- What is an empire?
- The Roman Empire
- The Carolingian Empire
- The Holy Roman Empire
- The Byzantine Empire
- The Ottoman Empire
We explain what an empire is and the characteristics of the Roman, Carolingian, Germanic Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires.
What is an empire?
An empire is a political organization in which the Condition expand your territory constantly. Through military power, an empire annexes other nations and States, on which it imposes a language, a culture and / or a financial year according to the interests and convenience of the metropolis, that is, establishing in its wake colonies or dependent territories.
In empires the can politician used to fall into the hands of an emperor or other type of monarch, especially those of the antiquity. In fact, the Latin word imperium is the one that gives rise to the term, although it was used in Ancient Rome as a synonym for "public Power"Or" command ", something similar to"sovereignty”.
However, the Romans used the title of imperator ("Emperor") for those rulers to whom the Roman Republic granted absolute powers over the Roman legions and political life. Since the reign of Augustus (between 27 BC and 14 AD), considered the first Roman emperor, these powers never ceased, and the Republic became an Empire.
There were many empires before and after the Roman Empire, and almost all shared its essential characteristics of military expansionism and colonization of different peoples, imposition of the language and religion own, and economic exploitation of the conquered.
Even so, it is usually distinguished between:
- Ancient or antiquity empires, of economic regime pro-slavery.
- Modern empires, fundamentally Western, emerged during the time of geographical exploration and scientific discoveries that Europe experienced between the 15th and 19th centuries, also known as the epoch of imperialism.
Are powers, later joined by the United States, colonized a good part of America, Africa Y Asia. Thus they expanded their language and culture, in addition to accumulating the goods and materials necessary to undertake the industrialization and modernization of its economies capitalists.
Empires, according to scholars such as the Israeli Yuval Noah Harari (1976-), possessed enormous historical importance as concentrating entities of political and economic power, unifying and unifying different populations human, allowing the construction of larger structures.
This, of course, at a gigantic cost in human lives and in the culture of the colonized itself, which in the best of cases came to occupy a residual, minority place within the dominant imperial culture.
Next, we will review some of the most important empires in European history.
The Roman Empire
The third of the historical periods of the ancient Roman civilization is known as the Roman Empire, characterized by an autocratic - dictatorial - exercise of power. Under the command of different emperors, it expanded its territory to cover from the Atlantic Ocean to the Caspian Sea, and from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, to the Rhine and Danube rivers, covering a total area of 6.5 million square kilometers. .
In this way, the Roman Empire is considered one of the largest and most important empires of the history of the West and of the world. He was responsible for the expansion of Latin (and therefore the birth of the Romance languages) and the founding of many of the great cities European like LondonLondinium), Milan (Mediolanum), Vienna (Vindobonna) or Lyon (Lugdunum), among other.
In addition, in its deeply multicultural and diverse bosom, Christianity was born and popularized, a religion that later dominated all of medieval Europe.
The fall of the Roman Empire was due to the difficulties of governing such an extensive territory, which made the corruption and the inefficiency of imperial institutions. Added to this was the weakening of the empire due to the division of its territory and power into two regions:
- The Western Roman Empire (27 BC - 476 AD), which fell under the invasions of the Germanic barbarians, giving birth to the various European Christian kingdoms.
- The Eastern Roman Empire (395-1453), better known as the Byzantine Empire, which outlived its western brother for almost 1000 years, but ultimately fell to the Ottoman Empire.
The Carolingian Empire
What is known as the Carolingian Empire was a Frankish kingdom led by the Carolingian dynasty, and which existed in much of Western Europe between the 8th and 9th centuries. It was part of the various attempts to restore the glory of the extinct Western Roman Empire, and began with the coronation of Charlemagne (c. 742-814), king of the Franks and the Lombards, as a new Roman emperor in 800 .
At its peak, the Carolingian Empire controlled a European territory of more than one million square kilometers and a population of ten to twenty million people, in the territories of the present-day nations of France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and northern Italy. It was a state of a Catholic Christian court, which had good relations with the Roman papacy.
This empire was the scene of a major cultural renaissance known as the Carolingian Renaissance. However, the political order depended excessively on the fidelity of the feudal nobles Europeans, who after the death of Charlemagne rebelled against the crown of his son Ludovico Pío or "the Pious" (778-840), submerging the Empire in conflict.
After its disintegration, two new kingdoms divided the territory: the Kingdom of France in the west, and the Holy Roman Empire in the east, after the signing of the Treaty of Verdun in 843.
The Holy Roman Empire
After the fall and dissolution of the Carolingian Empire, the Holy Roman Germanic Empire emerged in the territories of western and central Europe, also known as the First Reich or Old Germanic Empire, ruled by the Germanic Roman Emperor since the end of the Middle Ages until the Contemporary age (962-1806).
It was a supranational state, with very changing borders during its almost a millennium of history, which tried to preserve the prestige of the Carolingian Empire under the command of the Saxon dynasty. This Catholic state was the scene of the Protestant Reformation and of the crisis that it brought with it, because as the religious unity of the empire was cracked, it did not take long for internal enemies to appear.
The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) saw the confrontation of reformist and counter-reformist factions within the Empire. Neighboring powers intervened in this conflict, often keeping parts of the disputed territory.
Thus, when the Peace of Westphalia and the Peace of the Pyrenees ended the conflict, the German territories were devastated and its people suffered major famines, reducing the total population of the empire by 30%. Thus, the Holy Roman Empire never became a modern state, despite the fact that it dominated practically all of central Europe and different portions of southern Europe in the 16th century.
However, it functioned as a pacification entity for the region until its entry into the Modern Age and towards the 18th century it began its notorious decline. Unable to cope with Napoleonic expansion, the empire disappeared after the resignation of the throne of Francis II of Habsburg-Lorraine (1768-1835), who since then became Emperor of Austria only.
The Byzantine Empire
What we call the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, was really the Eastern Roman Empire, born in 395, with the division of the Roman territory. But while the capital of the Western Empire was Rome, the Byzantine capital was Byzantium, renamed Constantinople by Emperor Constantine, and now called Istanbul, an important city in Greek Thrace founded in 650 BC. C.
While the culture of the Western Empire was Latin, that of the Byzantine Empire was fundamentally Greek, which is why it adopted its own identity during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
In fact, the population of Byzantium was multi-ethnic, spoke Greek, and was largely Orthodox, so they were a Christian stronghold among their neighboring Muslim nations. They never called themselves Byzantines, nor was the State known as the Byzantine Empire, since these terms are the fruit of later historians, from the 16th century.
Instead, the Byzantines called themselves romioi, that is, residents of Romania, and subsequently helenoi or graekos: that is, they considered themselves a Christian Greek people with Roman citizenship.
When Byzantium fell in the 15th century, they had already experienced a time of territorial heyday (6th century) during the reign of Justinian, who tried and nearly succeeded in restoring the borders of the original Roman Empire.
However, centuries of deep crisis and internal strife followed, leading to the gradual loss of territory and profound cultural transformations. Thus, from the year 1056 the empire began its decline and a slow military agony took place against the Seljuk Turks, who finally conquered Constantinople in 1453, thus ending the Byzantine crown forever.
The Ottoman Empire
Also known as the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the Ottoman Empire was a powerful multi-ethnic and multi-denominational state, ruled first by the Seljuk dynasty and later by its heirs, the Osmanli dynasty.
These peoples led what was one of the smallest states in Central Asia, Turkestan, inhabited by semi-nomadic farmers of the Sunni Islamic religion, to become one of the strongest political and military powers in the region. He was responsible both for the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate, from whose bowels arose, and for its great rivals, the Byzantine Empire.
The beginnings of the Ottoman Empire date back to the first Turkish sultanate, whose territory was ceded by the Seljuks to Ertugrul (1198-1281), considered the founder of the Empire. It was a small and insignificant principality, with the capital Sögüt, which, when the bey Osman I passed into the hands of his son, began a process of military expansion that would later transform it into an empire that lasted seven centuries.
Enduring the pressures of the Mongol Empire, and defeating its Byzantine, Hungarian, Roman, Germanic and Egyptian Mamluk enemies in the West, among others, the Ottoman Empire reached its maximum territorial expression between the 16th and 17th centuries, controlling part of three continents:
- Southeastern Europe: Bulgaria, Serbia, and ancient Byzantium.
- The Middle East: Iran, Iraq, and all the Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts.
- North Africa: Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and part of Morocco).
In that sense, it was the Islamic successor to the great empires of antiquity. However, the decline of the Ottoman Empire began after the setback suffered in the Great Turkish War of 1683, in which a new assault on Vienna failed, defended by the unified armies of various European Christian kingdoms.
Thereafter, territorial losses, the demoralization of the army and internal conflicts weakened the Empire until between 1789 and 1914 there was a period of restructuring and reform, interrupted however by Turkish participation in the First World War.
Ally of Germany and the Triple Alliance, the performance of the Ottoman Empire in the war it was lousy, despite continued German assistance. Finally, the Arab Rebellion of 1916, supported by Great Britain, inflicted its mortal wound on the Empire, causing it to collapse into chaos. In 1922 the sultanate was abolished and the first Republic of Turkey emerged, at the hands of President Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938).