11-30-2015, 10:40 AM
Quoting CNV:
"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."
The two Roman societies were very different. The Punic War society was one of citizens-in-arms fighting for a state that was a form of limited democracy. Huge manpower losses could be replaced because the citizens were militarised, each citizen was trained for war and equipped himself, when a father was killed his son replaced him, when an older brother was killed a younger replaced him. At the time the middle classes, who provided the bulk of soldiers, were strong in numbers.
At the time of Adrianople the Roman state was an absolute monarchy/military dictatorship reliant on a professional army and its citizens were unmilitary and, indeed, forbidden arms. The old Roman middle class, both urban and rural, had been severely depleted and society was far more polarised into a rich elite at one end of the scale and a multitude of peasants/slaves on the other. If a trained professional soldier was killed it took both time and money to replace him; the Roman military of this period did not have the immediately available pool of cheap, motivated and militarily trained manpower available to the early republic.
As to plague, well the Black Death had quite limited effects on the prosecution of the Hundred Years' War. Also, due to the loss of manpower available, it lead to a modernisation of both society and military organisation based on an increasingly monetary, rather than feudal, relationship between people. Major pandemics can have positive as well as negative outcomes.
"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."
The two Roman societies were very different. The Punic War society was one of citizens-in-arms fighting for a state that was a form of limited democracy. Huge manpower losses could be replaced because the citizens were militarised, each citizen was trained for war and equipped himself, when a father was killed his son replaced him, when an older brother was killed a younger replaced him. At the time the middle classes, who provided the bulk of soldiers, were strong in numbers.
At the time of Adrianople the Roman state was an absolute monarchy/military dictatorship reliant on a professional army and its citizens were unmilitary and, indeed, forbidden arms. The old Roman middle class, both urban and rural, had been severely depleted and society was far more polarised into a rich elite at one end of the scale and a multitude of peasants/slaves on the other. If a trained professional soldier was killed it took both time and money to replace him; the Roman military of this period did not have the immediately available pool of cheap, motivated and militarily trained manpower available to the early republic.
As to plague, well the Black Death had quite limited effects on the prosecution of the Hundred Years' War. Also, due to the loss of manpower available, it lead to a modernisation of both society and military organisation based on an increasingly monetary, rather than feudal, relationship between people. Major pandemics can have positive as well as negative outcomes.
Martin
Fac me cocleario vomere!
Fac me cocleario vomere!
