Educate me about the crisis of the third century /his/

>>3377882
The Antonine Plague killed a good 10% of the entire Empire, more in the cities, and even more in the legions. This severely damaged the economy in the west beyond repair, and forever subordinated it to the East and Byzantium.

>what if the empire never recovered and splintered apart during the crisis?

Hard to say. Without the Tetrarchy and Dominate, quite a few things could have turned out drastically different.

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>>3377882
After the plague the crisis was pretty much unavoidable in some form or another, and nobody - not Marcus Aurelius or anyone else - could have done anything to stop it. The factors at work were just on too large a scale, like population movements, climate change, the Roman agricultural and economic situation, and the ever-present issue of succession.

The crisis is such a clear break from classical antiquity. Everything from about 270 onwards just looks and feels so utterly different to what came before it, I'm really surprised it's as little known and underappreciated as it is.

Also without Aurelian, the empire would likely have fallen much sooner. The west just wasn't able to survive without the rest of the Empire to prop it up. But the state centred on Palmyra in the east would probably have lasted as long as they held onto Egypt - so theoretically indefinitely. No idea about the "middle" third of the empire, but it had to deal with the Danube which was the longest frontier, so it likely would have been overrun much as the west.

>>3377932
>10% of the entire Empire, more in the cities,
SOUNDS RIGHT, CONSIDERING MOST PEOPLE DIDN'T LIVE IN CITIES.

> realized too late caps was on

>>3378272
>Everything from about 270 onwards just looks and feels so utterly different to what came before it
Agreed. I would argue that Diocletian's tax and census reforms were the final nail in the coffin. That more or less ended the classical economic structure and kickstarted a form of proto-feudalism where everyone was tied to their inherited land, occupation, and social status.

>>3378272
>>3378531
>Everything from about 270 onwards just looks and feels so utterly different to what came before it
Apart from the rise of feudalism, what other things shifted?

>>3378540
The replacement of the masquerade of the Principate with the openly autocratic Dominate and the formation of a true bureaucratic apparatus to manage the empire are the ones that pop out immediately to me. These two things essentially finally exorcised the ghost of the republic from the Roman state and turned it into a proto-Byzantine empire, the form it will more or less hold for the next thousand or so years.

>>3378408
People in cities are closer together making it easier to transmit and there are more animals and filth.