Damned Muslims

[Anomalocaris]

No. Rome had no trouble maintaining her far-flung empire until the military disasters of the mid 3'd century any more than Britain had trouble maintaining her empire in the days before radio communication. The provincial governors, either imperial or senatorial, had great discretion but as we know from Pliny's correspondence they regularly wrote reports to Rome. Those governors were also rotated frequently.

Well, maybe i shouldve said that if a province wasnt substainable it wouldve ended up being abandoned, as britain eventually was. There'd be no sense in occupying land that wasnt of any economic or military importance afterall.

The reason the Empire was held together up until then was because of the idea of the triumverate, it took the admin pressure off of the roman senate and decentralized governance amongst provincial leaders. It still took a little over a week at the very best for a message from York to reach Rome, and if the governors had to wait 2 weeks to send and receive orders for eveyr facet of administration you can imagine how the empire wouldve been totally unworkable.

But that being said, the empire in the first days of the triumverate was half the size as it was in 300AD, and if the idea of decentralized government wasnt welcomed in the Octavians days it wouldve been desperately needed by Constantines time, else the empire wouldve collapsed.

Triumverate ended with Lepidus, before the founding of the Empire.

Yes, later Discletian did find it more expedient to divide the empire into 2, but this was an Empire whose western half was much improverished by a century of civil wars, and the center of the National power has clearly shifted from the moral capital of the city of Rome to lands in the east whose wealth supported much of the empire's physical strength. So in some ways the division was to allow the rich eastern half to independently defend itself without having its strength sapped by the needs of the west.