Napoleon's downfall would come from two sides: Britain and Russia. The latter, along with eastern Europe, shared in the Byzantine legacy, including the Orthodox church. in part to the stagnation of Eastern culture under Byzantium, political institutions had not developed in Russia as they had in the West. Its kings were often exceptionally cruel. They called themselves czars (ZAHRZ), a Russian version of “caesar.” They thought of their civilization as the “Third Rome,” after Rome and Byzantium.
Another set of European rulers gave themselves a title based on “caesar”: the kaisers (KY-zuhrz) of Germany. Germany had taken much longer than the rest of Europe to unite as a single nation; therefore it had not built the great overseas empires of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 1500s or the British, French, and others in later centuries. Germany's rulers demanded a greater share of land both in Europe and abroad. This expansionism along with a number of other issues led to World War I (1914-1918).
One result of the war was the establishment of Communism in Russia in 1917, following a revolt inspired in part by the French Revolution. The Soviet Union would become a highly militarized society not unlike Sparta, ruled by a tyrant named Josef Stalin. Another outcome of the war was widespread resentment in Germany, on whom the Allied nations had imposed what many criticized as a “Carthaginian peace.” This discontent helped give rise to another brutal dictator, Adolf Hitler.
Hitler had long admired Alexander and dreamed of exceeding his conquests. He also looked back with awe at the Roman Empire, adopting Roman symbols such as the war eagle, along with the ancient Indian swastika. Eventually he allied himself with Benito Mussolini (beh-NEE-toh moo-soh-LEE-nee; 1883-1945), an Italian dictator who likewise fancied himself an heir to the Roman emperors. He, too, adopted an ancient symbol, the fasces. When he invaded Albania (ancient Illyria) and Greece, he must have thought he was repeating the conquests of 2,200 years before.
By that time, World War II (1939-1945) had begun, and when it was over, the world was an utterly different place. Israel became a nation after more than 2,000 years; China became Communist and ultimately emerged as a world power. The former colonies of Europe gradually became independent. The center of power had shifted away from Europe, chiefly to the Soviet Union and to a country that many saw as the heir both of Greece and of Rome, the United States.
Over the next decades, the Cold War between those the Soviet Union and the United States would be the focal point of world events. As America and western Europe prospered, Russia and eastern Europe stagnated. All of the east, except Greece itself, had come under the sway of Communism. By the late 1980s, as in the 400s a. d., a sharp dividing line had developed between what had been the western and eastern halves of the Roman Empire. Only now it was the west that was better off.
Eventually Communism would end, but that end would bring troubles of its own, most notably in the former nation of Yugoslavia, where the Orthodox Serbs waged war on their Catholic and Muslim neighbors in the 1990s. Greece, which had a region named Macedonia, waged a war of words with the newly formed nation of Macedonia over which had the right to the name.
All over Europe, the lines drawn by ancient culture are vivid, far more important than the many magnificent Roman structures that dot the towns of France, Spain, and Italy. Those three countries all speak languages derived from Latin, as do the Spanish - and Portuguese-speaking peoples of Latin America. North of the Rhine, as in ancient times, people speak the language of the Romans' ancient foes, the Germans. Across the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean, millions more speak a language derived in part from both German and Latin: English.
World History
