Byzantine Empire years of existence. Byzantine Empire. Empire history. Rise of early Byzantium
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 would simply not understand us. And those who did understand would think that we want to flatter them by calling them residents of the capital, and even in an outdated language that is used only by scientists who try to make their speech as refined as possible. Part of the consular diptych of Justinian. Constantinople, 521 Diptychs were presented to consuls in honor of their assumption of office. The Metropolitan Museum of ArtThere 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 in 330 was re-founded by Emperor Constantine under the name of Constantinople. They were called that only in texts written in a conventional literary language, stylized as ancient Greek, which no one had spoken for a long time. No one knew the other Byzantines, and these existed only in texts accessible to a narrow circle of educated elites who wrote in this archaic Greek and understood it.
The self-name of the Eastern Roman Empire, starting from the III-IV centuries (and after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453), there were several stable and understandable phrases and words: romean state, or Romans, (βασιλεία τῶν Ρωμαίων), romania (Ρωμανία), Romaida (Ρωμαΐς ).
The inhabitants 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 how 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 (this is how Byzantium is often called in modern historical writings, and this is much closer to the self-consciousness of the Byzantines themselves), in fact, lost its 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; the only important thing now was that Western European scholars thought and wrote about Byzantium.
Jerome Wolf. Engraving by Dominicus Custos. 1580 Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum BraunschweigIn the Western European tradition, the state of Byzantium was actually created by Hieronymus Wolff, a German humanist and historian, who in 1577 published the Corpus of Byzantine History, a small anthology of works by historians of the Eastern Empire with a Latin translation. It was from the "Korpus" that the concept of "Byzantine" entered the 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 edition of the second Corpus was used by the 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon when writing his History of the Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire - perhaps no other 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-consciousness.
2. The Byzantines didn't know they weren't Romans
Autumn. Coptic panel. 4th century Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, UK / Bridgeman Images / FotodomFor 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 Komnenos - 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 inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Social institutions, laws, statehood - all this has been preserved in Byzantium since the time of the first Roman emperors. The adoption of Christianity had almost no effect 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, like the ancient Romans, they attributed the beginning of their own political history 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 scholarship and written culture: the Byzantines considered classical ancient Greek literature to be their own. For example, in the 11th century, the monk and scholar Michael Psellos seriously argues in one treatise about who writes poetry better - the Athenian tragedian Euripides or the Byzantine poet of the 7th century George Pisida, the author of a panegyric on the Avaro-Slavic siege of Constantinople in 626 and the theological poem "Shestodnev about the divine creation of the world. In this poem, later translated into Slavic, George paraphrases the ancient authors Plato, Plutarch, Ovid and Pliny the Elder.
At the same time, at the level of ideology, Byzantine culture often opposed itself to classical antiquity. Christian apologists noticed that all Greek antiquity - poetry, theater, sports, sculpture - was permeated with religious cults of pagan deities. Hellenic values (material and physical beauty, the desire for pleasure, human glory and honors, military and athletic victories, eroticism, rational philosophical thinking) were condemned as unworthy of Christians. Basil the Great, in his famous talk "To Young Men on How to Use Pagan Writings," sees the main danger for Christian youth in the attractive way of life offered to the reader in Hellenic writings. He advises to select in them for oneself only stories that are morally useful. The paradox is that Basil, 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 into disuse and sounded like archaic.
In practice, ideological incompatibility with Hellenism did not prevent the Byzantines from carefully treating the ancient cultural heritage. Ancient texts were not destroyed, but copied, while the scribes tried to be accurate, 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 epos of Homer, the tragedies of Euripides, the speeches of Demos-Phen and use the Hellenic cultural code in their own writings, for example, call the Arabs Persians, and Russia - 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 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 how we used to think. For the most part, this thought seems natural to us, due 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 prompts both historians and non-specialists to look at the period from the 3rd to the 7th centuries (now increasingly called late Antiquity) as the time of the decline of the former greatness of the Roman Empire under the influence of two main factors - the invasions of the Germanic tribes and the ever-growing social role of Christianity, which became the dominant religion in the 4th century. Byzantium, existing in the mass consciousness primarily as a Christian empire, is drawn in this perspective as a natural heir to the cultural decline that occurred in late Antiquity due to mass Christianization: the focus of religious fanaticism and obscurantism, which stretched for a whole millennium of stagnation.
Amulet that protects from the evil eye. Byzantium, 5th-6th centuries
On one side, an eye is depicted, at which arrows are directed and attacked by a lion, a snake, a scorpion and a stork.
© The Walters Art MuseumHematite amulet. Byzantine Egypt, 6th–7th centuries
The inscriptions define him as "the woman who suffered from bleeding" (Luke 8:43-48). Hematite was believed to help stop bleeding, and amulets related to women's health and the menstrual cycle were very popular from it.
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 just a time of destruction of beautiful antiquity? Historical science has been sure for more than half a century that this is not so.
Especially 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 organized for its creators and users was much more complex: the very question of the conflict between the Roman and the religious would have seemed strange to Christians of that era. In the 4th century, Roman Christians could easily place images of pagan deities, made in ancient style, on household items: for example, on one casketgiven to newlyweds, naked Venus is adjacent to the pious call "Seconds and Project, live in Christ."
On the territory of the future Byzantium there was an equally problem-free fusion of pagan and Christian in artistic techniques 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 kind of funeral portraits common in Hellenized Egypt in the Ι-III centuries AD. e. The image was applied with hot paints on 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 (and perhaps, on the contrary, naturally and naturally) adhered to it. The same fusion of pagan and Christian is seen in the literature of late Antiquity. The poet Arator in the 6th century recites in the Roman cathedral a hexametric poem about the deeds of the apostles, written in the stylistic traditions of Virgil. In Christianized Egypt in the middle of the 5th century (by this time there were different forms of monasticism here for about a century and a half), the poet Nonn from the city of Panopol (modern Akmim) writes an adaptation (paraphrase) of the Gospel of John in the language of Homer, preserving not only the meter and style, but also deliberately borrowing whole verbal formulas and figurative layers from his epos Gospel of John 1:1-6 (synodal 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 the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. There was a man sent from God; his name is John.
Nonn from Panopol. Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, Canto 1 (translated by Yu. A. Golubets, D. A. Pospelov, A. V. Markov):
Logos, God's Child, Light born from Light,
He is inseparable from the Father on the infinite throne!
Heavenly God, Logos, you are the primordial
He shone together with the Eternal, the Creator of the world,
Oh, Ancient of the universe! All things were done through Him,
What is breathless and in the spirit! Outside the Speech, which does a lot,
Is it manifest that it abides? And in Him exists from eternity
Life, which is inherent in everything, the light of a short-lived people ...<…>
In the bee-feeding more often
The wanderer on the mountain appeared, the inhabitant of the desert slopes,
He is the herald of the cornerstone baptism, the name is
God's man, John, the leader. .
Portrait of a young girl. 2nd century©Google Cultural Institute
Funeral portrait of a man. 3rd 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 relate to Christianization, since the Christians of that time were themselves such hunters for classical forms both in the visual arts and in literature (as well as in many other areas of life). The future Byzantium was born in an era in which the relationship between religion, artistic language, its audience, as well as the sociology of historical shifts were complex and indirect. They carried the potential of the complexity and diversity that developed later over the centuries of Byzantine history.
4. In Byzantium they spoke one language, but wrote in another
The language picture of Byzantium is paradoxical. The empire, which not only claimed succession from 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 legal code in Latin was the Code of Justinian, promulgated in 529 - after it laws were already issued in Greek), it enriched Greek with many borrowings (before only in the military and administrative spheres), early Byzantine Constantinople attracted Latin grammarians with career opportunities. But still, Latin was not a real language even of early Byzantium. Let the Latin-speaking poets Corippus and Priscian live in Constantinople, we will not meet these names on the pages of the textbook of the history of Byzantine literature.
We cannot say at what exact moment the Roman emperor becomes Byzantine: 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 merged Roman institutions, Greek culture and Christianity and carried out this synthesis on the basis of the Greek language. Therefore, one of the criteria on which we could rely is the language: the Byzantine emperor, unlike his Roman counterpart, is easier to express himself in Greek than in Latin.
But what is this Greek? The alternative that bookstore shelves and philological programs offer us is misleading: we can find either ancient or modern Greek in them. No other reference point is provided. Because of this, we are forced to proceed from the fact that the Greek of Byzantium is either a distorted ancient Greek (almost the dialogues of Plato, but not quite) or Proto-Greek (almost the negotiations of Tsipras 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 the ancient Greek (this is what the Western European classical philologists thought before the establishment of Byzantine studies as an independent scientific discipline), or the inevitable germination of the modern Greek (this is how the Greek scientists thought at the time of the formation of the Greek nation in the 19th century) .
Indeed, Byzantine Greek is elusive. Its development cannot be viewed as a series of progressive, successive changes, since for every step forward in language development there was a step back. The reason for this is the attitude towards the language of the Byzantines themselves. Socially prestigious was the language norm of Homer and the classics of Attic prose. To write well meant to write history indistinguishable from Xenophon or Thucydides (the last historian who dared to introduce into his text the Old Attic elements, which seemed archaic already in the classical era, is a witness to the fall of Constantinople, Laonicus Chalkokondylus), and the epic is indistinguishable from Homer. From educated Byzantines throughout the history of the empire, it was required to literally speak one (changed) language and write 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
Ostraca - shards of clay vessels - were used to record Bible verses, legal documents, accounts, school assignments and prayers when papyrus was unavailable or too expensive.
© The Metropolitan Museum of ArtOstracon with a troparion to the Theotokos in Coptic. Byzantine Egypt, 580–640© The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The situation was aggravated by the fact that since the time of classical antiquity, certain dialectal features 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 opposition of vowels by longitude left the Greek language, but nevertheless, even a thousand years later, heroic poems and epitaphs were written as if the phonetic system had remained unchanged since the time of Homer. Differences also permeated other linguistic levels: it was necessary to build a phrase, like Homer, select words, like Homer, and decline and conjugate them in accordance with a paradigm that died out in living speech millennia ago.
However, not everyone was able to write with antique liveliness 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, has almost completely disappeared in Modern Greek. It would be logical to assume that with each century in literature it will occur less and less until it gradually disappears altogether. However, recent studies have shown that the dative case is used much more often in Byzantine high literature than in the literature of classical antiquity. But it is precisely this increase in frequency that speaks of the loosening of the norm! Obsession in using one form or another will tell about your inability to use it correctly no less 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 errors of manuscript copyists, non-literary inscriptions and the so-called vernacular literature. The term “folk-speaking” 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. It 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 rhymes.
Diglossia, or bilingualism, also gave rise to another typically Byzantine phenomenon - metaphrasing, that is, transcription, retelling in half with translation, presentation of the content of the source with new words with a decrease or increase in the stylistic register. Moreover, the shift could go both along the line of complication (pretentious syntax, refined figures of speech, ancient allusions and quotations), and along the line of language simplification. Not a single work was considered inviolable, even the language of sacred texts in Byzantium did not have the status of sacred: the Gospel could be rewritten in a different stylistic key (as, for example, the already mentioned Nonn of Panopolitan did) - and this did not bring down anathema on the head of the author. It was necessary to wait until 1901, when the translation of the Gospels into colloquial Modern Greek (in fact, the same metaphrase) brought opponents and defenders of the language renewal to 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 like, but also than Pallis himself.
5. There were iconoclasts in Byzantium - and this is a terrible mystery
Iconoclasts John the Grammarian and Bishop Anthony of Silea. Khludov Psalter. Byzantium, circa 850 Miniature to Psalm 68, verse 2: "They gave me gall to eat, 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 - John Grammatik and Bishop Anthony of Silea. rijksmuseumamsterdam.blogspot.ruIconoclasm is the most famous period for a wide audience and the most mysterious even for specialists in the history of Byzantium. The depth of the trace 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 of the historical context, in the timeless meaning of “rebel, overthrower of foundations”.
The event line is like this. By the turn of the 7th and 8th centuries, the theory of the worship of religious images was hopelessly lagging behind practice. The Arab conquests of the middle of the 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 of disordered forms of icon veneration, sometimes indistinguishable from magical practices. According to the collections of miracles of saints, drunk wax from a melted seal with the face of St. Artemy healed a hernia, and Saints Cosmas and Damian healed the suffering woman by ordering her to drink, mixing with water, the plaster from the fresco with their image.
Such veneration of icons, which did not receive a philosophical and theological justification, caused rejection among some clerics, who saw signs of paganism in it. 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 (Gnoemennogo) (741-775).
Claiming for the status of the ecumenical, the iconoclastic council of 754 took the dispute to a new level: from now on, it was not about the fight against superstitions and the fulfillment of the Old Testament prohibition “Do not make an idol for yourself”, but about the hypostasis of Christ. Can He be considered pictorial if His divine nature is "indescribable"? The “Christological dilemma” was as follows: the iconodules are guilty either of imprinting 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 Irina 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 foundation for previously unordered practices. An intellectual breakthrough was, firstly, the separation of “official” and “relative” worship: the first can only be given to God, while with the second “the honor given to the image goes back to the archetype” (the words of Basil the Great, which became real motto of iconodules). 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 spelling of the name - the act of naming.
Patriarch Nicephorus. 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 politics, hoping in this way to build a line of succession towards Constantine V, the most successful and most beloved ruler in the army in the last century. The so-called second iconoclasm accounts for both a new round of repressions 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 covert iconoclasm, and this accusation was more serious than 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 unsteady.
The main difficulty is the state of the sources. The texts, thanks to which we know about the first iconoclasm, were written much later, and by iconodules. In the 40s of the 9th century, a full-fledged program was carried out to write the history of iconoclasm from icon-worshipping positions. As a result, the history of the dispute has been completely distorted: the iconoclasts' writings are available only in tendentious selections, and textual analysis shows that the iconodules' works, 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 - “innovation” on Greek - the most hated word for any Byzantine), and deliberately anti-Christian. Iconoclasts appeared not as fighters for the cleansing of Christianity from paganism, but as "Christian accusers" - this word began to refer specifically and exclusively to iconoclasts. The parties in the iconoclastic dispute turned out to be not Christians, who interpret the same teaching in different ways, 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 hatred of iconoclasts for education, for example, about the burning of the never-existing university in Constantinople by Leo III, and participation in pagan rites and human sacrifices, hatred of the Mother of God and doubts about the divine nature of Christ were attributed to Constantine V. If such myths seem simple and were debunked long ago, others remain at the center of scientific discussions to this day. For example, it was only very recently that it was possible to establish that the cruel reprisal committed against Stefan the New, glorified as a martyr in 766, was connected not so much with his uncompromising icon-worshiping position, as life claims, but with his proximity to the conspiracy of political opponents of Constantine V. disputes about key questions: what is the role of Islamic influence in the genesis of iconoclasm? what was the true attitude of the iconoclasts towards the cult of saints and their relics?
Even the language we use to talk about iconoclasm is the language of the conquerors. The word "iconoclast" is not a self-designation, but an offensive polemical label invented and implemented by their opponents. No "iconoclast" would ever agree with such a name, simply because the Greek word εἰκών has many more meanings than the Russian "icon". This is any image, including non-material, which means that to call someone an iconoclast is to declare that he is struggling with 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, in fact, is not such, but is just an image.
In the end, defeat their teaching, it would be called Orthodox now, and we would contemptuously call the teaching of their opponents icon-worship and talk not about the iconoclastic, but about the icon-worshipping period in Byzantium. However, if it were so, the whole 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 mutual understanding between them. At the end of the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire broke up into barbarian states and the tradition of "Romanness" 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 they entered into dynastic marriages with Byzantine princesses. The court of Charlemagne competed with Byzantium - this can be seen in architecture and in art. However, the imperial claims of Charles rather increased the misunderstanding between East and West: the culture of the Carolingian Renaissance wanted to see itself as the only legitimate heir of Rome.
Crusaders attack Constantinople. Miniature from the chronicle "The Conquest of Constantinople" by Geoffroy de Villehardouin. Approximately 1330, Villardouin was one of the leaders of the campaign. Bibliothèque nationale de France
By the 10th century, the overland routes from Constantinople to northern Italy through the Balkans and along the Danube were blocked by barbarian tribes. The only way left was by sea, which reduced the possibilities of communication and made cultural exchange more difficult. The division into East and West has become a physical reality. The ideological gap between East and West, fueled throughout the Middle Ages by theological disputes, 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 the rest, referring to the divine establishment.
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 depravity of the Byzantine clergy and attributed the success of Islam to it. For example, Dante believed that Sultan Saladin could have converted to Christianity (and even placed him in his "Divine Comedy" in limbo - a special place for virtuous non-Christians), but did not do this because of the unattractiveness of Byzantine Christianity. In Western countries, by the time of Dante, almost no one knew the Greek language. At the same time, Byzantine intellectuals learned 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 Europe along with Byzantine scholars who had 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 in the society that preserved it. In addition, it was mainly intellectuals who fled to the West who were negatively inclined 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 negotiate 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 “their own”, then the image of Byzantium was fixed in European culture as oriental and exotic, sometimes attractive, but more often hostile and alien to European ideals of reason and progress.
The age of European enlightenment completely stigmatized Byzantium. The French Enlighteners Montesquieu and Voltaire associated it with despotism, luxury, lavish ceremonies, superstition, moral decay, civilizational decline and cultural sterility. According to Voltaire, the history of Byzantium is "an unworthy collection of grandiloquent phrases and descriptions of miracles" that dishonors the human mind. Montesquieu sees the main reason for the fall of Constantinople in the pernicious and pervasive influence of religion on society and power. He speaks especially aggressively about Byzantine monasticism and clergy, about the veneration of icons, as well as about theological controversy:
The Greeks - great talkers, great debaters, sophists by nature - constantly entered into religious disputes. Since the monks enjoyed great influence in 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 first calming down, then inciting theological disputes, regarding which it was noticed that they became the hotter, the more insignificant was 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 - the Muslims. In the Orientalist model, Byzantium was opposed to 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 the drama The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert:
“The king wipes fragrances from his face with his sleeve. He eats from sacred vessels, then breaks them; and mentally he counts his ships, his troops, his peoples. Now, out of a whim, he will take and burn his palace with all the guests. He thinks to restore the Tower of Babel and overthrow the Almighty from the throne. Antony reads from a distance on his forehead all his thoughts. 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 question of any moral example of Byzantine history for the education of youth. School curricula were based on samples of classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, and Byzantine culture was excluded from them. In Russia, science and education followed Western patterns. 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 Russia:
“By the will of fateful fate, we turned for moral teaching, which was supposed to educate us, to corrupted Byzantium, to the subject of deep contempt of these peoples.”
Byzantine ideologist Konstantin Leontiev Konstantin Leontiev(1831-1891) - diplomat, writer, philosopher. In 1875, his work “Byzantism and Slavism” was published, in which he argued that “Byzantism” is a civilization or culture, the “general idea” of which is composed of several components: autocracy, Christianity (different from Western, “from heresies and splits”), disappointment in everything earthly, the absence of an “extremely exaggerated concept of the earthly human personality”, rejection of the hope for the general welfare of peoples, the totality of some aesthetic ideas, and so on. Since all-Slavism is not a civilization or culture at all, and European civilization is coming to an end, Russia - having inherited almost everything from Byzantium - needs Byzantism to flourish. pointed to the stereotypical idea of Byzantium, which has 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 collection of Topkapı Palace. Istanbul, late 15th century Wikimedia CommonsIn 1935, the book of the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga, Byzantium after Byzantium, was published - and its title established itself as a designation of 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 Eastern European medieval cultures that were directly influenced by Byzantium - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia. The participants in this supranational unity preserved the heritage of Byzantium in religion, the norms of Roman law, the standards of literature and art.
In the last hundred years of the existence of the empire, two factors - the cultural revival of the Palaiologos and the Palamite disputes - contributed, on the one hand, to the renewal of ties between the Orthodox peoples and Byzantium, and on the other hand, to a new surge in the spread of Byzantine culture, primarily through liturgical texts and monastic literature. In the XIV century Byzantine ideas, texts and even their authors got into the Slavic world through the city of Tarnovo, the capital of the Bulgarian Empire; in particular, the number of Byzantine works available in Russia 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 manage the church, in whose jurisdiction both Russia and the Orthodox Balkan peoples remained. Finally, the rulers of the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, even after becoming subjects of the Sultan, retained Christian statehood and considered themselves the cultural and political heirs of the Byzantine Empire. They continued the traditions of the ceremonial of the royal court, Greek education and theology, and supported the Greek elite of Constantinople, the Phanariots. Phanariots- literally "inhabitants of Phanar", a 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 predominantly in this quarter..
Greek uprising of 1821. Illustration from A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times by John Henry Wright. 1905 The Internet ArchiveIorga believes that Byzantium died after Byzantium during the unsuccessful uprising against the Turks in 1821, which was organized by Phanariot Alexander Ypsilanti. On one side of the banner of Ypsilanti there was the inscription “Conquer this” and the image of Emperor Constantine the Great, whose name is associated with the beginning of Byzantine history, and on the other, 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 then dissolved into Greek nationalism.
accepted in East. science is the name of the state-va, which arose in the east. parts of Rome. empire in the 4th century and existed until ser. 15th century; adm., economic and the cultural center of V. was Constantinople. Official name On Wednesday. century - Basileia ton Romaion - the empire of the Romans (in Greek "Romes"). V.'s emergence as independent. state-va prepared in the depths of Rome. empires where the slave owners are economically more powerful and less affected by the crisis. about-va hellenized east. districts (M. Asia, Syria, Egypt, etc.) already in the 3rd century. tried to separate themselves politically from lat. West. Creation at the beginning 4th c. new political center in the East was actually the division of the empire into 2 states and led to the emergence of V. In the continuation of the 4th century. both states sometimes united under the rule of one emperor, they will finish. the gap occurred in con. 4th c. The emergence of V. contributed to the economic. stabilization and delayed the fall of the slave owners. building in the east. parts of the Mediterranean. 4 - early 7th century for V. were characterized by economic. rise, the transformation of a number of agr. settlements in the centers of craft and trade in M. Asia, Syria, east. parts of the Balkan Peninsula; the development of trade with Arabia, the Black Sea region, Iran, India, China; densification of the population in Syria, M. Asia. In Marxist historiography, the periodization of the history of early Hungary is connected with the problem of the existence of slave-owners in Hungary. building, with the stages of transition to feudalism and its development. Most scientists consider V. slave-owning to ser. 7th c. (M. Ya. Syuzyumov, Z. V. Udaltsova, A. P. Kazhdan, A. R. Korsunsky), although some believe that V. was moving to feudalism already in the 4th-5th centuries, believing that already in the 4th c. feud began to take shape. property, main the colony became a form of exploitation in the countryside, the labor of free artisans was used in the city, slavery was preserved only as a dying way of life (E. E. Lipshits most consistently defends this point) (see the discussion on page VDI, No 2 and 3 for 1953, Nos. 2 and 3 for 1954, Nos. 1, 3 and 4 for 1955, No. 1 for 1956 and on the pages of the VI magazine, No. 10 for 1958, No. 3 for 1959, No. 2 for 1960, NoNo 6, 8 for 1961). V. in the last period of the existence of the slave system (4th - early 7th centuries). The state, the nobility, the church, townspeople, and free peasant communities were the owners of the land of V. of this period. Members of the peasant community (mitrokomia) had plots of arable land in private ownership; the sale of land to "foreigners" was limited (Codex Justinian, XI, 56). The peasants were bound by mutual responsibility; communal relations were regulated by customary law; horticultural and horticultural crops, viticulture have become widespread; main economic the trend was towards the growth of small x-va. Slavery still retained a predominant place in society, both in the countryside and in the city. Although the number of slaves entering as military. production decreased, but the influx of slaves into the state continued, since barbarian tribes neighboring V., fighting with each other, sold many slaves to V. (almost the only equivalent in trade with V.). Slave prices were stable for a long time. The slave was still considered a thing, the use of which was regulated by law; the slave was not a subject of family law, did not have personal property guaranteed by law. However, the impact of the new relationship was taking its toll; legislation facilitated the release of slaves into the wild, which took in the 4th-6th centuries. wide scope. The estates of large landowners were processed not only by slaves, but also by dependent peasants - enapographers, freedmen, or rented out. Slave owners sought to use the benefits of small x-va. Contrary to the main economic tendencies of the era, they tried to enslave and attach small landowners to the land, the dependence of which was under the rule of slave owners. relations often approached a slave state (especially among the Enapographers). Slave owner the nature of society in the 4th-6th centuries. was determined not only by the predominance of slave labor in society, but also by the preservation of slave owners. superstructure, which came into conflict with the progressive development trends. State. the apparatus was in the hands of those strata of the nobility who were interested in the conservation of slave-owning property relations. From Byzantium. only a part of the cities were centers of crafts and trade (for example, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, Laodicea, Seleucia, Skitopol, Byblos, Caesarea, Beirut, Thessaloniki, Trebizond, Ephesus, Smyrna). Most cities are settlements of small proprietors, slave owners united in municipalities. Provincial the cities were exploited by the nobility of Constantinople; local self-government (curia) has become an auxiliary apparatus of the tax system. Most cities in the 4th-6th centuries. lost its society. land; a number of settlements that were previously part of the district subordinate to the city received the rights of the metrocomia. Large estates of the provinces. the nobility also got out of subordination to the city, moreover, the election of officials and the bishop (who was of great importance in self-government) was decided by the surrounding large landowners (Justinian Code 1, 4, 17 and 19). Production in the cities was small, artisans rented premises from the nobility, the church, and the state. Trade and craft. associations were associated with a system of liturgies, therefore rich townspeople and landowners were forcibly included in the colleges. Taxes and rent swallowed up means. part of the surplus product of artisans. Luxury goods and weapons were manufactured in the state. workshops where slave labor prevailed (Codex Justinian, XI, 8, 6); the legally free were also usually assigned to such workshops and, in case of flight, were forcibly returned. In large cities, there were many a lumpen-proletarian stratum that lived at the expense of either the state-va (the policy of "bread and circuses") or the mountains. liturgists. From the 4th c. does good. functions began to be assigned to the church and special. "charitable institutions". The bulk of the bread for the capital came from Egypt. Local markets were supplied with Ch. arr. suburban x-you: mountains. nobility sought to have "proasti" (suburban estate) with vineyards, olive groves, vegetable gardens, orchards. Despite the devastation caused by the barbarian invasions, the burden of taxes, which sometimes forced the townspeople to flee the city, until the 7th century. there were no signs of urban agrarianization. Inscriptions, papyri testify rather to the enlargement of old and the founding of new cities. The development of the city was based, however, on the shaky ground of the degrading slave-owner. x-va and interrupted at the beginning. 7th c. (this t. sp., however, is disputed by some scientists). Cities were cultural centers (see article Byzantine culture). Those types of antique. property, to-rye already actually ceased to exist, were canceled by the Code of Justinian, where a single "complete property" was proclaimed. Justinian law, imbued with the idea of the supra-class essence of the state, theoretical. the justification for the swarm was the provision on the deities, the origin of imperial power, was aimed at guaranteeing property. slave-owner relations. about-va. The social base of the monarchy in V. 4-6 centuries. were mountains. slave owners: owners of suburban estates ("proastians"), homeowners, usurers, merchants, from among whom a high-ranking nobility was created by buying positions. The material base of the monarchy was heavy taxes for the population, absorbing means. part of the surplus product of slaves and colonies. Class. wrestling in V. 4-6 centuries. was a protest against the military-fiscal dictatorship, against attempts to artificially hold back societies. development within the slaveholding. relations. From the 4th c. it took mostly the form of a heretic. movements. Under Constantine, Christianity became the dominant religion, which caused an aggravation of the internal. controversy in the church. Christianity, genetically associated with the protest of the oppressed masses, in the 4th century. kept still democratic. phraseology. Church. hierarchs and exploitative layers sought to eliminate in Christ. democratic doctrine. trends; nar. the masses sought to preserve them. The origin of any "heresy" of that time lies in this contradiction. Dep. hierarchs, relying on the mood of the masses, dogmatically formalized those who disagreed with dominance. the church of doctrine (see Donatists, Arianism, Nestorianism, etc.); in the future, having become a "church", heresy lost its democratic character. character. Repressions, restrictions on rights and religions were used against heretics. "anathemas" (the church hierarchy fiercely defended slaveholding relations). In Egypt and Syria, the church. unrest, taking religion. shell, were also due to separatist sentiments. Dr. a form of class struggle was the movement of dims - organizations of the mountains. population by circus parties (see Venets and Prasins). Both parties sought to attract people. masses, to-rye sometimes opposed the oppression of slave owners. state-va as a whole, against the will of their leaders (for example, in the Nika uprising in 532). V. ethnically represented a combination of various nationalities involved in the Hellenic-Rome. statehood and culture. Greek the population prevailed in Greece, to the east. coast of the Mediterranean; Romanizir lived in the Balkans. tribes, into the environment of which German, Alanian and Slavs were poured. settlers. In the East, Britain subjugated the Armenians, Syrians, Isaurians, and Arabs; in Egypt, the local Coptic population. Official lang. was Latin, which was gradually replaced by Greek with con. 5th and 6th centuries. Language of citizens acts would be h. Greek. Protest against national oppression took religion. form (rebellion of the Samaritans 529-530). A serious danger to the slave owner. V. were attacked by barbarians. The rural population of V. sometimes supported the barbarians, hoping with their help to get rid of the fiscal oppression and oppression of the landowners. know. But mountains. patriciate and trade.-crafts. layers, fearing barbaric robberies and violations of bargaining. connections, fiercely defended the city. Among the Byzants. landowner nobility there was a stratum, ready to get close to the barbarian leaders. In an effort to merge with the military. the nobility of V., the leaders of the barbarians went to the service of the Byzantine. pr-woo, which used barbarians as punishers in the fight against bunks. movements (especially in cities). The Visigoths who had been recruited into the service of V. rebelled in 376, which led to a revolution. movement among the population of the Balkan Peninsula. In the battle of Adrianople (378) Byzant. the army was destroyed. However, with the support of the mountains. population and due to the betrayal of the barbarian leaders, this movement was suppressed in 380 imp. Theodosius I. To the end. 4th c. the barbarian element began to predominate in Byzantium. army and a real threat of a united action of barbarian slaves with barbarian soldiers loomed. In the face of this danger, the patriciate of Constantinople in 400 massacred the barbarian mercenaries and the slaves who supported them, eliminating the threat of barbarian conquest. Having overcome in the 5th c. danger from the Ostrogoths and Huns, the empire in order to stabilize the slave owners. relations throughout the Mediterranean, under Justinian, went on the offensive against the barbarian states of the West (Vandal, Ostrogothic and Visigothic). However, V.'s successes were fragile. In Africa, the resistance of the broad masses arose (the uprising of Stotza), in Italy - the uprising of the Ostrogoths under the arm. Totils with the support of slaves and columns. V. suppressed these movements with difficulty. Difficulties increased in the East, where the Persians, using separatist sentiments, waged wars against Britain, trying to break through to sea trade. routes in the Mediterranean and Black Seas. V. fought hard with various tribes advancing from the North. Black Sea coast, repelling their attacks either by force of arms or by bribery of leaders. Under Justinian, V. achieved the highest degree of its power; However, Justinian's aggressive policy undermined Britain's strength, and already in the last quarter of the 6th c. V. began to lose her conquests in Italy and Spain. Fundamental changes in the position of the empire are associated with the attack on the Balkan Peninsula of the Slavs. Failures in the wars with the Slavs, the general discontent of the population caused an uprising in the army. Rebelled in 602 with the support of the mountains. The lower classes took possession of Constantinople and, having proclaimed the emperor of the centurion Fok, began to carry out terror against the nobility. Regardless of Foca's subjective goals, his government objectively performed progressive functions. After 8 years, the uprising was crushed, but dominance. the class as a whole was dealt a crushing blow. The power of the slave owner. the superstructure was broken and the forces striving for social reorganization were given free rein. In the 1st floor. 7th c. most of the Balkan Peninsula was settled by the Slavs, while Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were lost to Britain as a result of the Arab conquests. Early feudal warfare during the period of domination by a free peasant community (mid-7th - mid-ninth centuries). As a result, fame and Arab. conquests of the territory. V. decreased. V. of this period is a country with a strong glory. ethnic element. In the north and west of the Balkan Peninsula, the Slavs created their own states (from 681 - Bulgaria) and assimilated the local population, in the south of the peninsula and in M. Asia, on the contrary, they joined the Greek. nationality. The Slavs did not create new social forms in Byzantium, but they did introduce Byzantine. community strong remnants of the tribal system, which strengthened the Byzantine. community, the nature of which is the subject of discussion. The customary law of the community was formalized by the Agricultural Law (approximately the beginning of the 8th century). Large-scale landownership has been extremely reduced; sources speak of abandoned, forested deposits, of the division of land between peasants ("merismos"). Apparently, there was a gradual violence. the destruction of that form of earth. property, which was based on the labor of slaves, enapographers, and other categories of the dependent population. The institution of peasants attached to the land disappeared: not in the Eclogue - legislator. collection of the 8th century, which replaced the Code of Justinian, nor in the later Tax Charter did not provide for attachment to the land. Free cross. the community became dominant. The community owned pastures, forests, and undivided land, but the arable land was apparently privately owned. The changes were generally favorable for the peasants - and if in the 4th-6th centuries. the peasants fled from V. to the barbarians, then from horseback. 7th and 8th centuries from arab. caliphate and from Bulgaria there was an exodus of the population to V. This allowed the Byzants. pr-woo go to the military service villages. population, to-paradise with ser. 7th c. spread throughout the empire; the structure of the army acquired the territory. character. New military-adm. districts - themes, with a strategos at the head (theme device). The command structure of the femme was formed from consist. landowners, from the environment to-rykh was made provincial. military-landowner. nobility, turning into a feudal one. The process of feudalization was facilitated by the fact that the freedom of the peasant was relative - although the peasant did not depend on a large landowner, he was in the grip of the state. taxes and debts to usurers; the differentiation of the village progressed. Various forms of rent and hired labor were common within the community; slavery also survived. Ch. enemy cross. communities in that period was a state-in with its tax system and dominance. church. At the end of the 7th c. the peasant-plebeian heresy of the Paulicians, which originated in Armenia, is spreading. Social shifts 7-8 centuries. affected the city as well. Some cities remained centers of commodity production (Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Ephesus). With the loss of the largest cities of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, conquered by the Arabs, the role of Constantinople in the history of Byzantium increased. At the end of the 7th-8th centuries. economical the power of the Constantinople nobility is falling, the position of free craft is being strengthened. Commodity circulation has decreased. In the archaeological finds of coins of the 7th-8th centuries. almost never meet. Outlying cities, without losing their nominal ties with V., actually achieved independence and turned into aristocratic, patriciate-controlled republics (Venice, Amalfi, Chersonese). Int. the policy of V. of this period was characterized by the struggle of the mountains. and provincial nobility, and both groups sought to preserve the centralists. state-in. End of 7th c. was marked by the confiscation of the property of the ancient mountains. surnames (terror of Justinian II) in favor of the military. settlements and the emerging military. provincial know. In the future, the struggle for the ways of feudalization took the form of iconoclasm, which originated as a bunk. a movement against the oppression of the state and the church (bourgeois historians consider iconoclasm from a confessional point of view, seeing in it an exclusively ideological struggle and tearing it away from socio-economic conditions). Provincial the hierarchs, demagogically leading the movement of the masses, perverted its social meaning, concentrating the attention of the masses on the question of the cult of icons. Folding military-landowner estate used the movement to strengthen its political. and economic provisions. The government supported iconoclasm, seeking to strengthen its power over the church and seize its treasures. Mountains acted on the side of the iconodules. know Constantinople, monasticism associated with it, bargaining. centers of Hellas and islands. Iconoclast emperors of the Isaurian (Syrian) dynasty, confiscating the property of the mountains. nobility and recalcitrant monasteries, significantly strengthened the thematic nobility and supported the free cross. community and mountains. artisans. However, the thematic nobility began to use their privileges to attack the peasants, which caused the discontent of the peasants and thereby narrowed the social base of the iconoclasts. This led to a big bunk. uprising under the arms Thomas the Slav (820-823) - the first anti-feud. movement. In the early period of feudalization, ethnicity intensified in Hungary. the diversity of the population. Of particular importance is the glory pouring into the ranks of the Byzantine nobility. and arm. to know: a number of emperors and major politicians come out of the Armenians. and cultural figures. The foreign policy of V. was aimed at the struggle for the preservation of independence. Having lost Syria, Palestine, Egypt, huge territories. on the Balkan Peninsula, V. repulsed the onslaught of the Arabs and Bulgarians and in the middle. 8th c. went on the offensive. Feudalization of V. in the period of domination of the urban dignitary nobility (mid. 9th - late 11th centuries). Two centuries of free cross dominance. communities have had a positive impact on the development of manufactures. forces: empty lands were settled, water mills spread more widely, the profitability of the village increased. x-va. In the 9th century free cross. the community became the object of attack by the landowners. nobility, especially after the defeat of the uprising of Thomas the Slav. The social struggle intensified; part of the peasantry joined the Paulicians, who founded a military near the borders of the caliphate. the center of Tefriku. Duration the wars ended in 872 with the defeat of the Paulicians, who were partially exterminated and partially resettled on the Balkan Peninsula. Violence. The resettlement was aimed at weakening the resistance of the masses in the East and creating a military. barriers from an alien population to counter the Bulgarians in the west. Massa cross. land was taken over by the military. nobility. Further attack on the cross. the community was carried out by buying up the lands of impoverished peasants, followed by the provision of plots of acquired land to the settlers on the "parichi law" (see Pariki). Feud spread widely. dependence of the peasants: a wig, rarely found in the monuments of the 9th century, is made ch. figure in the village in con. 11th c. Slavery to con. 11th c. almost disappeared, although isolated cases of it were observed, for example. sale of children in the years of Nar. disasters. In the process of feudalization, the military changed. organization of the population. Nar. the militia lost its meaning. Consist. part of the peasants was included in the stratiotsky lists (see. Stratioty) with the announcement of the definition. part of the land inalienable. The sizes of these sites to ser. 10th c. were increased in connection with the introduction of heavy cavalry and reached the size of the estate (cost 12 liters, approx. 4 kg of gold). Among the stratiotes, differentiation was observed: those who were economically weakened lost their plots and fell into a dependent state, at the same time becoming a politically unreliable element; wealthier stratiots tended to merge into the privileged military landowning nobility. The vast territories confiscated during the Paulician wars served as the basis for the power of the Asia Minor nobility, which in the 10-11 centuries. makes attempts to seize state power. From Ser. 9th c. there is a rapid development of cities, especially large seaside ("emporia"). The concentration of wealth as a result of the formation of the feud. property in the province, the rapid growth of ext. trade with the East. Europe, the restoration of maritime power in the Aegean and the Adriatic - all this contributed to the development of crafts. Trade relations were strengthened. The civil the law of Justinian (see Prochiron, Epanagoge, Vasiliki). were codified (ie. n. Eparch's book) decrees on trade and crafts. corporations, in which, along with the free owners of ergasterii, there could also be slaves (as figureheads for masters). Corporations were given benefits - advantages. the right to manufacture and trade, purchase goods from foreigners. The ergasteria were staffed by employees with little connection to the corporation, as well as slaves and apprentices. Both the types of products and the rate of profits were regulated by the mayor (eparch). Builds. workers were outside the corporations and worked hand in hand. contractors. Standard of living osn. the mass of artisans was extremely low. The policy of the pr-va was reduced to the encouragement of associations in order to facilitate the state. control and regulation. Despite the presence of remnants of the slave owner. relations, to-rye hindered the development of technology, the craft was mainly worn by the Middle Ages. character: small-scale production, associations by profession, regulation. To avoid Nar. unrest, the government sought to ensure the supply of the capital and large cities with the necessary goods; to a lesser extent, the state was interested in exporting abroad. Rich merchants and craftsmen, by purchasing positions and titles, passed into the ranks of the nobility, refusing to directly participate in trade and crafts. activities, which weakened the position of the Byzantines. merchant class in its competition with the Italian. Int. the policy of V. in the 9th-10th centuries. was carried out in the main for the benefit of the mountains. dignitaries, united around the synclite of the nobility, striving to maintain a leading position in the state and through taxes, adm. and the judiciary to exploit the population. Enslavement of the rural population of the provinces. landowners (dinats) and the development of private power on the ground damaged the influence of the capital's nobility, in the interests of which the Macedonian dynasty began to support a free cross. community against the dinats, forbidding them to buy a cross. land, and the poor were given incentives to buy back the sold land. Peasant relatives and neighbors were given the right of preference when buying a cross. plots. This policy was persistently pursued throughout the 10th century. However, the rules of preference created such advantages for the wealthy village elite that votchinniki began to stand out from among the peasants themselves, who later merged with the feud. nobility. From the 2nd quarter 11th c. Byzantium Prospect increased the tax burden by transferring natures. cash contributions. The importance of the synclite, the local court, has increased. institutions, the influence of handicrafts increased. corporations, the intervention of Nar. masses (especially in the capital) in the political. life. At the same time, typical forms of exploitation of the peasantry through the feud were planted in the provinces. rent. Subordination center. state institutions of the mountains. the nobility did not at all correspond to the prevailing power of the provinces. feud. land ownership, in connection with this, the struggle between the capital and the provinces intensified. strata of the nobility, and the pr-in maneuvered between them. After the defeat of iconoclasm and the restoration of icon-worship (843), the importance of monasticism and politics increased. the role of the patriarch. Patriarch Photius came up with the theory of the strong (equal imperial) power of the patriarch (Epanagogue). The church actively intervened in the struggle of various strata for power, hence a number of conflicts with imp. Leo VI, Nicephorus II Phocas, Isaac Komnenos. But Byzantium. The (Orthodox) Church failed to create a strong centralization. organization, like the papacy in the West: and state. system, and legislation, and education in V. were less dependent on the church than in the West. Differences between Byzantine. feudalism and feudalism in the West led to disagreements between the East. and app. churches. In the 9th-10th centuries. disagreements between the churches intensified in the struggle for influence in the glory. countries and in the South. Italy. The strife of the hierarchs was fueled by the hatred of trade and crafts. circles of Constantinople to Italian. competitors. In 1054 the "separation of the churches" followed. In the 10-11 centuries. large monasteries were created. feud. possessions, to-rye received special privileges in the field of taxation and rights over the dependent population. The foreign policy of V. of this period was characterized by feud. expansion. In the 10th century a number of victories were won over the Arabs. In the Balkans, Hungary in 1018 took possession of Bulgaria and strengthened its influence in Serbia; fought to maintain positions in the South. Italy and for dominance over the Adriatic and the Aegean m. In the 9th century. V. established a connection with Kievan Rus. In 860, after repelling the first Russian campaign against Constantinople, V. managed to achieve the baptism of part of the population of Russia. In 907, as a result of a successful campaign, Prince. Oleg V. had to conclude a mutually beneficial bargain on the basis of equality of the parties. contract, basic the provisions of which were consolidated as a result of the campaigns of 941, 944 and the visit of Princess Olga to Constantinople in 957. In 967, a struggle for Bulgaria began between V. and Rus, which ended, despite the initial. book success. Svyatoslav Igorevich, the victory of V. In 987, V. entered into an alliance with Prince. Vladimir Svyatoslavich, who helped Vasily II to deal with the rebellious feudal lords. With the adoption (c. 988) of Prince. Vladimir Christianity by Byzantium. the rite of intercourse with Russia V. became even closer. However, V. failed to use Christianization for political. subjugation of Russia. In east. In parts of M. Asia, V. continued its expansion, pursuing a policy of oppression of the Transcaucasian peoples. In 1045 Armenia was conquered with the center of Ani. The resistance of the oppressed peoples made Britain's position in the East unstable. All R. 11th c. in the East there was a danger from the Seljuks. The population conquered by V. was not inclined to support the Byzantines. domination. The result was the defeat of the Byzantines. army at Manazkert (Manzikert) in 1071 and the loss of most of M. Asia, conquered by the Seljuks. At the same time, V. loses his possessions in Italy as a result of the offensive of the South Italian Normans. At the same time, the resistance of the popular masses in conquered Bulgaria is intensifying. V. during the period of domination of the military-feudal (provincial) nobility (late 11th - early 13th centuries). In 1081, using a heavy int. position V., the throne was seized by a representative of the provinces. nobility Alexei I Komnenos, who managed to repel the dangerous offensive of the Normans, Pechenegs, Seljuks, and from 1096 used crusades to recapture part of M. Asia. By the end of the 11th century. major provinces. landowners (Komneni, Duki, Angels, Palaiologos, Kantakouziny, Vrany, etc.) became the main. dominance political force in the state-ve. During the 12th century Byzantine institutions are being formed. feudalism: charistic, pronia, excursion. The progressive ruin of the peasantry led (from the 11th century) to the formation of a special category of "have-nots"—actimons. Monastic centers (especially Athos) became semi-independent churches. gos-you. On the contrary, political the influence of the white clergy fell. Despite the decline of the political the influence of urban high-ranking nobility, V. remained bureaucratic. monarchy: preserved numerous. staff of financial and judicial officials; civil law (Vasiliki) extended to the entire territory. empire. Numerous still survive. strata of the independent peasantry, to which the settlements around the military can be included. fortifications (kastra). Cross. the community fought against pressure from the feudal lords: sometimes it used legal forms, turning complaints to the court or to the emperor, and sometimes embarked on the path of arson of the master's estates. Unlike the predecessors. period, main by enslaving the peasants during this period is no longer the purchase of land by the feudal lords, but the measures of the state. authorities. Usually k.-l. a person in the form of a grant was given the right to collect taxes from the defined. settlements. Under Manuel, the cross. lands were widely distributed to foreign knights and petty Byzantines. feudal lords. These actions, which caused indignation among contemporaries, were in fact an expropriation of the cross. property, which, having become the object of the award, passed into the conditional possession of the feudal lord. Formed in the 12th century Byzantium feud. institutions grew organically on local soil, however, since the Komnenos dynasty relied in part on Western European. mercenary knights, in Byzantium. feud. law began to appear app. concepts and terms. Transfer of power to the provincials. nobility somewhat restricted privileges. the position of Constantinople, which in general had a positive effect on the economy of the provinces, where there was an increase in crafts and trade, revived den. appeal. Many agrarianized in the 7-8 centuries. centers again became cities in the economy. sense. Silk industry developed in the cities of Hellas. However, the Komnenos dynasty did not take into account the importance of the mountains. economy and often at the conclusion of international. agreements sacrificed the interests of the townspeople. Italian privileges. merchants had a detrimental effect on the cities: in the economy of V., bargaining prevailed. Latin capital. Thus, the process of creating an internal, which was favorably developing for V., was stopped. market and determined the beginning of economic. decline B. Unsuccessful external. policy under Manuel I undermined the military. the power of V. (in 1176, after the battle of Myriokephalon, V. forever lost most of M. Asia). After the death of Manuel in Constantinople, a bunk erupted. movement against his "Western" policies. There was a pogrom against the Latins. Andronicus Komnenos took advantage of this, to-ry, having seized power, tried to revive centralization by means of terror. state apparatus and thereby prevent the collapse of the empire. However, Andronicus failed to create support for his government and under the influence of time, failures in the war against the Normans was overthrown from the throne. The collapse of V. Otd began. feudal lords and cities sought to obtain complete independence. Rebelled against the Byzantines. the dominance of the Bulgarians and Serbs revived their state-va. The weakened empire could not withstand the onslaught of the French. knights and crown. fleet - Constantinople in 1204 as a result of the 4th crusade fell into the hands of the crusaders, to-rye created on the territory. conquered areas of the Latin Empire. V. during the period of feudal fragmentation, the heyday of feudalism (beginning of the 13th - middle of the 15th centuries). Britain broke up into a number of independent feudal regions, some of which at various times were under the rule of the French knights, Venetians, Genoese, and Catalans, some fell into the hands of the Bulgarians, Serbs, and Turks, and some remained under the rule of the feudal lords of Greece. map); however, the uniformity of economic and social life, linguistic and cultural community, preserved ist. traditions make it possible to interpret V. as a single state, which is in the stage of a feud. fragmentation. Feud. the estate was the main household unit. In the 13th-15th centuries. it was involved in market relations, sending products from buyers through buyers. x-va on ext. market. The lordly plow, especially on the monastic lands, meant pastures for the master's flocks. part of the land and were served by dependent wigs, elefters (free, not included in the tax lists), some of which settled, merging with dependents. Deposits and virgin lands were given to settlers from "persons unknown to the treasury", who also joined the dependent population (proskafimen). The scribe books reflected the strong fluidity of the dependent population of the feuds. estates. Cross. the community, which fell under the rule of the feudal lord, survived (for example, sources testify to the acute struggle of the cross. communities against the monasteries, which sought to expand their farm at the expense of the cross. land). In the countryside, social stratification deepened even more: the low-powered worked as farm laborers (dulevts). Cross. plots, so-called. Stasi, were in inheritance. possession of the cross. families. State. peasants had their own land, they could sell it, donate it. However, in the 13-15 centuries. state the peasants were the object of rewards and easily turned into dependents. Pronia in the 13th-15th centuries. turned into legacy. conditional possession with military duties. character. Secular feudal lords usually lived in cities where they had houses and rented workshops. In rural areas, purgoi were built - piers, fortified castles - strongholds of feudal lords. Mountain wealth, salt works, alum developments were usually state-owned. property, but were farmed out or ceded to individual nobles, monasteries, foreigners. Late Byzantine. the city was the centers of agricultural - x. territory drawn into the external. agricultural trade products (grain, olive, wine, in some areas raw silk). Economically stood out Ch. arr. seaside cities. Leading role in external trade belonged to the auction. Italian capital. cities. V. from a country that sold in the 4th-11th centuries. luxury goods, has become a country that sends products abroad with. x-va and raw materials. Each district participating in the external trade, was economically cut off from other regions of the country. This prevented the creation of a single internal market. Economical disunity prevented nat. reunification of the country. Constantinople, although it was no longer an economic, adm., cultural center of the whole country, retained an important place in the international. trade. Sources are distinguished in the cities of archons (landowners to know), burgesians, or mesoi (prosperous trade and crafts. layer), plebeian masses. Inside the city trade-crafts. circles and the plebeian masses fought against the patriciate, which sought to use the feud. unrest, to strengthen the independence of the city in their own interests. At the same time, the population, in the form of support for Orthodoxy, opposed the dominance of the Italians. merchants and zap. feudal lords. Cultural, linguistic and religious. unity, ist. traditions determined the presence of tendencies towards the unification of V. The leading role in the struggle against Lat. empire was played by the Nicaean Empire, one of the most powerful Greek. state-in, established in the beginning. 13th c. on the territory V., not captured by the crusaders. Its rulers, relying on small and medium-sized landowners and cities, managed in 1261 to expel the Latins from Constantinople. However, this victory did not lead to the reunification of V. Vneshnepolitich. situation and centrifugal forces, weakness and lack of unity in the mountains. estates hampered attempts to unite. The Palaiologos dynasty, fearing the activity of the Nar. the masses, did not enter the path will decide. struggle against large feudal lords, preferring dynastic. marriages, intrigues and feuds. wars using foreign mercenaries. Foreign Policy V.'s position turned out to be extremely difficult: attempts by the West to recreate Lat did not stop. empire and extend the power of Rome to V. dads; economics intensified. and military pressure from Venice and Genoa; Serb offensive from S.-Z. and the Turks from the East became more and more successful. Exaggerating the influence of Rome. pope, Byzantine. Emperors have repeatedly sought to get military. help by subordinating the Greek. Church of the Pope (Union of Lyon, Union of Florence), but the dominance of the Italian. bargain. capital and zap. the population was so hated by the feudal lords that the government could not force the people to recognize the union. As a religion strife, and internecine wars were an expression of internal. contradictions in the country: produces. forces developed, there were some economic. conditions for the introduction of capitalist. relations. However, when exclude. the weakness of the townspeople and the complete dominance of the feud. orders of any strengthening external. trade in centers (Mistra, Monemvasia, etc.) only strengthened (economically) the feudal lords. overcome feud. fragmentation was impossible without revolution. performances of the masses and follow. wrestling center. governments against feuds. fragmentation. The decisive period was the 40s. 14th century, when in the course of the struggle of two cliques for power the cross flared up. traffic. Having taken the side of the "legitimate" dynasty, the peasantry began to sack the estates of the rebellious feudal lords headed by John Kantakouzin. The government of Apokavka and Patriarch John began to pursue a progressive policy, sharply speaking out against the feuds. aristocracy (confiscation of the estates of the nobility) and against the reaction. mystical hesychast ideologies. The townspeople of Thessalonica, having organized the plebeian masses, supported Apokavkas. The movement was led by the party of zealots, whose program was soon adopted by the anti-feud. character. The Constantinople government was frightened by the activity of the masses and did not use the bunks. traffic. Apokavk was killed in 1345, the struggle of the pr-va against the rebellious feudal lords actually stopped. In Thessalonica, the situation worsened as a result of the crossing of the mountains. nobility (archons) on the side of Cantacuzenus. The plebs who came out destroyed most of the mountains. know. However, the movement, having lost contact with the center. Prospect, acquired a local character and was suppressed. The collapse of the policy of centralization and the defeat of the bunk. movements in Thessalonica marked the final victory of the reactionaries. forces. The exhausted V. could not resist the onslaught of the Turks, who
Byzantium (Byzantine Empire) - a medieval state from the name of the city of Byzantium, on the site of which the emperor of the Roman Empire Constantine I the Great (306–337) founded Constantinople and in 330 moved the capital here from Rome (see Ancient Rome). In 395 the empire was divided into Western and Eastern; in 476 the Western Empire fell; East survived. Byzantium was its continuation. The subjects themselves called her Romania (Roman power), and themselves - Romans (Romans), regardless of their ethnic origin.
Byzantine Empire in the VI-XI centuries.
Byzantium existed until the middle of the 15th century; until the 2nd half of the 12th century. it was a powerful, richest state that played a huge role in the political life of Europe and the countries of the Middle East. Byzantium achieved its most significant foreign policy successes at the end of the 10th century. - the beginning of the 11th century; she temporarily conquered the western Roman lands, then stopped the offensive of the Arabs, conquered Bulgaria in the Balkans, subjugated the Serbs and Croats and became in essence a Greek-Slavic state for almost two centuries. Its emperors tried to act as the supreme overlords of the entire Christian world. Ambassadors from all over the world came to Constantinople. The sovereigns of many countries of Europe and Asia dreamed of kinship with the emperor of Byzantium. Visited Constantinople around the middle of the 10th century. and Russian princess Olga. Her reception in the palace was described by Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus himself. He was the first to call Russia "Rosia" and spoke about the path "from the Varangians to the Greeks."
Even more significant was the influence of the peculiar and vibrant culture of Byzantium. Until the end of the 12th century. it remained the most cultured country in Europe. Kievan Rus and Byzantium supported from the 9th century. regular trade, political and cultural ties. Invented around 860 by Byzantine cultural figures - the "Thessalonica brothers" Constantine (in monasticism Cyril) and Methodius, Slavic writing in the 2nd half of the 10th century. - early 11th c. penetrated into Russia mainly through Bulgaria and quickly became widespread here (see Writing). From Byzantium in 988, Russia also adopted Christianity (see Religion). Simultaneously with the baptism, Prince Vladimir of Kyiv married the emperor's sister (granddaughter of Constantine VI) Anna. In the next two centuries, dynastic marriages between the ruling houses of Byzantium and Russia were concluded many times. Gradually in the 9th-11th centuries. on the basis of an ideological (then primarily religious) community, an extensive cultural zone (“the world of orthodoxy” - Orthodoxy) developed, the center of which was Byzantium and in which the achievements of Byzantine civilization were actively perceived, developed and processed. The Orthodox zone (it was opposed by the Catholic one) included, in addition to Russia, Georgia, Bulgaria and most of Serbia.
One of the factors holding back the social and state development of Byzantium was the continuous wars that it waged throughout its existence. In Europe, she held back the onslaught of the Bulgarians and nomadic tribes - the Pechenegs, the Uzes, the Polovtsians; waged wars with the Serbs, Hungarians, Normans (in 1071 they deprived the empire of its last possessions in Italy), and finally, with the crusaders. In the East, Byzantium served for centuries as a barrier (like Kievan Rus) for Asian peoples: Arabs, Seljuk Turks, and from the 13th century. - and the Ottoman Turks.
There are several periods in the history of Byzantium. Time from the 4th c. until the middle of the 7th c. - this is the era of the collapse of the slave system, the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Slavery has outlived itself, the ancient policy (city) - the stronghold of the old system - was wrecked. The crisis was experienced by the economy, the state system, and ideology. Waves of "barbarian" invasions hit the empire. Relying on the huge bureaucratic apparatus of power inherited from the Roman Empire, the state recruited part of the peasants into the army, forced others to perform official duties (to carry goods, build fortresses), imposed heavy taxes on the population, attached it to the land. Justinian I (527–565) attempted to restore the Roman Empire to its former borders. His commanders Belisarius and Narses temporarily conquered North Africa from the Vandals, Italy from the Ostrogoths, and part of Southeastern Spain from the Visigoths. The grandiose wars of Justinian were vividly described by one of the largest contemporary historians - Procopius of Caesarea. But the rise was short. By the middle of the 7th c. the territory of Byzantium was reduced by almost three times: possessions in Spain, more than half of the lands in Italy, most of the Balkan Peninsula, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were lost.
The culture of Byzantium in this era was distinguished by its bright originality. Although Latin was almost until the middle of the 7th century. official language, there was also literature in Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian. Christianity, which became the state religion in the 4th century, had a huge impact on the development of culture. The church controlled all genres of literature and the arts. Libraries and theaters were destroyed or destroyed, schools where "pagan" (ancient) sciences were taught were closed. But Byzantium needed educated people, the preservation of elements of secular learning and natural science knowledge, as well as applied arts, the skill of painters and architects. A significant fund of ancient heritage in Byzantine culture is one of its characteristic features. The Christian Church could not exist without a competent clergy. It turned out to be powerless in the face of criticism from pagans, heretics, adherents of Zoroastrianism and Islam, without relying on ancient philosophy and dialectics. On the foundation of ancient science and art, multicolored mosaics of the 5th-6th centuries, enduring in their artistic value, arose, among which the mosaics of churches in Ravenna stand out especially (for example, with the image of the emperor in the church of San Vitale). The Code of Civil Law of Justinian was drawn up, which later formed the basis of bourgeois law, since it was based on the principle of private property (see Roman law). An outstanding work of Byzantine architecture was the magnificent church of St. Sophia, built in Constantinople in 532-537. Anthimius of Thrall and Isidore of Miletus. This miracle of building technology is a kind of symbol of the political and ideological unity of the empire.
In the 1st third of the 7th c. Byzantium was in a state of severe crisis. Huge areas of previously cultivated lands were desolate and depopulated, many cities lay in ruins, the treasury was empty. The entire north of the Balkans was occupied by the Slavs, some of them penetrated far to the south. The state saw a way out of this situation in the revival of small free peasant landownership. Strengthening its power over the peasants, it made them its main support: the treasury was made up of taxes from them, an army was created from those obliged to serve in the militia. It helped to strengthen power in the provinces and return the lost lands in the 7th-10th centuries. a new administrative structure, the so-called thematic system: the governor of the province (themes) - the strategist received from the emperor all the fullness of military and civil power. The first themes arose in areas close to the capital, each new theme served as the basis for the creation of the next, neighboring one. The barbarians who settled in it also became subjects of the empire: as taxpayers and warriors, they were used to revive it.
With the loss of lands in the east and west, the majority of its population were Greeks, the emperor began to be called in Greek - "basileus".
In the 8th–10th centuries Byzantium became a feudal monarchy. A strong central government held back the development of feudal relations. Some of the peasants retained their freedom, remaining taxpayers to the treasury. The vassal system in Byzantium did not take shape (see Feudalism). Most of the feudal lords lived in large cities. The power of the basileus was especially strengthened in the era of iconoclasm (726-843): under the flag of the fight against superstition and idolatry (veneration of icons, relics), the emperors subjugated the clergy, who argued with them in the struggle for power, and supported separatist tendencies in the provinces, confiscated the wealth of the church and monasteries . From now on, the choice of the patriarch, and often the bishops, began to depend on the will of the emperor, as well as the welfare of the church. Having solved these problems, the government restored icon veneration in 843.
In the 9th-10th centuries. the state completely subjugated not only the village, but also the city. The gold Byzantine coin - nomisma acquired the role of an international currency. Constantinople became again a "workshop of splendor" that amazed foreigners; as a "golden bridge", he brought into a knot the trade routes from Asia and Europe. Merchants of the entire civilized world and all "barbarian" countries aspired here. But the artisans and merchants of the major centers of Byzantium were subject to strict control and regulation by the state, paid high taxes and duties, and could not participate in political life. From the end of the 11th century their products could no longer withstand the competition of Italian goods. Uprisings of townspeople in the 11th-12th centuries. brutally repressed. Cities, including the capital, fell into decay. Their markets were dominated by foreigners who bought wholesale products from large feudal lords, churches, and monasteries.
The development of state power in Byzantium in the 8th–11th centuries. - this is the path of gradual revival in a new guise of a centralized bureaucratic apparatus. Numerous departments, courts, and overt and secret police operated a huge machine of power, designed to control all spheres of life of citizens, to ensure their payment of taxes, the fulfillment of duties, and unquestioning obedience. In the center of it stood the emperor - the supreme judge, legislator, military leader, who distributed titles, awards and positions. His every step was decorated with solemn ceremonies, especially the receptions of ambassadors. He presided over the council of the highest nobility (synclite). But his power was not legally hereditary. There was a bloody struggle for the throne, sometimes the synclite decided the matter. Intervened in the fate of the throne and the patriarch, and the palace guards, and all-powerful temporary workers, and the capital's plebs. In the 11th century two main groups of nobility competed - the civil bureaucracy (it stood for centralization and increased tax oppression) and the military (it sought greater independence and expansion of estates at the expense of free taxpayers). The Vasileusses of the Macedonian dynasty (867–1056), founded by Basil I (867–886), under whom Byzantium reached the pinnacle of power, represented the civil nobility. The rebellious commanders-usurpers waged a continuous struggle with her and in 1081 managed to put their protege Alexei I Comnenus (1081-1118), the founder of a new dynasty (1081-1185), on the throne. But the Comneni achieved temporary successes, they only delayed the fall of the empire. In the provinces, the rich magnates refused to consolidate the central government; Bulgarians and Serbs in Europe, Armenians in Asia did not recognize the power of the Basils. Byzantium, which was in crisis, fell in 1204, during the invasion of the Crusaders during the 4th Crusade (see Crusades).
In the cultural life of Byzantium in the 7th-12th centuries. changed three stages. Until the 2nd third of the 9th c. its culture is marked by decadence. Elementary literacy became a rarity, secular sciences were almost expelled (except for those related to military affairs; for example, in the 7th century "Greek fire" was invented, a liquid combustible mixture that brought victories to the imperial fleet more than once). Literature was dominated by the genre of biographies of saints - primitive narratives that praised patience and implanted faith in miracles. Byzantine painting of this period is poorly known - icons and frescoes perished during the era of iconoclasm.
The period from the middle of the 9th c. and almost to the end of the 11th century. called by the name of the ruling dynasty, the time of the "Macedonian revival" of culture. Back in the 8th c. it became predominantly Greek-speaking. The "Renaissance" was peculiar: it was based on official, strictly systematized theology. The metropolitan school acted as a legislator both in the sphere of ideas and in the forms of their embodiment. The canon, model, stencil, fidelity to tradition, the unchanging norm triumphed in everything. All types of fine arts were permeated with spiritualism, the idea of humility and the triumph of the spirit over the body. Painting (icon painting, frescoes) was regulated by obligatory plots, images, the arrangement of figures, a certain combination of colors and chiaroscuro. These were not images of real people with their individual traits, but symbols of moral ideals, faces as carriers of certain virtues. But even in such conditions, artists created genuine masterpieces. An example of this is the beautiful miniatures of the Psalter of the early 10th century. (stored in Paris). Byzantine icons, frescoes, book miniatures occupy a place of honor in the world of fine arts (see Art).
Philosophy, aesthetics, and literature are marked by conservatism, a penchant for compilation, and a fear of novelty. The culture of this period is distinguished by external pomposity, adherence to strict rituals, splendor (during worship, palace receptions, organizing holidays and sports, triumphs in honor of military victories), as well as a sense of superiority over the culture of the peoples of the rest of the world.
However, this time was also marked by a struggle of ideas, and by democratic and rationalist tendencies. Major advances have been made in the natural sciences. He was famous for his scholarship in the first half of the 9th century. Lev Mathematician. The ancient heritage was actively comprehended. He was often approached by Patriarch Photius (mid-ninth century), who cared about the quality of teaching at the higher Mangavra school in Constantinople, where the Slavic enlighteners Cyril and Methodius were then studying. They relied on ancient knowledge when creating encyclopedias on medicine, agricultural technology, military affairs, and diplomacy. In the 11th century the teaching of jurisprudence and philosophy was restored. The number of schools that taught literacy and numeracy increased (see Education). Passion for antiquity led to the emergence of rationalistic attempts to justify the superiority of reason over faith. In the "low" literary genres, calls for sympathy for the poor and humiliated became more frequent. The heroic epic (the poem "Digenis Akrit") is permeated with the idea of patriotism, consciousness of human dignity, independence. Instead of brief world chronicles, there are extensive historical descriptions of the recent past and events contemporary to the author, where the basileus' devastating criticism often sounded. Such, for example, is the highly artistic Chronography by Michael Psellos (2nd half of the 11th century).
In painting, the number of subjects increased sharply, technique became more complicated, attention to the individuality of images increased, although the canon did not disappear. In architecture, the basilica was replaced by a cross-domed church with rich decoration. The pinnacle of the historiographical genre was the “History” by Nicetas Choniates, an extensive historical narrative, brought to 1206 (including a story about the tragedy of the empire in 1204), full of sharp moral assessments and attempts to clarify the cause-and-effect relationships between events.
On the ruins of Byzantium in 1204, the Latin Empire arose, consisting of several states of Western knights bound by vassal ties. At the same time, three state associations of the local population were formed - the Kingdom of Epirus, the Empire of Trebizond and the Nicaean Empire, hostile to the Latins (as the Byzantines called all Catholics whose church language was Latin) and to each other. In the long-term struggle for the “Byzantine inheritance”, the Nicaean Empire gradually won. In 1261, she expelled the Latins from Constantinople, but the restored Byzantium did not regain its former greatness. Not all lands were returned, and the development of feudalism led to the 14th century. to feudal disunity. In Constantinople and other large cities, Italian merchants were in charge, having received unheard-of benefits from the emperors. Civil wars were added to the wars with Bulgaria and Serbia. In 1342–1349 the democratic elements of the cities (primarily Thessalonica) revolted against the big feudal lords, but were defeated.
The development of Byzantine culture in 1204–1261 lost unity: it proceeded within the framework of the three states mentioned above and in the Latin principalities, reflecting both Byzantine traditions and the characteristics of these new political entities. Since 1261, the culture of late Byzantium has been characterized as a "Paleologian revival". This was a new bright flowering of Byzantine culture, marked, however, by especially sharp contradictions. Literature was still dominated by works on church topics - lamentations, panegyrics, lives, theological treatises, etc. However, secular motifs are beginning to sound more and more insistently. The poetic genre developed, novels in verse on ancient subjects appeared. Works were created in which there were disputes about the meaning of ancient philosophy and rhetoric. Folk motifs, in particular folk songs, began to be used more boldly. The fables ridiculed the vices of the social system. Literature in the vernacular arose. 15th century humanist philosopher Georgy Gemist Plifon exposed the self-interest of the feudal lords, proposed to liquidate private property, to replace obsolete Christianity with a new religious system. In painting, bright colors, dynamic postures, individuality of portrait and psychological characteristics prevailed. Many original monuments of religious and secular (palace) architecture were created.
Starting from 1352, the Ottoman Turks, having captured almost all the possessions of Byzantium in Asia Minor, began to conquer its lands in the Balkans. Attempts to bring the Slavic countries in the Balkans to the union failed. The West, however, promised Byzantium help only on the condition that the church of the empire be subordinated to the papacy. The Ferraro-Florentine union of 1439 was rejected by the people, who protested violently, hating the Latins for their dominance in the economy of the cities, for the robberies and oppression of the crusaders. At the beginning of April 1453, Constantinople, almost alone in the struggle, was surrounded by a huge Turkish army and on May 29 was taken by storm. The last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died in arms on the walls of Constantinople. The city was sacked; it then became Istanbul - the capital of the Ottoman Empire. In 1460, the Turks conquered the Byzantine Morea in the Peloponnese, and in 1461 Trebizond, the last fragment of the former empire. The fall of Byzantium, which had existed for a thousand years, was an event of world-historical significance. It resonated with keen sympathy in Russia, in Ukraine, among the peoples of the Caucasus and the Balkan Peninsula, who by 1453 had already experienced the severity of the Ottoman yoke.
Byzantium perished, but its bright, multifaceted culture left a deep mark on the history of world civilization. The traditions of Byzantine culture were carefully preserved and developed in the Russian state, which experienced a rise and soon after the fall of Constantinople, at the turn of the 15th-16th centuries, turned into a powerful centralized state. Her sovereign Ivan III (1462–1505), under whom the unification of Russian lands was completed, was married to Sophia (Zoya) Paleolog, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor.
BYZANTINE EMPIRE
the eastern part of the Roman Empire, which survived the fall of Rome and the loss of the western provinces at the beginning of the Middle Ages and existed until the conquest of Constantinople (the capital of the Byzantine Empire) by the Turks in 1453. There was a period when it stretched from Spain to Persia, but it was always based on Greece and other Balkan lands and Asia Minor. Until the middle of the 11th century. Byzantium was the most powerful power in the Christian world, and Constantinople was the largest city in Europe. The Byzantines called their country the "Empire of the Romans" (Greek "Roma" - Roman), but it was extremely different from the Roman Empire of Augustus. Byzantium retained the Roman system of government and laws, but in terms of language and culture it was a Greek state, had an oriental-type monarchy, and most importantly, zealously preserved the Christian faith. For centuries, the Byzantine Empire acted as the guardian of Greek culture; thanks to it, the Slavic peoples joined the civilization.
EARLY BYZANTIA
Founding of Constantinople. It would be legitimate to start the history of Byzantium from the moment of the fall of Rome. However, two important decisions that determined the character of this medieval empire - the conversion to Christianity and the founding of Constantinople - were taken by Emperor Constantine I the Great (reigned 324-337) about a century and a half before the fall of the Roman Empire. Diocletian (284-305), who ruled shortly before Constantine, reorganized the administration of the empire, dividing it into East and West. After the death of Diocletian, the empire was plunged into a civil war, when several applicants fought for the throne at once, among whom was Constantine. In 313, Constantine, having defeated his opponents in the West, retreated from the pagan gods with whom Rome was inextricably linked, and declared himself an adherent of Christianity. All of his successors, except one, were Christians, and with the support of the imperial power, Christianity soon spread throughout the empire. Another important decision of Constantine, taken by him after he became the sole emperor, having overthrown his rival in the East, was the election as the new capital of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium, founded by Greek sailors on the European coast of the Bosporus in 659 (or 668) BC . Constantine expanded Byzantium, erected new fortifications, rebuilt it according to the Roman model and gave the city a new name. The official proclamation of the new capital took place in 330 AD.
Fall of the Western Provinces. It seemed that Constantine's administrative and financial policies breathed new life into the united Roman Empire. But the period of unity and prosperity did not last long. The last emperor who owned the entire empire was Theodosius I the Great (reigned 379-395). After his death, the empire was finally divided into East and West. Throughout the 5th c. at the head of the Western Roman Empire were mediocre emperors who were unable to protect their provinces from barbarian raids. In addition, the welfare of the western part of the empire has always depended on the welfare of its eastern part. With the division of the empire, the West was cut off from its main sources of income. Gradually, the western provinces disintegrated into several barbarian states, and in 476 the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire was deposed.
The struggle to save the Eastern Roman Empire. Constantinople and the East as a whole were in a better position. The Eastern Roman Empire had more capable rulers, its borders were less extensive and better fortified, and it was richer and more populous. On the eastern borders, Constantinople retained its possessions during the endless wars with Persia that began in Roman times. However, the Eastern Roman Empire also faced a number of serious problems. The cultural traditions of the Middle Eastern provinces of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt were very different from those of the Greeks and Romans, and the population of these territories regarded imperial domination with disgust. Separatism was closely connected with ecclesiastical strife: in Antioch (Syria) and Alexandria (Egypt) every now and then new teachings appeared, which the Ecumenical Councils condemned as heretical. Of all the heresies, Monophysitism has been the most troubling. Constantinople's attempts to reach a compromise between orthodox and Monophysite teachings led to a schism between the Roman and Eastern churches. The schism was overcome after the accession to the throne of Justin I (reigned 518-527), an unshakable orthodox, but Rome and Constantinople continued to drift apart in doctrine, worship and church organization. First of all, Constantinople objected to the pope's claim to supremacy over the entire Christian church. Discord arose from time to time, which led in 1054 to the final split (schism) of the Christian Church into the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.
Justinian I. A large-scale attempt to regain power over the West was made by Emperor Justinian I (reigned 527-565). Military campaigns led by outstanding commanders - Belisarius, and later Narses - ended with great success. Italy, North Africa and southern Spain were conquered. However, in the Balkans, the invasion of the Slavic tribes, crossing the Danube and devastating the Byzantine lands, could not be stopped. In addition, Justinian had to content himself with a tenuous truce with Persia, following a long and inconclusive war. In the empire itself, Justinian maintained the traditions of imperial luxury. Under him, such masterpieces of architecture as the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Constantinople and the church of San Vitale in Ravenna, aqueducts, baths, public buildings in cities and border fortresses were also built. Perhaps Justinian's most significant achievement was the codification of Roman law. Although it was subsequently replaced by other codes in Byzantium itself, in the West, Roman law formed the basis of the laws of France, Germany and Italy. Justinian had a wonderful assistant - his wife Theodora. Once she saved the crown for him by persuading Justinian to stay in the capital during the riots. Theodora supported the Monophysites. Under her influence, and also faced with the political realities of the rise of the Monophysites in the east, Justinian was forced to move away from the orthodox position he had held in the early period of his reign. Justinian is unanimously recognized as one of the greatest Byzantine emperors. He restored cultural ties between Rome and Constantinople and prolonged the period of prosperity for the North African region by 100 years. During his reign, the empire reached its maximum size.
FORMATION OF MEDIEVAL BYZANTH
A century and a half after Justinian, the face of the empire changed completely. She lost most of her possessions, and the remaining provinces were reorganized. Greek replaced Latin as the official language. Even the national composition of the empire changed. By the 8th c. the country effectively ceased to be the Eastern Roman Empire and became the medieval Byzantine Empire. Military setbacks began shortly after Justinian's death. The Germanic tribes of the Lombards invaded northern Italy and established duchies in their own right further south. Byzantium retained only Sicily, the extreme south of the Apennine Peninsula (Bruttius and Calabria, i.e. "sock" and "heel"), as well as the corridor between Rome and Ravenna, the seat of the imperial governor. The northern borders of the empire were threatened by the Asian nomadic tribes of the Avars. Slavs poured into the Balkans, who began to populate these lands, establishing their principalities on them.
Heraclius. Together with the attacks of the barbarians, the empire had to endure a devastating war with Persia. Detachments of Persian troops invaded Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Asia Minor. Constantinople was almost taken. In 610 Heraclius (reigned 610-641), the son of the governor of North Africa, arrived in Constantinople and took power into his own hands. He devoted the first decade of his reign to raising a crushed empire from ruins. He raised the morale of the army, reorganized it, found allies in the Caucasus, and defeated the Persians in several brilliant campaigns. By 628, Persia was finally defeated, and peace reigned on the eastern borders of the empire. However, the war undermined the strength of the empire. In 633, the Arabs, who converted to Islam and were full of religious enthusiasm, launched an invasion of the Middle East. Egypt, Palestine and Syria, which Heraclius managed to return to the empire, were again lost by 641 (the year of his death). By the end of the century, the empire had lost North Africa. Now Byzantium consisted of small territories in Italy, constantly devastated by the Slavs of the Balkan provinces, and in Asia Minor, now and then suffering from the raids of the Arabs. Other emperors of the Heraclius dynasty fought off the enemies, as far as it was in their power. The provinces were reorganized, and administrative and military policies were radically revised. The Slavs were allocated state lands for settlement, which made them subjects of the empire. With the help of skillful diplomacy, Byzantium managed to make allies and trading partners of the Turkic-speaking tribes of the Khazars, who inhabited the lands north of the Caspian Sea.
Isaurian (Syrian) dynasty. The policy of the emperors of the Heraclius dynasty was continued by Leo III (ruled 717-741), the founder of the Isaurian dynasty. The Isaurian emperors were active and successful rulers. They could not return the lands occupied by the Slavs, but at least they managed to keep the Slavs out of Constantinople. In Asia Minor, they fought off the Arabs, driving them out of these territories. However, they failed in Italy. Forced to repel the raids of the Slavs and Arabs, absorbed in ecclesiastical disputes, they had neither the time nor the means to protect the corridor connecting Rome with Ravenna from the aggressive Lombards. Around 751, the Byzantine governor (exarch) surrendered Ravenna to the Lombards. The Pope, who himself was attacked by the Lombards, received help from the Franks from the north, and in 800 Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as emperor in Rome. The Byzantines considered this act of the pope an infringement on their rights and in the future did not recognize the legitimacy of the Western emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. The Isaurian emperors were especially famous for their role in the turbulent events around iconoclasm. Iconoclasm is a heretical religious movement against the worship of icons, images of Jesus Christ and saints. He was supported by broad sections of society and many clergy, especially in Asia Minor. However, it went against ancient church customs and was condemned by the Roman church. In the end, after the cathedral restored the veneration of icons in 843, the movement was suppressed.
THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE MEDIEVAL BYZANTINE
Amorian and Macedonian dynasties. The Isaurian dynasty was replaced by the short-lived Amorian, or Phrygian, dynasty (820-867), whose founder was Michael II, formerly a simple soldier from the city of Amorius in Asia Minor. Under Emperor Michael III (reigned 842-867), the empire entered into a period of new expansion that lasted almost 200 years (842-1025), which made us recall its former power. However, the Amorian dynasty was overthrown by Basil, the harsh and ambitious favorite of the emperor. A peasant, in the recent past a groom, Vasily rose to the post of great chamberlain, after which he achieved the execution of Varda, the powerful uncle of Michael III, and a year later he deposed and executed Michael himself. By origin, Basil was an Armenian, but was born in Macedonia (northern Greece), and therefore the dynasty he founded was called the Macedonian. The Macedonian dynasty was very popular and lasted until 1056. Basil I (reigned 867-886) was an energetic and gifted ruler. His administrative transformations were continued by Leo VI the Wise (ruled 886-912), during whose reign the empire suffered setbacks: the Arabs captured Sicily, the Russian prince Oleg approached Constantinople. Leo's son Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (ruled 913-959) focused on literary activity, and military affairs were managed by the co-ruler, naval commander Roman I Lakapin (ruled 913-944). The son of Constantine Roman II (reigned in 959-963) died four years after accession to the throne, leaving two young sons, until the age of majority of which the outstanding military leaders Nicephorus II Phocas (in 963-969) and John I Tzimisces (in 969) ruled as co-emperors -976). Having reached adulthood, the son of Roman II ascended the throne under the name of Basil II (reigned 976-1025).
Successes in the fight against the Arabs. The military successes of Byzantium under the emperors of the Macedonian dynasty took place mainly on two fronts: in the struggle against the Arabs in the east, and against the Bulgarians in the north. The advance of the Arabs into the interior regions of Asia Minor was stopped by the Isaurian emperors in the 8th century, however, the Muslims fortified themselves in the southeastern mountainous regions, from where they now and then staged raids on Christian regions. The Arab fleet dominated the Mediterranean. Sicily and Crete were captured, and Cyprus was under the complete control of the Muslims. In the middle of the 9th c. the situation has changed. Under pressure from the large landowners of Asia Minor, who wanted to push the borders of the state to the east and expand their possessions at the expense of new lands, the Byzantine army invaded Armenia and Mesopotamia, established control over the Taurus Mountains and captured Syria and even Palestine. Equally important was the annexation of two islands - Crete and Cyprus.
War against the Bulgarians. In the Balkans, the main problem in the period from 842 to 1025 was the threat from the First Bulgarian Kingdom, which took shape in the second half of the 9th century. states of the Slavs and Turkic-speaking Proto-Bulgarians. In 865, the Bulgarian prince Boris I introduced Christianity among the people subject to him. However, the adoption of Christianity in no way cooled the ambitious plans of the Bulgarian rulers. The son of Boris, Tsar Simeon, invaded Byzantium several times, trying to capture Constantinople. His plans were violated by the naval commander Roman Lekapin, who later became co-emperor. Nevertheless, the empire had to be on the alert. At a critical moment, Nikephoros II, who focused on conquests in the east, turned to the Kyiv prince Svyatoslav for help in pacifying the Bulgarians, but found that the Russians themselves were striving to take the place of the Bulgarians. In 971, John I finally defeated and expelled the Russians and annexed the eastern part of Bulgaria to the empire. Bulgaria was finally conquered by his successor Vasily II during several fierce campaigns against the Bulgarian king Samuil, who created a state on the territory of Macedonia with the capital in the city of Ohrid (modern Ohrid). After Basil occupied Ohrid in 1018, Bulgaria was divided into several provinces as part of the Byzantine Empire, and Basil received the nickname Bulgar Slayer.
Italy. The situation in Italy, as had happened before, was less favorable. Under Alberic, "princeps and senator of all the Romans," papal power was unaffected by Byzantium, but from 961 control of the popes passed to the German king Otto I of the Saxon dynasty, who in 962 was crowned in Rome as Holy Roman Emperor. Otto sought to conclude an alliance with Constantinople, and after two unsuccessful embassies in 972, he still managed to get the hand of Theophano, a relative of Emperor John I, for his son Otto II.
Internal achievements of the empire. During the reign of the Macedonian dynasty, the Byzantines achieved impressive success. Literature and art flourished. Basil I created a commission tasked with revising the legislation and formulating it in Greek. Under Basil's son Leo VI, a collection of laws was compiled, known as the Basilicas, partly based on the code of Justinian and in fact replacing it.
Missionary. No less important in this period of development of the country was missionary activity. It was started by Cyril and Methodius, who, as preachers of Christianity among the Slavs, reached Moravia itself (although in the end the region ended up in the sphere of influence of the Catholic Church). The Balkan Slavs living in the neighborhood of Byzantium converted to Orthodoxy, although this did not go without a short quarrel with Rome, when the cunning and unprincipled Bulgarian prince Boris, seeking privileges for the newly created church, put either Rome or Constantinople. The Slavs received the right to hold services in their native language (Old Church Slavonic). Slavs and Greeks jointly trained priests and monks and translated religious literature from Greek. About a hundred years later, in 989, the church achieved another success when Prince Vladimir of Kyiv converted to Christianity and established close ties between Kievan Rus and its new Christian church with Byzantium. This union was sealed by the marriage of Vasily's sister Anna and Prince Vladimir.
Patriarchy of Photius. In the last years of the Amorian dynasty and the first years of the Macedonian dynasty, Christian unity was undermined by a major conflict with Rome in connection with the appointment of Photius, a layman of great learning, as Patriarch of Constantinople. In 863, the pope declared the appointment null and void, and in response, in 867, a church council in Constantinople announced the removal of the pope.
DECLINE OF THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE
The collapse of the 11th century After the death of Basil II, Byzantium entered into a period of reign of mediocre emperors that lasted until 1081. At this time, an external threat loomed over the country, which eventually led to the loss of most of the territory by the empire. From the north, the Turkic-speaking nomadic tribes of the Pechenegs advanced, devastating the lands south of the Danube. But far more devastating for the empire were the losses suffered in Italy and Asia Minor. Beginning in 1016, the Normans rushed to southern Italy in search of fortune, serving as mercenaries in endless petty wars. In the second half of the century, they began to wage wars of conquest under the leadership of the ambitious Robert Guiscard and very quickly took possession of all the south of Italy and expelled the Arabs from Sicily. In 1071, Robert Guiscard occupied the last remaining Byzantine fortresses in southern Italy and, having crossed the Adriatic Sea, invaded Greece. Meanwhile, the raids of the Turkic tribes on Asia Minor became more frequent. By the middle of the century, Southwestern Asia was captured by the armies of the Seljuk khans, who in 1055 conquered the weakened Baghdad Caliphate. In 1071, the Seljuk ruler Alp-Arslan defeated the Byzantine army led by Emperor Roman IV Diogenes at the Battle of Manzikert in Armenia. After this defeat, Byzantium was never able to recover, and the weakness of the central government led to the fact that the Turks poured into Asia Minor. The Seljuks created a Muslim state here, known as the Rum ("Roman") Sultanate, with its capital in Iconium (modern Konya). At one time, young Byzantium managed to survive the invasions of Arabs and Slavs into Asia Minor and Greece. To the collapse of the 11th century. gave special reasons that had nothing to do with the onslaught of the Normans and Turks. The history of Byzantium between 1025 and 1081 is marked by the reign of exceptionally weak emperors and the ruinous strife between the civil bureaucracy in Constantinople and the military landed aristocracy in the provinces. After the death of Basil II, the throne passed first to his mediocre brother Constantine VIII (ruled 1025-1028), and then to his two elderly nieces, Zoe (ruled 1028-1050) and Theodora (1055-1056), the last representatives of the Macedonian dynasty. Empress Zoe was not lucky with three husbands and an adopted son, who did not stay in power for long, but nevertheless devastated the imperial treasury. After Theodora's death, Byzantine politics came under the control of a party headed by the powerful Duca family.
The Komnenos dynasty. The further decline of the empire was temporarily suspended with the coming to power of a representative of the military aristocracy, Alexei I Komnenos (1081-1118). The Komnenos dynasty ruled until 1185. Alexei did not have the strength to expel the Seljuks from Asia Minor, but at least he managed to conclude an agreement with them that stabilized the situation. After that, he began to fight with the Normans. First of all, Alexei tried to use all his military resources, and also attracted mercenaries from the Seljuks. In addition, at the cost of significant trading privileges, he managed to buy the support of Venice with its fleet. So he managed to restrain the ambitious Robert Guiscard, who was entrenched in Greece (d. 1085). Having stopped the advance of the Normans, Alexei again took up the Seljuks. But here he was seriously hampered by the crusader movement that had begun in the west. He hoped that mercenaries would serve in his army during campaigns in Asia Minor. But the 1st crusade, which began in 1096, pursued goals that differed from those outlined by Alexei. The crusaders saw their task as simply driving the infidels out of Christian holy places, in particular from Jerusalem, while they often ravaged the provinces of Byzantium itself. As a result of the 1st crusade, the crusaders created new states on the territory of the former Byzantine provinces of Syria and Palestine, which, however, did not last long. The influx of crusaders into the eastern Mediterranean weakened the position of Byzantium. The history of Byzantium under Komnenos can be characterized as a period not of rebirth, but of survival. Byzantine diplomacy, which has always been considered the greatest asset of the empire, succeeded in playing off the crusader states in Syria, the strengthening Balkan states, Hungary, Venice and other Italian cities, as well as the Norman Sicilian kingdom. The same policy was carried out with respect to various Islamic states, which were sworn enemies. Inside the country, the policy of the Komnenos led to the strengthening of large landlords at the expense of weakening the central government. As a reward for military service, the provincial nobility received huge possessions. Even the power of the Komnenos could not stop the slide of the state towards feudal relations and compensate for the loss of income. Financial difficulties were exacerbated by the reduction in revenue from customs duties in the port of Constantinople. After three prominent rulers, Alexei I, John II and Manuel I, in 1180-1185 weak representatives of the Komnenos dynasty came to power, the last of which was Andronicus I Komnenos (reigned 1183-1185), who made an unsuccessful attempt to strengthen the central power. In 1185, Isaac II (reigned 1185-1195), the first of the four emperors of the Angel dynasty, seized the throne. The Angels lacked both the means and the strength of character to prevent the political collapse of the empire or to oppose the West. In 1186 Bulgaria regained its independence, and in 1204 a crushing blow fell upon Constantinople from the west.
4th crusade. From 1095 to 1195, three waves of crusaders passed through the territory of Byzantium, who repeatedly looted here. Therefore, every time the Byzantine emperors were in a hurry to send them out of the empire as soon as possible. Under the Komnenos, Venetian merchants received trade concessions in Constantinople; very soon most of the foreign trade passed to them from the owners. After the accession to the throne of Andronicus Komnenos in 1183, Italian concessions were withdrawn, and Italian merchants were either killed by a mob or sold into slavery. However, the emperors from the dynasty of Angels who came to power after Andronicus were forced to restore trade privileges. The 3rd Crusade (1187-1192) turned out to be a complete failure: the Western barons were completely unable to regain control over Palestine and Syria, which were conquered during the 1st Crusade, but lost after the 2nd Crusade. Pious Europeans cast envious glances at the Christian relics collected in Constantinople. Finally, after 1054, a clear schism emerged between the Greek and Roman churches. Of course, the popes never directly called for the Christians to storm the Christian city, but they sought to use the situation in order to establish direct control over the Greek church. Eventually, the crusaders turned their weapons against Constantinople. The pretext for the attack was the removal of Isaac II Angel by his brother Alexei III. Isaac's son fled to Venice, where he promised the aged Doge Enrico Dandolo money, assistance to the crusaders, and the union of the Greek and Roman churches in exchange for support from the Venetians in restoring his father's power. The 4th crusade, organized by Venice with the support of the French military, was turned against the Byzantine Empire. The crusaders landed at Constantinople, meeting only token resistance. Alexei III, who usurped power, fled, Isaac became emperor again, and his son was crowned as co-emperor Alexei IV. As a result of the outbreak of a popular uprising, a change of power took place, the aged Isaac died, and his son was killed in the prison where he was imprisoned. Enraged crusaders in April 1204 stormed Constantinople (for the first time since its founding) and betrayed the city to plunder and destruction, after which they created a feudal state here, the Latin Empire, headed by Baldwin I of Flanders. Byzantine lands were divided into fiefs and transferred to the French barons. However, the Byzantine princes managed to maintain control over three regions: the Despotate of Epirus in northwestern Greece, the Empire of Nicaea in Asia Minor, and the Empire of Trebizond on the southeastern coast of the Black Sea.
NEW RISE AND FINAL COLLAPSE
Restoration of Byzantium. The power of the Latins in the Aegean region was, generally speaking, not very strong. Epirus, the Empire of Nicaea, and Bulgaria competed with the Latin Empire and with each other, making attempts by military and diplomatic means to regain control of Constantinople and drive out the Western feudal lords who had entrenched themselves in various parts of Greece, in the Balkans and in the Aegean Sea. The Empire of Nicaea became the winner in the struggle for Constantinople. July 15, 1261 Constantinople surrendered without resistance to Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos. However, the possessions of the Latin feudal lords in Greece turned out to be more stable, and the Byzantines did not succeed in putting an end to them. The Byzantine dynasty of Palaiologos, which won the battle, ruled Constantinople until its fall in 1453. The empire's possessions were significantly reduced, partly as a result of invasions from the west, partly as a result of the unstable situation in Asia Minor, in which in the middle of the 13th century. the Mongols invaded. Later, most of it ended up in the hands of small Turkic beyliks (principalities). Greece was dominated by Spanish mercenaries from the Catalan Company, which one of the Palaiologos invited to fight the Turks. Within the significantly reduced borders of the empire split into parts, the Palaiologos dynasty in the 14th century. torn apart by civil unrest and strife on religious grounds. The imperial power was weakened and reduced to supremacy over a system of semi-feudal appanages: instead of being controlled by governors responsible to the central government, the lands were transferred to members of the imperial family. The financial resources of the empire were so depleted that the emperors were largely dependent on loans provided by Venice and Genoa, or on the appropriation of wealth in private hands, both secular and ecclesiastical. Most of the trade in the empire was controlled by Venice and Genoa. At the end of the Middle Ages, the Byzantine church was significantly strengthened, and its tough opposition to the Roman church was one of the reasons why the Byzantine emperors failed to obtain military assistance from the West.
Fall of Byzantium. At the end of the Middle Ages, the power of the Ottomans increased, who initially ruled in a small Turkish udzha (border inheritance), only 160 km away from Constantinople. During the 14th century The Ottoman state took over all other Turkish regions in Asia Minor and penetrated into the Balkans, formerly belonging to the Byzantine Empire. A wise internal policy of consolidation, together with military superiority, ensured the dominance of the Ottoman sovereigns over their strife-torn Christian opponents. By 1400, only the cities of Constantinople and Thessaloniki, plus small enclaves in southern Greece, remained from the Byzantine Empire. During the last 40 years of its existence, Byzantium was actually a vassal of the Ottomans. She was forced to supply recruits to the Ottoman army, and the Byzantine emperor had to personally appear at the call of the sultans. Manuel II (reigned 1391-1425), one of the brilliant representatives of Greek culture and Roman imperial tradition, visited the capitals of European states in a vain attempt to secure military assistance against the Ottomans. On May 29, 1453, Constantinople was taken by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, while the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, fell in battle. Athens and the Peloponnese held out for several more years, Trebizond fell in 1461. The Turks renamed Constantinople Istanbul and made it the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
GOVERNMENT
Emperor. Throughout the Middle Ages, the tradition of monarchical power, inherited by Byzantium from the Hellenistic monarchies and imperial Rome, was not interrupted. The whole Byzantine system of government was based on the belief that the emperor was God's chosen one, his vicegerent on Earth, and that imperial power was a reflection in time and space of God's supreme power. In addition, Byzantium believed that its "Roman" empire had the right to universal power: in accordance with a widely spread legend, all sovereigns in the world formed a single "royal family", headed by the Byzantine emperor. The inevitable consequence was an autocratic form of government. Emperor, from the 7th c. who bore the title of "basileus" (or "basileus"), single-handedly determined the domestic and foreign policy of the country. He was the supreme legislator, ruler, protector of the church, and commander in chief. Theoretically, the emperor was elected by the senate, the people and the army. However, in practice, the decisive vote belonged either to a powerful party of the aristocracy, or, which happened much more often, to the army. The people vigorously approved the decision, and the elected emperor was crowned king by the Patriarch of Constantinople. The emperor, as the representative of Jesus Christ on earth, had a special duty to protect the church. Church and state in Byzantium were closely connected with each other. Their relationship is often defined by the term "caesaropapism". However, this term, implying the subordination of the church to the state or emperor, is somewhat misleading: in fact, it was about interdependence, not subordination. The emperor was not the head of the church, he did not have the right to perform the religious duties of a clergyman. However, the court religious ceremonial was closely connected with worship. There were certain mechanisms that supported the stability of imperial power. Often children were crowned immediately after birth, which ensured the continuity of the dynasty. If a child or an incapable ruler became emperor, it was customary to crown junior emperors, or co-rulers, who might or might not belong to the ruling dynasty. Sometimes commanders or naval commanders became co-rulers, who first acquired control over the state, and then legitimized their position, for example, through marriage. This is how the naval commander Roman I Lekapin and the commander Nicephorus II Phocas (reigned 963-969) came to power. Thus, the most important feature of the Byzantine system of government was the strict succession of dynasties. There were sometimes periods of bloody struggle for the throne, civil wars and mismanagement, but they did not last long.
Right. Byzantine legislation was given a decisive impetus by Roman law, although traces of both Christian and Middle Eastern influences are clearly felt. Legislative power belonged to the emperor: changes in laws were usually introduced by imperial edicts. Legal commissions have been set up from time to time to codify and revise existing laws. Older codices were in Latin, the most famous of them being Justinian's Digests (533) with additions (Novels). Obviously Byzantine in character was the collection of laws of the Basilica compiled in Greek, work on which began in the 9th century. under Basil I. Until the last stage of the country's history, the church had very little influence on law. Basilicas even canceled some of the privileges received by the church in the 8th century. However, gradually the influence of the church increased. In the 14-15 centuries. both laity and clergy were already placed at the head of the courts. The spheres of activity of church and state overlapped to a large extent from the very beginning. Imperial codes contained provisions relating to religion. The Code of Justinian, for example, included rules of conduct in monastic communities and even attempted to define the goals of monastic life. The emperor, like the patriarch, was responsible for the proper administration of the church, and only secular authorities had the means to maintain discipline and carry out punishments, whether in church or in secular life.
Control system. The administrative and legal system of Byzantium was inherited from the late Roman Empire. In general, the organs of the central government - the imperial court, the treasury, the court and the secretariat - functioned separately. Each of them was headed by several dignitaries directly responsible to the emperor, which reduced the danger of the appearance of too strong ministers. In addition to actual positions, there was an elaborate system of ranks. Some were assigned to officials, others were purely honorary. Each title corresponded to a certain uniform worn on official occasions; the emperor personally paid the official an annual remuneration. In the provinces, the Roman administrative system was changed. In the late Roman Empire, the civil and military administration of the provinces was separated. However, starting from the 7th century, in connection with the needs of defense and territorial concessions to the Slavs and Arabs, both military and civil power in the provinces was concentrated in one hand. The new administrative-territorial units were called themes (a military term for an army corps). Themes were often named after the corps based in them. For example, the Fem Bukelaria got its name from the Bukelaria Regiment. The system of themes first appeared in Asia Minor. Gradually, during the 8th-9th centuries, the system of local government in the Byzantine possessions in Europe was reorganized in a similar way.
Army and Navy. The most important task of the empire, which almost continuously waged wars, was the organization of defense. The regular military corps in the provinces were subordinate to the military leaders, at the same time - to the governors of the provinces. These corps, in turn, were divided into smaller units, the commanders of which were responsible both for the corresponding army unit and for the order in the given territory. Along the borders, regular border posts were created, headed by the so-called. "Akrits", who have become virtually undivided masters of the borders in a constant struggle with the Arabs and Slavs. Epic poems and ballads about the hero Digenis Akrita, "the lord of the border, born of two peoples," glorified and glorified this life. The best troops were stationed in Constantinople and at a distance of 50 km from the city, along the Great Wall that protected the capital. The imperial guard, which had special privileges and salaries, attracted the best soldiers from abroad: at the beginning of the 11th century. these were warriors from Russia, and after the conquest of England by the Normans in 1066, many Anglo-Saxons expelled from there. The army had gunners, craftsmen who specialized in fortification and siege work, artillery to support the infantry, and heavy cavalry, which formed the backbone of the army. Since the Byzantine Empire owned many islands and had a very long coastline, a fleet was vital to it. The solution of naval tasks was entrusted to the coastal provinces in the south-west of Asia Minor, the coastal districts of Greece, as well as the islands of the Aegean Sea, which were obliged to equip ships and provide them with sailors. In addition, a fleet was based in the area of Constantinople under the command of a high-ranking naval commander. Byzantine warships varied in size. Some had two rowing decks and up to 300 rowers. Others were smaller, but developed more speed. The Byzantine fleet was famous for its destructive Greek fire, the secret of which was one of the most important state secrets. It was an incendiary mixture, probably prepared from oil, sulfur and saltpeter, and thrown onto enemy ships with the help of catapults. The army and navy were recruited partly from local recruits, partly from foreign mercenaries. From the 7th to the 11th century in Byzantium, a system was practiced in which residents were provided with land and a small payment in exchange for service in the army or navy. Military service passed from father to eldest son, which provided the state with a constant influx of local recruits. In the 11th century this system was destroyed. The weak central government deliberately ignored the needs of defense and allowed residents to pay off military service. Moreover, local landlords began to appropriate the lands of their poor neighbors, in fact turning the latter into serfs. In the 12th century, during the reign of the Comneni and later, the state had to agree to grant large landowners certain privileges and exemptions from taxes in exchange for the creation of their own armies. Nevertheless, at all times, Byzantium was largely dependent on military mercenaries, although the funds for their maintenance fell on the treasury as a heavy burden. Starting from the 11th century, the support from the navy of Venice and then Genoa, which had to be bought by generous trade privileges, and later by direct territorial concessions, cost the empire even more expensive, starting from the 11th century.
Diplomacy. The principles of defense of Byzantium gave a special role to its diplomacy. As long as it was possible, they never skimped on impressing foreign countries with luxury or buying potential enemies. Embassies to foreign courts presented magnificent works of art or brocade garments as gifts. Important envoys arriving in the capital were received in the Grand Palace with all the splendor of imperial ceremonials. Young sovereigns from neighboring countries were often brought up at the Byzantine court. When an alliance was important to Byzantine politics, there was always the option of proposing marriage to a member of the imperial family. At the end of the Middle Ages, marriages between Byzantine princes and Western European brides became commonplace, and since the time of the Crusades, Hungarian, Norman or German blood flowed in the veins of many Greek aristocratic families.
CHURCH
Rome and Constantinople. Byzantium was proud to be a Christian state. By the middle of the 5th c. the Christian church was divided into five large regions under the control of the supreme bishops, or patriarchs: Roman in the West, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria - in the East. Since Constantinople was the eastern capital of the empire, the corresponding patriarchate was considered the second after Rome, while the rest lost their significance after the 7th century. Arabs took over. Thus, Rome and Constantinople turned out to be the centers of medieval Christianity, but their rituals, church politics and theological views gradually moved further and further away from each other. In 1054, the papal legate anathematized Patriarch Michael Cerularius and "his followers", in response he received anathemas from the council that met in Constantinople. In 1089, it seemed to Emperor Alexei I that schism was easily overcome, but after the 4th Crusade in 1204, the differences between Rome and Constantinople became so clear that nothing could force the Greek Church and the Greek people to abandon the schism.
Clergy. The spiritual head of the Byzantine Church was the Patriarch of Constantinople. The decisive vote in his appointment was with the emperor, but the patriarchs did not always turn out to be puppets of the imperial power. Sometimes the patriarchs could openly criticize the actions of the emperors. Thus, Patriarch Polyeuctus refused to crown Emperor John I Tzimisces until he refused to marry the widow of his rival, Empress Theophano. The patriarch headed the hierarchical structure of the white clergy, which included metropolitans and bishops who headed the provinces and dioceses, "autocephalous" archbishops who did not have bishops in their subordination, priests, deacons and readers, special cathedral ministers, such as custodians of archives and treasuries, as well as the regents who were in charge of church music.
Monasticism. Monasticism was an integral part of Byzantine society. Originating in Egypt in the early 4th century, the monastic movement has fired the Christian imagination for generations. In organizational terms, it took different forms, and among the Orthodox they were more flexible than among the Catholics. Its two main types were cenobitic ("coenobitic") monasticism and hermitage. Those who chose cenobitic monasticism lived in monasteries under the guidance of abbots. Their main tasks were the contemplation and celebration of the liturgy. In addition to the monastic communities, there were associations called laurels, the way of life in which was an intermediate step between kinovia and hermitage: the monks here gathered together, as a rule, only on Saturdays and Sundays to perform services and spiritual communion. The hermits made various kinds of vows on themselves. Some of them, called stylites, lived on poles, others, dendrites, lived on trees. One of the numerous centers of both hermitage and monasteries was Cappadocia in Asia Minor. The monks lived in cells carved into the rocks called cones. The purpose of the hermits was solitude, but they never refused to help the suffering. And the more holy a person was considered, the more peasants turned to him for help in all matters of everyday life. In case of need, both the rich and the poor received help from the monks. Widowed empresses, as well as politically dubious persons, were removed to monasteries; the poor could count on free funerals there; monks surrounded orphans and elders with care in special houses; the sick were nursed in the monastic hospitals; even in the poorest peasant hut, the monks provided friendly support and advice to those in need.
theological disputes. The Byzantines inherited from the ancient Greeks their love of discussion, which in the Middle Ages usually found expression in disputes over theological issues. This propensity for controversy led to the spread of heresies that accompanied the entire history of Byzantium. At the dawn of the empire, the Arians denied the divine nature of Jesus Christ; the Nestorians believed that the divine and human nature existed in it separately and separately, never completely merging into one person of the incarnated Christ; Monophysites were of the opinion that only one nature is inherent in Jesus Christ - divine. Arianism began to lose its positions in the East after the 4th century, but it was never completely possible to eradicate Nestorianism and Monophysitism. These currents flourished in the southeastern provinces of Syria, Palestine and Egypt. The schismatic sects survived under Muslim rule, after these Byzantine provinces had been conquered by the Arabs. In the 8th-9th centuries. iconoclasts opposed the veneration of images of Christ and saints; their teaching was for a long time the official teaching of the Eastern Church, which was shared by emperors and patriarchs. The greatest concern was caused by dualistic heresies, which believed that only the spiritual world is the kingdom of God, and the material world is the result of the activity of the lower devilish spirit. The reason for the last major theological dispute was the doctrine of hesychasm, which split the Orthodox Church in the 14th century. It was about the way in which a person could know God while still alive.
Church cathedrals. All the Ecumenical Councils in the period before the division of the churches in 1054 were held in the largest Byzantine cities - Constantinople, Nicaea, Chalcedon and Ephesus, which testified both to the important role of the Eastern Church and to the wide spread of heretical teachings in the East. The 1st Ecumenical Council was convened by Constantine the Great in Nicaea in 325. Thus, a tradition was created in accordance with which the emperor was responsible for maintaining the purity of the dogma. These councils were primarily ecclesiastical assemblies of bishops, who were responsible for formulating rules concerning doctrine and ecclesiastical discipline.
Missionary activity. The Eastern Church devoted no less energy to missionary work than the Roman Church. The Byzantines converted the southern Slavs and Russia to Christianity, they also began its spread among the Hungarians and the Great Moravian Slavs. Traces of the influence of Byzantine Christians can be found in the Czech Republic and Hungary, their huge role in the Balkans and in Russia is undoubted. Starting from the 9th c. Bulgarians and other Balkan peoples were in close contact with both the Byzantine church and the civilization of the empire, since church and state, missionaries and diplomats acted hand in hand. The Orthodox Church of Kievan Rus was directly subordinate to the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire fell, but its church survived. As the Middle Ages came to an end, the church among the Greeks and Balkan Slavs gained more and more authority and was not broken even by the domination of the Turks.
SOCIO-ECONOMIC LIFE OF BYZANTIA
Diversity within the empire. The ethnically diverse population of the Byzantine Empire was united by belonging to the empire and Christianity, and was also to some extent influenced by Hellenistic traditions. Armenians, Greeks, Slavs had their own linguistic and cultural traditions. However, the Greek language has always remained the main literary and state language of the empire, and fluency in it was certainly required from an ambitious scientist or politician. There was no racial or social discrimination in the country. Among the Byzantine emperors were Illyrians, Armenians, Turks, Phrygians and Slavs.
Constantinople. The center and focus of the entire life of the empire was its capital. The city was ideally located at the crossroads of two great trade routes: the land route between Europe and Southwest Asia and the sea route between the Black and Mediterranean Seas. The sea route led from the Black to the Aegean Sea through the narrow Bosphorus (Bosporus) Strait, then through the small Sea of Marmara squeezed by land and, finally, another strait - the Dardanelles. Immediately before the exit from the Bosphorus to the Sea of Marmara, a narrow crescent-shaped bay, called the Golden Horn, deeply protrudes into the shore. It was a magnificent natural harbor that protected ships from dangerous oncoming currents in the strait. Constantinople was erected on a triangular promontory between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara. From two sides the city was protected by water, and from the west, from the land side, by strong walls. Another line of fortifications, known as the Great Wall, ran 50 km to the west. The majestic residence of the imperial power was also a trading center for merchants of all conceivable nationalities. The more privileged had their own quarters and even their own churches. The same privilege was given to the Anglo-Saxon Imperial Guard, which at the end of the 11th century. belonged to a small Latin church of St. Nicholas, as well as Muslim travelers, merchants and ambassadors who had their own mosque in Constantinople. Residential and commercial areas mainly adjoined the Golden Horn. Here, and also on both sides of the beautiful, wooded, steep slope that towered over the Bosphorus, residential quarters grew up and monasteries and chapels were erected. The city grew, but the heart of the empire was still a triangle, on which the city of Constantine and Justinian originally arose. The complex of imperial buildings, known as the Grand Palace, was located here, and next to it was the church of St. Sofia (Hagia Sophia) and the Church of St. Irene and St. Sergius and Bacchus. Nearby were the hippodrome and the Senate building. From here Mesa (Middle Street), the main street, led to the western and southwestern parts of the city.
Byzantine trade. Trade flourished in many cities of the Byzantine Empire, for example, in Thessaloniki (Greece), Ephesus and Trebizond (Asia Minor) or Chersonese (Crimea). Some cities had their own specialization. Corinth and Thebes, as well as Constantinople itself, were famous for the production of silk. As in Western Europe, merchants and artisans were organized into guilds. A good idea of trade in Constantinople is given by a 10th-century An eparch's book containing a list of rules for artisans and merchants, both in everyday goods such as candles, bread or fish, and in luxury goods. Some luxury items, such as the finest silks and brocades, could not be exported. They were intended only for the imperial court and could only be taken abroad as imperial gifts, for example, to kings or caliphs. The importation of goods could only be carried out in accordance with certain agreements. A number of trade agreements were concluded with friendly peoples, in particular with the Eastern Slavs, who created in the 9th century. own state. Along the great Russian rivers, the Eastern Slavs descended south to Byzantium, where they found ready markets for their goods, mainly furs, wax, honey and slaves. The leading role of Byzantium in international trade was based on income from port services. However, in the 11th c. there was an economic crisis. The gold solidus (known in the West as "bezant", the monetary unit of Byzantium) began to depreciate. In Byzantine trade, the dominance of the Italians, in particular the Venetians and Genoese, began to achieve such excessive trading privileges that the imperial treasury was seriously depleted, which lost control over most of the customs fees. Even trade routes began to bypass Constantinople. At the end of the Middle Ages, the eastern Mediterranean flourished, but all the riches were by no means in the hands of the emperors.
Agriculture. Even more important than customs duties and trade in handicrafts was agriculture. One of the main sources of income in the state was the land tax: both large land holdings and agricultural communities were subject to it. Fear of tax collectors haunted smallholders who could easily go bankrupt due to poor harvests or the loss of a few heads of livestock. If a peasant abandoned his land and ran away, his share of the tax was usually collected from his neighbors. Many small landowners preferred to become dependent tenants of large landowners. Attempts by the central government to reverse this trend were not particularly successful, and by the end of the Middle Ages, agricultural resources were concentrated in the hands of large landowners or were owned by large monasteries.
Wikipedia
Maximum territorial expansion of the Roman (green) and Byzantine empires (blue). The red line shows the division of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western parts.
First period
The first period extends to the beginning of the VIII century, its initial moments chronologically cannot be determined, just as the date delimiting the end of ancient and the beginning of modern history has not been found. In terms of the volume and content of historical material, this should include facts that characterize and prepare Byzantinism, even if they chronologically relate to the flourishing period of the Roman Empire. The same ethnographic upheaval that in the West prepared the transition from ancient to middle history is gradually taking place in the East as well. The difference lies in the fact that the West completely became the prey of the new peoples, being absorbed by German immigration, while the East showed more adaptation to new historical conditions and survived the critical era with fewer losses for itself. In the struggle against the Goths and Huns, the empire suffered only temporary losses. The situation was more difficult in the 6th and 7th centuries, when the Empire, on the one hand, was under pressure from the Avars and Slavs, and on the other, the Persians. The victories of Justinian (527-565) and Heraclius (610-641) delayed the onslaught of external enemies and determined the political tasks of the empire for the future. The most important business of the kings of this period was the organization of the relationship of the Slavs to the empire. This task was achieved by the system of distribution of the Slavic tribes in the western and eastern provinces, providing them with free land for agricultural crops and non-interference in the internal order of the Slavic community. As a result, the outskirts of the empire acquired a settled agricultural population, which constituted a barrier against unexpected invasions of new enemies; military and economic means increased so much that the impending danger of an Arab conquest did not have disastrous consequences for the empire.
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Second period
Third period
The period of unrest ended in 867 with the coming to power of the Macedonian dynasty. The third period lasts from the accession to the throne of Basil I the Macedonian to Alexei I Comnenus (867-1081). From the East, the most important event was the conquest of the island of Crete from the Arabs in 961. An essential feature of this period in the field of foreign policy history is the most expressive fact that passes through the entire period - the wars with the Bulgarians. Then for the first time the question of the political role of the Slavic element was raised. Simeon of Bulgaria, by accepting the royal title and establishing an independent church government, claimed to transfer the primacy of the empire to the Slavs. The theater of operations was transferred from Adrianople and Philippopolis to Greece and the Dardanelles. The participation of the Kyiv prince Svyatoslav in this war was accompanied by disastrous consequences for the Slavic movement. In 1018, the Byzantines captured the capital of the First Bulgarian Kingdom, the city of Ohrid, the Bulgarians were defeated and their territory became part of the empire.
Temporary strengthening of the empire (11th century)
Byzantine Empire by 1025.
In 1019, having conquered Bulgaria, Armenia [ ] and Iberia [ ] , Basil II celebrated with a great triumph the greatest strengthening of the empire since the times preceding the Arab conquests. The picture was completed by a brilliant state of finance and the flourishing of culture. However, at the same time, the first signs of weakness began to appear, which was expressed in increased feudal fragmentation. The nobility, which controlled vast territories and resources, often successfully opposed itself to the central government.
The decline began after the death of Vasily II, under his brother Constantine VIII (1025-1028) and under the daughters of the latter - first under Zoya and her three successive husbands - Roman III (1028-1034), Michael IV (1034-1041), Constantine Monomakh (1042-1054), with whom she shared the throne (Zoya died in 1050), and then under Theodore (1054-1056). The weakening manifested itself even more sharply after the end of the Macedonian dynasty.
The fourth period
Byzantine Empire in 1180
The fourth period - from the accession to the throne of Alexei I Komnenos until 1261. The entire interest of the period is mainly focused on the struggle of the European West with the Asian East. The crusading movement (see Crusades) inevitably had to affect the Byzantine Empire and make it necessary to take care of the protection of its own possessions. The leaders of the crusading militias gradually lose sight of the original goal of the movement - the Holy Land and the weakening of the power of the Muslims and come to the idea of conquering Constantinople. All the wisdom of the policy of the kings of the Komnenos (Alexei and Manuel) focused on keeping the elements hostile to the empire in balance and not allowing one of them to predominate over the other. As a result of this, political alliances are concluded alternately with Christians against the Mohammedans, then vice versa; hence the phenomenon that particularly struck the crusaders of the first campaign - the Polovtsian and Pecheneg hordes in the service of the empire.
In 1204, the crusaders of the fourth campaign captured Constantinople and divided the empire among themselves. But a handful of patriots, led by Theodore I Laskaris, withdrew to Nicaea, and there was formed the seed of a political movement against the Latins and a center of freedom, to which the thoughts of all Hellenes rushed. Michael VIII Palaiologos ousted the Latins from Constantinople in 1261.
In more or less close connection with the events of the crusades are secondary facts of this period. Seljuk Turks appear in the East, who use the crusades to spread their power at the expense of the Byzantine Empire. In the west - on the one hand, the Normans, who established themselves in Southern Italy and Sicily, bring personal scores with the empire to the crusading movement and threaten the maritime possessions of Byzantium, on the other hand, the Bulgarians make a complete revolution in the affairs of the Balkan Peninsula. The uprising of Peter and Asen at the end of the 12th century was accompanied by the liberation of Bulgaria and the formation of the second Bulgarian kingdom, which tended to unite the interests of all Slavs in the Balkan Peninsula. The interests of the Bulgarian kingdom and the Empire of Nicaea coincided for some time due to the common danger from the Latins; but with the transfer of the capital back to Constantinople, political antagonism reappears, which the Ottoman Turks successfully took advantage of.
Fifth period
The fifth period covers the time from 1261 to 1453. The facts of the external and internal history of this last period are determined by the exceptional conditions in which the kingdom of the Palaiologos found itself. After the conquest of Constantinople, Michael VIII Palaiologos makes every effort to unite under his rule the provinces of the empire that were under alien domination. To do this, he enters into very difficult and burdensome agreements with Genoa and Venice, sacrificing the essential interests of the empire in favor of these commercial republics; in the same considerations, he made very important concessions to the Pope, agreeing to a union with the Roman Church (