Peter Haugen - World History For Dummies

Seizing the treasures of pagan temples and spending them on magnificent new Christian churches from Italy to Turkey to Jerusalem.

Handing out huge endowments.

Authorizing bishops to draw on imperial funds as reparation for the years of enmity.

These moves helped establish the institution’s wealth and power for centuries to come. In 391 AD, Constantine’s successor, Theodosius I, added a final touch by prohibiting old-style Roman pagan worship, making Christianity the official religion. The empire—both in its western and eastern components—continued to promote, strengthen, and spread that religion in Europe, western Asia, North Africa, and beyond. Two centers of early, state sanctioned Christianity emerged—one in Constantinople and the other in the city of Rome.

Even as the empire shifted its energies away from Rome, it remained Christianity’s western headquarters and it is still the center of Roman Catholicism because of what the city had been at its imperial height.

When talking about the Christian Church in its early years, I often refer to it simply as the Church. Christianity was a huge cultural force from late Roman times onward. Before the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, the Catholic Church was the Christian church in Western Europe — virtually the only one. It was the Catholic Church because catholic was still an adjective meaning universal. (Spelled with a lowercase c, catholic still means universal or wide-ranging. ) After Rome banned pagan worship, and as the old Norse and Celtic beliefs faded, virtually everybody was a Christian, at least nominally. Everybody was also Catholic; there was no such thing as a Protestant. Historians capitalize the word Church when they mean the network of cathedrals, chapels, priories, and so on that looked to the pope in Rome for direction, and so do I in this chapter and in chapters 10and 14.

In addition to its role as the root of modern romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, and so on), Latin was the unifying language of the Roman Catholic Church, which to Roman and other European Christians before the 16th century AD was just the Church. Until the middle of the 20th century, Catholic masses worldwide were almost always celebrated in Latin.

Don’t confuse the Roman Empire with the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was a later group of European principalities and duchies (lesser monarchies) that changed shapes and allegiances over centuries. It started in 800 AD, when Pope Leo III bestowed the new title of Emperor of the West on Charlemagne, king of the Franks (a Germanic tribe) and the first ruler since the original Roman Empire’s demise to unite most of Western Europe under a single rule. The title carried with it an understanding that Charlemagne would use his military strength to defend the Church.

Charlie’s empire, based where France is today, didn’t long survive him, but German King Otto I put together another edition of the Holy Roman Empire in 962 AD, and that one hung on until the 19th century. (For more on the Holy Roman Empire, see Chapters 6and 14.) Aside from the pope’s blessing and his expectation of loyalty, this empire’s nominally united lands, largely German and Austrian, and had little to do with Rome. Still, the name Roman smacked of imperial legitimacy.

Other Roman terms endured as well, especially terms for positions of authority. The Russian title czar (or tsar, as it’s often spelled) and the later German kaiser both came from the Roman title caesar. The name of a powerful dynastic family, the Romanovs, who ruled Russia from 1613–1917, referred to imperial Rome too. Even in the Islamic world, the name Qaysar — a place name found from Afghanistan to Egypt — comes from Caesar.

After Alexander the Great died of a sudden fever in 323 BC, his vast empire disintegrated. Without Alexander, there was little to unite such widespread, dissimilar places as Macedonia, northern India, and Egypt — all among his territories. Yet the breakup brought about new empires — not as big, but impressive nonetheless. Several of them were founded by Alexander’s former military governors.

Alexander was primarily a conqueror. He couldn’t personally rule all the lands he won — especially not while conducting further military campaigns — so he appointed regional viceroys to govern in his name. The word viceroy is similar to vice president, with the “roy” part meaning king. These assistant kingships went to some of Alexander’s top military commanders.

With Alexander gone, the generals were free to turn their territories, which they had been holding in trust for their boss, into personal kingdoms. Ptolemy, Macedonian governor of conquered Egypt, used Alexander’s funeral procession to found his own Egyptian dynasty. Although the Roman Empire, the largest and most influential empire to emerge after Alexander, arose first as a city-state, and although the Mediterranean was sprinkled with successful Greek city-states, imperial might became the model for large-scale government in the late centuries of the BC period and the early centuries of the AD period.

Seleuces was the Macedonian general whom Alexander the Great left in charge of conquered Persia (largely what’s now Iran) in the 330s BC. The Achaeminid Empire, also called the Old Persian Empire, had been immensely powerful at its height, around 480 BC. It was in decline by the time Alexander added it to his collection of kingdoms. Still, there was precedent for imperial government in Persia, and Seleuces took advantage of it by bringing Persian officers and Persian regional officials into his government of Macedonians and Greeks and by using his troops to keep order. He successfully dropped the vice and transformed himself into a full-on roy ( king ).

Seleuces’ descendants, the Seleucid Dynasty, ruled a piece of Asia that stretched from Anatolia (the Asian part of modern Turkey) to Afghanistan. Seleucid rule lasted until a powerful regional rival, the Parthians, conquered Persia in the second century BC.

The rise of the Parthians traces back to 250 BC, when the leader Arsaces, from central Asia, founded Parthia in eastern Persia. His descendant, Mithradates I, went on an empire-building campaign of his own from about 160–140 BC, assembling lands from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea and eastward into India.

Mithradates’ goal was to re-create the Achaeminid Empire of more than 300 years earlier. Alexander and his successors had displaced Persian culture with Greek — a change called Hellenization because the Greeks called themselves Hellenes. Mithradates reversed Hellenization and revived all things Persian. The Parthian Empire lasted until 224 AD, when a soldier called Ardashir, a member of a noble Persian family called Sassanid, rebelled against the king and killed him. Like the Parthians, the Sassanid Dynasty was Rome’s major rival in the East, lasting until the Muslim Arabs conquered Persia in about 642. (For more about the Arabs, turn to Chapter 6.)

The political borders within today’s India and Pakistan shifted a few times over the centuries between 300 BC and 400 AD, a time that gave rise to both the Indian subcontinent’s first united empire — the Mauryan — and India’s golden age under the Gupta Dynasty.