Suddenly he pulls the van over and gets out, pausing to pack tobacco into his pipe and consult a 1:50,000-scale survey map ... At its peak in the second century A.D., the empire sent soldiers ...

the Eastern Roman Empire would last for another 1,000 years before it too fell. At its peak, the Byzantine Empire stretched from southern Spain to Syria, on to to modern-day Turkey and Greece ...

This story appears in the January/February 2017 issue of National Geographic History magazine. The emperor Hadrian was well known for building monuments across the Roman Empire, a territory that ...