LegatiusRatio

History. Philosophy. The minds that shaped Europe. Full deep dives every week on YouTube.

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

@Dominantblitz @romanhistory1 Possible, but his actions speak louder. He crossed the Rubicon, made himself dictator for life, and put his own face on coinage, something no living Roman had done before. Belief in the Republic and dismantling its institutions aren’t easy to square.

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

You think you know Rome. Legions. Conquest. Gladiators. Except almost everything is wrong. Romans weren’t militaristic. Gladiators didn’t fight to death. They invented nothing. Rome didn’t fall. And everything else you believe is probably wrong too.
New video on Imperium Explained.

https://t.co/TkG1Oe9bbA

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

A whole nation was bled dry to buy back one man. Clergy lost everything. Common people were taxed into poverty. And when Richard was released, his own brother and the King of France tried to keep him imprisoned. That's how much they feared him. John knew what was coming. "The devil is loose." That's not a warning. That's terror. Richard didn't thank England for the ransom. He didn't rebuild what was destroyed to pay it. He went to war against John and Philip immediately. The ransom that ruined a kingdom bought Richard a chance to punish the men who tried to destroy him. Loyalty isn't purchased. Neither is vengeance. Sometimes the only currency that matters is power. And Richard had just proved he would cost any price, destroy any nation, to getit back

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

The painting wasn't made despite the asylum. It was made because of it. Not in the romantic sense where suffering makes art beautiful. In the practical sense: Van Gogh had nothing left but the view from that window and the need to make something from it. He couldn't fix his mind. He couldn't leave. So he painted what he could see and what he couldn't. The stars didn't care that he was locked away. They burned the same. And he had the clarity, in that moment, to paint them honestly. Most people spend their whole lives looking at stars and painting wallpaper. Van Gogh spent his worst moment painting heaven. That's not inspiration. That's necessity. Sometimes the most beautiful things come not from reaching up. But from having nowhere else to go.

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

Maria Theresa was never supposed to rule. She had no military experience. No political experience. The major powers of Europe invaded. She rebuilt Austria anyway. Not by winning wars. By building systems that lasted 137 years after her death. Sometimes the most powerful thing a ruler can do is build something that survives them.
https://t.co/bqxvuC0yXo

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

@Nullainmundo1 @aestheticsguyy This is on Lemnos, a Greek island. The Mediterranean Sea

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

That framing doesn’t quite work either though. The Christianization of the Greco-Roman world wasn’t purely voluntary self-repurposing, Theodosius I’s decrees in the 390s made paganism illegal and ordered temples closed by force, with many pagans resisting well into the 5th and 6th centuries. The people who built those original temples weren’t Christian and in many cases didn’t choose the change, it was imposed by whoever held imperial power at the time, the same dynamic as later conquests. “Repurposing your own building” assumes continuity of consent that often wasn’t there, it was still one group in power converting the religious building of a group that had different beliefs, just without a change of ethnic rulership. The mechanism, power imposing its faith on a site, was the same either way.

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

The "Fall of Rome" is a lie. Rome didn't fall. It moved east and became Byzantium. For another 1,000 years. The same laws. The same language evolving. The same structure. Only the capital changed and the name on the bureaucracy. When the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453, they ended something that had survived for 1,600 years. Not because of invaders. Because of an empire that refused to adapt to a changing world. Rome's real weakness wasn't military. It was inflexibility.

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

Fair observation on the floor plan, the Greek cross layout is architecturally still visible. But “can’t unChristianize it” cuts both ways historically, the same logic applies to mosques converted into churches that still show clear Islamic geometric patterns and mihrab niches beneath later additions, like several churches in Hungary and the Mezquita in Córdoba. Architecture surviving underneath a later religious use isn’t unique to Hagia Sophia, it’s just what happens when a building outlives multiple owners across centuries, in either direction.

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

Just to be clear, I’m not trying to idealize the Ottomans or downplay what happened here, the sack of Constantinople was genuinely brutal, that’s well documented by multiple contemporary sources including Christian eyewitnesses. My point isn’t “one side was gentle,” it’s that this kind of violence wasn’t unique to this conquest or to Islamic expansion specifically. The Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople in 1204, done by fellow Christians, is described by many historians as even more destructive to the city long-term. Charlemagne’s Massacre of Verden in 782 saw thousands of Saxons killed for refusing conversion to Christianity, within Europe, Christian on pagan. Three-day sacks after a city refused surrender were standard siege convention across basically every culture in this era, not something invented for this specific conquest. None of that excuses the suffering, it just means the cruelty wasn’t a uniquely Islamic phenomenon, it was how warfare worked almost everywhere at the time.

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

The “invaders vs. reclaiming” framing runs into a problem: Visigothic Spain, the Christian kingdom the Umayyads conquered in 711, wasn’t some ancient indigenous state either. The Visigoths were Germanic invaders who’d taken Hispania from Rome only around three centuries earlier, and Rome itself had taken it from the Iberians and Celtiberians centuries before that. By the time of the Islamic conquest, “Christian Spain” had existed as a political entity for roughly the same span of time Al-Andalus itself would go on to exist. Nobody in that chain was the “original” owner, it’s conquest layered on conquest, the same as almost everywhere else in history.

Anatolia follows the same pattern. Before the Byzantines, it belonged to Rome, before that the Greeks, before that the Persians and the Hittites. Each of those was also acquired through conquest of whoever held it previously. Picking one specific point in that chain and calling it the “real” ownership that later conquest violates isn’t really how history works anywhere.

Al-Aqsa and Temple Mount is genuinely a separate, live situation with its own complexities I won’t get into here, but as a historical parallel to religious buildings changing hands through conquest, it fits the broader pattern too, that site itself sits on layers of Jewish, Roman, Christian, and Islamic history stacked on top of each other.

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

Since you blocked me I have to reply to myself @shinigamiamiami No AI involved, this is coming from someone studying cultural studies with a focus on history and literature, not a chatbot. Happy to keep this factual though.

The “invaders vs locals” distinction doesn’t actually hold up historically. Constantinople itself was originally Greek Byzantium before Constantine refounded it as a Roman capital, and the city changed hands between Romans, Latin Crusaders, and Byzantines multiple times before 1453, “who the real locals are” isn’t as clean a line as it sounds. And the word “destroyed” still isn’t accurate regardless of who built what, Hagia Sophia has been continuously standing and in active religious use for nearly 1,500 years. A building doesn’t get destroyed by changing which faith worships in it, that’s true whether we’re talking about Hagia Sophia, the Mezquita in Córdoba, or the Parthenon, which went through the exact same conversions in the opposite direction over its own history.

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

Converting isn’t destroying, by that logic, Córdoba’s Mezquita is also “destroyed” since it’s been a functioning cathedral since 1236, or Hagia Sophia was “destroyed” in 1935 when it became a museum. Words matter here.

And since we’re doing this comparison properly: after the Ottoman retreat from Hungary in the 17th century, mosques in cities like Pécs and Eger were converted into churches, several are still standing as churches today. In Andalusia, the pattern was often harsher than conversion, after 1492 many mosques across the region weren’t converted at all but demolished outright, and the Muslim population was eventually expelled entirely by 1614. Seville’s Giralda, the minaret of the former Great Mosque of Seville, still stands today as the bell tower of Seville Cathedral, exactly the same practice being discussed here, just the other direction.

So if converting a mosque into a cathedral counts as “destruction” too, that standard applies equally to both sides across this entire history. Consistency matters more than which dire

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

Joan of Arc was a teenager who commanded an army, crowned a king, and exposed how fragile power actually is. In a world run by men, she had more of it than all of them. And that’s exactly why they burned her at the stake. Sometimes the most threatening thing isn’t strength. It’s clarity that shows people how little courage they have.

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

Fair, “Reconquista” is a loaded term since much of Iberia had never been under Christian rule to begin with before the 8th century Islamic conquest, so “re” is doing a lot of work there. Doesn’t change the underlying point though, both sides converted the other’s religious buildings when they took territory, that’s the actual pattern regardless of what either conquest gets called.

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

@xavi87319 @HomerPavlos The Great Mosque of Córdoba is the most famous example, converted to a cathedral after the Reconquista in 1236 while keeping much of the original Islamic architecture intact. Several mosques in Seville and Toledo followed the same pattern after their respective reconquests.

[LegatiusRatio @Legatiusratio]

That claim doesn’t hold up factually. Hagia Sophia’s site had pre Christian temples that were repurposed by Christian rulers before the current structure was built in the 6th century, that’s well documented archaeology, not disputed. And “no roots outside the Arabian Peninsula” ignores that Islam had already spread across the Levant, North Africa, Persia, and parts of Europe within a century of its founding, that’s simply historical fact regardless of how you view the expansion. On temple destruction specifically, Christian emperors destroyed and converted pagan temples across the empire for centuries before Islam even existed, the Serapeum in Alexand