HP101 Byzantine Empire
Welcome to history podcast episode 101. This is a request via email from John Birkhead. John has his own podcast called Desertcast. Check it out at desertcastshow.com. John asked me to cover the Byzantine Empire. Not a small task. This is a huge topic, so this will just be a brief introduction and you can find further information on the website historyonair.com about this topic.
The Byzantine Empire is the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which survived for a thousand years after the western half had fallen into various feudal kingdoms and which finally fell to Turkish onslaughts in 1453.
The city of Byzantium expanded from an ancient Greek colony founded on the European side of the Bosporus. In AD 330 the Roman emperor Constantine I, in an attempt to reinforce the empire, refounded Byzantium as Constantinople, the “New Rome” and eastern capital. At his death in 395 Emperor Theodosius I split the empire between his two sons, and it was never reunited. Theodosius also made Christianity the only religion of the empire and Constantinople assumed supremacy over other Christian centers in the East as Rome did in the West. The fall of Rome to the Ostrogoths in 476 left Constantinople the lone capital of the empire.
The eastern realm differed from the western in various respects. It was heir to the Hellenistic civilization, a blending of Greek and Middle Eastern elements going back to the conquest of Alexander the great. It was more commercial, more urban and richer than the West, and its emperors who in the Hellenistic tradition joined political and religious functions, had firmer control over all classes of society. They were also more skillful at fending off invaders, through warfare and diplomacy. With these advantages, the Byzantine emperors, who still considered themselves Romans long encouraged the dream of subduing the barbarian kingdoms of the West and reuniting the empire.
The greatest of these was Justinian I (reigned 527 – 565), who with his able wife Theodora prepared for the re-conquest by conquering the Persians on the eastern frontier and squashing some opposition that had alienated the Roman Catholic Church. He sponsored a collection and re-codification of Roman law and built the magnificent Hagia Sophia. Justinian’s re-conquests of North Africa and Italy were fleeting. The later years of his reign were blemished by the famous war with the Persians, incursions, bubonic plague, which created severe shortages of manpower and revenue. The destabilized empire, preoccupied with internal problems, grew less and less concerned with the West. Although its rulers continued to picture themselves “Roman” long after the death of Justinian, the term “Byzantine” more accurately describes the very different medieval empire.
Perhaps the most considerable cultural feature of the Byzantine Empire was the type of Christianity developed there. More mystical and more liturgical than Roman Christianity, it was also less integrated because of age-old ethnic hostilities in the region, the survival of various heresies among the clergy in Syria, Egypt, and other provinces, and the early use of demonic (vernacular) languages in religious services. The disarray partly caused the sweeping success of Arab invasions that began after Muhammad’s death in 632. Within 10 years of Syria and Palestine, Egypt and North Africa were under Muslim Arab rule. Religious confusion continued to weaken the empire throughout the Iconoclastic Controversy (a dispute over the use of religious images, or icons) of the 8th and 9th centuries, which left the eastern Orthodoxed Church split into factions and further alienated from Rome. A formal split between Eastern and Western churches was mutually agreed to in 1054. By that time, the Eastern Orothodoxed church had been invigorated by successful missions among the Russians, Bulgars, and Slavs, some of them directed by the monks Cyril and Methodius, whose invention of Slavonic alphabets (still called Cyrillic) made possible the translation of the bible and the spread of literacy along with Christianity in Slavic lands.
Although the empire had lost much territory to the Arabs and to the independent kingdoms established in the Balkan Peninsula, its remnants were reinforced by a number of institutional reforms. A new administrative unit, the theme, was introduced along with a system of military land grants and hereditary service that ensured a sufficient supply of soldiers. It also laid the foundation for the emergence of great landed families who in later centuries would wage dynastic battles for the imperial throne. The Byzantine economy was actually fortified by the loss of territory, as the shrinking empire allowed greater freedom to merchants and agricultural labor.
All of these developments led to a golden age marked by a literary renaissance and brief revival of military and naval power under the Macedonian dynasty, whose founder, a peasant adventurer named Basil, murdered his way to the throne in 867. The Macedonia emperors oversaw the Hellenization of the Code of Justinian; into which they wrote the principal of imperial absolutism tempered only by the spiritual authority of the church. They also reversed for a time the military defeats of their predecessors and re-conquered sizeable areas from the Arabs and Bulgars.
No matter how centralized their administration or how absolute their power on paper; the emperors were incapable of stoping the feudalization of the empire and the concentration of land and wealth in a few great families. The rivalry between rural and urban nobility led each faction to nominate its own imperial candidates. While they were engaged in civil disputes new rivals, the Normans and the Seljuq Turks increased their power around the eastern Mediterranean.
In the late 11th century, Emperor Alexius I reluctantly look for help from the outside. He petitioned Venice, to whom he gave the first of the commercial concessions that helped to make it a great maritime power, and to the pope, who in turn appealed to the rulers of the West, many of them, ironically Normans. These doubtful allies rapidly turned the ensuing Crusades into a series of plundering expeditions not only against the Turks but also against the nucleus of the Byzantine Empire. The fourth crusade resulted in the fall of Constantinople to Venetians and crusaders in 1204 and the formation of a line of Latin emperors. The empire was recaptured by Byzantine refugees in 1261, but under the final Palaeologus dynasty it was little more than a large city-state besieged from all sides. In the 14th century the Ottoman Turks replaced the Seljuqs as the major foe in the east. Almost the entire Balkan Peninsula fell to them, but their siege of Constantinople, which began in 1395, was prolonged by the city’s near-impregnable strategic position and by Turkish factionalism. It ended in 1453, when the final emperor, also named Constantine, died fighting on the walls. The final stronghold of the Greek power, Trebizond, fell to the Turks in 1461.
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Web Links:
Online class on this subject open to the public via Boise State University
Lots of resources listed here via Fordham University
Downloadable lectures from Anders.com
Books from Amazon.com: