I | INTRODUCTION |
Byzantine
Empire, eastern part of the Roman Empire, which survived after the
breakup of the Western Empire in the 5th century ad. Its capital was Constantinople (now
İstanbul, Turkey).
Constantinople became a capital of the Roman
Empire in 330 after Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor,
refounded the city of Byzantium and named it after himself. Only gradually did
it develop into the true capital of the eastern Roman provinces—those areas of
the empire in southeastern Europe, southwestern Asia, and the northeast corner
of Africa, which included the present-day countries of the Balkan Peninsula, and
Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, Egypt, and the eastern part of Libya.
Scholars have called the empire Byzantine after the ancient name of its capital,
Byzantium, or the Eastern Roman Empire, but to contemporaries and in official
terminology of the time, it was simply Roman, and its subjects were Romans
(Rhomaioi). Its predominant language was Greek, although some of its
subjects spoke Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and other local languages during
its long (330-1453) history. Its emperors regarded the one-time geographical
limits of the Roman Empire as theirs, and they looked to Rome for their
traditions, symbols, and institutions. The empire, ruled by an emperor
(basileus) without any formal constitution, slowly formed a synthesis of
late Roman institutions, orthodox Christianity, and Greek language and
culture.
II | EARLY PERIOD |
Constantine the Great established precedents
for the harmony of church and imperial authorities that persisted throughout the
history of the empire. These included his creation of a successful new monetary
system based on the gold solidus, or nomisma, which lasted into the middle of
the 11th century. The commercial prosperity of the 4th through the 6th century
enabled many ancient cities to flourish. Large estates dominated agriculture,
and while heavy taxation resulted in much abandonment of land, agriculture
continued to be productive. The church acquired vast landed estates and, along
with the emperor himself, was the largest landholder during most of the empire's
history. Rigorous imperial regulation of the purity and supply of precious
metals, as well as the organization of commerce and artisanship, characterized
economic life.
Emperor Justinian I and his wife, Theodora,
attempted to restore the former majesty, intellectual quality, and geographic
limits of the Roman Empire. At great cost, they reconquered, between 534 and
565, North Africa, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and parts of Spain. This effort,
however, together with substantial expenses incurred in erecting public
buildings and churches—in particular, Hagia Sophia (Church of the Holy Wisdom)
in Constantinople—overstrained the empire's resources, while plagues reduced its
population.
III | THE EMPIRE BESIEGED |
The empire had survived Germanic and Hunnic
tribal migrations and raids in the 5th and 6th centuries and had stabilized a
reasonably secure eastern frontier against the Sassanian Empire of Persia, but
it could not recover, hold, and govern the entire Mediterranean world. During
the second half of the 6th century the Lombards invaded and gradually occupied
much of former Byzantine Italy—except for Rome, Ravenna, Naples, and the far
south—while Turkic Avar cavalry raided and depopulated much of the Byzantine
Balkans.
Many features of the empire and its culture
changed during the 7th century. Most of the Balkans were lost to the Avars and
to Slavic tribes, who resettled abandoned sites. Meanwhile, the assassination of
Mauricius, the first Byzantine emperor to fall to a violent death, led to civil
and external war. Emperor Heraclius finally terminated a long series of wars
with the Persians by a decisive victory in 628 and the recovery of
Persian-occupied Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Exhaustion from this struggle and
bitter religious disputes between rival Christian sects weakened Byzantine
defenses and morale, leaving the empire unprepared to face another danger in the
decade that followed. Between 634 and 642, Arabs, inspired by a new religion,
Islam, conquered Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Constantinople
weathered major Arab sieges in the 670s and in 717-18, and Byzantine Asia Minor
survived almost annual Arab raids. Byzantium, by a process that remains
controversial among historians, transformed its armies into an elite
expeditionary guard named tagmata and into army corps called themes
(themata). Each was commanded by a strategos, or general, who acquired
civil and military authority over his army district; thematic armies became army
corps districts, and their soldiers, who acquired tax-exempt lands, preserved
the core of the empire while avoiding the ruinous drain of cash that had
overstrained the salaried armies of the period before the Arab invasions. Urban
life and commerce declined except in Thessaloníki and Constantinople. Warfare
and resulting insecurity inhibited agriculture and education. The empire, with
limited resources, could no longer maintain the full dimensions, infrastructure,
and complexity of the late Roman Empire. It managed to endure and adapt to its
straitened circumstances.
IV | AGE OF RECONQUEST |
Beginning in the 9th century, Byzantium
experienced a major recovery that took several forms. The Muslim offensive
halted on the eastern frontier, both because of the decline of the caliphate and
because of the ingenuity of Byzantine strategy. Byzantium began to regain
territory in southeastern Asia Minor in the early 10th century. Lands lost to
the Slavs in Greece, Macedonia, and Thrace also were reconquered and
reorganized. The recovery reached its maturity under the long-reigning
Macedonian dynasty, which began in 867 under its founder, Emperor Basil I, and
lasted until 1081. Intellectual life revived in many dimensions: Ancient
manuscripts were recopied and summarized; encyclopedias and other reference
works were compiled; and mathematics, astronomy, and literature received new
attention. The revival of learning was accompanied by a conscious return to
classical models in art and literature. External trade also intensified in the
Mediterranean and Black seas.
Bulgaria declined and was occupied by
Byzantine armies in the 970s, while these armies also reconquered land southeast
of the Taurus Mountains from the Muslims, including parts of northern
Mesopotamia, northern Syria, and the northern Syrian coast.
The greatest Macedonian emperor was Basil II,
who sternly repressed (1014) a lengthy Bulgarian rebellion and expanded his
control of formerly independent Armenian and Georgian principalities. His
efforts, like those of his predecessors, ultimately failed to reverse the
growing concentration of land in the hands of a few wealthy individuals and the
church. He replaced the power of many older families with a new group of loyal
families. This failure damaged the revenues, authority, personnel, and other
military resources of the state.
After the death of Basil II, the empire
enjoyed economic expansion and prosperity but suffered from a series of mediocre
emperors who neglected new technological, cultural, and economic developments in
western Europe and the Islamic world while the army deteriorated. The Seljuk
Turks, after making devastating raids into Byzantium's eastern territories,
crushed an imperial army at the Battle of Manzikert (1071) and overran most of
Byzantine Asia Minor. The old thematic armies had decayed. Meanwhile, the
Byzantines lost their last foothold in Italy and were alienated from the
Christian West by a schism (1054) between the Orthodox church and the
papacy.
V | DECLINE AND FALL |
Emperor Alexius I, founder of the Comnenian
dynasty, nevertheless appealed to the pope for aid against the Turks. Western
Europe responded with the First Crusade (1096-99).
Although Byzantium initially benefited from
the Crusades, recovering some land in Asia Minor, in the long run they hastened
the empire's decline. Italian merchant cities won special trading privileges in
Byzantine territory and gained control of much of the empire's commerce and
wealth. The Byzantines experienced a superficial prosperity in the 12th century,
but their political and military power waned. Crusaders allied with Venice, then
took advantage of internal Byzantine strife to seize and plunder Constantinople
in 1204, establishing their own Latin Empire of Constantinople. Byzantine
resistance sprang up in Epirus, Trebizond, and especially in the city and region
of Nicaea, in Asia Minor. Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus recaptured
Constantinople from the Latins in 1261 and founded the Palaeologan dynasty,
which ruled the empire until 1453. The Palaeologan Empire's resources were very
limited in terms of finances, land, and central authority. Agricultural
conditions worsened for the rural population. The emergent Ottoman Turks
conquered the remnants of Byzantine Asia Minor early in the 14th century. After
1354 they overran the Balkans and finally took Constantinople, bringing the
empire to an end in 1453.
VI | THE IMPERIAL OFFICE |
The Byzantine Empire was ruled by autocratic
emperors who were the source of governmental authority. Emperors were
responsible for upholding correct religious doctrine by placing the full force
of imperial power behind doctrinal uniformity. Emperors strove for religious
unanimity, in part to cultivate favor from church officials, but also because
they believed that the survival and welfare of the empire depended on divine
favor. The emperor embodied living law, issued legislation, and was the final
interpreter of secular law. Ultimate responsibility for all political and
military appointments rested with him, and he had a decisive role in selecting
and removing the patriarch of Constantinople and other church officials. The
emperor was at the summit of a splendid formal etiquette, and Byzantine society
was characterized by rank consciousness and minute attention to protocol.
VII | THE BYZANTINE LEGACY |
This conception of imperial authority,
together with the creation of the Cyrillic alphabet for the Slavs by Byzantine
missionaries, and the preservation of ancient Greek manuscripts and culture by
Byzantine scholars, were the most important contributions of Byzantium to
posterity. The Byzantine intellectual tradition did not die in 1453: Byzantine
scholars who visited Italy as individuals or imperial envoys in the 14th and
15th centuries exerted a strong influence on the Italian Renaissance. The
Palaeologan revival of elements of Greek classicism, especially in
encyclopedism, history, literature, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy, was
transmitted to a rarefied audience of Italian scholars and Greek residents of
Italy, and in this fashion Byzantine scholarship long survived the disappearance
of the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine traditions and procedures also survived among
the Greek and Slavic peoples. Conversion of the rulers of the Bulgars, Serbs,
and Russians to Orthodox Christianity in the 9th and 10th centuries drew these
peoples into the Byzantine cultural and ecclesiastical sphere and greatly
influenced their development in medieval and early modern times.
See also
Byzantine Art and Architecture; Iconoclasm; and biographies of individual
emperors.
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