Why communication Problems

I was thinking of a series of personal unions under one ruler that encompassed roughly OTL Western Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, Ireland, and Croatia. Someone mentioned communication problems. I was going to ask directly on that thread, but now I want a more general response.

Why would a series of kingdoms stretching this far have difficulties? The WRE and HRE in OTL did not have difficulty communicating within. The WRE had plenty of problems, but when it came to talking within, the problem was not incapability of long distance travel but that the Emperors got their information filtered through their decadent court (which in 405-410, proved disastrous). In fact, the distance from Vienna to Ireland is not much more than Rome to the Sinai.

Why would medieval era society be limited by communication problems? I can think of problems such as disloyal nobles, but that is a power balance issue inherent to the feudal system, not a communication problem.
 
Why would a series of kingdoms stretching this far have difficulties? The WRE and HRE in OTL did not have difficulty communicating within.
Rather than problems of communication, it's the delay in communication that would be a certain issue : while Romania managed pretty well, it's thanks to a costly road and quasi-postal network. Without a constant and efficient funding to maintain and expend it, you really had a contraction of the "connected" post-imperial Romania.
As for HRE, it's overall less communication problems,than overextension.

but that the Emperors got their information filtered through their decadent court (which in 405-410, proved disastrous).
While you had significant poor political and strategical choices (altough less than generally said, abandoning Rome to be raided in 408 made a lot of sense, in a lesser of two evil ways, we spoke about it some time ago), the problem wasn't that Ravenna was particularily prone to it, but that its political and strategical projections were significantly limited due to lesser fiscal resources and a dependency on foederati (which limiited the capacity of WRomans to push for decisive victories, Aetius or Majorian alike did used massively these to defeat rebels and foes and couldn't have pushed their advantage too far). And the growing militarisation of imperium and political offices didn't help. But I digress.

Why would medieval era society be limited by communication problems?
Besides the lack of a well funded and maintained road network?

Well, a definitely more oral-based communication : altough this may not have been the case of early medieval administration, but we lost the papyri; it really was more than in imperial Romania and kept growing until the late Xth century/XIth century.

Fixity of elites : the old cursus publicus more or less forced officials, administrators, military ranks, etc. to move there and there in the empire where they were needed and to prevent clientelisation. It was attempted by Merovingians (and probaby the whole of Romano-Barbarian kingdoms) and Carolingians but never really worked out. By the time feudality as a social/political institution is well rooted on, fixity of elites is the rule. You really have to wait the Renaissance of the XIIth century to see something comparable growing out (and rather original in some sense, as the communication between medieval universities is something brand new in the history of communications).
 
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The WRE had plenty of problems, but when it came to talking within, the problem was not incapability of long distance travel but that the Emperors got their information filtered through their decadent court (which in 405-410, proved disastrous).

To be fair, I think that was very much linked with the communications issue, since the sheer size of the empire made it nigh-on impossible for the Emperor to check the accuracy of reports himself, forcing him to rely on his courtiers for information.
 
To be fair, I think that was very much linked with the communications issue, since the sheer size of the empire made it nigh-on impossible for the Emperor to check the accuracy of reports himself, forcing him to rely on his courtiers for information.
You still had a fair mobility of information : for instance, Constantine III's imperial "career" does point the troops that proclaimed him or joined him had a fair knowledge of Ravenna's politics. So I'm really not confident on the "nigh-on impossible" with both easiness of communication and epistolary exchanges (another exemple would be Appollinarius, or St. Eloi's letters, in a period where the Roman state but perished and was transmitted to Barbarians), and a significant mobility of officials (maybe to a point, in the IIIrd/IVth centuries, not seen before).
It's less a prolem of size (China never really had this problem, and it's kinda colossal with more bureaucratisation than late Roman Empire) that structures. When the Roman state went down, so most of features that depended from him (altough they less disappeared overnight than slowly disused by lack of maintain : Roman roads were still the main roads until the Xth century and the disappearance of the last remaining of Roman-originated administration).
 
OK, so the problem is that the Roman roads aren't being maintained due to fragmentation. How about if the Muslims in North Africa started maintence attempts on the Roman roads? Also suppose East Francia, Lothringia, Barvaria (which at one point was de facto independent), the Papal States, whichever power controls Northern Italy (I think the Kingdom of Italy still existed?), Wessex, Mercia, navarre and Castile also attempted their own maintence attempts? The work would obviously not continue along the boarders, but there would be a series of road networks radiating from places like Rome, London, Nassau, and Vienna. From 900-3100, as marriages lead to personal unions upon death of senior heirs, the remaining roads are rebuilt, possibly using manuals archived in monasteries. And in the meantime, Europeans fight off the Muslims in the South and retake land up to Tunisia.
 
You still had a fair mobility of information : for instance, Constantine III's imperial "career" does point the troops that proclaimed him or joined him had a fair knowledge of Ravenna's politics. So I'm really not confident on the "nigh-on impossible" with both easiness of communication and epistolary exchanges (another exemple would be Appollinarius, or St. Eloi's letters, in a period where the Roman state but perished and was transmitted to Barbarians), and a significant mobility of officials (maybe to a point, in the IIIrd/IVth centuries, not seen before).
It's less a prolem of size (China never really had this problem, and it's kinda colossal with more bureaucratisation than late Roman Empire) that structures. When the Roman state went down, so most of features that depended from him (altough they less disappeared overnight than slowly disused by lack of maintain : Roman roads were still the main roads until the Xth century and the disappearance of the last remaining of Roman-originated administration).
What made it so that the medieval kingdoms didn't maintain the Roman roads internal to their countries? Lack of funds or manpower? Lack of cities? Feudalism?
 
OK, so the problem is that the Roman roads aren't being maintained due to fragmentation.
What made it so that the medieval kingdoms didn't maintain the Roman roads internal to their countries? Lack of funds or manpower? Lack of cities? Feudalism?
No, rather they weren't been maintained due to the decline of the roman state structure and administration, between the VIIth and IXth centuries.
We know Merovingians and Carolingians regularily acted to maintain Roman roads as much they could, as part of the public fisc. Not all roads, and it was essentially about limitating their disuse, but Roman roads up to the Xth century are the basic infrastructures for transportation (civilian or military) as point both the mentions of roads (British "streets", "Chausée Brunehaut" etc.) and a quick glance at military campaign and battles maps.
Anecdotically, we know that camels were used as oxen-driven chariots in Merovingian Gaul for transportation, and it's likely it was the same in Spain and Italy.

Several things changed with the Late Carolingian period.
- The collapse of the romanised state and what we could call the feudal anarchy up to the XIth century. Not that you didn't have a road network, but it was heavily decentralized, not that used (at least until the early XIth, land exchanges were limited and short-range) and "moving", so to speak, mostly dirt paths.
- The final decline of the administrative bureaucracy and the triumph of feudality (which is something Carolingians not only supported originally, but more or less provoked in their bid for power) meant that the fiscal revenues needed for a costly road network were extremely divided and no longer monetarized until the XIIth century. At best you could resort to corvée for public great works as French state did between the XVIth and XVIIIth century, but the desintegration of the state authority prevented this to happen on a regional scale.
- Technological development : while generally caricatured to the point of absurd unefficience, the horse collar used so far was still less practical than the breast collar that began to get widespread at this period, in the same time than stirrups. It made transportation and communication less dependent on heavy-maintenance road network and rather fit the new situation.
- Large use of rivers/sea/lakes/etc. : a bit like in pre-Roman times, transportation on ships was really dominant. In a "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads."-way. It was relatively efficient, cheap and quick enough up to the point cities more or less dug artificial canals when they could for intra-urban transportation.

How about if the Muslims in North Africa started maintence attempts on the Roman roads?
Medieval Arabo-Islamic civilization is litterally the last ensemble you'd want to restore a road network. To quote Richard Bulliet, it was a wheel-less civilisation, with an earlier stress on horses than in medieval world, few use of wagons, important use of camels in Africa, etc. Note that it wasn't all the same everywhere and al-Andalus kept a strong network.
But, generally, medieval Arabo-Islamic world didn't really cared for a road nework that would be close to what Romans had.

Also suppose East Francia, Lothringia, Barvaria (which at one point was de facto independent), the Papal States, whichever power controls Northern Italy (I think the Kingdom of Italy still existed?), Wessex, Mercia, navarre and Castile also attempted their own maintence attempts?
Roman road network was expensive. I mean REALLY expensive, both to build and even more to maintain.
Assuming no technological development whatsoever as described above, imagining that these ensembles doesn't crumble the same way than anyone else (Italy specifically was a feudal desintegration on steroids, but @Carp would be best to speak about it), how can they fund these while still managing to pull the basic expense of any feudal entity, meaning productive redistribution and warring.

as marriages lead to personal unions upon death of senior heirs
It sounds nice, but works a bit too much like a Crusader Kings game to be that believable : again, the key feature there is that between the late IXth and middle XIth, most of western europe is basically a decentralized ensemble. More unified in Germany, England and northern France almost litterally atomized in Aquitaine, Provence and Italy.
As for personal union, when Henri II inherited the lot of western French and Aquitain principalties, he didn't made him undisputed ruler of these lands and able to drain its wealth for great works, but more or less a feudal hegemon that had to deal as much with his own rebellious and independently-minded nobility than with the foes outside his domains.

Furthermore, and this is really important : roman road network was made for a geopolitical giant. The need for quick communication and transportation was a matter of imperial interest, if not survival (both for military and fiscal reasons). It was not so much for western Europe in the XIth (for reasons aformentioned) and even Byzzies mostly used the Via Egnatia for military purposes rather than economical. (Truth to be told, even roads in Byzantine Empire were more often than not in disrepair).

Add in "it's running well enough now that we don't need to invest" ideals of politicians too that caused modern day networks to fall behind.
Well, as bureaucratic states made a comeback since the XIIth century, one of the first things that they tried to settle was the matter of roads. You have some royal ordinances in France about the management of roads, but it remains in the spirit of late feudal bureaucratic states, with nomination of officials in charge of precise portions (not unlike private highway companies, mind you, except on a smaller scale) and its "nationalisation" happened significantly later (possibly delayed by the crisis of the Late Middle Ages). Elsewhere it was a matter of municipal management or semi-private great works (especially for bridges)
A public road network in the western world really begins to appear only in the XVth, and definitely in the early XVIIth.
 
To speak solely of Italy, the funding, as @LSCatilina mentioned, was not there; even Italy, which under the Lombards was more cash-rich than average for post-Roman Europe, did not have the sort of economy which could sustain such projects. That basic institution of Romano-Byzantine fiscal extraction, the land tax, ceased to exist under the Lombards and was not resurrected by their successors, whose incomes were probably based primarily on in-kind rents from an ever-decreasing royal domain.

But I suspect the more important factor was that there was simply not much reason to restore Roman roads. In Italy, at least, many of the old Roman routes were still in use well into the Medieval period despite their physical decline. Those roads that were truly abandoned were often abandoned not because of degradation but impracticality, as the early Medieval era saw a drastic change in patterns of settlement and political divisions (vs. Roman Italy) which made substantial parts of the old road system irrelevant. See, for instance, the shifting of traffic in central Italy from parts of the Via Flaminia to the “Byzantine Corridor” on account of the Furlo pass coming into the hands of the Lombard invaders, or the Lombard use of the Cima pass over the Appenines preferentially over older and more established routes because it avoided Byzantine interference. Once these patterns of transportation changed and the population moved to adapt, they were not easily undone. Major routes continued to use Roman roads (or at least parts of them) - the roads of the "Via Francigena" in Italy, for instance, or the continued use of the Via Appia as the major highway between Rome and Puglia - but in other parts medieval routes developed in ways that made more sense in the present moment. There’s an argument to be made that while the Roman roads were not obsolete technologically, many of them became obsolete in a political and demographic sense. My guess would be that this was less true in Italy, where the survival rate of Roman urban centers was high, compared to somewhere like France, but the results are clear enough. People aren't motivated to maintain what no longer serves their needs, even if (and in the Early Med this is a big "if") they have the money to do it and a state structure to accomplish it.

I would argue that even over the Alps the problem facing vast empires (specifically, the HRE) was not so much communications as force projection. Undoubtedly the speed of communications declined from the Roman era, not only because of degrading roads but the loss of things like horse relays, but what made it so difficult for the German emperors to exert themselves in Italy was not so much the speed of individual messengers as the intensive organizational, political, and logistical challenges of mustering an army, moving it over the Alps, and engaging in sustained warfare there. In practice even powerful emperors and emperors-elect could only exert a small fraction of their power in Italy, only after months or even years of preparation, and only for brief periods of time.
 
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