The early Romans could also be brutal to those who resisted, but far less so to those who didn't. And they have quite a few fans.
Most undeserved Dark Legends in History
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The early Romans could also be brutal to those who resisted, but far less so to those who didn't. And they have quite a few fans.
That's a more complicated case, though. For one, the military idealization of legions doesn't paper over our knowledge that they faced military setbacks, and often severe ones. In any case, whitewashing of Roman atrocities wouldn't be any better, but I dunno, I just don't see as much of that in modern discourse.
Case in point, nobody in this thread has suggested adding them to the list here, as opposed to those who replaced them.
No, they're mostly just ignored. Julius Caesar has plenty of admirers, despite his near-genocidal record in Gaul.
Well, see my edit. If someone comes into this thread and calls that an undeserved dark legend, then I'm against that. Until then, the Mongols came up, and I object to that.
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- Ottomans did nothing but opress and murder in the Balkans for about 600 years
I hear this mostly from people in the Balkans. Which makes no sense as neither the Islamic Religion nor the Turkish Language was enforced. Before the Serb Rebellion in 1804, the early borders of Belgrade Pashaluk had about 10% Muslims. For a nation who has opressed Christians for 350 years in the region it is too damn low. The Dahije Rule was brutal though. Although that was also in a rebellion vs Selim III.
I hear this mostly from people in the Balkans. Which makes no sense as neither the Islamic Religion nor the Turkish Language was enforced. Before the Serb Rebellion in 1804, the early borders of Belgrade Pashaluk had about 10% Muslims. For a nation who has opressed Christians for 350 years in the region it is too damn low. The Dahije Rule was brutal though. Although that was also in a rebellion vs Selim III.
As @Mikestone8 said, the Roman atrocities tend to be more ignored than whitewashed. The exception is the ethnic cleansing of Judaea following the Jewish Revolts, which has been studied exhaustively given its importance to both Judaism and Christianity. On the flip side, Caesar's near-genocide of the Gauls is scarcely noticed, and if anything acts like the destruction of Carthage are glorified. Not to mention the scale of slavery...
I think "near-genocidal" in an exaggeration based on Caesar's own propaganda about how many enemies he'd killed and enslaved. At any rate, Gaul seems to have been one of the more prosperous and populous western provinces during the early Roman Empire, and there doesn't seem any plausible way for it to have bounced back in such a short space of time if Caesar's conquest really had been genocidal or near-genocidal.
Might this be because of how culturally distant these groups are to today?
The Iraqis still have a cultural memory of the Mongol Siege of Baghdad; not so the French, who identify with the Romans almost as much as they do with the Gallic people. It’s even worse with the Carthaginians; no one today really claims descent from them, so who would be upset over their destruction today?
Columbus was stocked with a year's worth of supplies for a journey that took roughly a month. His crew would have mutinied (which they very nearly did) long before they would have starved to death.
-The Mughal Empire collapsed due to over extension by Aurangzeb.
Really common when just getting into Indian history, but the Mughal Empire was fine after he died and indeed it took multiple civil wars and the 'best cavalry general ever produced in India' to finally cause the Mughal system to fracture and a further half century before Nader Shah broke it permanently
Really common when just getting into Indian history, but the Mughal Empire was fine after he died and indeed it took multiple civil wars and the 'best cavalry general ever produced in India' to finally cause the Mughal system to fracture and a further half century before Nader Shah broke it permanently
I suppose the differences with Romans and Mongels were also about the difference between campaigning and ruling, not always the same thing and the argument is these 2 powers compared with some others were more inclusive with the second..
We can't know for sure after so long but Gaul pre Roman was rich and sophisticated and only "barbarian" in the sense that it it chose to use memory over the written word for prestige reasons. No Roman Empire it becomes the center of what Western Civilization is based on because the Classical world heading north gets filtered through a La Tene/Druidic filter and thus very important.
Yeah, Roman Gaul was prosperous, kinda like Indiana or Missouri is prosperous. But arguably the Roman conquest prevented Gaul from being New York or California prosperous i.e. the place where things "happen" rather than a place where people grow up and dreaming of moving on to the "big time" of Constantinople or Alexandria. The fact that France starting with the Franks became this gives this argument some weight.
And yeah, the Mongols were fair and just rulers, after they conquered you.
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I didn't mean to imply that the whole of Gaul was wiped out. But my impression is that a number of "tribes" (who probably controlled enough territory to count as small nations) were pretty well annihilated.