Introduction

The Big Picture

The chapter opens by zooming out to a vast stretch of history — roughly two thousand years after the first empires rose in Mesopotamia. During this long span, repeated attempts at empire-building reshaped the lands to the west and east of that ancient heartland. The story is not just about kings and battles; it is about how trade, language, religion, and the constant tension between settled empires and nomadic peoples together created a world that linked three continents.

The Hellenistic Background

By the sixth century BCE, the Iranians had taken control of major parts of the Assyrian empire. Trade networks grew both overland and along the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. In the eastern Mediterranean, Greek cities and their colonies gained from these improvements in trade, and they also profited from close commercial ties with nomadic peoples living to the north of the Black Sea.

In Greece itself, civic life centred on city-states such as Athens and Sparta. Then, in the late fourth century BCE, Alexander, the ruler of the kingdom of Macedon, launched a series of military campaigns. He conquered parts of North Africa, West Asia, and Iran, pushing as far as the Beas river. There his soldiers refused to march further east, and the army retreated — though many Greeks stayed behind in the conquered lands.

Across the territory Alexander controlled, Greek ideals and cultural traditions mixed with those of the local population. The region became 'Hellenised' — the Greeks called themselves Hellenes — and Greek became a widely known language. Alexander's empire fell apart politically soon after his death, but Hellenistic culture remained influential for nearly three centuries. Historians call this the 'Hellenistic period', though the book cautions that this label underplays how other cultures, especially the Iranian culture of the old empire, were just as important — sometimes more so — than Hellenistic ideas.

The Rise of Rome

After Alexander's empire disintegrated, a small but well-organised military force from the central Italian city-state of Rome stepped into the resulting political discord. From the second century BCE, Rome established control over North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean.

At this time Rome was a republic. Its government rested on a complex system of election, but political institutions still gave weight to birth and wealth, and society depended on slavery. Rome's forces built a trade network linking the states that had once been part of Alexander's empire.

In the middle of the first century BCE, under Julius Caesar — a high-born military commander — the empire was extended to present-day Britain and Germany. Latin, the language of Rome, became the empire's main language, though many in the east continued to use Greek. The Romans held great respect for Hellenic culture.

From the late first century BCE, the political structure of the empire changed. In the fourth century CE, after the emperor Constantine became a Christian, the empire was substantially Christianised. To make government easier, it was divided into eastern and western halves in the fourth century CE.

Collapse in the West

In the western half, the arrangements between Rome and the frontier tribes — the Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, and others — broke down. These arrangements had dealt with trade, military recruitment, and settlement. Increasingly, the tribes attacked the Roman administration. Conflicts grew in scale and coincided with internal dissensions within the empire, leading to its collapse in the west by the fifth century CE.

The tribes set up their own kingdoms inside the former empire. Later, with the prompting of the Christian Church, a Holy Roman Empire was formed from some of these kingdoms from the ninth century CE, claiming continuity with the old Roman Empire.

The Eastern Empire and the Arabs

Between the seventh and fifteenth centuries, almost all the lands of the eastern Roman Empire — centred on Constantinople — were taken over by the Arab empire. This empire was created by the followers of the Prophet Muhammad, who founded the faith of Islam in the seventh century, and was centred on Damascus. Its successors initially ruled from Baghdad. There was close interaction between Greek and Islamic traditions in the region.

The area's trading networks and prosperity attracted pastoral peoples from the north, including various Turkic tribes, who often attacked the region's cities and established control. The last of these peoples to attempt control were the Mongols, under Genghis Khan and his successors, who moved into West Asia, Europe, Central Asia, and China in the thirteenth century.

What Drove All These Empires

Every attempt to make and maintain an empire was driven by the search to control the resources of the region's trading networks and to benefit from links with other areas such as India and China. All the empires developed administrative systems to give stability to trade, and they evolved different types of military organisation. The achievements of one empire were often taken up by its successor.

Over time, the region came to be marked by Persian, Greek, Latin, and Arabic, above the many other languages spoken and written there.

Why Empires Were Unstable

The empires were not very stable. This was partly due to disputes and conflict over resources in various regions. It was also due to a recurring crisis in relations between empires and the pastoral peoples to the north — peoples from whom empires derived support both for their trade and for labour to produce manufactures and to fill their armies.

Religion and Empire

Religions that appealed to peoples of different ethnic origins, who often spoke different languages, were important in the making of large empires. This was true of Christianity, which originated in Palestine in the early first century CE, and of Islam, which originated in the seventh century CE.