Emperor Goblinus

I'm writing a fictional work that takes place during the reign of Sennacherib of Assyria, dealing with events like the Battle of Halule, and I need help in finding sources for researching the period. More specifically, the cultural and political world of Iranian, Median, Aramaean, and Elamite peoples at the time, and anything dealing with the semi-mythical king Achamaenes (I'm having a hard time digging up much on him). This is all for a novel that I am researching to write; I'm putting that out there just so that people do not that I'm some high schooler who wants the forum to do my homework. I do have some sources already, but this is a region and time period that I know very little about, and any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I would be curious to see how they would handle Europe's current economic crisis.

But as local rulers were raised to senatorial status, they would have been the social equals of original Romans. I'm not saying that there was no social friction, but at least by the time of Augustus, intermarriages between Roman elite families and Spanish nobility would probably not have been scandalous.

These are texts that show Latin morphing into Romance: Compositiones Lucenses: A northern Italian treatise on the handicrafts of the 8th century. The Swedish scholar J. Svennung has done a lot of study on this text. Not much on the internet in English. Here's a quote in which you can see the ungrammatical nature of the Latin, confusion of cases: Tinctio pellis prasini: Tolles pellem depellatam et mitte stercos caninus et colombinus et gallinacium. Peregrinatio Sylviae ad Loca Sancta, 5th Century? See: http://en.wikipedia....a_%28pilgrim%29 Several deeds that survive from 8th Century Italy and France. From Spain, Mozarabic texts. See: http://en.wikipedia....arabic_language and the Glosas Emilianenses. See: http://en.wikipedia....as_Emilianenses Thanks. The Glosas Emilianenses strikes me as the most fascinating of these, as it in many ways looks very clearly like Latin, but the Aragonese elements are very noticeable as well. I really need to brush up on my Latin and learn some more Romance languages. I do know a good bit of French, but that has gotten rusty as of late. I just find it really fascinating how Latin spread among the common people of such a wide swath of territory and morped into all of these unique languages. Would you happen to know of any Romance texts from Gaul which show the emerging Germanic influence? Oh, and you forgot to put the link for the French and Italian deeds.

One thing that is always stated about Trajan is that while he was the first emperor not to have been born in Italy, his family had Italian roots. Considering that the Ulpians had migrated to Spain in the third century BC, there was a more than 400-year old gap between Trajan and his Italian ancestors. Considering that Spain was still very much barbarian territory in the third century, and that the Roman presence would have been minimal at first, it just doesn't make sense to put that much influence on his Italian roots. Yes, the family was originally from Italy, but there had to have been significant intermixing with the local Celtiberian population. Not immediately, but as Spain calmed down, greater connections were forged between the people and the Hispano-Roman culture developed. I would not be surprised if Trajan had a majority Celtic blood, just that the Celts in his family had been Romanized and adopted the history of the Italian side of the family. For all we know, Trajan's early life may have been steeped in Celtiberian cultural customs. This would of course had been in a Latinized Roman context, but it definitely would not have been pure Italian. I can't help but think that the emphasis on his Italianess was probably for political purposes only. To get on to my second question, how important was it for Trajan to play down his provincial roots? Being the first non-Italian emperor would have been a bit tricky at first, especially from the point of view of the Italian senatorial aristocracy. Nevertheless, Spain was an almost fully Latinized part of the empire by the time of Trajan's ascension, and had been the home to several prominent Romans. I can see how things might have been an issue had he been from Germania Inferior, but Spain was as Romanized as Italy, Gallia Transalpina, and North Africa. I can't help but wonder if the emphasis on Trajan's Italian origins was something made up by historians, and did not reflect the realities of the time. Thoughts? (yes, I'm making alot of threads today )

Does anyone of any documents written in provincial Vulgar Latin of the Late Empire or languages that could be considered early medieval Romance (not Latin, but not quite the languages that we know today), or at least where I might be able to find some? The Oaths of Strasbourg is the only one that I know of.

In John Moorhead's The Roman Empire Divided: 400-700, he writes about Roman commanders who led Gothic armies in Spain organized in ways very similar to the Roman legion. I don't have a direct quote offhand. As to the Franks, I don't have a direct quote, but I read about it somewhere like you. I do know that both the Frankish and Burgundian kings used Gallo-Roman generals to lead their armies. Considering how Romanized Burgundy was, I would not be surprised if their armies were organized in a Roman fashion. This indeed the case, and units which had retained the prefix 'LEGIO' continued to be so named until the early 7th century when the Thematic reforms took place. If I had my books handy (I am away from home just now) I could even name some Legions which retained their designation from at least the third century up until the time of Heraclius in 625.These legions were, in turn, originally formed from vexillations of the earlier legions formed in the Principate. Caldrail's source paints a depressing picture of the later Roman army, and this description of forces under some of the later Roman emperors certainly applied to a great many units. This was not, however, universal. Ammianus Marcellinus refers to Gallic legions in the service of the General Julian ( later emperor ) who fought with great discipline and almost fanaticism, and whose engineering skills were on a par with those of the earlier empire. The Gallic legions did serve well, but I've stated in an earlier post in another thread that this may have been somewhat due to the fact that they were directly defending their homes and families from destruction in and around Strasbourg, although their training and tactics were definitely crucial, especially since they were facing a much larger force. In fact, the catalyst that had Julian acclaimed as Augustus was that his men did not want to be moved east to serve under Constantius since they knew that the barbarians would come back and kill their loved ones.

Southern Gaul had become very Romanized by the time of Julius Caesar and did not retain much of a Celtic identity to the extent that some of the northern regions of the province did. Consequently, the south stayed quite Roman culturally and linguistically to a great extent for a century or two after the fall of the western empire, far more than the Merovingian regions around cities like Paris and Orleans. My question is; how exactly was this society organized? The local patricians were at least nominally loyal to the Frankish kings, but they basically did their own thing as few Franks migrated into areas like Aquitaine and Provence. It's a well-known fact that Gallo-Romans monopolized most of the higher ecclesiastical offices in Gaul until the about the mid-seventh century. But I've also read that Roman political civil offices, such as that of senator, remained for a while and were recognized by the kings. Were these Roman nobles just individuals who clung to their Roman trappings and agricultural systems in a changing world, or was there in fact a Roman civil system that continued in the absence of direct Frankish control?

I think there were legions until the fall of western empire, although their quality began to noticeably deteriorate in the fifth century. In some ways, they actually continued on for a bit after the fall, as a number of Frankish kings I think made use of several Gallic legions for several decades along borders of the kingdom, and Visigothic kings may have done something similar. In Byzantium, Latin continued to be the administrative language of the army until the early seventh century due to a majority of the troops being enrolled from the Latinized Balkan provinces, so legions would have continued, though they weren't as large as the ones in the Pax Romana. After Heraclius' reforms made Greek the official military language, the term legio would probably have fallen out of use, although had the Muslim conquests not occurred, the future East Roman military organization might not have been that different. As it were, the Byzantines were forced to radically reorganize their armies to suit the needs of a much smaller empire that for a time was on the verge of the destruction. In some ways, this simply accelerated the trend that began in the third century with faster and smaller cavalry and light infantry units being increasingly favored over massive plodding legions. The realities of Dark Age Byzantium made this a necessity,and by the time the empire began to recover, the core of the military were fast and mobile cavalry units that were very much under local control and ultimately developed into the powerful armored cataphracts, a less feudal-based cousin of the medieval knight.

While I agree on the fact that their homeland was around the Rhine, the areas of northern and central France were very important to the Franks. Many Merovingian kings like Clovis made cities like Orleans and Paris their capitals, decisions crucial in the Latinization of the Frankish elite. Aquitaine was often hostile and had its own identity, but since the late fifth century, most of it was part of Francia, and Septimanian I think was incorporated in the late eighth century. Brittany stayed mostly independent until the Late Middle Ages. But the areas which we consider to be the heart of French culture were very important to the Franks.

Weren't the Goths pretty Romanized even before they entered Spain? That was my understanding.

Interesting, I did not know this. Did this shift come about due to the Arab invasions?

I'm curious as the what the exact relationship the Latin Dacians had with the Roman Empire after the legions withdrew from the province. I know that Dacians on both sides of the Danube continued to provide the Roman army with troops into the Byzantine period and that they did recognize the general supremacy of the Roman emperor, but at the same time, there are attestations of the Dacians repeatedly raiding across the border and needing to be subdued militarily several times. This scenario mimics Rome's relationship with numerous other peoples that were along its borders, but as the Dacians were a Latin that people that were largely Romanized, this was a bit different. Does anyone here have any further information on this, or know where I can read more? Peter Wells' The Barbarians Speak was an excellent read, but I think that he went a bit too far to try to prove his argument that the provincial Romans along Rome's continental borders were not really Romanized, and I didn't really get a look into how Roman culture deeply affected the cultures here, just how the peoples retained aspects of their own culture.

The name of France definitely comes from the Franks, but I think it was more from the gradual political imposition of the Ile de France and Paris on the rest of the country than a general, wide-spread identity, though I could be wrong. Northern France was definitely more Germanic in its political and cultural character than the other Latin peoples, and the Gallo-Romance languages are significantly influenced by Old Frankish. Still, it's strange that the original homeland of the Franks, the Low Countries, abandonded that identity. As for the Gauls, they did pretty much go extinct culturally, although I think that there were still some Gaulish speakers in the seventh century. Also, although the original Gauls were a predominantly Celtic people, I do think that the area in the north of Gaul, particularly the Belgae, were partly Germanic, so the Franks might not have seemed that alien to them and this may partly account why they were so quickly acclimated to the region. One thing also to keep in mind was that Gaul was not wracked with the ethno-religious disputes that were seen in Italy, Spain, and North Africa. Arianism never really took root among the Franks, and under Clovis, Romans and Franks were placed under the same religion and given the same citizenship status. Class was really the big divider, and continued to be until the French Revolution, but you did not see in Gaul the crippling religious conflicts that you saw under the Goths and Vandals. This probably helped to break down the overall Frankish and Roman identities, and create the new local ones that eventually united under France. Nevertheless, considering how massive the Frankish Empire came to be you would think that they would have maintained a larger presence for a longer time.

While they all shared an overall unified faith, Christianity had divisions almost right from the beginning. One of the first and most famous was the debate over how much the Gentiles should adopt Jewish customs when converting (such as circumcision). Ultimately the Gentile position won out due to the efforts of Paul and other preachers in Roman world that took the center of the Christian world out of Jerusalem, and the major setback that Jewish Christianity suffered after the Jewish Rebellion in AD 70. Many Christian churches throughout the empire had very divergent practices and sometimes used various Scriptural texts that were later cut out by various councils such as Nicaea. And this does not even take into account the churches that were created outside of the empire, such as in India, Persia, Armenia, Ethiopia, and eventually China, which of course were even more different.