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Byzantine would be one of the important topics we studied these days. Byzantine Empire did a lot of things which had shaped the modern day and had effected Western culture.I strongly think Byzantine must be studied in schools. These reasons would explain why byzantine empire is so important Byzantine was an empire made after the Rome was disappeared.

1. There were various of smart leaders in Byzantine such as Justinian.
2. He wrote a book of laws which shaped modern days legal systems.
3. The Byzantines defense was also great because it blocked the Islam army and protected many other countries.
4. D had the strong defenses of Byzantine had halted the spread of Islam and saved the Western culture.This would be why we should study Byzantine Empire and show more content According to Wikipedia “After the three good Emperors, the remaining Emperors ruled badly and again wasted a lot of money and soldiers.

In the west, the Europeans betrayed the Byzantines and attacked their capital, Constantinople. The Byzantines lost their capital in 1204 and they did not take it back until 1261. The Byzantines were then divided into many smaller Greek states that were fighting with each other for the throne of the Empire.”Therefore which means that we don’t need to study byzantine because Byzantine empire collapsed by himself.

In other words we also could say that because of fight inside of byzantine empire they wasn’t able to survive from other attacks.In response to this argument I would like to argue back still it is worth because there isn’t any history source we can’t learn. Which means that we could at least learn that we shouldn’t fight inside because normally country falls because of split from inside.

In conclusion, Byzantine empire should be studied by Schools because it is worth to study. And in 21 st century we should investigate and study more about the reason why Byzantines empire has fallen, As a result schools should study Byzantine empire to improve students
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Why is studying the Byzantine Empire important?

The most important legacy of the Byzantine Empire is the preservation of Greek and Roman civilization during the Middle Ages. Byzantine civilization blended Christian religious beliefs with Greek science, philosophy, arts, and literature. They also extended Roman achievements in engineering and law.
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What is the primary reason to study the Byzantines quizlet?

Based on this document, why should we study the Byzantines? To learn how they defended themselves because based on if they survived, Christianity would survive. Why did the Eastern Orthodox Church separate from the western Roman Catholic Church?
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What is interesting about the Byzantine Empire?

8. The Byzantines were the first to try rosemary – The Byzantines were the first people to cook using saffron and rosemary to flavor roasted lamb. These aromatics, which were well-known in antiquity, had not previously been considered to be culinary components. The Byzantines were also the first to enjoy eggplant, lemons, and oranges, which were mainly unfamiliar to ancient Europeans. Image from
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What is the study of the Byzantine Empire?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The opening session of the IV International Congress of Byzantine Studies in the Aula of the University of Sofia, 9 November 1934 Byzantine studies is an interdisciplinary branch of the humanities that addresses the history, culture, demography, dress, religion/theology, art, literature /epigraphy, music, science, economy, coinage and politics of the Eastern Roman Empire,

The discipline’s founder in Germany is considered to be the philologist Hieronymus Wolf (1516–1580), a Renaissance Humanist, He gave the name “Byzantine” to the Eastern Roman Empire that continued after the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 AD. About 100 years after the final conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans, Wolf began to collect, edit, and translate the writings of Byzantine philosophers,

Other 16th-century humanists introduced Byzantine studies to Holland and Italy, The subject may also be called Byzantinology or Byzantology, although these terms are usually found in English translations of original non-English sources. A scholar of Byzantine studies is called a Byzantinist,
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What were the three most important contributions of the Byzantine Empire to world history?

1261:1453; Decline and fall Introduction When we speak of the fall of the Roman Empire, we should not forget that in fact only the western portion of that empire succumbed to the Germanic invaders. In the east, the eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire stood for a thousand years as a citadel against the threats of expansion by the Muslims.

The Byzantine Empire made great contributions to civilization: Greek language and learning were preserved for posterity; the Roman imperial system was continued and Roman law codified; the Greek Orthodox church converted some Slavic peoples and fostered the development of a splendid new art dedicated to the glorification of the Christian religion.

Situated at the crossroads of east and west, Constantinople acted as the disseminator of culture for all peoples who came in contact with the empire. Called with justification “The City,” this rich and turbulent metropolis was to the early Middle Ages what Athens and Rome had been to classical times.

• By the time the empire collapsed in 1453, its religious mission and political concepts had borne fruit among the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe and especially among the Russians.
• The latter were to lay claim to the Byzantine tradition and to call Moscow the “Third Rome.” Byzantium: The Shining Fortress At the southern extremity of the Bosphorus stands a promontory that juts out from Europe toward Asia, with the Sea of Marmora to the south and a long harbor known as the Golden Horn to the north.

On this peninsula stood the ancient Greek city of Byzantium, which Constantine the Great enlarged considerably and formally christened “New Rome” in A.D.330. Constantine had chosen the site for his new capital with care. He placed Constantinople (now Istanbul) on the frontier of Europe and Asia, dominating the waterway connecting the Mediterranean and Black seas.

Nature protected the site on three sides with cliffs; on the fourth side, emperors fortified the city with an impenetrable three-wall network. During the fourth and fifth centuries Visigoths, Huns, and Ostrogoths unsuccessfully threatened the city. In the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, first Persians, then Arab forces, and finally the Bulgarians besieged – but failed to take – Constantinople.

Until 1453, with the exception of the Fourth Crusade’s treachery, the city withstood all attacks. The security and wealth provided by its setting helped Byzantium survive for more than a thousand years. Constantinople was a state-controlled, world trade center which enjoyed the continuous use of a money economy – in contrast to the localized systems found in the west.

• The city’s wealth and taxes paid for a strong military force and financed an effective government.
• Excellent sewage and water systems supported an extremely high standard of living.
• Food was abundant, with grain from Egypt and Anatolia and fish from the Aegean.
• Constantinople could support a population of a million, at a time when it was difficult to find a city in Europe that could sustain more than 50,000.

Unlike Rome, Constantinople had several industries producing luxury goods, military supplies, hardware, and textiles. After silkworms were smuggled out of China about A.D.550, silk production flourished and became a profitable state monopoly. The state paid close attention to business, controlling the economy: A system of guilds to which all tradesmen and members of the professions belonged set wages, profits, work hours, and prices and organized bankers and doctors into compulsory corporations.

Security and wealth encouraged an active political, cultural, and intellectual life. The widespread literacy and education among men and women of various segments of society would not be matched in Europe until, perhaps, eighteenth-century France. Until its fall in 1453, the Byzantine Empire remained a shining fortress, attracting both invaders and merchants.

The Latin Phase Constantine and his successors struggled to renew the empire. Rome collapsed under the pressure of the Germanic invaders in 476 (see ch.5). Thanks to its greater military and economic strength, Constantinople survived for a thousand years, despite revolutions, wars, and religious controversy.

Justinian (527-565) was the last emperor to attempt seriously to return the Roman Empire to its first-century grandeur. Aided by his forceful wife Theodora and a corps of competent assistants, he made lasting contributions to Western civilization and gained short-term successes in his foreign policy.

The damage caused by devastating earthquakes (a perennial problem in the area) in the 520s and 530s gave Justinian the opportunity he needed to carry out a massive project of empire-wide urban renewal. He strengthened the walls defending Constantinople and built the Church of the Holy Wisdom, which still stands in the city.

The dome of the church is an architectural triumph with forty windows circling its base, producing a quality of light that creates the illusion that the ceiling is floating. Justinian also reformed the government and ordered a review of Roman law. This undertaking led to the publication of the Code of Justinian, a digest of Roman and church law, texts, and other instructional materials that became the foundation of modern Western law.

Justinian also participated actively in the religious arguments of his day. The emperor’s expensive and ambitious projects triggered outbreaks of violence among the political gangs of Constantinople, the circus crowds of the Greens and Blues. Since ancient times city dwellers throughout the Mediterranean formed groups, each pursuing a set of economic, social, and religious goals.

Much like contemporary urban gangs, members of the circus factions moved about in groups and congregated at public events. In Constantinople the Circus took place in the Hippodrome, a structure that could hold 80,000 spectators. There contests of various types were held, including chariot races. The Blues and Greens backed opposing drivers and usually neutralized each other’s efforts.

In 532, however, the Blues and Greens united to try to force Justinian from the throne. The so-called Nike rebellion, named after the victory cry of the rioters, nearly succeeded. In his Secret Histories, Procopius relates that Justinian was on the verge of running away, until Theodora stopped him and told the frightened emperor: “I do not choose to flee.

1. Those who have worn the crown should never survive its loss.
2. Never shall I see the day when I am not saluted as empress.
3. If you mean to flee, Caesar, well and good.
4. You have the money, the ships are ready, the sea is open.
5. As for me, I shall stay.” Assisted by his generals, the emperor remained and put down the rebellion.

Justinian momentarily achieved his dream of re-establishing the Mediterranean rim of the Roman Empire. To carry out his plan for regaining the lost half of the empire from the Germanic invaders, he first had to buy the neutrality of the Persian kings who threatened not only Constantinople but also Syria and Asia Minor.

• After securing his eastern flank through diplomacy and bribery, he took North Africa in 533 and the islands of the western Mediterranean from the Vandals.
• The next phase of the conquest was much more exhausting.
• Like warriors before and after him, Justinian had a difficult time taking the Italian peninsula.

After twenty years, he gained his prize from the Ostrogoths, but at the cost of draining his treasury and ruining Rome and Ravenna. Justinian’s generals also reclaimed the southern part of Spain from the Visigoths, but no serious attempt was ever made to recover Gaul, Britain, or southern Germany.

• By a decade after Justinian’s death, most of the reconquest had been lost.
• The Moors in Africa, Germanic peoples across Europe, and waves of Asiatic nomadic tribes threatened the imperial boundaries.
• Ancient enemies such as the Persians, who had been bribed into a peaceful relationship, returned to threaten Constantinople when the money ran out.

In addition, the full weight of the Slavic migrations came to be felt. Peaceful though they may have been, the primitive Slavs severely strained and sometimes broke the administrative links of the empire. Finally, the empire was split by debates over Christian doctrine.

1. Two of Justinian’s successors succumbed to madness under the stress of trying to maintain order in the empire.
2. Heraclius : The Empire Redefined Salvation appeared from the west when Heraclius (610-641), the Byzantine governor of North Africa, returned to Constantinople to overthrow the mad emperor Phocas.

Conditions were so dismal and the future appeared so perilous when Heraclius arrived in the capital that he considered moving the government from Constantinople to Carthage in North Africa. The situation did not improve soon. The Persians marched through Syria, took Jerusalem – capturing the “True Cross” – and entered Egypt.

1. When Egypt fell to the Persians, the Byzantine Empire lost a large part of its grain supply.
2. Two Asiatic invaders, the Avars and the Bulgars, pushed against the empire from the north.
3. Pirates controlled the sea lanes and the Slavs cut land communication across the Balkans.
4. At this moment of ultimate peril, the emperor decided to throw out the state structure that had been in place since the time of Diocletian and Constantine.

Heraclius created a new system that strengthened his army, tapped the support of the church and people, and erected a more efficient, streamlined administration. He determined that the foundation for the redefined empire would be Anatolia (present-day Turkey) and that the main supply of soldiers for his army would be the free peasants living there, rather than mercenaries.

In place of the sprawling realm passed on by Justinian, Heraclius designed a compact state and an administration conceived to deal simultaneously with the needs of government and the challenges of defense. Heraclius’ system, known as the theme system, had been tested when the emperor had ruled North Africa.

Acting on the lessons of the past four centuries, he assumed that defense was a constant need and that free peasant soldiers living in the theme (district) they were defending would be the most effective and efficient force. He installed the system first in Anatolia, and his successors spread it throughout the empire for the next two centuries.

Heraclius’ scheme provided sound administration and effective defense for half of the cost formerly required. As long as the theme system with its self-supporting, land-owning, free peasantry endured, Byzantium remained strong. When the theme system and its free peasantry were abandoned in the eleventh century, the empire became weak and vulnerable.

Heraclius fought history’s first holy war to reclaim Jerusalem from the Persians. By 626 he stood poised to strike the final blow and refused to be distracted by the Avar siege of Constantinople. He defeated the Persians at Nineva, marched on to Ctesiphon, and finally reclaimed the “True Cross” and returned it to Jerusalem in 630.

1. Heraclius was unable to savor his victory for long, because the Muslim advance posed an even greater threat to Byzantium.
2. The Muslims took Syria and Palestine at the battle of Yarmuk in 636.
3. Persia fell the following year, and Egypt in 640.
4. Constantinople’s walls and the redefined Byzantine state withstood the challenge, enduring two sieges in 674-678 and in 717.

When Byzantium faced a three-sided invasion from the Arabs, Avars, and Bulgarians in 717, the powerful leader Leo the Isaurian (717-741) came forward to save the empire. The Byzantines triumphed by using new techniques such as Greek fire, a sort of medieval equivalent of napalm.

The substance, a powerful chemical mixture whose main ingredient was saltpeter, caught fire on contact with water and stuck to the hulls of the Arabs’ wooden ships. Over the next ten years, Leo rebuilt those areas ruined by war and strengthened the theme system. He reformed the law, limiting capital punishment to crimes involving treason.

He decreed the use of mutilation for a wide range of common crimes, a harsh but still less extreme punishment than execution. The Iconoclastic Controversy From the beginning, the Byzantine emperors played active roles in the calling of church councils and the formation of Christian doctrine.

Leo the Isaurian took seriously his role as religious leader of the empire. He vigorously persecuted heretics and Jews, ordering that the latter must be baptized. In 726 he launched a theological crusade against the use of icons, images or representations of Christ and other religious figures. The emperor was concerned that icons played too prominent a role in Byzantine life and that their common use as godparents, witnesses at weddings, and objects of adoration violated the Old Testament prohibition of the worship of graven images.

Accordingly, the emperor ordered the army to destroy icons. This image-breaking, or iconoclastic, policy sparked a violent reaction in the western part of the empire, especially in the monasteries. The government responded by mercilessly persecuting those opposed to the policy.

1. The eastern part of the empire, centered at Anatolia, supported the breaking of the images.
2. By trying to remove what he considered an abuse, Leo split his empire in two.
3. In Byzantium’s single-centered society, this religious conflict had far-reaching cultural, political, and social implications.
4. In 731 Pope Gregory II condemned iconoclasm.

Leo’s decision to destroy icons stressed the fracture lines that had existed between east and west for the past four centuries, expressed in the linguistic differences between the Latin west and the Greek east. Leo’s successors continued his religious and political policies, and in 754 Pope Stephen II turned to the north and struck an alliance with the Frankish king Pepin.

This was the first step in a process that half a century later would lead to the birth of the Holy Roman Empire and the formal political split of Europe into the east and west (see ch.9). There was a brief attempt under the regent, later empress, Irene (797-802), in 787, to restore icons. In 797 she gained power after having her son – the rightful but incompetent heir – blinded in the very room in which she had given him birth.

Irene then became the first woman to rule the empire in her own name. She could neither win widespread support for her pro-icon policies, nor could she put together a marriage alliance with the newly proclaimed western emperor Charlemagne, a union which would have brought east and west together.

• As Irene spent the treasury into bankruptcy, her enemies increased.
• Finally in 802, they deposed her and exiled her to the island of Lesbos.
• The conflict over iconoclasm and Irene’s ineptitude placed the empire in jeopardy once again.
• Her successor, Nicepherous (802-811), after struggling to restore the bases of Byzantine power, was captured in battle with the Bulgarians in 811.

The Khan Krum beheaded him and had his skull made into a drinking mug. Soon the iconoclasts made a comeback, but this phase of image-breaking lacked the vigor of the first, and by 842 the policy had been abandoned. The iconoclastic controversy marked a period when the split between east and west became final.

Eastern emperors were strongly impressed by Islamic culture, with its prohibition of images. The emperor Theophilus (829-842), for example, was a student of Muslim art and culture, and Constantinople’s painting, architecture, and universities benefited from the vigor of Islamic culture. This focus on the east may have led to the final split with the west, but it also produced an eastern state with its theological house finally in order and its borders fairly secure by the middle of the ninth century.

The Golden Age: 842-1071 For two centuries, roughly coinciding with the reign of the Macedonian dynasty (867-1056), Byzantium enjoyed political and cultural superiority over its western and eastern foes. Western Europe staggered under the blows dealt by the Saracens, Vikings, and Magyars.

The Arabs lost the momentum that had carried them forward for two centuries. Constantinople enjoyed the relative calm, wealth, and balance bequeathed by the theme system and promoted by a series of powerful rulers. The time was marked by the flowering of artists, scholars, and theologians as much as it was by the presence of great warriors.

It was during this golden age that Constantinople made its major contributions to Eastern Europe and Russia. Missionaries from Constantinople set out in the 860s to convert the Bulgarian and Slavic peoples and in the process organized their language, laws, esthetics, political patterns, and ethics, as well as their religion.

But such transformation did not take place without struggle. Conflict marked the relationship between the Roman and Byzantine churches. The most significant indication of this competition was seen in the contest between the patriarch Photius and Pope Nicholas I in the middle of the ninth century. Photius excelled both as a scholar and religious leader.

He made impressive contributions to universities throughout the Byzantine empire and worked to increase the area of Orthodoxy’s influence. Nicholas was his equal in ambition, ego, and intellect. They collided in their attempts to convert the pagan peoples such as the Bulgarians, who were caught between their spheres of influence.

• The Bulgarian Khan Boris, as cunning and shrewd as either Photius or Nicholas, saw the trend toward conversion to Christianity that had been developing in Europe since the sixth century and realized the increased power he could gain by the heavenly approval of his rule.
• He wanted his own patriarch and church and dealt with the side that gave him the better bargain.

Between 864 and 866 Boris changed his mind three times over the issue of which holy city to turn to. Finally, the Byzantines gave the Bulgarians the equivalent of an autonomous church, and in return the Bulgarians entered the Byzantine cultural orbit.

The resulting schism between the churches set off a sputtering sequence of Christian warfare that went on for centuries. The work of the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius was more important than Bulgarian ambitions or churchly competition. The two, who were brothers, were natives of Thessalonica, a city at the mouth of the Vardar-Morava waterway that gave access to the Slavic lands.

They learned the Slavic language and led a mission to Moravia, which was ruled by King Rastislav. The king no doubt wanted to convert to Orthodoxy and enter the Byzantine orbit in order to preserve as much independence for his land as he could in the face of pressure from his powerful German neighbors.

Cyril and Methodius went north, teaching their faith in the vernacular Slavic language. Cyril devised an alphabet for the Slavs, adapting Greek letters. The two brothers translated the liturgy and many religious books into Slavic. Although Germanic missionaries eventually converted the Moravians by sheer force, the efforts of Cyril and Methodius profoundly affected all the Slavic peoples, whose languages are rooted in the work of the two brothers.

Byzantium continued its military as well as its theological intensity. Arab armies made continual thrusts, including one at Thessalonica in 904 that led to the Byzantine loss of 22,000 people through death or slavery. But during the tenth century the combination of the decline in Muslim combativeness and the solidarity of Byzantine defenses brought an end to that conflict.

Basil II (963-1025), surnamed Bulgaroctonus, or Bulgar-slayer, stopped the Bulgarians at the battle of Balathista in 1014. At the same time, the Macedonian emperors dealt from a position of strength with western European powers, especially in Italy, where their interests clashed. Western diplomats visiting the Byzantine court expressed outrage at the benign contempt with which the eastern emperors treated them, but this conduct merely reflected Constantinople’s understanding of its role in the world.

By the eleventh century, succession to the Byzantine throne had degenerated into a power struggle between the civil and military aristocracies. On the other hand, the secular and theological universities flourished despite the political instability, and the emperors proved to be generous patrons of the arts.

1. Basil I (867-886) and Leo VI (886-912) oversaw the collection and reform of the law codes.
2. Leo, the most prolific lawgiver since Justinian, sponsored the greatest collection of laws of the medieval Byzantine empire, a work that would affect jurisprudence throughout Europe.
3. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (912-959) excelled as a military leader, lover of books, promoter of an encyclopedia, and surveyor of the empire’s provinces.

At a time when scholarship in western Europe was almost nonexistent, Byzantine society featured a rich cultural life and widespread literacy among men and women of different classes. The greatest contribution to Western civilization made during the golden age was the preservation of ancient learning, especially in the areas of law, Greek science, Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, and Greek literature.

Unlike in the West where the church maintained scholarship, the civil servants of Constantinople perpetuated the Greek tradition in philosophy, literature, and science. Byzantine monasteries produced many saints and mystics but showed little interest in learning and teaching. Decline And Crusades Empires more often succumb to internal ailments than to external takeovers and this was the case with the Byzantine empire.

As long as Constantinople strengthened the foundations laid by Heraclius – the theme system and reliance on the free peasant-soldier – the empire withstood the military attacks of the strongest armies. When the Byzantine leaders abandoned the pillars of their success, the empire began to falter.

• Inflation and narrow ambition ate away at the Heraclian structure.
• Too much money chased too few goods during the golden age.
• Land came to be the most profitable investment for the rich, and the landowning magnates needed labor.
• As prices went up, taxes followed.
• The peasant villages were collectively responsible for paying taxes, and the rising tax burden overwhelmed them.

In many parts of the empire, villagers sought relief by placing themselves under the control of large landowners, thus taking themselves out of the tax pool and lowering the number of peasant-soldiers. Both the state treasury and the army suffered. Until the time of Basil II, the Macedonian emperors tried to protect the peasantry through legislation, but the problem was not corrected.

1. Even though the free peasantry never entirely disappeared and each free person was still theoretically a citizen of the empire, economic and social pressures effectively destroyed the theme system.
2. Exacerbating the problem was the growth of the church’s holdings and the large percentage of the population entering church service, thus becoming exempt from taxation.

In the fifty years after the death of Basil II in 1025, the illusion that eternal peace had been achieved encouraged the opportunistic civil aristocracy, which controlled the state, to weaken the army and ignore the provinces. When danger next appeared, no strong leader emerged to save Byzantium.

Perhaps this was because no enemies appeared dramatically before the walls of Constantinople. Instead, a new foe arose, moving haphazardly across the empire. Around the sixth century, the first in a series of waves of Turkish bands appeared in southwest Asia. These nomads converted to Islam and fought with, then against, the Persians, Byzantines, and Arabs.

When the Seljuk Turk leader Alp Arslan (“Victorious Lion”) made a tentative probe into the empire’s eastern perimeter near Lake Van in 1071, the multilingual mercenary army from Constantinople fell apart even before fighting began at the battle of Manzikert.

With the disintegration of the army, the only limit to the Turks’ march for the next decade was the extent of their own ambition and energy. Byzantium lost the heart of its empire, and with it the reserves of soldiers, leaders, taxes, and food that had enabled it to survive for the past four centuries.

From its weakened position, the empire confronted Venice, a powerful commercial and later political rival, By the end of the eleventh century, the Venetians took undisputed trading supremacy in the Adriatic Sea and turned their attention to the eastern Mediterranean.

1. The Byzantines also faced the challenges of the Normans, led by Robert Guiscard, who took the last Byzantine stronghold in Italy.
2. In 1081 the Comnenian family claimed the Byzantine throne.
3. In an earlier time, with the empire in its strength this politically astute family might have accomplished great things.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, though, the best they could do was play a balance-of-power game between east and west. Fifteen years later, in 1096, the first crusaders appeared., partially in response to the Council of Clermont, partially in response to the opportunity for gold and glory.

1. Alexium Comnenus (1081-1118) had appealed to Pope Urban II for help against the Turks, but the emperor had not bargained on finding a host of crusaders, including the dreaded Normans, on his doorstep.
2. Alexius sent them quickly across the Dardanelles where they won some battles and permitted the Byzantines to reclaim some of their losses in Asia Minor.

Subsequent crusades, however, failed to bring good relations between east and west, whose churches had excommunicated each other in 1054. By the time of the Fourth Crusade, the combination of envy, hatred, and frustration that had been building up for some time led to an atrocity.

• The Venetians controlled the ships and money for this crusade and persuaded the fighters to attack the Christian city of Zara in Dalmatia – a commercial rival of Venice – and Constantinople before going on to the Holy Land.
• Venice wanted a trade monopoly in the eastern Mediterranean more than a fight with the Muslims.

Constantinople was paralyzed by factional strife, and for the first time, an invading force captured the city and devastated it far more than the Turks would 250 years later. A French noble described the scene: The fire.continued to rage for a whole week and no one could put it out.

• What damage was done, or what riches and possessions were destroyed in the flames was beyond the power of man to calculate.
• The army.gained much booty; so much, indeed, that no one could estimate its amount or its value.
• It included gold and silver, table-services and precious stones, satin and silk, mantles of squirrel fur, ermine and miniver, and every choicest thing to be found on this earth so much booty had never been gained in any city since the creation of the world.

The Venetians made sure they got their share of the spoils, such as the bronze horses now found at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, and played a key role in placing a new emperor on the throne. The invaders ruled Constantinople until 1261. The Venetians put a stranglehold on commerce in the region and then turned their hostility toward the Genoese, who threatened their monopoly.

The Paleologus Dynasty (1261-1453), which ruled the empire during its final two centuries, saw the formerly glorious realm become a pawn in a new game. Greeks may have regained control of the church and the state, but there was little strength left to carry on the ancient traditions. The free peasant became ever rarer, as a form of feudalism,

developed in which nobles resisted the authority of the emperor and the imperial bureaucracy. The solidus, the Byzantine coin which had resisted debasement from the fourth through the eleventh century, now fell victim to inflation. The church, once a major support for the state, became embroiled in continual doctrinal disputes.

Slavic peoples such as the Serbs, who had posed no danger to the empire in its former strength became threats. After the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century destroyed the exhausted Seljuq Turks, a new, more formidable threat appeared – the Ottoman, or Osmanli, Turks. Blessed after 1296 with a strong line of male successors and good fortune, the Ottomans rapidly expanded their power through the Balkans.

They crossed the Straits into Europe in 1354 and moved up the Vardar-Morava valleys to take Serres (1383), Sofia (1385), Nish (1386), Thessalonica (1387), and finally Kossovo from the South Slavs in 1389. The Turks won their victories by virtue of their overwhelming superiority in both infantry and cavalry.

1. But their administrative effectiveness, which combined strength and flexibility, solidified their rule in areas they conquered.
2. In contrast to the Christians, both Roman and Byzantine, who were intolerant of religious differences, the Turks allowed monotheists, or any of the believers in a “religion of the book” (the Bible, Torah, or Koran), to retain their faith and be ruled by a religious superior through the millet system, a network of religious ghettoes.

In response to the Ottoman advance, the west mounted a poorly conceived and ill-fated crusade against the Turks at Nicopolis on the Danube in 1396 that led to the capture and slaughter of 10,000 knights and their attendants. Only the overwhelming force of Tamerlane (Timur the Lame), a Turko-Mongol ruler who devastated the Ottoman army in 1402, gave Constantinople and Europe some breathing space.
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Why do you think Byzantine scholars were so important to Western Europe?

Key Points –

The Byzantine Empire had lasting legacies on many subsequent cultures. The Byzantine Empire insulated Europe from enemies and gave it the time it needed to recover from the chaotic medieval period. Byzantium’s role in shaping Orthodoxy was also hugely influential; the modern-day Eastern Orthodox Church is the second largest Christian church in the world. Byzantine architecture, particularly in religious buildings, can be found in diverse regions, from Egypt and Arabia to Russia and Romania. Byzantine painting from this period would have a strong influence on the later painters of the Italian Renaissance.

A common language used by people of diverse backgrounds to communicate with one another; often a basic form of speech with simplified grammar. Byzantium has been often identified with absolutism, orthodox spirituality, orientalism and exoticism, while the terms “Byzantine” and “Byzantinism” have been used as metaphors for decadence, complex bureaucracy, and repression.

1. Both eastern and western European authors have often perceived Byzantium as a body of religious, political, and philosophical ideas contrary to those of the west.
2. Even in 19th-century Greece, the focus was mainly on the classical past, while Byzantine tradition had been associated with negative connotations.

This traditional approach towards Byzantium has been partially or wholly disputed and revised by modern studies, which focus on the positive aspects of Byzantine culture and legacy. Historian Averil Cameron, for example, regards the Byzantine contribution to the formation of medieval Europe undeniable, and both Cameron and Obolensky recognize the major role of Byzantium in shaping Orthodoxy.
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Why were Byzantine scholars so important to Western Europe?

History – The main role of Byzantine scholars within Renaissance humanism was the teaching of the Greek language to their western counterparts in universities or privately together with the spread of ancient texts. Their forerunners were Barlaam of Calabria (Bernardo Massari) and Leonzio Pilato, two translators who were both born in Calabria in southern Italy and who were both educated in the Greek language.

1. The impact of these two scholars on the humanists was indisputable.
2. By 1500 there was a Greek-speaking community of about 5,000 in Venice,
3. The Venetians also ruled Crete, Dalmatia, and scattered islands and port cities of the former empire, the populations of which were augmented by refugees from other Byzantine provinces who preferred Venetian to Ottoman governance.

Crete was especially notable for the Cretan School of icon -painting, which after 1453 became the most important in the Greek world. After the peak of the Italian Renaissance in the first decades of the 16th century, the flow of information reversed, and Greek scholars in Italy were employed to oppose Turkish expansion into former Byzantine lands in Greece, prevent the Protestant Reformation spreading there and help bring the Eastern Churches back into communion with Rome.

In 1577, Gregory XIII founded the Collegio Pontifico Greco as a college in Rome to receive young Greeks belonging to any nation in which the Greek Rite was used, and consequently for Greek refugees in Italy as well as the Ruthenians and Malchites of Egypt and Syria, The construction of the College and Church of S.

Atanasio, joined by a bridge over the Via dei Greci, was begun in that year. Although ideas from ancient Rome already enjoyed popularity with the scholars of the 14th century and their importance to the Renaissance was undeniable, the lessons of Greek learning brought by Byzantine intellectuals changed the course of humanism and the Renaissance itself.

• While Greek learning affected all the subjects of the studia humanitatis, history and philosophy in particular were profoundly affected by the texts and ideas brought from Byzantium,
• History was changed by the re-discovery and spread of Greek historians’ writings, and this knowledge of Greek historical treatises helped the subject of history become a guide to virtuous living based on the study of past events and people.

The effects of this renewed knowledge of Greek history can be seen in the writings of humanists on virtue, which was a popular topic. Specifically, these effects are shown in the examples provided from Greek antiquity that displayed virtue as well as vice,

1. The philosophy of not only Aristotle but also Plato affected the Renaissance by causing debates over man’s place in the universe, the immortality of the soul, and the ability of man to improve himself through virtue.
2. The flourishing of philosophical writings in the 15th century revealed the impact of Greek philosophy and science on the Renaissance.

The resonance of these changes lasted through the centuries following the Renaissance not only in the writing of humanists, but also in the education and values of Europe and western society even to the present day. Deno Geanakopoulos in his work on the contribution of Byzantine Greek scholars to Renaissance has summarised their input into three major shifts to Renaissance thought:

• in early 14th century Florence from the early, central emphasis on rhetoric to one on metaphysical philosophy by means of introducing and reinterpretation of the Platonic texts,
• in Venice – Padua by reducing the dominance of Averroist Aristotle in science and philosophy by supplementing but not completely replacing it with Byzantine traditions which utilised ancient and Byzantine commentators on Aristotle,
• and earlier in the mid 15th century in Rome, through emphasis not on any philosophical school but through the production of more authentic and reliable versions of Greek texts relevant to all fields of humanism and science and with respect to the Greek fathers of the church. Hardly less important was their direct or indirect influence on exegesis of the New Testament itself through Cardinal Bessarion ‘s inspiration of Lorenzo Valla ‘s biblical emendations of the Latin vulgate in the light of the Greek text.

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What is Byzantines general problem?

The Byzantine Generals Problem – The Byzantine Generals Problem is a game theory problem, which describes the difficulty decentralized parties have in arriving at consensus without relying on a trusted central party. In a network where no member can verify the identity of other members, how can members collectively agree on a certain truth? The game theory analogy behind the Byzantine Generals Problem is that several generals are besieging Byzantium.

1. They have surrounded the city, but they must collectively decide when to attack.
2. If all generals attack at the same time, they will win, but if they attack at different times, they will lose.
3. The generals have no secure communication channels with one another because any messages they send or receive may have been intercepted or deceptively sent by Byzantium’s defenders.

How can the generals organize to attack at the same time?
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Why was the Byzantine Empire so powerful?

The Golden Age of Byzantium – The period from about 641 to 1025 is considered to be the golden age of the Byzantine Empire. Advances in military strength, religious influence, and the arts made the Byzantines one of the most powerful forces in the world of the Middle Ages,

• The territories of the empire continued to change.
• Lands were lost to Islam in North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria.
• Arab forces besieged Constantinople in 674 and again in 717.
• Slavs and Bulgars threatened Byzantine holdings in the Balkans.
• Byzantine leaders were able to protect the empire, however.

By the end of this period, the empire once again had far-flung frontiers and enormous wealth. Emperor Leo III, known as the Isaurian, turned back Arab assaults on the Byzantines in 718 and 740. His son and successor, Constantine V, also won victories against the Arabs, Syrians, and Bulgars during his reign from 741 to 775. Courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum The coronation of Basil I of Macedonia in 867 instituted a long dynasty of Macedonian emperors. After murdering Emperor Michael III, Basil secured the succession to the crown for his descendants. Under the Macedonians, Byzantine military might triumphed against the Arabs to the east and the Bulgars to the north.

In 880 Basil retook Italy and rebuilt the imperial army and navy. In 976 the 20-year-old Basil II became sole ruler of the empire. His victory over the Bulgarians in 1018 after a 20-year campaign, and his orders to blind the Bulgarian soldiers, gained him the title of “Bulgaroktonus,” or Bulgar Slayer.

In 1018, the Byzantines won further victories against the Lombards and Normans in Italy, and against the Bulgarians in Macedonia. The religious identity of the Byzantines underwent profound change during this period. In particular, the controversy over the use of icons led to the movement called iconoclasm (image breaking).

1. This in turn paved the way for the final split between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.
2. Iconoclasts argued that the use of icons by such leaders as Heraclius was a pagan rather than Christian ritual.
3. Religious art, they claimed, should be only of abstract symbols, plants, or animals.
4. They believed that the growing power of the Arabs was due to the Byzantine sin of icon worship.

Opponents to iconoclasm, led by the monks, were called iconophiles. In 726 Emperor Leo III issued the first of many laws against the use of icons. This ushered in the Iconoclastic Controversy, which lasted until 843. In 731, the Roman pope, Gregory III, countered the uprising with a threat to expel the iconoclasts from the Catholic church.

1. The controversy revealed the Eastern Orthodox church to be closer in spirit to the followers of Islam, to whom the representation of God in human form was blasphemy, than to the Roman Catholic church.
2. The Eastern church was becoming much more of a national church that saw the emperor as the union of both religious and political power.

The Western church, in contrast, was independent of state authority and more international in scope. © Tolga TEZCAN—E+/Getty Images It was not until 1054 that a permanent split between the two churches occurred. One indication of the future division was seen on Christmas Day in 800 when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans in the West.

1. The Byzantines, who at that time were ruled by Empress Irene, ignored the claims of the new Holy Roman Empire and of the pope.
2. It was Empress Irene who brought the Iconoclastic Controversy to an end by restoring the use of images in the Eastern Orthodox church.
3. A further sign of dissent came in 879, when the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople expelled each other from the church by a process called excommunication.

In the time of the Macedonian emperors, Eastern Orthodox churchmen made great strides in converting pagan peoples. The conversion of the Slavs and the Bulgars to Christianity was carried out by the Thessalonian monks Cyril and Methodius. These missionaries invented the Slavonic alphabet (Cyrillic and Glagolitic).

The new language brought literacy as well as Christianity to the converts. At the same time, missionary activities extended Byzantine influence to Russia and the Balkans. Byzantine culture continued to flourish. In the arts, poetry revived and scholars produced encyclopedias, anthologies, studies of classic Greek and Roman texts, and histories.

The University of Constantinople was reorganized. Mosaics and paintings were influenced by a new church decoration style, in which the church itself represented the world and the dome represented heaven. In this scheme, a portrait of Christ Pantocrator (Ruler of All) stared down at worshipers from the dome; the church walls were covered with portraits of other holy figures.

• The Macedonians developed a revision of the Justinian code, known as the Basilica, and abolished the last vestige of the old Roman Republic—the Senate.
• A centralized and highly ritualized bureaucracy helped the emperor to control an elaborate foreign and diplomatic service.
• There were by now more than 30 army districts in Europe and Asia directly responsible to the emperor in Constantinople.

By the opening decades of the 2nd millennium, the Byzantines had reached the peak of their power.
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When was the Byzantine Empire important?

Byzantine Empire | History, Geography, Maps, & Facts The Byzantine Empire existed from approximately 395 CE—when the Roman Empire was split—to 1453. It became one of the leading civilizations in the world before falling to an Ottoman Turkish onslaught in the 15th century.

1. The Byzantine Empire was the eastern half of the, and it survived over a thousand years after the western half dissolved.
2. A series of regional traumas—including pestilence, warfare, social upheaval, and the Arab Muslim assault of the 630s—marked its cultural and institutional transformation from the Eastern Roman Empire to the Byzantine Empire.

Modern historians use the term Byzantine Empire to distinguish the state from the western portion of the Roman Empire. The name refers to Byzantium, an ancient Greek colony and transit point that became the location of the Byzantine Empire’s capital city,,

Inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire would have self-identified as Romaioi, or Romans. At its greatest extent, the Byzantine Empire covered much of the land surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, including what is now Italy, Greece, and Turkey along with portions of North Africa and the Middle East. It peaked in size in the 6th century under Emperor but was significantly diminished by the 11th century following internal conflict and invasions from outsiders, including the Seljuq Turks and the Normans.

Citizens of the Byzantine Empire strongly identified as Christians, just as they identified as Romans. Emperors, seeking to unite their realm under one faith, recognized Christianity as the state religion and endowed the church with political and legal power.

Under some emperors, pagans were ordered to attend church and be baptized, and Jews and Samaritans were barred from receiving dowries or inheritances unless they converted. Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the, which survived for a thousand years after the western half had crumbled into various feudal kingdoms and which finally fell to Turkish onslaughts in 1453.

The very name illustrates the misconceptions to which the history has often been subject, for its inhabitants would hardly have considered the term appropriate to themselves or to their state. Theirs was, in their view, none other than the Roman Empire, founded shortly before the beginning of the era by God’s grace to unify his people in preparation for the coming of his Son.

• Proud of that Christian and Roman heritage, convinced that their earthly empire so nearly resembled the heavenly pattern that it could never change, they called themselves Romaioi, or Romans.
• Modern historians agree with them only in part.
• The term East Rome accurately described the political unit embracing the Eastern provinces of the old Roman Empire until 476, while there were yet two emperors.

The same term may even be used until the last half of the 6th century, as long as men continued to act and think according to patterns not unlike those prevailing in an earlier Roman Empire. During those same centuries, nonetheless, there were changes so profound in their effect that after the 7th century state and society in the East differed markedly from their earlier forms.

In an effort to recognize that distinction, historians traditionally have described the empire as Byzantine. The latter term is derived from the name Byzantium, borne by a colony of ancient Greek foundation on the European side of the, midway between the and the, The city was, by virtue of its location, a natural transit point between and (Anatolia).

Refounded as the “new Rome” by the emperor in 330, it was endowed by him with the name, the city of Constantine. The derivation from Byzantium is suggestive in that it emphasizes a central aspect of Byzantine civilization: the degree to which the empire’s administrative and life found a focus at Constantinople from 330 to 1453, the year of the city’s last and unsuccessful defense under the 11th (or 12th) Constantine.

The circumstances of the last defense are suggestive too, for in 1453 the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds seemed briefly to meet. The last Constantine fell in defense of the new Rome built by the first Constantine. Walls that had held firm in the early against,,,, and were finally by modern, in the mysteries of which European technicians had instructed the most successful of the Central Asian invaders: the Ottoman,

The fortunes of the empire were thus intimately entwined with those of peoples whose achievements and failures the medieval history of both Europe and, Nor did hostility always characterize the relations between and those whom they considered “barbarian.” Even though the Byzantine intellectual firmly believed that civilization ended with the boundaries of his world, he opened it to the barbarian, provided that the latter (with his kin) would accept and render loyalty to the emperor.

Thanks to the settlements that resulted from such policies, many a name, seemingly Greek, disguises another of different origin: Slavic, perhaps, or Turkish. Barbarian illiteracy, in consequence, obscures the early generations of more than one family destined to rise to prominence in the empire’s military or,

Byzantium was a melting-pot society, characterized during its earlier centuries by a degree of that belies the, often applied to it, of an immobile caste-ridden society. A source of strength in the early Middle Ages, Byzantium’s central geographical position served it ill after the 10th century.

1. The conquests of that age presented new problems of organization and assimilation, and those the emperors had to confront at precisely the time when older questions of economic and social policy pressed for answers in a new and form.
2. Satisfactory solutions were never found.
3. Bitter ethnic and religious hostility marked the history of the empire’s later centuries, weakening Byzantium in the face of new enemies descending upon it from east and west.

The empire finally collapsed when its administrative structures could no longer support the burden of leadership thrust upon it by military conquests. The Roman Empire, the ancestor of the Byzantine, remarkably blended unity and, the former being by far the better known, since its were the predominant features of Roman civilization.

• The common, the coinage, the “international” army of the Roman, the urban network, the law, and the Greco-Roman heritage of civic loomed largest among those bonds that and his successors hoped would bring unity and peace to a Mediterranean world exhausted by centuries of civil war.
• To strengthen those sinews of imperial civilization, the emperors hoped that a lively and spontaneous trade might develop between the several provinces.

At the of that world stood the emperor himself, the man of wisdom who would shelter the state from whatever mishaps fortune had darkly hidden. The emperor alone could provide that protection, since, as the embodiment of all the virtues, he possessed in perfection those qualities displayed only imperfectly by his individual subjects.

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2. The Roman formula of combating fortune with reason and therewith ensuring unity throughout the Mediterranean world worked surprisingly well in view of the pressures for disunity that time was to multiply.
3. Conquest had brought regions of background under Roman rule.

The Eastern provinces were ancient and populous centres of that urban life that for millennia had defined the character of Mediterranean civilization. The Western provinces had only lately entered upon their own course of urban development under the not-always-tender ministrations of their Roman masters.

1. Each of the aspects of unity enumerated above had its other side.
2. Not everyone understood or spoke,
3. Paralleling and sometimes influencing were local customs and practices, understandably by reason of their antiquity.
4. Temples,, and Christian baptisteries attest to the range of organized religions with which the official forms of the Roman state, including those of emperor worship, could not always peacefully coexist.

And far from unifying the Roman world, often created self-sufficient units in the several regions, provinces, or great estates. Given the obstacles against which the masters of the Roman state struggled, it is altogether remarkable that Roman patriotism was ever more than an empty formula, that gentlemen from the to the were aware that they had “something” in common.

1. That “something” might be defined as the Greco-Roman civic tradition in the widest sense of its institutional, intellectual, and emotional,
2. Grateful for the conditions of peace that fostered it, men of wealth and culture dedicated their time and resources to glorifying that tradition through adornment of the cities that exemplified it and through education of the young who they hoped might perpetuate it.

Upon that world the barbarians descended after about 150 ce, To protect the frontier against them, warrior emperors devoted whatever energies they could spare from the constant struggle to reassert control over provinces where local regimes emerged. In view of the ensuing warfare, the widespread incidence of disease, and the rapid turnover among the occupants of the imperial throne, it would be easy to assume that little was left of either the traditional fabric of Greco-Roman society or the structure designed to support it.

Neither assumption is accurate. Devastation was haphazard, and some regions suffered while others did not. In fact, the economy and society of the empire as a whole during that period was the most diverse it had ever been. Impelled by necessity or lured by profit, people moved from province to province.

Social disorder opened avenues to eminence and wealth that the more-stable order of an earlier age had closed to the talented and the ambitious. For personal and dynastic reasons, emperors favoured certain towns and provinces at the expense of others, and the course of succession to the throne, coupled with a resulting constant change among the top administrative officials, largely deprived economic and social policies of recognizable consistency.
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What is Byzantine called today?

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article is about the ancient city. For the city in the late Roman and the Eastern Roman or Byzantine periods (330–1453), see Constantinople, For the Ottoman and modern city (after 1453), see Istanbul, For the empire, see Byzantine Empire, For other uses, see Byzantium (disambiguation),

Byzantium

Byzantion
Location of Byzantion, corresponding to the modern-day Fatih district of Istanbul
Alternative name	Byzantion (earlier Greek name), Nova Roma (“New Rome”)
Location	Fatih, Istanbul, Turkey
Region	Marmara Region
Coordinates	41°00′55″N 28°59′05″E  /  41.01528°N 28.98472°E Coordinates : 41°00′55″N 28°59′05″E  /  41.01528°N 28.98472°E
Type	Ancient city
Part of	Roman Empire Byzantine Empire Latin Empire
Area	6 km 2 (2.3 sq mi) enclosed within Constantinian Walls 14 km 2 (5.4 sq mi) enclosed within Theodosian Walls
History
Founded	667 BC
Cultures	Greek, Ancient Greek Latin Byzantine

Byzantium () or Byzantion ( Ancient Greek : Βυζάντιον ) was an ancient Greek city in classical antiquity that became known as Constantinople in late antiquity and Istanbul today. The Greek name Byzantion and its Latinization Byzantium continued to be used as a name of Constantinople sporadically and to varying degrees during the thousand year existence of the Byzantine Empire,
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Why is Byzantine called Byzantine?

Byzantium – The term “Byzantine” derives from Byzantium, an ancient Greek colony founded by a man named Byzas. Located on the European side of the Bosporus (the strait linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean), the site of Byzantium was ideally located to serve as a transit and trade point between Europe and Asia.

In 330 A.D., Roman Emperor Constantine I chose Byzantium as the site of a “New Rome” with an eponymous capital city, Constantinople, Five years earlier, at the Council of Nicaea, Constantine had established Christianity — once an obscure Jewish sect — as Rome’s official religion. The citizens of Constantinople and the rest of the Eastern Roman Empire identified strongly as Romans and Christians, though many of them spoke Greek and not Latin.

Did you know? One of the most extraordinary aspects of the Byzantine Empire was its longevity: It was the only organized state west of China to survive without interruption from ancient times until the beginning of the modern age. Though Constantine ruled over a unified Roman Empire, this unity proved illusory after his death in 337.

1. In 364, Emperor Valentinian I again divided the empire into western and eastern sections, putting himself in power in the west and his brother Valens in the east.
2. The fate of the two regions diverged greatly over the next several centuries.
3. In the west, constant attacks from German invaders such as the Visigoths broke the struggling empire down piece by piece until Italy was the only territory left under Roman control.

In 476, the barbarian Odoacer overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, and after many centuries, the once-mighty empire of Rome had fallen,
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What was the Byzantine Empire philosophy?

The principal characteristics of Byzantine philosophy are: The personal hypostases of God as the principle not only of substance but also of being (Ontology, Metaphysics). Person as ontological rather than substance or essence. The creation of the world by God and the limited timescale of the universe.
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Who was educated in Byzantine Empire?

Byzantine education is an enticing subject for exploration, and one that changes in hue from one era to the next. Of course, there were stable axes traversing its entire, extensive history. Education itself was one such axis of reference throughout the Byzantine centuries.

It retained its links with its — mainly Hellenistic — past and expanded on them, moulding at a relatively early stage a homo Byzantinus who remained true both to his classical learning and his Christian beliefs.1 The Byzantine Empire never imposed compulsory schooling on its subjects, while education was always open to those that desired it and had the wherewithal to pay for it.2 And while the state was well aware that its functionaries had need of at least a rudimentary school-training, education in itself was never a prerequisite for holding an imperial post.

On the other hand, when it was present, education was a highly-regarded element in anyone’s make-up, but was especially admired in holders of high office. Much has been written about the attitude of the Christians of the fourth century towards the intellectual heritage of the Greco-Roman world.

Christianity, a religion founded on the revealed God, could never entertain the idea that people should be educated in order to embrace the faith. On the other hand, it was realized at an early stage that the dialogue with the intellectual tradition of the ancient world would only benefit Christianity.

Indeed, this dialogue played a major role in the formative intellectual debates and concerns of this period.3 One of the great sponsors of education in the early Byzantine period was the emperor Julian (361-363). The young emperor propounded the view that Greco-Roman civilization finds his historical justification in theological terms; education and religion were inextricably related, while the ultimate guarantor of education was divine providence itself.

1. In this conviction Julian issued an edict in 362 by which Christian teachers were banned from practising their profession, as it was assumed that they did not respect the works they were using as textbooks.
2. The law applied to holders of municipal chairs but not to the vast majority of teachers, who taught privately and were paid by their students.4 It was Basil the Great (ca.329-379) who in the end ensured that developments pursued a less hasty pace.

In his Address to youths on how they might profit from Greek literature he commended the study of the classics to Christians, with the proviso that pupils should draw from the pagan authors whatever was consistent with the ethics of the new religion.

His close friend Gregory of Nazianzos (329/330-390), patriarch of Constantinople and one of the most fascinating and intellectually restless men of his age, was more forceful in his criticism of Julian, pointing out that the works of pagan Antiquity were a legacy that benefited not only the pagans but also the Christians.

This view of Gregory’s was to prove the most enduring in the centuries to come, and paved the way for the compromise between Christianity and the old literary and intellectual codes, both in the religious and the secular spheres. Education in Byzantium was a matter of individual choice and there was never such a thing as statutory school attendance.

Any child whose parents were freeborn citizens was allowed to attend school. Given that the schools were always privately run, parents had to possess sufficient financial means to pay for their child’s education, the tuition fees frequently being referred to as misthos or siteresion, There is uncertainty as to the level of these fees; we are indirectly given to understand that they were relatively high, although this would depend on the learning and reputation of the teacher.

In a number of cases teachers are known to have demanded payment of fees owed from the parents of schoolchildren. On occasions, indeed, they had to resort to the law courts in order to receive their dues. In the tenth century we know of the existence in Constantinople of the office of the prokathemenos ton paideuterion, whose task was to supervise the schools.

1. Disputes arising between teachers could be resolved with the intervention of the eparch, the patriarch or even the emperor himself.
2. The imperial treasury occasionally provided assistance to certain teachers, but this assistance was rarely sufficient or paid on a regular basis.
3. The same policy was implemented by the patriarchate of Constantinople: again, the economic support was far from regular.

A number of monasteries also offered elementary schooling to young boarders who were usually destined to become monks or members of the clergy; this practice, however, was not widely popular. It must be stressed that one cannot talk of a purely Byzantine education.5 The Byzantine state neither knew an education of its own, nor imposed new guidelines on the education it offered.

Rather, Byzantium’s Hellenistic and Roman past had bequeathed an educational system whose structure remained unchanged until the final years of the Empire: a primary school, where the child was taught basic literacy, and a secondary school, where the bulk of the curriculum was based exclusively on secular literature.6 During the middle and late Byzantine period, it was the secondary school that undertook the brunt of children’s education, given that higher educational institutions were only available in large cities during the Empire’s early years, while from the ninth century onwards they depended on initiatives taken by emperors—and more rarely by senior officials—which were generally short-lived.

The Byzantine school was a one-man affair, the extension (so to speak) of a given tutor, who also determined the image projected by his small educational unit onto its social surroundings. Although there is no shortage of exceptions, a perusal of the sources -correspondence, in the main- confirms that the success (or otherwise) of a given school depended exclusively on the character of its teacher.

It was his presence and teaching that attracted parents and students.7 Children went to school in Constantinople whenever parents were sufficiently well off to afford such schooling. The primary level of education was generally known as propaideia, beginning around the age of six to eight, and lasted three to four years.

The ‘primary’ schoolteacher was known as the grammatistes, paidodidaskalos, paidotribes or paidagogos, Little is known about the places in which these schools were housed; as many grammatistai were members of the clergy, it is quite likely that lessons were widely conducted in churches or courtyards of monasteries.

1. Reading, writing and arithmetic were the staple subjects of primary education.
2. The pupils began by learning the individual letters, then syllables, monosyllabic words, combinations of vowels and consonants in alphabetical and reverse order, entire words and, gradually, entire texts.
3. Pupils used a stylus to write their exercises either on ostraca or on wooden tablets, known as schedaria,

The best type of tablet was coated in wax. Cheaper tablets could simply be coated with a thin layer of mud or sand; the pupil would scratch out his exercises with his nails. The key textbook was the Psalter, although other texts were also used. Given that books were very expensive, pupils practised by reading the text out loud and then repeating it and learning it by heart.

For arithmetic the schoolchildren counted with their fingers or used stones to make elementary calculations; they also used an abacus, i.e. a board with holes in it corresponding to numbers. Given that until the end of Byzantium it remained common practice to use the Greek numbering system, the grammatistes would get the children to indicate numbers to him by pointing to the appropriate hole on the abacus.

The grammatikos, also termed maistor, was responsible for the secondary level of education, the famous enkyklios paideia, commencing at around the age of twelve to fourteen and lasting, usually, for at least four years. The secondary schools were generally housed in buildings in the centre of Constantinople.

The pupils would spend the entire day at school and there were often boarding facilities for those whose families did not live locally. Attendance in class was obligatory; the so-called Anonymous Teacher, who had established such a school in Constantinople around the mid-tenth century, records how he once received a visit from an angry father who had seen his son in the market with friends bargaining for songbirds (!) when he was supposed to be at school.8 Judging from the recipients of Anonymous’ letters, this latter teacher had excellent connections to the palace, to high-ranking officials, as well as to the clergy; indeed, the patriarchate used to subsidise his school from time to time.9 Peer teaching is a fascinating methodological feature of the educational system, which is referred to in the Anonymous Teacher’s correspondence.

Thus, a group of students were assigned teaching duties, presumably because the school could not otherwise be effectively run. Comparative study of the contents of the Anonymous’ letters indicates that in addition to undertaking teaching tasks, which presumably consisted in tutoring the school’s younger students, the ekkritoi tes scholes or the epistatountes also had a voice in the institutional decision-making process.10 This important testimony is backed up by Life A of Athanasius of Athos, which refers both to a hierarchy of teachers and to students voting with regard to the promotion of teachers within this hierarchy.11 It is worth noting, however, that the sources make no mention of a comparable system of internal school organization during the later period of Byzantine history.

At the secondary level of education, the curriculum included the trivium of grammar, rhetoric and philosophy, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. The core texts of the trivium, 12 apart from Homer (principally the Iliad, with the Odyssey assigned only secondary importance), included what is known as the nine Byzantine tragedies, three by each tragedian ( The Persians, Prometheus Bound, and Seven against Thebes by Aeschylus, Ajax, Electra, and Oedipus the King by Sophocles, Hecuba, Orestes, and Phoenician Women by Euripides), three comedies by Aristophanes ( Wealth, Clouds, Frogs ), passages from Hesiod, Pindar, and Theocritus, Platonic dialogues, Lucian, the Cyropaedia combined with extracts from other works by Xenophon, speeches of Demosthenes and Isocrates, Philostratus, Psalms of David, poems of Gregory of Nazianzos, and other material.

The Techne grammatike of Dionysios Thrax remained the primary compendium for the teaching of grammar throughout the Byzantine period. The Canons of Theodosius of Alexandria and the grammar of George Choiroboskos were also popular.13 From the end of the tenth century onwards, a new teaching technique was developed, known as the schedographia (from schedos, meaning ‘draft’, ‘sketch’), by means of which the teacher taught the pupil spelling and grammar rules through a combination of wordplay and riddles.

The popularity of schedographia would reach near-extreme proportions among the intellectual community of the era, and the schede examinations, taking place in early summer, assumed an official character almost immediately.14 Rhetoric was viewed as the most important component of the secondary stage of education in Byzantium.

The grammatikos ‘ key teaching tool were exercises, known as progymnasmata, which aimed at training the student to compose short texts on a variety of themes: mythical stories, popular sayings, eulogies for historical or mythological characters, or comparisons between persons and events of opposing qualities (again usually drawn from mythology).

1. Among the most popular forms of progymnasmata was the ethopoiia, i.e.
2. The imitation of a particular character, and the ekphrasis, or description of a work of art, building etc.
3. The key textbook for the subject was that of Hermogenes of Tarsus ( On Staseis and On Ideas ), although various Byzantine writers produced commentaries on his work.

Aphthonios’ Progymnasmata 15 as well as Joseph Rhakendytes’ Encyclopedia, providing, among others, a partial synopsis of rhetoric, were also very popular. Mathematics was taught either as an individual subject or in combination with astronomy. The favourite textbook throughout the Byzantine period was written by Nikomachus of Gerasa (first–second century AD), but a series of mathematical epigrams by Metrodorus (sixth century) were also widely used.

1. Geometry as such was not widely developed by Byzantine scholars.
2. Euclid was the basis, although abundant commentaries that had been appended to his works since Antiquity were also used.
3. The boundary between astronomy and astrology was not always clear, but the Byzantines were intensely interested in the subject right down to the fall of Constantinople.

Ptolemy’s Mathematical Composition was another text frequently referred to, together with Aratos’ Phainomena and a small group of works by Autolykus, Euclid and Theodosius. A great number of important theoretical works related to the quadrivium was composed, including the Tetrabiblos of George Pachymeres (c.1242-1310), who paraphrased Diophantus.16 We have no idea whether teachers taught the entire core curriculum, especially the quadrivium,

The sources are of little help in this respect, while surviving accounts are incomplete; the correspondence of the Anonymous Teacher is typical in referring to Choiroboskos indirectly and saying very little about the school curriculum, while detailing disagreements and rivalry with Constantinopolitan colleagues in the most caustic of terms, and painting a tragic picture of his financial situation.17 The eleventh-century accounts are no different; we know almost nothing about the schools in which John Mauropous (ca.1000–1075/81) studied; the same is true of Michael Psellos (1018 – post 1081 ?), whose enkomion to his mother merely lists the different periods in his school career.18 However, some other texts, such as the epitaph written by Nicholas Mesarites (ca.1163/64-post 1214) in memory of his brother John, and the same author’s description of the Holy Apostles’ school, offer some interesting information concerning students’ life in twelfth century.19 Finally, the well-known autobiography by Gregory of Cyprus (1241-1290), the scholar patriarch, provides an intensely private approach to the schools of the thirteenth century and the material that they taught, initially in Nicaea and later in Constantinople after its recapture by Michael VIII Palaiologos (1261).

Gregory was a man of wide-ranging interests who himself taught and authored works for and about his chosen profession; he also contributed to the educational process in the late Byzantine period through the collection and copying of manuscripts, at least some of which were used for teaching purposes.20 Schedographia apart, the school curriculum was not subject to further change.

The primary characteristic of the teachers, especially in late Byzantium, was the number of works they produced relating to their vocation (manuals, editions or commentaries on standard texts etc.). Perhaps the best example of this development is the case of Maximos Planudes, a scholar with multiple and wide-ranging interests, among which mathematics and geography took pride of place, along with a deep concern for the fate of books.

Apart from copying and prolifically authoring volumes, Planudes was also an expert in binding them.21 ‘Higher education’ does exist in Byzantium, although it has few similarities with the structure of present-day universities. It should be pointed out that in Antiquity or Byzantium there were no institutions of higher education in the specific present-day sense of the term.

The Empire saw since Roman times to the education of those who would staff the state machine, through a number of largely ‘public’ officials who provided knowledge and enjoyed special privileges, such as tax exemption, purely for reasons of public interest.22 This was achieved through the familiar diffusion of education, ensured by the unhindered operation, at least until the sixth or even the seventh century, of the famous schools of Late Antiquity.

The schools in question focused on specific areas of study: Platonic and mostly Neoplatonic philosophy for the school of Athens, rhetoric for that of Antioch, broader classical and philosophical studies for the schools of Alexandria and Aphrodisias. Philosophy was also the focus of the school of Apameia, while Caesarea turned towards Christian and Jewish literature and thought, equipped with an outstanding library as well as with famous scriptoria.23 Finally, Berytus cultivated legal studies, from early on and at a very high level.

All those schools remained private, like the schools of the first two levels, although at times they elicited funds either from the state or from their host cities.24 We now have some knowledge about the internal organisation and operation of many of these institutions beyond the most prominent ones of Athens and Alexandria, on which there was always sufficient information.25 I note some examples: prospective students at the school of Antioch, which was dominated by Libanios after AD 354, submitted an application accompanied by the letter(s) of references required by the great rhetorician.26 As almost everywhere in Byzantium, this was a one-man school, although Libanios often employed grammatikoi to undertake the teaching of classical texts, which he deemed of major importance; some of Libanios’ associates either worked in Antioch or were former students of his.27 The operation of the school was assisted by the existence of an association of alumni, whose frequent meetings and close contact with the orator via personal correspondence promoted the image of the institution and of Libanios in particular.28 The law school of Berytus was included by Justinian (527-565), alongside that of Constantinople, in the constitutio Omnem of the year 533, after which it adopted a rigorous five-year curriculum with distinct subjects for each year.29 The legal text was read in Latin, interpreted by the antecessores, also called oikoumenikoi didaskaloi, and then translated into Greek by the students; most of them had difficulties in understanding Latin, and the teachers intervened to resolve them.30 It is worth noting that there are surviving explanatory texts by antecessores as well as student notes.

Finally, there is evidence of the existence of student unions which participated in School matters.31 If all this is observed in the periphery, great care is required when it comes to examining the presence of Byzantium, as a state, in the educational practice, with a view to reinforcing the educational image of Constantinople.

1. The city had no history of ‘higher’ schools, and things were likely to remain fluid for a period of time necessary for the city’s ideological determinants to take shape.
2. Yet the interventions of the state did not always have the same starting point.
3. When Libanius arrives in Constantinople, around the 340s, in search of work, he finds ‘sophists’ teaching in the market, having obtained official positions remunerated by the state, according to the old practice; 32 indeed, as he notes, one of these sophists taught from the special throne in the exedra,33 Libanios’ involvement in the quarrels between the rival sophists will get the eminent rhetorician into judicial adventures and cost him his stay permit in Constantinople, forcing him to flee rather hastily to Nikomedeia.34 Libanius returns again to Constantinople, most probably between 348 and 355, but this second journey only adds to his unpleasant impressions, despite the honours lavished upon him by the emperor Constantius (337-361).35 Constantinople evolves into the intellectual capital of the Empire in the time of Constantius, after 355.36 A key role in this process was played by Themistios, who was admitted to the Senate, following a letter of imperial recommendation in which the rhetorician’s appointment is explained in detail.37 The invitation to Themistios to teach in Constantinople clearly reflects Constantius’ determination to furnish the new capital with the intellectual prestige it hitherto lacked, despite the presence of sophists.38 The orator, who would teach from the city’s koinon theatron, would soon repay his debt to Constantius.

In his well-known speech of the year 357 -on the occasion of the celebrations for the emperor’s vicennalia in Rome-, 39 Themistios says that the new role assigned to Constantinople is mainly intellectual; the city’s mission was to preserve the classical past through the Greek language and spread it all over the then known world.

In the same speech Themistius applauds the process of copying texts and setting up a library, which was under way in the new capital at the time, again with the emperor’s consent.40 It is obvious that the variously significant presence of Themistius in Constantinople and his influence on the new capital’s educational matters and intellectual life, always from within a safe net of imperial protection, largely paved the way for the founding of the Pandidakterion in Constantinople by emperor Theodosius II (408-450).

Inaugurated in 425, 41 this was beyond doubt an institutional novelty; it is the first time that Byzantium as a state goes into intellectual matters with the aim of instituting a new educational policy and a new system in parallel to the existing one (purely private schooling, education with discreet state support, etc.).

It must be stressed that this unprecedented school had the exclusive purpose of educating officials for the administration of the state.42 It is significant that what Themistius had proposed about promoting the Greek language in 357, is put into practice by this novel institution, which had an almost equal number of teachers for Greek and Latin.43 It is also worth noting at this point that in the fourth century the Empire experienced a rivalry between Greek and Latin, caused exclusively by the switch towards learning Latin on the part of those Greek speakers who were after a career in the state machine.44 Yet, after the death of Theodosius I (395) and the resultant split of the Empire, a new lingual boundary was created and became associated with the corresponding choices of the various social classes.

Therefore, the original tendency towards having a single state with two ‘official’ languages in use, Greek and Latin, falls into decline, judging from the Pandidakterion, and is abandoned over time, as is broadly accepted by scholars.45 It is almost certain that the Pandidakterion did not continue after the reign of Herakleius (610-641).46 After that, the state will undertake no further action in the field of ‘higher’ education and, apart from the constitutio Omnem, it will be more than two hundred years before the next state initiative, the establishment of the school of Magnaura (855).

1. The reasons behind this change in state policy go back to the times of Justinian.
2. It is during that time that the earlier state dogma (once again essentially formed by Themistius), whereby Hellenism and Christianity should be treated as two worldviews diametrically opposed yet capable of coexisting, 47 gives way to Justinian’s dogma of a single state with a single language — harsh though the reality was for an emperor like Justinian, a fervent lover of Latin — and a single religion with no exceptions.

Thus in September 529 Justinian issues the well-known edict by which he bans pagans, heretics and Jews from teaching; it is then that the closure of the school of Athens takes place, although it had been showing signs of advancing decline, despite the presence of Damaskius, who had been teaching philosophy there since the early sixth century.48 As a consequence, research, a key element of education in the earlier centuries, recedes; the antecessores of law schools are replaced by scholastikoi, who are closer to rhetoric than to law theory; 49 everything is codified; teachers lose the tax immunity they had enjoyed for centuries, and literary production is almost placed under control.50 It would be a distortion of the reality of those times to claim that, after Justinian’s rigorously enforced institutional decisions on education, Byzantium severed the umbilical cord that linked it to learning and knowledge more generally.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that from the seventh century onward our sources almost dry up and it is hard to find information on higher education or, indeed, on any education at all. Nevertheless, the educational level of an admittedly limited élite, in the cities rather than in the countryside, remains high, since the educational process is not disrupted, as one concludes from numerous testimonies, predominantly in hagiographical texts.51 In any case, the scattered information at our disposal confirms that no new institutions emerge.

Moreover, the major crisis that hit Byzantium for a long time after the years of Herakleius has a direct impact on education. The huge territorial losses of the time deprive the Empire of the higher schools it still had, such as Alexandria, while natural disasters and epidemics come to accelerate this process: the earthquake of 551 AD destroys the law school of Berytus, 52 a later earthquake razes Aphrodisias to the ground, 53 and, finally, the plague epidemic of the year 551 may well be behind the closure of the law school of Constantinople.54 The absence of higher schools was filled by the schools of enkyklios paideia, i.e.

• Those run by grammatikoi,
• This tacit reformation was imposed by the circumstances: namely, the abandonment of cities, the concomitant restructuring of the state, but also (slightly later) Iconoclasm, combined with decisions which had been taken earlier but were still enforced, would produce entirely new conditions in a state which had hitherto operated with different structures.

It would be no exaggeration to say that these schools, which almost invariably relied on one main teacher, essentially “rose” in the educational hierarchy and attempted to compensate for the absence of higher education from the country’s intellectual life – and largely succeeded.55 It is worth noting that the internal structure of an organised school of enkyklios paideia was quite similar to that of the old higher schools; at least, this is what transpires from the correspondence of the Anonymous Teacher.

In justifying the presence of a school of this level in the capital at the time, Lemerle speaks of a couche sociale urbaine which uses education for social advancement and entry into the higher echelons of the city’s society.56 This felicitous assessment is corroborated by the presence of more schools of a probably similar structure in the capital around the same time.57 On the other hand, it must be noted that shortly after the end of Iconoclasm (843), the Empire had already reintroduced the institution of a higher ‘state’ establishment in the form of the school of Magnaura, founded by caesar Bardas.58 Could it be again the same couche sociale which, liberated from the long years of dogmatic uncertainty under Iconoclasm, takes its first steps towards forming its own élite with the graduates of this new establishment? This is more than likely, especially if Magnaura’s foundation by a high-ranking official of the Empire is seen in conjunction with the appointment of Leo the Mathematician as head of the school; the latter’s iconoclastic past neither diminished his widespread acceptance nor prevented him from taking the reins of this very ambitious institution.59 Our sources speak of the three teachers that joined Leo (who taught philosophy) and had specific teaching duties: Theodore, a pupil of Leo, taught geometry; astronomy was assigned to Theodegios and grammar to the well-known Kometas.

The texts note that the generous funding of Magnaura had been secured by Bardas himself.60 After Leo’s death (post 869) all traces of Magnaura are lost and there is no evidence to show that the school continued to operate for any length of time.61 Things seem to change again in the second half of the tenth century, around the time that the school of the Anonymous Teacher was operating in Constantinople.

According to Theophanes Continuatus, the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (945-959) decided to reorganise the system of ‘higher’ education by appointing four outstanding teachers: the protospatharios Constantine to teach philosophy, the metropolitan Alexander of Nicaea for rhetoric, the patrician Nikephoros for geometry and the asekretis Gregory for astronomy.

With this action, the chronicle emphatically points out, the emperor, who subsidised both teachers and students, as Bardas had done with Magnaura, glorified the Roman State with his wisdom.62 There is no mention in any source of the ‘school’ of Porphyrogennetos continuing after the emperor’s death; it is my personal view that the old practice of abandoning the whole matter was followed in this case as well, since none of the subsequent emperors showed any interest in its operation.

The last attempt at creating a higher education institution in Byzantium came from Constantine IX Monomachus (1042-1055) with his very important novel of April 1047; with this text the pre-existing (private) school of Michael Psellos and John Xiphilinus, which had two “orientations”, philosophy and law, was divided into separate schools—a school of philosophy under Psellos and a school of law under Xiphilinus.63 Yet, despite the ample information we have about the establishment and regulations of these institutions, 64 as well as about their early years, it is almost certain that they did not continue for long; indeed, the law school does not seem to have survived beyond the year 1054.65 In later years and until the conquest of Constantinople no higher school of the kind described above will appear.

Schools of a scope similar to that of the Anonymous Teacher will dominate the scene and, like the school of the Anonymous, they will have close ties to the palace. Other schools to emerge or survive are those with a specific educational focus, such as the philosophy school of George Pachymeres, 66 the medical school of John Argyropoulos, financed by the state treasury, 67 or the school of George Scholarius, who taught philosophy from his family house in Constantinople between 1430 and 1448.68 As the Empire’s end approaches, a cycle seems to be drawing slowly but steadily to a close in educational affairs, which revert to earlier practices.
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How does the Byzantine Empire affect us today?

The Byzantine Empire influenced many cultures, primarily due to its role in shaping Christian Orthodoxy. The modern-day Eastern Orthodox Church is the second largest Christian church in the world. Orthodoxy is central to the history and societies of Greece, Bulgaria, Russia, Serbia, and other countries.
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What is a Byzantine worldview?

A. of the Byzantine Empire continued the Roman tradition of authoritarianism: the viewed their empire in terms of an aspiration to dominate or, if possible, to rule over the civilized world itself (i.e. by now essentially Christendom).
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Who was the greatest of the Byzantine Empire?

1. Justinian: The Byzantine Emperor Who Reconquered the West – The detail of the mosaic showing the emperor Justinian I, 6th century CE, Basilica di San Vitale, Ravenna, via Historytoday.com Justinian I, also known as, was probably the most important Byzantine emperor. Justinian was born in Tauresium (near modern-day Skopje, Macedonia) around 482, only a few years after the fall of Rome.

• Justinian’s meteoric rise was greatly helped by his uncle Justin, a distinguished military commander and imperial guardsman, who became the emperor in 518.
• He quickly promoted Justinian to important positions, preparing him for the throne.
• Then, in 527, Justin I adopted his nephew and made Justinian his co-emperor.

Within four months, Justin was dead, and Justinian I was the sole ruler of the Roman Empire. Or was he? While Justinian had the final say in the Empire’s affairs, his wife Theodora ruled with her husband as an equal. In fact, Theodora soon became Justinian’s closest advisor, and on more than one occasion, it was her who directed the course of the state — and probably saved her husband’s life. The Barberini Ivory, depicting triumphant emperor Justinian I on horseback, mid-6th century CE, via The Louvre
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What if Byzantium never fell?

If the Eastern Roman/Byzantine Empire never collapsed, we might not have had the Protestant Reformation. Two things really helped the Reformation to get going. One was The abuses of the Roman Catholic Church in the area of indulgence sales (there were other corruption issues too.)
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What makes the Byzantine Empire different from the Roman Empire?

Roman and Byzantine Empire – Similarities – The similarities between the Roman and Byzantine Empires are as follows:

Both were authoritarian empires ruled by hereditary emperors. The Byzantine and Roman empires went through internal rifts caused by court intrigues and corrupt administration. Both the Byzantine and the Roman empires were centers of trade, and much of the wealth in the empires was generated through their extensive trade routes. Additionally, both empires established large-scale building projects. The Roman Empire established aqueduct systems throughout their empire to distribute fresh water into cities and towns while the Byzantine empire built the Hagia Sophia, now a world Heritage site.

Differences between Roman and Byzantine Empire

While the Roman Empire was pagan in nature, worshipping a wide pantheon of gods, the Eastern Roman Empire had adopted Christianity in its early days, much before its western counterpart did the same. The Western Roman Empire spoke Latin while the Byzantine Empire was Greek both culturally and linguistically. The Roman Empire covered more land than its eastern counterpart. At its peak, the Roman Empire reached into regions of the British islands, Germania, Spain, parts of North Africa, and much of Asia Minor. In contrast, at the height of Byzantine militaristic power under Justinian throughout 527-565 CE, only some of the wealthy areas in Italy and parts of North Africa and Spain were reconquered. Roman art, especially sculpture, focused much more on imitating the true form of people and objects. Unlike Roman art, Byzantine art appears to the modern viewer to have made few attempts to mimic reality. Images are often two-dimensional and flat, and are anti-naturalistic in its most basic form. Art in the Byzantine Empire was largely dedicated to religious and imperial purposes, and decorated the interior of churches most prominently

Candidates can find in the given link The Byzantine Empire was the eastern continuation of the Roman Empire after the Western Roman Empire’s fall in the fifth century CE. It lasted from the fall of the Roman Empire until the Ottoman conquest in 1453. The Roman Empire had become too large to be ruled by one emperor by the third century (this was one of the causes of the Crisis of the Third Century).
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What did the Byzantines invent?

Posted by Powee Celdran ” The sciences were financially supported, honoured everywhere, universally pursued; they were like tall edifices supported by strong foundations. ” -Al Masudi, Arab historian (896-956) Hello everyone and once again welcome to another Byzantine article from the Byzantium Blogger! The last article was a special edition feature on the mosaics of Ravenna and stories behind them, now this time I will be tackling more interesting stories on Byzantium, this time about their science and technology.

In the 1100-year existence of the Byzantine Empire, the Byzantines being a civilized and educated people have made several scientific discoveries in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, astronomy, geography, and even philosophy that have been a basis for modern science and have made quite crazy but very practical inventions.

A lot of us remember people from the Renaissance like Leonardo Da Vinci and Galileo for their mind-blowing inventions and scientific discoveries but what a lot of us do not know is that the Byzantines who came before them have already made discoveries and inventions as significant as theirs.

• With the preservation of ancient Greek and Roman science, the Byzantines had studied them in order to improve them and make new discoveries, which later influenced Islamic science in the Middle Ages and Western European science in the Renaissance.
• Flamethrowers, hand grenades, portable sundials, musical organs, hydraulics, water cisterns, ship mills, and the fork were among the many inventions of the Byzantines.

However, other than inventions, the Byzantines have already made some crazy but true scientific discoveries before the Renaissance including the theory of the earth being a sphere, time zones, and the basis for the Gregorian Calendar we use today. All the information in this article comes from the chapter on Science and Technology from the fascinating book ” A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities ” by Anthony Kaldellis which includes a lot more “strange tales and surprising facts from history’s most orthodox empire”.

• Some more additional information here comes from Judith Herrin’s “Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire” which is another great book on the history of Byzantium.
• Like the great detail and amount of work that went to the art of the Ravenna mosaics, the Byzantines put this much enthusiasm to creating new theories and inventions.

Note: This information is from sources written by Byzantine historians. Byzantine Imperial flag and symbols A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities, Anthony Kaldellis Other Byzantine Articles from the Byzantium Blogger: 7 Reasons to be Interested in Byzantium Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire Byzantine Siegecraft and Naval Warfare The 94 Emperors The Ravenna Mosaics and What to Expect Watch this video for more info on Byzantine Science and Technology Byzantine Inventions for War: The one invention everyone would remember the Byzantines for is the war machine known as “Greek Fire”, which was a large flamethrower placed on ships dating back to the 7 th century first used in protecting their capital, Constantinople from an Arab siege.

The liquid fire from the flamethrower was made up of a chemical compound of flammable resins, Sulphur, and Naphtha which came possibly from the Naphtha wells in the Crimea. The formula for Greek Fire is a mystery and has remained a Byzantine state secret and this weapon could only be operated by a secret branch of the army.

In the book De Ceremoniis by Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos (r.913-959), he explains to his son, later Emperor Romanos II (r.959-963) that Greek Fire is something the Byzantines should keep to themselves and not share to other nations because these other nations may copy their invention.

Greek Fire was operated by heavy air pressure pumped into a heated sealed container to ignite the compound enabling it to release a large blast of fire to burn down ships or scare the enemy away, although Greek Fire was hard to operate as it was slow and went in its own direction, as seen while playing Assassin’s Creed Revelations (2011).

Greek Fire was also used in defending the Bosporus from Viking attacks and against the Normans in Dyrrachion from 1107-8 as mentioned by the historian Anna Komnene. Some ships used the Greek fire by making it come out of the mouths of animal sculptures such as lions. Greek Fire, Byzantine invention ( Madrid Skylitzes) Greek Fire gun recreation Handheld flamethrower (Cheirisiphon) Leo VI the Wise (r.886-912) Cheirosiphon sample Ships using Greek fire To communicate with the different Themes or military regions across the empire, the Byzantines developed a system to send a signal across Asia Minor in an hour. This system consisted of beacons all timed by a synchronized clock and were equidistant to each other starting from a fort near Tarsus in the east of Asia Minor and ending at the seaside palace in Constantinople and in 1 hour, the signal would reach the other end.

This system of lighting the beacons was created by the scientist Leo the Mathematician for Emperor Theophilos (r.829-842). With the beacons being lit, word would quickly reach the emperor in the capital to inform him usually of a threat, and usually the beacons were lit across Asia Minor when the Saracens from the east would be attack in order to inform to emperor to send reinforcements.

This beacon system the Byzantines used was used in the 3rd movie of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy- The Return of the King (2003). Leo the Mathematician, Byzantine scientist Emperor Theopilos (829-842) Map of the Byzantine Beacons in Asia Minor Sample Byzantine beacon Byzantine beacon diagram A smart invention the Byzantines made in time of war were ship mills, first made in 536 when the Goths had besieged Rome and the Byzantine Army of Emperor Justinian I under the general Belisarius was on their mission to reconquer Italy.

1. The Goths had previously destroyed the Roman aqueducts to cut the food supply for the population of Rome and when the army of Belisarius reached Rome, they too needed food supply.
2. Belisarius thought of a smart solution by finding the part of the Tiber River where the current was at its strongest and there he stretched 2 ropes putting ships between them with wheels attached on their sides and this way, the grain was able to be milled due to the strong current of the water, thus the population of Rome was fed.

When the Goths learned of this, they responded by tossing debris down the river to jam the mills, but Belisarius countered it by hanging chains down the bridges to catch the debris and pull it up. Flavius Belisarius, Byzantine general (500-565) Ship Mill illustration Medieval illustration of a ship mill Modern ship mill The Byzantines also knew that human excrement was useful against any kind of siege engine, including interlocked shields which could distract the soldiers inside. Stirrups for horses were however not invented by the Byzantines but were first attested by them in 600 by Emperor Maurice after being brought into them by the Avars who took it from Central Asia.

1. Stirrups then proved useful in cavalry combat to keep riders such as the Cataphracts in place, especially when firing arrows while mounted.
2. For horses, the Byzantines have also developed a way to deploy mounted Cataphracts from ships directly to land by attaching a ramp that drops from the ship once it hits the land, therefore the mounted cataphracts immediately ride off to attack the enemy similar to the World War II D-Day Landings (1944).

This ramp system on ships was used in Crete when being recaptured by the general Nikephoros Phokas in 961. Ancient stirrups Emperor Maurice (r.582-602), native Greek of Cappadocia Nikephoros II’s Byzantine Cataphracts invade Crete, 961 D-Day Landings (1944) ramp Other Byzantine Inventions: The Byzantines have introduced a couple of new inventions to the west, one of the being the fork which came in to the west when western princes married Byzantine princesses introducing a new method for eating. Other than the fork, it is also believed that the Byzantines introduced the musical organ to the medieval west. Manuscript depicting Byzantine musical instruments Byzantine organ Constantine V Kopronymos (r.741-775) Pepin, king of the Franks (751-768) Like the Romans before them, the Byzantines also built aqueducts to supply water for their capital, Constantinople. The capital however was far from a large fresh water source, which was in Thrace so they had to build 3 large aqueducts spanning 592km long, which was even longer than the lengths of Rome’s 11 aqueducts combined which in total was 520km.

The water brought in from the aqueducts was stored in hundreds of cisterns located around Constantinople and the notable ones that still can be seen today include the open-air Aetius Cistern, the covered Philoxenos Cistern which has 224 double columns, and of course the most famous one being the Basilica Cistern across the Hagia Sophia which can hold up to 80,000 cubic meters and has 336 columns.

The large water supply in the cisterns coming in from the aqueducts was able to sustain the population of Constantinople especially during times of siege when the enemy cuts the water supply. Aside from providing a sustainable amount of water supply for the population, the cisterns also provided enough water for the many fountains in the city. Aqueduct of Valens, a surviving Byzantine aqueduct bringing water supply to Constantinople Cistern of Aetius illustration Cistern of Philoxenos illustration Basilica Cistern near the Hagia Sophia Basilica Cistern in James Bond: From Russia with Love (1963) Basilica Cistern in AC Revelations In the early Byzantine period, more accurate sundials have already been developed by the Byzantines which had latitude scales and a list of places and their latitudes, and at the same time could be adjusted when at those specific locations. Byzantine sundial with dates and latitudes Byzantine sundial mechanisms One of the more trivial but interesting Byzantine inventions were the mechanisms at the throne room or Magnaura of the imperial palace. The mechanisms included hydraulics behind the 2 golden lion sculptures flanking the throne in which the sounds it made and its movements were operated by water pumps inside and beside the throne was a golden tree with mechanical birds.

1. Although the hydraulics were not operated within the statues itself but from curtains behind it but pipes connect it to the lion statues.
2. The mechanisms in the throne room were recorded by Liutprand, bishop of Cremona during his visit in 949 during the reign of Constantine VII.
3. Here, he mentions that the lions moved their tails and made sounds, the birds warbled at the bronze tree, and when he bowed down he saw the throne elevated to the ceiling on it while the emperor was seated on it.

Liutprand however says he was not afraid because he had been told all about the imperial throne room in advance. Byzantine imperial throne room with lion statues and mechanical birds For the Byzantines, purple was the color only reserved for emperors as it is seen in their purple tunics and togas but one lesser known fact is that a special purple ink was made only for emperors in signing documents and no one else but they could use it, otherwise if anyone else manufactured it, the punishment is death. Byzantine purple silk Byzantine “golden bull” Ancient Tyrian purple (royal silk) Emperor Theodosius II (r.408-450), son of Arcadius Signature of Theodosius II on papyrus Andronikos II Palaiologos (r.1282-1328) Signature of Andronikos II using purple ink Theories in Science and Math: In 4 th century BC Ancient Greece, Aristotle already came up with a theory that heavier bodies fall faster in proportion to their weight, this theory though was refuted by Galileo in the Renaissance era. However, long before Galileo, John Philoponos, a teacher from Byzantine Alexandria in 530 had already refuted Aristotle’s theory by testing it himself. Aristotle’s Theory of Falling Objects Falling Objects Theory tested by Galileo in Pisa Formula of falling objects Theories of John Philoponos Apparently, the Byzantines already did know something about solar and lunar eclipses and how they are caused and that the Sun was much bigger than the Earth, although the Church Father say the sun is the size of the earth.

1. In the 11 th century, the Byzantine scholar Symeon Seth gave some proofs in his book, ” Summary of Physics ” that the earth is a sphere.
2. His first theory is that he noticed that the sun comes in from the east and sets in the west, already proving the fact about time zones.
3. With the pattern of the sun, he concluded that when it is afternoon in Persia, it is morning in their part of the world (Greece and Asia Minor).

Second, Seth could prove that the earth was round when seeing mountaintops appear from the horizon when sailing at sea, similar to seeing the top of ship’s mast first. Third, he noticed that not all stars in the night sky are visible but they change and that there are some stars that can only be seen in the north and some at south which means that the earth is not flat. Byzantine depiction of a spherical earth Chart of Lunar and Solar Eclipses Map of Global Time Zones When it came to numbers, the Byzantines stuck to the Greek numerical system which used numbers as combinations of Greek letters. In 1305, the scholar Maximos Planoudes wrote about how to Arabic numerals which he calls “Indian numerals”.

1. According to him, numbers are infinite but we cannot have infinite numbers so philosophers (from the Orient) invented signs and a method for using them in a concise way.
2. Planoudes says there are only 9 signs (numbers 1-9) and the other sign they made was called the cipher which means nothing, and this sign is 0.

From then on, the Byzantines began to adapt to the Arabic/ Indian numerical system. Greek Numerals Evolution of Indian to Arabic to modern numerals Maximos Planoudes (1260-1330) One Byzantine astronomer that could predict eclipses together with their year, date, time of day or night, and its extent was Nikephoros Gregoras (1295-1361) who was at the same time a theologian and historian during the late Byzantine period known as the Palaiologan Renaissance.

However, because of opposing the prevailing theology of his time, Gregoras was put under house arrest where he worked on more astronomical theories creating many books as well, including some histories of the Palaiologos imperial family. One of the things Gregoras is best known for was when he found an accurate way to calculate the date of Easter in 1324 in which he realized that the Julian calendar miscounted the length of the year by a small fraction of a day.

Once he saw this mistake and fixed the calendar, he explained his findings to the emperor Andronikos II who saw that Gregoras was right but decided to not push through with changing the calendar for it might create a split in the Eastern Churches (in which it later did with the Russian Church). Nikephoros Gregoras (1295-1360) Astronomical illustration by Gregoras Histories of Gregoras Pope Gregory XIII (r.1572-1585) Gregorian calendar months Renaissance depiction of the Gregorian calendar Successful and Failed Experiments: Back in the 6 th century, according to the histories of Agathias, Anthemios of Tralles, the architect of the Hagia Sophia during the reign of Justinian I (527-565) performed an experiment in steam power to scare off his neighbor, the lawyer Zenon who had blocked his view with a structure. Gold coin of Anthemios of Tralles Modern steam boiler Sometime during the reign of Theophilos (829-842), the helmet of Justinian I’s equestrian statue above a high column next to the Hagia Sophia fell off. When this happened, no one really knew how to put it back until one worker found a way by climbing up to the roof of the Hagia Sophia, shooting an arrow with a rope attached to it to the statue. Drawing of Justinian I’s statue Tightrope walker drawing Column with Justinian I’s equestrian statue According to the Histories of Niketas Choniates, an Arab resident in Constantinople in 1162 tried to fly off the towers at the gates of the Hippodrome by making wings. When he stood above the high gates of the Hippodrome, the people believed he could fly and at the right moment when the wind was strong, he unfurled the twisted white robe wrapped around him and jumped off. Illustration of Constantinople’s Hippodrome Eiffel Tower Death Jump (1912) Watch this to see the Eiffel Tower Death Jump of 1912, very much like the Constantinople Hippodrome Death Jump of 1162 Well, this is all for now on Byzantine science and technology. So far, this is about it recorded on Byzantine inventions and scientific theories, but true enough they are really influential and used up to this day.

So far, this was the 1st article I wrote which is mostly about science, but still interesting as well especially since it had to do with the Byzantine Empire’s history. A lot of these inventions were brilliant ideas such as Greek Fire, ship mills, cisterns, organs, and sundials or had some crazy back story behind them like the steam boiler in the basement but more importantly, it is interesting to realize that some theories that we believe in today including the falling of objects, learning about the earth being a sphere, and about time zones because of the sun’s direction were already thought of back in the early Middle Ages when the Byzantines were at their height of power while Western Europe was still growing.

For me, perhaps the most fascinating discovery from Byzantine science and astronomy was the creation of the calendar predating the Gregorian calendar by Nikephoros Gregoras, and yet none of know that the basis for the calendar we use today (the Gregorian calendar) came from an astronomer in Byzantium.

As I have mentioned many times, the Byzantines are an underrated civilization everyone tends to forget about but have made so many contributions to global civilization, and a lot of them happened to be in the fields of science, math, and technology rather than in the arts. Of course, creating spectacular art such as the Ravenna mosaics needed some science and math too in order to get the exact shapes, align them together, and stick them up in high places.

The continuous discoveries in science by the Byzantines show that they continued in preserving ancient Greek and Roman knowledge and continued developing them before they travelled west in the Renaissance, but also with the help of intellectual emperors the Byzantines were able to continue in developing science as well as medicine.

Even before the Renaissance began, the Byzantines were already the Renaissance people being skilled in art, science, philosophy, theology, and practical inventions except that they were not as advanced enough to build massive ships and navigate the oceans the way the Portuguese did in the Renaissance.

The sciences developed the Byzantines at the end ended up influencing the eastern Islamic world as well when the Arabs gained knowledge from attacking the Byzantines over the centuries just as how Byzantine scholars in the declining years of the empire went west to spread their knowledge of science and philosophy.

Of course, one thing I have to mention before finishing is the author Anthony Kaldellis and how well written his book “A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities ” is, especially with the amount of facts and crazy but true stories about the Byzantines he mentioned, which gave me inspiration to write this article.

Well, this is about it for the article and next time hopefully I will post an article about more interesting facts on Byzantine medicine or perhaps crime and punishment in the Byzantine era, or as I have always wanted, an article on Byzantium’s cosmopolitan society.
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When was the Byzantine Empire important?

Byzantine Empire | History, Geography, Maps, & Facts The Byzantine Empire existed from approximately 395 CE—when the Roman Empire was split—to 1453. It became one of the leading civilizations in the world before falling to an Ottoman Turkish onslaught in the 15th century.

The Byzantine Empire was the eastern half of the, and it survived over a thousand years after the western half dissolved. A series of regional traumas—including pestilence, warfare, social upheaval, and the Arab Muslim assault of the 630s—marked its cultural and institutional transformation from the Eastern Roman Empire to the Byzantine Empire.

Modern historians use the term Byzantine Empire to distinguish the state from the western portion of the Roman Empire. The name refers to Byzantium, an ancient Greek colony and transit point that became the location of the Byzantine Empire’s capital city,,

Inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire would have self-identified as Romaioi, or Romans. At its greatest extent, the Byzantine Empire covered much of the land surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, including what is now Italy, Greece, and Turkey along with portions of North Africa and the Middle East. It peaked in size in the 6th century under Emperor but was significantly diminished by the 11th century following internal conflict and invasions from outsiders, including the Seljuq Turks and the Normans.

Citizens of the Byzantine Empire strongly identified as Christians, just as they identified as Romans. Emperors, seeking to unite their realm under one faith, recognized Christianity as the state religion and endowed the church with political and legal power.

1. Under some emperors, pagans were ordered to attend church and be baptized, and Jews and Samaritans were barred from receiving dowries or inheritances unless they converted.
2. Byzantine Empire, the eastern half of the, which survived for a thousand years after the western half had crumbled into various feudal kingdoms and which finally fell to Turkish onslaughts in 1453.

The very name illustrates the misconceptions to which the history has often been subject, for its inhabitants would hardly have considered the term appropriate to themselves or to their state. Theirs was, in their view, none other than the Roman Empire, founded shortly before the beginning of the era by God’s grace to unify his people in preparation for the coming of his Son.

• Proud of that Christian and Roman heritage, convinced that their earthly empire so nearly resembled the heavenly pattern that it could never change, they called themselves Romaioi, or Romans.
• Modern historians agree with them only in part.
• The term East Rome accurately described the political unit embracing the Eastern provinces of the old Roman Empire until 476, while there were yet two emperors.

The same term may even be used until the last half of the 6th century, as long as men continued to act and think according to patterns not unlike those prevailing in an earlier Roman Empire. During those same centuries, nonetheless, there were changes so profound in their effect that after the 7th century state and society in the East differed markedly from their earlier forms.

• In an effort to recognize that distinction, historians traditionally have described the empire as Byzantine.
• The latter term is derived from the name Byzantium, borne by a colony of ancient Greek foundation on the European side of the, midway between the and the,
• The city was, by virtue of its location, a natural transit point between and (Anatolia).

Refounded as the “new Rome” by the emperor in 330, it was endowed by him with the name, the city of Constantine. The derivation from Byzantium is suggestive in that it emphasizes a central aspect of Byzantine civilization: the degree to which the empire’s administrative and life found a focus at Constantinople from 330 to 1453, the year of the city’s last and unsuccessful defense under the 11th (or 12th) Constantine.

The circumstances of the last defense are suggestive too, for in 1453 the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds seemed briefly to meet. The last Constantine fell in defense of the new Rome built by the first Constantine. Walls that had held firm in the early against,,,, and were finally by modern, in the mysteries of which European technicians had instructed the most successful of the Central Asian invaders: the Ottoman,

Why study the Byzantine Empire?

The fortunes of the empire were thus intimately entwined with those of peoples whose achievements and failures the medieval history of both Europe and, Nor did hostility always characterize the relations between and those whom they considered “barbarian.” Even though the Byzantine intellectual firmly believed that civilization ended with the boundaries of his world, he opened it to the barbarian, provided that the latter (with his kin) would accept and render loyalty to the emperor.

1. Thanks to the settlements that resulted from such policies, many a name, seemingly Greek, disguises another of different origin: Slavic, perhaps, or Turkish.
2. Barbarian illiteracy, in consequence, obscures the early generations of more than one family destined to rise to prominence in the empire’s military or,

Byzantium was a melting-pot society, characterized during its earlier centuries by a degree of that belies the, often applied to it, of an immobile caste-ridden society. A source of strength in the early Middle Ages, Byzantium’s central geographical position served it ill after the 10th century.

The conquests of that age presented new problems of organization and assimilation, and those the emperors had to confront at precisely the time when older questions of economic and social policy pressed for answers in a new and form. Satisfactory solutions were never found. Bitter ethnic and religious hostility marked the history of the empire’s later centuries, weakening Byzantium in the face of new enemies descending upon it from east and west.

The empire finally collapsed when its administrative structures could no longer support the burden of leadership thrust upon it by military conquests. The Roman Empire, the ancestor of the Byzantine, remarkably blended unity and, the former being by far the better known, since its were the predominant features of Roman civilization.

1. The common, the coinage, the “international” army of the Roman, the urban network, the law, and the Greco-Roman heritage of civic loomed largest among those bonds that and his successors hoped would bring unity and peace to a Mediterranean world exhausted by centuries of civil war.
2. To strengthen those sinews of imperial civilization, the emperors hoped that a lively and spontaneous trade might develop between the several provinces.

At the of that world stood the emperor himself, the man of wisdom who would shelter the state from whatever mishaps fortune had darkly hidden. The emperor alone could provide that protection, since, as the embodiment of all the virtues, he possessed in perfection those qualities displayed only imperfectly by his individual subjects.

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. The Roman formula of combating fortune with reason and therewith ensuring unity throughout the Mediterranean world worked surprisingly well in view of the pressures for disunity that time was to multiply. Conquest had brought regions of background under Roman rule.

The Eastern provinces were ancient and populous centres of that urban life that for millennia had defined the character of Mediterranean civilization. The Western provinces had only lately entered upon their own course of urban development under the not-always-tender ministrations of their Roman masters.

1. Each of the aspects of unity enumerated above had its other side.
2. Not everyone understood or spoke,
3. Paralleling and sometimes influencing were local customs and practices, understandably by reason of their antiquity.
4. Temples,, and Christian baptisteries attest to the range of organized religions with which the official forms of the Roman state, including those of emperor worship, could not always peacefully coexist.

And far from unifying the Roman world, often created self-sufficient units in the several regions, provinces, or great estates. Given the obstacles against which the masters of the Roman state struggled, it is altogether remarkable that Roman patriotism was ever more than an empty formula, that gentlemen from the to the were aware that they had “something” in common.

• That “something” might be defined as the Greco-Roman civic tradition in the widest sense of its institutional, intellectual, and emotional,
• Grateful for the conditions of peace that fostered it, men of wealth and culture dedicated their time and resources to glorifying that tradition through adornment of the cities that exemplified it and through education of the young who they hoped might perpetuate it.

Upon that world the barbarians descended after about 150 ce, To protect the frontier against them, warrior emperors devoted whatever energies they could spare from the constant struggle to reassert control over provinces where local regimes emerged. In view of the ensuing warfare, the widespread incidence of disease, and the rapid turnover among the occupants of the imperial throne, it would be easy to assume that little was left of either the traditional fabric of Greco-Roman society or the structure designed to support it.

• Neither assumption is accurate.
• Devastation was haphazard, and some regions suffered while others did not.
• In fact, the economy and society of the empire as a whole during that period was the most diverse it had ever been.
• Impelled by necessity or lured by profit, people moved from province to province.

Social disorder opened avenues to eminence and wealth that the more-stable order of an earlier age had closed to the talented and the ambitious. For personal and dynastic reasons, emperors favoured certain towns and provinces at the expense of others, and the course of succession to the throne, coupled with a resulting constant change among the top administrative officials, largely deprived economic and social policies of recognizable consistency.
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Why do you think we are talking about the Byzantine Empire?

Key Points –

While the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 CE, the Eastern Roman Empire, centered on the city of Constantinople, survived and thrived. After the Eastern Roman Empire’s much later fall in 1453 CE, western scholars began calling it the “Byzantine Empire” to emphasize its distinction from the earlier, Latin-speaking Roman Empire centered on Rome. The “Byzantine Empire” is now the standard term used among historians to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire. Although the Byzantine Empire had a multi-ethnic character during most of its history and preserved Romano-Hellenistic traditions, it became identified with its increasingly predominant Greek element and its own unique cultural developments.

Formerly Byzantium, the capital of the Byzantine Empire as established by its first emperor, Constantine the Great. (Today the city is known as Istanbul.) The Byzantine Empire, sometimes referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire in the east during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul, originally founded as Byzantium).

It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century CE, and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. During most of its existence, the empire was the most powerful economic, cultural, and military force in Europe.

Both “Byzantine Empire” and “Eastern Roman Empire” are historiographical terms created after the end of the realm; its citizens continued to refer to their empire as the Roman Empire, and thought of themselves as Romans. Although the people living in the Eastern Roman Empire referred to themselves as Romans, they were distinguished by their Greek heritage, Orthodox Christianity, and their regional connections.

1. Over time, the culture of the Eastern Roman Empire transformed.
2. Greek replaced Latin as the language of the empire.
3. Christianity became more important in daily life, although the culture’s pagan Roman past still exerted an influence.
4. Several signal events from the 4th to 6th centuries mark the period of transition during which the Roman Empire’s Greek east and Latin west divided.

Constantine I (r.324-337) reorganized the empire, made Constantinople the new capital, and legalized Christianity. Under Theodosius I (r.379-395), Christianity became the empire’s official state religion, and other religious practices were proscribed.

1. Finally, under the reign of Heraclius (r.610-641), the empire’s military and administration were restructured and adopted Greek for official use instead of Latin.
2. Thus, although the Roman state continued and Roman state traditions were maintained, modern historians distinguish Byzantium from ancient Rome insofar as it was centered on Constantinople, oriented towards Greek rather than Latin culture, and characterized by Orthodox Christianity.

Just as the Byzantine Empire represented the political continuation of the Roman Empire, Byzantine art and culture developed directly out of the art of the Roman Empire, which was itself profoundly influenced by ancient Greek art. Byzantine art never lost sight of this classical heritage.

1. For example, the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, was adorned with a large number of classical sculptures, although they eventually became an object of some puzzlement for its inhabitants.
2. And indeed, the art produced during the Byzantine Empire, although marked by periodic revivals of a classical aesthetic, was above all marked by the development of a new aesthetic.

Thus, although the Byzantine Empire had a multi-ethnic character during most of its history, and preserved Romano-Hellenistic traditions, it became identified by its western and northern contemporaries with its increasingly predominant Greek element and its own unique cultural developments. A map of Constantinople, the capital and founding city of the Byzantine Empire, drawn in 1422 CE by Florentine cartographer Cristoforo Buondelmonti. This is the oldest surviving map of the city and the only one that predates the Turkish conquest of the city in 1453 CE.

The first use of the term “Byzantine” to label the later years of the Roman Empire was in 1557, when the German historian Hieronymus Wolf published his work, Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ, a collection of historical sources. The term comes from “Byzantium,” the name of the city of Constantinople before it became Constantine’s capital.

This older name of the city would rarely be used from this point onward except in historical or poetic contexts. However, it was not until the mid-19th century that the term came into general use in the western world; calling it the “Byzantine Empire” helped to emphasize its differences from the earlier Latin-speaking Roman Empire, centered on Rome.

• The term “Byzantine” was also useful to the many western European states that also claimed to be the true successors of the Roman Empire, as it was used to delegitimize the claims of the Byzantines as true Romans.
• In modern times, the term “Byzantine” has also come to have a pejorative sense, used to describe things that are overly complex or arcane.

“Byzantine diplomacy” has come to mean excess use of trickery and behind-the-scenes manipulation. These are all based on medieval stereotypes about the Byzantine Empire that developed as western Europeans came into contact with the Byzantines, and were perplexed by their more structured government.

No such distinction existed in the Islamic and Slavic worlds, where the empire was more straightforwardly seen as the continuation of the Roman Empire. In the Islamic world, the Roman Empire was known primarily as Rûm. The name millet-i Rûm, or “Roman nation,” was used by the Ottomans through the 20th century to refer to the former subjects of the Byzantine Empire, that is, the Orthodox Christian community within Ottoman realms.

: Naming of the Byzantine Empire
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