History of West Eurasia
From Freepedia
West Eurasia is an area bounded by the Sahara and the Indian Ocean to the south, the Atlantic to the west, and the Arctic Ocean to the north. Significant movements of people have entered the region from the East across the steppes. None the less, the steppes have, for much of history, been lowly populated and so the interaction of West Eurasia with East Eurasia had been indirect.
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Early Classical
Cyrus the Great after having sucessfully rebelled and overthrown the Median King, invaded Lydia in 546 BCE and conquered it. In 538 BCE he overans Babylonia. Along with the conquest of Egypt by his son Cambyses the Persian Empire reached a unprecedented size for West Eurasia. Cambyses' plans to continue west against Carthage came to nothing when the Phoenicians refused to participate - Carthage had taken pains to maintain its links with its mother city Tyre.
The Greco-Persian Wars (circa 500 BCE - 448 BCE) between the Persian Empire and the Greek city states, resulted in a stalemate and Persian Kings from them on chose a policy of divide and rule. This allowed Persia to regain control of the Ionian cities of Anatolia at the end of the Peloponnesian War but the policy was most successful during the Corinthian War. However Philip of Macedon secured a hegemony over the Greek city states. In 334 Philips son Alexander crossed into Asia, and in a series of campaigns conquered the Persian Empire. Though on his death, in 323, war between his generals divided his Empire, the Hellenistic age was marked by a spread of Greek culture and language thru much of Western Asia and Egypt.
By this period a large area of Europe including north Italy, France, parts of Spain and the British Isles was dominated by Celtic culture. In 279 BCE, a group of Celts led by Brennus invaded Macedonia and broke thru Thermopylae looting Delphi before being driven off. A section of them crossed over into Anatolia the next year and the area where they were to settle became known as Galatia. The Scythians the nomads who had till then dominated the steppe area north of the Black Sea, were driven out of the Balkans by Celtic tribes around this period. They were to come under pressure from the related Sarmatians from the East to whom they gradually sucumbed over the next 100 years.
Rome had been gradually completing the conquest of Italy and the only major city to hold out in the south was Tarentum. When Tarentum stumbled into war with Rome, in 282 BCE, it appealed to Pyrrhus of Epirus. Pyrrhus also attempted to drive out the Carthaginians from Scilly but was eventually defeated at Beneventum. In 264 BCE Rome went to war with Carthage and in the course of the First and Second Punic War Rome secured dominance in the Western Mediterranean despite Hannibal's invasion of Italy. Philip of Macedonia had allied with Hannibal and because of this Rome went to war with Macedonia in 200 BCE. The resulting Second Macedonian War broke Macedonian power in Hellas.
The Seleucid Empire had been reestablishing its traditional preeminence in the Eastern Mediterranean under Antiochus III the Great taking the long coveted Coele-Syria from the Ptolemids after the Battle of Panium in 198 BCE. War between Antiochus and Rome broke out when Antiochus entered Greece in alliance with Aetolia. Driven out of Greece he was defeated at the Battle of Magnesia in 198 BCE.
Roman Dominance
Magnesia secured Roman dominance in the Mediterranean region. The destruction of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BCE merely confirmed this. Despite this, Greek culture and religion remained dominant in the West Mediterranean. Indeed Greek Syncretism accommodated Roman Gods as merely the different names of Greek Gods - Celtic Gods were to be similarly co-opted later. On the other hand the revolt of the Maccabees in Judea was merely the rejection of Greek culture for which we have the most detailed records. Probably, the establishment of Parthian rule over Persia represented at the time a far more significant rejection of Greek culture even though the extent that it represented the reestablishment of Zoroastrianism to dominance is uncertain due to our lack of reliable sources. Greek artistic taste had already been spread by the conquests of Alexander, the Roman conquest of Greece was to spread it across much of Western Eroupe. Roman art did show other influences however such as Etruscan in Roman architecture.
Though Roman expansion seems quite unstoppable this was an unstable period. According to Peter Green, in this period a large number of people were enslaved due to the large number of wars and this explains the large number of slave revolts in this period. Piracy was on the increase because Rome cut down to size those navel poweres who had kept piracy in check but was slow to take on the responsibility herself.
Roman dominance was so great that it was able to indulge in a series of civil wars without serious risk. Only Mithridates King of Pontus, was able to exploit Roman disunity, and during the First Mithridatic War (88 BCE-84 BCE) he overan Anatolia and sent an army to invade Greece which was defeated by Sulla in 85 BCE. Indeed, the rivalry between generals helped to fuel expansion as in Caesar's conquest of Gaul. In 53 BCE, the Roman general Crassus trying to match Caesar's prestige invaded Parthia but was killed at the battle of Carrhae - this was the first lasting check on Roman expansion. The era of civil wars came to end with Octavian's victory at Actium in 31 BCE and this is the point designated for the transition of the Republic to the Roman Empire. Along with the annexation of Egypt, Augustus expanded the Empire at a number of points, the most significant was the series of campaigns from 14 BCE to 8 BCE in Dalmatia and Panonia which pushed the Roman border up to the Danube along with and invasion of North Western Germany in 9 BCE. The revolt of the Danube provinces in 6 CE was to be supressed but it was immediately followed by a German revolt and the defeat of Teutoburger Wald in 9 CE.
In the wake of the Teutoburger Wald disaster, Augustus faced reality and gave advice to his succesors to stick to the borders he had achieved. That advice was in the main kept until the reign of Claudius. Under Claudius a number of vassel states were annexed and in 43 CE the island of Britain was invaded. The empire reached its maximum extent under Trajan who had completed his conquest of the Thracian kingdome of Dacia in 106 and in 113 launched a war against Parthia conquering Mesopotamia and placing the pliable Parthamaspates on the Parthian throne. On Trajan's death, however, Hadrian withdrew from Mesopotamia.
Even at its height Rome rulled less than half the West Eurasian region but dominates the history because most of the surviving written history was written within its borders. Beyond the borders, as well as the Celtic remnant in Ireland and Scotland, in Europe there were the Germans and Sarmatians - the Sarmatian Jazyges now grazed the Hungarian plains. The Venedes who Roman historians occasional mention may have been Slavs living further North or may have been some otherwise unknown people. To the West of the Parthians, the Tocharian speaking Kushans had established an Empire that extended into India some of whose rulers adopted Buddhism.
The Parthian weakness that had allowed the Romans to annex the area around Edessa as Upper Mesoptamia opened the way to Ardashir to rebel and overthrow the Parthian king in 224, so founding the Sassanid dynasty. Though it was a more formidable foe Rome was able to hold their own against them - not so the Kurshans who were overun by the Persians.
In 235 Maximinus Thrax was proclaimed emperor by his troops which marks the start of the Crisis of the Third Century. Civil war was not new to the Roman Empire but instead of a brief succession dispute this period is notable for large sections of the Empire being ruled separately for prolonged periods. On some level West Eurasia again become a multi polar world. While Diocletian who was proclaimed Emperor in 284 may have ended the crisis he institutionalized a division of the empire, the Tetrarchy, that proved to be stable only so long as Diocletian was in place to keep it together. Renewed division ensued almost as soon as Diocletian resigned to ended when Constantine I (emperor) defeated his last rival at the Battle of Chrysopolis in 323. Constantine's elevation brought to prominence Christianity which quickly established it as the state religion - being adopted also by many Germanic tribes though they in the main followed the variant of Christianity Arianism which had been the orthodoxy at the time most of them converted.
The Fall of Rome
The Germanic Ostrogoths had established a large kingdom north of the Black Sea. In 376 the Huns attacked the Ostrogothic kingdom. The Ostrogoths were defeated and the defeated Germans were soon on the banks of the Danube clamoring to be allowed to cross into the safety of the Roman Empire. Valens the emperor based in Constantinople reluctantly agreed. His misgivings were confirmed when things got out of hand. In 378 the Roman army was defeated at the Battle of Adrianople and Valens killed during the rout. In the wake of the battle the Balkans were devastated but Theodosius the new Eastern Emperor gradually recovered the Roman position and he successfully defeated rival emperors in the East. After his death a period of instability and Germanic incursions, especially in the Western half of the Empire, culminated in the sack of Rome by Alaric I of the the Visigoths in 410
See Also
- History of Eurasia
- History of Europe
- History of the Middle East
- History of North Africa
- Classical antiquity
