The Western Roman Empire lasted about a thousand years, dissolved in 476 CE. The SPQR on the standards of Roman legions stood for Senatus Populusque Romanus (Senate and People of Rome).  

Among the best love stories of the Roman Empire are Ovid's (c. 1 CE) Ars Amatoria with lines such as

It was a hot afternoon. The shutters were half closed and the room was basking in shadows one can find in the woods, a chiaroscuro of departing night and rising daylight.  I was laying on the couch, seeking rest, when Corinne entered the room dressed in a tunic, her hair interwoven in twin braids. I ripped off her tunic; it was easy as the tunic was thin. She kept struggling, but since she fought like one who has no desire to win, I defeated her without difficulty. She stood before my naked, her clothes cast off, her perfect body and breasts so fit for caressing. Her stomach was flat, her pelvis narrow and her thighs slender. I undressed and pressed her lithe body against mine. What happened afterwards is easy to imagine. Tired by lovemaking we fell asleep in each others arms. May many an afternoon turn out to be like that one!

Ovid wrote his Ars Amatoria during the reign of Emperor Augustus and hung out with Emperors' daughter Julia, which earned him banishment to Tomi (today's Constantza, Rumania) on the northwest shore of the Black Sea, where he died eight years later.

Zoe Paleolog

 

 

 

The Eastern Roman Empire lasted another thousand years before being conquered in 1453. In 1472, Ivan the Great married Sophia (Zoë) Paleolog, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Paleolog. Raised in Italy, Sophia was an educated woman who brought with her to Russia her library of hundreds of books from the Byzantine Empire, some dating back to ancient Greece and Rome. Ivan the Great adapted the Byzantine court ceremonies and began to use the title of Tsar, Russian for Caesar.

 

 

Empire of the Czars

Russia is named after the Viking explorer Rurik who founded the Rurik dynasty (862-1598) in the north-east of today's Russia with its capital Kiev. Among the best known rulers of the Rurik dynasty are Vladimir I (in Russian, Vladimir means the ‘ruler of the world’), Ivan III (the Great) and Ivan IV (the Terrible).

Russia's expansion eastward started during the reign of Ivan IV who opened Russia's windows to the East, particularly China and India and tried to liberate Russia from her subjugation to the church. This predictably earned him countless atrocity attributions and the epithet ‘terrible.’ Thus, e.g., reports of the Western envoys to Russia are that, during an internal struggle, about 400 members of the ruling elite were killed, some historians give the figure as high as 10,000. Ivan IV reformed the government and court, established the first Russian printing-house in Moscow, conquered Kazan Khan (1552) and Astrakhan Khan (1556). Financed by the Novgorod family of salt merchants, the Stroganovs, Cossack Yermak and his riders captured Sibir, the capital of the Khan Kuchum, in 1582 and, subsequently, Ivan IV and annexed Siberia to the Russian State.  

Ivan IV inherited the Sophia Paleolog’s library that included thousands of documents dating back to ancient Greece and Rome. He stored the library in three vast subterranean vaults which location remains a mystery. 

Two years before his own death in 1584, Ivan quarreled with his oldest son, and in the heat of argument struck him with such a force that he died. He never overcame the grief his temper had brought him and died in despair. 

Russian eastward expansion continued and preceded the westward expansion of the United States. Russians crossed the Bering Straits and settled Alaska. Their southernmost settlements were in the area of present day Oregon. Before the time of California’s 1848 Gold Rush, Russian ships were the most numerous among the ships harbored in San Francisco Bay. Russians withdrew from the North American continent in 1867 when they sold Alaska to the United States.

The reign of Ivan IV was followed by the interregnum ('Time of Troubles,') which ended in 1613 with the inauguration of the Romanov Dynasty. Among the rulers of the Romanov dynasty were Peter the Great; Catherine II, a German princess who married into the Romanov family, and Alexander I, who defeated Napoleon in 1812.

Leonardo da Vinci Vitruvian Man

Anthropometry  Modern anthropometry is to anthropometry of cranial measurements and speculations of Cesare Lombroso as astronomy is to astrology. Quite different picture emerges if one consults the  article using anthropometric measurements by Boris N. Mironov, "New Approaches to Old Problems: The Well-Being of the Population of Russia from 1821 to 1910 as Measured by Physical Stature."  which appeared in the Slavic Review (Spring 1999, vol. 58, no.1). Mironov uses information on the height of male recruits in Russia between 1821 and 1910 to offer an unbiased measure of changes in the economic and social well-being of the population. The study is introduced as 

... using standard statistical techniques and discussing the nature and problems of anthropometric data, this paper suggests a new interpretation of the periodization of the Russian standard of living in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The physical stature of males in Russia increased from 1821 to 1850, then declined from 1851 to 1865--the years leading up to the Great Reforms, and then increased again between 1866 and 1910

and is visualized below.

Portraits of the Russian Emperors, superimposed on the graph are those of

 

• Alexander I (1801-1825), victor over the Napoleon armies.
• Nicholas I (1825-1855) who died toward the end of the Crimean War.
• Alexander II (1855-1881 who sold Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to the United States in 1867 and was assassinated in 1881.
• Alexander III (1881-1894) who feared assassination so much that he lived away from the St. Petersburg in a medieval fortress surrounded by moats and watchtowers.
• Nicholas II (1894-917), the last Emperor of the Romanov Dynasty.

The Crimean War (1854-1856)  After winning the war with France under Napoleon, the living conditions in Russia steadily improved. Fearing the growing presence in Afghanistan and India, Great Britain forced the Crimean war on Russia.

 In the 1840s, Palmerston and other British leaders expressed fears of Russian encroachment upon India and Afghanistan, and advocated finding an opportunity to weaken this threat. In the 1850s, a pretext was found in the cause of protecting Catholic holy places in Palestine, at that time under control of the Ottoman Empire. The British government of the Prime Minister Aberdeen sent Lord Stratford to Istanbul. Through skillful diplomacy, Lord Stratford influenced the Sultan to take actions that made war inevitable. 

The Crimean War which Russia lost marks the deterioration of the living conditions. The economic downturn preceding the Crimean war and accentuated by this military conflict is reflected by the decreasing average height of the Russian soldiers between the years 1851-1865.  

The BBC History page describes the Crimean War (1854-1856), excerpted as follows:

Russian troops had occupied parts of the Ottoman Empire and the Turks declared war. On 28 March 1854 Britain and France also declared war on Russia. The British troops suffered immense casualties. The French and British forced the fall of Sebastopol on 11 September 1855 and peace was subsequently concluded at Paris.  

In concert, comparison of the above explanations of the Crimean War and the visualization of the casualties indicate that the BBC narrative on the Crimean is biased and implausible.

Sale of Alaska   The text-book answer to the question why Alexander II sold the Alaska to the United States in 1867.is that at that time, Alaska was no longer commercially viable to maintain, due to a steep decline in the animal population caused by the slaughter of animals by the trappers. The above graph suggests that at the time Alexander II sold Alaska Russia was in dire economic straights and that the economic turnaround was, to a degree, due to selling Alaska to the United States. Afterwards, the living conditions were steadily improving up to the time of the First World War,

Emperor Nicholas II (1894-1918)

 The Last Emperor   The last Romanov, Nicholas II was executed at the end of the First World War together with members of his immediate family. This execution (in Nicolas Ipatiev's House in Yekaterinburg), to a degree, was a vindication of Vladimir Lenin, whose brother was hanged by the Romanovs in 1887. However, in the final analysis, it was the repayment in kind for the deaths of millions during the WW I, the war not fought in the interest of Russia, but that of the Great Britain. As observed by Bruce Lockhart (1932) in his Memoirs of a British Agent who lived during the closing days of the Nicholas' Empire in Moscow,  

'his loyalty to the Allies remained unshaken to the last; it was his failure to harness the loyalty of his own people which cost him his throne.

 

House of Nicholas Ipatiev (1869-1923)

Analysis of Graffiti  Graffiti often voice social undercurrents and their analysis is a valuable addition to the inquiry about opinions of the underprivileged that they are unable to communicate otherwise.  The analysis of graffiti on the walls of the Ipatiev house where the Romanovs were executed shows that graffiti sympathetic to Romanovs are mostly supernatural, such as parting of heavens, rotating clouds, and bright light streaming from the basement door behind which the execution took place. The graffiti inimical to Romanovs include numerous expressions of hatred and a drawing of Monk Rasputin inserting penis into orifices of Empress Alexandra. There is also Heinrich Heine's poem Belshazzar scrawled on the wall with its 

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin
(in Aramaic 'it has been counted,
counted, weighted, divided') 

drawing a parallel between Nicholas II and the Babylonian king Belshazzar whose grandfather Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem, who was also executed and whose kingdom was also destroyed.

Notes

During the Napoleonic Wars, many of military officers in the Alexander I army were influenced by the ideals of the French revolution. The ideals of these officers were those of the French Revolution, 

Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.

After Alexander I death, during the short interregnum in December, 1825, these military officers attempted to prevent Nicolas I ascension to the throne. Nicolas I motto was

 One Tsar, One Faith, One Nation.

Five of these officers, called Decembrists were executed and over 120 Decembrists were exiled to Irkutsk on the shore of Lake Baikal. Letters of Decembrists to their friends in St. Petersburg and Moscow were censored and thus they communicated 'between the lines.'

The modern computer assisted methods for decoding of hidden meaning in censored communications, are often called the Decembrists Methods, allowing for identification, analysis, enhancement and separation of the overt and covert meaning.