was on the wane.In 660, Constantine II visited Rome with a sizable army and an assembly of nobles. Everyone came out to greet him, big parade. A diplomatic mission? No, the Byzantine empire was on the verge of bankruptcy. They had tried to reclaim the west and lost. They had to pay off the Persians to keep them from attacking and they were beset on all sides by Muslims. They came to Rome to rob it blind. They took whatever was left in the treasury (not much), and he had his men strip every bit of lead and bronze off every fixture that they could find. They used it to make fitting for shields, armor, horse rigging, etc. And the lead was for pellets that were slung at armies. Most of the stonework of Rome was held together with lead clamps. The Byzantines took these, so everything in Rome began to fall apart. From figuratively to literally. And the lead? Most of the building were made out of wood, but were protected with sheets of lead and all of the gutters and downspouts were made out of lead, as were all the pipes that distributed water through the city. The slabs that held back the Tiber river were made out of stone. During the next flood, the entire bank collapsed, taking with it most of the nearby merchant district and all of the warehouses. Houses, now unprotected, began to rot and roofs caved in. Without water coming in through the pipes, the sewers began quickly to become clogged. The main sewer of the entire city, the Cloaca Maxima, ran beneath the form. When it finally stopped up, all of the sewage in the city began flowing into the forum, filling it up with excrement, garbage, dead animals, and so forth. The gift of the last emperor to visit Rome. Its gross, but its the reason why we can still go look at the forum today. Most of the ancient building of Rome were torn down by the Romans because without the fittings, they were dangerous. They used the stone to make new buildings. Someone once said that the temples of Rome were t...
