The winter of 627 opened with an army that should not have existed. After years of catastrophic defeats, territorial losses stretching from Egypt to Syria, and a Persian occupation that once reached the very gates of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire was expected—by friends and…
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On July 27, 1299, a frontier chieftain named Osman I led his warriors across the Byzantine border and launched a raid into the territory of Nicomedia, a strategic outpost in northwestern Anatolia. According to Edward Gibbon, the English historian best known for The History…
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After more than two millennia, the Roman Empire—transfigured, fragmented, renamed, and reimagined—finally collapsed on May 29, 1453, as Ottoman forces under Sultan Mehmed II breached the gates of Constantinople following a 53-day siege. With the city’s fall came the extinguishing of the last imperial…
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On December 25, 800 AD, in the grand Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, Charlemagne, the King of the Franks, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III. This pivotal event not only reshaped European history but also established the political and cultural…
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