Rome: Not Fallen Yet

Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire draws the line for the end of the Empire at 476, the year the last Western Roman Emperor was deposed, and most historians since have followed his lead.

This reflects a Western European worldview. The second half of the fifth century was a bad time for Romans living in Spain or Britain or France, but in the Eastern Empire, things chugged along as usual. The surviving portion of the Empire is usually dubbed "The Byzantine Empire" from 476 onward, but that is a modern convention. They called their state "The Roman Empire."

In the year 600, as you can see from the map above, a good portion of what we think of as the Roman Empire was still holding up over a century later. It was still the undisputed superpower of the ancient world. Not a lot had changed since 476 for the Romans of the East. But in the next 50 years, the Empire would lose half its area and between 65 and 75 percent of its population and GDP.

What happened? Mohammed. Islam. Arab conquest.

The wealth of the Roman lands seized by the Arabs was the basis of a new Arab Empire that would rival the old Roman Empire. To my mind, this is where you should draw the line between the fall of the ancient world and the dawn of the medieval one. This is where the remaining Roman Empire becomes "The Byzantine Empire," a second-tier power that is a shadow of the old empire.

The loss of Egypt to the Arabs in 641, fifteen years before The Sorcerer's Apprentice opens, is the key moment. The wealth of Egypt was the basis of Roman Power for almost 700 years. When it was gone, so was Roman power.

The protagonist of my story would have seen it happen. He would have been a child in Alexandria when it fell to the Caliphate. A decade or so later, when he is a young adult, he will leave Egypt and travel across the world, winding up in Britain.

Why?

The Arab conquest may well be part of it, although I would expect someone who was just a boy when it happened to be pretty used to the idea by the time he's eighteen. Things must have gotten dicey for him when he reached adulthood.

Today's word count is 57,161.