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Middle East: Odenathus - Ghosts of the Desert - Extra History (Patreon)

Published:
2015-10-30 09:07:24
Imported:
2026-06
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Content



Enemies on all sides. Confusion reigns. And the only man who can save the Roman Empire isn't even Roman.

UPDATE! Watch the afterword on Palmyra Today: http://bit.ly/1kiAKTN

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Previews only

Middle East: Odenathus - Ghosts of the Desert - Extra History

Watch the afterword about Palmyra Today: http://bit.ly/1kiAKTN Support us on Patreon: http://bit.ly/EHPatreon Watch more Extra History: http://bit.ly/18BltIj (---Episode details below!) Subscribe for new episodes every Saturday! http://bit.ly/SubToEC Play games with us on our sister channel! http://bit.ly/WatchEXP Talk to us on Twitter (@ExtraCreditz): http://bit.ly/ECTweet Follow us on Facebook: http://bit.ly/ECFBPage Get our list of recommended games on Steam: http://bit.ly/ECCurator ____________ In 260 CE, the Roman Empire was falling apart on all sides. Emperor Valerian gathered the legions to push back on the worst incursions from the Sassanid Empire in the east. They not only lost - they were massacred, and the emperor was taken captive. This left the empire in disarray. Into this desperate moment stepped Odenathus from the city-state of Palmyra. Palmyra was a vassal state that owed fealty to Rome and had been decorated with many honors and recognition in the past. If Rome fell, the Sassanid Empire would certainly look to conquer and annex Palmyra, so Odenathus rode to the rescue. He gathered all the soldiers he could find and took the Sassanid army by surprise on their way back from the battle with Valerian. He destroyed them. From there, he rode north to protect the emperor's son, and the next heir to Rome, then south again where he pushed the Sassanids all the way back to their capitol twice. Despite his success and undeniable military power, he never took power for himself or declared himself an emperor. Rome showered him with appreciation and titles. Sadly, he was murdered by his nephew in 267 CE, but his loyalty had bought the Roman Empire enough time to recover and survive for another 200 years. ____________ Get the intro music here! http://bit.ly/1EQA5N7 *Music by Demetori: http://bit.ly/1AaJG4H Get the outro music here! http://bit.ly/1PYiICA *Music by Henrik Neesgaard __________ Extra History - Byzantine Empire: Justinian and Theodora From Swineherd to Emperor: http://bit.ly/1LYJKFX

Comments

Jorge

The video shows the year of his death as 277 instead of 267.

Halil Köklü

I have not known of Odenathus at all and this episode shows his significance to European history. It's a pity to see Palmyra destroyed by the damn ISIS this year :(

ExtraCredits
>>935333

Darnit I always miss something! Can we pretend like the historical errors are easter eggs and I leave them in there for you to find on purpose? D:

ExtraCredits
>>935346

That's part of the reason we wanted to talk about him. :( I think James still has more to say on the subject.

Zachary Taylor

An interesting choice for a non-intentional Halloween episode. But a good one none the less.

ExtraCredits
>>935361

Yeah, it has nothing to do with the holiday - there was actually supposed to be a Lies episode this week for the Admiral Yi series, but James had to travel this week and so the episodes swapped places.

RMS Oceanic

Excellent episode. Just succinct enough to explain Odenathus' rule without having to explain the Crisis of the Third Century's combination of political instability and external threat. One nitpick though, more of an interesting fact really: You say Valerian was captured in a treacherous parley after the Battle of Edessa, and the Latin Record will back you up on this. However in the chaos of the Crisis, there are often two accounts of every event, and the truth is probably a third. Persian records have Valerian just captured during or just after the battle. We obviously will never know for sure, but it's interesting to think the Romans couldn't bear the shame of a captured emperor and had to justify it through Sassanid duplicity. This could also be projection, especially after the Emperor Caracalla's duplicity when dealing with the Parthians 45 years earlier.

Anonymous

Im confused I joined Patreon in part to vote for the upcoming - was there something I missed?

RMS Oceanic
>>935545

EH was originally set up so that each series was to be four parts long, plus the lies video. With many of the series ending up at five or six parts, they re-oriented to assume six part series, plus lies. Since Admiral Yi is only five parts, they decided to do a bonus episode for a topic too short for a full series. I dunno about future bonus series, but for Odenathus there wasn't a vote.

Jeff DigitalAirAire

King of kings, just like the newest hardcore history episode, haha. Haven't gotten to it yet, but he's probably talking about the Persians too

ExtraCredits
>>936049

Odds are that yes, he's talking about the original king of kings - i.e. the Persians - which would be a fascinating series!

ExtraCredits
>>935391

Interesting! You know, I did wonder about that a moment - considering the troops were massacred, you wouldn't really expect the Persians to hang back and wait to capture the Roman emperor until later. There he is, with no army, so... get him.

Amy Reynolds

Fantastic little episode--I love this idea of filling in a gap with a mini-sode like this. :3

Michael Jebbett

Can't help but notice that Rome didn't last long after the adoption of Christianity. Coincidence? I think not.

RMS Oceanic
>>936769

Hmm, Theodosius makes Christianity the Empire's Official Religion in 390, and a mere 1063 years later Constantinople is overrun! Even looking at the traditional fall of Rome, you give one factor of many too much credit. Christianity didn't cause the incessant inflation that undermined the Roman Middle Class and therefore tax base. It didn't encourage noble estates to pay as little taxes and offer as few conscripts as possible. It certainly didn't introduce the Antonine and Cyprian plagues which caused long term population and economic decline. No Missionary encouraged the Huns to displace the traditional inhabitants of Germania and force them into the Empire. The Gospels had no advice on how to handle these migrations, so Adrianople can't be laid at their feet. To be fair, attempting to assert Christianity had no role would be dishonest, but I think the Christian/Pagan tensions or Nicean/Arian tensions are overstated as a cause.

ExtraCredits
>>936769

RMS, I'm enjoying your mini lectures on the Third Century Crisis! It is something you've studied formally, or perhaps a favorite period to research on your own? Anyway, Michael, the fall of the Roman Empire is a really interesting subject to talk about, and if you ever look closely at it you'll find out what a mess it is, historically. Like RMS points out, what's traditionally given as the date that the Roman Empire "fell" usually refers to the Western half of it - the Eastern Roman Empire continued for centuries. And even if you only look at the Western Empire's fall, it doesn't actually get easier, because so many of the states that cropped up in Europe sought to legitimize themselves by claiming a connection to Rome. Heck, remember the Turkish sultan Kilij Arslan that was bothering Alexios Comnenos in the First Crusade series? He called his empire the Sultanate of *Rum.* So that phenomenon isn't limited to the west, either. I once had a classics professor who enjoyed asking students to write an essay on when the Roman Empire fell, because he knew he'd get a different answer from pretty much everyone. His favorite argument, which he made for us in class as an example, was that Rome *never* fell, they just transferred the power of their institutions into the Church, which survives to this day and had a very direct hand in controlling Europe up until very recently.

RMS Oceanic
>>936769

Nah, I'm just an amateur enthusiast who drunk up every word Mike Duncan had to say on Rome.

ExtraCredits
>>935333

*Generally* the one shots won't have Lies episodes, but uh... keep an eye on your YouTube subscriptions/Patreon feed the next couple of days. ::whistles innocently::

shadowolf

i like video and we need 1 more Dan

GrayMorality

This was really interesting. I really love all the intricacies of the history of Rome (the city itself was probably the coolest place I ever visited). I would love to see some more of these shorter episodes on other events and people of Rome like the tragedy of Pompeii or even just the rise and fall of Ostia

ExtraCredits
>>937314

Did you go to Ostia while you were there? I salute you. Most people don't realize it's there and they miss out on, in my opinion, one of the BEST experiences you can have in (or technically just outside) Rome.

GrayMorality
>>937314

Yeah Ostia was amazing. It was really cool being able to see the mosaics for the traders and store fronts. I'm really glad I took some time to go there

Jason Youngberg
>>936769

Interesting points, Oceanic. But it's also worth pondering what would have happened after the fall of Rome if it didn't adopt Christianity. How would Islam have faired, assuming it would still exist? Would the knowledge of ancient philosophers would have still been lost or horded in monasteries? Would there have been such resistance to heliocentricism and other scientific research without the Catholic Church?

RMS Oceanic
>>936769

I honestly don't know. Did the church suppress scientific lines of inquiry? Of course. But I think it's folly to automatically assume scientific progress would have been unabated if only for Christian Dogma. I covered the History of Medicine in school - one reason I'm looking forward to the Broad Street Pump - and one of the approved medical texts in Europe before the Renaissance was the writings of Galen, a Greco-Roman surgeon who came to prominence during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Among other things, he advanced knowledge of anatomy through dissecting animals, such as demonstrating that nerves control muscle action, but his work is obviously flawed if you assume the anatomy of a pig is the same as a human's. He was limited by the taboo about dissecting human bodies, the same taboo that was still around in the Middle Ages. Indeed when writings of his were rediscovered calling for human dissection this laid the seeds for Vesalius and William Harvey to do it. Christianity failing to take root does not preclude taboos developing that hinder advancement. My detailed knowledge of Islam is limited, but I do know that they were influenced by Christianity. Jesus is a Prophet in the Quran, and his mother Mary is considered a paradigm of virtue. So again the faith may look quite different to how we know it. But the reasons it was able to spread so effectively are more earthly than you might think: In the decade before the Muslin Conquests, the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires fought their final devastating war, lasting 25 years and seeing the Sassanids nearly achieve their dream of taking all the old Achemanid lands, but Heraclius was able to push them back and restore the empire. If any victory can be considered Pyrrhic however, it was this one. Both empires were militarily exhausted, and unable to do much when this new force swept out of Arabia. It's to Heraclius' credit he was able to protect Anatolia from being overrun, because the Persians were completely conquered. To return to the point, Rome and Ctesiphon had been warring well before Christianity's ascendance, so I don't see its impact changing this. I'm also not 100% on the ratio of actual suppression to fortunes of the times. Sure, there was active suppression of pagan or heretical ideas, but you also have other factors, such as the decline in trade, even within the empire before it destabilised, so exchange of ideas was harder. Also as proto-feudalism took form after Diocletian's economic reforms, literacy decreased, so the post-imperial populus may not have realised what was being lost in old ruins. And I should note that the narrative of scientific loss is mainly a western one that discounts that Constantinople kept on trucking with stuff like this. The Heliocentrism debate is a juicy affair indeed, but dig a little deeper and, like the Crusades, it's more wrapped up in politics than scripture. Copernicus was the first real advocate, and he got little more than some criticism by hard liners, and the fact that nobody had the equipment needed to detect the Solar Parallax needed to prove it. Galileo's ordeal takes place in the backdrop of the reaction against the reformation, and in addition to Heliocentrism he had also been trying to reinterpret the bible, a challenge to Papal Authority. I'm not sure how to wrap this up, but to say that I'm pretty sure mankind would have found a way to interfere with the pursuit of knowledge without having to rely on the Gospels.

Arturo Gutierrez

Love these history mini-episodes :D looking forward for more of them.

Edward Kim

Cant believe i never knew this guy. Thanks for teaching us good history lessons. Ya'll way better than any teacher out there.

The Cayute

This is what I love about EH. I love hearing about history in general, but my schooling on it was pretty general, and honestly more of it focused on American and Western European history within the last few hundred years. Work and a hectic life kept me from pursuing my education further than I'd have liked. You guys bring unknown history to the unknowing mass, and make it relatable and understandable while making us want more because it's so interesting. Thank you for this little slice of history :)