MoreanSwordsman t1_it4p62v wrote
Reply to comment by AJ_Lounes in Was there mass migration of Roman citizens from Western Empire to Eastern Empire during degredation and after fall of Western part of empire. by [deleted]
First, thank you very much for this productive input. I got a question: So why was the Roman infrastructure and architectural culture destroyed gradually? When you go to Rome today, you hardly can find a complete temple. Even the well known Forum Romanum is nothing more than a few stone blocks..
AJ_Lounes t1_it4vorx wrote
Thanks ! It is true the preservation is quite different from one thing to another. There are a bit of various reasons. Time is obviously one of them but not only. It happened sometimes that in order to build other monuments or support economy or war effort in troubled times that some monuments or places actually got destroyed to recycle the materials.
I imagine also that more modern conflicts could have damaged some places. Also, I don't remember precisely the place name, but I believe Mussolini actually ordered the destruction of old buildings to clear space and build a massive street through Rome.
If we look on the brightside however, we do have some monuments such as the Coliseum or the Pantheon which have made it quite good so far despite a few damages here and there. If we think also about the main roads paved by the romans, we are in a way still using some to this day technically, but obviously they're under concrete now..
I would also add that due to the fragmented political power and emergence of brand new regimes across Europe that the places of power changed of location too and so, I guess, the money allowed to maintain certain buildings in good shape.
MoreanSwordsman t1_it8txm1 wrote
Thanks!
Peter_deT t1_it5sxv4 wrote
Squared stone blocks are expensive to make. Cheaper and easier to take them from some abandoned building. Rome went from maybe 500,000 plus to 20,000 over two centuries, and stayed at 20,000 for several centuries more. Basically a mid-size town in the middle of a large field of ruins.
outsidenorms t1_it50mch wrote
As rome unwound, plebeians would take marble and stone from the colosseum to sell for food. This after a full year of no sun, a plague, and hardly any food. Other sites were just ignored as it was too expensive to maintain. The church came in and rebuilt but in their vision.
aphilsphan t1_it56qva wrote
I always think of the symbolic end of Rome as 660. Constans II comes over from Constantinople. He visits Rome which after all is still part of his empire. He walks around marveling at the glories done centuries ago. Rome has only about 50k people at this point, just the Papal bureaucracy really. It isn’t even the capital of Byzantine Italy. That’s Ravenna.
He orders his men to strip all the remaining precious metal gilding from the monuments. He even takes all the copper.
Then no Roman Emperor returns until the 15th century, unless you count Charlemagne and tue HRE.
outsidenorms t1_it5eojg wrote
This is where I start to get sad…
aphilsphan t1_it7r6un wrote
Historians used to think of 410 as almost a rowdy tourist visit. I’m not sure that’s true anymore. It was the Vandals in 455 that really ruined things, then Belisarius versus the Ostrogoths and Lombards that did the coup de grace. But if you think about it, in 405 the Danube and Rhine frontiers are leaking but they are still there and 5 years later the Visigoths are in Rome. Very sad.
clovis_227 t1_it52048 wrote
The new barbarian kingdom let taxation slip, since their armies were mostly landed now, not paid. Moreover, the aristocracy in the west became much more rural. Finally, there was a greater focus on churches and monasteries instead of the usual civil infrastructure.
aphilsphan t1_it563u8 wrote
They didn’t so much let taxation slip as they inherited a system of taxes in kind. The money economy was going away. It becomes much harder to rebuild a needed aqueduct for a city 500 miles away when you can’t pay the workers from the surplus you’ve got elsewhere. All you can do are smaller projects using your local surpluses.
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