Ok, so first of all, yeah, we definitely lingered on Rome for a bit too long there. I’m going to pick up the pace now for a while.
For starters, I want to point out that this episode not only marks the end of me talking about Rome (for the most part), it also marks the end of the Ancient World. You can kind of divide western history into 3 periods – the ancient world, which starts with creation, and ends in September AD 476 with the fall of Rome, and you also have the Modern World, which basically starts with the Enlightenment, around AD 1700 or so. Anything in between those dates of 476 and 1700 is essentially the Middle Ages. All of those dates are kind fuzzy, and AD 477 was probably a lot more like the ancient world than it was like rest of the Middle Ages, but you gotta divide it somewhere. Fall of Rome is an easy landmark for that kind of division. So now we are moving into the Middle Ages, and we’re going to stay here for not quite 20 episodes or so.
But before we get fully into the Middle Ages, and all the cool barbarian stuff that happens there, like Vikings, let’s take stock of the rest of how the rest of the world was doing in AD 476.
Because while we were focused on Rome, there was actually stuff going on in the rest of the world.