diocletian

The current year numbering is because a monk called Dionysius Exiguus thought the existing system of numbering the years since Emperor Diocletian was stupid as Diocletian persecuted Christians.

With certain exceptions, the ruling dynasties of Byzantium continued the oligarchical policy of Diocletian and Constantine.

The Diocletian program led to the depopulation of the cities, serfdom for farmers, and the collapse of civilization into a prolonged Dark Age.

It's like witnessing Diocletian do away with the republican pretense of earlier emperors.

Everyone nowadays is obsessed with Zimbabwe, or the ex-Soviet Unions, or the Diocletian Roman Empire, but those are red herrings, minor blips in a sea of (excessive) financial restraint.

I agree that some rulers of ancient Rome attacked christianity in part because they feared it threatened their political power (not the case for Diocletian as I'll explain later).

I believe most of the issues in Western Europe were due to the reorganization of the Roman Empire by the Emperor Diocletian after the time period known as the crisis of the third century.

On the one hand, it would render us incapable of acting if we were to economically quantify this entire value chain like Diocletian and then insist on slapping an appropriate price tag on it.

To anyone living in the Empire in 235, I suspect it felt an awful lot like the Year of the Five Emperors (about as far away from 235 as Diocletian is the other direction) and it wasn't until a while later that it became clear that no Septimus Severus type was going to be able to put it all back together quickly.

Cf, the Roman empire in Diocletian's era, post Tito Yugoslavia, political "Islam" in any number of countries, the Baath party in Syria and Iraq, etc.

I looked up the "bound to parent professions" and the first reference I can find is to emperor Diocletian around 280c.e., I admit I'm not sure if that counts as part of your dark ages.

Wiki has the result: "However, the Edict did not solve the problem, as Diocletian's mass minting of coins of low metallic value continued to increase inflation, and the maximum prices in the Edict were apparently too low.

He did this to replace the then dominant Era of Martyrs system, because he did not wish to continue the memory of a tyrant who persecuted Christians." So AD itself was a neologism to avoid mentioning something offensive (or someone offensive, Diocletian).

Under Diocletian, the flow of direct requests to the emperor was rapidly reduced and soon ceased altogether.

However, emperors kept the Senate around for a few hundred more years (at least until Diocletian).

It was reorganized by Aurelian, Diocletian, and Constantine with a series of measures that centered on banning any change in the technology of the means of production, and very heavy taxation.