A History of the Roman Empire in 75 Seconds

Want to see something pretty cool? Here is a visual survey of ancient Rome from the original city-state republic in 510 B.C., to the collapse of the West in the 5th century A.D., to the fall of Eastern Empire’s capital to the Ottoman Turks in A.D. 1453. Enjoy!

Licensed from the Wikipedia Creative Commons.

For anyone who may ask… Didn’t the Roman Empire collapse in the 400’s A.D.? What’s happening in Greece, Turkey, and the eastern territories after Rome’s fall?

Answer: Diocletian and Constantine divided the Roman Empire into more-manageable eastern and western halves. The western half declined and fell with the city of Rome, but the eastern half declined and recovered. We call the easterners “Byzantines” but they called themselves “Romans” all the way to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, just 39 years before Columbus sailed to the Americas. (That’s roughly an additional 1,000 years of “Roman” life after the fall of the West.)

We in the West don’t typically think of a Roman Empire after the 5th century A.D. This seems to reveal a gap in our educational perspective. The Byzantines considered themselves just as “Roman” as the citizens of 1st century Rome. They traced their history all the way back to the founding of Rome.