I'll start with the Eastern Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. What are some other extremely 'Reddit' countries?
I'll start with the Eastern Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. What are some other extremely 'Reddit' countries?
To play devil's advocate for the Eastern Roman Empire it was probably a lot better to live there than in western cities like Paris or Ravenna. The grain dole there lasted until the 7th century, allowing for the poorest citizens to have state subsidized food.
The walls and existence of an actual army allowed for safety against invaders or bandits at least in theory. Look how they stood up against Attila who was pretty fucking bad for your average peasant.
Lastly the reddit opinion of them is fucking stupid. They hated like all of the crusader states and even had mosques in their territory. They even used those mosques to appeal to Muslim powers in their general area, switching them from sunni to shia depending on who they needed an alliance with.
While they weren't perfect by any means, they were probably a decent place to live compared to a lot of other places, at least from the perspective of someone that lives in the west. I'd probably rather be a farmer of some sort in mesoamerica where the food situation was better though.
I don't disagree, Western Europe was a backwater for quite a while and I would in fact extend the same sentiment to the Ottoman Empire for at least the first 3 centuries of its existence (before Europeans really starting benefitting from Colonialism). I mostly take issue with it gets portrayed in its last century or so, when it was just a rump state in Constantinople. There was a pretty cool paper I read a while back about the nationalistic myths surrounding the fall of Constantinople and specifically 'Emperor' Constantine XI Palaiologos, basically establishing that he was a boringly mediocre bureaucrat that didn't really exhibit much military acumen, in opposition to some narratives I've run into that he was somehow actually a good ruler put into an impossible situation.
Yeah for sure. It would be stupid to want to live in rump state, isolated Constantinople rather than the effective government of the ottoman empire. In both of those societies you could be pretty sure that the rich were paying some degree of taxes and they were going to public works construction of some sort, even if they were religious buildings. Contrast that with western Europe even as late as the late 1700s. One of the reasons that France was broke was that the nobles could buy their way out of paying taxes. The entire society was existing on the backs of poor peasants and a lot of taxes. There's a lot of theories that the western Roman empire's collapse is at least partially because rich nobles were able to evade taxes and withdraw to their estates. I really agree with those.
Another way to think about this is in the whole feudalism thing. Sure you could be a poor and nearly destitute peasant in Ottoman Anatolia or ERE Anatolia but in both situations at least you weren't a serf, legally in land tied, semi slavery in England.
What made either society good had nothing to do with their kings or whatever you want to call them because they really didn't matter. The ERE dying sucked for those that were living in the city at the time but I doubt your average Greek person would have been that sad. The better standards of living for them would have died away a long time before the theodosian walls were breached.
When we're thinking about how good a society in the past was, please imagine yourself as a peasant and imagine your standard of living:
Hunter gatherer: basically living in a tribal proto-communism. Food scarcity, disease and injury were pretty fucking bad for people but there was a social safety net of people who would care about you.
Mesoamerican farmer: you are farming but growing a variety of crops that are nutritionally pretty healthy. The Spanish came over and were all amazed about how much corn was everywhere. This allowed for a healthier lifestyle for many people.
Roman citizen: if you're living in Rome congrats you have free grain, free entertainment and sanitation. Your city is probably pretty safe from being attacked by an outside power and you can walk around all day without any worry of being killed by a delivery wagon (they only allowed deliveries at night) Could be a lot worse.
Feudal peasant: You are a serf. Bitch, you live in Alsace. You are a peasant. You need to give your fuckin' lord the grain. Your fucking children, you've had 15 children. You've never taken a bath. You've literally never. washed. your. penis. You've never used toilet paper. Motherfucker, you have worms. You are dying. You've had 40 children, 3 of them are alive. 2 of them are child soldiers in the Duke's army.
Bitch, the greatest thing you can hope for is to die at the old age of 36. You fucking can't read. You don't know what TV is. If you were transported into today, you would be the worst gamer of all time. You don't know shit. You literally probably don't even know what the direction 'left' is. I'm sure some Medieval guy is gonna get mad at me for this, bitch I've been to the Renaissance Fair. I've eaten a large turkey wing, which the Juggalos call 'bitch beaters', which I think is problematic but a funny thing to call them.
Motherfucker, you gotta recognize where you are, and then you gotta get passed that. You gotta be unemotional. You can't sink into this hole. You live in the oubliette. Your job is to crawl up the ladder, motherfucker. You live in the HOLE. You're in the HOLE. You are a RAT. And the rat, when he's in the hole gets fucked. People only throw trash in the hole.
You need to eat a body. And you need to carry the plague. And you need to carry a plague around this whole world, that will change this whole fuckin world. And all your enemies will vomit black bile and will choke on blood and will grow boils and die. But only if you get together with your other RATS. And you come up with some kind of super plague, to fuckin end your enemies and...
End. This. Nightmare.
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