Lieve myDi-Lezers & Diverse Potenties zo nu & dan?


Lieve
Lezer &
potenties - Re: 2-4-2004


IT IS
difficult to visualise
the state of affairs in the world
at that time?
Over France, Spain, Italy and the Balkan peninsula,
the great cities that has flourished under the early empire still stood,
impoverished,
partly depopulated and
falling into decay.
Life in them must have been shallow, mean, and full of uncertainty.
Local officials asserted their authority and went on with their work
with such conscience as they had,
no doubt in the name of a now remote and inaccessible emperor.
The churches went on, but usually with illiterate priests.
There was little reading and much superstition and fear.
But everywhere, except when looters had destroyed them,
books and pictures and statuary and such-like works of art
were still to be found?

The life of the countryside
had also degenerated!
Everywhere this Roman world was very much more weedy and untidy
than it had been.
In some regions war and pestilence had brought the land down
to the level of waste.
Roads and forests were infested with robbers.
Into such regions the barbarians marched,
with little or no opposition,
and set up their chiefs as rulers,
often with Roman official titles ...
If they were half civilised barbarians
they would give the conquered districts tolerable terms,
they would take possession of the towns,
associate and intermarry,
and acquire {with an accent} the Latin speech;
but the Jutes, the Angles, and Saxons who submerged the Roman province of Britain were agriculturists and had no use for towns,
they seem to have swept south Britain clear of the Romanised population and they replaced the language by their own Teutonic dialects,
which became at last English.

IT IS
impossible in this myDi-time & -space
at our temporary disposal to trace the movements of all the variuous German & Slavonic tribes as they went to
and fro in the disorganised empire in search of plunder and a pleasant home?!
But the Vandals will serve as an example!?
THEY came into history in East Germany:
they settled, as we have told, in Pannonia.
Thence they moved somewhen about A.D. 425
thru the intervening provinces
to Spain.
THERE they found Visigoths from South Russia
and other German tribes
setting up dukes
and kings.
From Spain the Vandals under Genseric
sailed for North Africa around 429,
captured Carthage in 439,
and built
a fleet.




They
secured the
mastery of the
sea
and captured
and pillaged Rome in 455,
which had recovered very imperfectly
from her capture and looting by Alaric
half a century earlier.
THEN
the Vandals made themselves
masters of Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and most
of the other islands of the western
Mediterranean.
They made,
in fact,
a sea empire
very similar in its extent
to the sea empire of Carthage
700 odd years before?
THEY were at the climax of their power about 477 ...
They were only a mere handful of conquerors holding all this country.
In the next century almost all their territory had been reconquered
for the empire of Constantinople during
a transitory blaze of energy
under Justinian I
.............

The
story of
the Vandals is
but one sample
of a host of similar
adventures
...
And
NOW
there was coming into the European world
the least kindred and most redoubtable of all these devastators,
the Mongolian Huns or Tartars,
a 'yellow' pople,
active and able,
such as the western world
had never before
encountered!

And IF we don't
learn from our myDi-histories
of the past in private and in public: they might very well go on repeating
themselves over and over again -
endlessly?!

liefdesverdrietverliefdgemeengaap!nahnahcool!erg vrolijkknipoogvrolijkverliefd
engel
10 jul 2004 - bewerkt op 13 jan 2008 - meld ongepast verhaal
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Asih, man, 81 jaar
   
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