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The Roman Empire
The Mediterranean state whose roads, law and Latin still shape three continents
At its height under Trajan in 117 CE, the Roman Empire ruled every shore of the Mediterranean, a sea Romans called simply Mare Nostrum, our sea. From the Scottish borderlands to the Euphrates and from the Rhine to the edge of the Sahara, one government taxed, policed and connected perhaps a quarter of humanity. Its legacy is unusually easy to see on a modern map. The Romance languages descend from its Latin, legal systems across Europe and Latin America build on its law, and highways in France, Spain and Turkey still follow lines its engineers surveyed. Rome also gave Christianity the institutional frame in which it spread, and handed later rulers the very idea of empire.
The empire was built around the Mediterranean, which served as its highway, and reached inland as far as rivers and deserts allowed. Its northern frontier ran along the Rhine and the Danube, with Hadrian's Wall closing off northern Britain and the province of Dacia reaching across the Danube into the Carpathians. In the east it held Anatolia, Syria and the Levant and, briefly under Trajan, Mesopotamia. In the south it held the Nile valley and the fertile coastal strip of North Africa, backed by the Sahara. Today its former territory falls within some 40 countries, including Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, England and Wales, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Romania, the Balkan states, Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.
Rome grew from a city-state on the Tiber into a republic that controlled most of the Mediterranean by the first century BCE. After decades of civil war, the Senate granted Octavian the title Augustus in 27 BCE, the conventional start of the empire, and about two centuries of relative stability, the Pax Romana, followed. Conquest, slavery and heavy taxation underpinned the system, while citizenship was extended to all free inhabitants in 212. Crises in the third century led to reforms that split administration between East and West, and Constantine dedicated Constantinople as a new capital in 330. The western half fragmented as Germanic kingdoms took over its provinces, and the deposition of the last western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, in 476 marks its end. The eastern half, known today as the Byzantine Empire, lasted until 1453.