Italy and Iran, both ancient civilizations, have been wide in their ancestors, the former originated from the Roman Empire, the latter from the Persian Empire. Before the rise of the Arab Empire, Persia and Rome had been fighting for supremacy on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, with Persia representing the East and Rome representing the West.
There is generally no controversy about the demise of the Persian Empire, which was conquered by the Arab Empire in 651 AD and has been Islamized ever since.
Sassanid Persia
Regarding the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it is generally believed that:
In 476 AD, the Western Roman Empire died at the hands of the Germans;
In 1453, the Eastern Roman Empire was destroyed by the Ottoman Empire.
The demise of the Eastern Roman Empire is not controversial, while the demise of the Western Roman Empire is in fact artificially defined. Let's look at what happened in Rome around 476 AD:
In 474 AD, Julius Nepos became Emperor of the Western Roman Empire.
In 475 AD, the Commander of the Roman Army, the Germanic Oreste, captured the capital Ravenna, and the Emperor Nepos fled to Dalmatia. Later, Orestriel made his own son Romulus Augustus emperor.
However, the throne of Nepos was still recognized by the Eastern Roman Empire and gaul.
In 476 AD, the German Odoac deposed the Western Roman Emperor Romulus Augustus, proclaimed himself king, and then swore allegiance to the Eastern Roman Emperor Zeno, which was recognized by the Eastern Romans.
However, the last Western Roman Emperor, Nepos, was still alive and still emperor. In 480 AD, After the murder of Nepos, the Western Romans had no more emperors.
Whether it was 476 or 480, did the Roman Empire die? That was only the view of later generations, and people at that time did not see it that way.
1. The Eastern Roman Empire has always wanted to restore Rome's former territory
O'Doac's nominal choice to be loyal to the Eastern Roman Emperor after deposing the Western Roman Emperor shows that the legal system at that time was still in Rome, the influence of Rome did not disappear, and the emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire did indeed want to re-turn the Mediterranean sea into an inner lake.
In fact, at the height of the Eastern Roman Empire, it was indeed close to success, and we look at Justinian the Great's dream of unification:
In 532 AD, peace was negotiated with the Persians to stabilize the East;
In 534 AD, Justinian destroyed the Vandal kingdom of North Africa and occupied Sardinia and Corsica in the Mediterranean;
After that, it took nearly 20 years, and by 554 AD, the Eastern Roman Empire destroyed the Ostrogothic Kingdom that occupied Italy;
During this period, in 552 AD, the Eastern Romans also conquered the southern part of the Visigothic Kingdom in Spain.
This is the most prosperous territory of the Eastern Roman Empire, spanning Asia, Europe and Africa, is the Roman Empire dead? Apparently not yet.
2. The Germans began to merge with the Western Roman Empire
If you make a comparison with China, Eastern Rome is equivalent to China's Eastern Jin Dynasty + Southern Dynasty, while Western Rome is the Sixteen Kingdoms + Northern Dynasty.
Beginning in the 5th century AD, the Germanic peoples began to establish Germanic kingdoms on the original map of the Western Roman Empire:
Is it very similar to China's "Five Hu and Sixteen Kingdoms"? In China, the end of wuhu was the Northern Wei dynasty founded by the Xianbei people; in the former Western Rome, the end of the chaos was the Frankish kingdom of the Franks.
Charlemagne, like The Northern Wei Emperor Tuoba Tao in china, unified Western Europe and was awarded the title of "Emperor of the Romans" by the Pope, which marked the integration of the Germans with Christianity and the fusion with the Western Roman Empire. Both the Charlemagne Empire and the subsequent Holy Roman Empire were built by the Germanic people and can be called "Germanic Rome".
After the rise of Germanic Rome, is it possible to unify the world like China's Northern Dynasty and restore the former Roman Empire? History cannot be assumed, for the rise of another force has cut off the minds of Europeans.
3. The rise of the Arab Empire broke Europe's dream of reviving the Eastern and Western Rome
The Expansion of the Arab Empire in the east and west, from the Green Ridge in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, was only comparable to the later Mongol Empire.
After the Two Rivers civilization and the ancient Egyptian civilization, Persia was the most important geopolitical label in the Middle East for a thousand years. The Persian Sassanid Dynasty, which began in 224 AD, died in 651 AD. In these four hundred years, China and Europe were all in civil strife, and only Persia was the most powerful empire at that time.
If we look closely, the same is true of the Achaemenid dynasty, the first Persian Empire, which began in 550 BC and ended in 330 BC, a period in which the Warring States of the Seven Heroes in the East, the Greek City-States in the West, india the Sixteen Heroes, and Persia were also the most powerful at that time.
But no matter how glorious the ancestors were, "the wind is always blown away by the rain and the wind", with the rise of the Arabs in 630 AD, the Middle East underwent great changes, the Persian Sassanid Dynasty, which lasted for more than four hundred years, was destroyed, and the Persian princes fled to the Tang Dynasty.
But it is clear that the Direction of Arab expansion is not only to the east, but also to the north – > the Eastern Roman Empire, to the west – > Western Europe (formerly Western Rome), and we look at the expansion path of the Arab Empire:
In 635 AD, defeated the Eastern Roman Empire and occupied Damascus in Syria;
In 638 AD, Jerusalem was occupied;
In 640 AD, egypt was invaded, and two years later the Arabs became the masters of Egypt;
Later, the Arabs wiped out the last garrison of the Eastern Roman Empire in Africa and occupied vast lands from Tunisia to Morocco. At this point, all the territory of the Eastern Roman Empire in Africa disappeared, leaving only the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor.
In 714 AD, the Arabs entered Europe from the Strait of Gibraltar, destroyed the Visigothic kingdom, and conquered Spain.
If we look at it from the map, the Arabs attacked the Eastern Rome all the way, detoured all the way to Spain, completed the encirclement of the Europeans, and most of the Mediterranean became Arab territory. You know, the Mediterranean was once the inner lake of the Roman Empire.
The Arab Empire's conquest of Europe was limitless, marked by two wars:
In 717 AD, the Arabs besieged Constantinople, and the Eastern Roman Empire finally won the war with "Greek fire". This battle became the limit of the Arab Empire's war against the Eastern Roman Empire.
In 732 AD, the Arabs crossed the Pyrenees in Spain and invaded the Frankish Kingdom, and the Battle of Poitiers was won by the Frankish Kingdom, which became the end of the Arab Empire's conquest of Europe.
The strong rise of the Arab Empire ruined the hopes of the Eastern Roman Empire to reunify the "world", and also made the Europeans lose the Roman homeland of "North Africa".
Since then, the Circumnavigating mediterranean sea has been divided into three: its southern part belongs to the Islamic world, and its northern part is divided into two, the Eastern Roman Orthodox world and the Germanic Catholic world.
After Rome, there really is no Rome. On the one hand, this was due to the inability of eastern Rome to complete the unification (just as the Southern Dynasty of China could not succeed in the Northern Expedition), and on the other hand, the integration of western Rome and the Germans was too long (the so-called dark Middle Ages).
But externally, it was because of the rise of the Arab Empire that the Arab Empire not only destroyed the Persian Empire, but also divided the Mediterranean Sea equally with the Europeans, making the revival of the Roman Empire impossible. From this point of view, Iran and Italy are brothers and sisters in front of the Arabs.