its western territory overrun by barbarians and pirates, the Roman Empire was no longer anything like its former self. In 439 AD, Vandals advanced to Roman North Africa, capturing Carthage, the former Phoenician capital that had become one of the major cities of the Western Roman Empire. The once-mighty Western empire was unable to defend this valuable trade center.
While the Western empire declined, the imperial government in Constantinople signaled the changing times by declaring Greek, rather than Latin, to be the official language. Latin was the language of the West, of Rome. Greek was the language of the eastern Mediterranean, the new center of Roman ascendancy. Remembered as the Byzantine Empire, this eastern branch of the Roman Empire would persist for another 1,000 years.
Roman administration in the West struggled on until 476 AD, but without authority. When barbarian leaders closed in on the last emperor to sit on the Roman throne, a poor youngster named Romulus Augustus, a name recalling his great predecessors, they didn’t bother to kill him. This emperor (also known by the diminutive Augustulus) wasn’t considered to be important enough.
Rome’s legacy pervades the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, and other far-flung places culturally affected by Europeans — a broad swath that takes in the Philippines, South Africa (and most of the rest of the African continent), Australia, and arguably the whole world.
Rome and the Roman Catholic Church
After Rome was no longer an imperial capital, its name loomed so large and for so long in people’s minds that it continued to invoke power and an aura of legitimacy, in part because the Roman Catholic Church remained headquartered there. If you think of Romans as feeding Christians to the lions in the Coliseum, don’t forget that the empire later converted to Christianity. The Emperor Constantine, who built his capital in western Turkey, helped bring about a new Roman tolerance toward Christians and became the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, in 312 AD. Starting in 331 AD, Constantine also made the Roman Catholic Church rich by
Seizing the treasures of pagan temples and spending them on magnificent new Christian churches from Italy to Turkey to Jerusalem.
Handing out huge endowments.
Authorizing bishops to draw on imperial funds as reparation for the years of enmity.
These moves helped establish the institution’s wealth and power for centuries to come. In 391 AD, Constantine’s successor, Theodosius I, added a final touch by prohibiting old-style Roman pagan worship, making Christianity the official religion. The empire—both in its western and eastern components—continued to promote, strengthen, and spread that religion in Europe, western Asia, North Africa, and beyond. Two centers of early, state sanctioned Christianity emerged—one in Constantinople and the other in the city of Rome.
Even as the empire shifted its energies away from Rome, it remained Christianity’s western headquarters and it is still the center of Roman Catholicism because of what the city had been at its imperial height.
WHATEVER IT’S CALLED, IT’S STILL THE CHURCH
When talking about the Christian Church in its early years, I often refer to it simply as the Church. Christianity was a huge cultural force from late Roman times onward. Before the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, the Catholic Church was the Christian church in Western Europe — virtually the only one. It was the Catholic Church because catholic was still an adjective meaning universal. (Spelled with a lowercase c, catholic still means universal or wide-ranging.) After Rome banned pagan worship, and as the old Norse and Celtic beliefs faded, virtually everybody was a Christian, at least nominally. Everybody was also Catholic; there was no such thing as a Protestant. Historians capitalize the word Church when they mean the network of cathedrals, chapels, priories, and so on that looked to the pope in Rome for direction, and so do I in this chapter and in chapters 10 and 14.
In addition to its role as the root of modern romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, and so on), Latin was the unifying language of the Roman Catholic Church, which to Roman and other European Christians before the 16th century AD was just the Church. Until the middle of the 20th century, Catholic masses worldwide were almost always celebrated in Latin.
Charlie’s empire, based where France is today, didn’t long survive him, but German King Otto I put together another edition of the Holy Roman Empire in 962 AD, and that one hung on until the 19th century. (For more on the Holy Roman Empire, see Chapters 6 and 14.) Aside from the pope’s blessing and his expectation of loyalty, this empire’s nominally united lands, largely German and Austrian, and had little to do with Rome. Still, the name Roman smacked of imperial legitimacy.
Other Roman terms endured as well, especially terms for positions of authority. The Russian title czar (or tsar, as it’s often spelled) and the later German kaiser both came from the Roman title caesar. The name of a powerful dynastic family, the Romanovs, who ruled Russia from 1613–1917, referred to imperial Rome too. Even in the Islamic world, the name Qaysar — a place name found from Afghanistan to Egypt — comes from Caesar.
Building Empires around the World
After Alexander the Great died of a sudden fever in 323 BC, his vast empire disintegrated. Without Alexander, there was little to unite such widespread, dissimilar places as Macedonia, northern India, and Egypt — all among his territories. Yet the breakup brought about new empires — not as big, but impressive nonetheless. Several of them were founded by Alexander’s former military governors.
With Alexander gone, the generals were free to turn their territories, which they had been holding in trust for their boss, into personal kingdoms. Ptolemy, Macedonian governor of conquered Egypt, used Alexander’s funeral procession to found his own Egyptian dynasty. Although the Roman Empire, the largest and most influential empire to emerge after Alexander, arose first as a city-state, and although the Mediterranean was sprinkled with successful Greek city-states, imperial might became the model for large-scale government in the late centuries of the BC period and the early centuries of the AD period.
Ruling Persia and Parthia
Seleuces was the Macedonian general whom Alexander the Great left in charge of conquered Persia (largely what’s now Iran) in the 330s BC. The Achaeminid Empire, also called the Old Persian Empire, had been immensely powerful at its height, around 480 BC. It was in decline by the time Alexander added it to his collection of kingdoms. Still, there was precedent for imperial government in Persia, and Seleuces took advantage of it by bringing Persian officers and Persian regional officials into his government of Macedonians