(11-29-2015, 02:30 PM)Urselius Wrote: I don't think that your equation of widespread literacy and plate armour holds up very well. We know from archaeological remains that the 8th-9th century Turcic Khazars of the North Pontic Steppe produced plate armour greaves and pauldrons. Even with their conversion to Judaism, I do not think that they had any greater levels of literacy than was found in contemporary Western Europe, and westerners were exclusively using mail and scale at the time. Furthermore advanced metallurgy is not reliant on literacy. The illiterate or semi-literate Celts and Iberians had better metallurgical skills than the literate Romans, we know this because the Romans said so, and archaeology has tended to confirm it.
That's not exactly my theory. Through the course of the discussion, I've changed my opinion from it being a uniform to it probably being the best option generals had at the time for equipping their troops with gear that best served the unit as a whole, although not necessarily the individual soldier.
Hamata was probably more flexible, and more comfortable, but the very brilliant commanders of this period chose, used, and stuck with segmentata for a reason. Like I said, it wasn't abandoned in one battle, one war, not even a generation but was around several hundred years. Substandard military equipment, especially if it were a chore to maintain like segmentata, gets abandoned if there's a better alternative, especially when your state has near infinite economic resources.
Segmentata was never abandoned, it gradually fell out of use during a period where the Empire was losing it's citizens that comprised it's infrastructure. This kind of illustrates that disease inflicted a mortal wound on the Empire's economic, industrial, and military capacity. Other evidence is the bodies of numerous plague victims, writings we have from the time (Galen etc.), and the near constant drop in the amount of soldiers the Empire fielded onward all the way to Adrianople. Adrianople was a battle in which the Empire was dealt a lethal blow after ONLY losing 10,000 men. They had previously lost massive amounts of NCO's, officers, generals, and commanders, and more than 150,000 men fighting the 2nd Punic War. Yet, still Rome shrugged it off and went on to sack Carthage not much later. Why would an entire Empire not be able to recover from one relatively small battle, if it weren't ailing from far more serious problems? Rome had seen losses on those scales, or worse, several times during its history.
Blunt trauma is so overhyped that the maul and mace went on to be one of the most effective weapons in history... Anyway, if you disagree then why did the Romans abandon the Scutum? Are you honestly going to argue that the oval shield of the Late Empire was more effective? The Scutum is the preferred shape for every modern police riot shield. It's in widespread use for law enforcement officers who actually face melee combat. They don't walk around with small, flat, oval shields. It's painfully obvious that the Late Empire placed much less emphasis on personal protection for some reason. I've given my reasons. And they make sense in light of the evidence that we have. Disease, probably more than any other factor, brought the Romans to their knees. Their trade network and urban infrastructure was their undoing, and they were hit by both Smallpox and the Bubonic Plague. The EXACT diseases that destroyed the greatest Native American power in the 16th century, the Aztecs. [Go learn about Cortez' conquest of the Aztecs, and the more you learn the more you'll be able to relate to the Second, Third and Sixth century Romans.]
Go watch the movie Contagion, and then try to imagine an ancient society trying to operate in THAT context. It's difficult to and I can't fathom how rough it must have been. They'd have lost vast numbers of educated or trained people, replaced by large numbers of children. It is known in psychology that a women's response to psychological trauma is to have a bunch of children to protect them, and to replace their loved ones that they've lost. That's why we see large birth rates following disaster, and the exploding population in Africa, which has recently been a very troubled continent. This is a FACT. In a society without classrooms, where children were tutored and trained almost on an individual basis, you'd have a LOT more illiterate and untrained people running around. That is backed by evidence that shows the literacy and education of the Roman people, as a whole, dropped extensively sometime around the third century.
That's a LOT less people in a position of authority in the army. That's a LOT less people who know how to make extravagant armour and weapons. That's a LOT less people who could govern, rule, and lead properly. There would be a LOT more incompetence in ALL areas as people would basically be forced to relearn a LOT of things. What'd be easier to pass on and recreate on a large scale? Segmentata and it's high level of sophistication? No. It was mail and it's uniformity in rings! That's why we see segmentata completely die out not much after the Plague of Cyprus, because the last smiths trained to make, repair, and maintain it would be dying around the time we get the last example. YES, the population probably rebounded! But it had lost unquantifiable amounts of skilled citizens, and was undeniably augmented by the influx of foreigners.
Again I'm not tying literacy directly to the production of segmentata but only using it of evidence of a greater calamity. If there are a lot more children relative to adults around to teach them their skills, then you're going to see a dramatic drop in all areas of education, including the ability to read/write AND the ability to make sophisticated equipment such as segmentata. I am essentially saying that the emergence of both Smallpox and the Bubonic plague heralded a destructive capability not before seen, enhanced by the sophisticated trade network and urban populations of the Romans. It was these blows that both dramatically weakened the Roman Empire, and then later completely doomed it. Civilization simply CANNOT thrive while, or immediately after, its civilian population has been ravaged, for ANY reason.
Christopher Vidrine, 30
