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In reply to the discussion: THIS is why the world laughs at us (or thinks we're batshit crazy) [View all]Odin2005
(53,521 posts)In the early 200s all free subjects were made imperial citizens by decree of the Emperor Caracalla. This sounds like a good thing but it was actually a deeply cynical move. The reason was that citizens paid certain taxes that non-citizens did not, and he needed this tax money to keep his increasingly greedy soldiers happy. It didn't work. A generation after Caracalla the Empire collapsed into 50 years (AD 235-285) of civil wars, coups, invasion, and hyperinflation caused by the soldiers crowning emperors, demanding raises, and them murdering them in quick succession. This only ended with Diocletian, who saved the empire only by making it increasingly totalitarian, and also getting rid of the pretense of Rome being a republic, he was the first emperor to wear a crown and made people kow-tow to him.
What does this have to do with Factionalism? Before Caracalla's mass-expansion of citizenship, most Roman citizens lived in a tightly-knit zone of the western Mediterreanean, namely Italy, North Africa, Provence, and eastern Spain. Afterwards the cultural diversity of the Roman citizenry was greatly expanded, and thus less unified culturally.
Also, the 3rd Century Crisis caused grave economic damage to the Roman economy, it became more localized and the great landowners and their tenants became more self-sufficient on their own lands. This amplified the divergence between different parts of the empire.
Finally, by the late 300s the city of Rome itself stopped being the center of power, supplanted by Constantinople, Trier, and Milan.
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