Main Points

History is Now

In the Formative Era, the inherent fertility of soil in the river floodplains was a critical factor, probably the critical factor, which determined the wealth and power of nations. Europe had no such river system, and as such was the weakest and least sophisticated of the major geographic heartlands of civilization. What tenuous beginning Europe had made was wiped out in 1200 BC when it was overrun, the first victims of the "Sea Peoples" and the barbarians which followed them. The most sophisticated area in Europe, Greece, fell into 400 years where writing was lost and no records exist. When civilization reappeared in Greece, they would have to borrow the script of their trading partners, the Phoenicians.

The Greeks were so far behind that they found the outside world tremendously exciting. Greek attraction to the sea and interest in trade / business went beautifully with a people that liked to travel, see the world, and argue about it when they got home. It is no surprise that given how primitive Europe remained that civilization would bloom forth once more under a curious people that was interested in learning from others; there were too many advantages which the Greeks gained over their rivals because they essentially cheated and borrowed the advanced lessons from the Middle East. However, Greece was about to do something wholly unprecedented in the history of civilization, and it would make them the most successful culture of the Ancient Era.

New Institutions and Limited Government

Peloponnesian cities dominated Greek history throughout the Formative Era. Then for the first time, a rival outside the Peloponnesian Peninsula rose to challenge the mightiest city-states of the time. In the hinterlands of Greece in 507 BC, a small city-state rioted. Like many of the Greek city-states, it had swung between various forms of government, kingship, dictatorship, and oligarchy, so the revolt itself was nothing new. What happened next was revolutionary; the preeminent oligarch wished to overthrow the ruling dictator at all costs. Lacking the power he needed, he secured his victory with the consent of the populous. Kleisthenes "took the people into partnership" founding the world's first democracy at the city of Athens. Word of his actions ripped through Greece like wildfire and painted a bullseye on the young state. From that moment on, all politics in Southern Greece were defined for or against Athens, without even having proved that it would survive the year.

But survive it did. One of Athens's first actions was to send aid to the city-states of Anatolia. Viewed at the time as a secondary item of foreign policy, this would become one of the Earth-shaking decisions in world history. For the Greeks living on the Aegean coast of Anatolia were threatened by the largest empire ever created, the Achmenid Persians of Darius the Great. The Athenian relief expedition failed and the Greek cities of Anatolia surrendered or were conquered by the Persians. However, Darius neither forgot nor forgave the cities of mainland Greece for sending aid, especially the Athenians who were rightly seen as the central conspirators.

Thus in 490 BC, the Persians launched the first of two major invasions which ended with improbable Greek victory at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC. The Persians were a massive, rich, strong, centrally unified bureaucracy, but they had been beaten in two major land battles, and what may have been the most important naval engagement in human history before or since, the Battle of Salamis. The Greeks were disorganized and divided, however; their dynamic ideas, energy, and institutions allowed them to persevere through long odds to survive and throw back the Persian tide.

Meanwhile in 600 BC Italy, the Romans were conquered by the Etruscans. The Romans absorbed important parts of Etruscan culture until 509 BC when the Romans drove out their Etruscan overlords. They established both their independence and a new form of government – the Republic. The Republic was an important development which gave the Romans an important advantage over other civilizations. However, the Romans were essentially oligarchs at heart and – as any well made mafia film depicts – Roman society operated on the principle "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours".

In Athens only slaves, women, and children were excluded; every other citizen in the city was required to attend government meetings in the amphiteater. The large and small councils were chosen by lot to manage government affairs. All the decisions of the city (and later empire) were made openly by discussion and vote; all points of view were acknowledged including power blocks openly bought and paid for by Athen's enemies advocating capitulation in debate. Nothing like it has ever been seen before or since. It was the key reason for sudden rise of Athens from little more than a village to the greatest city-state in Greece, and its ability to go toe to toe with the mighty Persian Empire.

Learning, Literacy, and Education

Athens reaped profound rewards from their victory at Plataea in 479 BC. The Persian Empire would never again seriously threaten to expand into Greece. However, the Persian threat remained very real and this proved an advantage to Athens. Using the Persian menace as incentive, Athens created the Delian League, a coalition of city-states around the Aegean Sea and throughout its hundreds of islands. First, through wisdom and leadership, and later through threats and force, the Athenians created an empire to challenge the Persians, though they spent most of their time sparring with other city-states.

In 431 BC, the Athenians under the command of their general Pericles attacked the Spartans, initiating the Peloponnesian War. Using the resources of the League, Pericles rebuilt the city and the Acropolis (by this time having rejected the illusion that League dues were to be used for anything other than enriching Athens). Confident that he could bankrupt the Spartans with a protracted war and spawn slave revolts that would bring the city down, he refused to give battle and risk allowing the Spartans to win the decisive victory that both sides recognized was Sparta's best hope. Instead the Athenians clung to their city walls and imported food using gold "borrowed" from the Delian League coffers; the Spartans ravaged the countryside hoping to provoke a conflict they could win. However, no slave revolt materialized (at any point throughout the war), Sparta failed to give up, and both sides tired as the war dragged on year after year with no end in sight.

The Peloponnesian War was a messy, dirty, vicious civil war typically consisting of Spartan / Athenian strikes against each other's allies, or conflicts fought between Spartan and Athenian allies over local grudges. As can well be guessed already, these conflicts were not confined to "official aims"; on a number of occasions "allies" fought against one another or took advantage of each other's weakness for brutal political benefit. Nor were "battles" usually traditional affairs; conflicts more frequently took the form of guerilla campaigns and outright massacres which left both sides decimated, disappointed, and frustrated. This war which no one had ever dreamed would last more than three or four years dragged on for more than two decades, yet all sides were too stubborn to give in.

Then in 404 BC, Sparta's highest-ranking admiral – known only for his cowardice and brutality – was sailing the latest fleet of ships donated by Persia, when he sighted the bulk of the Athenian fleet beached for the night. His marines dispersed the sailors and burned the last fleet that Athens could afford to build. He then sailed into the Athenian harbor unopposed and put the city under Spartan rule. While Athens would remain a center of culture and thought for hundreds of years, the barbaric terms of the Spartan surrender successfully deprived Athens of any further political power until the 19th century AD. Predictably, Sparta's heavy handed treatment of its enemies and allies quickly alienated the power it had acquired through the war. The Greek city-states continued to war, develop, argue, and do all the other things they had done before, but the collapse of the Athenian empire marked the end of any city-state's ability to wield international political power. Thus 404 BC marked the beginning of decline of the Hellenic Age, ie the Age of the Helenes, as the Greeks still call themselves to this day.

The Legacy of the Hellenic Age

The military power of Greece would never again seriously threaten anyone outside their borders; their military power was past its prime and the Greek city-states became more politically fragmented than ever. However, it is not for its military history that the Greeks are now best known. The Athenians invented not only democracy, but instituted the first law courts; previously kings had decided judical matters. Without a King, the Athenians chose to create courts where rival lawyers argued each side of a case. A jury of citizens listened and would then drop white or black balls into a jar (a secret ballot) to determine the guilt or innocence of the accused. The courts were dedicated to Athena and if the 12 jurors deadlocked, six against six, the accused was freed, the final "vote" being cast for innocence by Athena herself. This adversarial system of law was essentially the same adopted by the Romans.

The Athenians also developed religion in completely original, distinctively democratic ways. What passes for religion in most cultures during the Formative Era are stories, myths, and rituals. Rituals are the physical repetition of hymns and the revelation of mysteries, performance of rituals in an attempt to placate the gods or manipulate their favor. Nearly all Formative religions believed in this form of magic, that the physical act of certain motions and / or repeating religious words could influence weather, fate, etc. It was a way for early cultures to attempt to control things that were out of their power. In Athens, these had taken the form of choral rituals to the gods, and under democracy they began to change.

Philosophy and debate were rife in democratic Athens; everyone's voice mattered in government and so politics was a universal conversation not confined to a small ruling party. The choral rituals began to assert multiple voices and different views, they questioned the nature of what it meant to be Greek, to be human. They became an important cultural entertainment and dialogue about the future of the city. It seems that once the Athenians were talking about politics, they couldn't stop asking questions. These choral performances were the beginning of Greek drama, which turned into a new Greek passion. Playwrights would compete with each other, writing plays for each festival season, with awards and fame going to the winner of each year's competition. So too, the Olympic festival rewarded with fame the best athletes throughout Greece; even inter-city wars were halted to ensure safe passage of athletes to and from the games and this restriction was usually (though not always) recognized.

Philosophy and the foundation of sciences were also born. Socrates is founder of Greek philosophy and is thought to have fought at both Marathon and Plataea. Shortly after the Athenian defeat by Sparta, he was executed in 399 BC for challenging the existence of the gods. His pupil Plato, reviled democracy for executing his mentor, and he founded the school of rationalism, writing many important philosophical texts of which The Republic is the most famous. He also immortalized his mentor, Socrates, as the main character in his texts, though the views seem to have little to do with his teacher's. They do however, powerfully illustrate the Greek method of dialogue and demonstrate how Socrates declared that knowledge could be learned through vigorous discussion and challenging one's ideas, perhaps the quintessential expression of the new ideas that were transforming Athens. Plato also established the Academy, perhaps the most famous school in Ancient history.

Plato's student, Aristotle, rejected his teacher's rationalism; indeed it is a hallmark of Greek education that the three greatest philsophers studied under each other, intellectual father, son, and grandson, and yet held radically divergent opinions from their mentors. Aristotle was the most brilliant of the three, writing extensive treatises on the animals, mathematics, and nature. He also developed Socrates and Plato's ideas about rigorous logic into the technique of induction, the beginnings of scientific inquiry. He was a firm believer in the practical, unlike his idealistic mentor. He also founded his own school, the Lyceum, where he taught his own students.

The Greeks created the first truly stunning artistic tradition in drama, in prose, in history, in music, in architecture, in poetry. Nothing like it had been seen before. The great irony is that only Europe could have achieved these heights because only Europe was so far behind at the beginning of the Ancient Era; it was European inferiority that now drove European success...

When empires first began to clash and meet other cultures from other cultural heartlands, the Greek had much to learn, and learn they did. They studied the incredible knowledge that Mesopotamia and Egypt had acquired. This is what allowed Greece to catch up. However, in the process they did something that was unthinkable to the older cultures – they learned how to learn. They absorbed these foreign concepts and replaced their own ideas with the superior learning of these more advanced civilizations. For Mesopotamia and Egypt, these lessons had been hard won, their cultures had existed for thousands of years, and their ideas were the progress of slow centuries. For the Greeks it was assimilated in a matter of decades, and they became used to asking and questioning their values.

The texts of Plato and the dramas of Ancient Greece vividly illustrate the Greek's love of a good argument and demonstrate the vibrant intellectual life of Ancient Greece; this was wholly unique and original to first Athens and then to many other city-states in Greece and around the Aegean. The Greeks prized education not as a process of learning what came before, but of learning to ask, question, and think for oneself. It was these qualities that the Greeks loved in themselves, and that permitted these small city states to resist the combined might of the Persian Empire with an unhealthy dose of bravado and a not insignificant amount of luck. And an idea that powerful could not remain bottled up in the hinterlands of Eurasia for long. Someway, somehow, it was going to get out...

The Hellenistic Period

It all started around 342 BC when Aristotle took on a new pupil. The ruler of a small Greekish kingdom with a healthy streak of barbarism still running through it, Philip II of Macedon asked the renowned philosopher to become tutor to the royal heir. Being practical, Aristotle jumped at the chance to instruct a future leader. The boy was headstrong and their lessons did not always go smoothly, eventually causing Aristotle to resign his post in frustration. However, when Philip conquered Greece in 338 BC, his Aristotelian tutored heir was one of his chief generals. The Greeks were defeated, but not content under men they considered semi-barbaric upstarts and so Philip secured his conquests by calling for a Crusade against Persia. Drawing on all the old hatreds, especially Persia's detested role in the Peloponnesian War, Philip enrolled the Greeks in a united Hellenic League until he was assassinated, probably planned by his son in 336 BC. And thus it was Aristotle's pupil assumed control of all Greece; his name was Alexander III and for what he was about to do, the Romans would later christen him with the name by which he is known to history, Alexander Magnus, Alexander the Great.

With an army full of talented commanders, and a gallant spirit that always carried him into the thick of the fighting at the head of his elite cavalry, the Companions, Alexander launched his invasion of Persia in 334 BC. Alexander, however, was convinced of his ability to conquer the ancient empires of the Middle East, perhaps pathologically, and he had inherited all of his father's innovative brilliance on the battlefield if not exceeded him. Using daring and unexpected tactics and completely original geometric formations of his own design, he repeatedly destroyed the best armies of the Persian Empire, armies regarded as the greatest of the Ancient Era and which frequently outnumbered him by more than 3 to 1. By styling himself a savior from Persian rule and dealing fairly (or at least no more harshly than the Persians) Alexander established lasting rule in these territories. When he conquered the Persian capital, Persepolis, he had completed the first major invasion in world history. Nor did Alexander stop there. Now styling himself as an oriental monarch (much to the dismay of his generals), he was determined to march to the ends of the earth and with brilliance unmatched, he marched to the borders of India and conquered from the Hindu Kush to the Indus river valley by 328 BC.

He secured these conquests from Greece to the Ganges by establishing a dozen new cities each named egotistically, Alexandria. Humble he was not, but he understood well that Greek cities were the cornerstones of Greek culture and that urbanizing these regions, especially with his new Alexandrias was the way to secure his new territory. On the Indus River however, his troops revolted and would go no farther. They'd had enough of war, of conquest, of tramping the entire length of the known world, and not insignificantly of his high-handed attitude. He returned to his Persian capital triumphant but frustrated, and settled down to the ancient Macedonian tradition of drinking yourself to death. He disastrously forced Persian wives upon his top military officers, many of whom were married to women they had left in Greece. This may have gotten him assassinated, but whether by poison or by his own excess of wine, Alexander the Great finally, and quite probably gratefully, collapsed at a banquet and died in 323 BC.

This was also a major growth period for the Romans; they were eager to prove themselves after the Gallic disaster. In 387 BC, the city had been sacked by one of the most feared Celtic tribes in all of Europe, the Gauls. Defeated but not destroyed, the Romans now saw a silver lining in the Gallic invasions. While Rome had survived, the Gauls had wiped out the Etruscans leaving each of the local city-states free to fight amongst themselves for dominance. Rome emerged as the victor, their new military lessons culminating in the legion, a new, more advanced way of deploying their armies. The legion powered their drive for conquest even when their enemies united against them. This is not the most important way that the Romans distinguished themselves, however. Most cultures used victory as a tool for humiliating their enemies or at least robbing them blind, this was taken for granted even in Greek circles and was in some ways the root cause for the collapse of the Athenian Empire. However, the Romans used their conquests as a way to enforce mutually beneficial treaties upon their defeated foes. Thus, their conquests added to their power while requiring little of their army. It should be noted that allies were required to submit to taxation and obligations of military service, but compared to the methods that the Greeks and Persians used to enforce service, the Romans were sticklers for decorum and fairness.

The Romans enjoyed this arrangement because it meant their armies spent more time in the field conquering new enemies. While Aristotle was traveling north to tutor the young Alexander the Great, the Romans' local allies joined them in launching a critical but enormously difficult war against the Samnites. The Samnite Wars lasted from 340 - 290 BC, the Romans and their allies fought a combination of traditional and guerrilla battles against the Samnites who were entrenched in the high valleys of the Apennine Mountains in central Italy. For comparison, the Qin dynasty conquered China in 221 BC, with no more advantages than this. However, despite the Samnite's superior defensive position, they were eventually defeated. Rome also secured its expansion throughout Italy by planting Roman colonies throughout the peninsula to ensure their control. The Romans willingness to conscript their own citizens and march them off to found new cities was a critical technique in the early Romanization of Italy. As it turned out, simply being born Roman was a little like joining the military.

Culture and Empire

Alexander's conquests mark the beginning of a new phase in Mediterranean civilization and an especially important one given the influence they had throughout the Middle East, reaching even India. The Macedonians were part of the Greek sphere of influence, looked up to Greek culture and struggled to prove themselves significant in ways important to the Greeks (though how successfully is another question). Still, when they ruled from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River, it was Greek culture that they took with them, launching what is today known as the Hellenistic Age. It was not the Hellenic Age of "true" Grecian culture (the period of Sparta vs. Athens), but an international culture largely based on the culture of the Helenes.

Given the speed of Alexander's conquests and the fact that he died so soon after, remarkably little of his new empire fell apart; a testimony to the respect earned by the Macedonian military, but also to their appreciation of the practical in politics, and the success of urbanization in reinforcing Greek rule through Greek institutions and culture. From 323 - 280 BC, Alexander's generals fought what is known as the Wars of the Diadochi, the Successors. With the exception of the Indus River Valley, most of the conquered territories remained under Greek control through this civil war. The general who inherited most of Asia, Seleucus, fought an unsuccessful battle in India, and rather than invest more resources, sold the province to his Indian opponent for a group of war elephants that he used with some success in the wars of succession.

By 280 BC, the tenor of the Civil wars had changed significantly. All of the major players had been eliminated and each time someone had emerged to seize control of the entire empire, the others had managed by assassination or coalition to defeat him. While no one would have been opposed to reuniting the entire empire, the remaining players were more concerned with securing their local base of operations rather than overextending themselves to the advantage of their adversaries, so from 280 - 30 BC the territory conquered by Alexander was carved up into various kingdoms. Greece and Macedon were ruled by the Antigonids (descendents of the general Antigonus), Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemies (descendents of Ptolemy), and Asia was ruled by the Selucids. While most of these territories were relatively stable, the massive Selucid territory of Asia was whittled away decade by decade by native dynasties that emerged and rolled back the eastern border of the Greek kingdom.

Nevertheless, the Macedonians transformed Mesopotamia and Egypt in particular by spreading Greek culture. The large kingdom of Bactria broke free from Seleucos in 239 BC, and remained culturally Greek on the borders of the Himalayas long after Selucid power had collapsed in the area. Greek influence in the area only ended with the invasion of Central Asian barbarians, the Yue Qi, who destroyed Bactria in 135 BC. Even more amazingly, Greek culture can be found, if only as a fad, in India around 300 BC. The Mauryans were impressed enough with Greek art and power that they began carving their statues in the Greek style – known as the Gandhara School. While the statues remained traditional subjects near and dear to the Indian heart, these stunningly Greek statues can still be seen today.

197 BC was the beginning of the end of the Hellenistic Period, when Rome defeated the Antigonid dynasty and "freed" the Greeks. No one was under the illusion that they would exert any less influence over the area than the Macedonians, and Rome would dominate Europe and parts of the Middle East for centuries to come. Thanks to the fractured politics and infighting throughout Greece, the Romans did not even need to rule in Greece, but only "settle disputes" to achieve effective control. Greek culture would survive on in Rome as it had in the culture of the Hellenistic monarchs; these two empires would take Greek culture places the Greeks themselves had never seen. But where Roman culture prevented the rivalry of independent city-states which proved the downfall of Greece, Roman politics had its own built-in disadvantages which were about to cripple their civilization.

In 46 BC the Roman Civil War exploded between rival power blocks. It continued until Octavian – the adopted heir of Rome's greatest general, Julius Caesar – avenged his patron's assassination and went on to put down all resistance to his rule, Octavian triumphant and now unchallenged, returned to Rome where he restored the Republic, guaranteed the Senate its privileges, blah, blah, blah. Desperate not to alienate him, the Senate agreed to all Octavian's demands, ending the Roman Republic and inaugurating the Roman Empire.

Rome remained a powerful force because most other Roman institutions would be upheld. For example, the Senate was never disbanded; on the contrary it would outlive the collapse of the Empire. But Rome's internal instability was a graphic sign of its political regression. These were the same reasons that democratic and republican government had brought the Romans and Greeks to the height of power. Rome had not been ruled by a king in 500 years, and much of the literature of the period owes its greatness to the Romans' difficulty in reconciling themselves to this change.

All the greatest Roman poets were active in the early days of Augustus's rule. Latin poetry flourished under the patronage of senators, Augustus himself, and most importantly his right-hand man, Maecenas, who supported most of the key poets of the age. Vergil and Catallus were both supported by him and dedicated their verses in his honor. The sharp-tongued Ovid also wrote at this time. Augustus, a staunch conservative, carefully cultivated his support for the Senate and his impeccable Roman family values. Ovid's references to Augustus's morally loose daughter earned him exile to the Black Sea where he died miserable (the same fate that awaited Augustus's daughter who was banished to a small island in the Mediterranean).

This was also the time of the rise of Christianity. Jesus of Nazareth was possibly born in 4 BC under an especially spectacular appearance of Halley's Comet – if the controversial reports of the Star of Bethlehem are accurate. While he died unknown to anyone outside Judaea, the Roman inquisitor sent to root out his troublesome followers, Saul of Tarsus, was converted to Christianity around 37 AD. Taking the name Paul, he crisscrossed the Mediterranean founding churches and giving birth to the Christian church based on his interpretations of Jesus's reported sayings. Paul's letters to the various churches he founded are the earliest documents in the Christian tradition. The Gospels which depict Jesus's life were written down by his disciples, much of them to contradict what they felt were errors in Paul's teachings. For now however, Christianity was a hunted faith and emperors frequently persecuted Christians because they refused to worship the emperor as a god, or simply because Christianity appealed to many wealthy Greeks, especially rich widows, who were targeted to seize their wealth.

Following Augustus's rule, a few dynasties brought stability to the empire for time, but they were lost among a sea of civil wars. The short-sightedness of the Senate truly became apparent. Rather than ending the civil wars by acquiescing to Octavian, they brought about a series of ever more brutal, ever more destructive internal conflicts among the power brokers who sought to master the Roman Empire. The death of each emperor was the cue for a new round of civil wars, and if he lasted too long, emperors were frequently assassinated (even though "too long" was sometimes only a few weeks). Where the generals of the Republic had taken for granted that they must earn laurels by conquering new lands first, before they could pursue their political goals, the generals of the Empire spent their time on the defensive from barbarian invasions and rival claimants to the throne. Rome expanded little after Augustus, reaching its peak under the emperor Trajan who conquered Mesopotamia in 117 AD.

However, Trajan died the same year and his successor the Emperor Hadrian decided that Rome had grown too large. Technically, no emperor followed Hadrian's policy, but never again would any emperor advance the borders of Rome beyond what Hadrian gave up. This marks Hadrian as the territorial peak of the Roman Empire, and while Rome had been growing weaker for more than a century the story of post-Hadrian Rome is about the retreat and death of a major power. At first Rome was able to hold its own, but when Septimus Severus sacked Ctesiphon in 197 AD, he tried to leave a crippled and non-threatening Partian Empire to limp along in the East. However, the weakened Parthians succumbed in 226 AD to the Sassanian dynasty which would prove much stronger.

Several Roman emperors were killed in battle against the Sassanians, most disastrously the Emperor Valerian in 260 AD. With his death the empire to fell apart; first a Roman general seized France, Spain, and Britain and proclaimed himself Gallic Emperor. Next, a rival claimant took Egypt, Syria, and East Anatolia to form the Kingdom of Palmyra – named after its capital city in Syria. Rome was now stripped of 2/3 of its territory and sandwiched by two powerful Roman kingdoms; Rome looked ready to collapse. However, in 270 AD, Aurelian became Roman Emperor. After fighting off the almost annual barbarian invasions of Italy, he conquered Palmyra and the Gallic Empire from 270 - 274 AD. In an unlikely turn of events, the Roman Empire survived, though it's weaknesses were clear to all.

In 286 AD, the Emperor Diocletian tried to strengthen the Empire. He was the first emperor to abandon the fiction created by Augustus that the emperor's power derived from the Senate. What Rome really needed was the stability that the Republic had provided, and this only exaggerated the problem, and none of Diocletian's successors ever relinquished even the appearance of their total authority again. Thus 286 AD marks the formal end of the Ancient Era experiments in popular government. Not until the Industrial Era would forms of monarchy and oligarchy be challenged by governments that encouraged broader participation. Diocletian also became well known for the most intense persecutions of the Christians in Roman history. Seeing their refusal to pray to a human as a threat to his authority, he was determined to break the religion and subordinate it to the cult of the Emperor.

More seriously, Diocletian also declared a co-emperor. It was not uncommon for emperors to raise their heirs while alive in the hopes that their deaths would not cause civil war. However, Diocletian was the first to take a co-emperor and divide the Empire between them. Moreover, Diocletian installed not one but three other monarchs. It was not unreasonable by Diocletian's thinking; it did allow more effective response to the many threats facing the empire. Diocletian had chosen his co-regents because of his certainty that he could control them. While he calculated correctly, on his death the empire once again fell apart, undoing all the work that Aurelian had done to put the empire back together.

Once again, Rome survived but only just. One contender, Constantine, managed to rout his rivals and reunite the empire. Constantine was an amazing personality, known as Constantine the Great; he had ridden at Diocletian's side during the worst of the persecutions of the Christians. Yet, before the last battle of the civil war Constantine declared to his troops that he had a dream; his dream convinced him to convert to Christianity on the spot and he had his troops paint the cross on their shields. Constantine, like Alexander of Macedon, was mentally unstable and gradually fed his ego into a full blown God complex. Constantine's rule made it abundantly clear that by the end of his life, he considered his life to be second in importance only to Christ himself. Yet Christians unquestionably benefited from his change of heart. He issued the Edict of Milan in 313 AD ensuring tolerance for all Christians. Never again would Christianity be seriously persecuted... except by other Christians. While Constantine is best known for moving the capital from Rome to the old Greek city of Byzantium which he renamed Constantinople, Constantine was most important because he positioned himself as the head of the Christian church and used Christianity as a way to extend his control. Thus, 313 AD marks the beginning of the Medieval era in Europe.

The heartlands continued to be central sources of material and strength both in people and economic power. However, it was now routine for them to be the core of a much larger domain. The Persian empire may have been unusual for it's massive size, but Alexander conquered and expanded it, Rome unified the Mediterranean (a feat never again duplicated), and the Han Chinese spread from the Pacific along the Silk Road almost as far as the Middle East. Ancient empires made size and power the norm of their day.