837-876 CE (Superpowers)

Emperor Titus II (837-855)
The reign of the Emperor Titus II was a time of peace, as often occurs following a great war, as well as a time of catastrophe. Although he did handle the situation as best as any man could, his legacy will always be that of the man in charge when Rome was shook to the ground.

Civil and Military Events
In a small Galilean village in Judaea, a young lens merchant developed the wonderful idea of a convex lens that could be used to increased the visually perceived size of writing. His "magnifying glass" became incredibly popular in his native province and soon he had worked up enough funds to move to Constantinopolis in 840 and sell his products there. In 843 he developed a small eye piece, held on by a metal frame to cover one eye, that corrected vision to aid in reading texts. His reading stones became extraordinarily popular amongst both monks and press workers, both very easy to find people in the economic and Christian capital of the east. Eventually, in 866, he improved on the design by creating glasses with two lenses, thereby preventing the strain that can be caused by both eyes consistently seeing at different levels of clarity.

In 845, the man who had become known around the Empire as Galileo (Roman for "the Galilean"), made his greatest invention. Whilst tinkering with different lens combinations, he discovered a certain set-up that seemed to dramatically increase the distance which he was able to see. By making several geometrical calculations, essentially a pioneering attempt at optics, Galileo designed a rather nicely functioning refracting telescope. Three years later, Galileo made further improvements on the design by substituting a convex lens as the eyepiece instead of his original concave one, thereby decreasing the strain of viewing the image, at the cost of inverting it. After perfecting methods of constructing it, he released it to the public in 849.

Now that Galileo had a far steadier source of income than most people of his class, he began something which no one on the continent had ever done with as much precision as he: observing the cosmos. Nearly every year, new discoveries were made single-handedly by this curious Jewish man. Using gradually improving telescopes, Galileo discovered five moons of Jupiter, six moons of Saturn and evidence for what he believed was some kind of string of rocks forming a line across the sky. In 857 he released his greatest discovery to the public. Refuting the Aristotelian idea that the Earth was at the Universe's center and that everything revolved around it, he published his thesis, along with proof, that the Earth and all of the planets revolved around the Sun. Quickly, the scientific community refuted his theory and many hardline members of the community publicly attacked his work and his person. Eventually, by decree of the emperor, a public debate was to be held in Rome, mediated by the Pope himself, a man who was completely neutral on the subject of heliocentricity. Whomsoever convinced the Pope, or as the media put it, "induced a revelation", would be considered to have the most successful theory.

Normally, papal intervention was not an accepted method of resolving scientific conflict. Nevertheless, this was a matter of the heavens and so it was believed that God's representative on Earth would at least subconsciously know the truth in the matter. In any case, the Pope followed Galileo in the end and within two years he had the backing of most of the scientific community. In 878, almost a year after his Galileo's death, a famous Roman mathematician published calculations that conclusively proved, with sound scientific reasoning, that the theory of a heliocentric system was the most correct.

At the Empire's center, far more troubling things were afoot. 851 saw the most catastrophic earthquake to ever strike the city of Rome. Over 20,000 died and more than 400,000 were left homeless. Immediately, Titus II began the rebuilding process. For a nation as mighty as the Empire, finding the resources to repair a single city, regardless of its size, was not an especially costly endeavor. Furthermore, the destruction left much room for innovation and rebirth in a city whose architecture was constantly being upgraded and never replaced. It is because of all these facts that there is still a great deal of debate over whether the Earthquake of 851 had a positive or negative effect on Roman Civilization.

At the new Forum of Caesar in the City's center, a 200 meter tall mechanical clock tower dubbed the Turris Horologis was built. Power hydraulically by aqueduct flow, the tower was the most accurate timepiece ever built, accurately keeping time to an error of 10 seconds every day. Still, with four faces, each in the direction of one point on the compass, the people of Rome would know exactly what time it is, regardless of the position of the sun in the sky, a wonderful improvement over the old use of sundials. More importantly, the Turris popularized the idea of mechanical clocks, increasing their sale to the rich and jump-starting efforts to improve the accuracy of the technology.

By the emperor's death, nearly all of the city's residence who had been made homeless by the disaster were back in their own homes, though not necessarily in the same place, or even the same city. Dishearteningly, the mighty Coliseum was destroyed. To correct this, Titus began an effort to build an even grander replacement structure, with construction starting in late-852. Among his other efforts were the repairing of the Pantheon, construction of the Curia Sulla to replace the destroyed Senate, and finally the completion of a new aqueduct system that ran almost invisibly among the city's buildings.

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