It was Bob Marley who sang that “2000 years of history could not be wiped away so easily.”
Lucius Septimius Bassianus (April 4, 188 – April 8, 217), commonly known as Caracalla, was a Black Roman Emperor who ruled from 211 to 217.
Caracalla was the eldest son of Septimius Severus, the first black African-born Emperor of Rome. But before Septimius Severus, there had been other Roman-born black Emperors of Rome. This story of the other black emperors of Rome will be explored in another write-up, but for now we focus on Caracalla.
Unlike his father Septimius Severus, Caracalla was born and raised in Italy. After the death of his father, he ruled jointly with his younger brother Geta until the latter’s death in 211.
Caracalla’s reign was notable for the Constitutio Antoniniana, granting Roman citizenship to freemen throughout the Roman Empire. That act laid a foundation for a peaceful multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Empire that Rome was to become.
Caracalla was mean towards the military incursions of the Goths, the Parthians and the Tartars, and he took brutal and extreme steps to suppress those invaders from Turkemenistan that were sorely troubling the cohesion of the Roman state.
A modern-day British historian Edward Gibbon, a descendant of the Goths, referred to him as, “the common enemy of mankind” because of the massacres he authorized in various parts of the empire.
In AD 213, Caracalla went north to the German frontier and subdued the Alamanni tribesmen who were causing trouble in the Agri Decumates. Due to that feat the Senate conferred upon him the title of “Germanicus Maximus”.
In AD 216, Caracalla took on the Parthians, a related tribe of the Goths, (the Parthians are the ancestors of the modern day Farsi-Iranians) who were causing problems on the southernmost flank of the empire. He tricked the Parthians into believing that he accepted a marriage and peace proposal, but then launched a series of blistering attacks on the Parthians when their guards were down. The thereafter ongoing conflict and skirmishes became known as the Parthian war of Caracalla.
The baths of Caracalla were the largest public baths ever built in ancient Rome. To put it in historical perspective, the central room of the baths was larger than St. Peter’s Basilica. It could easily accommodate over 2,000 Roman citizens. The bath house opened in 216, complete with libraries, private rooms and outdoor tracks. Caracalla ordered the building of those baths that are named in his honour.
Caracalla was assasinated by his body-guard while travelling from Edessa to continue the war against Parthian. He died on April 8, AD 217.
It is important that Africans should remember and celebrate Caracalla and his family line, i.e. the Severan Dynasty, because as black Africans, they were us and we are them.
By the dint of their heritage, they were part of our legacy, and their attainments represented part of our unfolding tale of greatness, of towering historical achievements, of courage, regency and inimitable genius.
The descendants of the Goths who conquered Rome, and now control historical narratives, would want you to believe that they were the real Romans. Through centuries of selective narration and faking of historical artefacts, they have largely succeeded in hiding the central role of the Africans in the defunct Roman empire.
They hide the facts that the Goths and the Parthians (the ancestors of the present day Germans, Russians, British, Spanish, Italians, and Iranians…the Aryans!!!) were the mortal enemies of the dark Ibero-Maurisian Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, Libyans, and Numidians, Mauritanians, and Saharans, the original owners of western Europe. They promote a fake and false notion that Rome was a so-called white created civilization affiliated with their Gothic ancestry. But this is a lie!
Again we chant, blessings on the memorial of the Severan Dynasty, they were the “naigre” Emperors of Rome, from Africa. We will be meeting more Black Roman Emperors in the next series.
Oguejiofo Annu
September 25, 2010
Hi Jahday,
Colin the Goth here. I should be out conquering empires but I just can’t keep away.
It isn’t that easy to tell white people from black people. Take the photo that illustrates your blog’s masthead. I take it that is you. Well it could easily be a white man. The nose is pretty angular and the hair is straight. I would probably take him to be white. On the other hand, given your name you might well be black.
Does it matter that much? We are all humans and maybe we are not so very different.
Point blank, it’s true what they say when they say Africa starts in Rome. The moors which were black ruled Rome and the Egyptians that build the pyramids were black. What they taught in school was when it comes to the eastern civilation. Break history down and you will get His-Story. Get it.
Serious topics and nuff knowledge,,,, feelin dis site.
Hi Colin,
jus to let u kno d image/photo at the top of d blog is actually The Great EMPEROR HAILIE SALASIE. AND HE’S BLACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MY name is TJ and I am a black man.I find it very interesting that there were black emperors,and I must say I am pretty proud to learn about this.
Carcalla’s mother was from present day Syria. This means his birth was spurious. Geta was murdered by Carcalla.
No WRONG ASNWER i’m a teacher so i’m very smart.
ahhahaha loll
And Caracalla was one of the worst Emperors Rome ever had!!! I see frightening parallels between the Arrogance of Caracalla and what he did to the economy of Rome and What the current US president is doing to the United States! Both sides of the story should be told on all sites!! The good and the bad!!
Both sides? Barack is doing a wonderful job. If only he could get your kind to follow suite. Bush W was one of the worst, but I bet you didn’t think so, did you? Of course not. Because you are for your own kind regardless. Guess what? SO AM I.
Blimey,
what a lot of people with issues ….. as a white Briton, probably descended from a mix of Britons and Anglo-Saxons I have no axe to grind about the Romans but I do find the lack of knowledge and bogus history on this site worrying.
Look at statues or images of the ancient Romans or Greeks, do they look like the Romans or Greeks of today or not, no .. centuries of invasions from the east by Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, Franks and so on has diluted the original Romans and in Greece the migration of turkic peoples and later Ottoman enslavement and settlement has created a people that to me do not look much different to the modern Turks.
In the same way, the Romans and Greeks settled the north African littoral and the fringes of the Mediterranean for hundreds of years, so Septimius Severus and his son were probably of Greek or Roman stock, not arab and not black african either; in fact if you look at their images dispassionately you will see they have classic European features.
Why does it matter to black africans, why do they want to have been rulers of Rome, why not just celebrate your own cultural backgrounds and not try to annexe that of others; if you are proud of your heritage and confident in yourselves why do you need somebody else’s history?
Why the need to define somebody by skin colour anyway, I like to think of Barack Obama as just as much white as black, he’s 50/50 isn’t he?
BobB
BobB
2000 years of Muurish history could not be wiped away so easily. Though your rulers tried to do so, (I will not credit you cause your ancestors were probably slaves, serfs or peasants), they failed.
Septimius Severus was of African stock. He was Berber. He was not Roman/Greek. A little research could have saved you this embarrasment. Google the history of Septimius Severus.
That said, it is obvious to me that your level of cognition is basically elementary. It is easier to sneer, and be full of hubris, than it is to sit down and study history. If you did study history you would not be demonstrating your ignorance by imputing that Africans somehow misappropriate history, when you are clearly the culture thief.
You are the culture thief in claiming descent from Britons, when you are slavic or gothic only. Early Britons were black and brown in complexion like “the Silures”. Google that term. The Silures are different from your gothic ancestors who came and did them in.
You are a culture thief in implying that forged Roman statues, reworked between 18th and 20th centuries are indicative of who the Romans were. The Romans were a mix of many nationalites which included a sizeable black citizenry playing very prominent role. Your ancestors the Gothics and the slavics and the Turkics, they were the enemies then. They eventually swamped Rome through Alaric the Goth.
Today, your leaders wish to re-write history because they control the media. But 2000years of history cannot be wiped away so easily.
And the half that has not been told, Rasta Livewire is uttering bold! We are electric, we shock and burn out the paleness of ignorance. Welcome to Rasta Livewire. Time to learn…
I am a Gael with a good pinch of Pict, the roman empire literally stopped in my back garden, Sorry dude thar aint rasta’s in my woodpile. my people bled Rome dry so on the Antonie wall it, that it retreated to back to Hadrian walls.
How was he not roman or greek with a latin name lol like (Septimius Severus)
The need arises because of a political agenda to marginalize Western culture and thereby diminish the perceived power of white people as “exploiters” and “colonialists” to reforge the world into a new image. It’s about Marxism and it’s about the desire of the Left to erase the Judeo-Christian world, which it views as the source of all the world’s evils – capitalism and all that sort of rot.
So, Afrocentrism is another “useful idiot” movement that has been promulgated and nurtured by the Left over the past few decades to further a larger political agenda. And, given the painful memories of the recent past, and the burning desire to rise above their own dehumanization, many blacks eagerly embrace this historic revisionism.
jonathan8184, which part of stormfront, chimpout or chimpmania have you copied that nonsense. Please provide a time in history where the Albino race had a genuine interest in black history. So this left movement consisting of Albino revisionists are funding and/or conducting research to give black people their rightful place in history? After 500 years of whitewashing history and telling outright lies, a group of Albinos decided it is time to tell the truth?
In spite of the empirical evidence presented, it never stops your kind from telling outright lies because of your hubris. Even when Albino historians accidentally tell the truth, it never stops the others from continuing to tell the false/fake version of history. For example, why did Albinos left Central Asia, their homeland, where they built no pyramids and went to Egypt and built pyramids in black Africa, if we are to believe that the Egyptians were Albinos from European?
Your reaction to the thought of a any Roman being black comes as a shock to you. I understand the need to want to continue believing in the lie of, “If they were great, they must have been white and even if they weren’t white, let’s pretend.” Aside from your emotional defense, jonathan8184, what evidence do you have to counter what has been stated about the Romans on this site? Albino history is a fantasy concocted as a result of their deficiency in melanin.
Face fact, jonathan, there were great black men in history. There were black men residing in and conquering European long before Albinos realize they would walk on two legs. Everything you kind has ever tried to reduce the black race to is evidentiary of your nature. History has proven that it is you who are the beasts of the filed – the monkeys and apes with low intellect that you tried to reduce black people. It is your kind who has the inferiority complex you have tried to instill in black people. jonathan8184, you are not only a race of colonizers and exploiters, you are rapists, murderers and thieves of people land and resources during the time of old and you have managed to continue this practice to this day despite your claims of being a intellectually, genetically superior race with values built upon morals, fairness and ethics.