Byzantines

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The Byzantine empire is conventionally said to begin in 330 BCE, the year that the Roman empire's eastern capital was transferred to Constantinople. The Byzantines called themselves Romaioi, citizens of Rome, and regarded their ruler as absolute temporal and spiritual head of Rome and all its conquests. The emperors successfully defended the reduced eastern Roman provinces against onslaught from Persian and then Islamic invaders, but the effort left them powerless to protect the western empire, where the last emperor was deposed in 876 CE. Despite betrayal by western Christianity, the Byzantine empire survived as the repository of Greek and Roman civilization for 1,100 years.

The history of Byzantium is that of Constantinople—the queen city—and its emperors. Constantine I (c. 272–337 CE) emerged from civil war to found New Rome, named Constantinople, on the site of Byzantium, a colony Miletus built on a strategic peninsula where Asia meets Europe. The empire he bequeathed his sons included Roman provinces from Africa to England, but northern Europe was soon lost to Frankish, Visigoth, and Lombard invaders, and, better to command their armies, the emperors resided in Antioch. Theodosius II (401–450) divided the empire between his two sons; the West was reduced to a remnant before Emperor Justinian (483–565) sent General Belisarius and then Narses to recapture it.

From 600, the eastern flank was under attack; during the reign of Heraclius (575–641), the Persian Sasanid dynasty encroached as far as the Euphrates and disputed the theme (regional political unit) of Armenia. In 626, the Sasanids joined Avar invaders from the Balkans to besiege unsuccessfully Constantinople. In 647, Islamic raiders began annually to penetrate the heart of Anatolia, besieging Constantinople in 674 and 717. In 813, the Bulgars camped outside the Theodosian walls; the death of their leader, Krum, saved the city, and his successors were paid to push back the Rus (Russian tribes), who in 860 made a whirlwind naval attack on Constantinople.

Basil I (?–886) founded a dynasty that expanded the empire almost to its former borders, but from 894 the Bulgar attacks resumed; the death of their leader Simeon (927) saved the city again. Final victory went to Basil II (958–1025); in 1014, he blinded 15,000 Bulgar prisoners, and Bulgaria was absorbed into the empire.

In 1025, misrule by various rival factions enabled the Seljuk Turks to expand westward from Baghdad and penetrate central Anatolia; the emperor Romanus IV Diogenes (?–1071) cobbled together an army that met the Turks at Malazgirt (former Manzikert) in 1071. His rival General Andronicus Ducas deserted at a critical moment; the battle was lost, and the emperor captured. Armenia was taken, Cilicia became a separate Armenian kingdom, and the Seljuks parceled out south-central and east Anatolia to their followers, who forcibly converted the population.

In 1204, the Fourth Crusade, supporting the disinherited Alexius V, succeeded in capturing Constantinople, and Count Baldwin of Flanders became the first Latin emperor. Three Byzantine successor states were established at Nicaea, Trebizond, and Epirus.

In 1261, the emperor of Nicaea, Michael VIII Palaeologus, recaptured Constantinople and secured his conquests by dynastic marriages. Succeeding emperors reopened negotiations on unity with the Church of Rome, but their subjects preferred the turban to the miter and repudiated agreements. The Ottoman Turks had deprived the empire of its hinterland, and in 1453, after a siege in which a sea blockade played a decisive part, the city fell to Sultan Mehmed II, surnamed the Conqueror.

The Byzantine emperor, a religious, political, and military leader drawn from one of the leading landowning dynasties, was supported by his patriarch, a senate, and a huge civil service. Free bread and entertainment, religious endorsement, and military success kept the emperor in power. A strong emperor could appoint his successor; otherwise the succession fell to aristocratic candidates supported by the army. The blue and green chariot-racing factions represented rival parties, whose conflicts culminated in the Nika riots (532) and the burning of the city. The city's Theodosian walls, completed by Arcadius (c. 377–408), a massive ditch and double wall construction that still totally surrounds the peninsula, kept invaders at bay.

The legal and administrative system, which was recodified by Justinian and described by Constantine VII (907–959), concentrated local power in the hands of the governors of the themes, administered by civilian and military governors. Unlike western powers, the empire had to maintain a standing army, consisting of regiments raised from each theme and the emperor's personal Varangarian Guards (from 989) as well as a navy. The major defensive weapon was Greek fire, an incendiary mixture that could be shot by bellows from city walls or the deck of a warship. Military tactics originally consisted of leading huge, well-drilled armies on foreign campaigns. Against fast-moving border raiders, Nikephorus II Phokas's (?–969) book On Skirmishing Warfare marked a change to staged ambushes of returning bands loaded with booty at passes in the Taurus Mountains.

Orthodox Christianity became a state-sponsored hierarchic cult intertwined with civil life and culture. At the first Church Council at Nicaea in 325 CE, by presiding himself, Constantine demonstrated that he would cede neither the administration nor the creed to his nominee, the patriarch. Schism after schism sloughed off alternative churches—the Arians (325), Nestorians (431), and, most seriously, Monophysites (Syrian Orthodox Church) and Gregorians (Armenian Church) (451). By failing to contain these two substantial churches in the state system, the empire created potentially rebellious groups on the crucial eastern frontiers. Surprisingly, despite sporadic persecution, there is no evidence that Syrians or Armenians deserted en masse to the Persian or Islamic cause.

From the fourth century, monasticism spread from Egypt; the church, by amassing huge untaxed estates and removing able-bodied men from productive enterprise, became a drain on the economy. As the Islamic advance continued, from the seventh century the patriarchs of Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch fell under foreign domination. The army ascribed the invaders' success to the Islamic embargo on human images, and Emperor Leo III (c. 685–741) banned icon worship. Many monks fled, protecting their treasures both from the invading Muslims and overenthusiastic Iconoclast mobs, but icons were finally restored in 831.

Constantine decorated his rebuilt capital by plundering art treasures and building materials from Greek and Roman sites as far afield as Egypt. Surrounded by classical models, Byzantine art gradually developed more formal, stylized designs first seen in the churches of Justinian, including Saint Sophia, a magnificent dome-over-transept cathedral of revolutionary design, with four acres of gold tesserae and a jeweled cross set against stars in the dome. Church ceremonial was arranged to display the emperor directly under the dome, a symbol of God and empire. After the barren Iconoclastic period, the ninth century saw new Greek poetry, Photius the Patriarch's encyclopedia of Greek culture, the invention of the telegraph, and a famous golden plane tree with singing birds. Art (mainly religious) continued to flourish until the sack of Constantinople in 1204; looted material is displayed in Venice. The position of the peasants, who, from the time of Diocletian (?–305) had been a repressed and exploited workforce, worsened as the empire shrank.

Byzantium produced a ruling class of magnificent simplicity and dedication coupled with individual characteristics of duplicity and pragmatism; the system persisted in the centralized authoritarian organization of the Muslim state. Both European and Turkish neglect of Byzantine history is rapidly being reversed; however, the fate of surviving monuments is far from secure.

Herrin, Judith. (1987) The Formation of Christendom. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Norwich, John Julius. (1995) Byzantium: The Early Centuries, the Apogee, and the Decline. London: Penguin/Viking.

Runciman, Steven. (1951) The Crusades. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

——. (1965) The Fall of Constantinople, 1453. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Whittow, Mark. (1996) The Making of Byzantium, 600–1025. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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