Barbaren breken het Rijk in Twee met DonderBliksem


Throughout
that Third Century
the Roman Empire,
Decaying Socially and Disintegrating Morally,
Faced the Barbarians.

The emperors of this period
were fighting military autocrats,
and the capital of the empire shifted
with the necessities of their
military policy.

Now the imperial headquarters
would be at Milano in North Italy,
then in what is now Serbia at Sirmium or Nish,
and even Nicomedia in Asia Minor
now called Turkey.

Roma half-way down Italia
was too far from the centre of interest
to be a convenient imperial seat:
it was a declining city.
Over most of the empire peace still prevailed
and men went about
without arms.

The armies continued to be
the SOLE repositories of power;
the emperors, dependent on their legions,
became more and more autocratic to the rest of the empire
and their state more and more
like that of the Persian and other
Oriental monarchs.
Diocletian assumed a royal diadem
and Oriental robes.

All along the imperial frontier,
which ran roughly along the Rhine and Danube,
enemies were now pressing.
The Franks and other German tribes
had come up to the Rhine.
In north Hungary were the Vandals;
in what was once Dacia and is now called Rumania,
the Visigoths or
West Goths.

Behind these in south Russia
were the East Goths or Ostrogoths,
and beyond these again in the Volga region the Alans.
But now Mongolian peoples
were forcing their way towards Europe.
The Huns were already exacting tribute from the Alans
and Ostrogoths and
pushing them to
the west.

In Asia the Roman frontiers
were crumbling back under the push of a renascent Persia.
This new Persia, the Persia of the Sassanid kings,
was to be a vigorous and on the whole a successful rival of the Roman Empire in Asia for the next
three centuries.





A glance
at the map of Europe
will show the interested myDi-reader
the particular weakness of the empire.
The River Donau comes down to within a couple of hundred miles
of the Adriatic Sea in the region of
what is now Bosnia
and Serbia.
It makes
a square re-entrant angle there.
The Romans never kept their sea communications in good order,
and this 200-mile strip of land
was their line of communication between the western Latin-speaking part of the empire and the eastern
Greek-speaking portion.
Against this square angle of the Danube
the barbarian pressure was greatest.
When they broke thru there
it was inevitable that the empire should fall
into two parts.

All thru
our myDi-stories,
even from the very beginning,
we can see the connections to what we are now,
and our present situations
forced upon the world by developments
and struggles of the past.
Movements from the South to the North
and from the East to the West.
Civilisations and Nomads,
Languages and Cultures,
Cities and Armies,
Religions and
Ideologies.

What we are Now
is the Result of what we were Then
and what we will be in the Future
depends on our myDi-lives
of TODAY?


liefdesverdrietgemeenverwardgaap!bah!nahnahverdrietigcool!erg vrolijkknipoogvrolijkverliefdvrolijkknipoogerg vrolijkcool!verdrietignahnahbah!gaap!verwardgemeenliefdesverdriet
Logisch Toch?
10 jul 2004 - bewerkt op 12 jan 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
Weet je zeker dat je dit verhaal wilt rapporteren? Ja | Nee
Profielfoto van Asih
Asih, man, 81 jaar
   
Log in om een reactie te plaatsen.   vorige volgende