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Comment by nemo | Hacker News Reader

The Gothic Wars left Italy devastated and earned the long term enmity of people living on the peninsula who sometimes preferred the Germanic warlords to the bloodless sociopaths ruling out of Constantinople, opening a wedge that would continue to sow division over the centuries. Those wars depopulated the remnants of Rome that had persisted through the prior sacks, and left Italy even more defenseless against future invasions. Justinian had to destroy Rome to save it.

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All statements about what people there wanted is pretty much speculation. And often these statements were later simply asserted by later historians.

The initial invasion didn't actually depopulate the Peninsula. It was reconquered but then new invasion from new Germanic people started again. And of course the Roman Empire is gone try to defend Rome and Italy.

Again, this is only obvious in retrospect and had it worked, we would remember it differently. And it had worked many times in the past.

You really don't need to make excuses for Justinian's incompetence, but if you want to, have at it.

Given the amount of wars he won and the territory they still had after he was done, he clearly wasn't incompetent. Africa remained an important part of the empire for centuries for example.

The overextension of Byzantine territory under Justinian led to later collapse, and in the end harmed the Romans and (along with the brutality of the Roman tax farmers) was one of the key steps that paved the way towards the Caliphate's conquests. Justinian did valuable things, his legal work left a constructive lasting mark. His architectural work was lovely but left Rome bankrupt and his foolish conquests (pursued under false pretexts and open lies) left Rome worse off by any humane measures. He was a disaster for the Romans who suffered through his reign and past it. Justinian planted the seeds of both Rome's expansion and collapse and his policies in the Italic peninsula were catastrophic.

That a narrative. And a hard one to make. Between Justinian and the Arab conquest there is a lot of time and multiple emperor, many of those emperors made a lot of mistakes as well. To draw a direct line between Justinian and the Arab conquest is great for a grand narrative book, but I don't think its that clear.

Southern Italy and Africa turned out to be important in the fight with the Persian and the Arabs. Thinks like 'planted the seeds for collapse' isn't a strong argument for me.

Even with money issues its not clear that the empire was worse off when he left the scene.

Like many emperors he spend a lot of money and went on offensive wars to reunite the Roman Empire. He wasn't as successful as some, but more then many.

And the empire after him was strong enough to fight many wars against strong enemies, in the Lombards, the Avars and the Perians. So the empire clearly wasn't weak for the next century. The loss to the Arabs had more to do with Persian Wars that went on for decades.

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