Roman Empire

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity it included large territorial holdings around the Mediterranean Sea in Europe, Northern Africa, and Western Asia ruled by emperors. The fall of the Western Roman Empire to Germanic kings, along with the hellenization of the Eastern Roman Empire into the Byzantine Empire, conventionally marks the end of Ancient Rome.

About Roman Empire in brief

The Roman Empire was the post-Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity it included large territorial holdings around the Mediterranean Sea in Europe, Northern Africa, and Western Asia ruled by emperors. From the accession of Caesar Augustus to the military anarchy of the 3rd century, it was a principate with Italy as metropole of the provinces and the city of Rome as sole capital. The fall of the Western Roman Empire to Germanic kings, along with the hellenization of the Eastern Roman Empire into the Byzantine Empire, conventionally marks the end of Ancient Rome and the beginning of the Middle Ages. 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 development of language, religion, art, architecture, 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. The Empire’s adoption of Christianity led to the formation of medieval Christendom. Rome’s architectural tradition served as the basis for Romanesque, Renaissance and Neoclassical architecture, and also on Islamic architecture. The corpus of Roman law has today, such as the Napoleonic Code, many descendants in today’s legal systems of the world. Then it was not a nation in the modern sense of the word, but a network of emperors, not an emperor in the sense of a nation-state.

Then, it had not expanded outside the Italian peninsula until the 4th century BC, though it did not expand outside Italy until the 3nd century BC. It was not an empire until it had begun expanding in the 6th centuryBC, but it did expand in the 7th and 8th centuries BC. The Roman Republic became severely destabilized in a series of civil wars and political conflicts. The first two centuries of the Empire saw a period of unprecedented stability and prosperity known as the Pax Romana. A period of increasing trouble and decline began with the reign of Commodus. The Empire underwent a crisis that threatened its existence, as the Gallic Empire and Palmyrene Empire broke away from the Roman state. The empire was reunified under Aurelian. In an effort to stabilize it, Diocletian set up two different imperial courts in the Greek East and Latin West in 286. Christians rose to positions of power in the4th 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 toThe fall of Ravenna to the Germanic Herulians and the deposition of Romulus Augustus in 476 AD by Odoacer, the WesternRoman Empire finally collapsed. The Eastern Roman Emperor Zeno formally abolished it in 480 AD. The Holy Roman Empire survived for another millennium, until Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks of Sultan Mehmed II in 1453.

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