Tiberius, Korea and the Han Empire. What happened in the Year 3 & 4 AD? | The history of every year

So the reason we're doing two years in one video this time is because our research turned up very little actual recorded events that specifically took place in the year 3 AD. I guess it was just kind of a dull year. In any case, my name is Thoth, the God of Time. And I am Athena, the Goddess of Knowledge. Welcome back to Year by Year, where we take a look at all major recorded events of every year in human history. And this is everything that happened in the year 3 and 4 CE. While it may be the year 3 AD according to the Gregorian calendar, if we were to look at the Buddhist calendar, the year 3 would have been the year 547 instead, as that calendar was invented several centuries earlier. This set of lunar and solar calendars are primarily used in Tibet, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and by some Chinese populations for religious purposes to mark important Buddhist holidays. During this year in history, we saw in Rome the renewal of Emperor Augustus's rule for another 10 year period. But let's be honest, by this point into his reign, the renewal is more or less just a formality. It wasn't like he was going to be voted out at this stage of his life, especially after learning from the ultimate mistake of his dear uncle Julius Caesar. And let's be fair, Augustus did manage to deliver a real period of Pax Romana that would continue for decades after Augustus's eventual death. The other notable event that occurred this year was in the Western Han Dynasty of China, and if you recall from the previous videos, we talked about a man named Wang Mang. Here is a man who, with a gullible Empress Dowager in one hand and his own personality cult in the other, manages to claw his way into both the royal court and the royal family by having his daughter marry the child emperor. His son, Wang Yu, however, hated his father's scheming and personality cult. But more so, he feared that in the future his entire family would suffer once the young Emperor Ping grows up and realizes that his quote-unquote trusty advisor Wang Mang was actually manipulating him and purposely isolating the child emperor from his own family. And so Wang Yu formed a conspiracy with his teacher Wu Zhang and his brother-in-law Lu Quan, as well as multiple uncles of the young child emperor in an attempt to break Wang Mang's hold over the country and royal family. Unfortunately for Wang Yu and the gang of conspirators, their plans were doomed from the start because it was entirely way too convoluted. They wanted to scare Wang Mang by throwing a bottle of blood onto his mansion door so that he would think it was a supernatural or divine sign that he should transfer all his power over to the uncles of the emperor. It sounds quite silly now, but to be fair Wang Mang did get his court position by faking a divine sign with a The problem is that Wang Mang was the one that created that superstitious symbolism, which would stand to reason that if he saw this blood on his door and then hear his son telling him it's a sign, he would put the two and two together pretty quickly. But we'll never know for sure because the gang was discovered by Wang Mang's guards before they managed to throw the bottle and as a result Wang Yu and the gang were arrested. Not long after Wang Yu hung himself in were executed. Wang Mang, ever the opportunist, took this chance to wipe out other potential enemies. He had the conspirators tortured and anyone they mentioned were also arrested and executed. This purge included the princess Jing Wu, Wang Mang's own uncle Wang Li, as well as his cousin Wang Ren. But how did the emperor's mother feel about all of this? How did the Empress Dowager, who presides above everyone including Wang Mang in terms of authority and power, felt about her own family being purged by this one man? Well, this is when she goes from gullible to an absolute brick in the head. Wang Mang genuinely just told her that they all died of illness within weeks of each other and the Empress Dowager just believed him. And that was it. He got away with it just like that. Now feeling invincible, Wang Mang purged a few more officials who wasn't willing to follow him. And with the wedding of his daughter to the child Emperor Ping on the horizon, Wang Mang's hold on power became absolute as his title officially gets upgraded to superior duke. We'll return to Wang Mang's saga when we get to the year 6 AD. But for now we'll conclude the year 3 with a random trivia, which is that 3 AD is in fact the only year of the pig that's also a prime numbered year. And if you want to learn other thrilling pork-based trivia such as this, then remember to hit like and subscribe. Let's just move on to the year 4 AD by starting with Korea. Incidentally, 4 AD in the old Korean calendar would be the year While Korea today mostly uses the Gregorian calendar, traditional holidays like Seollal are still based on the old calendar as it's considered the first day of the traditional Korean New Year. This ancient calendar, just like many other traditional calendars in East Asia, derives from the old Chinese calendar and was used until January 1st of 1896, when the country officially adopted the Gregorian calendar. There's going to be some complicated names coming up, and I do apologize for butchering it, but I will also include them on the screen so you lovely folks can look it up as well. Now with that out of the way, in the year 4 AD, Namhae Chacheong succeeds from Baekjeokjeose as the new and second king in the kingdom of Silla, Silla being one of the three Korean kingdoms at the time. The Chacheong part of Namhae Chacheong is an early version of the Silla title, and according to Samguk Sagi, also known as History of the Three Kingdoms, Chacheong meant shaman in Old Korean. Namhae was the only son of Hyogeose, the founder of Silla, and his reign from this day onwards would be a difficult one, mired by series of invasions starting with this very year that he's crowned. Because in the year 4 AD, almost right after succeeding his father, the Lilang army of the Han Empire would surround Silla's capital. The fighting would last most of the year until it was eventually repelled. Let us travel westwards to the Middle East and the Parthian Empire and witness an interregnum, which is essentially a period of a gap in government and social order. This can happen between reigns of two monarchs, and often accompanied with civil unrest, warlords, and power vacuums. And in this case, it was caused by the downfall of Fratis V. If you recall back in episode 1, we talked about how Fratis, the King of Kings of Parthia, gave up his claims to the Kingdom of Armenia. After a long period of conflict with Rome, this capitulation gained him an official acknowledgement from Rome that he was a And Fratis wanted this because back at home his rule was rather insecure, and he wrongly thought that having another great empire acknowledge his rule would cement his position of power. It, in fact, backfired completely. What Fratis failed to consider was the fact that the main reason the nobility were discontent with his rule is actually because he wasn't fully Parthian and only half-noble birth. You see, a few decades back when Emperor Augustus visited Parthia, he gifted an Italian slave girl named Musa to Fratis IV, who then gave birth to Fratis V. But his ascension to the throne wasn't a peaceful transition, as Musa actually helped him claim the throne by murdering his father. So as far as the Parthian nobles were concerned, Fratis V was half-Roman and a usurper. So when Fratis conceded Armenia to get the approval of the Romans, this was the last straw, and both mother and son were expelled from the throne. What exactly happened after to Fratis is unclear. Some sources say he fled to Rome with his mother, where Augustus welcomed them. Other sources say that during the uprising, both mother and son were killed by peasants. In either case, the crown was eventually offered to a nobleman named Orodes III. Unfortunately, nothing is really known about this man and his lineage, and his reign was so short that he didn't really have time to do anything, though coins were minted with his image, and this is all we have of this short-lived king. We'll continue the story of the Parthian Empire in the year 6 AD, when his successor, Vononese I, takes the throne. Let's keep going westward to Rome, and continue to untangle the mess that is the lineage of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. We last left Emperor Augustus, after he brought Tiberius back from his self-imposed exile, and named him as his heir, though at the same time Augustus also named another young man named Agrippa Postumus as his heir. This, of course, is to have backup plans when it comes to successions, and will in no way cause infighting, division and murder years down the road, because as you know, successions to great empires are famously ever so peaceful and non-eventful. But speaking about forward thinking, right after being named heir, Tiberius also adopts a young Germanicus as his own heir. Germanicus was the son of Nero Claudius Drusus, not the same Nero as the one who's known for string instruments and city burning, that won't happen for several decades yet. This Nero was a rather great military commander, and most known for launching the first major Roman campaign into Germania, which is basically most of today's Europe, spanning across Germany, France, Poland, Denmark, Czech Republic, Netherlands and Austria. He also famously dueled quite a few Germanic chiefs in single combat, and eventually taking the armor and weapon of the enemy king after defeating them in duel. For this action, he would be given the honor of Spolia Opima, which made him the fourth and final Roman to ever earn that title. During the same year, the Roman assemblies would pass two laws, the Lex Aelia Centia and the Lex Fufia Caninia, at the behest of Augustus. What these two laws did was to place a limitation on the manumission of slaves. Manumission means being freed from ownership, an equivalent to the act of releasing a child from their father's legal power, known as emancipation. There were a few key things in these two laws, but one thing the assembly decided that for a manumission to be valid, the owner of the slave had to be at least 20 years old, and the slave at least 30. This means that if you were a young man, and remember in ancient Rome, 14 was considered manhood, and let's say you were gifted slaves by your family when you moved into your own villa, your slaves cannot be freed until you are at least 20, and only if they also reached past the age of 30. Another key thing with these two laws was that slaves who had been punished by their masters for criminal acts could not become Roman citizens if they were freed later, and instead would be counted among the dediti sai, a class of people who were free subjects but cannot hold the rights to any Roman civic, political, or legal statuses. The last important part of the two laws was that it is possible for a freed slave to gain full citizenship rights if he married a Roman freed woman and had children with her, and the child was at least the age of one at the time of the manumission. If the freed slave could prove all of this to a magistrate, he, his wife, and his child would all become full citizens. Augustus inserted this provision in an attempt to help increase the rate of marriage and childbirth, as he strongly believed that public morals were in decline, and thought that encouraging marriage would restore a degree of virtue to the public. Let's stay in the Roman Empire a little longer, but move on to a happier and far nerdier event, the completion of the Universal History Compendium, which was a total of 144 books written by Nicholas of Damascus in an attempt to catalogue all recorded events and history that came before him. These books are mostly lost to us now, but they were referenced and used in the creation of multiple other great writings throughout history, such as in the Suda, which was a 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world, and made references to these books up to Book 124. Another great work that made references was the Constantinian Excerpts, which was a 53-volume Greek anthology written by over 25 historians and commissioned by Emperor Constantine VII nearly a thousand years later, and the excerpts would quote from the first seven books extensively. Another book that references this great archive of Nicolaus would be the Antiquities of the Jews, written by Josephus in the 13th century, using these books to research the history of King Herod the Great, since Nicolaus was a very close and intimate friend with Herod. Sadly, the year that marked the completion of his greatest masterpiece would also be the year of his passing, but Nicolaus of Damascus' contribution to history does not end at just these volumes. His work also includes the Autobiography of Augustus Caesar, which allowed historians great insight to the life of Augustus, except for the final decade and a half of his life as Nicolaus died 15 years before Augustus. And it is with the completion of Nicolaus' History of the World that we conclude the year 4 AD. In the next video, we will once again combine two years in history into a single video, as the year 5 AD is once again quite empty of recorded events, nothing more than a couple of notable births and a few political position changes in Rome. The year 6 CE, however, is quite jam-packed with events, from assassinations, kidnappings and invasions to city-wide disasters and failed campaigns, so stay tuned and thank you for watching. This has been Thoth and Athena and we hope to see you in the next video and please remember to be kind and love one another.