Hello and welcome to another episode of ancient warfare magazine, the podcast. Today we're

discussing issue 14-5, the breakaway empires of the 3rd century AD. With me today, oh, I'm

Yos Borthaus, I'm the editor of the magazine. With me today, I'm Murray Dame, Mark McCaffrey,

Michael, Mark DeSantis, and Lindsay Powell.

Hello, everyone, good to have you back. Let's see what we can talk about, about breakaway

empires of the third century. Murray, you wrote the introduction in this issue. Maybe you can

give us a very short summary of the summary of 40 years of complete chaos.

So the third century, it's no longer politic to talk about the third century crisis.

That's the way that most people would probably know about the third century,

is that it's a crisis where suddenly the empire implodes,

and there's all these breakaway empires that we know about in Gaul, in Britain, in Palmyra.

There's also a couple in Africa and in Egypt.

And they splinter away from the empire through the middle years of the third century.

And then by the end of the century, under the firm hand of Diocletian, those are all brought back into the fold.

And of course, there are other aspects to the third century, which is, of course,

that all of the insecurity and instability is present earlier.

There's this still to the day today, you have this idea that the second

century AD is when the empire is strong and it's stable, especially with the idea of the adoptive

empires of the Antonines, and that all gets ruined when poor old Marcus Aurelius chooses who would choose

Commodus, but Marcus Aurelius allows his son, Commodus to become emperor and things go

downhill from there. There's sort of blips on the radar when things become unstable,

but for the first 35 years of the third century, things are relatively stable. There's still assassinations.

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