alt Hacker NewsThis is a very modern reading of a very ancient situation.
By the time of Western Roman Empire collapsing, the realm was Christian for two centuries and gladiator games et al. were banned for so long that no one alive would remember them happening. Most of the local languages were also gone and the previously conquered people considered themselves Romans and spoke Latin. They didn't have any Wikipedia or nationalist schooling system to teach them that they were once Celts or Illyrs, 400 years ago.
(Even in our modern world where history is taught and movies and books are abundant, few people have any idea of who conquered whom in 1620 AD and what were the consequences for their distant ancestors. This is a domain of history geeks. No modern German loses their sleep over whether his city was once plundered by the Palatinate forces or burnt to the ground by a Saxon army, and would not dismantle modern Germany just because such atrocities once took place.)
Also, the Roman empire did not dissolve into a vacuum, with the previous provinces simply declaring their long desired independence. It was conquered from the outside, and the attackers would not necessarily treat the subdued population any better. They might, or they might not.
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>By the time of Western Roman Empire collapsing, the realm was Christian for two centuries and gladiator games et al. were banned for so long that no one alive would remember them happening.
That is a fair point. But I believe the Romans were still a pretty brutal and repressive regime right up the the end. And also levied high taxes. Whether the regional powers that replaced them were any better, was a matter of luck I suppose.
>few people have any idea of who conquered whom in 1620 AD and what were the consequences for their distant ancestors
I bet most people in the US could tell you in broad strokes who used to live in North America and who conquered them.
> Even in our modern world where history is taught and movies and books are abundant, few people have any idea of who conquered whom in 1620 AD and what were the consequences for their distant ancestors.
This is just wrong, people are typically very well aware of the history of the area they grew up in. If you ask people in Sweden if Denmark once ruled Sweden, I'd bet around 99% of Swedish people would say yes. That ended 1523, they probably wouldn't know that exact date but they would know it happened for sure, people joke about that all the time. If you ask people in Finland if they were once ruled by Sweden, I'd bet 100% would say yes. If you asked exactly what periods people will be shaky, but they will know Sweden once ruled them and then Russia did rule them.
I think everyone goes into detail about their home area in the 9 years you study history in school, at least what happened the past 1000 years since that is recent and well documented, studying every single recorded war and rebellion for the area you live in is normal.
And the consequences? You can see them all over the places, you see the language changing, you see cultural connections everywhere with the conquerors etc, even hundreds of years later. Even today you have remnants from Mexico owning Texas like Cathedral of San Fernando, people wouldn't think USA built that with such a name.
Even USA does this, although its history doesn't stretch 1000 years back but the wars USA was in I think are well known by most Americans. And this goes for states as well, I'd doubt you would find many who grew up in Texas that doesn't know it was once a Mexican province and was conquered by USA. People in New York might be more shaky about that, but that's because the war didn't really affect their area.
As to "the previously conquered people considered themselves Romans and spoke Latin", I don't believe everybody spoke Latin, as even in what we now call Italy, people kept speaking their various regional languages, let alone in territories with people groups with a more distantly related "mother tongue". They would keep identifying with their ethnic and linguistic origins.