Youtube comments of The Historian's Craft (@TheFallofRome).
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Excellent video as always.
Any source by itself is going to have problems and limitations that need to be kept in mind when evaluating them, but the good thing about iconography and other artworks is that we can usually back it up with archaeology...but even still, there are serious problems. A decent example of this would be determining what armor the soldiers under Charlemagne used--the surviving illuminated manuscripts and other artistic sources (such as carvings) depict his troops in armor that bears a very strong resemblance to the armor worn by "Byzantine" soldiers around the same time.
We know from archaeological digs that the armor worn is (usually) not actually the armor that was depicted, but here we can interpret these illustrations as showing both the "power of the visual" as Chris Wickham puts it, and the strong pull of the Eastern Empire and the symbolism attached to identifying Carolingian troops in East Roman equipment...of course, when doing this you have to keep in mind that stuff like leather won't usually survive.
The interesting thing about Carolingian iconography as regards military matters lies in the weapons shown: many troops are shown with bows, and while we have Carolingian laws that back up the prevalence of archers in these armies, as far as I know there have only been a very limited number of arrow heads excavated. That being said, the iconography shows spears being very prevalent, and these have been excavated en masse...so it would appear that as regards weapons, the artistic sources are good.
Again, excellent video, it was a pleasure to watch!
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@guillaumemarcade7873 hi! Not a problem at all! I took them down because they were attracting some…interesting people, let’s say
To get a grip on this I’d recommend 3 books:
The Anatomy of Fascism, by Rob Paxton. It’s probably the best condensed account of the subject you’ll find, written by one of the leading experts on it
The Politics of Cultural Despair, by Fritz Stern. This one examines some of the figures in the conservative revolution, a movement that shares a somewhat ambiguous relationship with fascism, but which created the form of nationalism that fascism draws on. You want the black cover with the ah, German symbol, on it
Lastly, The Crisis of German of Ideology, by George Mosse. This was the original study of the elements that developed into German fascism, and still shows up on exam lists despite being published in the early 1960s
The bibliographies in all of those should help with pointing you in the right direction for further reading!
Happy holidays!
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Metatron, excellent video and great points overall. However, I noticed you didn't touch too much on the shields of Late Antiquity, so I just want to briefly add to the discussion here. The study of shields from this period is one of those understudied topics, and not necessarily from lack of evidence (not that we have an abundance of that here), so what we can say about them is rather limited.
From the Antonine Period, so far as I'm aware, we don't have any surviving shields, but we do have enough artwork to strongly suggest the typical "curved" shield continued in use. Although with that said there are some archaeological finds of copper-alloy edging which strongly suggest the shields continued to be edged in this manner. The Dura excavations tell us that these continued in use, but the prevalence of shallowly-curved ovular shields at this site (and others) probably means that during the third century the equipment was beginning to change due to the needs of the military situation.
By the Late Antique period, fully following the Dioclecianic and Constantinian reforms, the ovular shield appears to have come fully into use, with the more famous curved rectangular shield falling by the wayside (although it shows up a little bit in early fourth century art). The important thing here is that the construction changed from a plywood type construction to a plank construction, and the copper trimming was done away with, replaced by rawhide.
Probably this was due to the adoption of "barbarian" equipment, largely because the barbarians had a "ferocious mystique" about them, as it were. Early and High Medieval shields of this construction may have had straps, but during Late Antiquity there appear to have just been iron bars, potentially reinforced with wood to make the grip more comfortable. So, no arm straps here either, although some shields do have evidence of another bar to slip the forearm through
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