Eastern Roman Empire

Even more immediately threatening was young Mehmet II, the Turkish sultan who conquered the last remnant of the Eastern Roman Empire in 1453.

Istanbul, so magnificently sited on the Bosphorus, can be regarded as being at the extreme end of Europe, but when it was Byzantium, and later Constantinople, it was the centre of the civilised world as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Their citations seemed to imply that a collection of Iamblichus' letters was still in circulation among learned circles throughout the eastern Roman empire. Perhaps it was already only a collection of excerpts, however.

The concept of "Roman" identity developed under the Eastern Roman Empire and continued into the Ottoman period.

In the Western historical imagination, the Eastern Roman Empire, which ruled from Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) from AD 330 until 1453, has received mostly disdain and neglect.

He thus offers this book as a corrective, reviewing the archaeological evidence on the lived experiences of Christianity within the Eastern Roman Empire, Greece and the Balkans, North Africa, and Italy and Northwest Europe.

One of the two churches discovered at Perperikon is the oldest in the region, dated back to 4th and 5th centuries, the rules of Emperor Arcadius (395-408 AD) in the Eastern Roman Empire, and Emperor Honorius (395-423 AD) in the Western Roman Empire, after the division of the Roman Empire in 395 AD.

The Christian emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, Justinian, was the first one who removed marble parts from the Parthenon in the 6th century AD, which he used in the building of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

The remainders of walls and paving that cling obstinately to whatever hold it can retain amid the grass and sand of the hills--and whatever of its place it has held on to in spite of the shovels and tractors that have cleared the way for crops--show what there is to see now of the great road, the Via Diagonalis, that in Roman times connected Rome to the capital city of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople.

On the other hand, the Byzantine Christians residing in the Eastern Roman empire found the idea very unsettling as their gods have long before Christianity been pagan, a mindset that eventually lead to the creation of separate Nestorian sects that couldn't believe that Jesus was God.

In chapter seven, he discusses the rise of the Ottoman Empire and its destruction of the remainder of the Byzantine/ Eastern Roman Empire. He also discusses the expansion of the Ottoman Empire at the expense of Christian Europe until the unsuccessful second siege of Vienna in 1683.

Moreover, the Treaty of Omar unequivocally decreed that the possessions and personal belongings of the Christians, whether they chose to remain under the tutelage of Islam or to depart to the Eastern Roman Empire, were to be protected and respected.