The Roman and Byzantine Empire

[ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذه الصورة]

In the centuries
before
600 CE, the Roman Empire was the most influential power in many regions

that would later become Islamic. The Roman state developed from an
early
monarchy into a republic, established around 500 BCE. By the
3rd century BCE
Rome had completed its conquest of the Italian
Peninsula, and embarked on
military campaigns against foreign
powers. The first major conflict, known as
the Punic Wars, involved
Rome and Carthage, an empire in North Africa. Sparked
by
Carthaginian expansion into Greek settlements in Sicily, the Punic Wars
ended
with a Roman victory and subsequent control of all
Carthaginian territory. Roman
territory eventually came to include
the region encircling the Mediterranean
Sea, including Spain, North
Africa, Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt. More
information on the
expansion of the Roman Empire can be found in the First
Europe
Tutorial.

[ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذه الصورة]

Head of Constantine I
Rome, ca.
325
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y.

Beginning in the 3rd
century CE, the Roman
state underwent a prolonged series of crises. Regional
disparities
of long standing induced the Emperor Diocletian (r. 284-305) to
officially
split the empire. However, it was again briefly reunited by
Constantine
I (r. 306-337), who also became one of the Roman Empire's most
significant
rulers. He was the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity.
Christianity
had long been one of many religions present in the empire, and over
its
first three centuries it had evolved from a Jewish sect into a complex
system
of beliefs, though it continued to include a number of rival currents.
Constantine's
conversion and his subsequent actions to protect the Christians of
the
realm were instrumental to the religion's survival and expansion. In
313 he
signed the Edict of Milan, establishing a policy of
toleration for Christians in
the Empire, and in 325 he organised the
Council of Nicaea, which attempted to
establish standard articles
of faith to resolve doctrinal disputes among
Christians. In 330
Constantine built the city of Constantinople on the site of
the
ancient Greek city, Byzantium, as the principal capital of the Roman
Empire,
whose power was slowly shifting east from Rome.

The reign of
Theodosius
I (r. 379-395) was also important for the Roman Empire, as he was the
last
to rule over a united empire. He entrenched the separation between the
Eastern
and Western Empires in 395 by assigning his son Arcadius to rule in the

East, and his son Honorius to rule in the West. From that time
until the fall of
the Western Empire to Germanic invaders in the
late 5th century CE, the empires
were separate. Theodosius was also
the first ruler to declare Christianity to be
the official religion
of the Roman Empire. In 451, the Council of Chalcedon
divided the
Christian world into five patriarchates, or regions to be overseen
by
a patriarch: Rome (whose patriarch later assumed the title of pope),
Constantinople,
Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. When the Islamic conquests
of
the 7th century brought the latter three patriarchates under Muslim
rule,
Constantinople became the leading city of Eastern
Christianity. Eventually the
division between the Western church,
based in Rome, and the Eastern church,
based in Constantinople,
culminated in the Great Schism of 1054, when the Pope
in Rome and
the Patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other. The
result
was the formation of the Catholic Church in the west, and the Eastern
Orthodox
Church in the east.

In the 5th century
the Western
Empire progressively disintegrated, and in 476 Romulus Augustus, the
last
Roman Emperor in the west, was deposed by the German leader, Odovacer.
The
empire's eastern regions survived as a functional state. Though
attempts to
recapture large blocks of territory in the west were not
successful, the
emperors resident in Constantinople continued to
rule over one of the most
powerful empires in the region.

The Byzantine
Empire

[ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذه الصورة]

Emperor Justinian
S. Vitale, Ravenna
Courtesy of Tulane University

Although the rulers,
inhabitants,
and enemies of the Eastern Empire knew it as the Roman Empire, even
after
the collapse of the Western Empire in 476, it has acquired the name,
Byzantine
Empire, from later historians. The name is based on the ancient Greek
city
of Byzantium, which became the site for Constantinople in 330. Emperor
Justinian
(r. 527-565) reclaimed the Italian Peninsula from the Visigoths,
bringing
the Christians of the former Western Empire under Byzantine rule. He
also
conquered northwest Africa and coastal Spain, temporarily bringing most
of
the Mediterranean under Byzantine control. The Sassanid Empire
in Persia, a
historic enemy of the Roman Empire, began a new
campaign into Byzantine
territory in 610, the same year that Muslims
believe Muhammad received his first
revelation from God, in Mecca,
that he was the prophet of Islam. Within 30 years
these three
civilisations - the Byzantine, Persian, and Arab - would collide in
what
was for some a very unexpected way, as the Muslim Arabs embarked on a
rapid
expansion campaign that brought down the Sassanid Empire and
took a large swath
of Byzantine territories in North Africa and
Mesopotamia. As we shall see in the
following chapters, the Islamic
and Byzantine Empires were enemies for
centuries. They constantly
traded territory, particularly in the region of Asia
Minor that
surrounded Constantinople. In 1453, however, the Muslims would
finally
defeat the Byzantine Empire completely, with the sack of Constantinople

الموضوع الأصلي : The Roman and Byzantine Empire المصدر : مُنتَدَيَاتْ صُـوتــْ بَــلَــدْنََــا

______________________________________________________

eNg AhMeD