Rome: An Empire's Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

their realms, they issued coinage with Latin legends, devised law codes, and some even watched gladiatorial games.
    Then, in the early sixth century, the eastern empire struck back. During Justinian’s reign (527–65) his generals snatched Africa from the Vandals, and fought a long and damaging war up and down Italy culminating in the end of the Ostrogothic kingdom. Visigothic Spain was invaded. At Constantinople, great building projects were undertaken, a huge codification of Roman civil law was carried out, and administrative reforms put into place. (The complaints of one senior bureaucrat, John the Lydian, show how the ‘new’ bureaucracy created by Diocletian and Constantine was now regarded by its members as a set of ancient and venerable institutions!) For a generation, a Mediterranean Roman Empire seemed reborn. Then it folded up again. The Lombards invaded Italy, the Franks expanded their power, and, except for a foothold around Ravenna, Roman territory was confined to North Africa and Sicily. Meanwhile, the emperors were once again locked into war with Persia. The Persian Emperor Khusrau II swept back over the Syrian frontier once again and this time captured Jerusalem. Persian forces raided north into Anatolia and south-west into Egypt, where Alexandria fell in 619. The emperors could do little to help because the invasion coincided with an invasion from the north-west by the Avars. Constantinople, under siege from both sides, could well have fallen in 626. A new emperor, Heraclius, managed to pay off the Avars, defeat the Persians, and carry war to their own capitals in southern Mesopotamia. Humiliated by defeat, Khusrau was assassinated in 628. Heraclius triumphed in Jerusalem and Constantinople.
    And then the world changed. Among the many peoples drawn into the long Romano-Persian conflicts were the tribes of the Arabian peninsula. In the process they had developed considerable military experience and knowledge of both sides, but it was the religious movement started by the Prophet Muhammad that galvanized them into concerted action. At the battle of the Yarmuk in 636, the Roman forces suffered a devastating defeat. By 642 Egypt, Syria, and Palestine were all under Arab rule and would never berecovered. The empire had shrunk to a third of its size, a Balkan state with territory in western Anatolia and some distant western provinces, most of which it would lose as the Arab armies moved westward across North Africa and up into Spain, and as they mastered the sea. Cut off from the grain of Egypt, the urban population of Constantinople plummeted. The Persians were not so lucky. They too suffered a devastating defeat in 636, at Qadisyya. Their capital, Ctesiphon, was occupied the next year. The last remnant of the army was destroyed in 642 at the battle of Nihavand, and their last emperor perished, on the run, in 651.
    Fixing the end of the Roman Empire is not easy. Certainly those emperors who defended Constantinople when the Arabs besieged it in 717 considered themselves Romans. So too did their successors right up until Constantinople finally did succumb, not to Arabs but to Turks, in the fifteenth century. We do not have to agree with them, but any other date we pick is arbitrary. Much of Roman and of Persian civilization did survive the Arab conquest. The cities of Syria flourished under the caliphate, and the tax systems of Khusrau II had an afterlife in Iran, just as Roman ones did in the barbarian kingdoms of the west. Charlemagne the Frank dreamt of becoming Roman emperor, and in 800 his dream came true in a ceremony conducted in Rome by Pope Leo III. Does Byzantium have a special claim to be more of an heir to Rome than either western Christendom or medieval Islam? I am not sure that it does, and so for me, the story of the Roman Empire ends here.
    Further Reading
    Many excellent narrative accounts of Roman history exist. My short list of favourites is the following. Two very good and recent ones are