Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
At the start of the 5th century AD Rome was under siege, threatened by a vast army of Goths, forty-thousand of them were poised at the city’s gates. Rome was defenceless, even the remnants of its garrisons abandoned their posts. The events that brought Rome to the brink of disaster had their roots in a betrayal two years earlier.
Rome differed from Greek city-states in allowing freed slaves to become citizens; any future children of a freedman were born free, with full rights of citizenship. After manumission, a slave who had belonged to a Roman citizen enjoyed active political freedom ( libertas ), including the right to vote. [ 150 ]
Since Charlemagne, the realm was merely referred to as the Roman Empire. [35] The term sacrum ("holy", in the sense of "consecrated") in connection with the medieval Roman Empire was used beginning in 1157 under Frederick I Barbarossa ("Holy Empire"): the term was added to reflect Frederick's ambition to dominate Italy and the Papacy. [36]
The Roman expansion in Italy covers a series of conflicts in which Rome grew from being a small Italian city-state to be the ruler of the Italian region.Roman tradition attributes to the Roman kings the first war against the Sabines and the first conquests around the Alban Hills and down to the coast of Latium.
In exchange for the Pope's reconquest of the Papal States, he agreed to crown Barbarossa emperor. Rome was recaptured in 1155. Barbarossa was crowned by Adrian IV the day after he entered the city, on June 18, 1155. [5] Despite this exchange, tensions between the Papacy and the Empire persisted, and Rome remained unstable.
The history of Rome includes the history of the city of Rome as well as the civilisation of ancient Rome. Roman history has been influential on the modern world, especially in the history of the Catholic Church, and Roman law has influenced many modern legal systems. Roman history can be divided into the following periods:
Map of the Roman Empire with the distribution of Christian congregations of the first three centuries AD. The growth of Early Christianity from its obscure origin c. AD 40, with fewer than 1,000 followers, to being the majority religion of the entire Roman Empire by AD 400, has been examined through a wide variety of historiographical approaches.
Sociologist E. A. Judge explains Christianization through this sociological view as having occurred as a result of the powerful combination of new ideas Christianity offered, and the social impact of the church, which he says formed the central pivotal point for the religious conversion of Rome. [3] [4]