Byzantine Empire
The Byzantine Empire never called itself Byzantine. Its citizens used the term Roman Empire and called themselves Romans, in Greek Romaioi. Their Islamic contemporaries named their realm the land of the Romans, Bilad al-Rum. The word Byzantine was coined only after the empire had already fallen. It comes from Byzantion, the Greek settlement on which Constantinople was built, and at first it described only the people of that one city. So how did a state that thought of itself as Rome end up known by a name its own people never used? This was the continuation of the Roman Empire, centred on Constantinople, surviving the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and enduring until 1453. What follows is the story of how it governed, how it fought, how it prayed, what it ate, and what it left behind.
After 800 AD, Western Europe stopped calling these people Romans and started calling them Greeks, Graeci. The Papacy and the medieval German emperors had begun regarding themselves as the true heirs of Roman identity. The citizens themselves called their land Rhomania, Romanland. Early modern scholars, working after the fall, reached for many labels: the Eastern Empire, the Low Empire, the Late Empire, the Empire of the Greeks, the Empire of Constantinople, and simply the Roman Empire. The growing use of Byzantine and Byzantine Empire may have begun with Theodore Metochites or Laonikos Chalkokondyles, whose work was widely propagated by Hieronymus Wolf. The adjective sat alongside phrases like Empire of the Greeks until the 19th century before becoming the primary term. Even now the label is contested. A minority of modern historians argue it should be dropped, because it began as a prejudicial and inaccurate term. The same uncertainty surrounds the empire's birthday. Scholarship tied to Greece or Eastern Orthodoxy has placed the foundation in the early 300s, while the study of late antiquity pushes the start into the seventh or eighth centuries. Geoffrey Greatrex believes it is simply impossible to date the foundation precisely.
Diocletian recognised that the state was too big to be ruled by one person and instituted the Tetrarchy, splitting the empire into eastern and western halves. The Tetrarchy quickly failed, but the division proved an enduring concept. Constantine I secured absolute power in 324 and over the next six years rebuilt the city of Byzantium as a new capital he called New Rome, later named Constantinople. He instituted the gold solidus as a stable currency, favoured Christianity, and became an opponent of paganism. Theodosius I, after defeating the usurpers Magnus Maximus and Eugenius in 388 and 394, established Christianity as the Roman state religion and was the last emperor to rule both halves of the empire. The Eastern Empire never suffered the rebellious barbarian vassals or barbarian warlords that doomed the West. Zeno persuaded the Ostrogoth king Theodoric to take Italy from Odoacer, who had deposed Romulus Augustulus in 476. Justinian I, after his accession in 527, marked a high point. His general Belisarius subjugated the Vandal Kingdom in late 533, and the Ostrogothic Kingdom mostly ended in 554. Then came reversals. Khosrow I of the Sasanian Empire sacked Antioch in 540, and a devastating plague killed a large proportion of the population. The 630s and 640s brought the Arab conquests of the Levant and Egypt, and by Heraclius' death in 641 the loss of the eastern provinces had stripped the empire of as much as three-quarters of its revenue. Leo III repelled the siege of 717 to 718, the first serious check on Arab expansion. Under the Macedonian dynasty the recovery resumed. Basil II's decades-long campaign against Bulgaria ended in total victory at the Battle of Kleidion in 1014, and when he died in 1025 his empire stretched from the Danube and Sicily to the Euphrates. Then the Seljuk Turks won at Manzikert in 1071, taking the emperor Romanos IV Diogenes prisoner and seizing Anatolia up to the Sea of Marmara.
Constantinople remained the largest and wealthiest city in Europe until the 13th century, when Paris overtook it. Then came the Fourth Crusade, originally intended to target Egypt. Amid strategic difficulties, Isaac II's son Alexios Angelos convinced the crusaders to restore his father to the throne in exchange for a huge tribute. They attacked Constantinople in 1203 and reinstated Isaac II and his son. The new rulers swiftly grew unpopular and were deposed by Alexios V, an event the crusaders used as a pretext to sack the city in April 1204. They ransacked wealth the city had accumulated over nine centuries. The territories fragmented into competing entities. The crusaders crowned Baldwin I as ruler of a new Latin Empire, which suffered a crushing defeat against the Bulgarians in 1205. Three Greek successor states formed: the Empire of Nicaea and the Empire of Trebizond in Asia Minor, and the Despotate of Epirus on the Adriatic. Nicaea, ruled by the Laskarid dynasty, blocked both the Latins and the Seljuks of Rum. Its capable emperor John III pursued protectionist economic policies and exploited the chaos after Mongol armies ravaged Bulgaria and defeated Rum between 1237 and 1243. Michael VIII, founder of the Palaiologos dynasty, recaptured Constantinople in 1261. Yet the reconstituted empire wielded only regional power for its final two centuries.
Michael VIII staved off Charles I of Anjou first by recognising papal primacy and certain Catholic doctrines at the 1274 Second Council of Lyon, then by aiding the Sicilian Vespers against Charles in 1282. His religious concessions were despised by most of the populace and repudiated by his successor Andronikos II. A disastrous civil war between 1341 and 1354 caused long-term economic difficulties while the Ottoman Turks gradually expanded. The Ottomans subjugated Anatolia and expanded into Europe from 1354, taking Philippopolis in 1363, Adrianopolis in 1369, and Thessalonica in 1387. Emperors were crowned and deposed at the whim of the Venetians, Genoese, and Ottomans. After Manuel II refused to pay homage to Sultan Bayezid I in 1394, Constantinople was besieged, and the city came perilously close to surrender until the warlord Timur decisively defeated Bayezid in 1402. Manuel II then oversaw two decades of peace while the Ottomans convulsed in civil war. John VIII reconciled with the Catholic West at the Council of Florence, yet his empire steadily diminished. In 1452, Sultan Mehmed II resolved to capture Constantinople and laid siege early the following year. On the 29th of May 1453, the city was captured. The last emperor, Constantine XI, died in battle, and the Byzantine Empire ended. The Ottomans quickly absorbed what remained: Acciaiuoli Athens in 1458, Morea in 1460, Trebizond in 1461, and Gattilusi Lesbos in 1462.
Diocletian and Constantine's 4th-century reforms reorganised the provinces into Dioceses and then Praetorian prefectures, separating the army from the civil administration. After the 7th century the prefectures were abandoned, and in the 9th century the provinces were divided into themes, or themata, governed solely by a military commander called a strategos. In the late 6th century, seven mobile field armies called comitatenses, numbering around 150,000 troops, were deployed around the empire and remained the finest armies in Europe. They were aided by twenty-five frontier garrisons of roughly 195,000 lower-quality limitanei. Naval forces were limited: 30,000 oarsmen were assembled to row 500 mostly requisitioned transports for the Vandalic War in Africa in 533. The losses of the 7th-century Arab conquests forced fundamental change. Field armies withdrew into the Anatolian core and settled in specific districts, the themata, while the navy reorganised into provincialised fleets and became dominant in the eastern Mediterranean, its dromons equipped with Greek fire. Professional tagmata regiments, first introduced in the mid-700s and including foreign forces such as the Varangian Guard, had completely replaced the thematic militias by the 11th century. The late 10th-century army, perhaps the highest-quality force the empire produced, numbered around 140,000, up from below 100,000 in the late 700s. Byzantine strategy stayed primarily defensive because of a habitual lack of resources. To avoid risky and expensive campaigns, the empire engaged in extensive diplomacy: formal embassies, client management, political marriages, propaganda and bribery, even espionage and assassination. No post-1204 Byzantine field army fielded more than 5,000 troops, and fewer than 8,000 defended the final siege in 1453.
Theodosius II formalised Roman law by appointing five jurists as principal authorities and compiling legislation since Constantine's reign into the Codex Theodosianus. This culminated in the Corpus Juris Civilis under Justinian I, who commissioned a standardisation of imperial decrees since Hadrian's time. After 534, Justinian issued the Novellae, the New Laws, in Greek, marking a transition from Roman to Byzantine law. Zachary Chitwood argues the Corpus Juris Civilis was largely inaccessible in Latin, especially in the provinces. That gap pushed Leo III to develop the Ekloge ton nomon, which emphasised humanity and inspired practical texts like the Farmers' Law, Seamen's Law, and Soldiers' Law. Leo VI later completed a full codification of Roman law in Greek through the Basilika, a work of 60 books that became the foundation of Byzantine law. In 1345, Constantine Harmenopoulos compiled the Hexabiblos, a six-volume law book. Christianity, bolstered by Constantine's support, began shaping all aspects of life. The historian Anthony Kaldellis views Christianity as bringing no economic, social, or political changes to the state other than being more deeply integrated into it. Doctrinal disputes, particularly in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, split the church into three branches: Chalcedonian, Monophysite or Coptic, and Nestorian. The Chalcedonian group stayed dominant within the empire, while the Monophysite and Nestorian branches largely fell under Muslim rule in the 7th century. Differences in ritual and theology, such as the use of unleavened bread and the Filioque clause, separated Western from Eastern Christianity. That separation began by 597 and culminated in 1054 during the East West Schism.
As many as 27 million people lived in the empire at its peak in 540, a figure that fell to 12 million by 800. The population recovered to perhaps 18 million near the end of the Macedonian dynasty in 1025. A few decades after the recapture of Constantinople in 1282 it stood in the range of 3 to 5 million, and by 1312 had dropped to 2 million. When the Ottomans captured Constantinople, only 50,000 people lived in the city, one-tenth of its population in its prime. Feasting was central to the culture. By the 10th century, dining shifted from reclining to tables with clean linen, and the introduction of the fork and of salad dressing made with oil and vinegar shaped Italian and Western traditions. Classical Greco-Roman foods stayed common, including the condiment garos and the still popular baklava, while aubergine and orange, unknown in classical times, entered diets. Chariot races ran from the early era until 1204, becoming one of the world's longest continuous sporting events. A Persian version of polo called Tzykanion, introduced by the Crusaders, was played by the nobility in major cities. Latin and Greek were the primary languages, but Greek began to replace Latin even in official use by the time of Justinian I, who may have tried to arrest its decline. Many people knew neither tongue, speaking Armenian, Syriac, Coptic, Phoenician, or Berber. In a phenomenon called diglossia, the gap between everyday spoken Greek and the literary registers grew very wide. The Chronicle of the Morea, probably written by a French immigrant ignorant of formal Greek literature, shows spoken Greek breaking into written verse.
Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles, the engineer-architects of the Hagia Sophia, are uniquely esteemed, while most Byzantine artists went unrecorded and were typically deemed to have little importance. Their dome, pendentives, and decorative interior were imitated as far north as the Cathedral of Saint Sophia in Novgorod and the Saint Sophia Cathedral in Kiev. During two periods of Byzantine Iconoclasm between 726 and 843, possibly influenced by Islamic prohibitions on religious images, icons were suppressed and enormous amounts of figurative religious art were destroyed. Palaeologan artworks, many looted in the 1204 Fourth Crusade, greatly influenced the Italo-Byzantine style of Cimabue, Duccio, and Giotto, the last traditionally regarded as the inaugurator of Italian Renaissance painting. The empire's scholars played a principal role in transmitting classical knowledge to the Islamic world and Renaissance Italy. Isidore of Miletus compiled the works of Archimedes, which Leo the Mathematician later incorporated into formal courses, the reason the Archimedes Palimpsest survives. Military innovations included the riding stirrup, a specialised horseshoe, the lateen sail, and Greek fire, an incendiary weapon that burned even when doused with water and first appeared around the Siege of Constantinople of 674 to 678. In healthcare, the empire pioneered the hospital as an institution offering the possibility of a cure rather than merely a place to die. After the fall, Russia developed the Third Rome doctrine as the sole sovereign Orthodox state. The empire is credited with developing the Glagolitic alphabet, which later evolved into the Cyrillic script and Old Church Slavonic, providing the first literary language for the Slavs.
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Common questions
What was the Byzantine Empire and when did it exist?
The Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire centred on Constantinople during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. It survived the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD and endured until the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Why is it called the Byzantine Empire when its people called themselves Roman?
The term Byzantine Empire was coined only after the empire fell. Its citizens used the term Roman Empire and called themselves Romans, in Greek Romaioi, while the adjective Byzantine derives from Byzantion, the Greek settlement on which Constantinople was built.
When did the Byzantine Empire reach its greatest extent?
The Byzantine Empire reached its greatest extent under Justinian I, who briefly reconquered much of Italy and the western Mediterranean coast after his accession in 527. His general Belisarius subjugated the Vandal Kingdom in late 533, and the Ostrogothic Kingdom mostly ended in 554.
How did the Byzantine Empire fall to the Ottomans?
Sultan Mehmed II resolved to capture Constantinople in 1452 and laid siege early the following year. On the 29th of May 1453 the city was captured, the last emperor Constantine XI died in battle, and the Byzantine Empire ended.
What happened to the Byzantine Empire in 1204?
The Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in April 1204, ransacking wealth the city had accumulated over nine centuries. The territories fragmented into the Latin Empire and competing Greek successor states, and although Michael VIII recaptured Constantinople in 1261, the reconstituted empire wielded only regional power.
What was the legacy of the Byzantine Empire?
The Byzantine Empire transmitted classical knowledge to the Islamic world and Renaissance Italy, influenced the civil law traditions of continental Europe and beyond through its legal codes, and is credited with developing the Glagolitic alphabet, which later evolved into the Cyrillic script and Old Church Slavonic. It also pioneered the hospital as an institution offering the possibility of a cure.