Nonetheless, in its own time the Arab Empire was extraordinary, both because of its military successes, and because of its legacy. After 900 C.E., the empire began to crumble politically with the rise of rival dynasties, many of them Turkic and Persian in origin, as well as rival Caliphates in Spain and Egypt.
The Arab Empire effectively ended around 900 C.E., although the Abbasids maintained their religious role as figurehead Caliphs in Baghdad until the destruction of that city by the Mongols in 1258 C.E. The hereditary Umayyad Caliphate then ruled until 750 C.E., followed by the Abbasid Caliphate, though conquests had ended by this point. Muhammad was succeeded by the four Rightly-Guided Caliphs (“successors”) who were selected by consensus and acclimation (though not undisputed) until 661 C.E. It is more reasonable to call this the Arab Empire rather than the Muslim Empire because while Islam originated and spread because of this empire, there were many subsequent empires that were legally Muslim or ruled by Muslims but were not Arab. The Arab Empire, also known as the Caliphate, was a political entity founded by the Muslim Prophet Muhammad that encompassed most of Arabia by the time of his death in 632 C.E. And the Eastern Empire lasted until 1453 C.E., giving the political history of the Roman state a whopping two millennia span. When the empire did collapse, it was due more to continued crisis and civil war rather than its invasion by Germanic tribes. The Roman legions were militarily dominant for centuries, enabling Rome to rule over nearly all other civilized peoples in the Mediterranean and Near East except the Persians for hundreds of years and facing only minor raids by disorganized tribes. Though the Carthaginian general Hannibal almost destroyed the Romans after the Battle of Cannae in 216 B.C.E., the Romans were able to land an army at Carthage to defeat it a mere fourteen years later. They were able to bounce back from numerous setbacks against improbable odds to pull together and defeat their enemies. Once the Roman Republic transitioned into the Roman Empire, the idea and majesty of Caesar served as an inspiration for future rulers. The American political system- with its separate branches of government- approximate this Roman institutional division.
In fact, many of them frequently spoke of their distaste for the Athenian experiment in democracy and their admiration for the Roman form of mixed government, where monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements shared power. Despite Greece’s reputation as the “birthplace of democracy,” the American Founding Fathers were primarily influenced by British and Roman practices. Roman institutions also helped inspire the governance systems of modern democracies. Roman Law also influenced all subsequent legal systems in the West. Later, the Roman embrace of Christianity helped elevate that religion from a minor cult to one of the world’s great religions. The Romans took over and expanded upon the Hellenistic (Greek) culture, passing down Greek architecture, philosophy and science to future generations. Several important features of the modern world are the result of the Roman Empire. But it was not held together by brute force alone once conquered, people aspired to become Roman, which meant participating in a sophisticated, urbane, classical culture. The Romans displayed the awesome ability to conquer and hold large swathes of territory for hundreds or even thousands of years, if the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) is accounted for. But its importance is not the product of Western bias: the Roman Empire was truly one of history’s greatest empires. The Roman Empire has long been the empire par excellence for the Western world.
MARKSTER CON BASH OF THE EMPIRE FREE
The Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, influenced the development of key concepts like free will and heaven and hell in Abrahamic religions through Judaism. The Persian Empire’s legacy to the world in terms of imperial ideas include the use of a network of roads, a postal system, a single language for administration (Imperial Aramaic), autonomy for various ethnicities, and a bureaucracy. The Persian Empire ushered in a period of harmony and peace in the Middle East for two hundred years, a feat that has seldom been replicated. It should not be forgotten that, notwithstanding exaggeration and misinterpretation, the Persians believed that they achieved their goals in Greece and that more Greeks lived in the empire than not. Various Persian campaigns succeeded at subjugating most of the world’s advanced civilizations at the time including the Babylonians, Lydians, Egyptians, and the northwestern Hindu region of Gandhara, in today’s Pakistan. Such a large empire could only have been put together by military might, and the Persian Empire’s military achievements were significant, though they are often forgotten by its sudden demise at the hands of Alexander’s armies.
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