What makes the late roman army so shitty?

What makes the late roman army so shitty?

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They weren't?

reliance on germanics started by caracalla

Over reliance on German mercinarys, coupled with bloat

Barbarians learned how to fight

Autistic retarded garrison/assault divide shit made only defense possible, step 1 to losing.

>Too many invading enemies, not enough manpower
>Lack of a strong centralized ruler, as individual warlords/political machinations/incompetent emperors racked the WRE
>The enemies got better, through exposure to the Romans via proxy wars or serving in the army
>Exacerbation of inflation, made coin less and less reliable up till the 5th century = unhappy soldiers
>Arms and armor became gradually more expensive
>Killing actually effective generals (Aetius, Majorian, Stilicho etc.)
It's amazing the empire survived as long as it did. Blow after blow, it just kept going.

Underfunded and undermanned because latifundia refused to pay sufficient taxes and gobbled up all the citizens that would have previously been able to serve.

Oh, I just wrote a dissertation on the Late Roman Army.

To put it in short: they weren't, they won an incredible amount of victories and were superior to their predecessors in most ways, though what few loses they did suffer were often devestating.

The Late Roman Army did not employ many mercenaries, they didn't have the money.

>Autistic retarded garrison/assault divide shit made only defense possible, step 1 to losing
Not true at all, this was a theory pioneered by Edward Luttwak that has largely been discredited. More recent archaeological and textual evidence shows that the Late Roman Army very often did go on the offensive, just not necessarily with the intention of conquest.

الركود

>did not employ many mercenaries
I suppose we'd have to argue on semantics on what exactly classifies a mercenari. The foederati were certainly fighting for their own interests, and saw themselves as a unit unto their own. A legionary in the 1st century may have seen himself as a "spaniard", but his place was in a larger identity of being a "Roman". Compare that with a lombard or a goth, who may have seen themselves as ethnically belonging to a tribe, and is "working" for the roman army as part of the deal with his tribe.

Foederati were by definition not mercenaries. The Romans used a separate word for mercenaries. Foederati were part of the Roman army, commanded by Roman officers, and if effigies and tombs are anything to go by, they seem to have regarded themselves as being Romans.

The Late Roman Army had a very complex system of terminologies. Mercenaries are their own category and the words used for them all derive from Greek, suggesting they weren't very common in the Late Western Army. Foederati, again, are their own thing, almost always denoting foreign peoples who had been incorporated into the Roman military structure. Another interesting term here is "allies", who were foreign peoples who the Romans coerced into fighting for them, either through physically subduing them or by political coercion. These would be your mercenaries, only they weren't paid, and in some cases were actually expected to pay the Romans for the privilege.

One thing a lot of people forget is that there weren't actually very many of these foreign irregulars, Foederati or otherwise. Ammianus Marcellinus mentions a force of nearly a thousand Roman troops having 20 Foederati with them, and Zosimus similarly mentions a force of 2000 men being accompanied by 120 Foederati.

Yeah, no, Gibbons tells me that late Romans relied on mercenaries.

Do you have recommended reading on the subject? Books or papers (ones on JSTOR would be great) You've mentioned Zosimus and Marcellinus but some archeological analysis would be useful.

They actually weren't. Each individual soldier was far more effective and self-reliant than one from the Early Imperial period. Instead of fighting in massive formations against enemy forces of equal size, they were expected to fight guerilla style typically on the frontiers against much larger barbarian armies equipped as well as they were.

Thank Christ someone else thinks this. Isaacs BTFO Luttwak decades ago.

was the higher effectiveness against enemies in smaller scale, guerrilla style warfare at the cost of being better at chewing enemies in setpiece battles?

if the soldiers were better, were the commanders just worse?

Name me a single set-piece battle the Romans lost in the 5th century AD.

>were the commanders just worse?

Of course they were. They were using their own troops to fight each other as barbarians sacked the cities they were supposed to be protecting.

>>Name me a single set-piece battle the Romans lost in the 5th century AD.

er...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empire#408–410;_the_end_of_an_effective_regular_field_army,_starvation_in_Italy,_sack_of_Rome

they weren't, the government just failed to support them adequately. the WRE army was actually kickass given the circumstances it found itself in.

Bump

This, WRE army was top-tier at the time. I'd say the only problem they had was replacing their losses due to low imperial manpower.

And he is out of date

They became Carthage.

Not that user but here are some good'uns

• Barnes, Timothy D., The New Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (Harvard University Press, 1982).
• Barnes, Timothy D., Ammianus Marcellinus and the Representation of Historical Reality (Cornell University Press, 1998).
• Bury, J.B., A History of the Later Roman Empire, Vols I & II (Cambridge University Press, 1889).
• Cameron, Averil, 'The Reign of Constantine' in eds Bowman, A., Cameron, A., and Garnsey, P., The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. 12 (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
• Downey, Glanville, Belisarius: Young General of Byzantium (Dutton, 1960).
• Drijvers, Jan and Hunt, David, The Late Roman World and its Historian: Interpreting Ammianus Marcellinus (Routledge, 2003).
• Drinkwater, John, The Alamanni and Rome 213-496 (Caracalla to Clovis), (Oxford University Press, 2007).
• Elton, Hugh, Warfare in Roman Europe, AD 350-425 (Clarendon Press, 1996).
• Given, John P., The Fragmentary History of Priscus: Attila, the Huns and the Roman Empire, AD 430-476 (Arx Publishing, 2015).
• Gwynn, David Morton, ed. A.H.M. Jones and the Later Roman Empire (Brill, 2008).
• Heather, Peter, The Fall of the Roman Empire: a New History of Rome and the Barbarians (Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Jacobsen, Tortsten Cumberland, The Gothic War: Rome's Final Conflict in the West (Westholme, 2009).
• Lee, A.D., War in Late Antiquity: A Social History (John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
• MacGeorge, Penny, Late Roman Warlords (Oxford University Press, 2002).
• McEvoy, Meaghan, Child Emperor Rule in the Late Roman West, AD 367-455 (Oxford University Press, 2013).
• O'Flynn, John M., Generalissimos of the Western Roman Empire (University of Alberta, 1983).
• Potter, David S., The Roman Empire at Bay, AD 180-395 (Psychology Press, 2004).
• Rohrbacher, David, The Historians of Late Antiquity (Routledge, 2002).
• Southern, Pat and Dixon, Karen The Late Roman Army (Yale University Press, 1996).

they don't look right for one, they looks like barbarians

U mad cause they stylin'

>Implying that earlier roman legionaries didn't look like barbarians.

Yeah because the Romans would never adopt barbarian fashions amirite

Is your dissertation publicly available user?

>posting a Gallic auxiliary

Not just yet, I want to clean it up a bit before putting it up on Academia.edu or some such

I'll make a thread about it when I do so you'll probably see it pop up at some point