1015-1022 CE (Superpowers)

''Pope Legarus brought an end to the civil war using the authority of the Christian Church and the political power of the tribunes to break the Committee of the Senate and pardon the illegitimate emperor of the defunct dynasty. Making his first priority the restoration of the eastern provinces from the Caliphate, this first caesaro-papist leader began a period of heavy war between Christianity and Islam, in retaliation for its attempt to expand into Rome.''

Caesar Legarus
The Bellum Civile (Civil War) through which the empire suffered upset the stable line of succession that had sustained the Pax Romana (Roman Peace) for a millennium. A reactionary movement that gave the position of princeps civitatis greater religious significance was seen as the permanent solution to future aristocratic revolutions. As pontifex maximus and First Citizen of the State, Caesar Legarus needed to search no further than his own experience to discover a way to enforce such significance. By a vote of the people, the pontificate (papacy) became intertwined with the caesarship, giving an Emperor of Rome the authority of the spiritual leadership of the Ecclesia Christiana (Christian Church or Community). In this way, Legarus solidified the status of princeps in the wake of attempts to abolish the office.

At the same time, Legarus owed his position to the populus (people) and sought to magnify their power in relation to the Senate. Aside from reforming the tribuneship to select two tribunes by lottery from each foederata (client nation) of the empire, he also enfranchised nations other than Italy, Greece, and Egypt by designating saeptae (voting plazas) in the national capitals. By this means, there came to be sixteen voting sites in the empire that would be needed upon every election and popular assembly. The fiscal and commercial costs of this process were deemed worthwhile by the emperor for the more egalitarian results.

Comitia Gentia
Legarus enfranchised the other nations of the empire with his institution of the procedure of comitia gentia (assembling nations). An agreement of one tribunus plebis (tribune of the plebs) from half of the nations was made necessary to begin an irregular assembly of the people of each nation in their respective comitiae gentiae. A regular meeting of the comitiae was scheduled to happen during the traditional electoral month of Julius (July), when the annual magistracies were determined and lotteries held for the tribunes (whose Concilium Tribunum now consisted of 32 tribunes). Every nation had a substantial population of citizens but the system was designed to recognize the imbalances in demographics.

Once in place, the Comitium Gentium (National Assembly) - the term for the collective voting of the comitae gentiae - consisted of 3,653 centuriae (voting groups) in which only a cives (citizen of Rome) was permitted to vote. Every male citizen was assigned a centurial group by the Census and every century was connected to the saepta of a specific nation. An aedile provincialis was now permanently assigned to each nation and one of his primary duties was to arrange the voting pens after the tribunes called for a popular assembly. Due to their unwiedly nature, popular assemblies could not be called within a month of an earlier assembly or within a month of the yearly elections. With centuries of refinement, Romans had learned to hold voting for hundreds of thousands of people in voting plazas - the logical conclusion of earlier voting pens - within the span of a day. For example, the Saepta Julia in Rome were able to handle the voting of 700 centuriae, in which nearly three million people would participate, by covering the region behind the Pantheum (Pantheon) with an elaborate structure of voting pens (the Saepta Julia) that voters entered from the temporary pathways prepared on the massive plaza in front of the Pantheon. Campus Martius (Field of Mars) has become a name for the place of assembly in Rome in recent centuries due to this system of pens covering about 0.23 km² of the former field.

Property had gradually been appropriated on the Field of Mars to enlarge the voting pens but Caesar Lagerus took this land and built a stunning plaza over one half and a sophisticated complex of hallways, for voting in July and public affairs in other months, over the other. As the largest open space in Rome, the Field of Mars was a popular site for locals and stunning sight for anyone witnessing its size for the first time. During an election, the Field holds a crowd of a third of a million people, a tenth of the people that have come to Rome to cast their votes. A dozen pathways are laid down from this plaza to roads as far as the Vaticanum, in the incredible display of social engineering that takes place regularly in the capital of the Western world.