Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 91

With its western territory overrun by barbarians and pirates, the Roman Empire was no longer anything like its former self. In 439 AD, Vandals advanced to Roman North Africa, capturing Carthage, the former Phoenician capital that had become one of the major cities of the Western Roman Empire. The once-mighty Western empire was unable to defend this valuable trade center.

While the Western empire declined, the imperial government in Constantinople signaled the changing times by declaring Greek, rather than Latin, to be the official language. Latin was the language of the West, of Rome. Greek was the language of the eastern Mediterranean, the new center of Roman ascendancy. Remembered as the Byzantine Empire, this eastern branch of the Roman Empire would persist for another 1,000 years.

Roman administration in the West struggled on until 476 AD, but without authority. When barbarian leaders closed in on the last emperor to sit on the Roman throne, a poor youngster named Romulus Augustus, a name recalling his great predecessors, they didn’t bother to kill him. This emperor (also known by the diminutive Augustulus) wasn’t considered to be important enough.

Rome’s legacy pervades the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, and other far-flung places culturally affected by Europeans — a broad swath that takes in the Philippines, South Africa (and most of the rest of the African continent), Australia, and arguably the whole world.