Ruling a continent from an island

I have wondered why no Romans tried moving the western capital to Corsica or Sardinia.

Trouble getting food there.It's also not in the center of the empire.During the principate period,an emperor would have to be suicidal to try and move a capital there(if he doesn't get murdered by the Praetorian Guard or deposed by the senators,he'd probably be lynched by a very angry mob) and in the dominate period,it's just strategically poor to move a capital there.

wildly off topic, but in Rome:Total War, once you've conquered a wide swathe of the map, it's generally a good idea to put your capital in Crete... because of the 'distance=unhappiness' rule and Crete is about in the center of the map...
 
An alternate Spanish colonization could work with that...possibly the result of a failed attempt to conquer the Aztecs?

Or even a successful attempt. Just have them make Cuba their main colony in the New World and the place they project power from.
 
Come to think of it, for much of the Byzantine Empire's existence, Constantinople was geopolitically quite island-like, being surrounded by foreign-ruled territory.
 
An obvious example that sprung to my mind are the Sultans of Oman, who for a time ruled their whole realm (which included Oman itself and a swath of coastal East Africa) from the island of Zanzibar. It worked pretty well, until the British rolled in, but not much you can do about that, is there?
 
Both the City-State of Athens and the Aztecs created their own imperial islands. Athens' Themistocles did it by building a water channel all the way to the sea and building a megawall around it and Athens. The Aztecs noved to the biggest lake in the Valley of Mexico and built, piece by piece, there.

Crete is a good spot that history's way ahead of you from ancient times. The Minoan Empire was way-cool, maybe the first thinking civilization. Minoanism was so amazing, they had a Greek word for its style of trading rule, thalassocracy. Britain and Athens were total thalassocracies.
 
Top