aphilsphan t1_it56qva wrote
Reply to comment by outsidenorms 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]
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.
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