king Antiochos III, where they built the Sardis Synagogue and formed a community which continued for much of Late Antiquity. In 219 BC, Sardis passed to the Romans, under whom it continued its prosperity and political importance as part of the province of Asia. The city received three neocorate honors and was granted ten million sesterces as well as a temporary tax exemption to help it recover after a devastating earthquake in 17 AD. Sardis had an early Christian community and is referred to in the New Testament as one of the seven churches of Asia. In the Book of Revelation, Jesus refers to Sardians as not finishing what they started, being about image rather than substance. Later, trade and the organization of commerce continued to be sources of great wealth. After Constantinople became the capital of the East, a new road system grew up connecting the provinces with the capital. Sardis then lay rather apart from the great lines of communication and lost some of its importance. During the cataclysmic 7th Century Byzantine–Sasanian War, Sardis was in 615 one of the cities sacked in the invasion of Asia Minor by the Persian Shahin. Though the Byzantines eventually won the war, the damage to Sardis was never fully repaired. Sardis retained its titular supremacy and continued to be the seat of the metropolitan bishop of the province of Lydia, formed in 295 AD. It was enumerated as third, after Ephesus and Smyrna, in the list of cities of the Thracesion thema given by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the 10th century. However, over the next four centuries it was in the shadow of the provinces of Magnesia-upon-Sipylum and Philadelphia, which retained their importance in the region. Later history Sardis began to decline in the 600s AD.By the 1700s, only two small hamlets existed at the site. It remained part of the Byzantine Empire until 1071 AD, when it was conquered by the Seljuk Turks. It was reconquered in 1097 by the Byzantine general John Doukas 1097 and came under the rule of the Byzantine Empire of Nicea when Constantinople was taken by the Venetians and Franks in 1204. However once the Byzantines retook Constantinople in 1261, Sardis and surrounding areas fell under the control of Ghazw emirs. The Cayster valleys and a fort on the citadel of Sardis was handed over to them by treaty in 1306. The city continued its decline