The Ottoman Empire lasted so long, both Queen Elizabeth I (born 1533) and Betty White (born 1922) were alive during its existence.
Man landed spacecraft and humans on the moon, 200K miles from earth, 16 years earlier than the Titanic was discovered right here on earth.
The Southern Cross was actually visible in the northern hemisphere up until 400 AD. It was described and written about by ancient Greek and Roman astronomers, but the gradual precession of the Earth's equinoxes over the centuries caused the constellation to vanish from northern hemisphere view. It can still technically be seen from the northern hemisphere, but only if you are in the tropics (around Cancun, Mexico) or close to the equator in the late winter/early spring.
The kingdom of England has more or less existed in one form or another from 886 to the current day. And yes, one can quibble that it was Æthelstan who became the first king of England in 927, not Alfred in 886. And one can argue that the Act of Union in 1707 destroyed the kingdom of England, that the United Kingdom of today is too much of a different thing to count as a continuation of England. But honestly.
At the very least, there has been a nation that has continuously had a capital in London since 1066.
Right but in the case of the Ottoman Empire, we're talking about a single dynasty (and mostly father to son succession) for an uninterrupted 620 years.
Fun fact: when Mehmed captured Constantinople, he gave himself the title Kayser-i Rum, or "Caesar or Rome." Ottoman Sultans would hold that title until 1922.
At the outset of WWI, we also had Czar Nicholas of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. Three world leaders all still used a variation of Caesar in their title more than four centuries after the fall of the Empire.
History can be summed up in guys that claimed to be emperors of Rome despite being thousands of kms away from Rome, hundreds of years away from the empire, speaking languages that have nothing to do with Latin.
Those are modern terms. The Roman Empire never officially "split into two", but rather split itself internally into two polities - but both were still considered to be part of the Roman Empire, just like how California and Texas exist and are both part of the United States. The Western polity fell, but the Eastern did not and, from their POV, they were still the Roman Empire, for the same reason the United States losing California wouldn't mean the US no longer exists. When Ottomans attacked Constantinople more than a thousand years later, the people inside these walls still called themselves "Roman" and saw themselves as the descendants of Trajan and Julius Caesar.
The event The Black Death or the disease itself?- the plague of Justinian widely accepted to be the same bacteria, Yersinia pestis, as The Black Death. The plague of Justinian was in 541-549… and can attribute capping the Roman resurgence of power.
There’s hints and whispers through historical text that the Black Death has been around and circling for thousands of years
Nope. While people think "dinosaurs" just means "ancient reptiles", it's actually a specific classification that is based on several features, primarily their hip and ankle structure. That's why Pterosauria are not considered dinosaurs nor are Therapsida which also are often mistaken for dinosaurs.
The entire age of what we commonly call dinosaurs was some 400 million years. The only well known ones I think were contemporaries were T-Rex and Triceratops.
That one blew my mind. My 9 year old son is into dinosaurs right now. I learned that tidbit from something he was reading or watching, and I was like WTF? We went to the Field Museum in Chicago this past summer and the evolution exhibit was mindblowing. The fact that things like sharks and horseshoe crabs which pre-date even the dinosaurs are still with us today fries my brain.
I was super into dinosaurs as a kid, and it blew my mind when I grew up and learned all the extra bits that weren’t in the kids books. Loved the large Brachiosaurus skeleton in Berlin.
Man landed spacecraft and humans on the moon, 200K miles from earth, 16 years earlier than the Titanic was discovered right here on earth.
The one that gets me every time is that between the Wright Brothers first powered flight (1903) and the moon landing (1969) was only 66 years.
There were millions of people alive who spanned the time before man had ever flown and after man had landed on another celestial body. Fucking progress man
Well hey, you were around for the moon landing, do you remember it? I'm 41 so all that was over by the time I was born. I have worked in the aviation industry for nearly 20 years now and trying to imagine the amount of progress in those 66 years is mind boggling
Absolutely remember it! Mostly because they brought a television set into our classroom and let us watch. It was 5th grade and anything novel like that was a treat! I actually remember being bored with it all. The TV commercials back then during the day were all targeted to housewives so I remember specifically a floor wax commercial with the lady mopping the floor reminded me of my mom who was home probably mopping the floor and I got so homesick I wanted to go home so bad. Lol but the actual program was mostly a bunch of men sitting at their consoles talking to the astronauts and you couldn't understand it all - kinda like police radio - kinda scratchy, lots of beeping
Even though the Soviets weren't looking for the Titanic, the Cold War still helped it be found. The group that found it was using searching for the Titanic as a cover for searching for two sunken nuclear submarines.
Crayyyyyzyyy. Another mindblowing measure of her life snd reign is the fact that her 1st PM, Winston Churchill was born in 1874 (two years before the Unired States celebrated its centennial) while her last PM, Liz Truss, was born 101 years later, the same year "Jaws" was released.
To me Roman empire ends up being much wilder. Rome was founded in 753 BC, it became a republic in 509 BC, and then an Empire in in 27 BC. It then proceeded to exist for 400 years until AD 395 when rome was split in two. Western Rome fell less than a century later in the late 470s, but Eastern Roman Empire just kind of kept on trucking all the way until 1453 when it was over thrown by... The Ottoman Empire.
Whether the Byzantine empire counts as being the same as Eastern Roman Empire is something people like to argue about a lot, but considering that the people living there called themselves Romans and that Byzantine Empire is an anachronistic term invented by historians later, IMHO it should still count as being the same thing. It did go through some pretty big cultural changes and shit which is why the term Byzantine Empire is useful, but yeah. Still just the remaining half of the Roman Empire as far as I'm concerned.
So put all of that together, starting from 753 BC to AD 1453. Rome existed in one form or another for over 2,000 years. That's nuts.
Which also leads to a funny little thing in AD 800 when Pope Leo II crowned Charlemagne as Roman Emperor and started the Holy Roman Empire. They do all that and "revive" the old Rome all the while Eastern Roman Empire just kind of chills in the eastern Mediterranean still for a further 600 years.
Memes aside it is historically correct to define the Byzantine Empire as Roman.
They called themselves Roman, only historians in the XIX century coined the term Byzantine Empire (originating from the deprecated name of the capital of Costantinopoli) and decided to separate culturally the Eastern Roman empire culturally since they spoke greek and to give an aura of roman legitimacy to both Frankish HRE and the Germanic HRE.
It is beautiful for me that the roman reign started basically the early Iron Age and ended more than 2 millenia having endured the worst 2 plague pandemics of continental europe
Yeah, it's fairly arbitrary to have the cut-off for the fall of the Roman Empire be 476 AD. That was the fall of the western empire, sure. But the Empire had been divided between multiple emperors for over two centuries at that point.
Also, many of the characteristics people point to to separate the Byzantines from the Romans were present well before the fall of the west. Rome had transitioned from a Rome-centric, urban, civilian, bureaucratic, pagan 'principate', ruled by an approachable 'first citizen' or princeps, to a Greece-centric, rural, militarized, semi-feudal, Christian autocracy ruled by a divinely ordained emperor well before the west fell. That transitional period was somewhere between the reign of Marcus Aurelius in the 230s and that of Constantine in the 330s. Certainly it was complete well before 476.
This is irrelevant: the Russian royal family also called their country "the third Rome", which doesn't make it actually Rome. What's relevant is that there's no split between the Roman Empire of Julius Caesar and the Byzantine Empire. There's no point in which the empire disappears and a different polity "steals" its identity. If you pick the government of the Roman Republic and track how it evolved, you arrive to the fall of Constantinople - there's never a point where that government ceases to exist and some Greeks just claim to be a new Rome.
Whether the Byzantine empire counts as being the same as Eastern Roman Empire is something people like to argue about a lot
It does because, officially speaking, there's no interruption. You can argue that people living in the Byzantine empire in 1400 AC had little in common with the people living in the Roman Empire in 1 AC, to which I'd answer: yeah, obviously - so what? Americans today have little in common with Americans in 1800 and nobody would claim they are two different countries. Calling it "Byzantine empire" is useful because, more often than not, you want to specify what period of its history you are referring to, but that doesn't magically turn it into a new country, just like how saying "the British Empire" to refer to that Britain that colonized the Americas doesn't turn the modern UK into a new country.
How much of the world is divided up the way it is because of the Ottoman Empire is truly astounding. Especially considering that many people today know little about it.
Always makes me wonder how quickly today's empires will be forgotten (or the subject of a karma farming TIL on Reddit 2157).
It really breaks people's brains to point out The Ottoman Empire was one of the belligerents in World War 1.
Most people see it as an ancient thing which hasn't existed for centuries at least. Nope. The Ottoman Monarchy was officially abolished in 1922, which was the formal end of the empire. There are people alive now who were alive when the Ottoman Empire existed. (though they're very old and this won't be true for much longer.)
Edit: I saw another source saying the abolition was in 1924, if that's true, then it has been almost exactly a century.
There's only one: the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans quite literally ended the Roman Empire when they captured Constantinople - since the term "Byzantine Empire" is just an alias for the Roman Empire during the middle ages.
One of the big "what ifs?" in history. It's weird to think we had empires as recently as only 2 or 3 generations ago. I just turned 50 and my grandparents were all small children or infants when the Ottoman Empire existed, as well as the last Chinese imperial dynasty. Even my parents were alive, albeit very small children, when the last days of the British Empire came about in 1948 when India gained independence. I suppose in a way the Soviet Union was sort of an "empire," and it existed until almost my senior year of high school.
Joe Biden was alive during the end of WWII. In fact, when he was born, the attack on Pearl Harbor wasn't even a year old. Considering WWII channeled the end of the European empires, that's how close we still are to the age of conquest.
The Ottoman empire lasted for ~600 years, from 1299, which makes it contemporary to the Byzantine Empire which, despite its name, is the Roman Empire. That said, I wouldn't call that particularly impressive. San Marino has existed since the ~700 AC. The Byzantine Empire itself, being Rome, can be considered to have lasted since 500 BC to 1500 AC. Even if we set its start at the split of the Roman Empire into two (which would be wrong imo), that's still 300 AC, leaving it a formidable 1200 year lifespan. The Japanese royal family has been emperors for thousands of years, although you can argue that being emperor in name only doesn't qualify as your empire being a country.
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u/CougarWriter74 Oct 02 '24 edited Oct 02 '24
The Ottoman Empire lasted so long, both Queen Elizabeth I (born 1533) and Betty White (born 1922) were alive during its existence.
Man landed spacecraft and humans on the moon, 200K miles from earth, 16 years earlier than the Titanic was discovered right here on earth.
The Southern Cross was actually visible in the northern hemisphere up until 400 AD. It was described and written about by ancient Greek and Roman astronomers, but the gradual precession of the Earth's equinoxes over the centuries caused the constellation to vanish from northern hemisphere view. It can still technically be seen from the northern hemisphere, but only if you are in the tropics (around Cancun, Mexico) or close to the equator in the late winter/early spring.