You said that one of the important aspects about this edict is that giving equal rights to provincials was one of the things that helped deal with the crisis of the third century, and was the thing that, I think you said, sapped discontent from the relevant populations, which then minimized the probability of uprisings.
Well, now, that's a very long-term process.
Now, the third century is a chaos, there's a crisis, it's a mess, right? So, what follows the edict is quite a few decades of unrest.
Well, okay, let's put it in mildly. Let's talk about the crisis of the third century, where 26 emperors were murdered in a period of 50 years.
Yes, it's tremendous instability.
So, there's civil wars nonstop. Almost all of these emperors were generals, and almost all were murdered by their men. So, civil war was the norm, hyperinflation, economic crash, plus there's a plague from 249 to 262 AD, which is a pandemic, possibly smallpox or Ebola. It killed up to 5,000 people a day in Rome alone, devastating the tax base and army recruitment pool. And the empire fractured into three pieces, but then Emperor Aurelian miraculously reconquered them in a period of five years. So, there's a lot of chaos. It deserves the name, the crisis of the third century.
A perfect storm. Yeah, I mean, you have a crisis of imperial legitimacy. Basically, the army's proclaiming emperors left and right. In an odd sense, ironically, this is in part because there are now a lot more stakeholders in the Roman tradition, right? There's all of these provincial armies, and they're appointing their generals as rival emperors. But you also have a serious uptick in foreign invasions. And in the north, you have the creation of the Sasanian Persian or Iranian Empire in the east, and this was very, very bellicose. So lots of foreign defeats, armies are defeated by, you know, like, quote, barbarian enemies. You have eventually inflation, and you have plague. And so, under the pressure, right, of all of those forces, it almost fell apart. Now, it didn't actually. Inevitably, there are also historians who downplay the crisis. Of course. But, like, and legitimately so, right? We must push back against every one of these characterizations.
That's just the emperors. That's just the emperors. We're... No, we should be...
In 50 years, every other year, emperor dead. Civil war.
That's political instability at the top, right? But what about the lives of most people? So if you go to Egypt, for example, which is kind of out of the... right? What's going on there? How are people living there? And we can see how people are living in Egypt because we have all these papyrus documents from Egypt. And for the most part, they don't seem to be experiencing a crisis.
I mean, this is something you talk about with Constantine, as we'll get to him. He is one of the most murderous leaders in all of human history if you consider his own family. But if you're living in the provinces, you know, he's not that murderous.
No, no, no. He's perfectly fine.
So it's very important to actually remember about what the actual experience of the average citizen of the empire is like.
Fair. Okay. So, but how... maybe there's more we could say about the crisis, and then of course the crisis is in part resolved by Diocletian as he does a hard reset on the structure of the Roman system of government. So, maybe you could speak a little bit more to the crisis that's important for us to understand, and how Diocletian solves the crisis in 284 AD.
Right. So, again, these are processes rather than specific events. So, for example, you mentioned that the empire kind of breaks into pieces. And we have what's called sometimes the Empire of the Gauls. Gaul, or modern France, and sort of Britain for a while, for a decade and a half or so, are kind of like this little separatist empire. So, what's interesting about that is that this was not an attempt to break away from the empire. In other words, it's not some discontent provincials who are just tired of Roman rule and want to break away and do their own thing. No. This is actually just an attempt by provincial generals to take the throne, and that is to rule the entire empire. It doesn't work. They get only as far as the provinces that they take. And the only way that they know to set up a state is to make it a Roman state. Right? Like, that's the total of their political imaginary is like, well, we're just going to do a Roman thing here. And maybe we'll get, you know, we'll reunite the empire ourselves, or, as happened, Aurelian, that is someone from the other side will reunite the empire. But it's always a Roman model. Like, there's... it's almost like there's no alternatives by this point. So, that's interesting.
What Diocletian does essentially is, the way I characterize it sometimes, is that he turns the problem into its own solution. In other words, the problem is too many emperors or want-to-be emperors because there's just more going on. Like, one emperor can't deal with all these problems along the frontiers, with all the political problems. So, what he does is he deputizes some of his colleagues, people he was on very good terms with from the army. These are all Illyrians, they're from... By the way, for a few centuries, the emperors are all from this region of the former Yugoslavia that's the size of Scotland. That's where they all come from.
Well, what explains that?
The army. These are military men. And sometimes hard-drinking military men. Very good at their job. Like Illyrian, you mentioned, right? So, there's a series of Illyrian emperors who restore stability. And the reason why there's so many Illyrian emperors is because they worked their way up through the ranks of the army. And, you know, the regions of Yugoslavia at that time are sufficiently, you know, economically underdeveloped that there's a strong incentive for young men to go join the army because, you know, it's a living. And so, Illyrians become like kind of the backbone of the Roman army, and they're described as these, you know, tough Roman conservative types. I mean, these are, you know, these are tough military guys. I say that to draw contrast between, say, Hadrian, whom I mentioned earlier, you know, who was a much more sophisticated, artsy, poetic, cosmopolitan emperor.
Also a hard-ass. You did not want to mess with Hadrian. But these guys from the third century are military men through and through. Like, their whole careers are in the army.
And they have like the military stubble. They've got these thick necks. They look angry. They've got their hands on their swords. Like, they're not projecting an image of sort of calm and sophisticated, you know, bump... you know.
So, solid military men. Military men from Illyria.
Yep. So, Diocletian gets a gang of them together. They eventually... there are four. We call this the tetrarchy. And he basically allocates them to various... This wasn't any kind of hard division of the empire. Basically, it was a collaborative project. They each went wherever they were needed.
Is it fair to say that there was four administrative zones? He allocated each one to a zone.
Broadly, I'd say more military zones. So, the administration tends to operate, kind of humming along in the background wherever these emperors happen to be. Right? This is a... we're talking about a period of big government now. So, Diocletian creates a larger government, possibly a larger army, and in order to pay for that, you need more systematic and effective taxation, which means you need more census, you need more bureaucracy, you need more collect... you know? So, it is an era of bigger government.
