geografia: Fall of the Western Roman Empire

Evidence: 47 • authority: 72

In modern historiography, the Western Roman Empire was the Roman Empire's western provinces collectively during any period in which they were administered separately from the eastern provinces by a separate, independent imperial court. Particularly from AD 395 to 476, there were separate, coequal courts dividing the governance of the empire into western and eastern provinces with a distinct imperial succession in the separate courts. The terms Western Roman Empire and Eastern Roman Empire were coined in modern times to describe political entities that were de facto independent; contemporary Romans did not consider the Empire to have been split into two empires but viewed it as a single poli…

Evidence: 57 • authority: 72

The Roman Empire was a state that dominated the Mediterranean and much of Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa during the classical period. The Roman Republic had previously conquered most of these territories, which later came under permanent single-person rule following Octavian's rise to power and the establishment of the Augustan Principate in 27 BC. By the late 3rd century AD, the empire had been divided many times. The Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 AD, whereas the Eastern Roman Empire (also known as the Byzantine Empire) persisted until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. By 100 BC, the city of Rome had expanded its rule from the Italian peninsula to most of the Mediterranea…

Evidence: 57 • authority: 72

The fall of the Western Roman Empire, also called the fall of the Roman Empire or the fall of Rome, was the loss of central political control in the Western Roman Empire, a process in which the Empire failed to enforce its rule, and its vast territory was divided among several successor polities. The Roman Empire lost the strengths that had allowed it to exercise effective control over its Western provinces; modern historians posit factors including the effectiveness and numbers of the army, the health and numbers of the Roman population, the strength of the economy, the competence of the emperors, the internal struggles for power, the religious changes of the period, and the efficiency of…

Evidence: 47 • authority: 72

The causes and mechanisms of the fall of the Western Roman Empire are a historical theme that was introduced by historian Edward Gibbon in his 1776 book The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Though Gibbon was not the first to speculate on why the empire collapsed, he was the first to give a well-researched and well-referenced account of the event, and started an ongoing historiographical discussion about what caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The traditional date for the end of the Western Roman Empire is 476 when the last Western Roman emperor was deposed. Many theories of causality have been explored. In 1984, Alexander Demandt enumerated 210 different theori…

Evidence: 38 • authority: 72

The continuation, succession, and revival of the Roman Empire is a running theme of the history of Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. It reflects the lasting memories of power, prestige, and unity associated with the Roman Empire. Several polities have claimed immediate continuity with the Roman Empire, using its name or a variation thereof as their own exclusive or non-exclusive self-description. As centuries went by and more political ruptures occurred, the idea of institutional continuity became increasingly debatable. The most enduring and significant claimants of continuation of the Roman Empire have been, in the East, the Ottoman Empire and Russian Empire, which both claimed successi…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved on the 6th of August in 1806, when the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, abdicated his title and released all Imperial states and officials from their oaths and obligations to the empire. Since the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire had been recognized by Western Europeans as the legitimate continuation of the ancient Roman Empire due to its emperors having been proclaimed as Roman emperors by the papacy. Through this Roman legacy, the Holy Roman Emperors claimed to be universal monarchs whose jurisdiction extended beyond their empire's formal borders to all of Christian Europe and beyond. The decline of the Holy Roman…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The contacts between the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire with the Greeks began early in Roman history, as the Latins originated in the vicinity of the Greek colonies in the western Mediterranean. The Greeks initially took little notice of the Romans who were living on their periphery and borrowing heavily from Greek culture, but contacts greatly expanded in the course of Roman expansion in southern Italy, Greece and Asia Minor. Roman culture was highly influenced by the Greeks; as Horace said, Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit ("Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror"). Under Roman rule, Greco-Roman relations flourished but were frequently tinged with resentment: the Greeks r…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Assyrian continuity thesis is the idea that the modern Assyrians are to be culturally and historically identified with, and are the direct descendants of, the ancient Assyrians, who were one of several contemporary civilizations in Mesopotamia. This claimed heritage is a key aspect of the modern Assyrian identity. The modern Assyrian people are an ethno-linguistic and religious minority in their ancestral homeland, which spans parts of Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and northwestern Iran. Assyrian culture and identity appear to have survived the violent collapse of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 609 BC. During the long post-imperial period (6th century BC – 3rd century AD),…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Late antiquity is a time period between classical antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. The exact start and end dates are debatable. Late antiquity represents a cultural sphere covering much of the Mediterranean world, including parts of Europe and the Near East. As an approximate guide, the period can be thought of as spanning "c. 250–750". Late antiquity was an era of massive political and religious transformation. As a time of significant cultural innovation and transformation, it produced a large body of late antique literature, art, and public architecture like the Hagia Sophia. Religiously, it marked the origins or ascendance of the three major monotheistic religions: Christianity, Rab…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Arabia in late antiquity refers to the history of the Arabian Peninsula and its northern desert frontiers between roughly the third and seventh centuries CE. During this period, Arabia stood between the Roman or Byzantine, Sasanian, and Aksumite empires, while also containing independent kingdoms, oasis communities, nomadic and semi-nomadic groups, and long-distance commercial and religious networks. Modern scholarship increasingly treats the Arabian Peninsula not as an isolated setting for the later emergence of Islam, but as a region participating in the wider political, religious, linguistic, and economic transformations of late antiquity. The period saw major changes in political organi…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Late Bronze Age collapse was a period of societal collapse in the Mediterranean basin during the late 13th to early 12th century BC. It is thought to have affected much of the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East, in particular Egypt, Anatolia, the Aegean, eastern Libya, and the Balkans. The collapse was sudden, violent, and culturally disruptive for many Bronze Age civilizations, creating a sharp material decline for the region's previously existing powers. The palace economy of Mycenaean Greece, the Aegean region, and Anatolia that characterized the Late Bronze Age broke apart into the small isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark Ages, which lasted from c. 1200 BC to c. 800 BC and…

Evidence: — • authority: 92

Dressing and Addressing the Mental Patient: The Uses of Clothing in the Admission, Care and Employment of Residents in English Provincial Mental Hospitals, c. 1860-1960.. Scholars of insanity and its historical antecedents have paid very little attention to personal and institutional clothing. Such dress, distributed to patients in mental institutions, has always been inscribed with the conflicting narratives of the period in which it was made and worn. The language of civil and medical authority is more evident than personal choice in the shape and address of the attire. This article examines clothing worn by patients in three Devon mental hospitals during the century before 1960. We consi…