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The Roman Empire that outlived Rome by a thousand years: Constantine's refounding of Byzantium as Constantinople; the age of Justinian, the Hagia Sophia, and codified Roman law; the Arab conquests and Greek fire; the 1054 schism...
The Roman Empire that outlived Rome by a thousand years: Constantine's refounding of Byzantium as Constantinople; the age of Justinian, the Hagia Sophia, and codified Roman law; the Arab conquests and Greek fire; the 1054 schism; and the final fall to the Ottomans in 1453 that helped spark the Renaissance.
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The emperor Diocletian split the overstretched empire into eastern and western halves ruled by a college of four emperors, the Tetrarchy. The move was meant to steady a state worn down by civil war and invasion, and it set the precedent for a separate government in the Greek-speaking east.
Constantine the Great dedicated the old Greek town of Byzantium as his new capital, a Christian 'New Rome' guarding the straits between Europe and Asia. Its position on the Bosphorus, ringed by walls and water, would let the city outlast the western empire by nearly a thousand years. The choice tied the empire's future to Christianity and to the Greek east.
On the death of Theodosius I the empire passed to his two sons, Arcadius in the east and Honorius in the west, and the halves never again shared a single ruler. Contemporaries saw it as one more division of power, but the split proved permanent. The east, richer and more urban, would survive the shocks that broke the west.
The Germanic commander Odoacer deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus and sent the western imperial regalia to Constantinople, an act later marked as the end of the western Roman Empire. The eastern half carried on unbroken, still calling itself Roman and still governed from Constantinople. Historians debate how sharp a break 476 really was, since imperial authority in the west had been fading for decades.
Its people never called themselves Byzantines. They were Rhomaioi, Romans, heirs of an unbroken state that ran from Augustus to 1453. The label 'Byzantine' was coined by the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf in 1557 and spread among later historians, partly to deny the Greek-speaking Orthodox east a claim on the Roman name. The term is a modern convenience for a state that saw itself simply as Rome.
Justinian I became sole emperor and set out to restore the old Roman world in full, in territory, in law, and in faith. With his wife Theodora, a former actress and a formidable political partner, he drove a program of reconquest and reform. His reign became the high point of early Byzantine ambition.
Rival chariot-racing factions, the Blues and Greens, united in revolt and set much of Constantinople ablaze, chanting 'Nika' (victory). With the mob proclaiming a new emperor, Justinian was ready to flee until Theodora reportedly urged him to stand. His general Belisarius trapped the crowds in the Hippodrome and killed tens of thousands, ending the rising in blood.
Justinian's general Belisarius landed in North Africa and crushed the Vandal kingdom in a swift campaign, returning the rich province to imperial rule. The victory opened Justinian's western reconquest and revived the dream of a Mediterranean ruled from one throne. It also stretched the empire's armies thin across a vast frontier.
A commission under the jurist Tribonian gathered centuries of tangled Roman law into a single ordered body, begun in 529 and revised by 534. The Code, Digest, and Institutes preserved Roman legal thought and carried it to later ages. Rediscovered in the medieval west, it became the foundation of the civil-law tradition across much of Europe.
Justinian rebuilt the great church of Holy Wisdom after the Nika fire, crowning it with a dome so wide and light it seemed to hang from heaven. On entering it he is said to have exclaimed that he had outdone Solomon. For nearly a thousand years it was the largest cathedral in Christendom and the heart of Orthodox worship, later a mosque and now a monument.
Belisarius and later the eunuch general Narses fought a long war to take Italy from the Ostrogoths, capturing Ravenna in 540 and finishing the struggle by 554. The campaigns restored imperial rule but wrecked the peninsula, ruining cities and starving the countryside. The exhausted gains were largely lost within a generation to the invading Lombards.
A pandemic, now generally identified as bubonic plague, reached Constantinople and killed a large share of its people before spreading across the Mediterranean. Ancient writers give enormous death tolls that modern scholars treat with caution, but the toll was clearly severe. It drained the manpower and taxes Justinian needed and helped ensure his reconquests could not hold.
Justinian died having reconquered much of the west, but the effort left the treasury empty and the borders thinly held. His successors inherited a state exhausted by war, plague, and taxation. Within decades most of the western gains slipped away, and the empire turned to defending its Greek and Anatolian core.
After the Sasanian Persians overran Syria, Egypt, and Jerusalem, the emperor Heraclius struck deep into Persia and won a crushing victory, ending a war that had raged since 602. He recovered the True Cross and restored the eastern provinces. But both empires were spent by the long fight, and neither was ready for the storm about to come out of Arabia.
Armies of the new Islamic caliphate shattered a Byzantine field army at the Yarmuk in 636 and swept through Syria, Palestine, and Egypt within a decade. The empire lost its richest provinces, its grain, and Jerusalem itself, shrinking to Anatolia, the Balkans, and a string of coasts. The blow reshaped Byzantium into a smaller, embattled, and more thoroughly Greek Orthodox state.
An Umayyad army and fleet besieged Constantinople for a year, aiming to end the empire, but the great walls and a secret incendiary weapon held them off. This 'Greek fire', sprayed from ships and burning even on water, became the empire's most feared weapon; its exact recipe was a guarded secret and is still debated. The failed siege blunted the Arab advance into Europe and let Byzantium endure.
Emperor Leo III moved against religious images, and for over a century the empire tore itself apart over whether icons were holy aids or forbidden idols. Iconoclasts smashed and whitewashed sacred art while iconodules defended it, and the quarrel deepened the rift with Rome. The dispute finally ended in 843 with the restoration of the icons, remembered in Orthodoxy as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.
The Empress Theodora and a church council ended iconoclasm for good, confirming the veneration of icons first upheld at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. The settlement fixed the visual and devotional character of Orthodox Christianity for centuries after. Its anniversary is still kept as the Feast of Orthodoxy.
The Byzantine brothers Cyril and Methodius were sent to preach among the Slavs and devised an alphabet to write their tongue, translating scripture into Slavonic. The script they created is generally identified as Glagolitic; the later Cyrillic alphabet, named for Cyril, was most likely developed by their disciples in Bulgaria. Their mission spread Orthodox Christianity and a written culture across the Slavic world.
The Bulgarian ruler Boris I accepted Christianity from Constantinople rather than Rome, bringing his powerful Balkan state into the Orthodox and Byzantine cultural sphere. The choice, made after Boris weighed both churches, tied Bulgaria's church and script to the Greek east. It marked a major win in the long contest between Constantinople and Rome for the souls of eastern Europe.
Under the Macedonian dynasty founded by Basil I the empire entered a long revival of power, wealth, and learning. Scholars copied and studied the classical Greek texts that later reached the west, and a refined art and scholarship flourished. This 'Macedonian Renaissance' preserved much of the ancient heritage that would feed later European culture.
Prince Vladimir of Kiev accepted Orthodox Christianity from Constantinople and had his people baptized, an event traditionally dated to 988. Chronicles say his envoys, awed by the beauty of worship in the Hagia Sophia, reported they knew not whether they stood in heaven or on earth. The choice bound the Rus lands to Byzantine faith, art, and letters, a legacy that shaped Russia for a thousand years.
Basil II, called the Bulgar-Slayer after his long and brutal wars, died having pushed the frontiers to their greatest extent since Justinian. The empire he left was rich, disciplined, and dominant across the Balkans and the east. Within fifty years weak rule and court rivalries would squander that strength.
Legates of the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople exchanged excommunications, hardening a long drift between the Latin and Greek churches into open rupture. The quarrel ran over papal authority, the wording of the creed, and ritual, and its roots reached back centuries. Contemporaries did not see 1054 as final, but it came to mark the lasting divide between Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity.
The Seljuk Turks defeated and captured Emperor Romanos IV at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia. The battlefield loss was not catastrophic in itself, but the civil wars that followed let the Turks pour into Anatolia, the empire's heartland and its main source of soldiers and grain. The slow loss of Asia Minor was a wound Byzantium never truly healed.
Emperor Alexios I Komnenos asked the west for mercenaries to help recover lost lands from the Turks. Pope Urban II answered at the Council of Clermont with a call for a far grander armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem, launching the First Crusade. The crusaders helped Byzantium regain ground but also brought a large, unpredictable Latin army into a wary and mutually suspicious relationship.
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A crusade meant for the Holy Land was diverted and turned on the Christian city of Constantinople, which the crusaders looted and burned. Pope Innocent III had forbidden the attack and condemned it, but the assault crippled the Byzantine Empire and deepened the split between Rome and the Eastern Church.
Forces of the Nicaean successor state under Michael VIII Palaiologos recaptured Constantinople from the Latins and restored the empire. But the state they revived was a shadow of the old power, poor, encircled, and shorn of most of Anatolia. The Palaiologan dynasty would rule a shrinking realm for its final two centuries.
The rising Ottoman Turks seized a foothold at Gallipoli and began expanding across the Balkans, encircling the remnants of the Byzantine state. Over the following century they reduced the empire to little more than Constantinople and a few scattered holdings. The city, once the head of a Mediterranean power, became an island in an Ottoman sea.
After a siege of some seven weeks the army of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, aided by massive cannon, breached the ancient walls, and the last emperor, Constantine XI, died in the fighting. The fall ended the Roman Empire after about fifteen hundred years and turned the Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Mehmed made the city his capital, and it became the seat of Ottoman power for centuries.
In the years around the fall, Byzantine scholars fled to Italy carrying Greek manuscripts of Plato, Aristotle, and the ancient authors, along with the skill to read them. Their teaching fed the humanist revival already under way and helped spread firsthand knowledge of Greek antiquity in the Latin west. The dying empire's last great gift was the learning it had guarded for a thousand years.