Crusader Kings II: Legacy of Rome - Dev Diary 5: Events and Decisions | Page 20

Theddude · Oct 18, 2012

Ciccillo Rre said:
What I tried to say in a "slightly" different way!

Yeah, I thought that might be what you were saying, but it was a little bit, no offense here, vague... I find it's usually better to just go straight to the point. But yes, I find this new development strange and completely perplexing.

Sarog · Oct 18, 2012

Ciccillo Rre said:
That the Italian language, grammar-wise, is no closer to Latin than Occitan or Frankish is true. However, either phonetically or in terms of vocabulary there is a huge difference with the other Romance languages, as they either depart much more phonetically (Occitan, French) or in the vocabulary (Spanish) or in both (Portuguese, Romanian).

There's a difference between closer and close. The romance languages evolved/devolved/adapted in differences ways, but they changed tremendously. If Italian went the least distance from the source, that doesn't diminish just how far it went. We could go into a bigger debate here and discuss how the likes of Caesar changed from Kai-sar to Ches-a-ray, but I don't really care to spend that much time on it. But the impression I'm getting is that you're advocating a logic of "Italian is the closest to Latin, therefore Italians are the successors of the Romans", which doesn't work.

The impact of the Germanic tribes' advent on the evolution of Italian culture - the language of the popular masses - was nil (the CK2 nobles' culture is another matter). To me, that I have a certain knowledge of the matter, the best proof of this is represented by the fact that for all the main recipes of Italian cuisine that don't require New World ingredients, in particular varieties of bread, soups and vegetables' dishes, roots can be traced back into the Empire's age.

Culinary culture is a very poor reflection of larger culture. It reflects the traditions and resources of a region more than continuous cultural progression. Which is why, for an example off the top of my head, the descendents of Dutch settler communities in various places in the world have culinary traditions completely separate from those of the Netherlands, based on the particulars of their colony regions, even while their language, religious denominations and political culture remained true to their origins. Practicing the same diet in the same region isn't all that indicative of anything resembling cultural transference. If the eskimos had conquered the italian peninsula, they would likely have adopted much the same dietary practices.

The idea that the lombards and ostrogoths had no effect on Italian culture is not something that I think would hold up to close scrutiny. Culture changes that trickle down from the top tend to be a lot more expedient than shifts in grass roots culture. Both because the people at the top tend to impose their values and way of doing things, and because people lower down naturally start associating the practices of their overlords with wealth, power, and success and then define themselves in relation to that status quo one way or the other. A small norman ruling class drastically changed the future of England. A small norman ruling class transformed Sicily into a rare haven of religious tolerance, for a time. And the Lombards changed Italy drastically. Lombard law - probably the most sophisticated branch of early germanic law - supplanted Roman law in Italy (I'm not all that familiar with latter Italian history, so I'm not sure when/if/how Roman law in the form of Justinian's codex took hold again in Italy as it did elsewhere in western Europe, but for a very significant chunk of time Italy was under germanic law). Lombard politics is what carved Italy up into feuding duchies, Lombard recalcitrance against central rule helped keep Italian unification at bay and set the stage for the fierce independence of and rivalry between city states, which is quite a ways removed from roman notions of imperium. Anthropologically, the trickle-down effects on this on Italian values, Italian thinking, Italian social organisation and community development etc. must have been tremendous.

But assuming for the sake of the point that the lombards really did have zero impact on Italian grass-roots culture, it remains that grass-roots culture is not what defined Rome. Plebs drawing pornographic graffiti on the walls of Rome is colorful imagery, but Rome's true legacy was in its law, its political institutions, its mechanisms and methodology of governance, its military organization. All of which was swallowed by feudalism and the lombard rule of the dukes.

The medieval italians were only Roman in that they lived in the same place and that their language was a latin offshoot. Everything else that made Rome Roman is missing. Though I doubt I've convinced you. I don't really care enough to commit to a longer debate than this. To reach back to my main point here. Byzantine Roman triumph that proves Greek Roman legitimacy in Europe should not result in a culturally Italian state, both because it makes no sense in regard to the ideology involved, and because it lacks internal logic.

That's like saying the modern English have no more to do with Alfred the Great or Anglo-Saxon culture than the Spanish! If anything's a bastard language it's English, by your standard the Norman Invasion made all of England Frenchmen!

Eh, half-right. Modern english certainly have no real common culture with the saxons. The pubs of London are a far cry from the mead halls and quasi-norse lifestyle of the saxons, and I'm guessing that the next king of England isn't going to be entombed in a longship buried in a barrow. Culture doesn't leap in terms of centuries, it leaps in terms of years and decades. Current englishfolk are the heirs of Churchill and Thatcher, not Eathelred the Unready. Our connection to forefathers and ancestors of centuries past is really just nostalgia. The saxons did play their part in the evolution of an English nation, but their role in that doesn't make them any less alien from the modern culture.

The norman invasion didn't turn England into France, but it diverted the course of England's destiny down a parallel course. Pre-norman England had strong ties to Scandinavia, which perished. The mead halls and barrows and ceremonial axes were replaced with castles, knights, jousting, chivalry, and the all things that jump to mind when we think of medieval England. For the relatively few normans who ruled England, their cultural footprint was enormous. It would be silly to deny that the history of the English nation did start with the saxons, but it would be just as silly to deny the changes and influences that altered the course of saxon cultural development. Just as it is silly to deny germanic feudalism in Italy in favour of romanticizing Italians as Romans-adrift-in-time.

Theddude · Oct 18, 2012

Sarog said:
*snip*

I don't think anybody is arguing that the Italians are the Romans or that the English are the Anglo-Saxons, but they certainly owe quite a bit to those cultures, probably more than the invaders' influences. English is a West Germanic language despite its largely Latin vocabulary (much less such vocabulary in ordinary speech) and England's parliamentary system is largely an evolution of Witenagemot. I can't speak for Italy, I don't know enough about the subject of how much exactly is a continuation of Roman tradition so I leave that to someone else.

Nevertheless, it seems that you are arguing for some sort of clear break in cultures at specific times. This is definitely not the case, cultures and languages undergo a very slow evolution over time, albeit sometimes (virtually always) under outside influences. Take China at any point in its amazingly long history, Persia after the Islamic conquest or Greek culture after the Roman conquest or Turkish rule. Every culture has its moments where it is heavily influenced by other cultures, but it doesn't mean that modern Greeks have no claim to the heritage of Socrates and Plato, Persia to Cyrus the Great or the Chinese to Confucius. The Italians may not be the Romans in an absolute sense, but their inheritance from Rome is great.

But I still think making the restored Roman Empire Italian culture is pretty strange, especially considering that it's pretty much meant for the Byzantines. Better just to have an Italian Empire for that or some hypothetical restored WRE with Italian culture. Really the RE should be Greek culture if anything, I think it just shouldn't be specified, there are a lot of cultures that can claim connection to Rome, why not give them an equal shot?

Sarog · Oct 18, 2012

Theddude said:
Nevertheless, it seems that you are arguing for some sort of clear break in cultures at specific times.

Not clear *breaks* but clear *derailments*, or points of directional change. To use the more obvious England example, the modern nation obviously has its roots in the saxons, but the norman conquest (and many subsequent events of similarly massive cultural significance) altered the course of cultural development, effectively diverting the cultural river into new, un-saxon territory. The result is a nation that would for the most part be unrecognizable to the saxons, and if you picked a random englishman off the street and sent him back in time to saxon england, he really wouldn't be any less alien there than a random spaniard. You are right that culture changes slowly over time, which is what I was getting at with the decades-not-centuries comment. Modern english culture did not spring up from the saxons. It sprang up from a culture that sprang up from another culture that sprung up from yet another culture that sprang up from the saxons, if you follow. But with more steps in between. Culture is morphic, and to say something like "this is what my culture was like a thousand years ago" is fundamentally flawed, because it really isn't the same culture.

To draw back to Italy, medieval Italians are certainly not Roman. But the argument that seems to have been proposed to me is that they are closer to Roman than anyone else, therefore they are near-as-makes-no-difference to being Roman. Which I deny. All of the defining features of Rome disappeared from Italy after the collapse of Imperial rule in favor of feudalism and germanic law, and to say that the ostrogoths and lombards had no effect on Italian culture is much the same as saying England would have would up exactly the same even if the normans hadn't forced the country down a very different path of development.

I don't think an Italian empire would work in the game for gameplay purposes, which I've talked about at length previously. To recap, there are no clear, obvious cultural or territorial acquisitions for Italians to make which warrant empires, in the same way that uniting spain, britania, or scandinavia make natural sense for those constituent cultures. Lands would have to be carved out of other de jures to create a very messy, nonsensical ahistorical state. I don't think that empires should be about fluffy notions of what a culture "deserves", but about what makes sense in the game, and an italian empire is such a specific nonsensical niche that would be better served in mods. Considering that medieval Italian history is in some ways a story of duchies and city states holding on to an independent, recalcitrant spirit in resisting central rule while being stuck between two different competing successors of the Roman empire, I'm doubly OK with the lack of such an un-Italian Italian empire. The challenges and goals facing Italian players are different than those in other regions, and that is a good thing.

But yeah that is a lot of time and words I've spent nitpicking on a simple issue. The current branding in culture files of the Roman Empire as Italian is categorically ridiculous.

Ciccillo Rre · Oct 18, 2012

Sarog said:
There's a difference between closer and close. The romance languages evolved/devolved/adapted in differences ways, but they changed tremendously. If Italian went the least distance from the source, that doesn't diminish just how far it went. We could go into a bigger debate here and discuss how the likes of Caesar changed from Kai-sar to Ches-a-ray, but I don't really care to spend that much time on it. But the impression I'm getting is that you're advocating a logic of "Italian is the closest to Latin, therefore Italians are the successors of the Romans", which doesn't work.

Culinary culture is a very poor reflection of larger culture. It reflects the traditions and resources of a region more than continuous cultural progression. Which is why, for an example off the top of my head, the descendents of Dutch settler communities in various places in the world have culinary traditions completely separate from those of the Netherlands, based on the particulars of their colony regions, even while their language, religious denominations and political culture remained true to their origins. Practicing the same diet in the same region isn't all that indicative of anything resembling cultural transference. If the eskimos had conquered the italian peninsula, they would likely have adopted much the same dietary practices.

The idea that the lombards and ostrogoths had no effect on Italian culture is not something that I think would hold up to close scrutiny. Culture changes that trickle down from the top tend to be a lot more expedient than shifts in grass roots culture. Both because the people at the top tend to impose their values and way of doing things, and because people lower down naturally start associating the practices of their overlords with wealth, power, and success and then define themselves in relation to that status quo one way or the other. A small norman ruling class drastically changed the future of England. A small norman ruling class transformed Sicily into a rare haven of religious tolerance, for a time. And the Lombards changed Italy drastically. Lombard law - probably the most sophisticated branch of early germanic law - supplanted Roman law in Italy (I'm not all that familiar with latter Italian history, so I'm not sure when/if/how Roman law in the form of Justinian's codex took hold again in Italy as it did elsewhere in western Europe, but for a very significant chunk of time Italy was under germanic law). Lombard politics is what carved Italy up into feuding duchies, Lombard recalcitrance against central rule helped keep Italian unification at bay and set the stage for the fierce independence of and rivalry between city states, which is quite a ways removed from roman notions of imperium. Anthropologically, the trickle-down effects on this on Italian values, Italian thinking, Italian social organisation and community development etc. must have been tremendous.

Sarog said:
To draw back to Italy, medieval Italians are certainly not Roman. But the argument that seems to have been proposed to me is that they are closer to Roman than anyone else, therefore they are near-as-makes-no-difference to being Roman. Which I deny. All of the defining features of Rome disappeared from Italy after the collapse of Imperial rule in favor of feudalism and germanic law, and to say that the ostrogoths and lombards had no effect on Italian culture is much the same as saying England would have would up exactly the same even if the normans hadn't forced the country down a very different path of development.

There are many wrong statements and ideas here. First of all, the Lombards did in fact set their own Germanic Law, but they did it very late, with the issue of the Edictum Rothari, which was the most primitive among the Germanic Laws, and did apply only to the ruling feudal class, not to the masses for which even in Lombard Italy the Codex Iustinianeum still applied. This I believe was a unique exception among the barbaric kingdoms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edictum_Rothari

Second, the idea that Lombard feudalism defined Italian culture in the Middle Ages is simply very wrong. The best proof of this is that when Italian culture emerged during the Middle Ages in all its splendor, that is when the northern Comuni became substantially independent from the HRE, they established a unique form of social organization for the time, but that was not in all effects new. The city states traced their roots in the pre-Imperial social organization of the Mediterranean peoples, as well as in the tradition of Roman coloniae (remember that the Roman Empire left lots of autonomy to the Italian regiones, which until Diocletian were not organized into provinciae). This in a sense was in the Middle Ages, and still is today, the form of social organization that Italians understand / perceive as best.

In addition, when many of these substantially republican organizations drifted towards more despotic form of rule, they did not so because feudal forms prevailed. In many cases, the signorie were in all effect dictatorial forms of rule that emerged from the political battle within the republican city states. This resembles more the classical Greek tyrannida and the Ceasaristic approach to dictatorship-within-a-republic or principatum, that is the concept that eventually defined the Roman Empire in its first three centuries of life, and which was unique to Rome (see one of my posts earlier in this thread). Exterior, formal shapes of feudalism were later adopted for reasons of prestige and adaptation to the general European environment, but were in all effects something other from feudal Europe until the XVI century. Still, this had nothing to do with the Lombards but for the genealogic tree of a couple of noble families.

If there was any force that really shaped Italian culture in the Middle Ages, it was the Catholic Church, at the same time a factor of cultural unity and political disintegration.

Your discussion on language evolution shows a lack of understanding of linguistics, but I agree it makes no sense to delve into this discussion; let’s assume for the moment language does not define culture. I do not even accept your rejection of ‘gastronomic’ arguments, for the example of European settlers in other continents is very ill-posed, given that Italians retained the same environment as the Romans. What I think really sets the difference between you and me is a different concept of what is “culture”. For you, it is the set of formal institutions, legal frameworks, rules and established principles that mostly relate to the elite of a given country; to me, culture is the set of shared values, norms of behavior and tacit codes of conduct that regulate the life of ordinary people. To me, the plebs drawing pornographic graffiti on the Walls of Pompeii talking a variety of Vulgar Latin with phonetic features that anticipate the evolution into the Neapolitan language are much more Roman than the senators with the toga, and in all honesty, they look much more Italian than a bunch of Lombard princes whose names Italians today as well as yesterday would have had a hard time to pronounce – unless they are Italianized (I can tell it from school memories).

A model of culture as something that spreads from the top to the bottom is debated among anthropologists and historians as for whether it can be valid for semi-primitive societies (the main example being the Indoeuropean languages and cultures spreading because of warring elites), is very hard to assess for later periods (debates are still ongoing on whether the Anglo-Saxons exterminated the Britons or rather they were an assimilating elite), certainly it cannot work effectively in the later Middle Ages (the Norman influence of Anglo-Saxon cultures was the most successful yet very partial episode). It definitely could not work in a country like Italy that was already at the times very rich in history and civilization.

Ciccillo Rre · Oct 18, 2012

Sarog said:
But yeah that is a lot of time and words I've spent nitpicking on a simple issue. The current branding in culture files of the Roman Empire as Italian is categorically ridiculous.

With all I have said before, I agree on the first sentence, partly on the second.

1) There should not be "Imperial restoration", the Byzantine Empire was already "Roman", and Greek at the same time; it should retain greek culture;

2) However, if the Catholic westerners had to restore the Roman Empire, I feel that italian culture for the title is a sound choice.

3) Hence, I will work on a mod that edits the Byzantine Empire in a historical way so to make the Imperial Restoration unnecessary (it largely is so already) but allows Imperial Restoration for Catholics controlling the Latin Empire, with large gameplay advantages for doing so (currently there is no benefit from creating the LE as the BE has that nice free duchy revocation feature). This will be for DLC owners only, of course. I'll post it in the future when ready.

Sarog · Oct 18, 2012

I do not even accept your rejection of ‘gastronomic’ arguments, for the example of European settlers in other continents is very ill-posed, given that Italians retained the same environment as the Romans.

Exactly. The same environment. If you put all those Italians in china, they'd likely wind up with a rice diet. If italians retained Roman diet in the same environment as the romans, that's really just environmental, not evidence of cultural transference. Food is much less important than values and ideology.

What I think really sets the difference between you and me is a different concept of what is “culture”. For you, it is the set of formal institutions, legal frameworks, rules and established principles that mostly relate to the elite of a given country; to me, culture is the set of shared values, norms of behavior and tacit codes of conduct that regulate the life of ordinary people.

Two points here.

Firstly, formal institutions and legal frameworks are culturally important because those are bound with cultural ideology, values, ideas which are much more important than what you put in your mouth. Law impacts succession impacts governance impact social structure impacts social mobility. The institutions and laws that defined the Roman state survived in Greece, and despite the completely different language and eastern aesthetic that developed in Constantinople, the Byzantines were more Roman than any other group because of this continuity of institutions and laws meant that they thought like Romans. Greek ideas of governance were Roman, Greek ideas of social class were Roman, Greek ideas of succession and gender roles were Roman. Because greeks continued to live in a state that was functionally Roman. Without any of that, the Italians may sound more like Romans but they were not in substance.

Secondly, our discussion is in the context of the Roman empire, a state. Grass roots culture, diet, language are of course less important than laws, institutions and governance when discussing imperial continuity.

Ciccillo Rre · Oct 18, 2012

Sarog said:
Exactly. The same environment. If you put all those Italians in china, they'd likely wind up with a rice diet. If italians retained Roman diet in the same environment as the romans, that's really just environmental, not evidence of cultural transference. Food is much less important than values and ideology.

Uhm, if you ask Italians what defines their culture, they will typically answer 'food' just before or after 'language' (which for us is very often the regional language). Anyways, you should be able to explain why in the Mediterannean, in places with almost identical environment and climate (Italy, Turkey, Greece, southern Spain, the Levant and so on) there are different culinary cultures which all have ancient roots and distinctive historically evolutive paths.

If Italians were to move to China they would NEVER start eating dim sum. I am sure of this as of the fact I am breathing right now.

Sarog said:
Two points here.

[...]

Secondly, our discussion is in the context of the Roman empire, a state. Grass roots culture, diet, language are of course less important than laws, institutions and governance when discussing imperial continuity.

I agree and I have addressed that in my previous post. However, Roman nostalgia was present in the west as well, and I still argue that if any, Italian culture is the best choice for the Western Restoration option; for all what I have said before, despite not to the point of the Byzantines, the Italians retained the tradition of Roman Law (thanks in particular to the effort the Church made into incorporating/merging it with Ecclesiastical Law in its formal structure, see also my point before about the limited scope of Lombard Law) more than anywhere else in Europe, also as I argued before people retained pre-tetrarchy attitudes towards political power and political struggle; so apart from geographical and linguistical obvious reasons I think that setting Byzantines apart, Italians are a sound choice also under a legal/formal/politico-philosophical perspective among westerners.

Sarog · Oct 18, 2012

Ciccillo Rre said:
Uhm, if you ask Italians what defines their culture, they will typically answer 'food' just before or after 'language' (which for us is very often the regional language). Anyways, you should be able to explain why in the Mediterannean, in places with almost identical environment and climate (Italy, Turkey, Greece, southern Spain, the Levant and so on) there are different culinary cultures which all have ancient roots and distinctive historically evolutive paths.

If Italians were to move to China they would NEVER start eating dim sum. I am sure of this as of the fact I am breathing right now.

Modern Italian food is really quite different though, isn't it? I wouldn't know, but I don't recall reading about Roman era pasta. I'd discuss the point more but being from the wrong hemisphere I really don't know more about Mediterannean food apart from what I see on a menu when I visit, so I can't really compare and contrast except through using much wider analogs like the Dutch settler example and my cultural perspective that informs me that diet really doesn't matter in terms of greater cultural continuity.

I agree and I have addressed that in my previous post. However, Roman nostalgia was present in the west as well, and I still argue that if any, Italian culture is the best choice for the Western Restoration option; for all what I have said before, despite not to the point of the Byzantines, the Italians retained the tradition of Roman Law (thanks in particular to the effort the Church made into incorporating/merging it with Ecclesiastical Law in its formal structure, see also my point before about the limited scope of Lombard Law) more than anywhere else in Europe, also as I argued before people retained pre-tetrarchy attitudes towards political power and political struggle; so apart from geographical and linguistical obvious reasons I think that setting Byzantines apart, Italians are a sound choice also under a legal/formal/politico-philosophical perspective among westerners.

To change the focus of the discussion somewhat, what would be the approach for an Italian restoration? Owning k_italy and k_sicily? Adding north africa and egypt? Winding up with three Roman Empires instead of two, all awkwardly bunched up against each other... the idea just seems clumsy to me. There is already a western claimant to Imperial continuity, and as remarkably un-Roman as it is I think that a western restoration should involve the HRE being restored to what it was under Charlemagne. I think it fits the east-west-legitimacy-squabble narrative better, and having Italians come out of the left field as a third player in all that would be a touch strange with the clutter of empires. The west's idea of Empire was remarkably different from the east, and the HRE should take priority over a potential fictional polity. Gameplay-wise I think the HRE approach has a lot more potential for interesting content than slapping an imperial title on a Italian blob kingdom. Though I'm speaking from anticipation of what might come in the next DLC, not in terms of what people mod to suit personal narratives.

Ciccillo Rre · Oct 18, 2012

Sarog said:
Modern Italian food is really quite different though, isn't it? I wouldn't know, but I don't recall reading about Roman era pasta. I'd discuss the point more but being from the wrong hemisphere I really don't know more about Mediterannean food apart from what I see on a menu when I visit, so I can't really compare and contrast except through using much wider analogs like the Dutch settler example and my cultural perspective that informs me that diet really doesn't matter in terms of greater cultural continuity.

Indeed there is much confusion about this. If you go to the London Museum, section Roman England, section gastronomy you will find packages of modern De Cecco brand pasta, which is wrong. Also I excluded dishes requiring New World ingredients, that limits the scope quite a bit. Romans did not have pasta, but several dishes based on baked flour that were eventually perfectioned and that evolved into pasta. They had almost the same breads and soups. As the Aeneid suggests us, they had focaccia, a thick pizza and actual pizza's predecessor (in my opinion much better than pizza, and very difficult to find of good quality outside Italy) since a very long time. They accompanied focaccia with oil and vegetables as we do today.

You can find similar examples in the Iliad and the Odyssey for predecessors of modern Greek dishes.

Sarog said:
To change the focus of the discussion somewhat, what would be the approach for an Italian restoration? Owning k_italy and k_sicily? Adding north africa and egypt? Winding up with three Roman Empires instead of two, all awkwardly bunched up against each other... the idea just seems clumsy to me. There is already a western claimant to Imperial continuity, and as remarkably un-Roman as it is I think that a western restoration should involve the HRE being restored to what it was under Charlemagne. I think it fits the east-west-legitimacy-squabble narrative better, and having Italians come out of the left field as a third player in all that would be a touch strange with the clutter of empires. The west's idea of Empire was remarkably different from the east, and the HRE should take priority over a potential fictional polity. Gameplay-wise I think the HRE approach has a lot more potential for interesting content than slapping an imperial title on a Italian blob kingdom. Though I'm speaking from anticipation of what might come in the next DLC, not in terms of what people mod to suit personal narratives.

Wait... do you have any inside info/reasonable belief about what will come in the next DLC?

Anyways, yes, I think expanding the HRE idea, perhaps with a Translatio Imperii mechanics that lets say the Franks retake control of the western Imperator Romanorum title (by the way, Italo-Lombard princes had it for a while as well) would be awesome, but I am thinking about something else. In the end, the HRE was a legal fiction.

When I think about 'western restoration' I think about the usurpation of the actual Roman Empire based in the East. Essentially, something based off the Latin Empire. The requirements would be to create the Latin Empire as any catholic latin/iberian/perhaps german or dutch character, then restore the Roman Empire if you meet the right conditions. The two titles would be based on Italian culture for cultural spread (it's better to choose one culture), but that doesn't limit creation requirements. There would be no need of specific kingdom titles, and there would be absolute freedom on the path you choose for doing this - you can start as a turkish ruler and take Constantinople from the East after appropriate cultural and religious conversion (say, occitan catholic).

Sarog · Oct 18, 2012

Ciccillo Rre said:
Wait... do you have any inside info/reasonable belief about what will come in the next DLC?

Anyways, yes, I think expanding the HRE idea, perhaps with a Translatio Imperii mechanics that lets say the Franks retake control of the western Imperator Romanorum title (by the way, Italo-Lombard princes had it for a while as well) would be awesome, but I am thinking about something else. In the end, the HRE was a legal fiction.

When I think about 'western restoration' I think about the usurpation of the actual Roman Empire based in the East. Essentially, something based off the Latin Empire. The requirements would be to create the Latin Empire as any catholic latin/iberian/perhaps german or dutch character, then restore the Roman Empire if you meet the right conditions. The two titles would be based on Italian culture for cultural spread (it's better to choose one culture), but that doesn't limit creation requirements. There would be no need of specific kingdom titles, and there would be absolute freedom on the path you choose for doing this - you can start as a turkish ruler and take Constantinople from the East after appropriate cultural and religious conversion (say, occitan catholic).

No I'm just speculating. I'm not as convinced of the mechanical viability/inevitability of republic/theocracies as others and I'm inclined to think that at least one of the expansions down the pipeline is going to mirror LoR with HRE events and decisions and possibly cardinals and other Catholic stuff. That seems like a logical place to go, mechanically. Your idea is something I haven't considered, and has interesting implications - Roman "restoration" from the Sultanate of Rum could be a weird but interesting twist. As far as future DLC goes I would personally rather see a HRE mirror of LoR to take the other side in the East-West legitimacy squabble, though it would result in a very different empire.

Ciccillo Rre · Oct 18, 2012

Sarog said:
No I'm just speculating. I'm not as convinced of the mechanical viability/inevitability of republic/theocracies as others and I'm inclined to think that at least one of the expansions down the pipeline is going to mirror LoR with HRE events and decisions and possibly cardinals and other Catholic stuff. That seems like a logical place to go, mechanically. Your idea is something I haven't considered, and has interesting implications - Roman "restoration" from the Sultanate of Rum could be a weird but interesting twist. As far as future DLC goes I would personally rather see a HRE mirror of LoR to take the other side in the East-West legitimacy squabble, though it would result in a very different empire.

I agree that the HRE view is better tackled by a devoted DLC, and that republics/theocracies are not that immediately implementable (nor am I interested in them that much). However I would like to see a pagan DLC first! It will probably be the second next one, according to the interpretation of the rumors.

So while we wait for the HRE DLC, here's my view on the Roman Restoration in LoR: it is redundant for Byzantium, which already is the Roman Empire, so the title and the decision can find some alternative, more interesting or at least more challenging use. I will let you know once my work in progress is ready, hopefully you'll appreciate it.

Joel M Bridge · Oct 18, 2012

Sleight of Hand said:
Doesn't it mean that Italian culture will spread, though?

Most what is Italian are really german or greek at the moment.

Ciccillo Rre · Oct 18, 2012

Joel M Bridge said:
Most what is Italian are really german or greek at the moment.

From what I can understand, this is really wrong

Laur · Oct 23, 2012

The HRE and the Italian City Republics' fate was intertwined during the timespan of the game so I believe a new DLC should reflect this - the emergence of the Italian City States which used the conflict between the Papacy and the Emperor to their own advantage, as well as exploiting the imperial military might to their own fraticidal ends - I'm thinking of Pavia calling the emperor against Pisa, defeating it, then the emperor having to descend once more in order to raze for the n-th time the way too independent city of Milan before aiding Pisa extract revenge against Pavia kind of stuff. The game should also reflect the economic and financial importance that Italy and its city states had for the HRE, as opposed to the still wild north. Also, if the ERE does well and manages to restore its influence in the south of the penninsula, then maybe the city states would start playing one empire against the other... the possibilities are endless!

Sleight of Hand · Oct 23, 2012

I'd like the Lombards to be better represented.

Theddude · Oct 24, 2012

Ciccillo Rre said:
From what I can understand, this is really wrong

I think he means that in most scenarios in the game, Italian culture will be absorbed by Greeks or Germans, which is true 95% of the time when the player isn't involved. Sadly tends to happen to Dutch culture too. They revolt against the HRE, get crushed, revoked, HRE gives a German the title, culture assimilates. No more Italians/Dutch.

Ciccillo Rre · Oct 24, 2012

Sleight of Hand said:
I'd like the Lombards to be better represented.

They were extinct as a separate culture since a long time in the game, maybe with the exception of the southern part of the peninsula, where practically the only group of remaining Lombards are the di Salerno family

Theddude said:
I think he means that in most scenarios in the game, Italian culture will be absorbed by Greeks or Germans, which is true 95% of the time when the player isn't involved. Sadly tends to happen to Dutch culture too. They revolt against the HRE, get crushed, revoked, HRE gives a German the title, culture assimilates. No more Italians/Dutch.

Sad, and true, especially now that the conquest_culture bug has been fixed; hopefully something is done for this

George The Eco · Nov 11, 2013

Ciccillo Rre said:
On the culture of the Roman Empire issue: most likely we won't see any fantasy or "extinct" (loosely speaking) culture in vanilla, so we have to stick to what we have.

Please consider that, already in late Imperial Roman times, the elite used to speak Latin and the masses a corrupted, easy and "vulgar" version of the language, that used to vary as a continuum across the western provinces. These would eventually develop into the modern "dialects" or regional language of today Romance-speaking countries, the politico-culturally dominant of which would eventually become the "standard" Italian, French, Occitan, Catalan, Castilian and Portuguese.

As today there are many variations and sub-languages of Italian, Castilian and so on, so it was in medieval and even roman times (with the difference that the medieval languages were, in fact, an intermediate stage between the vulgar Latin and the modern languages). Hence the use of a single Italian, or Castilian or Occitan culture in game is an abstraction.

In addition, just like in the late Roman times, classical Latin was still commonly used by the elite, like the Church, in the west.

Hence I do not see any "evolutionary-historical" reason not to pretend that the restored Roman Empire is just a natural continuation of the late actual Roman Empire. As in that one the dominant culture was the Italo-Latin one, so whatever Sleight of Hand thinks about offenses the Italian culture is still the best abstraction we have for such a continuation.

The issue I see is that in-game, it would be actually the Greeks those who would restore the Roman Empire (but what about if, say, a Norman dynasty has taken over the throne?). This makes some sort of melting pot mechanic fascinating, but how plausible is that Italians all of a sudden would lose their Latin heritage for returning part of the Roman empire (with the exception of those southern areas with a very archaic Greek heritage)? I very much doubt it. The most I would allow is a spread or classical Latin- or Greek-derived names among Italians at the expense of Germanic-derived names - much typical of the Middle Ages - like Aldobrandino, Azzo and Sichelgaita, in a kind of "soft" melting pot, but we can discuss this.

Don't forget that at the times of the "real" Roman Empire, the Latin language greatly influenced Greek (and vice-versa) but it never supplanted it with the exception of peninsular southern Italy. The inverse process looks even more unlikely to me. As much as the Greek emperors would adopt Latin titles and styles to gain legitimacy in the West ('Augustus', as in the DLC).

All the fuss about a "Roman" or a "Nova-Roman" (actual language should require "Novoroman") is just plain wrong and I sincerely hope it will never be implemented.

I would just want to add to this that it shoudl be remembered that at this time The greeks saw themselves as roman the byzatnines saw themselves as roman their empires name was still rome Byzantium is a title created only later so in a certain sense you are right and a new culture would be worng,but the Byzantines had no love for the italians(if you look at venice the papacy and so forth)also italian culture is much different from latin culture(italian culture has been mixed by babarian invasions)so italian would be wrong i would say that the most right thing to do was to leave it as greek and maybe start slowly making italy greek(as that is the culture of the Byzantines)(the last emperor to speak latin was in the 7th century )

Aardvark Bellay · Nov 11, 2013

Did you seriously just necro'ed a thread more than a year old and responded to a post just as old ?

Also, use punctuation and capital letters.

Please.

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