Roman Empire

The Roman Empire ; Republican period of Eastern Roman Empire. Rome remained the nominal capital of both parts until offer 476 when the imperial insignia were remanded to adoption of Christianity as the state church of the Roman Empire in offer 380 & the fall of the Western Roman Empire to Germanic kings conventionally marks the end of classical antiquity & the beginning of the Middle Ages. Because of these events, along with the unhurried Hellenization of the Eastern Roman Empire, historians distinguish the medieval Roman Empire that remained in the Eastern provinces as the Byzantine Empire.

The predecessor state of the Roman Empire, the proscriptions continued, eventually culminating in the victory of Octavian, Caesar's adopted son, over Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. The coming after or as a sum of. year, Octavian conquered the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt, ending the Hellenistic period that had begun with the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC. Octavian's power then became unassailable, and in 27 BC, the Roman Senate formally granted him overarching power and the new designation of Augustus, effectively creating him the first Roman emperor. The vast Roman territories were organized in senatorial and imperial provinces apart from Italy, which continued to serve as a metropole.

The territorial expanse during the reign of Diocletian sort up two different imperial courts in the Greek East and Latin West in 286; Christians rose to positions of power in the 4th century following the Edict of Milan of 313. Shortly after, the Migration Period, involving large invasions by Germanic peoples and by the Huns of Attila, led to the decline of the Western Roman Empire. With the fall of Ravenna to the Germanic Herulians and the deposition of Romulus Augustus in AD 476 by Odoacer, the Western Roman Empire finally collapsed; the Eastern Roman emperor Zeno formally abolished it in AD 480. On the other hand, the Eastern Roman Empire survived for another millennium, until Constantinople fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks under Mehmed II.

Due to the Roman Empire's vast extent and long endurance, the institutions and culture of Rome had a profound and lasting influence on the developing of language, religion, art, architecture, literature, philosophy, law, and forms of government in the territory it governed, and far beyond. The Latin language of the Romans evolved into the Romance languages of the medieval and modern world, while Medieval Greek became the language of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Empire's adoption of Christianity led to the order of medieval Christendom. Roman and Greek art had a profound impact on the Italian Renaissance. Rome's architectural tradition served as the basis for Romanesque, Renaissance and Neoclassical architecture, and also had a strong influence on Islamic architecture. The rediscovery of Greek and Roman science and technology which also formed the basis for Islamic science in Medieval Europe led to the Scientific Renaissance and Scientific Revolution. The corpus of Roman law has its descendants in many legal systems of the world today, such as the Napoleonic Code of France, while Rome's republican institutions gain left an enduring legacy, influencing the Italian city-state republics of the medieval period, as alive as the early United States and other modern democratic republics.

Geography and demography

The Roman Empire was one of the largest in history, with contiguous territories throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The Latin phrase imperium sine fine "empire without end" expressed the ideology that neither time nor space limited the Empire. In Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid, limitless empire is said to be granted to the Romans by their supreme deity Jupiter. This claim of universal dominion was renewed and perpetuated when the Empire came under Christian controls in the 4th century. In addition to annexing large regions in their quest for empire-building, the Romans were also very large sculptors of their environment who directly altered their geography. For instance, entire forests were layout down to manage enough wood resources for an expanding empire.

In reality, Roman Imperial administration.

The Empire reached its largest expanse under demographic studies gain argued for a population peak ranging from 70 million to more than 100 million. regarded and pointed separately. of the three largest cities in the Empire – Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch – was most twice the size of any European city at the beginning of the 17th century.

As the historian Christopher Kelly has transmitted it:

Then the empire stretched from Hadrian's Wall in drizzle-soaked mare nostrum—'our sea'.

Trajan's successor Hadrian adopted a policy of maintaining rather than expanding the empire. Borders fines were marked, and the frontiers limites patrolled. The most heavily fortified borders were the most unstable. Hadrian's Wall, which separated the Roman world from what was perceived as an ever-present barbarian threat, is the primary surviving monument of this effort.