sea.

Sea shipping is just incredibly efficient compared to us landlubbers.

Praise God! Henry’s come to see us!

That point of view probably has more relevance in modern wars, which have a broader participation by ordinary folk. The Crusades, like most European warfare of the time, was prosecuted largely by the warrior-nobility (who would find an excuse to go to war if not given one) and semi-professional mercenaries.

The common people largely ‘enjoyed’ the despoilation of their land and abuse of their persons, and increased taxes from their lords to pay for it, but had little say in the matter.

I’d respond to that but I’ve resolved to no longer be literate 💪

Explanation that maybe got away from me a bit: Even before it was part of the Roman Empire, the grain supply from Egypt was vital to the continued day-to-day functioning of the city of Rome. Vast amounts of grain were purchased for delivery to the capital, which by the 2nd century BCE had swollen to one of the largest cities ever known (and would eventually become the largest city in world history until London surpassed the 1 million mark around 1800 AD).

While perhaps Italy could have supplied more of Rome’s grain than it did - perhaps even all of it (at least in tandem with Sicily), a kind of issue of comparative advantage had arisen - as the Roman Republic (and Empire) expanded its reach, so too did its markets expand with the security of Roman authority and the insistent legalism of Roman contract law. The demand in the provinces for high quality wine and olive oil from Italy was far greater than the demand for wheat (whose quality is important, but not nearly to the same price point as high-quality wine or olive oil). The vast estates in Italy, and even many of the larger independent farmers, grew for sale in a well-integrated market rather than just regional subsistence.

This is actually, from an efficiency standpoint, a very good thing. More people get better wine and olive oil at cheaper prices, less land is used in the provinces for lower-quality wine and olive oil (and can thus be dedicated to local specialties themselves) and everyone benefits. Classic economics!

Only… this made Rome’s dependency on foreign grain a very serious security risk. After the Numidian (North African) King Jugurtha nearly bribed his way into cutting away a fifth of the Roman Republic’s holdings in all-but-plain-daylight, there was increased concern over the leverage that such ‘barbarians’ might hold over domestic Roman politics - considering the near-disaster with King Jugurtha, a concern not entirely without merit.

As (then-independent) Egypt was their biggest grain supplier, it was discussed that the Egyptians potentially held a strange kind of power over Roman governments - without explicitly starving even a single Roman, they could, theoretically, sabotage Roman leaders who were opposed to Egyptian interests and reinforce those in favor simply by throttling the wheat supply and driving prices in the city of Rome (all-important in Roman politics, after all) up. What is left, then, but a state in effective vassalage to another, driven not by military victory or even absolute economic strength, but simply by what leverage it gave them over the other country’s domestic politics.

What is a Republic to do?

What Rome always did (or always tried, at least) - played the game better than their opponents (including those ‘opponents’ who didn’t even realize they were playing). Rome intensified their involvement in Egyptian domestic politics to the point where Egypt, without a major war, had become all-but-vassalized to Rome’s interests - and that interest was primarily buying grain. Uno reverse on the treacherous barbarians, so glad we manipulated them into subservience before they could do the same to us!

By the time of the most famous Cleopatra, the Graeco-Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty was basically dependent on the goodwill of Rome for their continued rule… and when Cleopatra picked the wrong side in a Roman civil war, the dynasty’s number was up. Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, formalized what had been the essential situation for nearly 100 years at that point, and integrated Egypt into the structures of the Roman polity. So important was the Egyptian grain supply for Rome that a later Emperor, Claudius, would grant citizenship to provincials who ran private for-profit grain routes between Rome and Egypt.

After that, Egypt would be a quiet (if extremely prosperous) breadbasket for Rome, except whenever civil wars stirred up and everyone made a mad dash to control the grain supply. The hungry plebs of the city of Rome, after all, can overthrow even an Emperor - he who controls the grain, controls the Empire! Or at least can deny it to someone else!

The integration of Egypt’s grain-producing lands into the markets of the Empire is sometimes suggested to have created considerable price stability of grain across the Roman Empire for the next 200 years - one of many reasons why provincial unrest rarely blossomed into strong movements for independence. The Romans were callous, smug, greedy, arrogant bastards, but they also ran an unprecedented system of multi-continental economic integration which was widely recognized as a positive (even if not phrased in quite those terms).

“Not me, I’m built different.” - Frankish Failking #29

That’s darkly fascinating.

“The Austro-Hungarian wiki page seems to be as united as the empire itself”

Perfection

It’s just for show, of course - his coin is far too great and heavy for any purse to hold

Explanation: Austria-Hungary had a spiffy flag, if you like coats of arms.

It was also nowhere near a functioning polity, being predicated on the dynastic domination of a royal family over two large polities which, themselves, were barely functioning patchworks of other minority ethnicities given just the right amount of concessions and brutality to not revolt at any given moment. It was a very… medieval setup for a late 19th century polity. Not helping matters was a total inability to decide on even a lingua franca for government use - the Austro-Hungarian military itself (wherein one expects fast communication to be important) had chains of command that had to pass through several translators to get news up the pipeline. The OODA loop there was certainly not optimal.

k.u.k. stands for kaiserlich und königlich - ‘imperial and royal’ - as the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a union of the (imperial) Austrian throne and the (royal) Hungarian throne.