Roman Empire
Roman Empire / Mediterranean · -27 – 476
The empire that ruled the Mediterranean world for half a millennium and shaped the foundations of Western law, governance, language, and Christianity. From Augustus's establishment of the principate in 27 BC to the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476, more than seventy emperors held the throne — by inheritance, adoption, civil war, and the sword of the Praetorian Guard. The Western half collapsed in the fifth century under Germanic pressure; the Eastern half outlived it by a thousand years.
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