Another cool aspect that I thought of later on: the Romans were never too interested in consolidating and “developing” non-mediterranean Europe, preferring much more to integrate regions on what is now known as the Middle-East and North Africa, with direct trade routes, uplifting of local prestigious families with citizenship and senatorial rank, and eventually even adopting the Greek language and religions that were common to the regions. Europe itself was mostly a backwater, with Spain being colonised for their gold mines much earlier on, but most European colonisation being based on erasing the local culture and enslaving the population who they saw as backwards barbarians. Which is a fun contrast to their very strong Hellenistic weeb movement that eventually changed the make up of their whole culture.
For example, since Christianity developed a lot in the Greek-speaking world (Egypt, Syria) and it benefited from Greek being sort of an eastern lingua franca, a lot of the earlier Christian writings were actually made in Greek and had to later be translated to Latin for the Italian Romans. They also had a lot of theological divergences that were reasonably tolerated in the East due to the local power of the Patriarchates and the influence of their cultural philosophies and traditions, which deconstructs a lot the modern idea of a unified monolithic church.
This partly explains how Roman authority silently faded away in what is now France and Britain very quickly after Odoacer’s coup without much notice or even attempts to retake it, while there was a constant struggle on the part of Eastern Rome to maintain their holdings at Mediterranean Africa and Southern Italy. I don’t know much about the following Caliphates, but from what I’ve read a reasonable part of their administrative success after their expansion was because they managed to integrate and adapt the already extant Roman administration of the regions into their own system.
So the Europeans and even Latin wasn’t that important to the Romans when taken through their full history. After the Fourth Crusade took Thrace and installed their own “Latin Empire,” the Byzantine Romans derisively referred to all of those latin-speaking Catholics as “Franks” regardless of their actual origins, and the whole chapter of their history was often referred to historiographically as “Frankokratia” (francocracy?). Weirdo European reactionaries who think they’re the ideological (and sometimes even racial) descendants of Romans or something just don’t know much history.
Today I’m learning a whole bunch of new things. That family tree did have me in despair
Another cool aspect that I thought of later on: the Romans were never too interested in consolidating and “developing” non-mediterranean Europe, preferring much more to integrate regions on what is now known as the Middle-East and North Africa, with direct trade routes, uplifting of local prestigious families with citizenship and senatorial rank, and eventually even adopting the Greek language and religions that were common to the regions. Europe itself was mostly a backwater, with Spain being colonised for their gold mines much earlier on, but most European colonisation being based on erasing the local culture and enslaving the population who they saw as backwards barbarians. Which is a fun contrast to their very strong Hellenistic weeb movement that eventually changed the make up of their whole culture.
For example, since Christianity developed a lot in the Greek-speaking world (Egypt, Syria) and it benefited from Greek being sort of an eastern lingua franca, a lot of the earlier Christian writings were actually made in Greek and had to later be translated to Latin for the Italian Romans. They also had a lot of theological divergences that were reasonably tolerated in the East due to the local power of the Patriarchates and the influence of their cultural philosophies and traditions, which deconstructs a lot the modern idea of a unified monolithic church.
This partly explains how Roman authority silently faded away in what is now France and Britain very quickly after Odoacer’s coup without much notice or even attempts to retake it, while there was a constant struggle on the part of Eastern Rome to maintain their holdings at Mediterranean Africa and Southern Italy. I don’t know much about the following Caliphates, but from what I’ve read a reasonable part of their administrative success after their expansion was because they managed to integrate and adapt the already extant Roman administration of the regions into their own system.
So the Europeans and even Latin wasn’t that important to the Romans when taken through their full history. After the Fourth Crusade took Thrace and installed their own “Latin Empire,” the Byzantine Romans derisively referred to all of those latin-speaking Catholics as “Franks” regardless of their actual origins, and the whole chapter of their history was often referred to historiographically as “Frankokratia” (francocracy?). Weirdo European reactionaries who think they’re the ideological (and sometimes even racial) descendants of Romans or something just don’t know much history.