Q&A YOU ASK, WE ANSWER
When did Rome split?
SHORT ANSWER
Decades of deterioration led Emperor Diocletian to make the decisive cut
LONG ANSWER
The third century was not a particularly good time for the Roman Empire. Its glory days were firmly behind it and constant fighting, both internal and external, dragged its rulers into political and military chaos. During this so-called ‘Crisis of the Third Century’, competing interests carved up the land and emperors came and went, with the empire blitzing through at least 26 claimants in just 50 years.
One of the emperors, Aurelian, did successfully manage to unite the Romans, but not for long. When Diocletian later came to power in AD 284, he saw the empire as too unwieldy to rule by himself, so made the decision to choose another man, Maximian, as co-emperor. Then, in AD 293, Diocletian officially split governance by creating the Tetrarchy, where both West and East had a senior emperor, an augustus, and a junior, or caesar.
Beyond two brief stints in the fourth century, when Constantine the Great and later Theodosius I ruled as sole emperor of both halves, the Roman empire was forevermore split. The East, based in Constantinople (formerly Byzantium) thrived thanks to its trade routes, while the West (based in what is now Milan), crumbled until its last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in AD 476. The Byzantines would last another thousand years, finally falling to the Ottomans in 1453.
