Of all the empires that arose and
thrived on the face of this earth, which were the five most powerful? And how
is it even possible to select five empires from among the hundreds that have
flourished over the past five thousand years? Truth be told, any formulation of
the “five most powerful empires” will always be subjective, because all empires
were glorious and influential in their own ways.
But there are some empires that were simply so powerful, large, and influential over the grand sweep of history that they deserve to be called the greatest, no matter the criteria. The reader may note that I left out empires from China and India. While I would be the first to acknowledge the importance and legacy of empires from these regions, the overall global legacy of empires from these regions tends to be regional.
The Achaemenid Persian Empire was founded by Cyrus the Great
around 550 B.C.E., who went by the title of King of Kings (Shahanshah).
Although the Persian Empire came to an inglorious end at the hands of Alexander
the Great in 330 B.C.E., it had a lasting legacy on the subsequent development
of world civilizations and future empires. Indeed, the Persian Empire was a
pivotal empire because it was the first true empire that set the standard of
what it meant to be an empire for future ones.
The Persian Empire existed at a unique time in history, when most
of theoikumene, or civilized, settled,
populated world was concentrated in or near the Middle East. As a result, the
Persian Empire, which dominated most of the Middle East, ruled over a greater
percentage of the world’s population than any other empire in history. Indeed,
in 480 B.C.E., the empire had apopulation of approximately 49.4 million people,
which was 44 percent of the global population at that time. The Persian Empire
was the first empire to connect multiple world regions, including the Middle
East, North Africa, Central Asia, India, Europe, and the Mediterranean world.
It jumpstarted the concept of empires in places like Greece and India.
Such a large empire could only have been put together by military
might, and the Persian Empire’s military achievements were significant, though
they are often forgotten by its sudden demise at the hands of Alexander’s
armies. Various Persian campaigns succeeded at subjugating most of the world’s
advanced civilizations at the time including the Babylonians, Lydians,
Egyptians, and the northwestern Hindu region of Gandhara, in today’s Pakistan.
It should not be forgotten that, notwithstanding exaggeration and
misinterpretation, the Persians believed that they achieved their goals in
Greece and that more Greeks lived in the empire than not. The Persian Empire
ushered in a period of harmony and peace in the Middle East for two hundred
years, a feat that has seldom been replicated.
The Persian Empire’s legacy to the
world in terms of imperial ideas include the use of a network of roads, a
postal system, a single language for administration (Imperial Aramaic),
autonomy for various ethnicities, and a bureaucracy. The Persian religion,
Zoroastrianism, influenced the development of key concepts like free will and
heaven and hell in Abrahamic religions through Judaism.
The Roman
Empire
This one should be obvious. The Roman Empire has long been the
empire par excellence for the Western world. But its importance is not the
product of Western bias: the Roman Empire was truly one of history’s greatest
empires. The Romans displayed the awesome ability to conquer and hold large
swathes of territory for hundreds or even thousands of years, if the Eastern
Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) is accounted for. But it was not held together
by brute force alone; once conquered, people aspired to become Roman, which meant participating in a
sophisticated, urbane, classical culture.
Several important features of the modern world are the result of
the Roman Empire. The Romans took over and expanded upon the Hellenistic
(Greek) culture, passing down Greek architecture, philosophy and science to
future generations. Later, the Roman embrace of Christianity helped elevate
that religion from a minor cult to one of the world’s great religions.
Roman Law also influenced all subsequent legal systems in the
West. Roman institutions also helped inspire the governance systems of modern
democracies. Despite Greece’s reputation as the “birthplace of democracy,” the
American Founding Fathers were primarily influenced by British and Roman
practices. In fact, many of them frequently spoke of their distaste for the
Athenian experiment in democracy and their admiration for the Roman form of
mixed government, where monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements
shared power. The American political system— with its separate branches of
government— approximate this Roman institutional division. Once the Roman
Republic transitioned into the Roman Empire, the idea and majesty of Caesar
served as an inspiration for future rulers.
The Romans were a tenacious people.
They were able to bounce back from numerous setbacks against improbable odds to
pull together and defeat their enemies. Though the Carthaginian general
Hannibal almost destroyed the Romans after the Battle of Cannae in 216 B.C.E.,
the Romans were able to land an army at Carthage to defeat it a mere fourteen
years later. The Roman legions were militarily dominant for centuries, enabling
Rome to rule over nearly all other civilized peoples in the Mediterranean and
Near East except the Persians for hundreds of years and facing only minor raids
by disorganized tribes. When the empire did collapse, it was due more to
continued crisis and civil war rather than its invasion by Germanic tribes. And
the Eastern Empire lasted until 1453 C.E., giving the political history of the
Roman state a whopping two millennia span.
The
Caliphate
The Arab Empire, also known as the Caliphate, was a political entity founded by
the Muslim Prophet Muhammad that encompassed most of Arabia by the time of his
death in 632 C.E. It is more reasonable to call this the Arab Empire rather
than the Muslim Empire because while Islam originated and spread because of
this empire, there were many subsequent empires that were legally Muslim or
ruled by Muslims but were not Arab.
Muhammad was succeeded by the four Rightly-Guided Caliphs
(“successors”) who were selected by consensus and acclimation (though not
undisputed) until 661 C.E. The hereditary Umayyad Caliphate then ruled until
750 C.E., followed by the Abbasid Caliphate, though conquests had ended by this
point. The Arab Empire effectively ended around 900 C.E., although the Abbasids
maintained their religious role as figurehead Caliphs in Baghdad until the
destruction of that city by the Mongols in 1258 C.E. After 900 C.E., the empire
began to crumble politically with the rise of rival dynasties, many of them
Turkic and Persian in origin, as well as rival Caliphates in Spain and Egypt.
Nonetheless, in its own time the Arab Empire was extraordinary,
both because of its military successes, and because of its legacy. It is
amazing that a loosely organized, tribal people on the fringes of world
civilization defeated the Byzantine Empire and overthrew the Sassanid Persian
Empire, both of whose populations and resource bases dwarfed the Arabian
Desert. The Arab conquests are a good example of how ideological zeal can
sometimes make up for technological and organizational deficiencies, and Arab generals
from this period deserve to be ranked among the world’s greatest military
geniuses, especially the third Caliph Omar, who conquered the region from Egypt
to Persia in ten years. In a hundred years, the Arab Empire grew to be several
times larger than the Roman Empire at its height.
Because of its location, the Arab Empire, like the Persian Empire
before it, connected the other centers of world civilization in Africa, Europe,
Central Asia, India and China. As a result, goods and knowledge from all these
regions were able to mix for the first time, giving rise to new concepts like
algebra.
The ultimate legacy of the Arab Empire, of course, is the religion
of Islam, followed by more than a billion people today.
The
Mongol Empire
The Mongol Empire was
another empire that originated on the periphery, and against all odds, defeated
enemies much more powerful and populous than it. It was the world’s largest
contiguous land empire, one that struck terror into all its enemies. Founded by
the Mongol warlord Temujin, who assumed the title of Genghis Khan in 1206 C.E.,
the Mongol Empire first grew by picking off parts of China, as many previous
steppe tribes had done.
But the defining moment of
the Mongol Empire was when its ambassadors were killed by leaders of the
neighboring Khwarazmian Empire, which included Iran, Afghanistan, and Central
Asia. This was perceived as a grievous affront to the Great Khan and the
subsequent Mongol revenge completely wrecked Central Asia and ended its Golden Age. Combined
with the subsequent establishment of European sea routes that bypassed the Silk
Road, the Mongol Invasions spelled the doom of Central Asia as an important
region.
Although there were only
about two million Mongols in the whole world, they subsequently conquered most
of the Middle East, Russia, and China under Genghis Khan’s descendants. During
their heyday, they suffered few setbacks except for their failed invasion of
Japan and the 1260 C.E. Battle of Ain Jalut against the Egyptian Mamluks. How
were the Mongols able to accomplish these feats? Despite their small
population, the Mongols were able to field large and mobile armies against
their enemies because they carried their herds with them and could sustain
themselves off of horse blood. In an
era before refrigeration, it was logistically difficult for a Chinese rules to
field a comparable army.
The Mongol conquests killed
millions of people but afterwards established a brief era of peace and
prosperity as trade spread across their large expanse. In the long run,
however, the Mongols proved inefficient at administering their empire, which
eventually split into four khanates before each one eventually fell apart or
further split.
The
British Empire
The British essentially made the
modern world. British institutions of representative democracy inspired French
Enlightenment philosophers such as Montesquieu to devise theories of modern
government that influenced other modern European states. The main
characteristics of the United States— a commitment to liberalism, the rule of
law, civil rights, and trade— were inherited from the British and spread
throughout the world. Most of these characteristics evolved organically
throughout the long history of England, rather than being the result of some
master plan.
These characteristics were also instrumental in helping the
British Empire grow, thrive and hold whatever territory it controlled.
Moreover, its example was widely emulated, whether for its financial prowess or
its naval strength. At its peak in the early 20th century, the British Empire
stretched across almost a quarter of the world— the largest of any empire in
history. This feat was made possible more because of England’s organizational
feats and financial prowess rather than through a huge army. For example, the
British conquest of India was mostly undertaken by Indian troops in British pay
who choose to serve the British because of the regular salaries and benefits
offered by them. London also demonstrated a remarkable ability to handle
multiple wars at once. And while they sometimes lost battles the British rarely
lost wars.
conclusion
So how does the United States of America match up with all these
behemoths? The United States is certainly the world’s most powerful nation
ever, militarily speaking. It combines the British ingenuity for trade with a
more deeply held liberalism and continent-sized resources. Like the Romans, it
has an attractive culture. Like the Mongols, it can wield total destruction.
Like the Arabs, it has spread a universal ideology across the globe. Like the
Persian Empires, America combines different cultures and links together
regions.
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