Roman History: The Dominate

3 units

If we mark the beginning of Roman history by the foundation of the city on the Tiber and continue that narrative until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, we see a grand political experiment without parallel in world history. Persian historians would have been hard pressed to match these boasts. This course focuses on one segment of that history: the Later Roman Empire, beginning with the accession of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, to the outbreak of a calamitous war between rival superpowers Rome and Persia in the early seventh century of the Christian era. That conflict destroyed the classical world of the Eastern Mediterranean basin, and it paved the way for the rise of Islam in the region and beyond.