Decline of the Byzantine Empire of Constantinople in 1453. The process by which the empire waned, and from when its decline can be traced, is a matter of scholarly debate. In some cases, the entire history of the Byzantine Empire has been portrayed as a protracted period of decline of the Roman Empire. This holds especially for Enlightenment era writers such as Edward Gibbon, author of "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", published in six volumes between 1776 and 1789, whose view was coloured by pro-western or anti-clerical biases, and tended to see the whole ten-century empire as merely a
Legacy of the Roman Empire those colonies were connected by another important legacy of the Roman Empire: the Roman roads. Indeed, the empire comprised more than of roads, of which over were stone-paved. The courses (and sometimes the surfaces) of many Roman roads survived for millennia. Many are overlaid by modern roads, like the Via Emilia in northern Italy. The road networks from the empire's territorial peak in 117CE are closely linked to cities having greater modern-day economic activity, particularly in European areas since they did not abandon wheeled vehicles in the latter half of the first millenium. In the mid-18th century, Roman architecture inspired