Aqueduct Warfare in the Early Middle Ages
After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire around 500, many aspects of its civilization started to decay, especially material aspects, most notably the stonework. Of all of the stone work and masonry structures built by the Romans, probably the most famous is the Roman aqueduct. These brought fresh water to cities and towns and proved critical for drinking, bathing, plumbing, and other aspects of hygiene. But, when the Roman Empire fell, very quickly those Roman aqueducts began to decay and fall into disrepair because the technical know-how and the skilled masons and engineers were no longer around, and the collapse of the economy led to regional warfare in Early Medieval Europe and contributed to a general lack of money to maintain those aqueducts. In Early Medieval Europe, those aqueducts took on a new role--they became crucial in the fighting, and several sources from the early middle ages inform us of how armies, Roman and barbarian alike, broke aqueducts to cut water off from Roman cities, or entered those cities through the aqueduct channels. Probably the most famous is Belisarius and his Roman (Byzantine) army breaking into the city of Naples through its Roman-era aqueduct, thus making it a crucial part of the warfare during the Roman reconquest of Italy, but it was was also used against the Romans themselves when Avars broke the Aqueduct of Valens during their siege fo Constantinople in 626. The Roman Emperor Justinian II famously entered the city via the aqueduct system with an army of Bulgars and Slavs to orchestrate a coup and take back power during the Twenty Years Anarchy.
SOURCES:
Gregory of Tours, Ten Books of Histories, Thrope
Aqueducts & Urbanism in Post-Roman Hispania, Jimenez
Warfare & Society in the Post Roman West, Halsall
War in Late Antiquity, Lee
The Walls & Aqueducts of Rome in the Early Middle Ages, Coates-Stephens
Пікірлер: 94
One correction: Justin II is actually supposed to be Justinian II, last of the Heraclian Dynasty. Slip of the tongue
@JonBrownSherman
Жыл бұрын
Brah do you even Byzantine!? /s
@drakehashimoto685
Жыл бұрын
Also, *536 AD, not 436 lol, just a nitpick.
@hachibidelta4237
Жыл бұрын
@@JonBrownSherman of course not it was Romans
@Steven-dt5nu
Жыл бұрын
Now that is a good historian.
@Zogerpogger
Жыл бұрын
Justin II: Electric Boogaloo
An hour ago I was looking at maps of ancient cities and wondering how big a risk aqueducts posed in warfare. And then bang - here is the answer. Thank you.
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
You’re welcome!
@JonBrownSherman
Жыл бұрын
THC is plugged into the zeitgeist
@andrewrackliff8223
Жыл бұрын
If one wanted to find these maps, where would one look?
One of the most intriguing parts of the fall of Rome was the new ways of warfare and how local regions with bridges, aqueducts, and viaducts quickly became strategic points and possibly more important than during the Roman era when they were constructed. Great video on this topic
The Qanats that apparently began in Persia and spread though North Africa and the middle east is another related topic to Aqueducts that I've always found amazing as they were made without masonry and usually by teams of as few as four men working over the course of years.
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
I’ll actually be doing a video on that pretty soon
@alejandrorojasgarcia1614
Жыл бұрын
@@TheFallofRome let’s goooo
thanks for the shoutout i'm pretty proud of that aqueduct trick
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
All hail the glorious general, savior of the Empire
@Colonel1891
Жыл бұрын
@@TheFallofRome Justinian:
People always treat medieval people as "me ug me caveman" as to explain why many aqueducts and roads and large stone buildings were left to ruin, but the truth is that the peasant farmers and migrating tribesmen who lived there after mass economic collapse were too poor to pay to bring the specialists and resources required for empire sized projects
@connorperrett9559
Жыл бұрын
We may just live to see a time when we advanced moderns lose the ability to run certain pieces of critical infrastructure. I've seen multiple casual analysts worrying about boomers retiring and dying off because there are fewer numbers of young people who have been trained in the same skills.
@kirgan1000
Жыл бұрын
Yes a city of 100 000 need a aqueduct and have a sufficient tax base to afford the maintenance cost. But a city of only a few thousand, cant afford the maintenance cost, and the local wells and river is sufficient (even if that water isn't as clean)
Somehow reminds me of the first and second battles of Hoover Dam in Fallout:New Vegas. Or really Fallout in general. lots of fighting over repurposed old world tech, supplies, and locations. Someone should make a post apocalypse themed game set in the post Western Roman world.
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
Absolutely. I support NCR btw
@connorperrett9559
Жыл бұрын
@@TheFallofRome Profligate!
@NCRVeteranRanger
Жыл бұрын
@@TheFallofRome Based. 😎
@baneofbanes
10 ай бұрын
That’s why I like NV so much.
Fascinating! Thanks for these explorations of the strange days after the "fall" of Rome.
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
You’re welcome! I actually had a blast researching this one
@quartzking3997
Жыл бұрын
Why put “fall” in quotation marks when the city of Rome literally fell?
David Drake (who is a massive Belisarius fanboy) uses the aqueduct-infiltration idea in one his Raj Whitehall/General series scifi books.
i know disrepair was a big reason why aqueducts were stopped being used. but did big storms/earthquakes also cause major damage that they couldn't repair/cost to much or didn't have the manpower/technology to repair them. do you know of any earthquakes/lighting/storms that damage a aqueducts for a city/region?
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
Not that I’m aware of, but I would imagine earthquakes could be a problem, especially in the eastern Mediterranean
Nice work. I have a feeling this video is gonna make waves.
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
I certainly hope so!
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
Love the pun!
Just keeping an aqueduct going surely is a significant task.
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
Absolutely. There are some instances of medieval cities building them-I’d have yo dig around to find which ones in particular-but from what I understand they were massive projects and didn’t always succeed
@WagesOfDestruction
Жыл бұрын
@@TheFallofRome Please consider doing a video on a medieval city building one and the manpower, organisation and finance required to build them.
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
@@WagesOfDestruction sure I can do that
Very insightful insight.
Thanks for this insightful video!
It's the first time I'm watching your videos, and I must say it's realy interesting, I never tought about that subject and now I realy want to research more about it, thank you very much.
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
You’re welcome! There’s a list of sources in the video description if you want to do some further reading
Love these small bits of history unspoken of. And even recent definitely subscribed
instantly thought of Belisarius's siege of Naples when i saw the title lol.
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
It’s in the video!
Very interesting subject! Thanks :)
Great video!
Cool video topic, I had never thought about The vulnerability of most aqueducts.
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
Glad you enjoyed it!
Go with the flow. 🌊
Fantastic video man!!!
Neat video subject. Straightforward but interesting.
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
Glad you enjoyed it !
Bit off topic, but the latest episode of Anthony Kaldellis' podcast Byzantium and Friends deals with blinding/mutilation. Well worth a listen and gives a bit more insight into the mutilation of Justinian II.
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
Great I’ll have to give it a listen! I’m working my way through Wyman’s “The Fall of Rome” at the moment
Fantastic!
“All three peoples [the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, and Vandals] disappeared from history, and with them vanished the last cherished traces of Roman military skill in the West. Only the ruins of broad highways and frontier castella testified to the legionary past as the Dark Ages settled down over Europe. Another cycle had been completed...” - Lynn Montross, War Through the Ages (3rd Ed., 1960), p. 93.
This is an awesome niche topic
Prokopios was not bad. Also, thanks for this video. It inspires me to check out more aqueduct related articles. Also, Justinian II would make a badass movie.
Nice
targetting critical infrastructure during the decline of empire?! unthinkable :^)
@jamesabestos2800
Жыл бұрын
When infrastructure good: Whoa nice ;) When infrastructure changes: MY McDonald's, Soccer Mom and Dictatorship in that one asian country.
Not a subject I would have thought about, interesting however how as a weak point for exploitation by an army that they would not be thought of by the defenders.
This is one weird call of duty game.
Little nitpicking, you show the pont du gard in southern France when saying that acqueducts stayed in service after the fall of Rome, but in that particular case it was already out of service by the fall of Rome
My own opinions on aqueduct warfare in the middle ages follow the reasoning found here.
Justinian II, not Justin II. Justin II was the one who died at Syracuse.
👍
First comment? wild
2:33 I think you may mean 536 here.
You mean they used aqueducts as a road?... 🤔😏
@TheFallofRome
Жыл бұрын
Tunnel might be more accurate but yeah pretty much
@SkyFly19853
Жыл бұрын
@@TheFallofRome Wow... my guess was almost right... 🤔😏👏👏👏
@r0ky_M
Жыл бұрын
@@TheFallofRome _Ardennes 44' it was critical to use and control the roads, junctions and bridges ,, but would one call it 'road' or 'bridge' warfare?..sounds a bit odd.
🤠👍🏿
A large pack of wolves somehow got into Paris in the winter of 1450 A.D. and made it all the way to Notre Dame.
"What have the Romans ever done for us?"
Those Romans were real jerks.
Aqueduct Warfare? Didn't they have a split with Agoraphobic Nosebleed?
I can never understand how people consider the Byzantines as "Romans" when they were Greek, spoke Greek, and created their own cultural and artistic legacy...
@trevorsm.9735
Жыл бұрын
Because they considered themselves Roman’s. Albeit Greek Citizens of Rome. But Roman for short. The prestige of being a Roman people is still important in that time
@histguy101
Жыл бұрын
Because they were Romans. Where did the Romans go? Did they flee the east? Did they stop making babies? The used Latin and Greek officially, just as in earlier periods, but Latin gradually fell out of use over the course of centuries. By late Antiquity, what we call Greek, they called Romaic, the language of the Romans. Latin was also Romaic.
@histguy101
Жыл бұрын
@@trevorsm.9735 Would an American whose great grandparents immigrated to the US from Italy consider themselves "Italian citizens of America"? Now what if it was more than 4 generations...and like 15-20 generations. What if some Byzantine citizen descended from Roman colonists intermarrying with local Greek/Thracian/Anatolian locals 600-1000 years ago, and all the generations during that time were Romans? Can we really call that Byzantine a "Greek citizen of Rome"?
@trevorsm.9735
Жыл бұрын
@@histguy101 I agree. I was more saying “Greek citizen of Rome” because I was saying, while their ethnicity was primarily Greek, they had been Roman citizens or “Romans” for hundreds of years and saw themselves as just continuing in the Eastern half of the empire. I don’t go around saying I’m Irish American, I know I’m Irish but I go around saying I’m an American. So I’m a way that is a good comparison.
@histguy101
Жыл бұрын
@@trevorsm.9735 How many generations from Ireland are you? And did your parents/grandparents continue to marry other Irish Americans?
poison water suply: broke invade through water supply: woke
IDK why, but every seige on Constantinople hurts my heart.