WI: Romans try to hold onto Mesopotamia?

Are we then looking at a Hadrian's Wall across the Georgian mountains in the Caucasus?

How easy in this period is it to defend Mesopotamia from attack from the East? What are the natural defensive boundaries?
 

Skallagrim

Banned
Untrue. Pliny moralized writing about how much the Empire lost in the oriental trade, much more interesting text from this time the Periplus of Maris Erythraei. One of those luxory good was quite popular among southern indian elites, it was called wine...

The fact that trade wasn't purely mono-directional doesn't imply that Rome didn't suffer from severe trade imbalance. In fact, Pliny's observations have too often been dismissed as "moralising", while the actual import of Eastern luxury goods and the outflow of gold simply occurred. Documents such as the Muziris Papyrus do confirm that the extent of trading volume that Pliny described was not likely to be an over-estimation at all. The trend of denying Pliny's honesty on this point is a relic from a time when the scope of the Indian Ocean trade was vastly under-estimated in general.


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Can the Romans afford to just abandon Britian? Seems like the blow to imperial prestige would be immense. It would be the first major withdrawal from a province - a sign of major weakness, imo.

Wealth isn't everything in this equation. Mesopotamia is hard to defend from the east and war and even the rumor of war can naturally disrupt trade.

I think Mesopotamia, if taken and held, is something of a last gasp of imperial conquest. The resources that will go into holding and defending it make it less of a beachhead and more of a fortress. Over the next two hundred years or so the Roman army is going to become increasingly defensive in it's outlook and doctrines. There's going to be periods of upheval and civil war and plague down the line. Cash infusion won't fix either of those things - at best you're kicking the can down the road.

Mesopotamia is a sink. It's not a money sink - obviously it'll be profitable - it's a manpower sink, a time and attention sink, a logistical sink. It's Roman Emperors investing huge amounts of effort and capacity no matter what the outcome.

I think that abandoning Britain on the grounds of "our future is in the wealthy East, not the wretched North" can be sold as a good idea. There are surely those who will describe it as weakness, but their complaints will fall to silence when the gold starts pouring in from the East.

The notion of Mesopotamia becoming a "last gasp" doesn't seem particularly likely to me. It will be a fortress, but an Empire having a border that it must defend all the time is not somehow a factor that dooms it. The troubles ahead in the future, at least those of OTL, were in part caused by underlying economic problems. I remain convinced that the OTL trade balance issue played a key role there, no matter how much some down-play it. Solving the "problem of the East" in a definitive manner puts Rome in a much better position to avoid certain problems altogether, and deal in a better way with those that do crop up.

The tendency to go "on the defensive" will also be countered by the need (and inevitable pull) to take further steps of expansion in the East. The Red Sea, the Gulf of Persia, the Arabian Peninsula and parts of East Africa are likely to end up as part of Rome's extended back-yard. Lots of opportunities for a more dynamic mind-set in that regard. Instead of Mesopotamia becoming the last gasp, I think it could well prove to be the first deep breath of a whole new phase of Roman history.

No guarantees, of course. Things can always go wrong in some unexpected way.
 
Can the Romans afford to just abandon Britian? Seems like the blow to imperial prestige would be immense. It would be the first major withdrawal from a province - a sign of major weakness, imo.

Wealth isn't everything in this equation. Mesopotamia is hard to defend from the east and war and even the rumor of war can naturally disrupt trade.

I think Mesopotamia, if taken and held, is something of a last gasp of imperial conquest. The resources that will go into holding and defending it make it less of a beachhead and more of a fortress. Over the next two hundred years or so the Roman army is going to become increasingly defensive in it's outlook and doctrines. There's going to be periods of upheval and civil war and plague down the line. Cash infusion won't fix either of those things - at best you're kicking the can down the road.

Mesopotamia is a sink. It's not a money sink - obviously it'll be profitable - it's a manpower sink, a time and attention sink, a logistical sink. It's Roman Emperors investing huge amounts of effort and capacity no matter what the outcome.

I think this fundamentally overlooks one crucial aspect.

Holding Mesopotamia is not the same as the consolidation strategy of Hadrian. Sure that border will be defensive, but the resources will change the approach to other frontiers. Germania can be focused on, changing that frontier from defensive to aggressive - and there are at least two different African strategies. The next two hundred years could be wildly different, Germania, Africa, and potentially even the much-hypothesised Vistula-Carpathian-Pruth lines could be reached - and that ignores a return to Britain.

Plague however, plague is the big problem. but it has been weathered IOTL, in fact, control over Mesopotamia could mean the Romans are hit before the Persian Remnant - who will still BE hit. This is where I think the (IMO) Power-Up of Mesopotamia gives the most. The ability to ensure that the majority of Europe is 'Roman'. No ability to sit north of the Danube and organise large invasions across a stretched Roman border. Instead you have the potential of holding steppe nations at the 'frontier', weakening those threats, but at the same time? You've potentially got the relative strength of a Plague-hit-MesoRoman Empire being significantly greater than that of OTLs Rome.
 
My point is more that the benefits of Mesopotamia are essentially based on taxation and larger overall population. Defending and administering that population, let alone further expansion, takes immense investment.

The best aspect of defending Mesopotamia is the chance of indigenous revolt is rather low, I expect. The worst is that Persia and the Arabian interior will both be difficult to defend against in the long term. Both are almost impossible for the Romans to conquer and both will necessitate the establishment of federates and major garrisons.

Roman attention will be drawn Eastward. I think you make a good point that more ventures will be attempted in this scenario. The question is where they go and how likely they are to fail.

I disagree that Mesopotamia makes an offensive strategy in Germania more likely or more useful. I think it makes Emperors more likely to spend more time out east and less likely to focus on Germany and more likely to have fewer resources to conquer Germany and more money to buy off tribes rather than pursuing long term solutions.

Holding a hypothetical line that deep into Europe would be expensive as all hell with premodern logistics.

Edit: I also recognize I've had this debate with roughly the same parameters many times. My general opinion is that Rome stopped where it did, more or less, for good reasons, mostly relating to logistics. If the Romans had been able to keep going they would have - they were nothing if not boundlessly stubborn and persistent. Those reasons are extremely hard to overcome, I believe. And I think I'll leave it there, since otherwise I'm just being a naysayer and getting in the way of creative ideas.
 
My point is more that the benefits of Mesopotamia are essentially based on taxation and larger overall population. Defending and administering that population, let alone further expansion, takes immense investment.

The best aspect of defending Mesopotamia is the chance of indigenous revolt is rather low, I expect. The worst is that Persia and the Arabian interior will both be difficult to defend against in the long term. Both are almost impossible for the Romans to conquer and both will necessitate the establishment of federates and major garrisons.

Roman attention will be drawn Eastward. I think you make a good point that more ventures will be attempted in this scenario. The question is where they go and how likely they are to fail.

I disagree that Mesopotamia makes an offensive strategy in Germania more likely or more useful. I think it makes Emperors more likely to spend more time out east and less likely to focus on Germany and more likely to have fewer resources to conquer Germany and more money to buy off tribes rather than pursuing long term solutions.

Holding a hypothetical line that deep into Europe would be expensive as all hell with premodern logistics.

Edit: I also recognize I've had this debate with roughly the same parameters many times. My general opinion is that Rome stopped where it did, more or less, for good reasons, mostly relating to logistics. If the Romans had been able to keep going they would have - they were nothing if not boundlessly stubborn and persistent. Those reasons are extremely hard to overcome, I believe. And I think I'll leave it there, since otherwise I'm just being a naysayer and getting in the way of creative ideas.

While I tend to agree with all you say, I think that some of the reasons why the Romans stopped where they did, particularly in Europe, had more to do with internal political dynamics that, after early Imperial times, tended not to encourage expansion. Of course, it was also a matter of diminishing rewards - there was little of much worth to the Romans in Germany, Caledonia, or Ireland, and none of these places seemed to be enough of a strategic challenge to overcome these other considerations - when that changed, it had become too late for Roman offensive responses. I believe that logistical challanges alone, at least in Germany and the British Isles, could have been overcome by the Romans if a sufficient political or strategic reason existed in their eyes - which IOTL evidently was not the case. The Mesopotamian case is perhaps more complex but under a vaguely comparable dynamic. I just want to stress how domestic political concerns impacted external expansion in Imperial times: such as fear of the political legitimacy that victorous generals as conquering front commanders could have, threatening the Emperor's somewhat precarious position as the monarch of a notionally Republican polity; Corbulo and to a lesser extent Agricola are clear examples.
 
That's a very good point - after a certain point conquest no longer equals internal political advancement in the same way it did for the Republic. The incentives diminished and changed over time.
 

Deleted member 97083

On the other hand, had the Romans successfully held the ground they would have found it difficult (if not impossible) to Romanize the province. The rivers’ flow into the Persian Gulf would have ensured constant contact with India.

Syrian merchants (who some historians argue dominated Roman trade within the empire) would have quickly expanded their efforts through the gulf and flooded the Roman market with Eastern (desirable) goods. The flow of this trade would have ensured a constant flow of Eastern culture into a province that was already, by sheer distance, less swayed by Roman influence.
Why would this impede Romanization? India had a different set of cultures separate from that of Mesopotamia, Persia, or Rome, so I am not sure how contact with India is relevant. Wealthy Syrian traders back in this era were often already Hellenized. The vernacular language of Mesopotamia at this time was Aramaic, not Parthian, and Greeks had already been present as urban mercantile classes for many years by the time of Trajan. The Parthians themselves used the Greek language alongside Parthian.

Historically, Mesopotamia has been completely assimilated three times over (first by Akkadians, then Aramaeans, then Arabs) demonstrating that it's at least possible.

The biggest obstacle to Romanization of Mesopotamia is distance, but Hellenized minorities were already present in much of the Near East already, mitigating this factor.
 
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Are we then looking at a Hadrian's Wall across the Georgian mountains in the Caucasus?

How easy in this period is it to defend Mesopotamia from attack from the East? What are the natural defensive boundaries?

It doesn't hence why local dynasties over the ages have often been nomad warlords or their descendants. There are no natural chokes, cliffs, mountains or anything except the river valleys, the marshes by the rivers in the south, and stretches of desert on both sides not too distant for invaders to cross (unlike Egypt), not to compact enough to sufficiently patrol or garrison and too vast to fortify.

The area is fertile with nothing else as resources, it isn't self-sufficient nor are its rivers easily navigable; it relies on the North and East for stone, wood, and metals. Southern Mesopotamia receives virtually no rainfall forcing it to rely on vast irrigation works easily disrupted by chaos and war. The region needs trade which requires the Romans to secure the North/East or build railroads to the Levant, no trade=no way to acquire wealth in the form of gold/silk, the few goods that are compact enough to justify a caravan back to the Mediterranean. The Romans need to conquer a lot, they also need to adapt for warfare against mounted nomads in an open desert, and they need some way to communicate quickly with Mesopotamia or it will over time become semi-autonomous.
 
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ar-pharazon

Banned
Maybe if the Roman's abandon Britain and send 3-4 legions instead to garrison and defend Mesopotamia?

Maybe the Roman's could build a series of forts, entrenchments, towers, maybe even trenches(to defend against Persian heavy cavalry).
 
Maybe if the Roman's abandon Britain and send 3-4 legions instead to garrison and defend Mesopotamia?

Maybe the Roman's could build a series of forts, entrenchments, towers, maybe even trenches(to defend against Persian heavy cavalry).

Spanning over 2,000 km in the desert? Unlikely and like the Chinese showed its would be more like a series of lookout points meant to prevent raiders from leaving with their loot than a proper defensive wall that they can't man properly; better to just have a few hubs of heavy cavalry.
 
It doesn't hence why local dynasties over the ages have often been nomad warlords or their descendants. There are no natural chokes, cliffs, mountains or anything except the river valleys, the marshes by the rivers in the south, and stretches of desert on both sides not too distant for invaders to cross (unlike Egypt), not to compact enough to sufficiently patrol or garrison and too vast to fortify.

The area is fertile with nothing else as resources, it isn't self-sufficient nor are its rivers easily navigable; it relies on the North and East for stone, wood, and metals. Southern Mesopotamia receives virtually no rainfall forcing it to rely on vast irrigation works easily disrupted by chaos and war. The region needs trade which requires the Romans to secure the North/East or build railroads to the Levant, no trade=no way to acquire wealth in the form of gold/silk, the few goods that are compact enough to justify a caravan back to the Mediterranean. The Romans need to conquer a lot, they also need to adapt for warfare against mounted nomads in an open desert, and they need some way to communicate quickly with Mesopotamia or it will over time become semi-autonomous.
Holding Mesopotamia as a desert is a way better trade-off than having it prosper under the hands of a rival eastern empire.
 
Holding Mesopotamia as a desert is a way better trade-off than having it prosper under the hands of a rival eastern empire.

As a Professional Cactus I can testify to the idea that not everything should be done, even if they can be. Taking desert is fine and all, but keeping it is nearly impossible; the Romans are no exception, come the next time of troubles and the Middle East will change ownership again.
 

Deleted member 97083

As a Professional Cactus I can testify to the idea that not everything should be done, even if they can be. Taking desert is fine and all, but keeping it is nearly impossible; the Romans are no exception, come the next time of troubles and the Middle East will change ownership again.
It's not just any desert, though, but the highly fertile Mesopotamia. All the Romans need to control is the two rivers and a few cities between them. They'd already settled more arid lands in Arabia Petraea and North Africa.

As long as the Romans maintain their asabiyyah they should be able to hold onto Mesopotamia. It will certainly be one of the first areas they lose when the Romans start to decline. This may be reversible, though.
 
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