Examples like aquaducts, sewage, advanced architecture, etcetera
In: 121
A lot of it was sort of vanity projects of the time, better than pyramids but not by that much, Rome got the fanciest stuff and rest of the empire got to pay for it. After the empire, the economical and political concentration of power to continue doing such things just wasn’t there anymore. And when it again happened with St Peter’s Basilica it resulted in some chap nailing a manifesto on some church door and kicking off a lot of bloody wars.
It did make it, medieval people didn’t lost ancient knowledge, they were even heavilly dependent on it, ancient greek and roman texts were copied in mass at this time, and hopefully, because the originals are lost to us.
there are many periods of time in the middle ages, and technology thrived really thrived since the 12th century, which is the begining of industrialization due to the use of watermills.
However, it is us who lost the knowledge of medieval people.
For most of the Empire, the population of Rome was estimated to be in excess of a million. By 500 AD, the population had dropped to about 80,000. By 1000 AD, the population was 30,000 and the indigent and bandits were squatting in the ruins of the Colosseum. The Eternal City didn’t really recover until the Renaissance.
To run counter to some of what’s in here; it’s not that Medieval people didn’t understand these things or lack the money.
They didn’t *need* them a lot of the time.
Social, political, and economic changes in the medieval produced a more distributed population. The largest medieval cities were located directly on water ways and didn’t need dedicated aquaducts or sewage until the early modern period when population booms blew the size of these cities up. Link London and Paris.
There were some aqueducts built in the Middle Ages btw. Many you’ll find in Spain which is drier and hotter. Some aqueducts used in the period were themselves roman and maintained so no one needed a new one.
And the exception here is architecture. Look at gothic cathedrals from the high Middle Ages and seriously say it’s not some advanced stuff. Castles built by medieval states were way more advanced than the forts of the Romans, but siege warfare had also evolved a lot in those centuries. Fortunes were spent on these structures and they’re no less complex a feat than anything built by the Greeks or the Romans in terms of design and execution.
There’s a lot in this comment that makes assumptions about the Roman Empire and about the Medieval era. But it can be answered in a general sense: large and complex societies require large and complex societies in order to maintain themselves. When the large and complex society goes away, the systems and technologies that it built and relied upon stop working.
For example, agriculture. City of Rome was so economically important that many generations of farmers/farm workers in, say, Spain, made their living by growing grain as a cash crop to to feed the imperial city. Doing so required multiple complex systems: transportation (moving the grain to ports, ships to move the grain), economic (so they could do this and get paid), legal and political (for resolving disputes); social/commercial (agents whose job it was to co-ordinate – and profit from – the process); as well as urban systems that provided markets, administrative centres, etc. Take one part of it away and the system crumbles. No large population in Rome means no market; no roads means you can’t get it to the ships; no agents means it isn’t worth it for any one farmer to take their grain across the sea in the hope of selling it; no economic system means no way to group the output of many farms together for transport and sale in a cost effective way; no stable political and legal system makes it impossible to trade and transport goods over large distances. The system took decades/centuries to evolve, and without the components that kept it together, it stopped working.
Now apply this to all of the systems built to support cities or massive infrastructural systems like drainage or large buildings, and the problem becomes obvious and circular. You can’t have aqueducts without infrastructure; you don’t generally need aqueducts if you don’t have large urban centres that require water; cities concentrate resources, skills, and political power in order to create infrastructure (not to say that you need cities for this, there are other dynamics, but cities do seem to work well). It works in reverse too: take away the cities, you won’t be need or be able to build and maintain the aqueducts, take away the aqueducts, and the cities run dry.
A lot of long posts and I have not seen this referenced.
In addition to wealth and power, empires aggregate technology. Different cultures and societies each develop technology, that all is mixed when they are conquered.
So the largest empires have their choice of the best technologies, and they in turn are more likely to stand the test of time.
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