Rq How Did The Edict Of Milan Change The Structure Of Roman Government

RQ:How did the Edict of Milan Change the Structure of Roman Government?

Centuries ago in February of 313 the Edict of Milan was signed, and all peoples following Christianity in the realm of Rome were saved from persecution by Constantine, however, he had inadvertently split rome into two parts through this document. Throughout the history of the christian faith there have been instances where political leaders had told the followers of this faith to idolize them, however, it is also a known fact that the bible preaches to only idolize the one God. This is contrary to what the emperor of Rome demands, which is that you should see the emperor as a god, and idolize him. This created a massive controversy between Constantine and the christian

Soon more will follow and with the beginning of this holy war Leo the third created a movement called Iconoclasm which has the meaning of smashing images. This was used to destroy all religious symbols from the empire and began to ban worship and also veneration. However this is stopped when the emperor Michael the third is placed in power, and he discontinued the tradition. As the byzantine empire grew more stable with less land to protect this lead to more time for arts, which, lead to more trade control and the restoration of the churches. Many byzantine missionaries also converted the slavs to christianity. Soon after this they switched to greek as the official language and supporting greek studies. The downfall of the byzantine empire is solely because of the involvement in the Crusades, also known as the holy war. This holy war was against the Turks mounted in central Asia, however, the Pope had started the Crusade even though politically they should have not created them. The first crusade was a mild success with Alexios asking Pope Urban II for help to expand eastward to stifle the muslim rule. Of course Urban had seen this as a two birds with one stone kind of deal by knocking out

Because of his straightforward military activism the second crusade began to fail and he had When the byzantine empire was finally being invaded they retreated and went back for more crusades against political needs. This lead to the next crusades and finally during the fourth crusade. Pope Innocent III had approached the byzantine empire to ensure a crusade to conquer egypt because of the central muslim power of the country. This then led to the army arriving at venice however they were quite smaller than they had thought since the money was not available to recruit the venetian forces. As we can infer the crusade still went in order to plan but to win over the venetians they had to help them conquer a city state port of Zara which had been rebelling. The city fell and the venetians agreed to join the final crusade, and the crusade had been a relative success except for the destruction and looting of the byzantine capital in 1204. The empire was taken over by the latin regime, and the rulers beginning with Michael the eighth with the crippled economy of the byzantine empire tried to restore the empire. However, because of the church and state combination he could not