1. A country called Byzantium never existed
If the Byzantines of the 6th, 10th or 14th centuries had heard from us that they were Byzantines, and their country was called Byzantium, the vast majority of them simply would not have understood us. And those who did understand would have decided that we wanted to flatter them by calling them residents of the capital, and even in an outdated language, which is used only by scientists trying to make their speech as refined as possible.
Part of Justinian's consular diptych. Constantinople, 521 Diptychs were presented to consuls in honor of their assumption of office. The Metropolitan Museum of Art There never was a country that its inhabitants would call Byzantium; the word “Byzantines” was never the self-name of the inhabitants of any state. The word "Byzantines" was sometimes used to refer to the inhabitants of Constantinople - after the name of the ancient city of Byzantium (Βυζάντιον), which was refounded in 330 by Emperor Constantine under the name Constantinople. They were called that only in texts written in conventional literary language, stylized as ancient Greek, which no one spoke for a long time. No one knew the other Byzantines, and even these existed only in texts accessible to a narrow circle of the educated elite who wrote in this archaic Greek language and understood it.
The self-name of the Eastern Roman Empire, starting from the 3rd-4th centuries (and after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453), had several stable and understandable phrases and words: state of the Romans, or Romans, (βασιλεία τῶν Ρωμαίων), Romagna (Ρωμανία), Romaida (Ρωμαΐς ).
The residents themselves called themselves Romans- the Romans (Ρωμαίοι), they were ruled by the Roman emperor - basileus(Βασιλεύς τῶν Ρωμαίων), and their capital was New Rome(Νέα Ρώμη) - this is what the city founded by Constantine was usually called.
Where did the word “Byzantium” come from and with it the idea of the Byzantine Empire as a state that arose after the fall of the Roman Empire on the territory of its eastern provinces? The fact is that in the 15th century, along with statehood, the Eastern Roman Empire (as Byzantium is often called in modern historical works, and this is much closer to the self-awareness of the Byzantines themselves), essentially lost a voice heard beyond its borders: the Eastern Roman tradition of self-description found itself isolated within the Greek-speaking lands that belonged to the Ottoman Empire; What was important now was only what Western European scientists thought and wrote about Byzantium.
Hieronymus Wolf. Engraving by Dominicus Custos. 1580 Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig In the Western European tradition, the state of Byzantium was actually created by Hieronymus Wolf, a German humanist and historian, who published the Corpus Byzantine history"- a small anthology of works by historians of the Eastern Empire with a Latin translation. It was from the “Corpus” that the concept of “Byzantine” entered Western European scientific circulation.
Wolf's work formed the basis of another collection of Byzantine historians, also called the “Corpus of Byzantine History,” but much larger - it was published in 37 volumes with the assistance of King Louis XIV of France. Finally, the Venetian reprint of the second “Corpus” was used by the English historian of the 18th century Edward Gibbon when he wrote his “History of the Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire” - perhaps no book had such a huge and at the same time destructive influence on the creation and popularization of the modern image of Byzantium.
The Romans, with their historical and cultural tradition, were thus deprived not only of their voice, but also of the right to self-name and self-awareness.
2. The Byzantines didn’t know they weren’t Romans
Autumn. Coptic panel. IV century Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, UK / Bridgeman Images / Fotodom For the Byzantines, who themselves called themselves Romans, the history of the great empire never ended. The very idea would seem absurd to them. Romulus and Remus, Numa, Augustus Octavian, Constantine I, Justinian, Phocas, Michael the Great Comnenus - all of them in the same way from time immemorial stood at the head of the Roman people.
Before the fall of Constantinople (and even after it), the Byzantines considered themselves residents of the Roman Empire. Social institutions, laws, statehood - all this was preserved in Byzantium since the time of the first Roman emperors. The adoption of Christianity had almost no impact on the legal, economic and administrative structure of the Roman Empire. If the Byzantines saw the origins of the Christian church in the Old Testament, then the beginning of their own political history, like the ancient Romans, was attributed to the Trojan Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s poem fundamental to Roman identity.
The social order of the Roman Empire and the sense of belonging to the great Roman patria were combined in the Byzantine world with Greek science and written culture: the Byzantines considered classical ancient Greek literature to be theirs. For example, in the 11th century, the monk and scientist Michael Psellus seriously discussed in one treatise who writes poetry better - the Athenian tragedian Euripides or the Byzantine poet of the 7th century George Pisis, the author of a panegyric about the Avar-Slavic siege of Constantinople in 626 and the theological poem “The Six Days” "about the divine creation of the world. In this poem, subsequently translated into Slavic, George paraphrases the ancient authors Plato, Plutarch, Ovid and Pliny the Elder.
At the same time, at the ideological level, Byzantine culture often contrasted itself with classical antiquity. Christian apologists noticed that all of Greek antiquity - poetry, theater, sports, sculpture - was permeated with religious cults of pagan deities. Hellenic values (material and physical beauty, the pursuit of pleasure, human glory and honor, military and athletic victories, eroticism, rational philosophical thinking) were condemned as unworthy of Christians. Basil the Great, in his famous conversation “To young men on how to use pagan writings,” sees the main danger for Christian youth in the attractive way of life that is offered to the reader in Hellenic writings. He advises selecting for yourself only stories that are morally useful. The paradox is that Vasily, like many other Fathers of the Church, himself received an excellent Hellenic education and wrote his works in a classical literary style, using the techniques of ancient rhetorical art and a language that by his time had already fallen out of use and sounded archaic.
In practice, ideological incompatibility with Hellenism did not prevent the Byzantines from treating the ancient cultural heritage with care. Ancient texts were not destroyed, but copied, while the scribes tried to maintain accuracy, except that in rare cases they could throw out a too frank erotic passage. Hellenic literature continued to be the basis of the school curriculum in Byzantium. An educated person had to read and know the epic of Homer, the tragedies of Euripides, the speeches of Demos-phenes and use the Hellenic cultural code in his own writings, for example, calling the Arabs Persians, and Rus' - Hyperborea. Many elements of ancient culture in Byzantium were preserved, although they changed beyond recognition and acquired new religious content: for example, rhetoric became homiletics (the science of church preaching), philosophy became theology, and the ancient love story influenced the hagiographic genres.
3. Byzantium was born when Antiquity adopted Christianity
When does Byzantium begin? Probably when the history of the Roman Empire ends - that’s what we used to think. Much of this thought seems natural to us, thanks to the enormous influence of Edward Gibbon's monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Written in the 18th century, this book still provides both historians and non-specialists with a view of the period from the 3rd to the 7th centuries (now increasingly called late Antiquity) as a time of decline of the former greatness of the Roman Empire under the influence of two main factors - the Germanic invasions tribes and the ever-growing social role of Christianity, which became the dominant religion in the 4th century. Byzantium, existing in mass consciousness primarily as a Christian empire, is depicted in this perspective as the natural heir to the cultural decline that occurred in late Antiquity due to mass Christianization: a center of religious fanaticism and obscurantism, stagnation stretching for a whole millennium.
An amulet that protects against the evil eye. Byzantium, V–VI centuries
On one side there is an eye, which is targeted by arrows and attacked by a lion, snake, scorpion and stork.
© The Walters Art MuseumHematite amulet. Byzantine Egypt, 6th–7th centuries
The inscriptions identify him as “the woman who suffered from hemorrhage” (Luke 8:43–48). Hematite was believed to help stop bleeding and was very popular in amulets related to women's health and the menstrual cycle.
Thus, if you look at history through the eyes of Gibbon, late Antiquity turns into a tragic and irreversible end of Antiquity. But was it only a time of destruction of beautiful antiquity? Historical science has been confident for more than half a century that this is not so.
Particularly simplified is the idea of the supposedly fatal role of Christianization in the destruction of the culture of the Roman Empire. The culture of late Antiquity in reality was hardly built on the opposition of “pagan” (Roman) and “Christian” (Byzantine). The way Late Antique culture was structured for its creators and users was much more complex: Christians of that era would have found the very question of the conflict between the Roman and the religious strange. In the 4th century, Roman Christians could easily place images of pagan deities, made in the ancient style, on household items: for example, on one casket given to newlyweds, a naked Venus is adjacent to the pious call “Seconds and Projecta, live in Christ.”
On the territory of the future Byzantium, an equally unproblematic fusion of pagan and Christian artistic techniques took place for contemporaries: in the 6th century, images of Christ and saints were made using the technique of a traditional Egyptian funeral portrait, the most famous type of which is the so-called Fayum portrait Fayum portrait- a type of funeral portraits common in Hellenized Egypt in the 1st-3rd centuries AD. e. The image was applied with hot paints onto a heated wax layer.. Christian visuality in late Antiquity did not necessarily strive to oppose itself to the pagan, Roman tradition: very often it deliberately (or perhaps, on the contrary, naturally and naturally) adhered to it. The same fusion of pagan and Christian is visible in the literature of late Antiquity. The poet Arator in the 6th century recites in the Roman cathedral a hexametric poem about the acts of the apostles, written in the stylistic traditions of Virgil. In Christianized Egypt in the mid-5th century (by this time, various forms of monasticism had existed here for about a century and a half), the poet Nonnus from the city of Panopolis (modern Akmim) wrote a paraphrase of the Gospel of John in the language of Homer, preserving not only the meter and style, but also consciously borrowing entire verbal formulas and figurative layers from his epic Gospel of John, 1:1-6 (Japanese translation):
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It was in the beginning with God. Everything came into being through Him, and without Him nothing came into being that came into being. In Him was life, and life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. There was a man sent from God; his name is John.
Nonnus from Panopolis. Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, canto 1 (translated by Yu. A. Golubets, D. A. Pospelova, A. V. Markova):
Logos, Child of God, Light born from Light,
He is inseparable from the Father on the infinite throne!
Heavenly God, Logos, because You were the original
Shone together with the Eternal, the Creator of the world,
O Ancient One of the Universe! Everything was accomplished through Him,
What is breathless and in spirit! Outside of Speech, which does a lot,
Is it revealed that it remains? And exists in Him from eternity
Life, which is inherent in everything, the light of short-lived people...<…>
In the bee-feeding thicket
The wanderer of the mountains appeared, inhabitant of the desert slopes,
He is the herald of the cornerstone baptism, the name is
Man of God, John, counselor. .
Portrait of a young girl. 2nd century© Google Cultural Institute
Funeral portrait of a man. III century© Google Cultural Institute
Christ Pantocrator. Icon from the Monastery of St. Catherine. Sinai, mid-6th century Wikimedia Commons
St. Peter. Icon from the Monastery of St. Catherine. Sinai, 7th century© campus.belmont.edu
The dynamic changes that took place in different layers of the culture of the Roman Empire in late Antiquity are difficult to directly connect with Christianization, since the Christians of that time themselves were such hunters of classical forms and in fine arts, and in literature (as in many other areas of life). The future Byzantium was born in an era in which the relationships between religion, artistic language, its audience, and the sociology of historical shifts were complex and indirect. They carried within themselves the potential for the complexity and versatility that later unfolded over the centuries of Byzantine history.
4. In Byzantium they spoke one language and wrote in another
The linguistic picture of Byzantium is paradoxical. The Empire, which not only claimed succession to the Roman Empire and inherited its institutions, but also from the point of view of its political ideology was the former Roman Empire, never spoke Latin. It was spoken in the western provinces and the Balkans, until the 6th century it remained the official language of jurisprudence (the last legislative code in Latin was the Code of Justinian, promulgated in 529 - after which laws were issued in Greek), it enriched Greek with many borrowings (formerly only in the military and administrative spheres), early Byzantine Constantinople attracted Latin grammarians with career opportunities. But still, Latin was not the real language of even early Byzantium. Even though the Latin-language poets Corippus and Priscian lived in Constantinople, we will not find these names on the pages of a textbook on the history of Byzantine literature.
We cannot say at what exact moment a Roman emperor becomes a Byzantine emperor: the formal identity of institutions does not allow us to draw a clear boundary. In search of an answer to this question, it is necessary to turn to informal cultural differences. The Roman Empire differs from the Byzantine Empire in that the latter merges Roman institutions, Greek culture and Christianity, and this synthesis is carried out on the basis of the Greek language. Therefore, one of the criteria that we could rely on is language: the Byzantine emperor, unlike his Roman counterpart, found it easier to express himself in Greek than in Latin.
But what is this Greek? The alternative that the shelves of bookstores and the programs of philological faculties offer us is deceptive: we can find in them either ancient or new Greek language. No other reference point is provided. Because of this, we are forced to assume that the Greek language of Byzantium is either a distorted ancient Greek (almost Plato’s dialogues, but not quite) or proto-Greek (almost Tsipras’s negotiations with the IMF, but not quite yet). The history of 24 centuries of continuous development of the language is straightened out and simplified: it is either the inevitable decline and degradation of ancient Greek (as Western European classical philologists thought before the establishment of Byzantine studies as an independent scientific discipline), or the inevitable germination of modern Greek (as Greek scientists believed during the formation of the Greek nation in the 19th century) .
Indeed, Byzantine Greek is elusive. Its development cannot be considered as a series of progressive, consistent changes, since for every step forward in linguistic development there was also a step back. The reason for this is the attitude of the Byzantines themselves to the language. The language norm of Homer and the classics of Attic prose was socially prestigious. To write well meant to write history indistinguishable from Xenophon or Thucydides (the last historian who decided to introduce Old Attic elements into his text, which seemed archaic already in the classical era, was the witness of the fall of Constantinople, Laonikos Chalkokondylos), and epic - indistinguishable from Homer. Throughout the history of the empire, educated Byzantines were literally required to speak one (changed) language and write in another (frozen in classical immutability) language. The duality of linguistic consciousness is the most important feature of Byzantine culture.
Ostracon with a fragment of the Iliad in Coptic. Byzantine Egypt, 580–640
Ostracons, shards of pottery vessels, were used to record Bible verses, legal documents, bills, school assignments, and prayers when papyrus was unavailable or too expensive.
© The Metropolitan Museum of ArtOstracon with the troparion to the Virgin Mary in Coptic. Byzantine Egypt, 580–640© The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The situation was aggravated by the fact that since the times of classical antiquity, certain dialectal characteristics were assigned to certain genres: epic poems were written in the language of Homer, and medical treatises were compiled in the Ionian dialect in imitation of Hippocrates. We see a similar picture in Byzantium. IN Ancient Greek vowels were divided into long and short, and their ordered alternation formed the basis of ancient Greek poetic meters. In the Hellenistic era, the contrast of vowels by length disappeared from the Greek language, but nevertheless, even after a thousand years, heroic poems and epitaphs were written as if the phonetic system had remained unchanged since the time of Homer. Differences permeated other levels of language: it was necessary to construct a phrase like Homer, select words like Homer, and inflect and conjugate them in accordance with a paradigm that had died out in living speech thousands of years ago.
However, not everyone was able to write with ancient vivacity and simplicity; Often, in an attempt to achieve the Attic ideal, Byzantine authors lost their sense of proportion, trying to write more correctly than their idols. Thus, we know that the dative case, which existed in ancient Greek, almost completely disappeared in modern Greek. It would be logical to assume that with each century it will appear in literature less and less often, until it gradually disappears altogether. However, recent studies have shown that in Byzantine high literature the dative case is used much more often than in the literature of classical antiquity. But it is precisely this increase in frequency that indicates a loosening of the norm! Obsession in using one form or another will say no less about your inability to use it correctly than its complete absence in your speech.
At the same time, the living linguistic element took its toll. We learn about how the spoken language changed thanks to the mistakes of manuscript copyists, non-literary inscriptions and the so-called vernacular literature. The term “vernacular” is not accidental: it describes the phenomenon of interest to us much better than the more familiar “folk”, since elements of simple urban colloquial speech were often used in monuments created in the circles of the Constantinople elite. This became a real literary fashion in the 12th century, when the same authors could work in several registers, today offering the reader exquisite prose, almost indistinguishable from Attic, and tomorrow - almost vulgar verses.
Diglossia, or bilingualism, gave rise to another typically Byzantine phenomenon - metaphrasing, that is, transposition, retelling in half with translation, presentation of the content of the source in new words with a decrease or increase in the stylistic register. Moreover, the shift could go both along the line of complication (pretentious syntax, sophisticated figures of speech, ancient allusions and quotations) and along the line of simplifying the language. Not a single work was considered inviolable, even the language of sacred texts in Byzantium did not have sacred status: the Gospel could be rewritten in a different stylistic key (as, for example, the already mentioned Nonnus of Panopolitanus did) - and this would not bring down anathema on the author’s head. It was necessary to wait until 1901, when the translation of the Gospels into colloquial Modern Greek (essentially the same metaphrase) brought opponents and defenders of linguistic renewal into the streets and led to dozens of victims. In this sense, the indignant crowds who defended the “language of the ancestors” and demanded reprisals against the translator Alexandros Pallis were much further from Byzantine culture not only than they would have liked, but also than Pallis himself.
5. There were iconoclasts in Byzantium - and this is a terrible mystery
Iconoclasts John the Grammar and Bishop Anthony of Silea. Khludov Psalter. Byzantium, approximately 850 Miniature for Psalm 68, verse 2: “And they gave me gall for food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” The actions of the iconoclasts, covering the icon of Christ with lime, are compared with the crucifixion on Golgotha. The warrior on the right brings Christ a sponge with vinegar. At the foot of the mountain are John the Grammar and Bishop Anthony of Silea. rijksmuseumamsterdam.blogspot.ru Iconoclasm is the most famous period for a wide audience and the most mysterious even for specialists period in the history of Byzantium. The depth of the mark that he left in the cultural memory of Europe is evidenced by the possibility, for example, in English to use the word iconoclast (“iconoclast”) outside the historical context, in the timeless meaning of “rebel, subverter of foundations.”
The event outline is as follows. By the turn of the 7th and 8th centuries, the theory of worship of religious images was hopelessly behind practice. The Arab conquests of the mid-7th century led the empire to a deep cultural crisis, which, in turn, gave rise to the growth of apocalyptic sentiments, the multiplication of superstitions and a surge in disordered forms of icon veneration, sometimes indistinguishable from magical practices. According to the collections of miracles of saints, drinking wax from a melted seal with the face of St. Artemy healed a hernia, and Saints Cosmas and Damian healed the sufferer by ordering her to drink, mixed with water, plaster from a fresco with their image.
Such veneration of icons, which did not receive philosophical and theological justification, caused rejection among some clergy who saw in it signs of paganism. Emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717-741), finding himself in a difficult political situation, used this discontent to create a new consolidating ideology. The first iconoclastic steps date back to the years 726-730, but both the theological justification of the iconoclastic dogma and full-fledged repressions against dissidents occurred during the reign of the most odious Byzantine emperor - Constantine V Copronymus (the Eminent) (741-775).
The iconoclastic council of 754, which claimed ecumenical status, took the dispute to a new level: from now on it was not about the fight against superstitions and the implementation of the Old Testament prohibition “Thou shalt not make for yourself an idol,” but about the hypostasis of Christ. Can He be considered imageable if His divine nature is “indescribable”? The “Christological dilemma” was this: icon worshipers are guilty of either depicting on icons only the flesh of Christ without His deity (Nestorianism), or of limiting the deity of Christ through the description of His depicted flesh (Monophysitism).
However, already in 787, Empress Irene held a new council in Nicaea, the participants of which formulated the dogma of icon veneration as a response to the dogma of iconoclasm, thereby offering a full-fledged theological basis for previously unregulated practices. An intellectual breakthrough was, firstly, the separation of “service” and “relative” worship: the first can only be given to God, while in the second “the honor given to the image goes back to the prototype” (the words of Basil the Great, which became the real motto of icon worshipers). Secondly, the theory of homonymy, that is, the same name, was proposed, which removed the problem of portrait similarity between the image and the depicted: the icon of Christ was recognized as such not due to the similarity of features, but due to the writing of the name - the act of naming.
Patriarch Nikifor. Miniature from the Psalter of Theodore of Caesarea. 1066 British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images / Fotodom In 815, Emperor Leo V the Armenian again turned to iconoclastic policies, thus hoping to build a line of succession with Constantine V, the most successful and most beloved ruler among the troops in the last century. The so-called second iconoclasm accounts for both a new round of repression and a new rise in theological thought. The iconoclastic era ends in 843, when iconoclasm is finally condemned as a heresy. But his ghost haunted the Byzantines until 1453: for centuries, participants in any church disputes, using the most sophisticated rhetoric, accused each other of hidden iconoclasm, and this accusation was more serious than the accusation of any other heresy.
It would seem that everything is quite simple and clear. But as soon as we try to somehow clarify this general scheme, our constructions turn out to be very unstable.
The main difficulty is the state of the sources. The texts through which we know about the first iconoclasm were written much later, and by icon worshipers. In the 40s of the 9th century, a full-fledged program was carried out to write the history of iconoclasm from an icon-worshipping perspective. As a result, the history of the dispute was completely distorted: the works of the iconoclasts are available only in biased samples, and textual analysis shows that the works of the iconoclasts, seemingly created to refute the teachings of Constantine V, could not have been written before the very end of the 8th century. The task of the icon-worshipping authors was to turn the history we have described inside out, to create the illusion of tradition: to show that the veneration of icons (and not spontaneous, but meaningful!) has been present in the church since apostolic times, and iconoclasm is just an innovation (the word καινοτομία is “innovation” in in Greek is the most hated word for any Byzantine), and deliberately anti-Christian. The iconoclasts were presented not as fighters for the purification of Christianity from paganism, but as “Christian accusers” - this word came to mean specifically and exclusively iconoclasts. The parties to the iconoclastic dispute were not Christians, who interpreted the same teaching differently, but Christians and some external force hostile to them.
The arsenal of polemical techniques that were used in these texts to denigrate the enemy was very large. Legends were created about the iconoclasts’ hatred of education, for example, about the burning of the university in Constantinople by Leo III, and Constantine V was credited with participation in pagan rites and human sacrifices, hatred of the Mother of God and doubts about the divine nature of Christ. While such myths seem simple and have long been debunked, others remain at the center of scientific discussions to this day. For example, only very recently it was possible to establish that the brutal reprisal inflicted on Stephen the New, glorified among the martyrs in 766, was connected not so much with his uncompromising icon-worshipping position, as life states, but with his closeness to the conspiracy of political opponents of Constantine V. They do not stop debates about key questions: what is the role of Islamic influence in the genesis of iconoclasm? What was the true attitude of the iconoclasts to the cult of saints and their relics?
Even the language in which we speak about iconoclasm is the language of the victors. The word “iconoclast” is not a self-designation, but an offensive polemical label that their opponents invented and implemented. No “iconoclast” would ever agree with such a name, simply because the Greek word εἰκών has much more meaning than the Russian “icon”. This is any image, including an immaterial one, which means to call someone an iconoclast is to declare that he is fighting both the idea of God the Son as the image of God the Father, and man as the image of God, and the events of the Old Testament as prototypes of the events of the New etc. Moreover, the iconoclasts themselves claimed that they were defending the true image of Christ - the Eucharistic gifts, while what their opponents call an image is in fact not such, but is just an image.
Had their teaching been defeated in the end, it would now be called Orthodox, and we would contemptuously call the teaching of their opponents icon-worship and would talk not about the iconoclastic, but about the icon-worshipping period in Byzantium. However, if this had happened, the entire subsequent history and visual aesthetics of Eastern Christianity would have been different.
6. The West never liked Byzantium
Although trade, religious and diplomatic contacts between Byzantium and the states of Western Europe continued throughout the Middle Ages, it is difficult to talk about real cooperation or understanding between them. At the end of the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire fell apart into barbarian states and the tradition of “Romanity” was interrupted in the West, but preserved in the East. Within a few centuries, the new Western dynasties of Germany wanted to restore the continuity of their power with the Roman Empire and, for this purpose, entered into dynastic marriages with Byzantine princesses. The court of Charlemagne competed with Byzantium - this can be seen in architecture and art. However, Charles's imperial claims rather strengthened the misunderstanding between East and West: the culture of the Carolingian Renaissance wanted to see itself as the only legitimate heir of Rome.
The Crusaders attack Constantinople. Miniature from the chronicle “The Conquest of Constantinople” by Geoffroy de Villehardouin. Around 1330, Villehardouin was one of the leaders of the campaign. Bibliothèque nationale de France By the 10th century, the routes from Constantinople to Northern Italy overland through the Balkans and along the Danube were blocked by barbarian tribes. The only route left was by sea, which reduced communication opportunities and hampered cultural exchange. The division between East and West has become a physical reality. The ideological divide between West and East, fueled by theological disputes throughout the Middle Ages, deepened during the Crusades. The organizer of the Fourth Crusade, which ended with the capture of Constantinople in 1204, Pope Innocent III openly declared the primacy of the Roman Church over all others, citing divine decree.
As a result, it turned out that the Byzantines and the inhabitants of Europe knew little about each other, but were unfriendly towards each other. In the 14th century, the West criticized the corruption of the Byzantine clergy and explained the success of Islam by it. For example, Dante believed that Sultan Saladin could have converted to Christianity (and even placed him in limbo, a special place for virtuous non-Christians, in his Divine Comedy), but did not do so due to the unattractiveness of Byzantine Christianity. In Western countries, by the time of Dante, almost no one knew Greek. At the same time, Byzantine intellectuals studied Latin only to translate Thomas Aquinas, and did not hear anything about Dante. The situation changed in the 15th century after the Turkish invasion and the fall of Constantinople, when Byzantine culture began to penetrate into Europe along with Byzantine scholars who fled from the Turks. The Greeks brought with them many manuscripts of ancient works, and humanists were able to study Greek antiquity from the originals, and not from Roman literature and the few Latin translations known in the West.
But Renaissance scholars and intellectuals were interested in classical antiquity, not the society that preserved it. In addition, it was mainly intellectuals who fled to the West who were negatively disposed towards the ideas of monasticism and Orthodox theology of that time and who sympathized with the Roman Church; their opponents, supporters of Gregory Palamas, on the contrary, believed that it was better to try to come to an agreement with the Turks than to seek help from the pope. Therefore, Byzantine civilization continued to be perceived in a negative light. If the ancient Greeks and Romans were “theirs,” then the image of Byzantium was entrenched in European culture as oriental and exotic, sometimes attractive, but more often hostile and alien to the European ideals of reason and progress.
The century of European enlightenment completely branded Byzantium. The French enlighteners Montesquieu and Voltaire associated it with despotism, luxury, magnificent ceremonies, superstition, moral decay, civilizational decline and cultural sterility. According to Voltaire, the history of Byzantium is “an unworthy collection of pompous phrases and descriptions of miracles” that disgraces the human mind. Montesquieu sees the main reason for the fall of Constantinople in the pernicious and pervasive influence of religion on society and government. He speaks especially aggressively about Byzantine monasticism and clergy, about the veneration of icons, as well as about theological polemics:
“The Greeks - great talkers, great debaters, sophists by nature - constantly entered into religious disputes. Since the monks enjoyed great influence at the court, which weakened as it became corrupted, it turned out that the monks and the court mutually corrupted each other and that evil infected both. As a result, all the attention of the emperors was absorbed in either calming or arousing theological disputes, regarding which it was noticed that they became the more heated, the more insignificant the reason that caused them.
Thus, Byzantium became part of the image of the barbaric dark East, which paradoxically also included the main enemies of the Byzantine Empire - Muslims. In the Orientalist model, Byzantium was contrasted with a liberal and rational European society built on the ideals of Ancient Greece and Rome. This model underlies, for example, the descriptions of the Byzantine court in Gustave Flaubert's drama The Temptation of Saint Anthony:
“The king wipes the scents from his face with his sleeve. He eats from sacred vessels, then breaks them; and mentally he counts his ships, his troops, his people. Now, on a whim, he will burn down his palace with all its guests. He is thinking of rebuilding the Tower of Babel and dethroning the Almighty. Anthony reads all his thoughts from afar on his brow. They take possession of him and he becomes Nebuchadnezzar."
The mythological view of Byzantium has not yet been completely overcome in historical science. Of course, there could be no talk of any moral example from Byzantine history for the education of youth. School curricula were based on the models of classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, and Byzantine culture was excluded from them. In Russia, science and education followed Western models. In the 19th century, a dispute about the role of Byzantium in Russian history broke out between Westerners and Slavophiles. Peter Chaadaev, following the tradition of European enlightenment, bitterly complained about the Byzantine heritage of Rus':
“By the will of fate, we turned for moral teaching, which was supposed to educate us, to the corrupted Byzantium, to the object of deep contempt of these peoples.”
Ideologist of Byzantinism Konstantin Leontyev Konstantin Leontyev(1831-1891) - diplomat, writer, philosopher. In 1875, his work “Byzantism and the Slavs” was published, in which he argued that “Byzantism” is a civilization or culture, the “general idea” of which is made up of several components: autocracy, Christianity (different from Western, “from heresies and schisms”), disappointment in everything earthly, the absence of “an extremely exaggerated concept of the earthly human personality,” rejection of hope for the general well-being of peoples, the totality of some aesthetic ideas, and so on. Since Vseslavism is not a civilization or culture at all, and European civilization is coming to an end, Russia - which inherited almost everything from Byzantium - needs Byzantism to flourish. pointed to the stereotypical idea of Byzantium, which developed due to schooling and the lack of independence of Russian science:
“Byzantium seems to be something dry, boring, priestly, and not only boring, but even something pitiful and vile.”
7. In 1453, Constantinople fell - but Byzantium did not die
Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. Miniature from the Topkapi Palace collection. Istanbul, late 15th century Wikimedia Commons In 1935, the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga’s book “Byzantium after Byzantium” was published - and its name became established as a designation for the life of Byzantine culture after the fall of the empire in 1453. Byzantine life and institutions did not disappear overnight. They were preserved thanks to Byzantine emigrants who fled to Western Europe, in Constantinople itself, even under the rule of the Turks, as well as in the countries of the “Byzantine commonwealth,” as the British historian Dmitry Obolensky called the Eastern European medieval cultures that experienced the direct influence of Byzantium - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Rus'. The participants in this supernational unity preserved the legacy of Byzantium in religion, the norms of Roman law, and standards of literature and art.
In the last hundred years of the empire's existence, two factors - the cultural revival of the Palaiologans and the Palamite disputes - contributed, on the one hand, to the renewal of ties between Orthodox peoples and Byzantium, and on the other, to a new surge in the spread of Byzantine culture, primarily through liturgical texts and monastic literature. In the 14th century, Byzantine ideas, texts and even their authors entered the Slavic world through the city of Tarnovo, the capital of the Bulgarian Empire; in particular, the number of Byzantine works available in Rus' doubled thanks to Bulgarian translations.
In addition, the Ottoman Empire officially recognized the Patriarch of Constantinople: as the head of the Orthodox millet (or community), he continued to govern the church, under whose jurisdiction both Rus' and the Orthodox Balkan peoples remained. Finally, the rulers of the Danube principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, even becoming subjects of the Sultan, retained Christian statehood and considered themselves cultural and political heirs of the Byzantine Empire. They continued the traditions of royal court ceremonial, Greek learning and theology, and supported the Constantinople Greek elite, the Phanariots Phanariots- literally “residents of Phanar,” the quarter of Constantinople in which the residence of the Greek patriarch was located. The Greek elite of the Ottoman Empire were called Phanariotes because they lived primarily in this quarter..
Greek revolt of 1821. Illustration from the book “A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times” by John Henry Wright. 1905 The Internet Archive Iorga believes that Byzantium after Byzantium died during the unsuccessful uprising against the Turks in 1821, which was organized by the Phanariot Alexander Ypsilanti. On one side of the Ypsilanti banner there was the inscription “By this victory” and the image of Emperor Constantine the Great, with whose name the beginning of Byzantine history is associated, and on the other there was a phoenix reborn from the flame, a symbol of the revival of the Byzantine Empire. The uprising was crushed, the Patriarch of Constantinople was executed, and the ideology of the Byzantine Empire subsequently dissolved in Greek nationalism.
The end has come. But even at the beginning of the 4th century. the center of power moved to the calmer and richer eastern, Balkan and Asia Minor provinces. Soon the capital became Constantinople, founded by Emperor Constantine on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. True, the West also had its own emperors - the administration of the empire was divided. But it was the sovereigns of Constantinople who were considered the eldest. In the 5th century The Eastern, or Byzantine, as they said in the West, empire withstood the attack of the barbarians. Moreover, in the VI century. its rulers conquered many lands of the West occupied by the Germans and held them for two centuries. Then they were Roman emperors not only in title, but also in essence. Having lost by the 9th century. a significant part of the Western possessions, Byzantine Empire nevertheless, she continued to live and develop. It lasted up to 1453 g., when the last stronghold of her power, Constantinople, fell under the pressure of the Turks. All this time, the empire remained the legitimate successor in the eyes of its subjects. Its inhabitants called themselves Romans, which means “Romans” in Greek, although the majority of the population was Greek.
The geographical position of Byzantium, which spread its possessions over two continents - in Europe and Asia, and sometimes extended its power to areas of Africa, made this empire seem link between East and West. The constant bifurcation between the Eastern and Western worlds became the historical destiny of the Byzantine Empire. The mixture of Greco-Roman and Eastern traditions left its mark on public life, statehood, religious and philosophical ideas, culture and art of Byzantine society. However, Byzantium went on its own historically, in many ways different from the destinies of the countries of both the East and the West, which also determined the features of its culture.
Map of the Byzantine Empire
History of the Byzantine Empire
The culture of the Byzantine Empire was created by many peoples. In the first centuries of the existence of the Roman Empire, all the eastern provinces of Rome were under the rule of its emperors: Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, southern Crimea, Western Armenia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, northeastern Libya. The creators of the new cultural unity were the Romans, Armenians, Syrians, Egyptian Copts and barbarians who settled within the borders of the empire.
The most powerful cultural layer in this cultural diversity was the ancient heritage. Long before the advent of the Byzantine Empire, thanks to the campaigns of Alexander the Great, all the peoples of the Middle East were subjected to the powerful unifying influence of ancient Greek, Hellenic culture. This process was called Hellenization. Migrants from the West also adopted Greek traditions. So the culture of the renewed empire developed as a continuation mainly of the ancient Greek culture. The Greek language already in the 7th century. reigned supreme in the written and oral speech of the Romans (Romans).
The East, unlike the West, did not experience devastating barbarian raids. Therefore, there was no terrible cultural decline here. Most ancient Greco-Roman cities continued to exist in the Byzantine world. In the first centuries of the new era, they retained their previous appearance and structure. As in Hellas, the heart of the city remained the agora - a vast square where public meetings were previously held. Now, however, people increasingly gathered at the hippodrome - the place of performances and races, the announcement of decrees and public executions. The city was decorated with fountains and statues, magnificent houses of the local nobility and public buildings. In the capital - Constantinople - the best craftsmen erected monumental palaces of the emperors. The most famous of the early ones - the Great Imperial Palace of Justinian I, the famous conqueror of the Germans, who ruled in 527-565 - was erected above the Sea of Marmara. The appearance and decoration of the capital's palaces were reminiscent of the times of the ancient Greco-Macedonian rulers of the Middle East. But the Byzantines also used Roman urban planning experience, in particular the water supply system and baths (therms).
Most of the large cities of antiquity remained centers of trade, crafts, science, literature and art. Such were Athens and Corinth in the Balkans, Ephesus and Nicaea in Asia Minor, Antioch, Jerusalem and Berit (Beirut) in Syro-Palestines, Alexandria in ancient Egypt.
The collapse of many Western cities led to a shift of trade routes to the east. At the same time, barbarian invasions and captures made land roads unsafe. Law and order were preserved only in the domains of the Constantinople emperors. Therefore, the “dark” centuries filled with wars (V-VIII centuries) sometimes became heyday of Byzantine ports. They served as transit points for military detachments going to numerous wars, and as anchorages for the Byzantine fleet, the strongest in Europe. But the main meaning and source of their existence was maritime trade. The trade ties of the Romans extended from India to Britain.
Ancient crafts continued to develop in cities. Many products of early Byzantine masters are real works of art. The masterpieces of Roman jewelers - made of precious metals and stones, colored glass and ivory - aroused admiration in the countries of the Middle East and barbaric Europe. The Germans, Slavs, and Huns adopted the skills of the Romans and imitated them in their own creations.
Coins in the Byzantine Empire
For a long time, only Roman coins circulated throughout Europe. The emperors of Constantinople continued minting Roman money, making only minor changes to its appearance. The right of the Roman emperors to rule was not questioned even by their fierce enemies, and the only mint in Europe was proof of this. The first in the West who dared to start minting his own coin was the Frankish king in the second half of the 6th century. However, even then the barbarians only imitated the Roman example.
Legacy of the Roman Empire
The Roman heritage of Byzantium can be traced even more noticeably in the system of government. Politicians and philosophers of Byzantium never tired of repeating that Constantinople is the New Rome, that they themselves are Romans, and their power is the only empire preserved by God. The extensive apparatus of the central government, the tax system, and the legal doctrine of the inviolability of the imperial autocracy were preserved without fundamental changes.
The life of the emperor, furnished with extraordinary pomp, and admiration for him were inherited from the traditions of the Roman Empire. In the late Roman period, even before the Byzantine era, palace rituals included many elements of eastern despotism. Basileus, the emperor, appeared before the people only accompanied by a brilliant retinue and an impressive armed guard, following in a strictly defined order. They prostrated themselves before the basileus, during the speech from the throne he was covered with special curtains, and only a few were given the right to sit in his presence. Only the highest ranks of the empire were allowed to eat at his meal. The reception of foreign ambassadors, whom the Byzantines tried to impress with the greatness of the emperor's power, was especially pompous.
The central administration was concentrated in several secret departments: the Schwaz department of the logothet (manager) of the henikon - the main tax institution, the department of the military treasury, the department of post and external relations, the department for managing the property of the imperial family, etc. In addition to the staff of officials in the capital, each department had officials sent on temporary assignments to the provinces. There were also palace secrets that controlled the institutions that directly served the royal court: food stores, dressing rooms, stables, repairs.
Byzantium retained Roman law and the basics of Roman legal proceedings. In the Byzantine era, the development of the Roman theory of law was completed, they received finalization such theoretical concepts of jurisprudence as law, law, custom, the difference between private and public law was clarified, the foundations of regulation were defined international relations, norms of criminal law and procedure.
The legacy of the Roman Empire was a clear tax system. A free city dweller or peasant paid taxes and duties to the treasury on all types of his property and on any kind of labor activity. He paid for the ownership of the land, and for the garden in the city, and for the mule or sheep in the barn, and for the rented premises, and for the workshop, and for the shop, and for the ship, and for the boat. Almost no product on the market changed hands without the watchful eye of officials.
Warfare
Byzantium also preserved the Roman art of waging “correct war.” The empire carefully preserved, copied and studied ancient strategikons - treatises on the art of war.
Periodically, the authorities reformed the army, partly due to the emergence of new enemies, partly to suit the capabilities and needs of the state itself. The basis of the Byzantine army became cavalry. Its number in the army ranged from 20% in late Roman times to more than one third in the 10th century. An insignificant part, but very combat-ready, became the cataphracts - heavy cavalry.
Navy Byzantium was also a direct inheritance of Rome. The following facts speak about his strength. In the middle of the 7th century. Emperor Constantine V was able to send 500 ships to the mouth of the Danube to conduct military operations against the Bulgarians, and in 766 - even over 2 thousand. The largest ships (dromons) with three rows of oars took on board up to 100-150 soldiers and about the same number oarsmen
An innovation in the fleet was "Greek fire"- a mixture of petroleum, flammable oils, sulfur asphalt, - invented in the 7th century. and terrified enemies. He was thrown out of siphons arranged in the form of bronze monsters with gaping mouths. The siphons could be turned to different sides. The ejected liquid ignited spontaneously and burned even in water. It was with the help of “Greek fire” that the Byzantines repulsed two Arab invasions - in 673 and 718.
Military construction was excellently developed in the Byzantine Empire, based on a rich engineering tradition. Byzantine engineers - builders of fortresses were famous far beyond the borders of the country, even in distant Khazaria, where a fortress was built according to their plans
Large coastal cities, in addition to walls, were protected by underwater piers and massive chains that blocked the enemy fleet from entering the bays. Such chains closed the Golden Horn in Constantinople and the Gulf of Thessalonica.
For the defense and siege of fortresses, the Byzantines used various engineering structures (ditches and palisades, mines and embankments) and all kinds of weapons. Byzantine documents mention battering rams, movable towers with walkways, stone-throwing ballistae, hooks for capturing and destroying enemy siege equipment, cauldrons from which boiling tar and molten lead were poured onto the heads of the besiegers.
The content of the article
BYZANTINE EMPIRE, the name of the state that arose in the 4th century, accepted in historical science. on the territory of the eastern part of the Roman Empire and existed until the mid-15th century. In the Middle Ages, it was officially called the “Empire of the Romans” (“Romans”). The economic, administrative and cultural center of the Byzantine Empire was Constantinople, conveniently located at the junction of the European and Asian provinces of the Roman Empire, at the intersection of the most important trade and strategic routes, land and sea.
The emergence of Byzantium as an independent state was prepared in the depths of the Roman Empire. It was a complex and lengthy process that lasted for a century. Its beginning goes back to the era of the crisis of the 3rd century, which undermined the foundations of Roman society. The formation of Byzantium during the 4th century completed the era of development of ancient society, and in most of this society tendencies to preserve the unity of the Roman Empire prevailed. The process of division proceeded slowly and latently and ended in 395 with the formal formation of two states in place of the unified Roman Empire, each headed by its own emperor. By this time, the difference in internal and external problems facing the eastern and western provinces of the Roman Empire had clearly emerged, which largely determined their territorial demarcation. Byzantium included the eastern half of the Roman Empire along a line running from the western Balkans to Cyrenaica. The differences were reflected in spiritual life and ideology, as a result, from the 4th century. in both parts of the empire, different directions of Christianity were established for a long time (in the West, orthodox - Nicene, in the East - Arianism).
Located on three continents - at the junction of Europe, Asia and Africa - Byzantium occupied an area of up to 1 mln sq. It included the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Cyrenaica, part of Mesopotamia and Armenia, the Mediterranean islands, primarily Crete and Cyprus, strongholds in the Crimea (Chersonese), in the Caucasus (in Georgia), some areas of Arabia, islands of the Eastern Mediterranean. Its borders extended from the Danube to the Euphrates.
The latest archaeological material shows that the late Roman era was not, as previously thought, an era of continuous decline and decay. Byzantium went through a rather complex cycle of its development, and modern researchers consider it possible to even talk about elements of “economic revival” during its historical path. The latter includes the following steps:
4th–early 7th century. – the time of the country’s transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages;
second half of the 7th–12th centuries. – the entry of Byzantium into the Middle Ages, the formation of feudalism and corresponding institutions in the empire;
13th – first half of the 14th century. - the era of economic and political decline of Byzantium, which ended with the death of this state.
Development of agrarian relations in the 4th–7th centuries.
Byzantium included densely populated areas of the eastern half of the Roman Empire with a long-standing and high agricultural culture. The specifics of the development of agrarian relations were influenced by the fact that most of the empire consisted of mountainous regions with rocky soil, and the fertile valleys were small and isolated, which did not contribute to the formation of large territorial economically unified units. In addition, historically, from the time of Greek colonization and further, during the Hellenistic era, almost all land suitable for cultivation turned out to be occupied by the territories of ancient city-polises. All this determined the dominant role of medium-sized slaveholding estates, and as a consequence, the power of municipal land ownership and the preservation of a significant layer of small landowners, communities of peasants - owners of different incomes, the top of which were wealthy owners. Under these conditions, the growth of large land ownership was difficult. It usually consisted of tens, rarely hundreds of small and medium-sized estates, geographically scattered, which was not conducive to the formation of a single local economy, similar to the Western one.
Distinctive features of the agrarian life of early Byzantium in comparison with the Western Roman Empire were the preservation of small-scale, including peasant, land ownership, the viability of the community, a significant share of average urban landownership with the relative weakness of large landownership. State land ownership was also very significant in Byzantium. The role of slave labor was significant and clearly visible in legislative sources of the 4th–6th centuries. Slaves were owned by wealthy peasants, soldiers by veterans, urban landowners by plebeians, and municipal aristocracy by curials. Researchers associate slavery mainly with municipal land ownership. Indeed, the average municipal landowners constituted the largest stratum of wealthy slaveholders, and the average villa was certainly slaveholding in character. As a rule, the average urban landowner owned one estate in the urban district, often in addition a country house and one or several smaller suburban farms, proastia, which together constituted the suburbia, a wide suburban zone of the ancient city, which gradually passed into its rural district, the territory - choir. The estate (villa) was usually a farm of quite significant size, since it, being multicultural in nature, provided the basic needs of the city manor house. The estate also included lands cultivated by colony holders, which brought the landowner cash income or a product that was sold.
There is no reason to exaggerate the degree of decline of municipal land ownership at least until the 5th century. Until this time, there were virtually no restrictions on the alienation of curial property, which indicates the stability of their position. Only in the 5th century. the curials were forbidden to sell their rural slaves (mancipia rustica). In a number of areas (in the Balkans) up to the 5th century. the growth of medium-sized slave-owning villas continued. As archaeological material shows, their economy was largely undermined during the barbarian invasions of the late 4th–5th centuries.
The growth of large estates (fundi) was due to the absorption of medium-sized villas. Did this lead to a change in the nature of the economy? Archaeological material shows that in a number of regions of the empire, large slave-owning villas remained until the end of the 6th–7th century. In documents of the late 4th century. on the lands of large owners, rural slaves are mentioned. Laws of the late 5th century. about the marriages of slaves and colons they talk about slaves planted on the ground, about slaves on the peculium, therefore, we're talking about, apparently, not about changing their status, but about curtailing their own master's economy. The laws regarding the slave status of children of slaves show that the bulk of slaves were “self-reproducing” and that there was no active tendency to abolish slavery. We see a similar picture in the “new” rapidly developing church-monastic land ownership.
The process of development of large land ownership was accompanied by the curtailment of the master's own economy. This was stimulated natural conditions, the very nature of the formation of large land ownership, which included a mass of small territorially scattered possessions, the number of which sometimes reached several hundred, with sufficient development of exchange between the district and the city, commodity-money relations, which made it possible for the land owner to receive cash payments from them. For the Byzantine large estate in the process of its development, it was more typical than for the Western one to curtail its own master's economy. The master's estate, from the center of the estate's economy, increasingly turned into a center for the exploitation of the surrounding farms, the collection and better processing of the products coming from them. Therefore, a characteristic feature of the evolution of the agrarian life of early Byzantium, as medium and small slaveholding farms declined, the main type of settlement became a village inhabited by slaves and colons (koma).
An essential feature of small free land ownership in early Byzantium was not just the presence of a mass of small rural landowners, who also existed in the West, but also the fact that the peasants were united into a community. In the presence of different types of communities, the dominant one was the metrocomia, which consisted of neighbors who had a share in communal lands, owned common land property, used by fellow villagers or rented out. The Metropolitan Committee carried out the necessary joint work, had its own elders who managed the economic life of the village and maintained order. They collected taxes and monitored the fulfillment of duties.
Having a community is one of the the most important features, which determined the uniqueness of the transition of early Byzantium to feudalism, while such a community has certain specifics. Unlike the Middle East, the early Byzantine free community consisted of peasants - full owners of their land. It has gone through a long path of development on the polis lands. The number of inhabitants of such a community reached 1–1.5 thousand people (“large and populous villages”). She had elements of her own craft and traditional internal cohesion.
The peculiarity of the development of the colony in early Byzantium was that the number of columns here grew mainly not due to slaves planted on the land, but was replenished by small landowners - tenants and communal peasants. This process proceeded slowly. Throughout the entire early Byzantine era, not only did a significant layer of communal property owners remain, but colonate relations in their most rigid forms were formed slowly. If in the West “individual” patronage contributed to the fairly rapid inclusion of small landowners in the structure of the estate, then in Byzantium the peasantry defended their rights to land and personal freedom for a long time. The state attachment of peasants to the land, the development of a kind of “state colony” ensured for a long time the predominance of softer forms of dependence - the so-called “free colony” (coloni liberi). Such colones retained part of their property and, as personally free, had significant legal capacity.
The state could take advantage of the internal cohesion of the community and its organization. In the 5th century it introduces the right of protimesis - preferential purchase of peasant land by fellow villagers, and strengthens the collective responsibility of the community for the receipt of taxes. Both ultimately testified to the intensified process of ruin of the free peasantry, the deterioration of its position, but at the same time helped to preserve the community.
Spread from the end of the 4th century. the transition of entire villages under the patronage of large private owners also influenced the specifics of large early Byzantine estates. As small and medium-sized holdings disappeared, the village became the main economic unit, this led to its internal economic consolidation. Obviously, there is reason to talk not only about the preservation of the community on the lands of large owners, but also about its “regeneration” as a result of the resettlement of former small and medium-sized farms that had become dependent. The unity of communities was greatly facilitated by the barbarian invasions. So, in the Balkans in the 5th century. The destroyed old villas were replaced by large and fortified villages of colones (vici). Thus, in early Byzantine conditions, the growth of large land ownership was accompanied by the spread of villages and the strengthening of village rather than manorial farming. Archaeological material confirms not only the increase in the number of villages, but also the revival of village construction - the construction of irrigation systems, wells, cisterns, oil and grape presses. There was even an increase in the village population.
Stagnation and the beginning of the decline of the Byzantine village, according to archaeological data, occurred in the last decades of the 5th – early 6th centuries. Chronologically, this process coincides with the emergence of more rigid forms of colonata - the category of “attributed colons” - adscriptits, enapographs. They became former estate workers, freed slaves and planted on the land, free colons who were deprived of their property as tax oppression intensified. The assigned colonies no longer had their own land, often they did not have their own house and farm - livestock, equipment. All this became the property of the master, and they turned into “slaves of the land”, recorded in the estate’s qualifications, attached to it and to the person of the master. This was the result of the evolution of a significant part of the free colons during the 5th century, which led to an increase in the number of adscriptive colons. One can argue about the extent to which the state and the increase in state taxes and duties were to blame for the ruin of the small free peasantry, but a sufficient amount of data shows that large landowners, in order to increase income, turned colones into quasi-slaves, depriving them of the remainder of their property. Justinian's legislation, in order to fully collect state taxes, tried to limit the growth of taxes and duties in favor of the masters. But the most important thing was that neither the owners nor the state sought to strengthen the ownership rights of the colons to the land, to their own farm.
So we can state that at the turn of the 5th–6th centuries. the way for further strengthening of small peasant farming was closed. The result of this was the beginning of the economic decline of the village - construction was reduced, the village population stopped growing, the flight of peasants from the land increased and, naturally, there was an increase in abandoned and empty land (agri deserti). Emperor Justinian saw the distribution of land to churches and monasteries not only as a matter pleasing to God, but also as a useful one. Indeed, if in the 4th–5th centuries. the growth of church land ownership and monasteries occurred through donations and from wealthy landowners, then in the 6th century. The state increasingly began to transfer low-income plots to monasteries, hoping that they would be able to use them better. Rapid growth in the 6th century. church-monastic landholdings, which then covered up to 1/10 of all cultivated territories (this at one time gave rise to the theory of “monastic feudalism”) was a direct reflection of the changes taking place in the position of the Byzantine peasantry. During the first half of the 6th century. a significant part of it already consisted of ascriptions, into which an increasing part of the small landowners who had survived until then were transformed. 6th century - the time of their greatest ruin, the time of the final decline of average municipal land ownership, which Justinian tried to preserve by bans on the alienation of curial property. From the middle of the 6th century. The government found itself forced to increasingly remove arrears from the agricultural population, record the increasing desolation of land and the reduction of the rural population. Accordingly, the second half of the 6th century. - a time of rapid growth of large land ownership. As archaeological material from a number of areas shows, large secular and ecclesiastical and monastic possessions in the 6th century. have doubled, if not tripled. Emphyteusis, an everlasting lease of land, has become widespread on state lands. preferential terms associated with the need to invest significant effort and resources in maintaining land cultivation. Emphyteusis became a form of expansion of large private land ownership. According to a number of researchers, peasant farming and the entire agrarian economy of early Byzantium during the 6th century. lost the ability to develop. Thus, the result of the evolution of agrarian relations in the early Byzantine village was its economic decline, which was expressed in the weakening of ties between the village and the city, the gradual development of more primitive but less costly rural production, and the increasing economic isolation of the village from the city.
The economic decline also affected the estate. There was a sharp reduction in small-scale land ownership, including peasant-communal land ownership, and the old ancient urban land ownership actually disappeared. Colonation in early Byzantium became the dominant form of peasant dependence. The norms of colonate relations extended to the relationship between the state and small landowners, who became a secondary category of farmers. The stricter dependence of slaves and adscripts, in turn, influenced the position of the rest of the colons. The presence in early Byzantium of small landowners, a free peasantry united in communities, the long and massive existence of the category of free colons, i.e. softer forms of colonate dependence did not create conditions for the direct transformation of colonate relations into feudal dependence. The Byzantine experience once again confirms that colony was a typically late antique form of dependence associated with the disintegration of slave relations, a transitional form doomed to extinction. Modern historiography notes the almost complete elimination of kolonat in the 7th century, i.e. he could not have a significant impact on the formation of feudal relations in Byzantium.
City.
Feudal society, like ancient society, was basically agrarian, and the agrarian economy had a decisive influence on the development of the Byzantine city. In the early Byzantine era, Byzantium, with its 900–1200 city-polises, often spaced 15–20 km from each other, looked like a “country of cities” in comparison with Western Europe. But one can hardly talk about the prosperity of cities and even the flourishing of urban life in Byzantium in the 4th–6th centuries. compared to previous centuries. But the fact that a sharp turning point in the development of the early Byzantine city came only at the end of the 6th – beginning of the 7th centuries. – undoubtedly. It coincided with attacks by external enemies, the loss of part of the Byzantine territories, and the invasion of masses of new populations - all this enabled a number of researchers to attribute the decline of cities to the influence of purely external factors that undermined their previous well-being for two centuries. Of course, there is no reason to deny the enormous real impact of the destruction of many cities on general development Byzantium, but their own internal trends in the development of the early Byzantine city of the 4th–6th centuries also deserve close attention.
Its greater stability than Western Roman cities is explained by a number of circumstances. Among them is the lesser development of large magnate farms, which were formed in the conditions of their increasing natural isolation, the preservation of medium-sized landowners and small urban landowners in the eastern provinces of the empire, as well as the mass of a free peasantry around the cities. This made it possible to maintain a fairly wide market for urban crafts, and the decline of urban land ownership even increased the role of the intermediary merchant in supplying the city. On the basis of this, a fairly significant layer of the trade and craft population remained, united by profession into several dozen corporations and usually amounting to at least 10% of the total number of city residents. Small towns, as a rule, had 1.5–2 thousand inhabitants, medium-sized ones – up to 10 thousand, and larger ones – several tens of thousands, sometimes more than 100 thousand. In general, the urban population accounted for up to 1/4 of the country’s population.
During the 4th–5th centuries. cities retained certain land ownership, which provided income for the city community and, along with other income, made it possible to maintain city life and improve it. An important factor was that a significant part of its rural district was under the authority of the city, the urban curia. Also, if in the West the economic decline of cities led to the pauperization of the urban population, which made it dependent on the urban nobility, then in the Byzantine city the trade and craft population was more numerous and economically more independent.
The growth of large land ownership and the impoverishment of urban communities and curials still took their toll. Already at the end of the 4th century. the rhetorician Livanius wrote that some small towns were becoming “like villages,” and the historian Theodoret of Cyrrhus (5th century) regretted that they were unable to maintain their former public buildings and were “losing” among their inhabitants. But in early Byzantium this process proceeded slowly, although steadily.
If in small cities, with the impoverishment of the municipal aristocracy, ties with the intra-imperial market weakened, then in large cities, the growth of large land ownership led to their rise, the resettlement of rich landowners, merchants and artisans. In the 4th–5th centuries. major urban centers are experiencing a rise, which was facilitated by the restructuring of the administration of the empire, which was the result of shifts that took place in late antique society. The number of provinces increased (64), and state administration was concentrated in their capitals. Many of these capitals became centers of local military administration, sometimes - important centers of defense, garrisoning and large religious centers - metropolitan capitals. As a rule, in the 4th-5th centuries. Intensive construction was underway in them (Livanius wrote in the 4th century about Antioch: “the whole city is under construction”), their population multiplied, to some extent creating the illusion of general prosperity of cities and urban life.
It is worth noting the rise of another type of city - coastal port centers. Wherever possible, everything larger number provincial capitals moved to coastal cities. Externally, the process seemed to reflect the intensification of trade exchanges. However, in reality, the development of cheaper and safer sea transportation took place in conditions of weakening and decline of the extensive system of internal land routes.
A peculiar manifestation of the “naturalization” of the economy of early Byzantium was the development of state-owned industries designed to meet the needs of the state. This kind of production was also concentrated mainly in the capital and largest cities.
The turning point in the development of the small Byzantine city, apparently, was the second half - the end of the 5th century. It was at this time that small towns entered an era of crisis, began to lose their importance as centers of craft and trade in their area, and began to “push out” the excess trade and craft population. The fact that the government was forced in 498 to abolish the main trade and craft tax - the chrysargir, an important source of cash receipts for the treasury, was neither an accident nor an indicator of the increased prosperity of the empire, but spoke of the massive impoverishment of the trade and craft population. As a contemporary wrote, city residents, oppressed by their own poverty and oppression by the authorities, led a “miserable and miserable life.” One of the reflections of this process, apparently, was the beginning of the 5th century. a massive outflow of townspeople to monasteries, an increase in the number of city monasteries, characteristic of the 5th–6th centuries. Perhaps the information that in some small towns monasticism accounted for from 1/4 to 1/3 of their population is exaggerated, but since there were already several dozen city and suburban monasteries, many churches and church institutions, such an exaggeration was in any case small.
The situation of the peasantry, small and medium-sized urban owners in the 6th century. did not improve, the majority of whom became adscripts, free colons and peasants, robbed by the state and land owners, did not join the ranks of buyers in the city market. The number of wandering, migrating craft population grew. We do not know what the outflow of the craft population from the decaying cities to the countryside was, but already in the second half of the 6th century the growth of large settlements, “villages”, and burgs intensifying around the cities. This process was also characteristic of previous eras, but its nature has changed. If in the past it was associated with increased exchange between the city and the district, the strengthening of the role of urban production and the market, and such villages were a kind of trading outposts of the city, now their rise was due to the beginning of its decline. At the same time, individual districts were separated from the cities and their exchange with the cities was curtailed.
The rise of early Byzantine large cities in the 4th–5th centuries. also largely had a structural-stage character. Archaeological material clearly paints a picture of a real turning point in the development of a large early Byzantine city. First of all, it shows the process of gradual increase in property polarization of the urban population, confirmed by data on the growth of large land ownership and the erosion of the layer of average urban owners. Archaeologically, this finds expression in the gradual disappearance of neighborhoods of the wealthy population. On the one hand, the rich quarters of the palaces and estates of the nobility stand out more clearly, on the other – the poor, who occupied an increasing part of the city’s territory. The influx of trade and craft population from small towns only aggravated the situation. Apparently, from the end of the 5th to the beginning of the 6th century. One can also talk about the impoverishment of the mass of the trade and craft population of large cities. This was probably partly due to the cessation in the 6th century. intensive construction in most of them.
For large cities there were more factors that supported their existence. However, the pauperization of their population aggravated both the economic and social situation. Only manufacturers of luxury goods, food traders, large merchants and moneylenders flourished. In a large early Byzantine city, its population also increasingly came under the protection of the church, and the latter was increasingly embedded in the economy.
Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, occupies a special place in the history of the Byzantine city. The latest research has changed the understanding of the role of Constantinople, amended the legends about early history Byzantine capital. First of all, Emperor Constantine, concerned with strengthening the unity of the empire, did not intend to create Constantinople as a “second Rome” or as a “new Christian capital of the empire.” The further transformation of the Byzantine capital into a giant supercity was the result of the socio-economic and political development of the eastern provinces.
Early Byzantine statehood was the last form of ancient statehood, the result of its long development. The polis - municipality until the end of antiquity continued to be the basis of the social and administrative, political and cultural life of society. The bureaucratic organization of late antique society developed in the process of decomposition of its main socio-political unit - the polis, and in the process of its formation was influenced by the socio-political traditions of ancient society, which gave its bureaucracy and political institutions a specific antique character. It was precisely the fact that the late Roman regime of dominance was the result of centuries of development of the forms of Greco-Roman statehood that gave it an originality that did not bring it closer either to the traditional forms of eastern despotism, or to the future medieval, feudal statehood.
The power of the Byzantine emperor was not the power of a deity, like that of the eastern monarchs. She was power “by the grace of God,” but not exclusively so. Although sanctified by God, in early Byzantium it was viewed not as a divinely sanctioned personal omnipotence, but as an unlimited, but delegated to the emperor, the power of the Senate and the Roman people. Hence the practice of “civil” election of each emperor. It was no coincidence that the Byzantines considered themselves “Romans”, Romans, custodians of Roman state-political traditions, and their state as Roman, Roman. The fact that in Byzantium the heredity of imperial power was not established, and the election of emperors remained until the end of the existence of Byzantium, should also be attributed not to Roman customs, but to the influence of new social conditions, class non-polarized society of the 8th–9th centuries. Late antique statehood was characterized by a combination of government by state bureaucracy and polis self-government.
A characteristic feature of this era was the involvement of independent property owners, retired officials (honorati), and the clergy in self-government. Together with the top of the curials, they constituted a kind of official collegium, a committee that stood above the curiae and was responsible for the functioning of individual city institutions. The bishop was the “protector” of the city not simply because of his ecclesiastical functions. His role in the late antique and early Byzantine city was special: he was a recognized defender of the city community, its official representative before the state and the bureaucratic administration. This position and responsibilities reflected the general policy of the state and society in relation to the city. Concern for the prosperity and well-being of cities was declared as one of the most important tasks of the state. The duty of the early Byzantine emperors was to be “philopolis” - “ city lovers", it also extended to the imperial administration. Thus, we can talk not only about the state maintaining the remnants of polis self-government, but also about a certain orientation in this direction of the entire policy of the early Byzantine state, its “city-centrism.”
With the transition to the early Middle Ages, state policy also changed. From “city-centric” - late antique - it turns into a new, purely “territorial” one. The empire, as an ancient federation of cities with territories under their control, died completely. In the state system, the city was equalized with the village within the framework of the general territorial division of the empire into rural and urban administrative and tax districts.
The evolution of church organization should also be viewed from this point of view. The question of which municipal functions of the church, obligatory for the early Byzantine era, has died out has not yet been sufficiently studied. But there is no doubt that some of the surviving functions lost their connection with the activities of the city community and became an independent function of the church itself. Thus, the church organization, having broken the remnants of its former dependence on the ancient polis structure, for the first time became independent, territorially organized and unified within the dioceses. The decline of cities obviously contributed greatly to this.
Accordingly, all this was reflected in the specific forms of state-church organization and their functioning. The Emperor was the absolute ruler - the supreme legislator and chief executive, the supreme commander and judge, the highest court of appeal, the protector of the church and, as such, the "earthly leader of the Christian people." He appointed and dismissed all officials and could make sole decisions on all issues. State Council- the consistory, consisting of senior officials, and the senate, the body for representing and protecting the interests of the senatorial class, had advisory and advisory functions. All threads of control converged in the palace. The magnificent ceremony raised the imperial power high and separated it from the mass of its subjects - mere mortals. However, certain limitations of imperial power were also observed. Being a “living law,” the emperor was obliged to follow existing law. He could make individual decisions, but on major issues he consulted not only with his advisers, but also with the Senate and senators. He was obliged to listen to the decisions of the three “constitutional forces” - the Senate, the army and the “people”, involved in the nomination and election of emperors. On this basis, city parties were a real political force in early Byzantium, and often, when elected, conditions were imposed on emperors that they were obliged to observe. During the early Byzantine era, the civil side of election was absolutely dominant. The consecration of power, in comparison with election, was not significant. The role of the church was considered to some extent within the framework of ideas about state cult.
All types of service were divided into court (palatina), civil (militia) and military (militia armata). Military administration and command were separated from civil ones, and the early Byzantine emperors, formally the supreme commanders, actually ceased to be generals. The main thing in the empire was civil administration, military activity was subordinate to it. Therefore, the main figures in the administration and hierarchy, after the emperor, were the two praetorian prefects - the “viceroys”, who stood at the head of the entire civil administration and were in charge of managing provinces, cities, collecting taxes, performing duties, local police functions, ensuring supplies for the army, court, etc. The disappearance in early medieval Byzantium of not only the provincial division, but also the most important departments of prefects, undoubtedly indicates a radical restructuring of the entire system of public administration. The early Byzantine army was staffed partly by forced recruitment of recruits (conscription), but the further it went, the more it became mercenary - from the inhabitants of the empire and barbarians. Its supplies and weapons were provided by civilian departments. The end of the early Byzantine era and the beginning of the early medieval era were marked by a complete restructuring of the military organization. The previous division of the army into the border army, located in the border districts and under the command of the duxes, and the mobile army, located in the cities of the empire, was abolished.
Justinian's 38-year reign (527–565) was a turning point in early Byzantine history. Having come to power in conditions of social crisis, the emperor began by attempting to forcibly establish the religious unity of the empire. His very moderate reform policy was interrupted by the Nika Revolt (532), a unique and at the same time urban movement characteristic of the early Byzantine era. It focused the entire intensity of social contradictions in the country. The uprising was brutally suppressed. Justinian carried out a series of administrative reforms. He adopted a number of norms from Roman legislation, establishing the principle of the inviolability of private property. Justinian's code would form the basis of subsequent Byzantine legislation, helping to ensure that Byzantium remained a “rule of law state”, in which the authority and force of law played a huge role, and would further have a strong influence on the jurisprudence of all medieval Europe. In general, the era of Justinian seemed to sum up and synthesize the trends of previous development. The famous historian G.L. Kurbatov noted that in this era all serious possibilities for reforms in all spheres of life of early Byzantine society - social, political, ideological - were exhausted. During 32 of the 38 years of Justinian's reign, Byzantium waged grueling wars - in North Africa, Italy, with Iran, etc.; in the Balkans she had to repel the onslaught of the Huns and Slavs, and Justinian’s hopes for stabilizing the position of the empire ended in collapse.
Heraclius (610–641) achieved well-known success in strengthening central power. True, the eastern provinces with a predominant non-Greek population were lost, and now his power extended mainly over Greek or Hellenized territories. Heraclius adopted the ancient Greek title "basileus" instead of the Latin "emperor". The status of the ruler of the empire was no longer associated with the idea of the election of the sovereign, as a representative of the interests of all subjects, as the main position in the empire (magistrate). The Emperor became a medieval monarch. At the same time, the entire state business and legal proceedings were translated from Latin into Greek. The difficult foreign policy situation of the empire required the concentration of power locally, and the “principle of separation” of powers began to disappear from the political arena. Radical changes began in the structure of provincial government, the boundaries of the provinces changed, and all military and civil power was now entrusted to the governor by the emperors - the strategus (military leader). The strategos received power over the judges and officials of the provincial fiscus, and the province itself began to be called “fema” (previously this was the name of a detachment of local troops).
In the difficult military situation of the 7th century. The role of the army invariably increased. With the emergence of the feminine system, mercenary troops lost their importance. The femme system was based on the countryside; free peasant stratiots became the main military force of the country. They were included in the stratiot catalogues, and received certain privileges in relation to taxes and duties. They were assigned land plots that were inalienable, but could be inherited provided they continued to bear military service. With the spread of the theme system, the restoration of imperial power in the provinces accelerated. The free peasantry turned into taxpayers of the treasury, into warriors of the feminine militia. The state, which was in dire need of money, was largely relieved of the obligation to maintain the army, although the stratiots received a certain salary.
The first themes arose in Asia Minor (Opsiky, Anatolik, Armeniak). From the end of the 7th to the beginning of the 9th century. they also formed in the Balkans: Thrace, Hellas, Macedonia, Peloponnese, and also, probably, Thessalonica-Dyrrachium. So, Asia Minor became the “cradle of medieval Byzantium.” It was here, under conditions of acute military necessity, that the femme system was the first to emerge and take shape, and the stratiot peasant class was born, which strengthened and raised the socio-political significance of the village. At the end of the 7th–8th century. Tens of thousands of Slavic families who were conquered by force and voluntarily submitted were resettled to the north-west of Asia Minor (Bithynia), allocated land under the conditions of military service, and were made taxpayers of the treasury. The main territorial divisions of the theme are increasingly clearly military districts, turms, and not provincial cities, as before. In Asia Minor, the future feudal ruling class of Byzantium began to form from among the fem commanders. By the middle of the 9th century. The feminine system was established throughout the empire. New organization military forces and control allowed the empire to repel the onslaught of enemies and move on to returning lost lands.
But the feminine system, as it was later discovered, was fraught with danger for the central government: the strategists, having acquired enormous power, tried to escape from the control of the center. They even waged wars with each other. Therefore, the emperors began to split up large themes, causing discontent among the strategists, on the crest of which the theme strategist Anatolicus Leo III the Isaurian (717–741) came to power.
Leo III and other iconoclast emperors, who succeeded in overcoming centrifugal tendencies and for a long time turned the church and the military-administrative system of tribal government into the support of their throne, have an exceptional place in strengthening imperial power. First of all, they subjugated the church to their influence, arrogating to themselves the right of a decisive vote in the election of the patriarch and in the adoption of the most important church dogmas at ecumenical councils. Rebellious patriarchs were deposed, exiled, and Roman governors were also dethroned, until they found themselves under the protectorate of the Frankish state from the mid-8th century. Iconoclasm contributed to the discord with the West, serving as the beginning of the future drama of the division of churches. Iconoclast emperors revived and strengthened the cult of imperial power. The same goals were pursued by the policy of resuming Roman legal proceedings and reviving what had experienced a deep decline in the 7th century. Roman law. The Eclogue (726) sharply increased the responsibility of officials before the law and the state and established the death penalty for any speech against the emperor and the state.
In the last quarter of the 8th century. The main goals of iconoclasm were achieved: the financial position of the opposition clergy was undermined, their property and lands were confiscated, many monasteries were closed, large centers of separatism were destroyed, the femme nobility was subordinated to the throne. Previously, the strategists sought complete independence from Constantinople, and thus a conflict arose between the two main groups of the ruling class, the military aristocracy and the civil authorities, for political dominance in the state. As Byzantium researcher G.G. Litavrin notes, “this was a struggle for two different ways of developing feudal relations: the capital bureaucracy, which controlled the treasury funds, sought to limit the growth of large landownership and strengthen tax oppression, while the femme nobility saw prospects for its strengthening in all-round development private forms of exploitation. The rivalry between the “commanders” and the “bureaucracy” has been the core of the internal political life of the empire for centuries...”
Iconoclastic policies lost their urgency in the second quarter of the 9th century, since further conflict with the church threatened to weaken the position of the ruling class. In 812–823, Constantinople was besieged by the usurper Thomas the Slav; he was supported by noble icon-worshipers, some strategists of Asia Minor and some of the Slavs in the Balkans. The uprising was suppressed, it had a sobering effect on the ruling circles. VII Ecumenical The council (787) condemned iconoclasm, and in 843 icon veneration was restored, and the desire for centralization of power prevailed. The fight against adherents of the dualistic Paulician heresy also required a lot of effort. In the east of Asia Minor they created a unique state with its center in the city of Tefrika. In 879 this city was taken by government troops.
Byzantium in the second half of the 9th–11th centuries.
The strengthening of the power of imperial power predetermined the development of feudal relations in Byzantium and, accordingly, the nature of its political system. For three centuries, centralized exploitation became the main source of material resources. The service of stratiot peasants in the fem militia remained the foundation of the military power of Byzantium for at least two centuries.
Researchers date the onset of mature feudalism to the end of the 11th or even the turn of the 11th–12th centuries. The formation of large private land ownership occurred in the second half of the 9th–10th centuries; the process of ruin of the peasantry intensified during the lean years of 927/928. The peasants went bankrupt and sold their land for next to nothing to the dinates, becoming their wig holders. All this sharply reduced the tax revenues and weakened the fem militia. From 920 to 1020, emperors, concerned about the massive decline in income, issued a series of decrees in defense of peasant landowners. They are known as the "legislation of the emperors of the Macedonian dynasty (867–1056)". Peasants were given preferential rights to purchase land. The legislation primarily had the interests of the Treasury in mind. Fellow villagers were obliged to pay taxes (by mutual guarantee) for abandoned peasant plots. Deserted community lands were sold or leased.
11th–12th centuries
The differences between different categories of peasants are being smoothed out. From the middle of the 11th century. conditional land ownership is growing. Back in the 10th century. Emperors granted the secular and ecclesiastical nobility so-called “immoral rights,” which consisted of transferring the right to collect state taxes from a certain territory in their favor for a specified period or for life. These grants were called solemnias or pronias. Pronias were envisaged in the 11th century. performance by the recipient of military service in favor of the state. In the 12th century Pronia shows a tendency to become hereditary and then unconditional property.
In a number of regions of Asia Minor, on the eve of the IV Crusade, complexes of vast possessions were formed, virtually independent of Constantinople. The registration of the estate, and then its property privileges, took place in Byzantium at a slow pace. Tax immunity was presented as an exceptional benefit; a hierarchical structure of land ownership did not develop in the empire, and the system of vassal-personal relations did not develop.
City.
The new rise of Byzantine cities reached its apogee in the 10th–12th centuries, and covered not only the capital Constantinople, but some provincial cities - Nicaea, Smyrna, Ephesus, Trebizond. The Byzantine merchants developed extensive international trade. The capital's artisans received large orders from the imperial palace, the highest clergy, and officials. In the 10th century the city charter was drawn up - Book of the Eparch. It regulated the activities of the main craft and trading corporations.
Constant government intervention in the activities of corporations has become a brake on their further development. A particularly severe blow to Byzantine craft and trade was dealt by exorbitantly high taxes and the provision of trade benefits to the Italian republics. Signs of decline were revealed in Constantinople: the dominance of Italians in its economy was growing. By the end of the 12th century. The very supply of food to the capital of the empire ended up mainly in the hands of Italian merchants. In provincial cities this competition was weakly felt, but such cities increasingly fell under the power of large feudal lords.
Medieval Byzantine state
developed in its most important features as a feudal monarchy by the beginning of the 10th century. under Leo VI the Wise (886–912) and Constantine II Porphyrogenitus (913–959). During the reign of the emperors of the Macedonian dynasty (867–1025), the empire achieved extraordinary power, which it never knew subsequently.
From the 9th century The first active contacts between Kievan Rus and Byzantium begin. Beginning in 860, they contributed to the establishment of stable trade relations. Probably, the beginning of the Christianization of Rus' dates back to this time. Treaties 907–911 opened a permanent path for her to the Constantinople market. In 946, the embassy of Princess Olga to Constantinople took place; it played a significant role in the development of trade and monetary relations and the spread of Christianity in Rus'. However, under Prince Svyatoslav, active trade-military political relations gave way to a long period of military conflicts. Svyatoslav failed to gain a foothold on the Danube, but in the future Byzantium continued to trade with Russia and repeatedly resorted to its military assistance. The consequence of these contacts was the marriage of Anna, the sister of the Byzantine Emperor Vasily II, with Prince Vladimir, which completed the adoption of Christianity as the state religion of Rus' (988/989). This event brought Rus' into the ranks of the largest Christian states in Europe. Slavic writing spread to Rus', theological books, religious objects, etc. were imported. Economic and church ties between Byzantium and Rus' continued to develop and strengthen in the 11th–12th centuries.
During the reign of the Komnenos dynasty (1081–1185), a new temporary rise of the Byzantine state took place. The Comneni won major victories over the Seljuk Turks in Asia Minor and pursued an active policy in the West. The decline of the Byzantine state became acute only at the end of the 12th century.
Organization of public administration and management of the empire in the 10th century. 12th century has also undergone major changes. There was an active adaptation of the norms of Justinian's law to new conditions (collections Isagogue, Prochiron, Vasiliki and the publication of new laws.) The synclitus, or council of the highest nobility under the basileus, genetically closely related to the late Roman Senate, was generally an obedient instrument of his power.
The formation of personnel of the most important governing bodies was entirely determined by the will of the emperor. Under Leo VI, the hierarchy of ranks and titles was introduced into the system. It served as one of the most important levers for strengthening imperial power.
The power of the emperor was by no means unlimited, and was often very fragile. Firstly, it was not hereditary; the imperial throne, the place of the basileus in society, his rank were deified, and not his personality itself and not the dynasty. In Byzantium, the custom of co-government was established early: the ruling basileus hurried to crown his heir during his lifetime. Secondly, the dominance of temporary workers upset management at the center and locally. The authority of the strategist fell. Once again there was a separation of military and civil power. The leadership in the province passed to the judge-praetor, the strategists became the commanders of small fortresses, the highest military power was represented by the head of the tagma - a detachment of professional mercenaries. But at the end of the 12th century. There was still a significant layer of free peasantry, and changes gradually took place in the army.
Nikephoros II Phocas (963–969) singled out from the mass of strategists their wealthy elite, from which he formed a heavily armed cavalry. The less wealthy were obliged to serve in the infantry, navy, and wagon trains. From the 11th century the obligation of personal service was replaced by monetary compensation. The funds received were used to support the mercenary army. The army fleet fell into decay. The Empire became dependent on the help of the Italian fleet.
The state of affairs in the army reflected the vicissitudes of the political struggle within the ruling class. From the end of the 10th century. the commanders sought to wrest power from the strengthened bureaucracy. Representatives of the military group occasionally seized power in the mid-11th century. In 1081, the rebel commander Alexius I Komnenos (1081–1118) took the throne.
This marked the end of the era of the bureaucratic nobility, and the process of forming a closed class of the largest feudal lords intensified. The main social support of the Komnenos was already the large provincial landowning nobility. The staff of officials in the center and in the provinces was reduced. However, the Komnenos only temporarily strengthened the Byzantine state, but they were not able to prevent feudal decline.
Economy of Byzantium in the 11th century. was on the rise, but its socio-political structure found itself in a crisis of the old form of Byzantine statehood. The evolution of the second half of the 11th century contributed to the recovery from the crisis. – the growth of feudal land ownership, the transformation of the bulk of the peasantry into feudal exploitation, the consolidation of the ruling class. But the peasant part of the army, the bankrupt stratiots, was no longer a serious military force, even in combination with feudal shock troops and mercenaries; it became a burden in military operations. The peasant part was increasingly unreliable, which gave a decisive role to the commanders and the top of the army, opening the way for their revolts and uprisings.
With Alexei Komnenos, more than just the Komnenos dynasty came to power. A whole clan of military-aristocratic families came to power, already in the 11th century. connected by family and friendly ties. The Comnenian clan pushed the civilian nobility out of governing the country. Its importance and influence on the political destinies of the country was reduced, management was increasingly concentrated in the palace, at court. The role of the Synclite as the main body of civil administration declined. Nobility becomes the standard of nobility.
The distribution of pronias made it possible not only to strengthen and strengthen the dominance of the Komnenian clan. Part of the civil nobility was also satisfied with the pronias. With the development of the institution of pronys, the state created, in fact, a purely feudal army. The question of how much small and medium-sized feudal landownership grew under the Komnenians is controversial. It is difficult to say why, but the Komnenos government placed significant emphasis on attracting foreigners to the Byzantine army, including by distributing pronias to them. This is how a significant number of Western feudal families appeared in Byzantium. The independence of the patriarchs tried in the 11th century. to act as a kind of “third force” was suppressed.
By asserting the dominance of their clan, the Komnenos helped the feudal lords ensure the quiet exploitation of the peasantry. Already the beginning of Alexei's reign was marked by the merciless suppression of popular heretical movements. The most stubborn heretics and rebels were burned. The Church also intensified its fight against heresies.
The feudal economy in Byzantium is experiencing a rise. Moreover, already in the 12th century. the predominance of privately owned forms of exploitation over centralized ones was noticeable. The feudal economy produced more and more marketable products (the yield was fifteen, twenty). The volume of commodity-money relations increased in the 12th century. 5 times compared to the 11th century.
In large provincial centers, industries similar to those in Constantinople (Athens, Corinth, Nicaea, Smyrna, Ephesus) developed, which hit capital production hard. Provincial cities had direct contacts with the Italian merchants. But in the 12th century. Byzantium is already losing its monopoly of trade not only in the western, but also in the eastern part of the Mediterranean.
The Komnenos' policy towards the Italian city-states was entirely determined by the interests of the clan. Most of all, the Constantinople trade and craft population and merchants suffered from it. State in the 12th century received considerable income from the revitalization of city life. The Byzantine treasury did not experience, despite the most active foreign policy and enormous military expenditures, as well as the costs of maintaining a magnificent court, were in dire need of money throughout much of the 12th century. In addition to organizing expensive expeditions, emperors in the 12th century. They carried out extensive military construction and had a good fleet.
The rise of Byzantine cities in the 12th century. turned out to be short-lived and incomplete. Only the oppression placed on the peasant economy increased. The state, which gave the feudal lords certain benefits and privileges that increased their power over the peasants, did not actually strive to significantly reduce state taxes. The telos tax, which became the main state tax, did not take into account the individual capabilities of the peasant economy and tended to turn into a unified tax of the household or household tax type. The state of the internal, city market in the second half of the 12th century. began to slow down due to a decrease in the purchasing power of peasants. This doomed many mass crafts to stagnation.
Intensified in the last quarter of the 12th century. The pauperization and lumpen-proletarianization of part of the urban population was especially acute in Constantinople. Already at this time, the increasing import into Byzantium of cheaper Italian goods of mass demand began to affect his position. All this strained the social situation in Constantinople and led to massive anti-Latin, anti-Italian protests. Provincial cities are also beginning to show signs of their well-known economic decline. Byzantine monasticism actively multiplied not only at the expense of the rural population, but also the trade and craft population. In Byzantine cities of the 11th–12th centuries. There were no trade and craft associations like Western European guilds, and artisans did not play an independent role in the public life of the city.
The terms “self-government” and “autonomy” can hardly be applied to Byzantine cities, because they imply administrative autonomy. In the charters of the Byzantine emperors to cities, we speak of tax and partly judicial privileges, which, in principle, take into account the interests not even of the entire city community, but of individual groups of its population. It is not known whether the urban trade and craft population fought for “their own” autonomy, separately from the feudal lords, but the fact remains that those elements of it that strengthened in Byzantium put feudal lords at their head. While in Italy the feudal class was fragmented and formed a layer of urban feudal lords, which turned out to be an ally of the urban class, in Byzantium the elements of urban self-government were only a reflection of the consolidation of the power of the feudal lords over the cities. Often in cities, power was in the hands of 2-3 feudal families. If in Byzantium 11–12 centuries. If there were any trends towards the emergence of elements of city (burgher) self-government, then in the second half - the end of the 12th century. they were interrupted - and forever.
Thus, as a result of the development of the Byzantine city in the 11th–12th centuries. In Byzantium, unlike Western Europe, there was no strong urban community, no powerful independent movement of citizens, no developed urban self-government and even its elements. Byzantine artisans and merchants were excluded from participation in official political life and city government.
The fall of the power of Byzantium in the last quarter of the 12th century. was associated with the deepening processes of strengthening Byzantine feudalism. With the formation of the local market, the struggle between decentralization and centralization tendencies inevitably intensified, the growth of which characterizes the evolution of political relations in Byzantium in the 12th century. The Comneni very decisively took the path of developing conditional feudal land ownership, not forgetting about their own family feudal power. They distributed tax and judicial privileges to the feudal lords, thereby increasing the volume of privately owned exploitation of the peasants and their real dependence on the feudal lords. However, the clan in power did not at all want to give up centralized income. Therefore, with a reduction in tax collection, state tax oppression intensified, which caused sharp discontent among the peasantry. The Komneni did not support the tendency to transform the pronias into conditional but hereditary possessions, which was actively sought by an ever-increasing part of the proniaries.
A tangle of contradictions that intensified in Byzantium in the 70s–90s of the 12th century. was largely the result of the evolution that Byzantine society and its ruling class underwent in this century. The strength of the civil nobility was sufficiently undermined in the 11th–12th centuries, but it found support among people dissatisfied with the policies of the Komnenos, the dominance and rule of the Komnenos clan in the localities.
Hence the demands to strengthen central power and streamline public administration - the wave on which Andronicus I Komnenos (1183–1185) came to power. The masses of the Constantinople population hoped that a civilian, rather than a military government would be able to more effectively limit the privileges of the nobility and foreigners. Sympathy for the civil bureaucracy also increased with the emphasized aristocracy of the Komnenos, who to some extent dissociated themselves from the rest of the ruling class, and their rapprochement with the Western aristocracy. The opposition to the Komnenos found increasing support both in the capital and in the provinces, where the situation was more complicated. In the social structure and composition of the ruling class during the 12th century. there have been some changes. If in the 11th century. The feudal aristocracy of the provinces was mainly represented by large military families, large early feudal nobility of the provinces, then during the 12th century. a powerful provincial stratum of “middle-class” feudal lords grew up. She was not associated with the Comnenian clan, actively participated in city government, gradually took local power into her hands, and the struggle to weaken the government’s power in the provinces became one of her tasks. In this struggle, she rallied local forces around herself and relied on the cities. It had no military forces, but local military commanders became its instruments. Moreover, we are not talking about the old aristocratic families, which had enormous strength and power of their own, but about those who could act only with their support. In Byzantium at the end of the 12th century. Separatist uprisings and entire regions leaving the central government became frequent.
Thus, we can talk about the undoubted expansion of the Byzantine feudal class in the 12th century. If in the 11th century. a narrow circle of the country's largest feudal magnates fought for central power and was inextricably linked with it, then during the 12th century. a powerful layer of provincial feudal archons grew up, becoming an important factor in truly feudal decentralization.
The emperors who ruled after Andronicus I to some extent, although forced, continued his policy. On the one hand, they weakened the strength of the Comnenian clan, but did not dare to strengthen the elements of centralization. They did not express the interests of the provincials, but with their help the latter overthrew the dominance of the Comnenian clan. They did not pursue any deliberate policy against the Italians, they simply relied on popular protests as a means of putting pressure on them, and then made concessions. As a result, there was no decentralization or centralization of government in the state. Everyone was unhappy, but no one knew what to do.
There was a fragile balance of power in the empire, in which any attempts at decisive action were instantly blocked by the opposition. Neither side dared to reform, but all fought for power. Under these conditions, the authority of Constantinople fell, and the provinces lived an increasingly independent life. Even serious military defeats and losses did not change the situation. If the Komnenos could, relying on objective trends, take a decisive step towards establishing feudal relations, then the situation that developed in Byzantium by the end of the 12th century turned out to be internally insoluble. There were no forces in the empire that could decisively break with the traditions of stable centralized statehood. The latter still had a fairly strong support in the real life of the country, in state forms of exploitation. Therefore, in Constantinople there were no those who could decisively fight for the preservation of the empire.
The Comnenian era created a stable military-bureaucratic elite, viewing the country as a kind of “estate” of Constantinople and accustomed to not taking into account the interests of the population. Its income was wasted on lavish construction and expensive overseas campaigns, while the country's borders were poorly protected. The Komnenos finally liquidated the remnants of the theme army, the theme organization. They created a combat-ready feudal army capable of winning major victories, eliminated the remnants of the feudal fleets and created a combat-ready central fleet. But the defense of the regions was now increasingly dependent on the central forces. The Komnenians consciously ensured a high percentage of foreign knighthood in the Byzantine army; they just as consciously inhibited the transformation of proniyas into hereditary property. Imperial donations and awards turned the Proniars into the privileged elite of the army, but the position of the bulk of the army was not sufficiently secure and stable.
Ultimately, the government had to partially revive elements of the regional military organization, partially subordinating the civil administration to local strategists. The local nobility with their local interests, the proniars and archons, who were trying to strengthen the ownership of their possessions, and the urban population, who wanted to protect their interests, began to rally around them. All this was sharply different from the situation in the 11th century. the fact that behind all the local movements that arose from the mid-12th century. there were powerful trends towards feudal decentralization of the country, which took shape as a result of the establishment of Byzantine feudalism and the processes of the formation of regional markets. They were expressed in the emergence of independent or semi-independent entities on the territory of the empire, especially on its outskirts, ensuring the protection of local interests and only nominally subordinate to the government of Constantinople. This became Cyprus under the rule of Isaac Komnenos, the region of central Greece under the rule of Kamathir and Leo Sgur, Western Asia Minor. There was a process of gradual “separation” of the regions of Pontus-Trebizond, where the power of the Le Havre-Taronites, who united local feudal lords and trade and merchant circles, was slowly strengthening. They became the basis of the future Trebizond Empire of the Great Komnenos (1204–1461), which turned into an independent state with the capture of Constantinople by the crusaders.
The growing isolation of the capital was largely taken into account by the Crusaders and Venetians, who saw a real opportunity to turn Constantinople into the center of their domination in the Eastern Mediterranean. The reign of Andronikos I showed that the opportunities to consolidate the empire on a new basis were missed. He established his power with the support of the provinces, but did not live up to their hopes and lost it. The break of the provinces with Constantinople became a fait accompli; the provinces did not come to the aid of the capital when it was besieged by the crusaders in 1204. The nobility of Constantinople, on the one hand, did not want to part with their monopoly position, and on the other, they tried in every possible way to strengthen their own. The Comnenian “centralization” made it possible for the government to maneuver large funds and quickly increase either the army or the navy. But this change in needs created enormous opportunities for corruption. At the time of the siege, the military forces of Constantinople consisted mainly of mercenaries and were insignificant. They could not be increased instantly. The “Big Fleet” was liquidated as unnecessary. By the beginning of the siege by the Crusaders, the Byzantines were able to “fix 20 rotten ships, worn out by worms.” The unreasonable policy of the Constantinople government on the eve of the fall paralyzed even trade and merchant circles. The impoverished masses of the population hated the arrogant and arrogant nobility. On April 13, 1204, the crusaders easily captured the city, and the poor, exhausted by hopeless poverty, together with them smashed and plundered the palaces and houses of the nobility. The famous “Devastation of Constantinople” began, after which the capital of the empire could no longer recover. The “sacred booty of Constantinople” poured into the West, but a huge part of the cultural heritage of Byzantium was irretrievably lost during the fire during the capture of the city. The fall of Constantinople and the collapse of Byzantium were not a natural consequence of objective development trends alone. In many ways, this was a direct result of the unreasonable policy of the Constantinople authorities.”
Church
Byzantium was poorer than the West, priests paid taxes. Celibacy existed in the empire from the 10th century. obligatory for clergy, starting from the rank of bishop. In terms of property, even the highest clergy depended on the favor of the emperor and usually obediently carried out his will. The highest hierarchs were drawn into civil strife among the nobility. From the middle of the 10th century. they began to more often go over to the side of the military aristocracy.
In the 11th–12th centuries. the empire was truly a country of monasteries. Almost all noble persons sought to found or endow monasteries. Even despite the impoverishment of the treasury and the sharp decrease in the fund of state lands by the end of the 12th century, the emperors very timidly and rarely resorted to the secularization of church lands. In the 11th–12th centuries. In the internal political life of the empire, the gradual feudalization of nationalities began to be felt, which sought to secede from Byzantium and form independent states.
Thus, the Byzantine feudal monarchy of the 11th–12th centuries. does not fully correspond to its socio-economic structure. The crisis of imperial power was not completely overcome by the beginning of the 13th century. At the same time, the decline of the state was not a consequence of the decline of the Byzantine economy. The reason was that socio-economic and social development came into insoluble conflict with inert, traditional forms of government, which were only partially adapted to new conditions.
Crisis of the late 12th century. strengthened the process of decentralization of Byzantium and contributed to its conquest. In the last quarter of the 12th century. Byzantium lost the Ionian Islands and Cyprus, and during the 4th Crusade the systematic seizure of its territories began. On April 13, 1204, the crusaders captured and sacked Constantinople. On the ruins of Byzantium in 1204, a new, artificially created state arose, which included lands stretching from the Ionian to the Black Sea, belonging to Western European knights. They were called Latin Romagna, it included the Latin Empire with its capital in Constantinople and the states of the “Franks” in the Balkans, the possessions of the Venetian Republic, the colonies and trading posts of the Genoese, the territories that belonged to the spiritual knightly order of the Hospitallers (Johannites; Rhodes and the Dodecanese Islands (1306–1422) But the crusaders failed to carry out the plan to seize all the lands belonging to Byzantium. An independent Greek state arose in the northwestern part of Asia Minor - the Nicene Empire, in the Southern Black Sea region - the Trebizond Empire, in the western Balkans - the Epirus state. They considered themselves the heirs of Byzantium and sought to reunite her.
Cultural, linguistic and religious unity, historical traditions determined the presence of tendencies towards the unification of Byzantium. The Nicene Empire played a leading role in the fight against the Latin Empire. It was one of the most powerful Greek states. Its rulers, relying on small and medium-sized landowners and cities, managed to expel the Latins from Constantinople in 1261. The Latin Empire ceased to exist, but the restored Byzantium was only a semblance of the former powerful power. Now it included the western part of Asia Minor, part of Thrace and Macedonia, islands in the Aegean Sea and a number of fortresses in the Peloponnese. The foreign political situation and centrifugal forces, weakness and lack of unity in the urban class made attempts at further unification difficult. The Palaiologan dynasty did not take the path of a decisive struggle against the large feudal lords, fearing the activity of the masses; it preferred dynastic marriages and feudal wars using foreign mercenaries. The foreign policy situation of Byzantium turned out to be extremely difficult; the West did not stop trying to recreate the Latin Empire and extend the power of the Pope to Byzantium; economic and military pressure from Venice and Genoa increased. The attacks of the Serbs from the north-west and the Turks from the East became more and more successful. The Byzantine emperors sought to obtain military assistance by subordinating the Greek Church to the pope (Union of Lyons, Union of Florence), but the dominance of Italian merchant capital and Western feudal lords was so hated by the population that the government could not force the people to recognize the union.
During this period, the dominance of large secular and ecclesiastical feudal land ownership became even more consolidated. Pronia again takes the form of hereditary conditional ownership, and the immune privileges of feudal lords are expanded. In addition to granted tax immunity, they are increasingly acquiring administrative and judicial immunity. The state still determined the amount of public rent from the peasants, which it transferred to the feudal lords. It was based on a tax on a house, land, and a team of livestock. Taxes were applied to the entire community: livestock tithes and pasture fees. Dependent peasants (wigs) also bore private duties in favor of the feudal lord, and they were regulated not by the state, but by customs. Corvée averaged 24 days a year. In the 14th–15th centuries. it increasingly turned into cash payments. Monetary and in-kind collections in favor of the feudal lord were very significant. The Byzantine community turned into an element of a patrimonial organization. The marketability of agriculture was growing in the country, but the sellers on foreign markets were secular feudal lords and monasteries, who derived great benefits from this trade, and the property differentiation of the peasantry increased. Peasants increasingly turned into landless and land-poor people; they became hired workers, tenants of other people's land. The strengthening of the patrimonial economy contributed to the development of handicraft production in the village. The late Byzantine city did not have a monopoly on the production and marketing of handicraft products.
For Byzantium 13–15 centuries. characterized by the increasing decline of urban life. The Latin conquest dealt a heavy blow to the economy of the Byzantine city. The competition of the Italians and the development of usury in the cities led to the impoverishment and ruin of broad layers of Byzantine artisans who joined the ranks of the urban plebs. A significant part of the state's foreign trade was concentrated in the hands of Genoese, Venetian, Pisan and other Western European merchants. Foreign trading posts were located in the most important points of the empire (Thessalonica, Adrianople, almost all cities of the Peloponnese, etc.). In the 14th–15th centuries. the ships of the Genoese and Venetians dominated the Black and Aegean Seas, and the once powerful fleet of Byzantium fell into decay.
The decline of urban life was especially noticeable in Constantinople, where entire neighborhoods were desolate, but even in Constantinople economic life did not completely die out, but at times revived. The position of large port cities (Trebizond, in which there was an alliance of local feudal lords and the commercial and industrial elite) was more favorable. They took part in both international and local trade. Most medium-sized and small towns turned into centers of local exchange of handicraft goods. They, being the residences of large feudal lords, were also church and administrative centers.
By the beginning of the 14th century. Most of Asia Minor was captured by the Ottoman Turks. In 1320–1328, an internecine war broke out in Byzantium between Emperor Andronikos II and his grandson Andronikos III, who sought to seize the throne. The victory of Andronikos III further strengthened the feudal nobility and centrifugal forces. In the 20–30s of the 14th century. Byzantium fought grueling wars with Bulgaria and Serbia.
The decisive period was the 40s of the 14th century, when, during the struggle of two cliques for power, a peasant movement flared up. Taking the side of the “legitimate” dynasty, it began to destroy the estates of the rebellious feudal lords, led by John Cantacuzene. The government of John Apokavkos and Patriarch John initially pursued a decisive policy, sharply speaking out both against the separatist-minded aristocracy (and at the same time resorting to confiscation of the estates of the rebellious), and against the mystical ideology of the hesychasts. The citizens of Thessalonica supported Apokavkos. The movement was led by the Zealot Party, whose program soon took on an anti-feudal character. But the activity of the masses frightened the Constantinople government, which did not dare to use the chance that the popular movement gave it. Apokavkos was killed in 1343, and the government’s struggle against the rebellious feudal lords virtually ceased. In Thessalonica, the situation worsened as a result of the transition of the city nobility (archons) to the side of Cantacuzene. The plebs who came out exterminated most of the city nobility. However, the movement, having lost contact with the central government, remained local in nature and was suppressed.
This largest urban movement of late Byzantium was the last attempt by trade and craft circles to resist the dominance of the feudal lords. The weakness of the cities, the absence of a cohesive urban patriciate, social organization craft guilds and traditions of self-government predetermined their defeat. In 1348–1352, Byzantium lost the war with the Genoese. Black Sea trade and even the supply of grain to Constantinople were concentrated in the hands of the Italians.
Byzantium was exhausted and could not resist the onslaught of the Turks, who captured Thrace. Now Byzantium included Constantinople and its surroundings, Thessalonica and part of Greece. The defeat of the Serbs by the Turks at Maritsa in 1371 actually made the Byzantine emperor a vassal of the Turkish Sultan. Byzantine feudal lords compromised with foreign conquerors in order to maintain their rights to exploit the local population. The Byzantine trading cities, including Constantinople, saw their main enemy in the Italians, underestimating the Turkish danger, and even hoped to destroy the dominance of foreign trading capital with the help of the Turks. A desperate attempt by the population of Thessalonica in 1383–1387 to fight against Turkish rule in the Balkans ended in failure. The Italian merchants also underestimated the real danger of the Turkish conquest. The defeat of the Turks by Timur at Ankara in 1402 helped Byzantium to temporarily restore independence, but the Byzantines and South Slavic feudal lords failed to take advantage of the weakening of the Turks, and in 1453 Constantinople was captured by Mehmed II. Then the rest of the Greek territories fell (Morea - 1460, Trebizond - 1461). The Byzantine Empire ceased to exist.
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The history of Byzantium, one of the “world” powers of the Middle Ages, a society of unique development and high culture, a society at the junction of the West and the East, was full of turbulent internal events, endless wars with neighbors, intense political, economic, cultural relations with many countries of Europe and the Middle East .
Political structure of Byzantium
From the Roman Empire, Byzantium inherited a monarchical form of government with an emperor at its head. From the 7th century The head of state was more often called an autocrat.
The Byzantine Empire consisted of two prefectures - the East and Illyricum, each of which was headed by prefects: the praetorian prefect of the East (Latin: Praefectus praetorio Orientis) and the praetorian prefect of Illyricum (Latin: Praefectus praetorio Illyrici). Constantinople was allocated as a separate unit, headed by the prefect of the city of Constantinople (lat. Praefectus urbis Constantinopolitanae).
For a long time the previous system of state and financial management. But from the end of the 6th century, significant reforms began, related mainly to defense (administrative division into themes instead of exarchates) and the Greek culture of the country (introduction of the positions of logothete, strategist, drungaria, etc.).
Since the 10th century, feudal principles of governance have spread widely; this process led to the establishment of representatives of the feudal aristocracy on the throne. Until the very end of the empire, numerous rebellions and struggles for the imperial throne did not stop. The two highest military officials were the commander-in-chief of the infantry (Latin magister paeditum) and the commander of the cavalry (Latin magister equitum), later these positions were combined (Magister militum); in the capital there were two masters of infantry and cavalry (Strateg Opsikia) (lat. Magistri equitum et paeditum in praesenti). In addition, there was a master of infantry and cavalry of the East (Strategos of Anatolica), a master of infantry and cavalry of Illyricum, a master of infantry and cavalry of Thrace (Strategos of Thrace).
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476), the Eastern Roman Empire continued to exist for almost a thousand years; in historiography from that time on it is usually called Byzantium.
The ruling class of Byzantium was characterized by vertical mobility. At all times, a person from the bottom could make his way to power. In some cases it was even easier for him: for example, he had the opportunity to make a career in the army and earn military glory. For example, Emperor Michael II Travlus was an uneducated mercenary who was sentenced to death by Emperor Leo V for rebellion, and his execution was postponed only because of the celebration of Christmas (820). Vasily I was a peasant and then a horse trainer in the service of a noble nobleman. Roman I Lecapinus was also a descendant of peasants, Michael IV, before becoming emperor, was a money changer, like one of his brothers.
Army of the Eastern Roman Empire by 395
Although Byzantium inherited its army from the Roman Empire, its structure was closer to the phalanx system of the Hellenic states. By the end of Byzantium's existence, it became mainly mercenary and had a rather low combat capability. But a system of military command and supply was developed in detail, works on strategy and tactics are published, a variety of technical means are widely used, in particular, a system of beacons is being built to warn of enemy attacks. In contrast to the old Roman army, the importance of the fleet, which the invention of “Greek fire” helps to gain supremacy at sea, greatly increases. Fully armored cavalry - cataphracts - was adopted from the Sassanids. At the same time, technically complex throwing weapons, ballistae and catapults are disappearing, replaced by simpler stone throwers.
The transition to the femme system of recruiting troops provided the country with 150 years of successful wars, but the financial exhaustion of the peasantry and its transition to dependence on the feudal lords led to a gradual decrease in combat effectiveness. The recruitment system was changed to a typically feudal one, when the nobility was obliged to supply military contingents for the right to own land. Subsequently, the army and navy fell into ever greater decline, and at the very end of the empire’s existence they became purely mercenary formations.
In 1453, Constantinople, with a population of 60 thousand inhabitants, was able to field only a 5 thousand army and 2.5 thousand mercenaries. Since the 10th century, the emperors of Constantinople hired Rus and warriors from neighboring barbarian tribes. Since the 10th century, ethnically mixed Varangians played a significant role in the heavy infantry, and the light cavalry was recruited from Turkic nomads. After the era of Viking campaigns came to an end at the beginning of the 11th century, mercenaries from Scandinavia (as well as from Viking-conquered Normandy and England) flocked to Byzantium across the Mediterranean Sea. The future Norwegian king Harald the Severe fought for several years in the Varangian Guard throughout the Mediterranean. The Varangian Guard bravely defended Constantinople from the Crusaders in 1204 and was defeated when the city was captured.
The period of reign of emperors from Basil I of Macedon to Alexios I Komnenos (867-1081) was of great cultural significance. The essential features of this period of history are the high rise of Byzantinism and the spread of its cultural mission to southeastern Europe. Through the works of the famous Byzantines Cyril and Methodius, the Slavic alphabet - Glagolitic - appeared, which led to the emergence of the Slavs' own written literature. Patriarch Photius put barriers to the claims of the popes and theoretically substantiated the right of Constantinople to ecclesiastical independence from Rome (see Division of Churches).
In the scientific field, this period is characterized by extraordinary fertility and diversity of literary enterprises. Collections and adaptations of this period preserve precious historical, literary and archaeological material borrowed from writers now lost.
Economy
The state included rich lands with a large number of cities - Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece. In cities, artisans and merchants united into classes. Belonging to the class was not a duty, but a privilege; entry into it was subject to a number of conditions. The conditions established by the eparch (city governor) for the 22 estates of Constantinople were compiled in the 10th century in a collection of decrees, the Book of the Eparch. Despite a corrupt management system, very high taxes, slave-owning and court intrigue, the economy of Byzantium was for a long time the strongest in Europe. Trade was carried out with all former Roman possessions in the west and with India (via the Sassanids and Arabs) in the east.
Even after the Arab conquests, the empire was very rich. But the financial costs were also very high, and the country's wealth caused great envy. The decline in trade caused by the privileges granted to Italian merchants, the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders and the onslaught of the Turks led to the final weakening of finances and the state as a whole.
In the initial period of the state's history, the basis of the economy was production and the customs structure. 85-90 percent of production in all of Eurasia (excluding India and China) came from the Eastern Roman Empire. Absolutely everything was made in the empire: from consumer products (oil lamps, weapons, armor, the production of primitive elevators, mirrors, some other items related to cosmetics), which are now quite widely represented in all museums of the world, to unique works of art, in other areas of the world are not represented at all - iconography, painting, and so on.
Medicine in Byzantium
Throughout the entire period of the existence of the state, Byzantine science was in close connection with ancient philosophy and metaphysics. The main activity of scientists was in the applied plane, where a number of remarkable successes were achieved, such as the construction of the St. Sophia Cathedral in Constantinople and the invention of Greek fire.
At the same time, pure science practically did not develop either in terms of creating new theories or in terms of developing the ideas of ancient thinkers. From the era of Justinian until the end of the first millennium, scientific knowledge was in severe decline, but subsequently Byzantine scientists again showed themselves, especially in astronomy and mathematics, already relying on the achievements of Arab and Persian science.
Medicine was one of the few branches of knowledge in which progress was made compared to antiquity. The influence of Byzantine medicine was felt both in Arab countries and in Europe during the Renaissance. In the last century of the empire, Byzantium played an important role in the dissemination of ancient Greek literature in early Renaissance Italy. By that time, the Academy of Trebizond had become the main center for the study of astronomy and mathematics.
In 330, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great declared the city of Byzantium his capital, renaming it “New Rome” (Constantinople is an unofficial name).
The new capital was located on the most important trade route from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, along which grain was transported. In Rome, new contenders for the throne constantly appeared. Having defeated his rivals in grueling civil wars, Constantine wanted to create a capital that was initially and entirely subject to him alone. A deep ideological revolution was also intended to serve the same purpose: Christianity, which had recently been persecuted in Rome, was declared the state religion during the reign of Constantine. Constantinople immediately became the capital of the Christian empire.
The final division of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western occurred in 395 after the death of Theodosius I the Great. The main difference between Byzantium and the Western Roman Empire was the dominance on its territory Greek culture. The differences grew, and over the course of two centuries the state finally acquired its own individual appearance.
The formation of Byzantium as an independent state can be attributed to the period 330-518. During this period, numerous barbarian, mainly Germanic tribes penetrated into Roman territory across the borders on the Danube and Rhine. The situation in the East was no less difficult, and one could expect a similar ending, after in 378 the Visigoths won the famous battle of Adrianople, Emperor Valens was killed and King Alaric devastated all of Greece. But soon Alaric went west - to Spain and Gaul, where the Goths founded their state, and the danger from them to Byzantium had passed. In 441, the Goths were replaced by the Huns. Their leader Attila started a war several times, and only by paying a large tribute was it possible to buy him off. In the Battle of Nations on the Catalaunian Fields (451), Attila was defeated, and his power soon disintegrated.
In the second half of the 5th century, danger came from the Ostrogoths - Theodoric the Great ravaged Macedonia and threatened Constantinople, but he also went west, conquering Italy and founding his state on the ruins of Rome.
In 1204, Constantinople surrendered for the first time under the onslaught of the enemy: enraged by the unsuccessful campaign in the “promised land,” the crusaders burst into the city, announced the creation of the Latin Empire and divided the Byzantine lands between the French barons.
The new formation did not last long: on July 51, 1261, Constantinople was occupied without a fight by Michael VIII Palaiologos, who announced the revival of the Eastern Roman Empire. The dynasty he founded ruled Byzantium until its fall, but it was a rather miserable reign. In the end, the emperors lived on handouts from Genoese and Venetian merchants, and naturally plundered church and private property.
By the beginning of the 14th century, only Constantinople, Thessaloniki and small scattered enclaves in southern Greece remained from the former territories. Desperate attempts by the last emperor of Byzantium, Manuel II, to enlist military support from Western Europe were unsuccessful. On May 29, 1453, Constantinople was conquered for the second and last time.
Religion of Byzantium
In Christianity, diverse currents fought and collided: Arianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism. While in the West the popes, beginning with Leo the Great (440-461), established the papal monarchy, in the East the patriarchs of Alexandria, especially Cyril (422-444) and Dioscorus (444-451), tried to establish the papal throne in Alexandria. In addition, as a result of these unrest, old national feuds and separatist tendencies surfaced.
Political interests and goals were closely intertwined with the religious conflict.
From 502, the Persians resumed their onslaught in the east, the Slavs and Bulgars began raids south of the Danube. Internal unrest reached its extreme limits, and in the capital there was an intense struggle between the “green” and “blue” parties (according to the colors of the chariot teams). Finally, the strong memory of the Roman tradition, which supported the idea of the need for the unity of the Roman world, constantly turned minds to the West. To get out of this state of instability, a powerful hand was needed, a clear policy with precise and definite plans. This policy was pursued by Justinian I.
The national composition of the empire was very diverse, but starting from the 7th century, the majority of the population was Greek. Since then, the Byzantine emperor began to be called in Greek - “basileus”. In the 9th and 10th centuries, after the conquest of Bulgaria and the subjugation of the Serbs and Croats, Byzantium became essentially a Greco-Slavic state. On the basis of religious community, a vast “zone of orthodoxy (Orthodoxy)” developed around Byzantium, including Rus', Georgia, Bulgaria, and most of Serbia.
Until the 7th century, the official language of the empire was Latin, but there was literature in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian. In 866, the “Thessalonica brothers” Cyril (c.826-869) and Methodius (c.815-885) invented Slavic writing, which quickly spread in Bulgaria and Rus'.
Despite the fact that the entire life of the state and society was imbued with religion, secular power in Byzantium was always stronger than church power. The Byzantine Empire was always distinguished by stable statehood and strictly centralized governance.
In its political structure, Byzantium was an autocratic monarchy, the doctrine of which was finally formed here. All power was in the hands of the emperor (basileus). He was the highest judge, led foreign policy, made laws, commanded the army, etc. His power was considered divine and was practically unlimited, however (paradox!) it was not legally hereditary. The result of this was constant unrest and wars for power, ending with the creation of another dynasty (a simple warrior, even a barbarian, or a peasant, thanks to his dexterity and personal abilities, could often occupy a high position in the state or even become an emperor. The history of Byzantium is full of such examples).
In Byzantium, a special system of relationships between secular and ecclesiastical authorities developed, called Caesaropapism (Emperors essentially ruled the Church, becoming “popes.” The Church became only an appendage and instrument of secular power). The power of the emperors especially strengthened during the notorious period of “iconoclasm,” when the clergy was completely subordinated to imperial power, deprived of many privileges, and the wealth of the church and monasteries was partially confiscated. As for cultural life, the result of “iconoclasm” was the complete canonization of spiritual art.
Byzantine culture
IN artistic creativity Byzantium gave the medieval world lofty images of literature and art, which were distinguished by noble elegance of forms, imaginative vision of thought, sophistication of aesthetic thinking, depth philosophical thought. The direct heir of the Greco-Roman world and the Hellenistic East, in terms of the power of expressiveness and deep spirituality, Byzantium stood ahead of all the countries of medieval Europe for many centuries. Already from the 6th century, Constantinople turned into a famous artistic center of the medieval world, into a “palladium of sciences and arts.” It is followed by Ravenna, Rome, Nicaea, Thessalonica, which also became the focus of the Byzantine artistic style.
The process of artistic development of Byzantium was not straightforward. It had eras of rise and decline, periods of triumph of progressive ideas and dark years of domination of reactionary ones. There were several periods, more or less prosperous, marked by a special flowering of art:
Time of Emperor Justinian I (527-565) - "Golden Age of Byzantium"
and the so-called Byzantine "renaissances":
The reign of the Macedonian dynasty (mid-9th - end of the 11th century) - "Macedonian Renaissance".
The reign of the Komnenos dynasty (late 11th - late 12th centuries) - "Comnenos Renaissance".
Late Byzantium (from 1260) - "Palaeologian Renaissance".
Byzantium survived the invasion of the Crusaders (1204, IV Crusade), but with the formation and strengthening of the Ottoman Empire on its borders, its end became inevitable. The West promised help only on condition of conversion to Catholicism (Ferraro-Florentine Union, which was indignantly rejected by the people).
In April 1453, Constantinople was surrounded by a huge Turkish army and two months later it was taken by storm. The last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died on the fortress wall with weapons in his hands.
Since then, Constantinople has been called Istanbul.
The fall of Byzantium was a huge blow to the Orthodox (and Christian in general) world. Disregarding politics and economics, Christian theologians saw the main reason for its death in the decline of morals and the hypocrisy in matters of religion that flourished in Byzantium in the last centuries of its existence. Thus, Vladimir Solovyov wrote:
"After many delays and a long struggle with material decay, the Eastern Empire, long morally dead, was finally just before
the revival of the West, demolished from the historical field. ... Proud of their orthodoxy and piety, they did not want to understand the simple and self-evident truth that real orthodoxy and piety require that we somehow conform our lives to what we believe in and what we honor - they did not want to understand that the real advantage belongs to the Christian kingdom over others only insofar as it is organized and governed in the spirit of Christ. ... Finding itself hopelessly incapable of its high purpose - to be a Christian kingdom - Byzantium lost the internal reason for its existence. For the current, ordinary tasks of public administration could, and even much better, be fulfilled by the government of the Turkish Sultan, which, being free from internal contradictions, was more honest and strong and, moreover, did not interfere in the religious area of Christianity, did not invent dubious dogmas and harmful heresies, but “it also did not defend Orthodoxy through the wholesale massacre of heretics and the solemn burning of heresiarchs at the stake.”
The great influence that the Byzantine Empire had on the history (as well as religion, culture, art) of many European countries (including ours) during the Dark Middle Ages is difficult to cover in one article. But we will still try to do this, and tell you as much as possible about the history of Byzantium, its way of life, culture and much more, in a word, with the help of our time machine we will send you to the times of the highest heyday of the Byzantine Empire, so make yourself comfortable and let's go.
Where is Byzantium located?
But before we go on a journey through time, first let’s figure out how to move in space and determine where Byzantium is (or rather was) on the map. Actually at different times historical development The borders of the Byzantine Empire were constantly changing, expanding during periods of development and contracting during periods of decline.
For example, on this map Byzantium is shown in its heyday and, as we see in those days, it occupied the entire territory of modern Turkey, part of the territory of modern Bulgaria and Italy and numerous islands in the Mediterranean Sea.
During the reign of Emperor Justinian, the territory of the Byzantine Empire was even larger, and the power of the Byzantine emperor also extended to North Africa (Libya and Egypt), the Middle East, (including the glorious city of Jerusalem). But gradually they began to be forced out of there, first, with whom Byzantium had been in a state of permanent war for centuries, and then by warlike Arab nomads, carrying in their hearts the banner of a new religion - Islam.
And here on the map the possessions of Byzantium are shown at the time of its decline, in 1453, as we see at this time its territory was reduced to Constantinople with the surrounding territories and part of modern Southern Greece.
History of Byzantium
The Byzantine Empire is the heir to another great empire -. In 395, after the death of the Roman Emperor Theodosius I, the Roman Empire was divided into Western and Eastern. This division was caused by political reasons, namely, the emperor had two sons, and probably, so as not to deprive any of them, the eldest son Flavius became the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, and the youngest son Honorius, respectively, the emperor of the Western Roman Empire. At first, this division was purely nominal, and in the eyes of millions of citizens of the superpower of antiquity it was still the same one big Roman Empire.
But as we know, gradually the Roman Empire began to decline, which was greatly facilitated by both the decline of morals in the empire itself and the waves of warlike barbarian tribes that continually rolled onto the borders of the empire. And already in the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire finally fell, the eternal city of Rome was captured and plundered by barbarians, the era of antiquity came to an end, and the Middle Ages began.
But the Eastern Roman Empire, thanks to a happy coincidence, survived; the center of its cultural and political life was concentrated around the capital of the new empire, Constantinople, which in the Middle Ages became the largest city in Europe. Waves of barbarians passed by, although, of course, they also had their influence, but for example, the rulers of the Eastern Roman Empire prudently preferred to pay off the fierce conqueror Attila with gold rather than fight. And the destructive impulse of the barbarians was directed specifically at Rome and the Western Roman Empire, which saved the Eastern Empire, from which, after the fall of the Western Empire in the 5th century, the new great state of Byzantium or the Byzantine Empire was formed.
Although the population of Byzantium consisted predominantly of Greeks, they always felt themselves to be the heirs of the great Roman Empire and were called accordingly “Romans,” which in Greek means “Romans.”
Already from the 6th century, under the reign of the brilliant Emperor Justinian and his no less brilliant wife (on our website there is an interesting article about this “first lady of Byzantium”, follow the link) the Byzantine Empire began to slowly recapture the territories once occupied by barbarians. Thus, the Byzantines captured significant territories of modern Italy, which once belonged to the Western Roman Empire, from the Lombard barbarians. The power of the Byzantine emperor extended to northern Africa, and the local city of Alexandria became an important economic and cultural center of the empire in this region. The military campaigns of Byzantium also extended to the East, where continuous wars with the Persians had been going on for several centuries.
The very geographical position of Byzantium, which spread its possessions on three continents at once (Europe, Asia, Africa), made the Byzantine Empire a kind of bridge between the West and the East, a country in which the cultures of different peoples mixed. All this left its mark on social and political life, religious and philosophical ideas and, of course, art.
Conventionally, historians divide the history of the Byzantine Empire into five periods; here is a brief description of them:
- The first period of the initial heyday of the empire, its territorial expansions under the emperors Justinian and Heraclius, lasted from the 5th to the 8th centuries. During this period, the active dawn of the Byzantine economy, culture, and military affairs took place.
- The second period began with the reign of the Byzantine emperor Leo III the Isaurian and lasted from 717 to 867. At this time, the empire, on the one hand, achieved the greatest development of its culture, but on the other hand, it was overshadowed by numerous unrest, including religious ones (iconoclasm), which we will write about in more detail later.
- The third period is characterized on the one hand by the end of unrest and the transition to relative stability, on the other by constant wars with external enemies; it lasted from 867 to 1081. It is interesting that during this period Byzantium was actively at war with its neighbors, the Bulgarians and our distant ancestors, the Russians. Yes, it was during this period that the campaigns of our Kyiv princes Oleg (the Prophet), Igor, and Svyatoslav to Constantinople (as the capital of Byzantium, Constantinople, was called in Rus') took place.
- The fourth period began with the reign of the Komnenos dynasty, the first emperor Alexios Komnenos ascended the Byzantine throne in 1081. This period is also known as the “Komnenian Renaissance”, the name speaks for itself; during this period, Byzantium revived its cultural and political greatness, which had somewhat faded after the unrest and constant wars. The Komnenians turned out to be wise rulers, skillfully balancing in the difficult conditions in which Byzantium found itself at that time: from the East, the borders of the empire were increasingly being pressed by the Seljuk Turks; from the West, Catholic Europe was breathing in, considering the Orthodox Byzantines to be apostates and heretics, which was little better than infidel Muslims.
- The fifth period is characterized by the decline of Byzantium, which ultimately led to its death. It lasted from 1261 to 1453. During this period, Byzantium wages a desperate and unequal struggle for survival. The Ottoman Empire, which had gained strength, a new, this time Muslim superpower of the Middle Ages, finally swept away Byzantium.
Fall of Byzantium
What are the main reasons for the fall of Byzantium? Why did an empire that controlled such vast territories and such power (both military and cultural) fall? First of all, the most important reason was the strengthening of the Ottoman Empire; in fact, Byzantium became one of the first victims; subsequently, the Ottoman Janissaries and Sipahis would fray many other European nations, reaching even Vienna in 1529 (from where they were knocked out only by the combined efforts of the Austrians and the Polish troops of King John Sobieski).
But in addition to the Turks, Byzantium also had a number of internal problems, constant wars exhausted this country, many territories that it owned in the past were lost. The conflict with Catholic Europe also had its effect, resulting in the fourth crusade, directed not against infidel Muslims, but against the Byzantines, these “incorrect Orthodox Christian heretics” (from the point of view of Catholic crusaders, of course). Needless to say, the Fourth Crusade, which resulted in the temporary conquest of Constantinople by the crusaders and the formation of the so-called “Latin Republic,” was another important reason for the subsequent decline and fall of the Byzantine Empire.
Also, the fall of Byzantium was greatly facilitated by the numerous political unrest that accompanied the final fifth stage of the history of Byzantium. For example, the Byzantine emperor John Palaiologos V, who reigned from 1341 to 1391, was overthrown from the throne three times (interestingly, first by his father-in-law, then by his son, then by his grandson). The Turks skillfully used intrigues at the court of the Byzantine emperors for their own selfish purposes.
In 1347, the most terrible epidemic of plague, the Black Death, as this disease was called in the Middle Ages, swept through the territory of Byzantium; the epidemic killed approximately a third of the inhabitants of Byzantium, which became another reason for the weakening and fall of the empire.
When it became clear that the Turks were about to sweep away Byzantium, the latter began to again seek help from the West, but relations with Catholic countries, as well as the Pope, were more than strained, only Venice came to the rescue, whose merchants traded profitably with Byzantium, and Constantinople itself even had an entire Venetian merchant quarter. At the same time, Genoa, which was a trade and political enemy of Venice, on the contrary, helped the Turks in every possible way and was interested in the fall of Byzantium (primarily in order to cause problems for its trade competitors, the Venetians). In a word, instead of uniting and helping Byzantium to withstand the attack of the Ottoman Turks, the Europeans pursued their own personal interests; a handful of Venetian soldiers and volunteers, sent to help Constantinople besieged by the Turks, could no longer do anything.
On May 29, 1453, the ancient capital of Byzantium, the city of Constantinople, fell (later renamed Istanbul by the Turks), and the once great Byzantium fell along with it.
Byzantine culture
The culture of Byzantium is the product of a mixture of cultures of many peoples: Greeks, Romans, Jews, Armenians, Egyptian Copts and the first Syrian Christians. The most striking part of Byzantine culture is its ancient heritage. Many traditions from the times of ancient Greece were preserved and transformed in Byzantium. So the spoken written language of the citizens of the empire was Greek. The cities of the Byzantine Empire preserved Greek architecture, the structure of Byzantine cities was again borrowed from ancient Greece: the heart of the city was the agora - a wide square where public meetings were held. The cities themselves were lavishly decorated with fountains and statues.
The best craftsmen and architects of the empire built the palaces of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople, the most famous among them is the Great Imperial Palace of Justinian.
The remains of this palace in a medieval engraving.
In Byzantine cities, ancient crafts continued to actively develop; the masterpieces of local jewelers, craftsmen, weavers, blacksmiths, and artists were valued throughout Europe, and the skills of Byzantine craftsmen were actively adopted by representatives of other nations, including the Slavs.
Great importance in social, cultural, political and sports life Byzantium had hippodromes where chariot races took place. For the Romans they were about the same as football is for many today. There were even, in modern terms, fan clubs that supported one or another team of chariot hounds. Just as modern ultras football fans who support different football clubs from time to time arrange fights and brawls among themselves, Byzantine fans of chariot racing were also very keen on this matter.
But in addition to just unrest, various groups of Byzantine fans also had strong political influence. So one day, an ordinary brawl between fans at the hippodrome led to the largest uprising in the history of Byzantium, known as “Nika” (literally “win”, this was the slogan of the rebel fans). The uprising of Nik fans almost led to the overthrow of Emperor Justinian. Only thanks to the determination of his wife Theodora and the bribery of the leaders of the uprising, it was possible to suppress it.
Hippodrome in Constantinople.
In the jurisprudence of Byzantium, Roman law, inherited from the Roman Empire, reigned supreme. Moreover, it was in the Byzantine Empire that the theory of Roman law acquired its final form, and such key concepts as law, right, and custom were formed.
The economy in Byzantium was also largely determined by the legacy of the Roman Empire. Each free citizen paid taxes to the treasury on his property and labor activity (a similar tax system was practiced in ancient Rome). High taxes often became the cause of mass discontent, and even unrest. Byzantine coins (known as Roman coins) circulated throughout Europe. These coins were very similar to the Roman ones, but the Byzantine emperors made only a number of minor changes to them. The first coins that began to be minted in Western Europe were, in turn, an imitation of Roman coins.
This is what coins looked like in the Byzantine Empire.
Religion, of course, had a great influence on the culture of Byzantium, as read on.
Religion of Byzantium
In religious terms, Byzantium became the center of Orthodox Christianity. But before that, it was on its territory that the most numerous communities of the first Christians were formed, which greatly enriched its culture, especially in terms of the construction of temples, as well as in the art of icon painting, which originated in Byzantium.
Gradually, Christian churches became the center of public life for Byzantine citizens, pushing aside in this regard the ancient agoras and hippodromes with their rowdy fans. Monumental Byzantine churches built in V-X centuries, combine both ancient architecture (from which Christian architects borrowed a lot) and Christian symbolism. The Church of St. Sophia in Constantinople, which was later converted into a mosque, can rightfully be considered the most beautiful temple creation in this regard.
Art of Byzantium
The art of Byzantium was inextricably linked with religion, and the most beautiful thing it gave to the world was the art of icon painting and the art of mosaic frescoes that decorated many churches.
True, one of the political and religious unrest in the history of Byzantium, known as Iconoclasm, was associated with icons. This was the name of the religious and political movement in Byzantium that considered icons to be idols, and therefore subject to destruction. In 730, Emperor Leo III the Isaurian officially banned the veneration of icons. As a result, thousands of icons and mosaics were destroyed.
Subsequently, the power changed, in 787 Empress Irina ascended the throne, who brought back the veneration of icons, and the art of icon painting was revived with its former strength.
The art school of Byzantine icon painters set the traditions of icon painting for the whole world, including its great influence on the art of icon painting in Kievan Rus.
Byzantium, video
And in conclusion interesting video about the Byzantine Empire.
