Fishing for any sort of "turning points" or "decisive moments" in History is almost always an exercise in pushing some purposeful narrative. I think the only way to get a sense for Historical understanding is to read multiple narratives and understand that there are multiple points of view and complex systems change are complex and made of a whole lot of small changes, which cannot be all captured or captured fully by any one narrative.
Some periods transitions may be construed as "phase transitions" by scholars advancing interdisciplinary and "complex systems" types of analytical frame. Still, we shouldn't conflate such explanations with very well defined constructs from physics which rely on highly complicated mathematical models. We don't have nearly enough data to build such models for human behavior or social systems. It is just a metaphor.
Between the height of Rome's Imperial power in the second century to the dawn of Medieval Europe in the fifth you'd need thousands of pages to reasonably cover all the aspects of what changed and how. Simply put, there is a whole lot of irreducible complexity in History.
> It is estimated that Rome’s population fell from perhaps 500,000 in the mid-5th century to as little as 25,000 in the 560s. Other Italian cities suffered even worse fates. Milan, once Italy’s second largest city, was razed to the ground in 539 with its entire population either killed or enslaved.
I was going to ask how the Eastern Roman Empire could still wage war with the greatly diminished support of what was likely a war-wary public. But I see that the decimation of the public took place over a few generations.
It raises the hair on the back of neck, when I think of what world our children will inherit and accept as normal.
Other than modern day arbitrary interpretation, isn't the byzantine empire the roman empire? They were called romans by each other and their neighbors. The roman empire fell when the ottoman turks invaded.
Ship of thessius and all. The empire slowly changed in many ways but people considered it rome until the ottomans.
When did the british empire end? Or does the commonwealth count? Isn't the UK alone that same empire still, but evolved?
Some periods transitions may be construed as "phase transitions" by scholars advancing interdisciplinary and "complex systems" types of analytical frame. Still, we shouldn't conflate such explanations with very well defined constructs from physics which rely on highly complicated mathematical models. We don't have nearly enough data to build such models for human behavior or social systems. It is just a metaphor.
Between the height of Rome's Imperial power in the second century to the dawn of Medieval Europe in the fifth you'd need thousands of pages to reasonably cover all the aspects of what changed and how. Simply put, there is a whole lot of irreducible complexity in History.