ASMR - 3.5 Hours History of Ancient Rome (8th Century BC - 1453 AD)

Hello everyone, I invite you to explore a 2000-year-old

history

tonight, the

history

of

ancient

Rome. This video is in three parts because there is a lot to tell. In part 1, we will start from the founding of Rome and continue its long struggle. republic to finish with Italy and beyond how they began their walls in Italy and then against Carthage their society and we will finish this part with the rise of Julius Caesar in the 1st

century

BC. the second part is about to call the nage and then the decline of

ancient

Rome its conquest of the known world its transformation into an empire how it was Christianized how it declined and divided into two separate entities this part ends with the fall of the Roman Empire Western in the 5th

century

AD but the Empire was not yet dead in the East, the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, survived for another millennium, a story we explore in part 3.

This is a lot and this long history is also made to help you fall asleep , so if you want to resume the story later or go directly to a particular section, you will find timestamps in the first command and as always, you can easily download this video or just the audio and thousands more, if you want to join my patreon, there is a link in the description, so we are about to embark on this long adventure, please make yourself comfortable, sit or lie down and don't hesitate to close your eyes. Images are not necessary to follow this story.

Now let's begin, Emmeline, you are in the center of Rome one day in the beginning. from the 3rd century you would feel like you were in a place like no other in the world in a sense this is the center of the known world Rome has around 1 million inhabitants no other city you have ever heard of could match its impressive architecture and monuments the forum is the busiest market and political center in the world the city has an incredible infrastructure with fresh water brought by eleven actives the public baths have heating systems the roads and streets are covered with stone it offers entertainment to its population on a large scale scale that no other place in the world could compete with there is a giant coliseum for shows and many fights ATIS there is a hippod

rome

for chariot races there are theaters shops public and private parties all the time the noisy population is supported by enormous quantities of imported food From all corners of the Mediterranean Sea there are temples of multiple religions including traditional Roman gods such as Jupiter Mars or Apollo, their Greek equivalents and temples to the main gods of distant provinces such as a series of Isis or certain victors and there is also this new religion called Christianity.

ISM with only one God and a critical view of Roman society so they are regularly banned and persecuted for being disloyal to Rome but this is not a big concern for now and you know that absolutely nothing could seriously threaten the power of Rome from the city. You could travel many days or even weeks overland on modern, well-maintained roads and still be within the borders of the empire. Everywhere you would find more cities built like little replicas of Rome with foreign temples to ramen and local gods. people who have adopted Roman customs and mixed them with their own for a long time, this giant empire has maintained peace within its borders, not a perfect peace because there were times of trouble or internal struggles for power at the head of the state, but Even so, the gigantic territory is incomparably safer and richer than before the era of Rome and you can also be sure that the space will continue to expand.

It's not even at its full extent yet and appears to be built to last forever, but all of this didn't happen. In one day, it took centuries for Rome to emerge as this invincible power with tens of millions of inhabitants. Rome had humble beginnings and it all began around eight centuries BC. In central Italy, the Romans had a legend about their origins, the legend of Romulus and Remus, according to legend. Rome was founded in the year 753 BC. as a city and kingdom by Ramírez Rómulo and Remus we are twins and they were children of the mouse the god of war and the edge invested all the festivals they were priestesses of Vesta the goddess of the earth in ancient Rome and they truly existed for centuries of the Roman history formed a college, there were very few of them, only two to six depending on the period and they took a vow of chastity, then they served the goddess and took care of a sacred fire that had to burn constantly, they were worshiping and it was believed that the cultivation of fire It was crucial to the well-being and continuity of Rome, so going back to the legend, when a Vestal became pregnant, she had to abandon two twins and they were fed by a wolf.

The image of the wolf feeding Romulus and Remus is one of the symbols of Rome. Later Ramírez founded Rome and killed his brother Ramos and to develop the city he launched an expedition to kidnap Sabine women to populate Rome the Sabines where the people who lived were in the middle. Italy are not legendary, they existed and progressively merged with the population of Rome. It seems that this story of Ramírez and Ramos appeared around the 3rd century BC. when Rome had already grown a lot and obviously it is a myth but episodes like the abduction of the Sabine women have roots in reality, so how did Rome appear?

The site where Rome was built is famous for having hills, there are seven main ones and the site was occupied for a long time, even before the founding of the city, already in prehistoric times. Sometimes there are signs of occupation from the 10th to the 8th century BC. C. there were little Hamlets in these hills probably populated by shepherds in the 6th century BC. C. the region of Rome Lazio was occupied by an ancient people called the Etruscans. I'm going to tell you a little more about them in a minute because they were very influential in the culture and traditions of Rome and from this period to look before Christ, the various groups of houses and towns merged into one city, it was built a light fortification around it and Rome. became a small city, this region of Italy was populated by tribes under the influence of the Etruscans and the newly founded Rome became the head of a small federation of cities in relation to an Etruscan king, so it turned to Cannes the origins of this ancient town.

They remain a bit mysterious and are lost in prehistory. Their ancestors already lived in Europe several thousand years ago before they developed a civilization at the end of the Neolithic in what is now Tuscany, then expanded northwards to the northern Italy and south to central Italy, were never formed. a single state like a kingdom but its cities were part of leagues that functioned like those of the Federation and controlled much of Italy for several centuries until they were defeated and assimilated by Rome because the origins of Rome remain and are precise, there are conflicting opinions About the Role of the Etruscans we know that even a farce was populated by tribes that do not interest us and the tribe that populated Rome was called legends but it is not clear if the Latins founded Rome and then were just under the influence of the Etruscans or the Etruscans.

They themselves took Dean to found the city and organize it, what we do know is that the first kings of Rome, where the Etruscans and the Romans adopted many features of their culture and society, the Etruscans had achieved the organization of their society in a state or several states. It sounds like a fact today, but in ancient times it was not: a set of tribes could live in a given territory without creating a central power, and an administration that formed a state implies a certain level of organization and political thought. The Etruscan political system changed progressively. initially a monarchy with Kings that some cities became republics just like Rome would later be a Republic we are not talking about a democratic system as we define democracy today it was an oligarchic Republic where a few families controlled the state and made decisions that they found in numerous cities in Italy that later became Roman cities and developed and unique culture had a pantheon of gods and goddesses that are completely forgotten today such as katha sellas or Larin and were in contact with the Greeks and greatly influenced by Greek culture and architecture In particular, early Roman architecture was copied from Etruscan styles, so that it indirectly adopted this Greek influence.

The Etruscans had also developed very refined arts and crafts such as sculpture. There are bronze sculptures that were famous and often exported to other parts of the Mediterranean world, painting, ceramics and their Aristo Prezi lived a life of leisure and pleasure that also influenced the Romans. The rich had noisy houses with frescoes and all kinds of decoration. Its level of refinement existed around the Mediterranean Sea in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. as in Greece or in the Phoenician cities. but it was rare, and in many ways the Etruscans were an advanced people. The history of Rome as an independent and expansionist power began in 509 BC.

C. when the Romans who stayed there, the Etruscan king Terenas, founded a republic. This was the beginning of a long struggle of several years. centuries of almost constant walls with conquests and setbacks from which Rome emerged as the dominant power in the Mediterranean world then what happened and why Rome became independent from its foundation the city had a role and the majority of its population was this cursive tribe called the Latins Like other Sapiens tribes I mentioned above, the Latins were an Indo-European people, their ancestors having migrated westward beginning several thousand years earlier in the same waves of migration that brought the Celts to western Europe and the Greeks to the south. from the back.

I don't know exactly when and how, but after settling in Europe, the Indo-European peoples mixed with the inhabitants they encountered and strongly influenced their culture. The Italic tribes are the representatives of this Indo-European migration who settled in Italy and remained separate from the Etruscans who As far as we know, based on their language and the DNA tests carried out on the remains, we are not Indo-European, the exact reasons are unknown. which led to the overthrow of the darkness, but it was probably because with the growth of the families of Rome who had been living in the city for generations it had become much richer, more influential and wanted to have a say in politics. .

They must have organized this to get rid of the king and share political power between them. These well-established families are central to understanding politics in ancient Rome, especially. when it was a republic they formed a kind of aristocracy even though they did not have novel titles their surname and their belonging to a particular family the particular gems plural genders with a common ancestor was crucial for their social status these in fluid families that seized power when they founded the Republic, they are called the patricians who, as Rome grew in the following decades and centuries and had a more important proportion of the population, were no longer affiliated with patrician families, so they still wanted to be heard at least and they deformed the plebs by the Roman citizens who They are not patricians later and the term plebs was applied more broadly to all common people compared to the elite, but being a plebeian in Rome was not the worst possible social position, they were still citizens, slaves lived in Rome.

Tell them that after the plebs obtained rights, they had their Tribunes, their representatives and the Popular Assembly, so the state of mind of these people was a constant concern for the Senate that represented the patrician families and advised two consuls elected each year. to the head. of the Republic by the citizens for centuries and at the end of the Republic the system seems unstable with Stan's power struggles and yet for centuries, whenever a space needed to be defended or when big decisions had to be made, the Various factions managed to make it work. Without ending the Republic, it was sometimes suspended and replaced by a time-limited dictatorship in case of emergency, but it proved resilient for almost 500 years.

This is a long time for a political regime that you would not find in many countries in the world. In today's world, which has kept the exact same political system for so long, technically some countries have kept it in our code and here today for longer, but it works very differently now than it did four or five hundred years ago. . The history of the Roman Republic was unstable, apart from internal tensions in Rome, there were considerable difficulties when Rome became a republic. She was still a marginal and forgettable power in the Mediterranean world. Greece was much more relevant.

Greece was a collection of city-states and smaller kingdoms that Greek culture and commerce were also very influential and wherever you were in the Mediterranean Sea, from Spain in the West to 11 in the East, you were never very far from a great presence because the Greek cities had founded many colonies or around the sea there were also definitions. people fromsailors and traders based in the Levant initially roughly what Lebanon is today and also developed remote colonies and trading posts around the Mediterranean Sea, the most famous of these colonies was Carthage, north of Italy, on the other side of the Alps, Germany lived.

The tribes and Goulds are not well organized politically and are considered barbarians, but they are still the big threat due to their numbers and their ferocity in warfare, so Rome began to expand modestly absorbing small cities and towns and then expanded to the mountains around the Elysium, including the territory of the Sabines, this episode which saw the Sabines become part of Rome was probably the origin of the mythical story about the kidnapping of the Sabine women in the 4th century BC. C. Rome was threatened by a ghoul invasion of Italy, the ghouls lived mainly across the Alps in modern France who had occupied northern Italy and in the early 4th century they attacked the Etruscans living between them and the Romans and plundered the Etruscan cities and continued marching south on the Italian peninsula, indebted to the Roman army and occupied ours almost in its entirety, the only part that they could not take possession of was the fortified capital considered the heart and origin of the city in a from the hills finally those called agreed to leave a room with a large ransom of 1,000 pounds of gold and there is a famous anecdote that it is difficult to say if it really happened or not when the Romans were presenting the ransom that was being weighed on a chief's scales Kurdish Brenna. he would have thrown his sword on the scales to make it heavier and would have said five ictus which in Latin means woe to the defeated, which means that those who are defeated are completely at the mercy of their conquerors, so the beginnings of Rome were not so bright, the city was little more. that a small state a century after becoming a republic and was already defeated and occupied after the articles abandoned the fortification wall was built around the city, so for a long time Rome remained trapped in a longer intermittent war against The Samnites, another Cursive tribe who lived in south central Italy, this war lasted 70 years and Rome suffered great divisions throughout it, but they finally managed to subjugate the Samnites in the 4th and 3rd centuries.

Rome focused on controlling Italy, conquering the Etruscan regions to the north, and fighting various opponents in the south. In particular, King Pyrrhus of Epirus purus was a Greek general and later king of Epirus in western Greece. He fought against control of southern Italy and won several battles, but at such a cost that he is remembered primarily through the phrase Pyrrhic Victory, the Pyrrhic Victory is when your victory costs you so much and leaves you so exhausted that you cannot bear it. you feel and cannot benefit from it after years of fighting, Rome finally emerged victorious and expanded southward, about a century after being occupied.

During Brenner's time, Rome had reversed its fortunes and become the regional power. You see, war was almost constant and ancient Rome was at risk of disappearing if it was defeated. This precarious situation lasted for decades in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. and just when Rome was becoming a little more comfortable in Italy the rivalry with Carthage and the Punic Wars began, we will talk about that in a minute, but in the meantime it did not prevent the city from growing and developing its own civilization taking influences from the Etruscans. to the italicized Greek tribes and other peoples throughout the Mediterranean with whom the Romans came into contact, in part due to their tenacity, the Romans developed during this period an ability to absorb and further develop technologies and rules of herbalism that they used for military use.

Benefit The first architect to provide fresh water to the city was built shortly after the targeted invasion and so was the first major road, the Appian Way, Appian Way in Latin, this road connected Rome to Brindisi in southeastern Italy. The construction of Roman roads began approximately in the year 300 BC and roads are one of the greatest Roman assets in the conquest and continuity of their empire throughout the centuries, no civilization in the past had built that type of infrastructure on such a scale. Roman engineering and architecture continued to develop until the end and represented a peak in technology, in fact after the fall of the Western Roman Empire many technologies were lost and not rediscovered to us.

For the movement of troops and people as efficiently and quickly as possible, the main roads were excavated and within this trench several layers of materials had been excavated, including sand, gravel and rocks. The plans for its face were obtained. a layer of stones lasts. and concretely the roads were straight and in general the Romans invented solutions to obstacles instead of avoiding them, tunnels of dead ogres or built bridges, it is a characteristic of the Romans that makes them seem very modern to us, they had arrived to use technology to their advantage. and to solve problems they also confused geography to suit their needs, not only roads that no previous civilization had built, many bridges, architects invented complex systems designed for comfort, Roman baths, for example, had heating systems of water with metal tubes to transport water to the houses.

They had heating systems based on sending hot air and the floors to heat them. The Romans used a type of concrete architectural promises with high ceilings and domes that had never been built before. Innovation was a positive value for them while that many ancient societies including some of the brightest ones like Egypt didn't really care and didn't try to innovate, so this innovative drive and also the willingness to adopt whatever technology works wherever it comes from is a Roman characteristic that explains a lot of it. of the expansion and longevity of the Romans. They ended up with much better infrastructure, weapons, warships even though initially their strength was not agricultural productivity than any of their neighbors and this made the Roman lifestyle more attractive to other people, which made them accept conquered it more easily and made Rome richer and better organized than any other civilization before, its kind of advantage appears in the long term and, although the early Roman Republic had managed to control most of Italy by the 3rd century BC.

C., he faced perhaps his greatest opponent to date, Carthage. I made a story about the story. of Carthage that you will find in the description Carthage was a Phoenician colony that developed its own sphere of influence with smaller colonies and trading posts in the western half of the Mediterranean Sea the city was in Tunisia and by the 3rd century BC. It had become the largest commercial power in the Mediterranean world. Its power was based, in particular, on the control of the sea with a considerable merchant and war fleet. Caffe occupied the west of the island of Sicily, the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, parts of northern and southern Africa. of Spain its expansionism clashed with the ROMs in the 3rd century over control of Sicily and also control of the lucrative sea routes that connected the western Mediterranean with Greece, Egypt and the Levant and two north-south routes between North Africa and southern Europe.

Rome and Carthage became archenemies for a century and had three main walls until the Caliphate was defeated and literally destroyed. These walls between Rome and Carthage are called the Punic Wars. The first began in 264 BC. C. and lasted more than twenty years. It was difficult at first. For Rome, its fleet was lost in a storm and Rome tried to beg Carthage but the Roman legions, I will tell you later about the Roman army, we are inefficient against the tactics of the caliphates using war elephants and a very good cavalry of their allies, the new ones. Midway later the situation improved so that Rome, the false Carthage, evacuated Sicily and achieved a decisive naval victory in 241 BC.

Carthage accepted peace and signed a treaty abandoning Sicily to Rome and Rome also took advantage of its weakness after the war to annex Sardinia. and Corsica that this peace treaty was actually a truce because the objective antagonism between the two states had not really been resolved, because they would want revenge and 20 years after the First Punic War, if they now had a brilliant general, perhaps one one of the best military commanders of all time Hannibal Barca once again the existence of Rome was about to be threatened in Abu Khalid a massive army in Spain 50,000 infantry 10,000 cavalry plus war elephants and Carthage took the initiative attacking a Greek colony ally of Rome on the coast of Spain Then Hannibal crossed Spain south of Meta and the amps with his army directly threatened Italy and the territory of the Roman Republic.

Rome sent several armies against him which were all defeated and Hannibal continued marching towards the center of the Republic towards Rome in the year 216 BC. of the most important battles of antiquity took place at Keaney Hannibal's army had suffered attrition after this long journey, the passage of land and several battles, so at this point the Romans could field twice as many soldiers in the battlefield and yet this was not enough. Hannibal managed to surround the Roman army which moved in very strict and rigid formations and it was a massacre for the Romans in a bowl he could have attacked Rome which was now defenseless but fortunately for the Romans he did not do so due to dissensions between his officers and here the exhaustion of his troops after such a long journey and multiple battles, he stayed in Italy but did not dare to attack Rome and gave the Romans time to return to war in the following years, his army was lost.

Due to attrition and counterattacks and several years later a Roman expedition led by General Scipio took control of Spain and then moved to Africa the new Medes who were allied with Carthage changed their alliance and went to the side of Rome with the help of his new allies. The Romans decisively defeated the Couch and Hut at Yanami in Africa in 202 BC. C. a new piece that turned the CAF era almost into a protectorate of Rome was signed in the following years and with the end of the second Punic War the threat of Carthage was finally eliminated, but it was not the end, but fifty years later, The Romans were again concerned about a possible revival of Carthage and had been so traumatized by the walls of the past and especially by the Nepalese expedition in Italy that they decided to take no chances and began a third Punic period.

War in the year one hundred and fifty PC and besieged the powerful city for three years until it surrendered, the survivors in Carthage were sold into slavery and the city completely destroyed finally eliminating any future risk for Rome and it is true that once the Caliphate Malays eliminated Rome now expands faster than ever in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. C. after the second Punic War, the concord of northern Italy that was still in the hands of the Gallic tribes pacified the Spanish provinces taken from Carthage and also announced them and began to get involved in Greece I told you before that Greece was in its Age Golden, the so-called classical age, when Rome was taking its independence as a republic, then, when the first republic fought for its survival and expansion in Italy, the main events in the Mediterranean world, we are actually happening in the East Alexander the Great was conquering one of the largest empires in the Middle East and beyond, but after the fall of Carthage, the Greek world was somewhat in decline.

Alexander's Empire had not survived for long and had fragmented into several Hellenistic kingdoms, so the Romans played alliances, some of these kingdoms fighting among themselves. Rome intervened in Greece and after several walls failed to control it. heights in the middle of the 2nd century BC. The Roman Republic had become the most important power in the Mediterranean and had no rifles left, its armies had been victorious enough for people to forget the unfortunate defeats of ancient Rome or during the Punic Wars and Rome was seen as a considerable military power, but what really was this war machine and how did it work?

The army may be one of the most enduring institutions in the history of the world because if we take into account its continuation with Byzantium it lasted more than 2,000 years and changed a lot over the centuries at first during the period of the kingdom and beginnings. The republic was small and probably based on Etruscan and Greek models. The backbone of the Roman army was the infantry in the ranks we filled with the lower classes, while the cavalry, which was comparatively small, was left to the patricians because they had enough wealth to purchase horses. The role of commander-in-chief was assumed by the king and later by two consuls when the Republic was created in the5th century the troops were organized in phalanx like the Greek armies of the time that is, formation with reline soldiers armed with spears or bags during the Republic the army was reorganized to create Loyalist legions it was equivalent to a division in modern armies it was a unit of 5,000 to 7,000 men the regions were divided into smaller command units there was the cohort the tenth of a legion and then there were groups of one hundred themselves divided into groups of ten the majority of soldiers in the army were citizens the term legion It comes from the Latin let you quit means recruitment or levy and each man had to provide his equipment but then with the expansion throughout Italy and the creation of overseas provinces the army of the Republic grew dramatically in size the prominent army reached one hundred and fifty thousand men in the 3rd and 2nd centuries in times of war this number could be Tripoli when recruiting citizens long Roman history the military became increasingly professional and depended less and less on the editorial staff, equipment was standardized and discipline was extremely strict.

This was a major difference between the Roman army and most of its opponents, such as the Celts, the Germanic tribes of North Africa and the Middle East, very often Roman armies relied on straight formations. maneuvers on the battlefield, while their enemies had a more chaotic and disorganized way of fighting and the Romans applied their engineering capabilities and advanced technology to their weaponry, especially siege weapons, they did not invent the diesel siege weapon that they have been in use for centuries by other nations, but They had engineers accompanying the legions and could quickly build ballasts Scorpions or siege towers The Roman armies could also move very quickly thanks to the road network at the end of the empire there were 50,000 kilometers of main roads which connected all the provinces to the heart of the Empire's imagery after the Punic Wars that the Roman Republic required is based throughout the Mediterranean, in general, an alliance with Rome was the first step towards absorption into the empire, later , Roman armies often fought alongside non-Roman troops who remained structurally separate from them on the battlefield.

Roman armies had relatively few cavalry and archers and here were always found that these types of troops turned against the citizens fighting along with those from the region, they were called auxiliary auxiliaries in the period of the late Republic and the Empire, so over the centuries this Roman army became more and more professional men hired for a very long period of service. from 16 to 25 years depending on the period after some campaigns and with very strict training. The Roman legionaries are, by far, the most efficient troops in the Mediterranean world and after the walls against the Caliphate, the Roman army began to acquire a reputation for invincibility, although it is not entirely deserved, there were still defeats from time to time, but Rome had such a capacity to replace its armies and such a size that the neighbor could win over it in a lasting way despite Rome's expansion, I told you before that the political system of the republic could be unstable with a senate that represented the points of In the view and interests of the elite, the patricians were two players who had to fight for representation and be taken into account, but the plebs were able to obtain concessions from their popular assembly.

The tribunes had to be respected, they also obtained rights, for example, patricians and plebeians could not marry at the beginning of the republic and this interdiction was abolished. They also get the louse put into writing and this is another notable feature of ancient Rome, the systematic codification of Laos and the attribution of legal status to each individual depends on where you go, but whether it is in Europe or America in a country Aquaman's harsh low Roman laws are the basic framework of the legal system, which is why there are so many Latinos. In terms of legal terminology, of course, there were considerable changes since then relating the state of society and the rule of law, so what society was like in ancient Rome changed over time until the center of social organization It was the family and it was not just a biological reality or a tradition, the family was an illegal construction and it was said that he was the master of better families, he was the master of his wife, his children and even at the beginning of the Republic - the master of his children's wives, his children. and of course the slaves attached to the family because slavery was part of their social order and when the slaves were freed they remained legally inferior because they were not born free their children would be born free slavery was everywhere in the rich homes and in the countryside the Worthy slaves had to leave prisoners of war and their descendants, many of whom ended up being freed by their masters or had the right to save money and buy their freedom.

From a legal point of view, slaves were considered personal property almost like furniture because there were some limitations mutilations or acts of cruelty or murder we are prohibited by law that obviously between the rule of law and practice there can be a gap and in fact life as a slave could be anything from your daily nightmare to an almost decent life when slaves were more generous. the masters of the limitation the inequality of status was part of the law the women were miners and members of the family the knights or very few rights the paterfamilias was like an absolute king at the head of the family and could punish or make decisions at his discretion During the Republic, poor citizens were allowed to vote to elect the council's patricians and plebeians alike.

Citizen status excluded women, children and, obviously, slaves, and these basic rules remained in force for centuries, but over time the law and social opinions evolved towards greater emancipation of family members. of the family unit decreased since two sons could form their own family when they married, so the paterfamilias no longer ruled over their daughters-in-law and their sons and wives were progressively given a little more room for maneuver but not much Roman society was extremely patriotic, obviously, it is our confidence to know that jobs and families could be very different and social class was also a factor.

The rich woman may have had more real freedom than the poor man, even a poor citizen, in everyday life in a Roman city. It revolved a lot around the forum, whose communities had an economic, social and religious dimension. First it was a business district where people went to buy and trade, borrow money, participate in gatherings such as ceremonies or festivities and, finally, listen to its speakers expressing their opinions in the forum. It was also the place where public opinion was formed. Going to the forum was a normal daily activity for a Roman citizen, not only in Rome, in all Roman cities, and therefore going to a public bath at least once a day would separate death for those. men and For women, another type of occasion to socialize was through entertainment.

Rome and smaller cities built huge infrastructures so that this entertainment was generally free to visitors, and food and drink were sometimes offered to participants. She may have heard the phrase Panem Ezio can say it means. bread and games the formula to keep the population calm and avoid riots the games and entertainment took on particularly epic proportions in the city of Rome there was the Circus Maximus for chariot races and of course the Colosseum where shows were organized there were gladiatorial fights, fights between men o Fights between men and wild animals, over time their spectacles became more and more spectacular and entire battles could be recreated.

These spectacles look simultaneously fascinating and also a little monstrous. Thousands of people gathered to watch people being killed in front of them. It's incredibly. cruel and cruel to us also reflects what life was like in ancient times despite all the refinement of Roman culture life was hard and always very uncertain medicine was not very different from magic it was capable of doing a lot in many cases for Since the presence or risk of death was part of everyday life and human life had relatively little value, there was no such thing as human rights, of course, and it would have sounded completely absurd to a Roman citizen as a concept in a society with strict separation between social classes.

The clothing was also very differentiated, the common people generally wore dark tunics made of course from patrician materials on the contrary or tunics of linen or white wool and the same distinction existed between the dresses worn by women, the men also used canes that reflected their age and function and when they did it. eat it in dependent regions of course, a typical diet in the city of Rome was made of bread, salad, cheese and fruits with meats. Occasionally, at the beginning of the republic, families ate together around the table, but with more wealth and refinement in the richest circles, a special room with sofas. to eat called triclinium, the ring festivities appeared, people who gathered in a lynnium drink and the meals could last

hours

served by slaves to the participants.

Wine was a very common drink for all social classes from the 3rd century BC. You might think that this kind of indulgence and refinement was a sign of increasingly lax discipline, but in reality no, even though they are aware that excess is occurring, losing control was considered a serious defect and so was alcoholism, for example, most of the time wine was served tipped with water and drunk until wine was seen as a sign of alcoholism and condemned terribly in political life the accusation of alcoholism or softness was frequent against opponents another important part of social life was religion.

We Romans generally do not represent ourselves as very religious as the Egyptians say because there are other features in their civilization and there was almost no religious fanaticism or fundamentalism in ancient Rome. In reality, the Romans never tried to impose their cards on anyone, they simply built temples that coexisted with local deities. The idea that proselytism was necessary was foreign to them; they simply did not see the point, so in this sense they were tolerant when it came to religion, but this tolerance had limitations because the border between religion and social order, the war between the church and the state was completely blurred participating in religious ceremonies and paying respects to the gods and traditions was a way to socialize and show your belonging to the world of Rome.

Later I will tell you about the emergence of Christianity in the Roman Empire and the prostitution of the first Christians. They were not persecuted for religious reasons. Precisely the only garden that Christians believed in could have coexisted perfectly with traditional Roman beliefs, the problem was that the Christian faith rejected all other gods as false idols that should have no place and Christianity was also critical of many Roman traditions, so when this new religion began to spread it was perceived as a revolutionary threat directed at the very foundations of Roman society, Christians asked for the elimination of all other deities and refused to participate in the ceremonies and festivities that they regularly reaffirmed the foundations of Roman society;

There has been nothing like it before Christianity. and that is why for a long time until the Christians finally won the fight and obtained the Emperor's conversion to the new faith, the Christians were seen as an aggressive fanatical cult that needed to be eliminated to preserve the social order, but as I said, Socializing and being a citizen meant participating in ceremonies giving gifts to the gods and showing signs of respect for Roman traditions. Most public events had a religious dimension, for example, there was the Roman triumph, it was a parade organized to celebrate victories. of a general, in essence, the triumph It was a religious procession, the general showed his deity and his willingness to serve the public good by dedicating a part of his loot to the gods, especially Jupiter, who represented authority and just government.

The part of public displays of ready tragedy was also a daily private religion. In each home there was a small shrine where people could pray and make detours to the gods of their home and their ancestors, not return to political life under a republic. A period of political instability began after the Third Punic War around 130 BC. C. during the walls against Carthage. The senate and council had gained more power in Rome at the expense of the plebs and their popular assembly and this led to a reaction against the balance of power that now seemed too tilted against the people in 133 BC. named Tiberius Gracchus was elected tribune of the plebs and attempted to reform the low agrarianto favor the small peasants which infuriates the large landowners and the Senate to which his law was approved by the Popular Assembly so several senators organized his assassination to get rid of him but ten years ago Later, his brother Chaos Grekes was elected tribune of the plebs and continued to press in the same direction and further proposed a law that would force the state to provide cheap weed to all poor citizens of Rome.

This was acceptable to the Senate. which gave full powers to the council to crush the Grakkus supporters, troops were brought to the entrance of Rome and forced the separation of the followers from the chaos crackers. Kalem returned in the following years the missing with two cracker brothers was extremely dangerous and detrimental to the Republic due to violence. and assassination have become ways of governing that the Republic was not before this weekend and can be seen as the beginning of a process that will ultimately destroy it from within a few years later things have not improved our general Colton Marius grows with the support of the plebs was sent to pacify the new media in North Africa and returned covered in glory, he was elected council six times in a row and obtained greater military glory against the president in the south of coal at the end of the second century BC.

He was so popular that the Popular Party hoped to take advantage of his prestige to seize power in Rome and sidelined the Senate. Finally Marius did not dare to do this, but the Republic was close to the dictatorship of the Popular Assembly and the temporary dictatorship occurred a few years. Later, with a civil war in Italy with another general, Sulla, Silla was another strongman covered in military glory while campaigning in Greece, the plebs took power and began to tyrannize the aristocrats. Silla returned to Italy and filled the armies sent by the Popular Assembly. He eventually won and recovered from the hands of the People's Assembly becoming a dictator and used his power to restore balance with the Senate.

Silla is remembered as the model dictator because after having used his extraordinary and supposedly temporary powers to restore the Republic, instead of staying, he abdicated and ended his life he is a simple citizen despite this restoration and the ongoing expansion in Abroad, the Republic remained stable and faced multiple threats in the 1st century BC, the Senate and the Popular Party were still fighting and at some point the provinces of Spain rebelled. Pirate activity increased and began to threaten supply lines to Rome. In addition to this, a large slave revolt occurred in Italy around a famous slave and gladiator.

Spartacus. Spartacus's revolt was violently suppressed. It is not the only certain slave revolt that occurred. but he is undoubtedly the largest and most famous in the face of all these simultaneous threats, the Senate gave an army to another providential man Pompey Pompey was very efficient in solving the problems of the Senate, he crushed the Popular Party, then he pacified Spain and ended up destroying an army of Spartacus when he returned to Rome was seen as a savior but he had his own autonomy and was not just a creature of the Senate he used his powers and influence to restore the rights of the tribunes of the plebs which made him even more popular and gained even more popularity.

Overseeing the elimination of the pirate threat and winning more battles in the eastern regions of Roman territory in Anatolia, Syria and Palestine, in his absence because he remained in the Levant for five years, two men rose up. in Rome Crassus, a very wealthy politician who became head of the Popular Party and behind glasses Julius Caesar, when Pompey returned to Rome he was covered in more glory and military authority than ever and, given how weak the institutions of the Republic, the senators were concerned about what they could do with their influence in the face of hostility from the Senate.

Pompey allied himself with Crassus and Caesar to seize power between them in 60 BC. C. they formed the so-called triumvirate. They were granted full powers for five years and each of them was given provinces to oversee the Republic as a regime at this point. He had never been weaker because he could not escape his circle of infighting between factions and strongmen who controlled the power, but at the same time Rome as a state had never been stronger. The legions had successfully pacified the rebelling provinces. Italy was under good control after the fall of Spartacus and the new face of accelerated expansion was about to begin, but the days of the Republic were surely numbered and neither Caesar nor Crassus nor Pompey seemed willing to share power forever, for what we left the Roman Republic in the middle of the first century.

By then it was already very old. It had been founded at the end of the 6th century BC. C. and had already gone through many difficulties to stabilize its institutions. Conquering Italy defeated Carthage and expanded throughout the Mediterranean Sea in the mid-1st century BC. C. Rome had become a dominant power and already occupied Spain, southern Italy, Greece and parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Rome was rich technologically advanced and had the largest and most powerful army in the known world that the regime of the institution of the Republic seemed increasingly fragile and threatened remember that the republic was based on a balance of power in the city of Rome between classes Socially, there was an elite, the patricians who controlled the senate and the rest of the citizens forming the plebs.

After several centuries, these institutions were highly respected and culturally, the Romans were very distrustful of individuals who tried to take power for themselves. Political power in Rome was not very personalized. They were about to arrive. The souls reacted every year. Although the republican system had long been very resilient, it seemed increasingly weak in recent years. Politics in the first century had become more violent with the Senate or plebs willing to use violence and murder to impose their views. In recent decades, several strongmen had appeared and one faction or another had seen them as those who sought to impose their will.

Like Generals Myers and Salah and, more recently, Senators Pompey and the Tribunes of the Plebs, we are perfectly aware of the risk this could pose to the institutions and yet they could not help but play this game when it could serve his interests in the 70s BC, the strong ones. The man of the moment was Pompey, he had served Republican Rome very well by pacifying Spain by organizing the elimination of pirates in the Mediterranean Sea and he finished suppressing the slave revolt behind Spartacus and even sailed to the Levant to conquer more provinces for Rome. when Pompey.

He returned from the east after five years, his military glory and authority were unmatched and these were the best way to achieve power and influence in Rome, but many senators were worried about what he could do with this influence and he became hostile, so Pompey trusted the two men. who had risen in his absence, Crassus and Caesar, all three were given full powers for several years, they shared power between them, which was more acceptable in Rome due to republican traditions and their unofficial alliance. He called it the triumvirate. This is where we stopped. At the end of part 1 none of the three were so willing to share power forever and tried to use the years ahead of them to strengthen their positions.

Crassus was initially Caesar's political patron, he had amassed a considerable fortune and was even called the richest man in Rome and had been elected tribune of the plebs. Crassus and Pompey hated each other and their alliance was constantly unstable, in fact it lasted a few years, only Crassus received the position of governor of the province of Syria and intended to use it as a launching pad for He conquered more lands for Rome and won two military glories that gave him They were missing, so he launched an expedition against the Parthian Empire, Rome's neighbor in Syria, but the expedition was a complete disaster and he ended up losing his army and being killed in 53 BC.

Caesar also lacks treatment. of the military success Pompey had and knew we needed to acquire it when the triumvirate was formed, but who was Julius Caesar? He came from the patrician family, two gentlemen. Julia Jen, remember? is the Latin name of these ancient Roman families and Caesar had become the master of the family early at the age of 16 after the death of his father and at an early age he started a political career and in order to respond to the civility of India For the formation of the triumvirate he made a political alliance with Crassus and two men never betrayed each other, they remained trusting until Crassus' death, but before that Caesar had had a very even and full life, without casualties, he had lost his family's fortune because he was on the wrong side when Sara became dictator and he had been stripped of his inheritance and had to hide for several years outside of Rome he served in the army and then returned to Rome starting from scratch despite being from a patrician family heroes Within the Popular Party, the party of the plebs as a politician with talent as an orator and from this time he was in the same circle as Crassus, after having lost almost everything, he thus returned to the political top and was even elected to the council.

Caesar was extraordinarily ambitious and perfectly understood the institutions and balance of power in Rome. He grew up in a period in which political life was violent and seated by the plebs who were more than willing to use armies to crush the other faction if necessary and had understood, like Crassus, that the only way to have legitimacy in Rome and gaining popular support was through a show of force. through military victories, so that when the triumvirate began his objective was to conquer lands for the Republic and his own position in doing so, the scissor objectives would be go wykel.

He had been given direct command of provinces in the south of France that had already been ramen for decades. and the objective was a strategic objective for Rome first because it was very populated and could become a rich province if it were exploited. It's hard to know how many he never ate. Note that the rest dodge the point at around 10 million, which was as much as Italy, the land was fertile and the climate was temperate, so this land was quite welcoming, so the large population and the target as well They were a threat to Rome because it was close to Italy and needed to be secured.

The Romans had not forgotten the Gallic invasion of the 4th century BC. when Rome was occupied and rescued by the Brenners and the target was also very fragmented, it was an area with a common Celtic culture with multiple tribes around 60 that were often at war with each other and this lack of coordination was a perfect opportunity to confront them . separately and even allied with some of them like other Celtic peoples in Western Europe the targets did not have the kind of technological and administrative sophistication that the Romans had who were not backward nor did they have cities some of them of significant size and their weaponry was on par with the Romans almost particularly its metallurgy was as good as rooms in 58 BC.

C. Caesar responded to the call for help from one tribe against another and began a long campaign that would culminate a few years later in the submission of the Coal War, the Romans quickly moved north and took control of the northeast of the goal , a region called Bend Rica. From this position they pushed towards the southwest starting in 53 BC. C. the growing Roman presence united several tribes and they rose up against Rome and accepted a chief of command to lead their campaign against the invading power, this chief was vercingetorix and was the chief of the furnaces, a tribe of the central goal in the 52 a.

C., a large army under Vercingetorix that six legions were commanded by Caesar at the Battle of Jericho, which was a great setback for Rome. but only temporary because the same year Caesar managed to surround and besiege Vercingetorix and Gary call me inside the city of Alice this is in Burgundy today two defenders died of hunger inside the city and finally had to surrender Vercingetorix was taken prisoner and then sent to Rome appeared in Caesar's triumph and was then strangled in prison, after that, in the following years the objective was specified and became a new province of the Republic in terms of area and population.

This was Rome's greatest conquest to date outside of Italy and Caesar. it had now gained a kind of aura and popularity that could put it on par with Pompeii. Crassus had died in the East in his doomed war against the Parthian Empire and a triumvirate had ceased to exist with the death of the herbs. Pompeii will read about Caesar and so did the Senate, even though Caesar was from a prestigious patrician family, he had risen to power within the body of the people, while Pompey was closer to the Senate, so the senators appointed Tom painting in the council and as Caesar was back in Italy, they ordered Caesar refused to disband his army and instead marched towards Rome with him.

This is when a daily activist would have said: luckis cast and this is an anecdote that was probably invented later, but it reflects that our Caesar knew that defining the Senate and Pompey could only have two results: victory or death and his phrase in Latin Alaric proves his caste today remained as a way of saying that events have passed the point of no return there is another phrase crossing the Rubicon the Rebekah was a river in northern Italy which means approximately the same thing to cross the radical means to voluntarily decide to cross a point of no return, so to cross the radical It marked the beginning of a civil war between Caesar's supporters and Pompey's supporters.

The Civil War began in 49 BC. Caesar arrived in Rome and entered the city without difficulty Pompey and many senators had already escaped to regroup and form an army. Caesar crossed the Adriatic Sea and met at the Battle of the Phallus in 48 BC. This was a decisive victory for Caesar despite having a smaller army. Pompey escapes to Egypt and Caesar followed him, but when Caesar arrived in Egypt, King Ptolemy XIII had already ordered Pompey's assassination and sent his head to Caesar. . Egypt at the time was still an independent country with a Greek dynasty, the Ptolemies, this was an attempt to gain two new masters of Rome's favors, but it completely backfired on Ptolemy, instead of gaining a grateful friend, he became an enemy, in fact, Caesar was first and foremost a politician and his goal was more to consolidate his power than to seek revenge against Pompey, showing mercy and uniting factions was the best way. appear above everyone else and secure his power, which is why he pardoned many senators and other supporters of Pompey and even restored their positions.

Caesar hoped to do the same with Pompey himself; It would have been a fantastic PR operation for him. but by trying to curry favor with him until the middle of the 13th century, he stole this opportunity in Egypt. Caesar met Cleopatra, she was fighting her brother Ptolemy to become the sole ruler of the country and Caesar began a relationship with her and helped her secure her throne. He made a video about Cleopatra telling this particular story. I put a link in the description because Pompey had been killed before Caesar could convince him to accept defeat and become loyal, he had to continue fighting the remnants of Pompey's family and his supporters in the following years.

From Egypt Caesar also continued campaigning in Asia, what we call here Asia is Asia as the Greeks and Romans defined it. Asia began in Turkey and the world east of Mesopotamia was very mysterious to them, the Romans were perfectly aware that they were distant countries. . there in the East Alexander the Great had reached Central Asia and even India and they also knew China because in ancient times there was already the Silk Road that brought various products from the Far East to Thailand mainly through Central Asia and the Middle East later. to change hands. Precious Chinese products and spices from Southeast Asia often arrived in Rome.

I put another link to the video about the Silk Road in the description, so back to our story, in the year 46 BC. C. Caesar had finished pacifying the provinces of the Republic and this Republican Empire was larger than ever. and in Rome he had been promoted to dictator for life, the Republic still existed and so did its institutions, but in fact a dictator for life is not so far from a king or an emperor by gathering so much power in his hands when there was no imminent threat that asked for it. and without a time limit Caesar continued to weaken the republican institutions almost ruining them and he could not know it is that he was paving the way towards the transformation of the Republic into an empire ruled by a single person perhaps this was It was inevitable that long before Caesar the functioning of institutions began to deteriorate and become increasingly violent.

Several civil wars had taken place in less than a century and, due to the size of Rome with all these new distant provinces, perhaps the type of Republic that worked. Well, when the territory was smaller it was now doomed, we never knew that perhaps the alternative to Julius Caesar and his successors taking over all power could have been the explosion of Rome, which now extended from modern Spain into the west to Assyria in the east and from Belgium to Libya, which is undeniable anyway, began the transformation of the Republic into an empire that we will discuss opened a more peaceful period within the borders of Rome, at least at first almost put an end to the vicious cycle of fighting. in the city of Rome which led to severe walls in Italy and beyond, but Caesar would not be the one to end the Republic, he still had opponents within Rome, motivated by his own ambitions and also the will to preserve the Republic, he also had opponents to his politics, especially in the ruling and richer classes, because as a dictator he largely applied the program of the popular parties, limited the power of senators, and distributed land. for the veterans and the poor, that would be completely anachronistic, but if we were to position the owner of the Caesar policy on the left-right political axis as we do today, the Caesar policy would have been firmly on the left side and this would not pleased everyone in 44 BC, Caesar was assassinated within the Senate by a conspiracy that included his own adopted son, the Caesar brothers had chosen a successor, their nephew Octavian, better known as Augustus, his future name as the first emperor of Rome , but when Caesar was assassinated, Rome was still a republic and once again the struggle for power resumed immediately three men allied themselves to form a new triumvirate of military dictators the three men where Octavian the hair and comforts Mark Antony better known like Mark Antony and Marcus Lepidus, the latter was a close ally of Caesar until his assassination, the three members of this The new triumvirate shared among themselves the administration of the provinces as had been done before in the first triumvirate 20 years earlier, Octavian took the provinces Western, including the city of Rome, Mark Antony, the east and repeated the south with North Africa, like Julius Caesar before him.

Octavio was not. inclined to share power and his main rival was Mark Antony who was now far from Rome Octavian and his followers were trying to discredit Mark Antony in Rome and were helped when he began a relationship with Cleopatra in Egypt this gave him an image of weakness in Rome, for being in the arms of his foreign queen, obviously here Octavian's supporters pushed this narrative, he died and Egypt was under the influence of Rome, but it was still officially independent and it was also a very strategic region in the Mediterranean world because Rome needed grain of the Nile Valley, Italy alone did not produce enough to sustain its population, including the city of Rome itself, and like the ghouls and Italy, the delta and the Nile Valley had a very large population. .

Ptolemaic Egypt was not a threat to Rome, but Egypt being allied with a council controlling the eastern part of the Republic could be a threat and, like the first triumvirate, the second devolved into a civil war. Octavian won it after Eve's naval battle at Actium in 31 BC. This is probably the largest naval battle of ancient times. It sealed the fate of Antony and Cleopatra, both later committed suicide and assisted in the independence of Egypt, which became a Roman province. Marcus Lepidus was also forced into exile while Octavian, the sole ruler of Rome in 27 BC, was alive.

C., he was named Imperator, that is, commander by the Senate and people of Rome, by the way, this is the meaning of the initials s P Q R Senate was in the sinister popular square Senate and people of Rome who together formed the government of the Republic more Octavian was later given the name August, meaning officially venerating the Republic. The August was not abolished. He was too clever to do that and remained in place for three more centuries, but only as a facet the August emptied the Republic of its substance. The new Imperator in the system created with his internal office and government.

For the rest of their lives they were formed in Tennessee, which is why the year 27 BC. C., when August was named Emperor, it is considered the end of the Republic and the beginning of the empire, but there was never any proclamation about it. In reality, August simply continued Caesar's work that had been interrupted by Caesar's assassination, the end of the Republic in the past, but in the name of August's complete victory opened a period of lasting stability, something the Republic never I had really enjoyed it. Stability here means that no war took place within the borders of the Empire.

Many conflicts on the borders to defend provinces and gain more, but the interior of the Empire remained safe for about 200 years. Transitions between emperors were rarely smooth. We will talk about it when the Empire was not hit by large-scale civil wars. as before until at least the end of the 2nd century AD. For these reasons the beginning of the Empire is also the beginning of the so-called Roman tax the Roman peace the long period of stability that contributed a lot to the prosperity of each province and that was still remembered as a golden age centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire So what exactly does this prosperity mean?

Because, as always in history, we tend to focus on the trends of events and the people in power or how society worked, but people had many other concerns. In their daily lives there were no statistics on income or living standards, of course, but it is possible to estimate the relative wealth of the regions, how the economy worked and what was produced. The richest region of the Empire was most likely Italy because it had the best. infrastructure received taxes from other provinces and was the center of trade flows within the Empire, it was followed by Roman Asia, i.e.

Anatolia, Turkey, Egypt and objective, the economy was obviously mainly agrarian focused on agriculture, but mining and metallurgy enjoyed enormous development in the Roman provinces the main mining regions of the Empire where Spain Ghul and Anatolia for some metals such as lead the Roman Empire had visible impacts on world production we know this through the analysis of the ice sheets in Greenland ice sheets hold the memory of what the Earth's atmosphere was like several centuries or several millennia ago and levels of lead pollution in the atmosphere increased dramatically in the early centuries and then collapsed and returned to their peak since Roman times in the 18th century when The Industrial Revolution was a flourishing the same for copper.

Spain alone produced about 40 percent of the world's copper in this period. Iran's production was estimated at 3 pounds per capita. This is much more than in medieval Europe. Precious metals remained within the borders of the Empire. It circulated with trade between the provinces, but there were no large inflows or outflows of precious metals if the entire Roman Empire is considered, so thanks to mining, stocks of gold and even more of silver increased dramatically later, in the Middle Ages, precious metals became scarce in Europe. Because Europe was a net buyer of foreign goods and needed to pay in precious metals, it again took more than a millennium and until the discovery of America for Europe to return to the kind of precious metal abundance it enjoyed during the Roman Empire.

Banks and credit were also available to merchants. This was possible thanks to the monetization of the economy, unlike other ancient societies, people under the Empire expressed the price of goods in money. Butter was no longer the normal way of trading. Many Roman coins were created and are still relatively abandoned in museums and private collections today. The state functioned by increasing taxes on trading income between provinces and could finance the army and spectacular infrastructure, especially in Rome itself, the distribution of income. and assets was very unequal, it is estimated that around 90 percent of the people lived with the minimum and we are close to subsistence, about 10 percent of the population was formed as a small middle class that is often found in the cities and then you had 1 or 2 percent of the total population. being able to live in various levels of luxury these are just vague estimates that reflect the inequality between social classes these figures cannot be taken as our data as they give a fair picture of what society was like in reality the income distribution was quite similar to what which was observed in Europe and the Middle East until the Industrial Revolution began and then its middle-class sibling appeared.

They were great fortunes in some families. Some of them made a fortune from bank loans and real estate. This is how Crassus from the first triumvirate. he made his fortune, but as the Empire declined in the 4th and 5th centuries, it became increasingly difficult to make these familiesextremely rich paid taxes and the state, the government became increasingly poorer within an otherwise rich Empire. Some historians have blamed the substance of the faint for being one of the reasons why the Roman Empire could not defend itself from the barbarian invasions let's not be simplistic because there were also other reasons that we will discuss later and perhaps there is a lesson to ponder here by refusing to give little to the super rich of the Romans.

The empire may have lost everything because the society on which its wealth was based was destroyed and there can be no fortune without a functioning government and society to run it and protect it. Let's go back to the reign of the first Emperor Augustus because the fall of the empire is still a long way in the future it was a long reign he died apparently of natural cows in 1480 after 40 years as Emperor Augustus as he did more than anyone before or after him to expand the Empire after the annexation of Egypt ordered the conquest of The rest of the Iberian Peninsula Rome had been in Spain for a long time, more than 200 years after the Second Punic War, but not the entire Peninsula had been occupied and nor did it push the northern borders to the Rhine and the Danube. go without difficulties especially against the Germanic tribes the Romans suffered one of the worst defeats in their history against the presidents in the battle of the Borg forest in the year 983 the Roman legions were destroyed immediately the number of legions had increased to 50 during the Civil war against Mark Antony after the war was reduced to 28, so three legions represented about 10% of the entire Roman army, but despite some setbacks and unrest in new provinces, Augustus's reign was very successful in expand Rome and strengthen the new regime. in 1480 apparently due to natural causes at the age of 75 I say apparently because we will see that rural death was common among his successors the Empire may have been more stable but the struggle for power was still the rule in Rome and Octavian was ruthless and later August remains a controversial figure in historiography;

He was often disliked for his naked ambition, first for his severity and for his termination of the Republic, although in reality he simply continued a trend that had begun before him. The dictatorship existed from the beginning of the Republic even. although it was always for a limited time and for a short time in case of military emergency the Senate granted full powers to someone for a few months then the practice of dictatorship was revived with solar and Caesar was the first to become dictator for life on August no. he was technically a dictator, but the result was close, he concentrated a lot of power in his hands, but in some sense, Caesar did at least as much to undermine the Republic, perhaps more than anything.

Stories are not told from the point of view of her opponents, for example, stories about Cleopatra are always told from the point of view of Mark Antony and his augusts, there is no denying that she was perhaps the most important ruler in history from Rome. for his conquests his transformation of the institutions and the duration of his government the new system designed by August knew the hereditary succession between emperors but he outlived several of his possible successors and the letter was passed to his stepson Tiberius the following rulers including tuberculosis areas of the the so-called Giulio Claudian dynasty, what does it mean that Augustus, like Julius Caesar, belonged to the patrician family of Giulia?

Giulia de Jen, her stepson Tiberius was Claudia de Jen and until 68 AD. the emperors came from both families, therefore the Giulio Claudian dynasty, another thing that may be confusing is the title Caesar initially it is a name, the name of Julius Caesar, but it became a title claimed by successive emperors who would be called Caesar, Augustus's direct successors pale in comparison, after a few years Tiberius became increasingly paranoid and ordered executions to get rid of anyone who might have plotted against him when he died, most of the people who might have succeeded him had been murdered and fell to his great-nephew Caius, better known as Caligari Caligari literally means Little Boots, whose name has become a symbol of madness. according to the stories but you have to take them consciously once he appointed his favorite horse to the Senate and there are more stories of the same type Caligula's reign was short he lasted years only until he was assassinated by the commander of his god and his successor was Claudius later After the death of the rank, the Empire could have been ended and the Republic reinstated, the Senate discussed it, but the Praetorian Guard hailed Claudius as Emperor and the Empire lasted because of this.

The Praetorian Guard was a special card created by Augustus so recently when these events happened that it directly protected the emperor and maintained order in the city of Rome so Claudius became the new emperor and proved to be more functional than his two predecessors at the time. At least he was not paranoid or crazy, he continued the expansion of the Empire, ordering in particular the conquest of Great Britain in the year 43 AD. Britain was never completely controlled. The Robins headed north, to where the modern separation between England and Scotland is today. Claudia's family life and succession have been the subject of many theories, novels and dramatic works because she may have been poisoned by his fourth wife Agrippina to ensure the passing of the title to her son and her adopted son Niro at the expense of Brittany Gasps The Son Claudia from a previous Ukrainian marriage has been described by many historians as ambitious, violent and ruthless and there is probably some truth.

She was also described as very beautiful and physically attractive, so she also became a stereotype of darling and openly ambitious. and immoral femme fatale in a certain sense, in any case she ended up executed by her own son five years after her accession to the throne. Nero's reign lasted 15 years and he is one of the most famous emperors, although not for the right reasons, we cannot know exactly to what extent she certainly intended to at least share power with him or even control him and he resolved his little mummy problems ordering him to stab her to death.

Nero did a lot to develop the control infrastructure in Rome now that there was a giant fire in Rome in 64 AD. and this was convenient for his construction projects, so it has always been suspected that he was responsible for it and the legend of Nero appeared playing jumping enjoying the spectacle while Rome was building, it is very true and true, there is no evidence of it . This anyway, but it is true that Nero was not perfectly sane, he believed himself to be a god and a genius artist and he ordered the construction of the Domus Aurea, the golden house, it was a giant terrace with gardens that needed a lot of space in the It was built in the heart of Rome, but it was a shame to his successors, babies so big that they used a site to build new things, baths, an amphitheater, a temple to Venus, within 40 years Nero's Palace had been stripped of its precious materials and has disappeared, and there are new buildings Nero's reign also saw a victorious war in the east against the Parthian Empire and the suppression of the revolt led by Boudicca in the province of Britannia which Nero became hugely unpopular and was overthrown by a coup soldier committed suicide and was quietly executed while at the hands of the Senate now another aspect of Nero's rule was the beginning of the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire, which began with two Great Fires of Rome in 64 AD.

This persecution lasted more than two centuries until 313 AD, when the Christian religion was finally legalized why and how it happened, as I told you in the first part of this story, there was a plurality of religions in Rome and in the provinces the Romans perfectly accepted the coexistence of his letters with others from the Pantheon and the Kurds, but this tolerance had its limitations because religion and social order or religion and state do not completely distinguish ourselves. Participating in religious ceremonies and publicly showing their respect for God was a way of manifesting their belonging to Roman society and support for social order before Christians were already small-scale cases. the persecutions against the Celts that did not fit with these rules when they were seen as superstition superstition for the Romans had a very dangerous connotation much more serious than the current meaning of the world superstition for them superstition was a set of religious beliefs and practices that we Not only are they different, but they represent a threat to society.

It was believed that discards took people away from harmony and drove them crazy, almost for these reasons, some girls were persecuted throughout Romani history, for example, participants in the cult of daggers were executed in the century II BC, much earlier. Christianity for its excesses later similar measures were taken against the druids in provinces with their Celtic heritage for the same reason because they refused to participate in Roman ceremonies there were suspicions of the Jews: the Jews were never officially persecuted because at least their religion was ancient and the Romans, so honoring an ancient tradition is the right thing to do.

Some Romans despised the Jewish religion, considering it a dangerous skill, but they were generally left free to practice their religion. Your special tax. The Jewish tax was created, so there was a form of discrimination that never became the reason for the spread of violence when Christianity appeared, which was still very recent in the 1st century AD. Initially it was perceived as a sect within Judaism because of the place where it occurred and because the first followers of the new religion were Jews but a distinction soon appeared with the conversions and the first Christians who refused to pay the Jewish tax and Christianity entered quite a bit. well in the category of superstition for the majority of Romans, he rejected traditional gods as false, he implied the refusal to participate in ceremonies, he preached equal dignity among all men when the Roman social order was based on social class and birthright, so they were seen as a sect that could be corrosive to society and because Christians were, at best, from the frying pan, they hid and met at night in a private setting, while The Roman religion was meant to be public and visible, so this added another layer of suspicion, so initially much of the Roman rejection of Christianity was based on the perception that it was bad for the social order and contrary to the Judaism that At least he had the benefit of being a venerable.

The ancient religion, Christianity, was based on following Jesus Christ who died just a few decades earlier and, from the Roman point of view, as a convicted criminal, Nero was the first emperor who tried to blame the Christians for the difficulties of his reign, but I knew that would be easy because hostility towards them was already widespread for a long time until the middle of the 3rd century, so almost two hundred years later the Roman state remained on the sidelines, but Christianity was regularly banned in certain provinces and mobs formed. against Christians. and local authorities turned a blind eye or even encouraged them as a way to keep the population happy.

The persecutions took on a much broader dimension in the 3rd century and in a sense came with a relative weakness of the Empire. It is not uncommon to see the population or authorities turn against a minority when a feeling of insecurity ends in 250 AD. C. the emperor Decius issued a decree requiring public sacrifices to the gods, which was actually a kind of deterrent testimonial reference to the Emperor and the established order as an oath of loyalty to all citizens. Refusing this, even when given the opportunity to offer sacrifices, they were arrested, tortured and executed and in practice this meant that many Christians actually began systemic persecutions which culminated in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries.

At this point, Christian communities had multiplied and in some parts of the Empire they experienced, in a more or less visible way, systematic persecution by the State that divided these communities between those who agreed to give signs of submission to save their lives and those who agreed to give signs of submission to save their lives. In the first centuries the Catholic Church beatified several of them who died for refusing to abdicate their faith. Some of them that is the most visible and famous aspect of this Marty Odem died in public games where his execution became entertainment for the crowds there was a dramatic The reversal in the early 4th century, Christianity had reached ruling circles and was legalized and then the emperor converted to it and later converted an idea of ​​Christianity.

Empires, the official religion that appeared within the Roman Empire, had a great impact on the persecution of Christianity for a long time. time shaped it having the center of theCatholicism in Rome and the Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople for a long time spreading to the entire Mediterranean world all of these are products of the development of Christianity within the empire but we were with the four of Nero long before this happened Nero tied without hair ending the dynasty Jian truly okla there was a brief civil war in 68 and 69 known as the year of the 4 Emperor because several of them quickly rose and fell until the rise of speci on the first ruler of the Flavian dynasty is Vespasian who began the construction of the Colosseum in Rome and he maintained power for 10 years he was succeeded by Titus for two years it is during the reign of Titus that dear acronym and the disasters of Pompeii happened Vesuvius the volcano began an eruption that buried two cities and their inhabitants and their ashes then came the mission which reverted to the kind of paranoia that Tiberius had shown before he was assassinated in 96.

At this point after several emperors for more than a century it was difficult to defend the value of the imperial system, most emperors had proven to be incapable, paranoid and fit for their office, but Rome resisted today's useless emperor because his administration was sound with a functional Laos loyalty to Rome and loyalty not just to the Roman state or the emperor, but more broadly to Rome. As a concept, Rome had a long history as it brought technical progress and the Romans had no doubt that they were all, they were superior to anything else and this perception was vindicated in the following century which can be seen as the Golden Age of the Roman Empire. .

During the 2nd century, five consecutive emperors Nerva Trajan, Hadrian Antony, and Marcus Aurelius ruled during a much quieter period with peaceful transitions between them and the prosperous Empire. The Empire reached its maximum extent under Trajan in the 2nd century after Steeler conquered other provinces. Interestingly, it was under Marcus Aurelius that an embassy or perhaps a group of Roman merchants arrived in China, the phrase Pax Romana applies very well to the 2nd century because, despite border walls and occasional revolts, the general order in political life. In Rome the transitions between emperors were a little smoother and were perhaps helped by the fact that until Marcus Aurelius none of them had biological hair the title was transmitted by affiliation each emperor selected and then adopted his successor Marcus Aurelius had a future emperor son Commodus and many historians date the beginning of Rome's decline towards a clamorous reign, if you are wondering, these are the same commanders that appear in the movie Gladiator, the Emperor who murders at the beginning would be Marcus Aurelius and, as in the film cameras, was really angry that he stayed in power for 12 years until a plot led to his assassination in 192.

After Commodus' death, a period of unrest followed and several suitors appeared. The one who finally won after a civil war was Septimus Severus. He was supported by parts of the army and defeated his last opponent in 197 at the Battle of Luke Denham was the name of the flourishing city in France there was a period of respite with several emperors of the dynasty founded by Severus but the Empire entered into a serious crisis for 50 years from 230 years is called the crisis of the 3rd century political instability and the violent death of the emperor had returned in 235 Alexander Severus was assassinated by his own troops and the empire was hit by pressure from outside which he failed to achieve. contain the German tribes attacking across the borders the Sassanian empire in the east, which was a successful revival of the Persian empire that succeeded the Parthian empire and, furthermore, in 251 a permitted epidemic began called the plague of Cyprian, may have been a smallpox that caused high mortality and disorganized everything In the empire the situation was so out of control that in 258 the empire was divided into three states, one with Western Europe, Great Britain, another cold and Hispania, one in the east with Syria, Palestine and Egypt, and remained in the middle, it took 16 years and two emperors to restore the empire defeat the barbarians and the rebellious provinces reform it was already achieved under the emperor and in 274 he can already be credited with restoring even save the empire, but repairable damage had been done, especially in the western part, the cities had been destroyed and the economic system was broken, it never returned to what it was before.

At the end of the 3rd century there was a restoration and its emperor Diocletian, but he would never be the same again. The Empire was no larger than two centuries before. gained more independence and by the 3rd century the imperial system had not proven to be much better than the late Republic at avoiding civil wars. His question also understood that the Empire had become uncubable by a single emperor due to the size and existence of threats in two. main fronts, one in the North against mainly Germanic barbarian tribes and another in the East against the Sassanids, so a process of dividing the empire into two parts for administrative reasons began with two equal Emperors and a few years later in it half of the Secondary empire.

A ruler like a minor Emperor was chosen by them to head the health of the other domains, so in practice it was a Tetrarchy for the rulers, each holding a quarter of the Empire and making sure the transition between them was smooth. for secondary rulers who received the title of Caesar. while those of the Emperor were Augustans they became Augustans and had to appoint a new Caesar and so on these reforms saved the Empire that was on the verge of collapse and at the beginning of the 4th century Christian had stabilized it but the Tetrarchy was short-lived and after the equation disappeared, the pretenders multiplied, it is also under his question that the solutions against Christians reached their peak and Christianity was legalized shortly after in 313 under Emperor Constantine, who unified the Empire back under his control, the Roman Empire it resisted for most of the 4th century.

Despite more succession crises, the pressure of so-called suspension increased, many of their tribes were actually fleeing their lands after a manual invasion. Throughout the 4th century, the Empire oscillated between dividing and reuniting. The last emperor to rule the entire empire was Theodosius, who died in 395 AD. He made Christianity the official religion, his two sons each inherited the health of the Empire and the western part progressively declined and even disintegrated during the 5th century. The threat of raids made the Emperor move to Ravenna, the capital of the Western Empire, to the north of Rome. for defensive reasons sounds strange because the threat of barbarian tribes came from the north, but Ravana had a good defensive position, it was surrounded by swamps and marshes and it was also closer to the eastern half of the Empire.

It did not prevent Ravenna from later falling. Actually, in the 5th century, the Western Empire was unable to defend itself or absorb the waves of invaders or German tribes fleeing other invaders such as the Terrans, it retreated from distant provinces such as Britannia and tried to defend Italy and Spain, but after decades of decline and loss of territory, the last emperor Ramírez Auguste Ellis was deposed in 476 by it. Germany quarreled over who was crowned king of Italy in 476. It's a generally agreed upon date for the end of the Western Roman Empire, but that doesn't mean it all disappeared overnight.

In Italy, the Roman Senate continued to exist, so it took more time and supported this new king. but the Empire was definitively lost, it was not the end of the history of the Roman Empire nor because the eastern part later renamed Byzantium continued to exist for almost a thousand more years and even flourished in the centuries after the fall of Italy, reconquering parts of the west. empire but this is another story and I will stop here with the disappearance of the Western Empire the loss of Roman rule in Western Europe plunged its regent into walls fragmentation the economy receded and did not return to where it was for centuries - disappearance of the Roman Empire The empire in Europe and two waves of invaders who created their own kingdoms began the long and erratic process of the formation of European kingdoms that later became countries and nations after a millennium of expansion.

Rome no longer existed, the city of Rome itself declined dramatically and perhaps could have disappeared if it had not become the center of Christianity, the population fell from 1 million in the coordinates of the 2nd century to a few thousand and yet, The city's history was far from over as it was resurrected economically and culturally another millennium later becoming this incredible place. where the ruins of ancient Rome stand near the most extravagant palaces and churches of the Renaissance and Baroque era, for a thousand years the city of Rome exercised its power first as a kingdom in Italy and then as the center of a republic that projected its influence around the Mediterranean.

Sea and finally, as the capital of an empire that was larger and more powerful than any other before the rise of Rome, it was never a constant journey, it came with countless battles, victories and defeats, political crises, civil wars, problems and revolts. that for centuries Rome surpassed everything and reached the peak of its expansion and prosperity in the 2nd century AD. but no state is immortal and from the 3rd century AD. Instability due to the size of the empire, internal struggles for power, and threats accumulating on its borders put the Empire in a difficult situation. dangerous situation expansion stopped and Rome was hit again by the kind of civil wars it had avoided for generations the Empire was divided between factions it was reunified it lost some ground to its enemies in the north where the Germanic tribes threatened the Italy from the Vatican and target in the east the Persians and soon another formidable enemy will arrive the hands and their boss a tiara in the century the old model that centralized power in Rome thousands of kilometers from the front lines and the most remote provinces seemed and sustainable space was still a great military and control power that had Romanized distant provinces that some of them retained specificities especially in the east the Greek world the Middle East Egypt had already been part of the Roman world for centuries but did not speak the language and They had maintained specific cultures for them Rome was a distant capital that seemed less and less capable of maintaining peace after the end of the 3rd century and the exhaustion of the emperor and for much of the 4th and 5th centuries the Roman Empire changed its administration and It was divided into two entities that would be able to better organize their defense and guarantee stability, a Western and an Eastern health that were still part of the same Empire and actively collaborated but in practice increasingly had their own administration, armies and resources were not constantly available. separated some emperors reunited the to health but the last to reign in the entire Roman Empire was Theodosius at the end of the 4th century after him the two helmets were never reunited the Western Roman Empire logically kept Rome as its capital until the last decades of its existence when it moved No: Raveena, the Eastern Roman Empire needed a new capital.

It could have been Alexandria, a major city in the eastern Mediterranean at the time, or other major cities such as Antioch or Athens on the site of the new capital chosen by an emperor named Constantine. The first was further north in a very strategic location where Europe and the Middle East and the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea are separated by a narrow strait, this Strait is called the Bosphorus and there was a city called Byzantium founded by the Greeks several centuries ago. before. The origins of Byzantium are lost in legends, but it existed in the middle of the first millennium BC.

C. when it was taken by the Persian Empire and then, at the end of the 5th century BC. C., was captured by Sparta when Sparta was at war with the Spartans. They were trying to get supplies of grain from the Black Sea to reach their enemy. Centuries later it was besieged and captured by the Romans who rebuilt it and Byzantium remained a Roman city populated mainly by Greek-speaking inhabitants until Constantine converted it into a new capital. Completely rebuilt in the 4th century on a monumental scale, partly inspired by Rome itself, no effort, we are forced to convert Byzantium from the Roman Empire, the city retained its name of Byzantium, but was also called Constantinople, the city of Constantine after the empress tried and also the new Rome.

Today Istanbul is the largest city in Turkey and you can still see many remains from the Roman era there, but we will talk about that later location of Byzantium Constantinople and later Istanbul was always one of the bases of its prosperity and any trade between the Black Sea. and the Mediterranean Sea had to pass through the strait and could pay taxes for money or for passing through political influence, making Constantinople a prosperous trading node and also a valuable basemilitary for centuries, the two hands of the Empire were not as equal as one. Looking at a map you might think they were similar in size, but the western half was somewhat weaker for two reasons: the first reason is that it had fewer financial resources.

Italy was still prosperous and would probably have had the highest GDP per capita equivalent if such data had been available back then. It also had a significant population like Italy but had been greatly affected by internal crises and civil wars in the 3rd century and never had recovered from them and outside of these two provinces the other regions were sparsely populated and remain devastated by internal problems North Africa Hispaniola the Iberian Peninsula Great Britain the share of the pelicans in total all these provinces had only a few million of inhabitants and could not defend themselves without the loyalty sent from Italy so at this point in Roman history the regions that had contributed to the prosperity of the Empire a few centuries before are now both a burden and an asset to the Western Roman Empire and the second and main weakness of the Western health was that it was more severely threatened by invaders than the main danger to Rome in the 4th and 5th centuries where the waves of invaders coming from Asia and Eastern Europe Germany tribes there were many of them and hands and air Attila the Eastern Roman Empire in comparison was saved from an angry confrontation with most of these invaders because he was able to negotiate or managed to repel them while they ended up overwhelming the Western Empire so Rome had to abandon Britain and then abandon entire provinces behind its borders to tribes who established their own kingdoms on their land and eventually disappeared completely - generally a large state for the The end of the Western Roman Empire is 476 AD, the end of the 5th century, technically this was the end of an administrative entity of the Roman Empire, an entity that turned out to contain its historical heart, the city where it all came from, but in the late 5th century, when this happened, the eastern half was still alive and not in such a bad situation.

The Eastern Roman Empire had greater resources. Egypt was a strategic province that could provide labor and export grain. It was a barn. Greece Syria Anatolia Anatolia is Türkiye today. Peninsula between the Black Sea to the north and the Mediterranean Sea to the south, so they were relatively wealthy regions and had not suffered as much damage in the last two centuries. They had infrastructure such as roads, a functioning Administration that could collect taxes. They had urban infrastructure. centers, so when the Western Empire was crumbling in the 5th century, the eastern empire could hire mercenaries to defend itself or even pay invaders to stay away and trade with them to encamp them.

This is what Emperor Theodosius II did with both hands, for example, he gave him subsidies so that he would not attack his territories in falcons and instead divert his attention towards the Western Empire. The beginning of the Byzantine Empire can be dated to the fall. end of the Western Empire but could in this state war against Byzantium Byzantine Empire like we do today, which would have sounded really strange to its inhabitants back then, especially in the 5th and 6th centuries, they simply continued with the Roman Empire after the unfortunate loss of Western health and the cradle of their civilization, Rome, the Romans called themselves and so did their neighbors, only much later, during the Middle Ages, when the name was changed there were periods of expansion and retreat in the nonexistence of Byzantium the decades after the fall of Italy, where there was a period of success during which the Eastern Empire attempted to reconquer what had been lost in the West and partially succeeded.

This happened under the emperor Justinian the first who assumed the throne in 527 AD fifty years after the disappearance of the Western Roman Empire the part of the German peoples under the hands of another great threat to the Roman Empire at that time was for the Persians the Sassanids, it is a completely different story that probably I will tell you another time in the future, but Persia, Iran had several ancient empires, the first and largest, the Achaemenid Empire, dominated the Middle East until it was Conquered and destroyed by the armies of Alexander the Great after Alexander's death. , their empire quickly crumbled and a new power arose in Iran, the Bastion Empire that was at war with the Romans for a long time and put them in trouble, but was contained.

However, for Rome, it was too far away for the Romans to approach its center and in the 3rd century it was replaced by a new power, the Sassanian empire named after the house of Sasson. It lasted until the 7th century and was the archenemy of Byzantium for 300 years. years we will see later how the Sassanids threaten the very existence of Byzantium at a time the Sassanid empire is also called the Neo-Persian Empire and was the last state in Iran until the Muslim conquest the Sassanid empire was multicultural that in those pre-At the time In Islam its main religion was Zoroastrianism, a very ancient religion that has lost much of its influence today and still has a few tens of thousands of followers in Iran and around the world.

Emperor Justinian's main concern in the early 5th century was to secure his eastern borders with the Sassanids and negotiated peace with them in exchange for a tribute that allowed him to divert his forces westward paying tribute to the hands and later to The Sassanids reflects the difficulties of the Eastern Roman Empire at that time even though they were in a much better situation than the West, they were desperate for peace and to maintain the unity of what they had, but it also reflects the wealth of the Eastern Roman Empire. Interesting Yinz Rana was successful militarily in the sense that he managed to reconquer the Western Roman Empire at a time when several peoples had settled in the West after overwhelming the ancient Roman provinces.

There were Angles and Saxons in Britain, the Visigoths and their rule in Spain, the Burgh Franks, Indians and Visigoths in France, beloved Ostrogoths in Italy. The Vandals in North Africa mixed with the locals participating in the crucible from which medieval kingdoms would emerge centuries later that had for the moment formed independent states if the movement of borders and the passage of invaders had begun to slow down the context seemed more favorable for an attempt to reconquer the western provinces and try to restore the Roman Empire as it once was or at least part of it. Justinian's conquests began in 533 AD. and with his eastern border stabilized he was able to send his best general Belisarius to the west.

Belisarius is perhaps the last glorious Roman general. He may not be as famous as Scipio Caesar, but he was able to do so because he was victorious almost consistently even when the odds were against him and he led the Byzantine armies to victory in the north of Africa, first against the vandals who had established their capital. in Carthage, Tunisia, a century earlier and reconquered the province for Byzantium, then considered a large part of Italy, including Rome and Ravenna, to the western end of the Mediterranean Sea, Kurdish. Justinian was also able to recreate southern Spain in the mid-6th century. pleasant century and Jim had not only been able to survive but had expanded and could help recreate the Roman Empire even more than who had resumed against the Sassanids in the east and Justinian's armies had been victorious Justinian is not only remembered for his conquests or reconquest, he also ordered that Roman law be updated and favored the Christianization of the population. religion Christianity is an important aspect of Byzantine culture and I will return to this aspect a little later, but at the time of the separation of the Roman Empire into two entities Christianity was on the rise but still competing with multiple ancient beliefs.

Emperor Domitian, who initiated this separation into the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, was a fierce pagan so attached to traditional Roman religion that his successors became increasingly Christianized in the 4th and 5th centuries and Christianity became the official religion. of the Empire that the rise of Christianity was a process that lasted several centuries, not a rapid and radical change. In the 6th century, when Justinian reigned, the Eastern Roman Empire had multiple religions and traditional Greco-Roman culture was still quite influential. Increasingly, the power of thousands of petty emperors became not only secure but also spiritual, they would be crowned by religious authorities and go on a mission to sometimes forcibly Christianize the importance of Christianity from the early centium period as a state. independent is well reflected in the construction of perhaps the last Malval war the first of the Middle Ages the Church of Holy Wisdom Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, this monument that still stands 15 centuries later was for centuries the most largest in the world and is famous for its enormous dome that illustrates the capabilities of Byzantine architects, as they had absorbed centuries of Greek and Roman engineering and architectural knowledge. to a cathedral in the time of the Byzantine Empire then it became an imperial mosque under the Ottomans and today it is a museum the construction took five years on the site of a previous church that had been destroyed and for the most part agia sofia is made of bricks and mortar joints and equivalent to concrete the Romans used concrete, you know, it took spectacular and even older remains of their Roman Easter pantheon in Rome that such a large and tall dome had never been built before they really tried the limits of what was possible and the risk of the dome collapsing at some point was real in reality the first dome collapsed 20 years after its construction due to an earthquake it was rebuilt and partially collapsed again a few years later but It was rebuilt immediately in the 6th century and since then 15 centuries later it is still in place.

The interior was decorated with mosaics and marble pillars. Visitors to Malval for centuries lost 55 meters approximately one hundred and eighty feet above the ground and it is over 100 feet wide. Architecture was very influential within the Byzantine Empire. Later, in countries where the Orthodox Christian faith had spread and also in Muslim countries, traditional Turkish mosques in particular also adopted this intricate structure with successive domes when Constantinople fell to the Turks and became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. I guess Ofea became a mosque. It may surprise us today, but this was a common practice in ancient times or the Middle Ages.

Many early Christian churches were actually temples of previous religions that had been reused. The Ottomans admired the building and did not remove the mural decorations, they simply covered them with plaster and swirling minarets to the building that give it its current appearance, in addition to its religious and historical importance. IKEA Sofia is a milestone in architectural history, it is the epitome of Byzantine architecture and incorporated techniques from Greco-Roman antiquity. Concrete buttresses. Curiously, flying buttresses, that is, structures that collect and guide weight towards the ground, supporting a large structure, so flying buttresses were added to a vessel before they became one of the pillars of Gothic architecture. in Western Europe and Christianity became the only one. of its short religion and most of the western provinces of the Roman Empire we are lost the Eastern Roman Empire deviated more and more in the 6th and 7th centuries from exclusively Roman culture and traditions the Greek language was more widespread than Latin and many regions of Byzantium had made it a specific cultural legacy from before Roman times, of course, there was Greece, but also Egypt, Syria, Anatolia to run an AKC.

It cannot be understated that it was just one aspect of Byzantine culture and Greek eventually replaced Latin, making Byzantium the new incarnation of Greek culture for the In the following centuries, it can sometimes be surprising how much fat is mentioned in the antiquity in the ancient Passover or when talking about the origins of Western culture for such a small country, finally today it is small, of course, but even in ancient times, with the exception of a In the short period in which Alexander the Great had created an empire, Greece was never allowed an Empire or even a unified Kingdom, more than anything, Chris here must be understood as a cultural area like a civilization, its heart was almost entirely within the borders of modern Greece and a bit.

A bit in Turkey too, but from this small area Greece projected its culture for centuries through colonies around the Mediterranean Sea during its Classic period through its contacts with many ancient civilizations that took on aspects of Greek culture or Greek knowledge from the Phoenicians to the Etruscans.through Alexander's conquests that left several great honesties in the Middle East and after that, Rome also preserved and spread Greek culture and Byzantium became another iteration, a new face of Greek culture, this package of concepts, science, artistic principles, architecture, engineering, philosophy, all of this evolved over time. over the centuries, so there is no Greek culture written in stone and various forms of the Greek-speaking world remain influential in the West almost until the end of Byzantium, so this is almost 2000 years of influence on the culture around the Mediterranean Sea, from Western Europe to Russia. and in the Middle East;

This is the reason why Greece is a cradle of civilization, not so much in a geographical sense but in a cultural mental sense, it definitely is and this is an important characteristic of the Eisenstein culture now that the Western Latinized provinces work on the Greek . The language to cover and Byzantium allowed the centers of scientific artistic intellectual production to end or increase hidden and the Birkins and in Anatolia for centuries after the fall of Rome, so let us return to the course of events and after the 6th century, Byzantium resisted multiple threats to its borders and expansion the following period was much less brilliant the 7th century was disastrous for Byzantium began with a renewed war against the Sassanids who advanced westwards taking important cities in Asia Minor such as Damascus and Jerusalem and also briefly occupied Egypt a new emperor Heraclius I'm going to spare us the names of most of the emperors because there were thousands of long Byzantine histories and several dynasties, and I will only mention a few of them, so Heraclius counterattacked and the main Sassanid force was destroyed, the dice were left a thousand. and the Sassanid empire completely exhausted just as a new threat that no one had seen coming emerged from the south.

In just a few years the first wave of Arab conquest swept through the Middle East and North Africa and the first two victims were the Sassanids. It finally disappeared in the middle of the 7th century and that is when the Islamization of Iran began and the Byzantine Empire was reduced to a fraction of what it was a few decades before losing Egypt Palestine Syria and never regaining them at the same time. I had to face attacks from the Slavs on the pelicans and raids in Anatolia. In a previous story I told you about underground cities in Cappadocia, a region of Anatolia.

This was typically the period when these giant shelters were allowed to host thousands of people because at the time, regular Reds and invasions were a reality in this region, the Arabs even temporarily laid siege to Constantinople, so They were rejected, the borders were reduced and internally Byzantium was in complete decline due to the Reds and the constant threat of invasions on its territory, people abandoned the cities. To be objective, trade collapsed and what had happened centuries before in the Western Roman Empire seemed to occur again, a total decline and this organization that could have announced the end for Byzantium in a century lost three quarters of its territory and was left reduced to Historians of Anatolia and fragments of the pelicans and Italy give credence to a military reorganization that finally managed to stabilize the borders for the survival of PI and gem after such a setback, at this point hopes of recovering the Roman Empire had faded completely and the city of Constantinople itself had greatly declined at its peak in the 6th century, it was estimated to have had half a million inhabitants, making it by far the largest city in the Mediterranean world at that time it was not so much like Rome at its peak Rome would have had close to a million, but for ancient and medieval cities such size was very unusual, it required food imports from relatively distant infrastructure that few cities could afford, so only the main city of a state large according to capital law could have reached such a size, but by then, by the end of the 7th century, Constantinople had lost most of its inhabitants and was reduced to between 40,000 and 70,000 after the Arab siege.

It seemed that 300 years after the end of the Western Roman Empire, its eastern counterpart was now going to suffer the same fate. an end to the Roman saga but it did not happen and Basinger managed to reverse the situation and even restore its great power status, which was absolutely spectacular. What happened in the 8th century. Byzantium was on the defensive against the Arabs in the south and all the neighbors in the Vatican, especially the Burgers, whose army was still a force to be reckoned with, had inherited ancient Roman military traditions. Byzantium also remained relatively wealthy and was able to hire mercenaries over the centuries, people from many different backgrounds including even Vikings who came from the north through what is now Russia and Ukraine served the beloved emperors of Byzantium in the empire. they had the numbers Greece southern Italy western Anatolia while still densely populated regions in the Early Middle Ages the armies of Western Europe consisted of only a few thousand men at best even later In the Middle Ages, For example, if you look at the major battles after the Hundred Years War, they were thought to be very small armies compared to two major battles of antiquity.

At the same time, Paris and Jim could feel the tens of thousands of well-equipped men. disciplined and for some of them motivated by the belief that they were defending their faith, so once the initial momentum of the Arab conquests began to subside and then, when the Caliphate that was unified began to divide into multiple states, the type of military balance against the Arabs seemed one of the reasons why Byzantium could have so many soldiers and project power came from its administrative and political structure. It was not a field or state like in Europe, where the rulers had their power controlled and filled all the burdens under their command.

Byzantium had preserved here the ancient organization in provinces like the Roman Empire, these administrative divisions that could organize their own defense are colder themes of Thomas, so Byzantium was more centralized than other European kingdoms, sometimes there could be instability, but it also It gave many more resources to the states than to the Emperor, the equipment was also of the highest quality and the fleet was the most powerful in the Mediterranean Sea until the rise of Venice. Byzantium had a very efficient secret weapon called Greek fire, which was the ancestor of the flamethrowers and gave them several key victories, even when the capital was besieged by the Arabs it consisted of a combustible compound it is not clear which could continue to burn while floating in the water was invented in the 7th century and for greater effect they developed pressurized nozzles that could project the liquid at the enemy technologically Byzantium was very advanced and Centuries before in the Roman Empire this idea had been maintained that technical progress technology could be used in its benefit, that the 8th and 9th centuries were also a period of internal religious conflict and in relations with the rest of Christendom, the greatest controversy of this period was over the status of images in religion and the movement called iconoclasm.

I recently told you about this in the story about underground cities and churches in Cappadocia. There were conflicting interpretations of the scriptures about the images. This is a question that has been present since ancient times. between the Middle East and Judaism, Christianity, Islam, everyone who appeared in this part of the world had faced this at some point, some considered that images depicting people or even animals should be prohibited in a religious context because they are prohibited by sacred texts and are an insult to the Creator, it is not up to man to represent living creatures and competing with God in doing so may sound a little extreme to us, but perhaps it is because we are surrounded by so many images today that are meaningful, their power goes unnoticed the proliferation reduces the importance we give them in a certain sense, but this is something modern until modern times, images and a form of painting or sculpture were very rare and were loaded with a lot of power, the representation of something was not so separated from the thing in their minds in this Middle Eastern tradition, even naming things and saying the name of a creature or God should not be taken lightly, the name and the thing are not separated in your sermon, so that you mention when you speak or when you are right. perhaps some of this still exists in a very tenuous form today when we want to say something as if it could magically make it happen or appear and in addition to this another factor that made images suspect for monetizing religions was always the risk that worship would be diverted to idols to the image itself and no longer to God, now contrary to Islam which solved the problem by prohibiting religious images and its taboo has always been almost universally respected in Muslim countries.

Christianity was always more permissive, embracing images as a way to help. believers much closer to the object of their worship and also as a polite tool at a time when most people were illiterate could not read dates and sculptures on religious buildings were a way to help people tell them what face was a kind of writing system for the message that he did not know how to read and a Roman Catholic Church as well as the Orthodox Church have developed a very rich iconography over the centuries, but it took centuries to close these debates in Christianity and resurfaced in the 8th and 9th centuries in Byzantium with two episodes of iconoclasm, literally the war to fight over images when the Emperor banned religious images and people who used or produced them could be punished for heresy, had never become a Civil War in full force, but people died because of this and it maintained a state of tension for decades, but the religious controversies were not only internal and eventually also affected all of Christendom. leading to one of the most important events and setbacks in the history of Christianity: the East-West schism that separated the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church in the 11th century. 1000 years ago, Christianity grew mainly within the borders of the Roman Empire during its first centuries and that is why its Rome became so important to this religion.

Christians in Rome from the first century the Scriptures say nothing about how it should be organized. The church the way it evolved as an institution is a product of centuries of history when the Roman emperors converted Jannett and reorganized a new official religion in a way that also reflected the reality of the Roman Empire as it was at the time and the collapse of the Roman Empire Western made it even more complicated in the 6th century. Emperor Justinian the First, the one who recovered parts of the Western Empire, we talked about him at the beginning, formulated an ecclesiastical organization called Penn Turkey in which the Christian Church was governed by the five heads of five great Epis Coupole, see Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria , Antioch and Jerusalem at that time.

All five were within the borders of their empire, as in the east and a Rome in the west in the following centuries, this concept was generally accepted in the Byzantine Empire, but not in the west after Rome again escaped control. of Byzantium, the pen of Turkey did it. It does not cover all churches, nor were those that developed outside the Roman Empire seen as heretical and rejected, for example, the Church of the East, also called the Persian church or the historian church, by the way, this historian Church is often ignored in the West because it was never part of the noisy modern Christian confessions, but in the Middle Ages, between the 9th and 14th centuries, it spread from India as a minority religion, influenced and converted many Mongols when they arrived in this part of the world and even established A presence in China is completely outside the sphere of influence of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy today for several branches of the Nestorian church because it had a break.

The tisp ecclesiastical organization in Turkey was defended by the Byzantine emperors but rejected in the West and with the mass conversion of Western Europe in the first millennium and the emergence of Christian kingdoms across the continent following a church centered in Rome, the influence of Rome, which time and again the bishops of Rome the Pope claimed universal jurisdiction the leadership of all Christendom in the Empire Byzantine people saw things differently the importance of Rome was not supposed to be the sole seat of decision making for all Christians of course the motivations were not purely theoretical or spiritual Rome was now beyond the reach of the emperorsRomans, while Constantinople was its capital.

The concept of Turkey dissipated in the 7th century when Alexandria, Jerusalem and Antioch fell to the Arabs, but the idea that power in the Church need not be so centralized disappeared. It was not like this, for centuries the relations between Byzantium and the Pope in Rome were complicated and sometimes conflictive among all groups of hunters. They were theological controversies about complex points of doctrine, for example, about the doctrine of the Trinity, whether or not the Holy Spirit should be said. It comes from the father, for example, there were also several points of disagreement about the rituals that appeared over the centuries and a linguistic barrier for the Western Church to use Latin and the Eastern Church to use Greek and, after centuries, some geographical tensions , doctrinal, linguistic and political led to a schism.

In 1054, the two-sided project Rome maintained its claim to universal jurisdiction and Byzantium claimed its autonomy. This is the time when historic Christianity that had initially developed within the Roman Empire split into two branches: the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. They remained separated today in their organizations and in points of doctrine and rituals in the following decades there was a struggle in Eastern Europe between the two to convert people to Christianity, which is why the majority of the population in the Balkans increases but transports Serbia Romania photo of Orthodox Church and also Russia and Ukraine, while Rome was converted first for Central European countries like Poland and Hungary, the schism also occurred during a period of resurgence of Byzantium because, as I told you before, the Empire managed to reverse its destiny and restore a large part of its influence starting in the 9th century.

This was possible thanks to an economic improvement, trade grew again, a stabilization of the borders, a weakening of Byzantium's snipers, in the end, a period of internal problems, especially with the decline of iconoclasm in the 9th century, the arrival of a new dynasty. of Macedonia of Greece was now in power and with the situation internally stabilized the Emperor began to plan reconquest walls against the Muslims and the Bulgarians in the Paragons. The reconquest process was plan P against his raps but it solidified the Byzantine possessions in Italy. in the Mediterranean Sea such as Crete and they even landed expeditions south to Egypt, although most of the gains were not recovered in the east against the Abbasid caliphate, which weakened in the 9th century and after a series of walls and periods of peace. the gaya rejoined the Empire and at the turn of the millennium, under Emperor Basil II, peasants spread again from Italy to the Caucasus, including parts of the bank and in an instant a pond flourished again, its population almost returning to the sixth levels. century around the year 400,000 at this point the prestige of the term peasant in the known world was that of a great power began and I felt more powerful, the most prestigious Christian kingdom during its residence architecture and flourished again painting mosaics churches many remains in the Balkans and Turkey of this period show the wealth and refinement of Byzantium and its society, but as in the 7th century Byzantium was about to once again be a victim of new external threats, from the 11th century the Normans invaded southern Italy in the Romans, where an ethnic group that resulted from the settlement of those Vikings in a region called Normandy in northwest France where they mixed with the indigenous Franks and Caro Romans their settlement dates back to the 9th century a gnome and became a dubious part of the kingdom of France converted to Catholicism and played an important role in medieval Europe in the 11th century they invaded and Adele joke with William the conqueror but at the same time the Norman adventurers sailed to Sicily the island south of Italy expelled the Arabs and created a kingdom in Sicily, they also briefly invaded the south and Italy and that is how Byzantium lost its influence there even later during the Crusades the Normans continued to play a prominent role in creating crusader states in the Levant, we will talk about that in one minute. the loss of Italy was bad, that the greatest disaster for Byzantium occurred in the Middle East from the east a new people made their first explorations across the Byzantine borders the Turks what the first wave of Muslim conquerors had not taken from Byzantium in the 7th century the Turks also converted to Islam would conquer in the 11th and 12th centuries after a series of victories they occupied most of Anatolia, the historical heart of Byzantium that would never be fully recovered and they also inhabit most of the Levant .

It is in this context that The First Crusade took place at the end of the 11th century, 40 years after the religious schism. Byzantium was now able to repel the Turks and its diplomacy towards the west, especially towards Rome, became much friendlier. The Pope also saw the advantages of supporting Byzantium that he could afford. perhaps to put an end to religions that reduced their authority and bringing Christians together could unify Western Europe and was obviously the motivation for putting other sites in the Middle East back into Christian hands five centuries after they were alien to Muslims is in In this context, the Pope opened the second call for the First Crusade in 1095 and obtained a forceful response in Europe from Germany, Italy, France, England, thousands of knights and armed pilgrims traveled east, traveled throughout the territory and received guides upon arriving in Constantinople Byzantium. recovered a number of important cities and islands thanks to the First Crusade that the crusaders also took the opportunity to create their own independent kingdoms in the Levant in the 12th century.

The Byzantines collaborated with these Latin states in the Levant and tried to be their overlord even though their sovereignty was more nominal than real, but the Turks were now on the defensive and occupied only eastern Anatolia, so the Empire Byzantine benefited from a period of respite in its last period of prosperity because the 13th century would be disastrous. The first three Crusades had benefited Byzantium by providing large armies willing to attack their enemies there had been problems especially with the Normans who participated in them and we are not willing to swear allegiance to Constantinople but it had relieved the pressure on niacina diem the Fourth Crusade would be A catastrophic as it was called by the Pope to target Egypt, which had become the center of Muslim power in the Levant, the Crusader army gathered in Venice in 1202, but it was smaller than expected.

The Venetians had agreed to safely transport the crusaders in their powerful fleet in exchange for payment that they were gone. enough friends to pay them and also Venice had very strong commercial ties with Egypt and was not willing to help the tacit claimant to the throne of Byzantium to offer to pay the Venetians and reward the crusaders if they helped him take the throne in Constantinople and this is that's why the Venetian fleet sailed to Constantinople instead of Egypt once there after much intrigue and learning that their patron had been murdered and the crusaders took the city and looted it many icons, relics and other objects disappeared and then resurfaced in Europe many of them in Venice the throne was now vacant and a Council of crusaders and Venetians elected a new emperor died we know Flanders and they shared most of the Byzantine possessions between them for 60 years the situation remained confusing Greece and Anatolia exploded into principalities and the residence of the Bulgarian Kingdom and Hungary meant that the rest of the Americans were asked this period is called the Latin Empire because the rulers came from Western Europe but the Empire was only in name in reality a new Greek dynasty the logos panel managed to recover Constantinople in 1261 and revived the Byzantine A little fortune, but it was too late.

What remained of the empire had been devastated by war and Byzantium was surrounded by enemies in the following decades. In the 14th century there were civil wars and a threatening new dynasty arose in Anatolia among the Turks. The Ottomans say that Germany controlled the reach and around Constantinople and a small territory in southern Greece, the Ottomans completely surrounded it moving from Anatolia to Europe and conquering the Falcon question. The agony continued for decades as Byzantium depended entirely on the goodwill of the Ottomans for its survival until

1453

, when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II decided to take Constantinople, which he did after a two-month siege.

At this point, the city had been taken several times and had already lost much of its population and the atmosphere in Constantinople. The question remaining of the Roman Empire was about to fall must have been haunting with its gigantic monuments of the last 1000 years. Paris is so good now to be before what remains of the courts and the army in a port where, according to witnesses, no commercial ships are built. The last reigning Byzantine emperor, Constantine Xi, in later wars was last seen launching into hand-to-hand combat after the Turks took the city walls on May 29,

1453

, an ambition that had begun 2,000 years earlier. in Italy and dominated the known world for centuries the Roman Empire died definitively now it had gone forever to the nephew of Constantine The dream of reconquering the early Byzantine Empire would eventually be the Ottomans because they incorporated the term Constantinople into their capital and within two centuries they built a new multicultural empire that looked a lot like the early Eastern Roman Empire except it was even louder, but what it didn't died with the The fall of Constantinople was a sacred intellectual, artistic and technical legacy of Byzantium.

Sudhir ABS had already been passed to Western Europe, to the Turks, and this built a bridge between Greco-Roman antiquity and modern times during approximately the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century. The term was falling can be attributed to the migration of scholars and artists who sought refuge in Venice in the Papal States of Florence or Genoa. It is a matter of convention that many historians take the state of 1453 as the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, this is a choice that could be argued against obviously, but at least symbolically it functioned close to powerful kingdoms that would dominate the centuries.

Following now that the last of antiquity had disappeared in this part of the world, new discoveries and an acceleration of technical progress were about to occur and the Greek world, which had been so important since ancient times, had finally lost its last stronghold, so this is it. I hope you enjoyed this story and now I invite you to let yourself go. Go to a pleasant dream. I'll talk to you soon for another adventure about you.