Roman Empire - an empire established by Augustus in 27 BC and divided in AD 395 into the Western Roman Empire and the eastern or Byzantine Empire; at its peak lands in Europe and Africa and Asia were ruled by ancient Rome Byzantium - an ancient city on the Bosporus founded by the Greeks...
1.a group of nations, states, or peoples ruled over by an emperor, empress, or other powerful sovereign, as the former British Empire. 2.a government under an emperor or empress. 3.(often cap.) the historical period during which a nation is under such a government:French furniture of th...
As a result of these advantages, the Eastern Roman Empire, variously known as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, was able to survive for centuries after the fall of Rome. Though Byzantium was ruled by Roman law and Roman political institutions, and its official language was Latin, Greek was ...
and served as models for the textile art in Byzantium, China and Japan. Chinese merchants came to thriving Iranian ports such as Siraf to sell raw silk and buy rugs, jewels and rouge; Armenians,
These Roman settlers were eventually Hellenized and absorbed into Greek culture with the transfer of Roman power to Byzantium in the 4th Century AD. There has been a great deal of debate on whether or not the Macedonian people were actually Greek, as opposed to just Hellenized northern ...
Byzantium began as the city of Byzantium, an ancient Greek colony founded on the European side of the Bosporus (a narrow strait of water that connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean and Mediterranean seas). It was taken in 330 AD by Constantine I, who refounded it ...
Byzantine Empire.—The ancient Roman Empire having been divided into two parts, an Eastern and a Western, the Eastern remained subject to successors of Constantine, whose capital was at Byzantium or Constantinople. The term Byzantine is therefore, employed to designate this Eastern survival of the ...
___. The Arabs, Byzantium, and Iran: Studies in Early Islamic History and Culture, Brookfield, Vt. : Variorum, 1996. Brown, Peter. The Making of Late Antiquity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978. Cameron, Averil. The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, AD 395-600, Lond...
Relocated the empire’s capital to restore the ancient city of Byzantium. Byzantium gets called Constantinople or the City of Constantine on November 8, 324. Constantine’s successor, Theodosius, split the empire among his two sons, Arcadius and Honorius, forming the Western Roman Empire as well...
whose reign of terror destabilised the empire internally and led to his overthrow and death in Constantinople in 1185. The Angelos dynasty which ruled Byzantium from 1185 to 1204 has been considered one of the most unsuccessful and ineffectual administrations in the empire’s history. During this ...