Roman Third Century Crisis (235 - 284)

>Roman Third Century Crisis (235 - 284)
>Chinese Three Kingdoms Period (220 - 280)
It is like pottery, it rhymes.

Shame the only one famous to come out of Roman Three Kingdoms was a qtp2t Queen.

lol perians couldnt conquer that kingdom

There's actually a really good reason for this.

Han China recorded epidemics of Smallpox between 151 and 190 AD.

The Antonine Plague that devastated the Roman Empire started in 165 AD. There's good evidence to suggest the Antonine Plague was also Smallpox.

The epidemics killed perhaps up to 25% of the total population of the Han and Roman Empires, which decimated the military, the tax base, and the societal structures that depended on having 33% more people.

What else? Well look at this graph of world climate, taken from ice cores.

There's a massive dip around 200 AD, the start of the third century. This small dip made the growing season considerably shorter, and reduced the amount of food that could be produced, meaning subsistence farmers (read, basically everyone) had a really shitty time, and had less food available to feed the urban population.

So you have a plague, which kills off a ton of the workforce, and destroys certain economies of scale, and then you have less food, which means less food to feed the centralized urban population. These are decentralizing factors, which un-surprisingly, leads to the collapse of central authority and civil war.

IIRC the Kushan and Parthian empires were also experiencing huge problems around this time, lending support to there being some kind of continent-wide event that affected all these empires at once.

Well if the Han smallpox epidemic and Antonine Plague were the same one, it would had to have traveled through the lands in between, i.e. the Kushan and Parthian Empires. The Silk road brings Smallpox along with silk and spices.

Then it's a fact that for pre-industrial societies, a massive global cooling fucks up the agriculture, which then fucks up everything else.

Maybe if you're a brainlet who has never read a book. There are a bunch of great stories and characters from the Crisis.

You provide a compelling argument but the skeptic in me would argue that correlation=/=causation

To add the debasement of currency (raising more troops by the Severan dynasty, debasing the currency more to pay the troops, and the conflicts between upstarts resolving in paying the troops even more) was also a component to the Crisis

Every average person in East Asia knows who was Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang, Sima Yi, etc. No average joe in Western civilization knows who the fuck was Diocletian or Odenathus or Philip the Arab.

>. No average joe in Western civilization knows who the fuck was Diocletian or Odenathus or Philip the Arab.
Most people know Commodus as Joaquin Phoenix

Pre-dates the third century

Cao Cao and Zhuge Liang have the advantage of having one of the most popular novels of all time written about them

I wonder who could have been behind that, upside-down-satan trips

>Pre-dates the third century
>implying the death of Commodus and Pertinax did not awaken the Praetorian and started the downfall of the Principate

No, I meant that literally.

And Commodus certainly wasn't helping anything after Rome was rekt by the Antonine Plague, but it's not like the average westerner knows anything about him other than he was the bad guy in a Russell Crowe movie about a fictional Roman general who "restores the Republic"

Coin debasement and the hyperinflation it created was a symptom, not a cause.

If the tax base was still intact, and not ravaged by both plague and famine, Septimius Severus wouldn't have needed to debase the currency to fund his military campaigns.

It's like a man suffering from hypothermia taking off his clothes and only making the hypothermia worse.

Oh and by the way, remember how the little ice age in late 4th century sent hordes of Barbarians crossing into Rome because their own lands were not productive anymore? That's shown on the graph by the dip around 375. Now look at the dop near 200, and wonder how many of the Barbarian invasions Rome suffered during the 3rd century is because they were suffering from their own weather-related famine.

> a fictional Roman general who "restores the Republic"
Would the average Roman under Commodus have known they had an Emperor ruling an Empire, or were they still pretending the Augustus was merely the first citizen of a republic?

They called the guy in charge Imperator, and Augustus himself was deified post-mortem, so yes, everyone knew they lived in an Empire.

>that sudden 400AD dip corresponding to the near simultaneous fall of both Western Rome and Northern China to barbarian invasions

The Romans never stopped calling themselves the SPQR. Republic and Empire are modern distinctions.

Upper class Romans would have realized that their democracy was a sham, the lower classes were too complacent to care.

It was really around the time of Aurelius that the emperors dispensed with the principate trappings of democratic rule and began to rule as naked despots, but it was Diocletian who made it official.

You can basically chart the rise and fall of every pre-qing Chinese dynasty on this graph. Neat isn't it?

>citing a hack who believes in ID

kek m8 I bet you believe in pyramid woo too

Good subject! This is what Veeky Forums thread should look like.

>Kushan
good shit

I wonder if with modern agriculture and globalization we have managed to at least partially mitigate the danger of destruction of states by poor annual harvest?

So you're saying climate change is serious fucking business, and President Fuckface is literally threatening our lives every day he shits on Paris? Good to know.

If anything with the increase in life expectancy and population explosion we are more vulnerable than ever to a compromised food supply.

>Paris will do anything about climate change

You're dumb

Now I am interested what happened to those empires during that time.

tl;dr The Parthian Empire experienced heavy turmoil and rebellion and were overthrown by the Sasanians in 224AD. Meanwhile the Kushan Empire fragmented into smaller semi-independent kingdoms after Vasudeva I died in 230AD and also got invaded by Sasanians.

They were openly talking about being a monarchy by the time of Trajan, but it would be another century and a half before Diocletian legally acknowledged it.

Why was it always the barbarians who invaded the settled societies when their lands became less productive, and not the other way around