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>By the time of Western Roman Empire collapsing, the realm was Christian for two centuries and gladiator games et al. were banned for so long that no one alive would remember them happening.

That is a fair point. But I believe the Romans were still a pretty brutal and repressive regime right up the the end. And also levied high taxes. Whether the regional powers that replaced them were any better, was a matter of luck I suppose.

During the Gothic Wars of the 6th century, there was an interesting episode when the remaining Roman inhabitants of (much diminished) city of Rome actually defended the city on the Goths' side against their own Eastern Roman brethren, because they considered Gothic rule lighter and more tolerable.

But at nearly the same time, the Goths absolutely destroyed Milan.

History is rarely straightforward.

As to "the previously conquered people considered themselves Romans and spoke Latin", I don't believe everybody spoke Latin, as even in what we now call Italy, people kept speaking their various regional languages, let alone in territories with people groups with a more distantly related "mother tongue". They would keep identifying with their ethnic and linguistic origins.

>few people have any idea of who conquered whom in 1620 AD and what were the consequences for their distant ancestors

I bet most people in the US could tell you in broad strokes who used to live in North America and who conquered them.

Very broad strokes. "Indians vs. Whites".

But the Roman situation was more akin to "what precisely happened during the Thirty Years War". I really like history, but I wouldn't be able to tell you if Münster or Würzburg sided with those or these.

Unlike the conquest of North America, which usually resulted in physical destruction of the Indian tribes and their displacement by the colonists, Roman conquests tended to absorb the conquered polity, often with the basic social structure still intact, so the nobility would remain in local control, the priests would remain priests of that particular local god etc. This tends to take the edge off and make assimilation easier.

The conquest of north America was largely done by smallpox. As soon as the Europeans arrived, it doomed 95% of the population, who had been spared countless plagues and viruses that swept through Asia, Africa and Europe over the millenia. This fractured many tribes and collapsed their numbers to a point where they had no meaningful polity, maybe a few hundred to a few thousand at most.

Among the remaining tribes and the decimated numbers, many did in fact eventually integrate with Spanish, French, or English settlers, particularly the tribes that allied with them against another rival tribe, such as the Tlaxcalans who aided the Spanish in conquering the Aztecs, and subsequently integrated.

We hear the most and remember the most the tribes which warred the most fiercely (ie Commanche, Apache, Sioux, etc), however, we scarcely remember the tribes they themselves slaughtered, enslaved, and scalped, such as the Crow and Pawnee (who would ally with the US Army) . And some like the Iroquois were generally peaceful and continue to this day.

1620 was after the advent of the printing press and mass production of paper and the spread of reading and writing generally. By then we recorded everything.

We don't know as much about who conquered whom in pre-Colombian America, other than standout examples like the Incans, Mayans, and Aztecs. Oral histories fade rather quickly especially when decimated by war, famine, or disease. But even when conquered and absorbed into a society, how quickly would the descendents forget if properly integrated? A few generations is all it would take. We speak English because there was a society known as the Angles that I know almost nothing about. Are there any pure blood Angles still around? Who knows? They were conquered by the Saxons and no one can today tell you the difference. I'd reckon that the Anglo or Saxon distinction went away rather quickly.

> Even in our modern world where history is taught and movies and books are abundant, few people have any idea of who conquered whom in 1620 AD and what were the consequences for their distant ancestors.

This is just wrong, people are typically very well aware of the history of the area they grew up in. If you ask people in Sweden if Denmark once ruled Sweden, I'd bet around 99% of Swedish people would say yes. That ended 1523, they probably wouldn't know that exact date but they would know it happened for sure, people joke about that all the time. If you ask people in Finland if they were once ruled by Sweden, I'd bet 100% would say yes. If you asked exactly what periods people will be shaky, but they will know Sweden once ruled them and then Russia did rule them.

I think everyone goes into detail about their home area in the 9 years you study history in school, at least what happened the past 1000 years since that is recent and well documented, studying every single recorded war and rebellion for the area you live in is normal.

And the consequences? You can see them all over the places, you see the language changing, you see cultural connections everywhere with the conquerors etc, even hundreds of years later. Even today you have remnants from Mexico owning Texas like Cathedral of San Fernando, people wouldn't think USA built that with such a name.

Even USA does this, although its history doesn't stretch 1000 years back but the wars USA was in I think are well known by most Americans. And this goes for states as well, I'd doubt you would find many who grew up in Texas that doesn't know it was once a Mexican province and was conquered by USA. People in New York might be more shaky about that, but that's because the war didn't really affect their area.

People know relatively recent history of large nation states because we live in the post-Gutenberg era and we live in an era where vast majority of people do 12 years schooling at a minimum (a quite recent phenomenon). You can read, the vast majority of people in human history could neither read nor write. So people largely relied on oral history. How many Swedes can tell you about the various tribes that made up the oroginal identity of Sweden itself? Would a modern Swede think about the Götar, Upplänningar, or the Värmlänningar? These tribes occupied Sweden before the Swedish national identity emerged somewhere between the 1200s and 1500s. Unless they're history buffs probably not, and there are countless others for which we have no record of.

Many areas of the world existed outside the bounds of extensive record keeping. Thousands of tribal identities and city-states were absorbed into the modern day nation state. Even Germany did not exist as a country until 1871. At one point there was 300 principalities in the region now known as Germany.

The Cathedral of San Fernando was built by the Spanish in 1738, not Mexico. Mexico didn't exist as a nation state until the establishment of the First Mexican Empire in 1821. Meanwhile the Republic of Texas was founded in 1835, just 14 years later, as it broke off from a Mexican dictatorship. The Texans were wise to keep around beautiful and historic works from the Spanish and even retain the names of many Spanish established cities (although they might pronounce them differently as in Amarillo).

Texas wasn't conquered by the U.S., it was a sovereign republic for 10 years before the Texans voted to join the U.S.

Either way history is extremely complex and even as we know so much there is a lot that went undocumented and is lost to the ether. There are many cases where entire cultures were assimilated away, by the Romans and otherwise.

Yes, "people largely relied on oral history", but don't underestimate the power of that. We are now (kept) so busy that we don't listen to stories being passed down, but this used to be very different! Also, if your knowledge comes from books in the school system, they can be (and regularly are!) replaced and their content adapted to 'current needs'.