Was being too generous to refugees one of reasons triggered the falls of Roman Empire ?

The fall of Rome has always been caused by [thinly veiled reference to my political opponents' policies and ideals].

I kek'd hard

>Romans refused to let them in
>Armies comprised of solely Germans, lead by Germans making up the entirety of the late Roman Empire's military force
>Germans like Stilcho marrying into the royal family

To answer OP's point, the influx of refugees heavily exasperated some of the primary reasons for Rome's fall, especially in regards to the military. Going back to Marian reforms, you had soldiers no longer loyal to Rome itself or instilled with any notion of civic duty, as they were now entirely loyal to their generals instead. Also serving as an issue was the precedent Sulla set in taking political power by force and military might. Obviously you can see how this would worsen when you had a military comprised nearly in entirety of Germans being led by Germans.

The Romans were never generous to the migrants, pre-378, the Romans kicked the shit out of any tribe trying to migrate into their territory, forced them to submit before the might of Rome, and broke apart their tribal structure.

After the Battle of Adrianople, the Romans just didn't have the strength to exert their will on the tribes anymore in such a way; they were short on manpower, money, and officers, while the Goths proved themselves to be able warriors. It was only being pragmatic to solve the crisis at hand that led to a further reliance on Gothic and Germanic soldiers, leading to whole semi-independent tribes wandering around the empire. Even then, the Romans had to deliberately treat the Goths like shit and stab them in the back for no reason for the crisis involving Alaric to arise.

Roman economic model was based on conquest. They lived off the wealth of civilisations they defeated.

That worked as long as there were rich mediterranean nations they could fight against, but Germanic barbarians in the North were poor and Legions had to be paid for. Once that couldn't be done from the booty, taxes had to be raised and currency devalued.

Seeds of the Fall of Rome were there from the beginning. They just couldn't see it.

That isn't necessarily true, there was wealth to be had in conquering barbarian tribes. If memory serves correct, the empire was its wealthiest when Trajan conquered Dacia due to the gold deposits in the region.

In fact this post is just wrong, an economic model such as that is just not feasible for a large scale state. The Romans engaged in trade and commerce on a massive scale, it wasn't as if any and all wealth they amassed came from whatever city they had just toppled over and sacked.

WHOAH I have never seen a thread like this?
OP you must be an amazing and awesome guy ful of original ideas!

You can still sell barbarians into slavery, which was the real grease that turned Rome's wheels.

>triarii
heh

Half of Rome survived in for another 1000 years, making your list moot

> when Trajan conquered Dacia due to the gold deposits in the region.
Interesting that you would cite the prime example of his point in practice: the Dacians were more or less the last free people in Europe worth conquering, and represented the last of the great Roman conquests. Feudal Persia and decentralized Germans simply did not possess the kind of wealth which would have made the investment in conquering them worth it, and this was why within a few generations of the Dacian conquest was when shit hit the fan for the Romans in the 3rd century.

>The Romans engaged in trade and commerce on a massive scale, it wasn't as if any and all wealth they amassed came from whatever city they had just toppled over and sacked.
They relied on conquest as an economic stimulus, infusing into the economy with new capital (in the form of war booty) and a new foreign labor pool from which to draw slaves. It wasn't the sole source of their wealth, but it was a way to kick start a deflating economy.

The very nature of the Empire was that it existed in a permanently militarized state, whose military had de facto taken over the government after the reign of Augustus, and during the reign of Septimius Severus had taken it over outright and more or less dispensed with democratic niceties. The beast needed to be fed, something like 80% of the Roman government's budget was military spending, and when they no longer had external enemies worth fighting, they turned on each other and burnt their society to the ground in a relentless tide of civil wars.

I think you're overstating the overall prowess of the Dacian kingdom, while I can't say with complete certainty that they were on par with your typical blend of Germanic/Gallic tribes they certainly paled in comparison to the aforementioned "rich Mediterranean nations."

>within a few generations of the Dacian conquest was when shit hit the fan for the Romans in the 3rd century.

You mean a period of over 200 years?

Nothing about nazi Germany was based. The whole thing was a huge incoherrent shitshow.

>You mean a period of over 200 years?
The crisis of the third century starts a little over 100 years after the subjugation of the Dacians. From this period on the Romans simply had no one left to bleed, and their state was badly in need of funds after plague decimated the tax paying workforce and Commodus squandered what was left of the Roman coffers on lavish spectacle. When Pertinax tried to save the budget by denying Praetorians a lavish bonus for simply existing, they murdered him and raised money by auctioning the throne to the highest bidder, which inspired the military under Septimus Severus to take over the Roman state, which precipitated the crisis period.

You're right in that Dacia wasn't as impressive and enduring a conquest as, say, Egypt, which is why towards the end Marcus Aurelius was having to pawn imperial jewelry just to finance the unending defensive wars.

While I do appreciate this discourse and the information you're sharing I'm still not totally convinced that military conflict with other states was vital in sustaining Rome. I just find it hard to wrap my head around the idea that an entity as large as Rome would be able to fill its coffers primarily on conquest and subjugation. If memory serves correct the wealth obtained from the aforementioned Dacian kingdom came not from what was pillaged from the Dacians themselves, but the gold/metal deposits the Romans later mined. Did these deposits simply dry up? It just does not seem feasible to me that the empire could sustain itself solely off of what it could take from its neighbors with no source of domestic income.

>While I do appreciate this discourse and the information you're sharing
awfully sporting thing of you to say. My thanks.
>I'm still not totally convinced that military conflict with other states was vital in sustaining Rome
I'm not arguing that their economy was totally dependent on naked conquest. In fact transcontinental trade flourished under the peace time conditions fostered by the Romans, most of whom lived hundreds of miles away from the nearest legionary. At its height, ice was being transported to the Mediterranean as a luxury item and entire ecosystems were rounded up and fed to the slaughter of the arena.

It's just that their model was not sustainable. The overwhelming portion of their budget was being spent on the military even in times when there weren't any major external threats to the Roman peace, which was a severe drain on their economy. Throw in the fact that the government itself was a bloated, corrupt, pay-to-play mess which heavily taxed its citizens without even pretending to represent them, and you've got a situation where the economy depresses and from time to time needs a shot of Adrenalin, which for most of Rome's history was found through pilfering and Romanizing "barbarians" who in practice weren't that much less wealthy than the Romans. This continual process of conquering also fueled the lowest rung of society; slaves, who did all the work Romans didn't want to do like work themselves to do death in a mine or clean the chamber-pots of rich ladies.

But Germans were especially poor and after the disaster at Teutoborg Forest, conquering them was never financially feasible for the Romans. Trajan conquered the Persians but holding Persia was a huge drain on the economy and his successor immediately abandoned it.

Without the ability to inject that adrenalin into the economy, the government essentially fell into bankruptcy and the military staged a hostile take-over, and without any external enemies to fight fought each other.

The Edict of Caracalla helped trigger the Crisis of the Third Century which contributed to the end of Rome.

The edict of Caracalla was a last ditch effort to raise tax revenues by making every one within the borders a taxable citizen, rather than keeping the economy as an ungodly conglomerate of competing black markets.

It was too little, too late

Did the Edict of Carcalla give people the right to live in Rome or on the Italian peninsula or was that already permitted? Or was that only people under the 'Latin Rights'?

I'm not sure desu and flipping through my sources didn't come up with a satisfactory answer. What I did find was this quote by Cassius Dio:

>"This was the reason why he made all the people in his empire Roman citizens; nominally he was honouring them, but his real purpose was to increase his revenues by this means, inasmuch as aliens did not have to pay most of these taxes."

In many ways this made things shittier for people, because now Christians who were previously free to practice their trade were now subject to Roman regulations which required making sacrifices at pagan temples in order to get their trade license.

Basically everyone, including Cassius Dio, thought that Caracalla was a raging cunt which is why he was murdered while taking a piss and left to die in a puddle of his own urine.

Yeah, my study is mainly the Late Republic-Early Prinicipate era but by all accounts I know Caracalla was a dickhead. The reason I ask is because I'm trying to extend my knowledge into later periods of Rome and how citizenship developed over time is key to that.

I know those with full Roman citizenship (cives Romani) and of course the Socii (allied states) had the right to live on the Italian peninsula but if this was extended to everybody under the Edict of Caracalla, surely they would flock towards Rome.

kek

>the reason I ask is because I'm trying to extend my knowledge into later periods of Rome and how citizenship developed over time is key to that.
in practice, by the early 3rd century CE the idea of citizenship and the “right to vote” was mostly irrelevant. The duties of the emperor replaced the function of both the Senate and assemblies and voting rights were all but non-existent. In its place Rome became divided between two groups - the honestiores or the elite and the humilores, the lower sort - there was actually no legal distinction between the two classes. Citizenship had always meant that an individual had a role in the affairs of state, but with the assassination of Caesar and the rise to power of his step-son Augustus - who the Senate awarded the title of the first citizen or princeps - the government was forever changed in Rome. Citizenship was no longer the prized possession that it once had been.
>ancient.eu/article/859/

But surely people still prized being protected under Roman law?

For the duration of the Principate (32 BC to 235 AD) the facade of democratic rule was maintained and citizens would have still identified strongly as being the same SPQR that their great-great-great grandfathers voted for during the heyday of the Republic. The "Emperor" was never a codified aspect of public law in this period, and his only permanent public post was "high priest of the state religion", meaning that he controlled the flow of information in the Empire and maintained the calendar but from a larger perspective he was basically the equivalent of the food and beverage guy at a shady, mafia-run casino. To all outward appearances democracy was as strong as ever, with the first citizen acting as a preserver or guardian of the old ways.

This dissolved after the 190's, where the military basically took over the government and the Severans more or less reduced the concept of citizenship to meaninglessness, as by the time that the situation stabilizes under Diocletian it has been reduced to a military-dominated despotism which reduced the role of the senate to purely local affairs, while all major affairs of state were handled by the Emperor with the title Dominus ("the lord") to whom all were officially required to prostrate to as inferiors, hence the term "Dominate" (285 AD to 476 AD)

Stilicho was pretty loyal though. It was other Germanics (Ricimer) and foederati that were the problem. Of course the Romans themselves didn't help things (i.e. their treatment of Alaric as a large example) though.

No, fuck off. The fall of the Western Roman Empire was attributable to many other factors, such as its relative (I repeat, RELATIVE) absence of resources when compared to the East, which in turn allowed its economy to stagnate once the Empire became increasingly divided; also, the Crisis of the Third Century left its mark, with the break-down of the trade network that distributed the goods over the Empire, which left the West even more impoverished, without access to goods from the other provinces.

To be sure, barbarian migrations did their part, but only because at this point, the Western Empire was weakened economically and militarily: constant civil wars and usurpers did more to destroy the Western Empire than barbarians itself.