Roman Empire

This administrative shift paved the way for a profound cultural transformation under Constantine the Great. After emerging victorious from the civil wars that followed the collapse of the Tetrarchy, Constantine not only became the first emperor to embrace Christianity but also relocated the imperial seat in 330 CE from Rome to Byzantium, refounding it as Constantinople. This move permanently shifted the political and economic center of gravity eastward toward the wealthier, more populous, and highly urbanized provinces. Constantinople, modeled explicitly on Rome with its own Senate and urban prefect, was distinct from its predecessor in two crucial ways: it was thoroughly Greek in character and fundamentally Christian from its inception. While Julian briefly attempted to restore classical polytheism, the Christianization of the empire proved irreversible. By 395 CE, the year Theodosius I died after making Christianity the official state religion, the empire was permanently partitioned along an east-west axis, with dual power centers navigating very different geopolitical realities.

In the fifth century, the Western Roman Empire buckled under the strain of the Migration Period, as Germanic peoples and the Huns of Attila swept across the frontiers. The Western administrative apparatus, having assimilated large populations of Germanic federates whose primary loyalties did not lie with Rome, gradually disintegrated. The traditional end of the Western line came in 476 CE, when the Germanic warlord Odoacer deposed the young usurper Romulus Augustulus in Ravenna. Rather than claiming the imperial title for himself, Odoacer sent the western imperial regalia to Constantinople, recognizing the Eastern Emperor Zeno as the sole ruler of the Roman world and governing Italy as his nominal subordinate.

In the East, the Roman state did not fall; it adapted and endured. For another millennium, the Eastern Roman Empire—which later historians would term the Byzantine Empire—stood as the premier power in Europe and a vital bulwark against successive eastern empires. Though it lost its western provinces to Germanic kingdoms in the fifth century, it briefly reclaimed some of those territories in the sixth under Justinian. In the seventh century, it survived the dual expansions of the Slavs and the Saracens, reorganizing its internal administration to initiate a brilliant resurgence of power by the late ninth century. Throughout these centuries of transformation, the citizens of this empire never stopped calling themselves Romans. Greek became the official language of administration in the sixth century, and the Latin-speaking provinces were lost, yet the continuity of the state from Augustus to the final siege of Constantinople by the Ottoman forces of Mehmed II in 1453 remained unbroken.

The legacy of this dual-faced empire shaped the development of global civilization. The Roman legal tradition, culminating in codes that would form the basis of modern European jurisprudence, outlived the state that created it. Latin evolved into the modern Romance languages, while the Greek of the East preserved classical philosophy and science, which later fueled both Islamic scholarship and the European Scientific Revolution. The architectural innovations of the Romans—their mastery of the arch, the dome, and monumental civic engineering—reappeared in Romanesque, Renaissance, and Islamic designs. Long after the last emperor fell in battle at Constantinople, the memory of Rome survived as an ideal of universal order, inspiring the political structures of medieval Christendom, the city-state republics of Italy, and the constitutional designs of modern democratic republics.

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