Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: Who was the last emperor of Rome?
The Western Roman Empire collapsed in the late 5th century. Romulus Augustulus is often considered to be the last emperor of the West after his forced abdication in 476, although Julius Nepos maintained a claim recognized by the Eastern Empire to the title until his death in 480. Following Nepos' death, the Eastern Emperor Zeno abolished the division of the position and proclaimed himself as the sole Emperor of a reunited Roman Empire. The Eastern imperial lineage continued to rule from Constantinople ("New Rome"); they continued to style themselves as Emperor of the Romans (later βασιλεύς Ῥωμαίων in Greek), but are often referred to in modern scholarship as Byzantine emperors. Constantine XI Palaiologos was the last Roman emperor in Constantinople, dying in the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453.
In the year 457, Leo I became the first emperor to be crowned by the Patriarch of Constantinople. Anthemius (467-472), one of the last Western Roman emperors, seems to have planned a pagan revival at Rome. He was a descendant of Procopius, the relative of Julian. Anthemius gave Messius Phoebus Severus, a pagan philosopher who was a close friend of his, the important offices of Praefectus urbi of Rome, Consul and Patrician. Anthemius placed the image of Hercules, in the act of vanquishing the Nemean lion, on his coins. The murder of Anthemius (by Ricimer) destroyed the hopes of those pagans who believed that the traditional rites would now be restored. Shortly thereafter, in 476, the western emperor was deposed by Odoacer, who became the first barbarian king of Italy. In spite of this disaster, pagans made one last attempt to revive the pagan rites. In 484, the Magister militum per Orientem, Illus, revolted against Zeno and raised his own candidate, Leontius, to the throne. Leontius hoped to reopen the temples and restore the ancient ceremonies and because of this many pagans joined in his revolt against Zeno. Illus and Leontius were compelled, however, to flee to a remote Isaurian fortress, where Zeno besieged them for four years. Zeno finally captured them in 488 and promptly had them executed.
Disunion in the Roman Empire contributed to disunion in the Church. Theodosius the Great, who in 380 established Nicene Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire (see Edict of Thessalonica), was the last Emperor to rule over a united Roman Empire. Following the death of Theodosius in 395, the Empire was divided for the final time into western and eastern halves. In the 4th century, the Roman emperor (reigning in Constantinople) started to control the Church in his territory.
The Roman Empire, at its height (c. 117 CE), was the most extensive political and social structure in western civilization. By 285 CE the empire had grown too vast to be ruled from the central government at Rome and so was divided by Emperor Diocletian into a Western and an Eastern Empire. The Roman Empire began when Augustus Caesar became the first emperor of Rome (31 BCE) and ended, in the west, when the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed by the Germanic King Odoacer (476 CE). In the east, it continued as the Byzantine Empire until the death of Constantine XI and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE. The influence of the Roman Empire on western civilization was profound in its lasting contributions to virtually every aspect of western culture.
The wars began in the last years of the reign of Augustus, first emperor of Rome. Augustus died an old but respected man in the year 14 and was celebrated with much pomp and splendor. He left a document to be read to the senate posthumously, expressly forbidding extension of the empire beyond the Rhine. News of the will was welcomed by the Germans, thinking it gave them a free hand in the region. Germanicus found it necessary to pacify the border, which he did by a combination of scorched earth raids and offers of alliance with Rome - in short, stick and carrot. These raids also kept the army of the lower Rhine distracted from the possibility of mutiny, which had broken out on Augustus's death and only been quelled by concessions and executions.
Gaius Julius Caesar (; ; 12 or 13 July 100 BC – 15 March 44 BC), known by his nomen and cognomen Julius Caesar, was a Roman politician, military general, and historian who played a critical role in the events that led to the demise of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Roman Empire. He is also known as an author of Latin prose.
The reign of Augustus initiated an era of relative peace known as the "Pax Romana". The Roman world was largely free from large-scale conflict for more than two centuries, despite continuous wars of imperial expansion on the Empire's frontiers and the year-long civil war known as the "Year of the Four Emperors" over the imperial succession. Augustus dramatically enlarged the Empire, annexing Egypt, Dalmatia, Pannonia, Noricum, and Raetia, expanding possessions in Africa, and completing the conquest of Hispania, but suffered a major setback in Germania. Beyond the frontiers, he secured the Empire with a buffer region of client states and made peace with the Parthian Empire through diplomacy. He reformed the Roman system of taxation, developed networks of roads with an official courier system, established a standing army, established the Praetorian Guard, created official police and fire-fighting services for Rome, and rebuilt much of the city during his reign. Augustus died in AD 14 at the age of 75, probably from natural causes. However, there were unconfirmed rumors that his wife Livia poisoned him. He was succeeded as emperor by his adopted son (also stepson and former son-in-law) Tiberius.
Before its establishment as a Republic, Rome was ruled by kings (Latin "reges", singular "rex"). In Roman tradition, Rome's founder Romulus was the first. Servius Tullius was the sixth, and his successor Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud) was the last. The nature of Roman kingship is unclear; most Roman kings were elected by the senate, as to a lifetime magistracy, but some claimed succession through dynastic or divine right. Some were native Romans, others were foreign. Later Romans had a complex ideological relationship with this distant past. In Republican mores and institutions kingship was abhorrent; and remained so, in name at least, during the Empire. On the one hand, Romulus was held to have brought Rome into being more-or-less at a stroke, so complete and purely Roman in its essentials that any acceptable change or reform thereafter must be clothed as restoration. On the other, Romans of the Republic and Empire saw each king as contributing in some distinctive and novel way to the city's fabric and territories, or its social, military, religious, legal or political institutions. Servius Tullius has been described as Rome's "second founder", "the most complex and enigmatic" of all its kings, and a kind of "proto-Republican magistrate".
The late 5th century saw the dissolution of Roman authority in the west, and the last person to hold the title of emperor in the West was deposed in 476 by the general Odoacer. Odoacer ruled as King of Italy for 13 years, but in 489 the Eastern Emperor Zeno sent the Ostrogoth King Theoderic the Great to re-take the Italian peninsula. After losing the Battle of Verona, Odoacer retreated to Ravenna, where he withstood a siege of three years by Theoderic, until the taking of Rimini deprived Ravenna of supplies. Theoderic took Ravenna in 493, supposedly slew Odoacer with his own hands, and Ravenna became the capital of the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy. Theoderic, following his imperial predecessors, also built many splendid buildings in and around Ravenna, including his palace church Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, an Arian cathedral (now Santo Spirito) and Baptistery, and his own Mausoleum just outside the walls.
Both Odoacer and Theoderic and their followers were Arian Christians, but co-existed peacefully with the Latins, who were largely Catholic Orthodox. Ravenna's Orthodox bishops carried out notable building projects, of which the sole surviving one is the Capella Arcivescovile. Theoderic allowed Roman citizens within his kingdom to be subject to Roman law and the Roman judicial system. The Goths, meanwhile, lived under their own laws and customs. In 519, when a mob had burned down the synagogues of Ravenna, Theoderic ordered the town to rebuild them at its own expense.
In the early modern period, the Holy Roman Empire was a union of territories in Central Europe under a Holy Roman Emperor the first of which was Otto I. The last was Francis II, who abdicated and dissolved the Empire in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars. Despite its name, for much of its history the Empire did not include Rome within its borders.
The Roman emperors were rulers of the Roman Empire, wielding power over its citizens and military, dating from the granting of the title of to Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus by the Roman Senate in 27 BC. Augustus maintained a façade of republican rule, rejecting monarchical titles but calling himself (first man of the senate) and (first citizen of the state). The title of Augustus was conferred on his successors to the imperial position. The style of government instituted by Augustus is called the Principate and continued until reforms by Diocletian. The modern word 'emperor' derives from the title , which was granted by an army to a successful general; during the initial phase of the empire, it still had to be earned by the .
Augustus' reign laid the foundations of a regime that lasted, in one form or another, for nearly fifteen hundred years through the ultimate decline of the Western Roman Empire and until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Both his adoptive surname, Caesar, and his title "Augustus" became the permanent titles of the rulers of the Roman Empire for fourteen centuries after his death, in use both at Old Rome and at New Rome. In many languages, "Caesar" became the word for "Emperor", as in the German "Kaiser" and in the Bulgarian and subsequently Russian "Tsar" (sometimes Csar or Czar). The cult of "Divus Augustus" continued until the state religion of the Empire was changed to Christianity in 391 by Theodosius I. Consequently, there are many excellent statues and busts of the first emperor. He had composed an account of his achievements, the "Res Gestae Divi Augusti", to be inscribed in bronze in front of his mausoleum. Copies of the text were inscribed throughout the Empire upon his death. The inscriptions in Latin featured translations in Greek beside it, and were inscribed on many public edifices, such as the temple in Ankara dubbed the "Monumentum Ancyranum", called the "queen of inscriptions" by historian Theodor Mommsen.
As the Allies and the Resistance gradually chased the Nazis and Fascists off the peninsula, it became apparent that Victor Emmanuel was too tainted by his earlier support of Mussolini to have any postwar role. Accordingly, Victor Emmanuel transferred most of his powers to his son, Crown Prince Umberto, in April 1944. Rome was liberated two months later, and Victor Emmanuel transferred his remaining powers to Umberto and named him Lieutenant General of the Realm. Within a year, public opinion pushed for a referendum to decide between retaining the monarchy or becoming a republic. On 9 May 1946, in a last-ditch attempt to save the monarchy, Victor Emmanuel formally abdicated in favour of his son, who became Umberto II. It did not work; the Italian constitutional referendum, 1946 was won by republicans with 54% of the vote. Victor Emmanuel went into exile in Egypt, dying there a year later.
Gaius Julius Caesar, often referred to as "Julius Caesar", or simply "Caesar", was born in 100 BC, the youngest child of Gaius Julius Caesar (proconsul) and Aurelia Cotta. Together with Pompeius and Marcus Licinius Crassus, he was part of the first Triumvirate. A brilliant general who inspired his men, Caesar conquered Gaul, won the Civil War, and instituted various civil and social reforms at Rome. Named dictator in perpetuity, Caesar was assassinated by a group of senators on the Ides of March, 44 BC. The years after his death saw the demise of the Roman Republic, and the establishment of the Roman emperors.
The chief towns of Upper Moesia (and wider) were: Singidunum (Belgrade), Viminacium (now Old Kostolac), Remesiana (now Bela Palanka), Naissos (Niš), and Sirmium (now Sremska Mitrovica), the latter of which served as a Roman capital during the Tetrarchy. Seventeen Roman Emperors were born in the area of modern-day Serbia, second only to contemporary Italy. The most famous of these was Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor, who issued an edict ordering religious tolerance throughout the Empire.
When the Roman Empire was divided in 395, most of Serbia remained under the Eastern Roman Empire, while its northwestern parts were included in the Western Roman Empire. By the early 6th century South Slavs, present throughout the Byzantine Empire in large numbers, merged with the native population (Dacians, Illyrians, Thracians) and assimilated them.
The Battle of Ravenna was fought between supporters of Orestes and supporters of Julius Nepos for control of the Western Roman Empire. In prelude to the battle, Orestes had been ordered to raise a large army to confront tribal rulers in Gaul. Instead he led his force against Emperor Julius Nepos in the capital Ravenna. Nepos was defeated and deposed, but managed to flee to Dalmatia. Orestes in turn enthroned his son Romulus Augustulus as Roman emperor. He was in turn overthrown by Odoacer in September 476 following the Roman defeat at Pavia.
Victor Emmanuel II (; full name: "Vittorio Emanuele Maria Alberto Eugenio Ferdinando Tommaso di Savoia"; 14 March 1820 – 9 January 1878) was King of Sardinia from 1849 until 17 March 1861. At that point, he assumed the title of King of Italy and became the first king of a united Italy since the 6th century, a title he held until his death in 1878. The Italians gave him the epithet of "Father of the Fatherland" (). The monument Altare della Patria (or "Vittoriano") in Rome was built in his honor.
The split between the Albertinian and Leopoldinian lines of the Habsburg family and the Austrian lands enfeebled the dynasty's position. The Albertinian archduke Albert V of Austria was elected King of the Romans in 1438. Nevertheless, he died one year later and the line finally became extinct by the death of his son Ladislaus the Posthumous in 1457. The territories were inherited by the Leopoldian archduke Frederick V of Inner Austria, Albert's successor as King of the Romans and from 1452 also Holy Roman Emperor. Finally in 1490, all Habsburg territories were reunified, when Archduke Sigismund handed over the rulership of Tyrol and Further Austria ('Upper Austria') to Emperor Frederick's son King Maximilian I.
President of the Republic: Martín Alberto Vizcarra Cornejo
The Colosseum or Coliseum ( ), also known as the Flavian Amphitheatre (Latin: "Amphitheatrum Flavium"; Italian: "Anfiteatro Flavio" or "Colosseo" ), is an oval amphitheatre in the centre of the city of Rome, Italy. Built of travertine, tuff, and brick-faced concrete, it is the largest amphitheatre ever built. The Colosseum is situated just east of the Roman Forum. Construction began under the emperor Vespasian in AD 72, and was completed in AD 80 under his successor and heir Titus. Further modifications were made during the reign of Domitian (81–96). These three emperors are known as the Flavian dynasty, and the amphitheatre was named in Latin for its association with their family name "(Flavius)".
Paul remained overshadowed by his mother for most of his life. His reign lasted four years, ending with his assassination by conspirators. He adopted the laws of succession to the Russian throne—rules that lasted until the end of the Romanov dynasty and of the Russian Empire. He also intervened in the French Revolutionary Wars and, toward the end of his reign, added Kartli and Kakheti in Eastern Georgia into the empire which was confirmed by his son and successor Alexander I.
Diocletian divided the empire into four regions, each ruled by a separate emperor, the Tetrarchy. Confident that he fixed the disorders that were plaguing Rome, he abdicated along with his co-emperor, and the Tetrarchy soon collapsed. Order was eventually restored by Constantine the Great, who became the first emperor to convert to Christianity, and who established Constantinople as the new capital of the eastern empire. During the decades of the Constantinian and Valentinian dynasties, the empire was divided along an east–west axis, with dual power centres in Constantinople and Rome. The reign of Julian, who under the influence of his adviser Mardonius attempted to restore Classical Roman and Hellenistic religion, only briefly interrupted the succession of Christian emperors. Theodosius I, the last emperor to rule over both East and West, died in 395 AD after making Christianity the official religion of the empire.
Diocletian divided the empire into four regions, each ruled by a separate Emperor (the Tetrarchy). Confident that he fixed the disorders plaguing Rome, he abdicated along with his co-emperor, and the Tetrarchy soon collapsed. Order was eventually restored by Constantine, who became the first emperor to convert to Christianity, and who established Constantinople as the new capital of the eastern empire. During the decades of the Constantinian and Valentinian dynasties, the Empire was divided along an east–west axis, with dual power centers in Constantinople and Rome. The reign of Julian, who under the influence of his adviser Mardonius attempted to restore Classical Roman and Hellenistic religion, only briefly interrupted the succession of Christian emperors. Theodosius I, the last emperor to rule over both East and West, died in 395 AD after making Christianity the official religion of the Empire.
In 480, the last Western Roman emperor, Julius Nepos, was murdered and a Roman general of barbarian origin, Odoacer, declared allegiance to Eastern Roman emperor Zeno. Despite owing nominal allegiance to Constantinople, Odoacer and later the Ostrogoths continued, like the last emperors, to rule Italy as a virtually independent realm from Ravenna. Meanwhile, the Senate, even though long since stripped of wider powers, continued to administer Rome itself, with the Pope usually coming from a senatorial family. This situation continued until Theodahad murdered Amalasuntha, a pro-imperial Gothic queen, and usurped the power in 535. The Eastern Roman emperor, Justinian I (reigned 527–565), used this as a pretext to send forces to Italy under his famed general Belisarius, recapturing the city next year. The Byzantines successfully defended the city in a year-long siege, and eventually took Ravenna.
Justinian I (527–565), who succeeded Justin and was the last Latin speaking emperor, is generally regarded as the greatest of the Byzantine emperors and another Emperor-Saint. Justinian brought the empire to its greatest years of power and glory before the long decline that set in during the second half of the first millennium as western civilization moved from Late Antiquity into the High Middle Ages.
Justinian's foreign policy centred around trying to recapture the lost territories of the western empire after half century of Barbarian occupation, recapturing Rome in 536. However the western operations were hampered by competing wars in the east (see below) and the outbreak of plague in 541 (see below). Rome and Italy changed hands frequently after 541 but by 554 the Byzantines were firmly in control again.