Death Always Triumphs in the End

The history of the end of the Roman and Byzantine Empires seen through their mosaics

Roman and Byzantine mosaics required considerable time and funds to create, the images created were consequently most carefully thought through. Although many of the surviving mosaics have remained untarnished over the millennia, they were no mere camera snapshots, they were for the large part concerned with important people and events. From those that have survived we can follow the dramatic course of the last one thousand three hundred years of Roman and Byzantine history, from the last vestiges of pagan beliefs to the very fall of Constantinople. We actually see in the mosaics some of the great people who figured in these momentous times, their pomp and finery and some of the lesser but still astonishing feats, such as how the Romans captured tigers in India, how female athletes exercised in bikinis, how young children had miniature chariot races drawn by farmyard birds rather than horses and much more. We see the evolution of two dimensional art evolve from the early simple and generic to the full force of human expression, which triggered the Renaissance after the fall of Constantinople. The reader is taken on a journey from Ancient Rome through to more familiar times of huge canons, and the growth in power of the Kingdoms of England and France as the Roman Empire finally disappeared.