From a small city on the Tiber to an empire spanning three continents — and its long collapse.
Stop 01 · c. 509–500 BCE
A City on the Tiber
Around 500 BCE Rome was one city-state among many on the Italian peninsula. Powerful Etruscan cities such as Veii, just to the north, and Tarquinia were its neighbours, while Greek colonies held much of the south. Roman tradition said the last king, Tarquin the Proud, was driven out in 509 BCE and his powers handed to two consuls, elected every year and advised by a senate. The republic was really an elected oligarchy rather than a democracy, but its experiment in shared power proved remarkably durable. It was also almost always at war: the Romans beat their Latin neighbours at Lake Regillus in 496 BCE and fought the Etruscans of Veii for generations.
Foro Romano Musei Capitolini RomaThis Photo was taken by Wolfgang Moroder . Feel free to use my photos, but please mention… · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Around 500 BCE Rome was one city-state among many on the Italian peninsula. Powerful Etruscan cities such as Veii, just to the north, and Tarquinia were its neighbours, while Greek colonies held much of the south. Roman tradition said the last king, Tarquin the Proud, was driven out in 509 BCE and his powers handed to two consuls, elected every year and advised by a senate. The republic was really an elected oligarchy rather than a democracy, but its experiment in shared power proved remarkably durable. It was also almost always at war: the Romans beat their Latin neighbours at Lake Regillus in 496 BCE and fought the Etruscans of Veii for generations.
By 270 BCE Rome had conquered all of the peninsula south of the Arno. In 264 BCE a quarrel over Messana in Sicily drew it into war with Carthage, the western Mediterranean's leading sea power. Rome, starting with no navy, built fleets, won the First Punic War in 241 BCE and made Sicily its first province. In 218 BCE Hannibal marched from Iberia over the Alps and crushed Roman armies at the Trebia, Lake Trasimene and Cannae, where at least 67,500 Romans were killed or captured. Rome held on and invaded Africa; Scipio beat Hannibal at Zama in 202 BCE. Wars against the Greek kingdoms of the east came next, and Rome was becoming an empire while still calling itself a republic.
The republic ended in civil war. Julius Caesar, who completed the conquest of Gaul by 50 BCE, was assassinated in 44 BCE. His great-nephew and heir, Octavian, won over Caesar's legions and in 43 BCE marched on Rome to become its youngest elected consul. He later fell out with Mark Antony, who had moved to Alexandria as Cleopatra's partner. On 2 September 31 BCE Octavian's fleet, led by Marcus Agrippa, defeated theirs off Actium in western Greece, and Egypt was annexed. In 27 BCE the Senate gave Octavian the name Augustus. He kept up the outward forms of the republic, but his command of most of the armies made him, in effect, the first Roman emperor.
Under Trajan (98–117 CE), born at Italica in southern Spain, the Roman Empire reached its greatest extent: about 5 million square kilometres from Britain to Mesopotamia. In two wars between 101 and 106 he conquered Dacia, north of the Danube, destroying its capital Sarmizegetusa, and he annexed the Nabataean kingdom in Arabia. His war on Parthia made Armenia and Mesopotamia Roman provinces, though he died at Selinus in Cilicia in 117 on the way home. Estimates of the empire's population run from the traditional 55 to 60 million to more than 70 million. More than 400,000 km of roads, over 80,000 km of them stone-paved, and a common legal system tied it together.
Diocletian, a Dalmatian soldier of humble birth, took power in 284 and ended half a century of crisis by sharing out rule. In 286 he made Maximian co-emperor for the West, and in 293 added two junior emperors, Galerius and Constantius: the Tetrarchy. They governed from frontier bases such as Nicomedia, Sirmium, Milan and Trier rather than Rome. The system collapsed into civil war after Diocletian retired in 305. Constantine I legalised Christianity and founded a new eastern capital, Constantinople. Theodosius I was the last emperor to rule the whole empire; after 395 his sons Arcadius and Honorius ruled East and West separately. The East, with rich provinces such as Egypt and Syria, would outlast the West by nearly a thousand years.
After years of failed bargaining with the Western emperor Honorius, the Visigoths under their king Alaric besieged Rome for the third time in 410. Honorius was safe in Ravenna, the capital since 402, shielded by marshes and open to the sea. On 24 August the Goths entered through the Salarian Gate and plundered the city for three days. By the standards of the age the sack was restrained: there was no general massacre, and the basilicas of Peter and Paul served as sanctuaries. Yet Rome had not fallen to a foreign enemy in almost 800 years, and the shock was felt across the empire. Alaric moved south with his loot and died soon after at Consentia.
By 476 the Western emperor had almost no army, money or territory of his own; barbarian kingdoms ruled most of the old western provinces. The boy emperor Romulus, mocked as Augustulus ('little Augustus'), was a figurehead for his father, the general Orestes. When Orestes refused to give Italian land to the empire's barbarian troops, they rose under Odoacer, a barbarian officer in Roman service, who defeated and executed him at Ticinum. On 4 September Odoacer deposed Romulus but spared him, sending him to a fortress near Naples. The Senate sent the imperial regalia to the Eastern emperor Zeno. Some historians stress continuity rather than a sudden fall, and the Eastern Empire, centred on Constantinople, carried on as what we call Byzantium.
What we call the Byzantine Empire was simply the Eastern Roman Empire: its people called themselves Romans, and the label 'Byzantine' came into use only after it fell. Under Justinian (527–565 CE) the general Belisarius swiftly conquered the Vandal kingdom in North Africa, and after a long war Italy and Rome itself were won back from the Ostrogoths. Justinian also had Roman law rewritten as the Corpus Juris Civilis, still the basis of civil law in many countries, and rebuilt Hagia Sophia at a cost of 20,000 pounds of gold. The gains faded. The Lombards took much of northern Italy by 572, and the Arab conquests stripped away Syria, Palestine and Egypt, as much as three-quarters of the empire's revenue.
BattlesAd Decimum: Belisarius defeats the Vandals · Yarmuk: Arab victory
The empire's later centuries were a long contraction. In 1071 the Seljuk Turks routed its army at Manzikert and captured Emperor Romanos IV. In 1204 the Fourth Crusade, in debt to Venice, stormed and plundered Constantinople itself; the city was recovered in 1261, but the Ottomans then swallowed the remaining lands piece by piece. By 1453 the capital was a string of walled villages amid fields. Sultan Mehmed II, aged 21, besieged it for 53 days with perhaps 100,000 men against about 7,000 defenders, even dragging ships overland into the Golden Horn. On 29 May the walls were breached. Constantine XI is said to have died fighting, and Mehmed made the city his capital.
BattlesConstantinople falls, 29 May 1453 · Manzikert, 1071