Byzantine Empire

The half that did not fall

formationDrafted from Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997)

The two halves of the Roman empire were divided in 395 between two boys and faced the same century. By 476 the western administration had ceased to exist and the eastern one had not lost a province.

The difference is not that the east was better governed, and the contemporaries who thought it was virtue were wrong. It is mostly geography and money.

Four reasons

The western frontier is the Rhine and the upper Danube, running through open country for well over a thousand kilometres with organised peoples on the far side of all of it. The eastern land frontier in Europe is the lower Danube and then, once past it, an attacker faces the Bosphorus. The Persian frontier in the east was long but faced a state that wanted the same things Rome did and could be negotiated with. Sasanian Iran spent most of the fifth century at peace with Constantinople, largely because both were dealing with people coming out of the steppe.

The east was richer. Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor were the empire's most productive provinces and the ones least disturbed in the third century. When the western half lost Africa to the Vandals in 439 it lost its grain and its tax base at once, and the army it could no longer pay was the army it needed to get them back.

The east could buy its way out. Constantinople paid the Huns enormous annual subsidies through the 440s, and paid Goths, Bulgars and Persians at various points afterwards, and the western half is often criticised for the same policy when it could afford it less. A rich state that pays is not weaker than a poor state that fights; it is a rich state.

And the east had one city that could not be taken. Constantine's capital sat on a peninsula with water on two sides, and in 413 the prefect Anthemius built the land walls — a triple line with a moat, four and a half miles long — which were not breached by an enemy for a thousand and forty years.

Istanbul, Turkey · Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997) · Photograph: Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

What the west's fall was

It is worth being precise about how the west was lost, because almost everything said about it afterwards was said by people who wanted it back.

The western provinces were not conquered in a campaign. Groups already inside the empire, mostly serving in its armies under their own commanders on the model the Roman record's last turning point describes, converted their commands into kingdoms as the central government's ability to pay and to reassign them disappeared. Britain fell out of the system around 410 and out of the coin economy within a decade. Africa went in 439. Gaul and Spain were held by treaty arrangements that became kingdoms without anybody declaring it. In 476 Odoacer deposed the last western emperor and sent the regalia east with a note saying the west did not need one.

The eastern government's view of all this, for the following century, was that the western provinces were temporarily under improper management. The next chapter is about the emperor who acted on it.

Justinian

expansionDrafted from Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997)

Justinian reigned thirty-eight years from 527 and spent them trying to be the Roman emperor of the record above this one.

Africa was taken from the Vandals in 534 in a campaign of a few months. Sicily followed, then Italy, in a war against the Ostrogoths that Belisarius began briskly in 535 and that then ran for eighteen years, wrecked the Italian peninsula, depopulated Rome and ended with an exhausted province that could not pay for its own defence. A strip of southern Spain was taken in 552. At his death the Mediterranean was again a Roman sea on three sides, and the empire was at its largest since the fourth century.

What it cost

The eastern frontier was left to be managed by payment: Justinian bought two peaces from Khusrau I and the second was called the Eternal Peace and lasted eight years. The Balkans were raided repeatedly by Slavs and by Kutrigurs, once to the walls of the capital. The taxation required to fund the western wars is the loudest complaint in the sources — including in the Secret History of Procopius, who wrote the official campaign narrative and then wrote a second book calling the emperor a demon.

Basilica of San Vitale, Ravenna · Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997) · Photograph: Petar Milošević · CC BY-SA 4.0

And in 541 the plague arrived. It reached Constantinople in 542, killed on a scale the sources describe in the language of catastrophe and modern estimates cannot fix, and recurred in waves for two centuries. Whatever the number, the empire that fought the Persians in the 570s was not the empire that had taken Africa forty years earlier, and the Italy that had been reconquered was taken by the Lombards within three years of Justinian's death.

What survived him

Two things, and neither is territory.

The law. A commission under Tribonian compressed a thousand years of Roman jurisprudence into the Code, the Digest, the Institutes and the Novels in six years. It may be the single most consequential document produced by any European state: rediscovered in eleventh-century Bologna, it is the foundation of the civil law tradition that governs most of continental Europe, Latin America and a good deal else. A legal system is not the kind of thing that shows up in an account of territory or religion or script, and this one outlasted every empire that ever used it.

And Hagia Sophia, rebuilt in five years after a riot burned the previous church, with a dome on pendentives over a nave nobody had attempted to span that way.

It was the largest enclosed space in the world for eight hundred years, it is what the Rus envoys in the tenth century reported having seen, and it is a mosque now because of what happened in 1453.

Istanbul, Turkey · Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997) · Photograph: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin · CC BY-SA 4.0

The word reconquest

It is worth noticing that nobody at the time called it that.

Justinian's own legislation describes the African campaign as the recovery of provinces from usurpers, and the legal position throughout was that the western territories had never stopped being Roman — they had been under people who had no right to them. The same assumption runs through everything the empire said about itself: there had been no break, in 395, in 476, or afterwards.

The division of 395 is a bookkeeping convenience, and what it looked like from the eastern side, a hundred and forty years later, was an army in Carthage.

The last great war of antiquity

peakDrafted from Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture (1997)

Between 602 and 628 the eastern Roman empire and Sasanian Iran fought a war that neither could afford and that destroyed both as they had existed.

The Persians took Syria in 613, Jerusalem in 614 — carrying off the relic of the True Cross — Egypt by 619, and most of Anatolia. In 626 a Persian army stood on the Asian shore opposite Constantinople while an Avar and Slav host assaulted the land walls from Europe, and the city held.

Heraclius then did something no Roman emperor had done for centuries: he took the field himself, went around the Persian armies rather than through them, and campaigned into Iran, destroying the fire temple at Ganzak and beating a Persian army at Nineveh in 627. Khusrau II was overthrown and killed by his own nobles, the new government made peace, and in 630 Heraclius carried the Cross back into Jerusalem in procession.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture (1997) · Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC0

A peak that was not the largest or the strongest

It is not the empire's largest extent, which was Justinian's, a century earlier. It is not the empire's most effective moment, which most accounts put three and a half centuries later under Basil II.

It is the last moment at which the two great powers of late antiquity were the only powers that mattered, and the last Roman victory of the ancient world. What follows is a different kind of history altogether.

It is worth saying plainly that a thousand-year state does not have one peak. The empire of the tenth century, described several chapters on, was in most respects more successful than this one — and it arrived two centuries into what any account of the seventh and eighth centuries has to call decline. Any single curve drawn through this much time will be wrong somewhere.

Eight years

The war ended in 628 and the Arab armies took Syria in 636.

The usual observation is that both empires were exhausted, which is true and is not sufficient — the Sasanian state collapsed entirely and this one did not, and both were equally exhausted. What can be said with more confidence is narrower. Twenty-six years of war had wrecked the fiscal apparatus of Syria and Egypt and had moved the population of both through several changes of government. The Monophysite Christians of Syria and Egypt had spent a century being coerced over doctrine by Constantinople, most recently by Heraclius's own attempt to settle it, and had no particular reason to prefer him. The field armies had been fighting continuously for a generation.

And nobody in either empire had any idea what was coming, because there was nothing in the previous four hundred years to suggest that anything could come out of Arabia.

What happened next was the Arab conquest, and the empire had nothing left to meet it with.

The empire that lost half of itself and continued

contractionDrafted from Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997)

In 630 Heraclius returned the True Cross to Jerusalem, having just won a twenty-six year war against Persia that had reached the walls of Constantinople. Within twelve years Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa were gone.

The losses were catastrophic in a way the numbers understate. Egypt was the grain supply; Syria and Egypt together were the richest provinces and the demographic core; and the Monophysite Christian populations of both had spent a century being persecuted by Constantinople over doctrine and did not, on the whole, resist the change of ruler. What remained was Anatolia, the Aegean, and a Balkan frontier that Slavs and Bulgars were crossing at will.

Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid · Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997) · Madrid Skylitzes · Public domain

The empire that emerged is a different thing from the one that entered. It was smaller, poorer, Greek rather than Latin in administration, organised into military districts — themes — where soldiers held land in exchange for service because there was no longer cash to pay them, and permanently defensive on a frontier that ran through central Anatolia for three hundred years.

It also did not fall, which at the time was the surprising outcome. Arab armies besieged Constantinople in 674–678 and again in 717–718, and both failed - how, and at what cost to the caliphate's own ambitions in the Mediterranean, is worth its own telling further on.

The themes

contractionDrafted from Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture (1997)

The state that came out of the seventh century paid its army in land because it no longer had the cash to pay it in coin.

The field armies that retreated out of Syria and Mesopotamia were quartered on the Anatolian provinces they fell back into, and the districts they occupied took the armies' names. Thema originally means a body of troops; within a century it means the province the troops are in, under a general who is also the civil governor. Soldiers held land, were entered on a register, served from it, and passed the obligation with the land.

Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid · Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: The Transformation of a Culture (1997) · Madrid Skylitzes · Public domain

Haldon's argument is that nobody designed this. There is no reform, no edict, no emperor's name attached. It is what an administrative system does when it is retreating and insolvent, rationalised afterwards into a structure.

The same instrument, five times over

Paying a soldier with the revenue of land instead of with money is the commonest expedient in medieval government, and the Byzantine themes are the earliest of the medieval versions.

The Buyid and Seljuk iqta, the Ottoman timar, the later Byzantine pronoia, the Mamluk system — all of them assign the revenue of land to a soldier in return for service, and all of them arrive at it independently, from the same problem: a state that must field cavalry and cannot pay them in coin.

The failure mode is also the same everywhere, and it is visible here from the tenth century: land held for service becomes land held, the obligation attenuates, and the great families accumulate the holdings of the smallholders whose service the system depended on. A long series of tenth-century laws tried to stop the dynatoi — the powerful — from buying up soldiers' land, and did not.

What else was rebuilt

The tax register survived, and it is the reason the state did.

Everything else about the empire changed between 600 and 700 — the language of administration went from Latin to Greek, the cities of Anatolia contracted into hilltop fortresses, the coinage shrank, the senate faded, the consulship ended, the old provincial structure dissolved — and the land tax went on being assessed on registered holdings by a central bureau, in coin, without interruption. When the empire needed to raise armies in the eighth century it could find out who owed what.

The other thing a shrunken empire had was a capital on the straits, taking ten per cent on everything that passed. A state reduced to Anatolia and the Aegean still controlled the only sea route between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Two sieges

The Arabs besieged Constantinople in 674–678 and again in 717–718, and the second siege's failure is the one that mattered.

Both failed on the walls, on the fleet and on the incendiary weapon the sources call Greek fire, whose composition is not known and which was a state secret successfully kept. The 718 siege ended with the Umayyad fleet largely destroyed by storms and a Bulgar attack on the besieging camp, and the caliphate turned away from Constantinople for good in the same year.

The Byzantine survival is the single most consequential thing in this period that did not happen.

The images

contractionDrafted from Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (1996)

Around 726 the emperor Leo III began removing religious images from public display, and for the next hundred and seventeen years, with a gap, the official position of the eastern Roman state was that representing Christ and the saints in painting was idolatry.

State Historical Museum, Moscow · Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (1996) · Chludov Psalter, folio 67r · Public domain

The sources for it are almost all written by the winners after 843, which means the standard narrative — a persecuting emperor, smashed icons, martyred monks — comes from people with an interest in it having been that. What is reasonably clear is that images were removed from churches and replaced with crosses and ornament, that the policy had support in the army and in Anatolia, that it was reversed in 787, reimposed in 815 and finally abandoned in 843, and that the emperors who held it were among the most militarily successful of the period.

Why an empire would do this

Several arguments are on the table and none of them is settled.

The theological one is that the second commandment means what it says and that a church which had spent three centuries arguing about the nature of Christ had never resolved what it meant to paint him. The political one is that the emperors who took the position had just watched God hand Syria, Palestine, Egypt and North Africa to an army whose own position on images was unambiguous, and drew a conclusion. The institutional one is that icons and the monasteries that held them were a source of authority the emperor did not control.

The last of those is the one worth dwelling on. An emperor whose right to rule comes from God has an obvious interest in being the person who says what God wants. Iconoclasm is the last occasion on which a Byzantine emperor tried to settle a doctrinal question by imperial decree, and it is the occasion on which that failed permanently.

Istanbul, Turkey · Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (1996) · Photograph: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

843

The restoration was a council, a decree and a procession, and the settlement held for the remaining six hundred years. The Sunday it happened is still kept in the Orthodox calendar as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

What was settled that day was not really the images. It was the shape of Orthodox practice was fixed there — a church defined by its liturgy and its images, in which doctrine is settled by councils and not by emperors — and that this is the church the missions of the following generation carried out of the empire.

Everything the empire afterwards exported — the liturgy, the alphabet, the church order — was fixed in that settlement.

What the emperors kept

It would be wrong to leave this as a defeat for the throne.

The emperor went on appointing and deposing patriarchs, summoning councils, legislating on church property and being crowned by the patriarch in Hagia Sophia. What he could not do after 843 was define doctrine. That line — between controlling the church and deciding what it taught — is where the Byzantine emperor differed from the Sasanian king of kings and from the caliph, both of whom claimed the second as well as the first.

The throne that rose

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Cremona, The Works of Liudprand of Cremona (1930)

A north Italian bishop went to Constantinople twice, twenty years apart, and wrote up both journeys for western readers. The first account is admiring. The second is one of the most sustained insults in medieval literature. Together they are the best description there is of how the empire used a room.

Istanbul, Turkey · Cremona, The Works of Liudprand of Cremona (1930) · Photograph: Ronan Reinart · CC BY-SA 3.0

In 949 Liudprand was received by Constantine VII. In front of the throne stood a gilt bronze tree, its branches full of gilt bronze birds, each of which sang the cry of its own species. The throne itself was guarded by lions of bronze, or of wood plated with gold, which beat the ground with their tails and roared with open mouths and moving tongues. He was brought in on the shoulders of two eunuchs. As he approached, the lions roared and the birds began to sing. He made obeisance three times with his face on the floor, and when he lifted his head the emperor — who had been sitting at a moderate height a moment earlier — had changed his clothes and was sitting level with the ceiling. Liudprand could not work out how, and guesses at a device like the one used for lifting the beam of a wine press. The emperor did not speak to him; the distance, he explains, would have made conversation unseemly, so a secretary asked after his master's health on the emperor's behalf.

And then the line that gives the whole apparatus away. I was neither terrified nor surprised, for I had previously made enquiry about all these things from people who were well acquainted with them.

That is what the machinery was for and what it was worth. An audience at Constantinople was a designed experience, and the design was well enough known that a competent envoy could be briefed on it in advance and sit through it unmoved — while still, twenty years later, describing every part of it in order.

The second embassy, in 968, was to Nikephoros Phokas on behalf of Otto I, and it failed. Liudprand's account of it is an act of revenge. He is kept waiting, lodged badly, lectured, and outranked by Bulgarian envoys; the emperor, he reports, told him that the insult was not to Bishop Liudprand personally but to his master. His indignation, he writes, was appeased by a handsome present: the sacred emperor sent him one of his most delicate dishes, a fat goat that he had eaten from himself, richly stuffed with garlic, onions and leeks and swimming in fish sauce. I wish, sires, that you could have had it on your table. The sight of it, I am sure, would have banished any incredulity you have felt concerning the sacred emperor's luxurious ways.

He was made to dine there again eight days later, in ill health, and cross- examined in front of the patriarch about which church councils the west recognised.

Both visits describe the same institution and neither is neutral. In 949 he was bringing a request and the ceremonial was marvellous; in 968 he was refused and it was absurd. What survives the change of tone is the thing itself — a court that had turned the reception of foreigners into a repeatable performance with mechanical effects, a graded seating order that told every envoy what his ruler was worth, and enough confidence to let a resentful bishop go home and write whatever he liked about the goat.

The missions

contractionDrafted from Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (1996)

In 863 two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine — later Cyril — and Methodius, were sent by the emperor to Moravia at its prince's request. Before going, Constantine devised an alphabet for the Slavonic language, which had none, and began translating the liturgy and the scriptures into it.

The Moravian mission failed politically, driven out by Frankish clergy within a generation. The alphabet did not. Their pupils took it to Bulgaria, where it was adapted into the script now called Cyrillic; the Bulgarian church took it to Serbia and to the Rus; and it is written today by something over two hundred and fifty million people across a dozen countries.

The clearest case on the site

Most claims that one alphabet descends from another have to be argued through transitional inscriptions and contested datings. This one does not. The parent script is Greek; the derivation is documented, named and dated; the transmission was direct, by men an emperor sent; the language had no script before; and the result is in daily use by a quarter of a billion people.

Preslav, Bulgaria · Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (1996) · Photograph: Commons contributor · Public domain

A named man devised a named script for a named mission in a known year, and it is still being written.

And the religion

The other export was the church itself, and it went to populations that had not held it rather than being adopted at home.

The Bulgarian conversion in 864 is the political case: Boris played Constantinople against Rome for several years, took baptism from Constantinople, and got a church with its own archbishop and a liturgy in a language his subjects spoke, which is a better offer than Latin. The Rus conversion under Vladimir around 988 is the consequential one, and the story in the Russian Primary Chronicle — envoys sent to compare religions, who report from Hagia Sophia that they did not know whether they were in heaven or on earth — is a legend about a real building that was, and is, exactly as overwhelming as they said.

What it bought

Not much, in the short term, which is worth saying on a site that counts these things.

Bulgaria fought the empire repeatedly after its conversion and a Bulgarian tsar was besieging Constantinople within sixty years of it. The Rus raided the city four times. A shared religion did not produce a shared politics, and the next chapter is about an emperor who spent thirty years destroying the Bulgarian state his predecessors had converted.

What it did produce is the thing the coded fields register: a religious and literary culture across eastern Europe that outlived the empire that exported it by five hundred years and counting. The empire's most durable single export was made by two missionaries whose mission failed.

The second peak

contractionDrafted from Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (1996)

Most empires have one best century. The eastern Roman empire had two, four hundred years apart, with a catastrophe in between — and the second is the more remarkable, because it came after the loss of Syria, Egypt and North Africa, and after three centuries of holding a mountain frontier against raids it could not stop.

What happened in it

From the 860s the empire stopped defending and started taking.

The Taurus frontier that had held for three hundred years was pushed south. Crete was retaken in 961 after a hundred and thirty years in Arab hands, and the Aegean stopped being raided. Cilicia went in 965, and Antioch — lost in 638 — in 969, with Byzantine armies operating in northern Syria and into the Jazira; the Hamdanids of Aleppo spent those decades on the other side of it. The eastern frontier reached the Euphrates and passed it.

Basil II reigned from 976 to 1025. He spent the first thirteen years suppressing two enormous revolts by the Anatolian military families, and the next thirty destroying the Bulgarian empire — a campaign of attrition rather than of battles, conducted almost annually, that ended with Bulgaria annexed and the Danube frontier restored for the first time since the sixth century. Armenia and Georgia were absorbed or made client; Bagratid Armenia ended against this empire in 1045.

At his death the empire ran from the Danube to the Euphrates and from southern Italy to the Caucasus, with a full treasury and no serious enemy on any frontier.

Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (1996) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

Why it did not last

Fifty years later Anatolia was gone, and the standard explanations are internal.

The tenth-century laws against the dynatoi had failed. The great Anatolian families had absorbed the smallholdings the theme system depended on, and the soldiers those holdings produced were increasingly replaced by mercenaries paid in coin. Basil's successors then cut the army to save money, in a period with no visible threat, and let the frontier defences in Armenia go when they annexed the buffer kingdoms that had been holding them.

Manzikert in 1071 is the date everyone knows, and the battle is not what lost Anatolia. Alp Arslan captured the emperor, treated him well and released him on terms; he wanted Syria and Egypt, and had come north because he was being raided. What lost Anatolia was the civil war the defeat set off, in which rival Byzantine claimants hired Turkish troops and paid them in land. By 1081 the plateau that had supplied the empire's soldiers and taxes for four hundred years was held by people who had been invited in.

An army that can make a ruler eventually makes one it prefers. The variation here is that the army was somebody else's.

What Alexios rebuilt with

contractionDrafted from Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (1996)

Alexios I Komnenos took the throne in 1081 over an empire that had lost most of what the second peak had won. Anatolia, the plateau that had produced four centuries of soldiers and tax, was in the hands of Turkish beys who had been invited in during the civil wars after Manzikert. Norman adventurers under Robert Guiscard were crossing from Italy into the Balkans the same year. Pechenegs were raiding south of the Danube. The treasury was empty enough that Alexios melted down church plate to pay an army, and the coinage he inherited had been debased for a generation of rival claimants each paying troops with money the state did not have.

Moscow Kremlin Museums · Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (1996) · Photograph: shakko · CC BY-SA 4.0

What he had to rebuild with was not soldiers or silver. It was land, and the authority to assign its revenue to whoever would fight for it.

Pronoia

The instrument Alexios and his successors relied on, developed and expanded across the twelfth century, granted a named individual the tax revenue of a specified piece of land - not the land itself, and not the peasants working it as personal property, but the state's own claim on what it would otherwise have collected - in exchange for military service, usually as a cavalryman equipped and mounted at the grantee's own expense. The grant was not hereditary in principle: it reverted to the state at the holder's death and could be reassigned, which in theory kept the emperor able to reward loyalty and withhold it from families who had none to offer.

In practice the distinction between a pronoia and inherited property blurred within a few generations, exactly as it had with the theme lands three centuries earlier and would again with the Ottoman timar two centuries later - the same instrument arriving at the same failure mode each time it was tried, because a family holding the same revenue for two generations does not experience it as temporary even when the law says it is.

What it bought, while it worked

For about a century it worked well enough to matter. Alexios used the system, combined with a stabilised gold coinage - the hyperpyron, introduced around 1092 after decades of debasement - and a network of marriages binding the great Anatolian and Balkan families to his own house, to assemble an army capable of holding what remained of the empire and recovering some of what had been lost. Nicaea and the western Anatolian coast came back within the reign, with crusader help that the next chapter takes up in full. His son and grandson, John II and Manuel I, extended the same methods for another sixty years, campaigning in Anatolia, the Balkans and northern Syria with armies raised substantially on this basis.

What it cost

The court that pronoia grants and dynastic marriage produced was not the old Constantinopolitan bureaucracy the empire had run on before Manzikert. It was a network of related noble families - Komnenoi, Doukai, Angeloi, Palaiologoi, the names that fill the rest of Byzantine history - holding military command and provincial revenue as something close to a family business, with the emperor as the senior partner rather than an administrator standing above them all.

That arrangement rebuilt an army out of an empire that had none left to speak of, and it is why the twelfth century, rather than the years right after Manzikert, is when Byzantium last mattered as a first-rank power. It also planted the same aristocratic entrenchment the tenth-century laws against the dynatoi had failed to stop, in a more concentrated and more overtly dynastic form, and it is the family politics of exactly this class that produces the civil wars and coups that run through most of what follows.

The more astute had another reason

contractionDrafted from Komnene, The Alexiad (1928)

Anna Komnene wrote her father's life half a century after the First Crusade reached Constantinople, and she is the only person who described that arrival from inside the city. She is a partisan, a princess who had lost a throne, and writing to defend a reign. She is also the only witness who says what the empire thought was happening.

Her account of why they came is two sentences and it contains the whole subsequent history of Byzantine-Latin relations. The simpler-minded, she says, were urged on by a genuine desire to worship at the Sepulchre and see the holy places. But the more astute, especially men like Bohemond and those of like mind, had another secret reason, namely, the hope that while on their travels they might by some means be able to seize the capital itself, looking upon this as a kind of corollary.

That is written after 1204, by someone who had known Bohemond personally, in a book about the years before it. It is not evidence that Bohemond intended to take Constantinople in 1096. It is evidence of what a member of the imperial family had concluded by the time she wrote, and of the assumption the government worked on from the first day — which is why what the government actually did looks the way it does.

Istanbul, Turkey · Komnene, The Alexiad (1928) · Photograph: Isabeau · CC BY-SA 4.0

What it did was manage them like weather. Officers were sent ahead to mark the route and then follow the columns out of sight, with orders to come out and skirmish if the Franks began foraging; and each detachment was given men who spoke Latin, so that disputes could be settled before they became incidents. Anna describes Peter the Hermit crossing first with numbers she gives as eighty thousand foot and a hundred thousand horse, being advised by the emperor to wait for the great lords, refusing because he trusted his own multitude, and being destroyed. Godfrey refused for weeks to swear the oath of fealty and had to be argued into it by his own colleagues, and then compelled.

Her general verdict on the Franks is the one every Byzantine writer after her borrowed, and it is not stupid: the Frankish race is always very hot-headed and eager, but when once it has espoused a cause, it is uncontrollable. She admires the courage and describes the cruelty — the Normans who detached themselves and devastated the country round Nicaea and did things to children she records in detail — in the same paragraph.

The empire got what it wanted out of the crusade in the short run: Nicaea back, the western Anatolian coast recovered, an enemy diverted. It also acquired, in the same transaction, a permanent western belief that the Greeks were treacherous and a permanent Greek belief that the Latins had come to take the city. Anna states the second one as established fact in the middle of describing an alliance, which is how far the relationship had travelled by the time she picked up her pen.

Kalo-Ioannes

contractionDrafted from Finlay, A History of Greece, from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time, Vol. III (1854)

John II Komnenos, Alexios's son, ruled for twenty-four years and left almost no record of the scandal, treachery or self-indulgence that fills the reigns on either side of his. Even hostile Latin writers conceded his virtue, and his own subjects nicknamed him first Maurojoannes - dark John, for his complexion - and then, as his government won them over, Kalojoannes: John the Good.

Istanbul, Turkey · Finlay, A History of Greece, from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time, Vol. III (1854) · Photograph: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

A friend found outside his own family

John came to the throne to find the plot that would define his reign's one real danger already forming around him: his mother Irene, who had never wanted him to succeed, and his own elder sister Anna Komnene - the future historian - conspiring to put Anna's husband on the throne instead. John survived it by trusting almost no one born into his own class. His closest advisor and eventual prime minister was Axouchos, a Turkish boy captured as a child at the fall of Nicaea in 1097 and raised alongside John in the palace; the two became genuinely close friends, and John made him the most powerful minister in the empire once he was old enough to rule - a scandal to the aristocracy that says as much about their own corruption as about John's judgment.

A sister who wanted him blinded

Anna's own conspiracy, organized to put her husband Nikephoros Bryennios on the throne in John's place, required either John's murder or his blinding to disqualify him from rule. When Bryennios balked at the plan, Anna reportedly denounced his hesitation as womanish weakness, contrasting it with what she called her own manly resolve. The plot was discovered and John, characteristically, declined to execute his own sister or brother-in-law - he confiscated Anna's property instead, a mercy remarkable enough that later writers recorded it as unusual for a Byzantine court used to blinding its rivals as a matter of course.

A reign of steady, unglamorous recovery

John spent his twenty-four years pushing the recovery Alexios had begun further outward - campaigns against the Pechenegs, the Hungarians and the Serbs on the European frontiers, and a long series of expeditions into Anatolia and northern Syria that recovered Byzantine authority over Cilicia and forced the Latin principality of Antioch to acknowledge Byzantine overlordship, the same campaign that carried off the Rubenid prince Levon to Constantinople in 1137. None of it was as dramatic as Manzikert or as celebrated as Basil II's conquest of Bulgaria, and that is precisely why it is easy to skip: John's whole method was patient, well-financed, unspectacular soldiering rather than the kind of single decisive battle histories remember.

A wound from his own quiver

John died camped near Anazarbos in Cilicia in April 1143, preparing a spring campaign into Syria. Hunting a wild boar on Mount Taurus, he was gored, and in the struggle a poisoned arrow from his own quiver scratched his hand. He ignored the wound until his arm had swollen past the point where amputation could still save him, and spent his final days arranging a peaceful transfer of power to his youngest son, Manuel, whose talents he judged superior to his elder surviving brother's. He died, by every account, as calmly as he had ruled.

Myriokephalon

contractionDrafted from Finlay, A History of Greece, from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time, Vol. III (1854)

Manuel I Komnenos inherited an empire near the height of its Komnenian recovery and spent thirty-seven years spending that inheritance on an ambition his father had never shared: restoring Byzantine primacy over the whole eastern Mediterranean, Latin crusader states included, rather than simply defending what Alexios and John had rebuilt.

A court that impressed and appalled its own guests

Manuel's reign was the Komnenian dynasty at its most theatrical.

He negotiated commercial treaties with Venice, Pisa and Genoa that opened Constantinople's markets to Italian merchants on generous terms; he intervened in Antioch and forced its Latin prince to acknowledge him as overlord in a public ceremony; he fought a war against the Norman kingdom of Sicily after Roger II's fleet sacked Corinth and Thebes and carried off the city's silk-weavers as captive labor for a new industry in Palermo. Manuel personally led armies in Asia Minor, the Balkans and Egypt, married a Frankish princess, Maria of Antioch, as his second wife, and ran a court that Latin visitors described as the most magnificent in Christendom - while Byzantine writers closer to home worried, with some justification, that a middle class capable of restraining an emperor's ambitions had stopped existing in the empire he ruled.

Finlay, A History of Greece, from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time, Vol. III (1854) · Byzantine manuscript illumination · Public domain

An army committed to a narrow valley

Manuel's Anatolian ambitions ran directly against the Sultanate of Rum, and in September 1176 he marched a large, heavily provisioned army - three thousand supply wagons among the baggage train alone - toward Konya itself, intending to end the sultanate as a threat for good. Sultan Kilij Arslan II offered peace on the terms of an earlier treaty as the army approached a ruined fortress called Myriokephalon; Manuel refused to answer until he reached Konya and pressed on into the long, narrow pass of Tzybritze without sending cavalry ahead to clear the heights - a precaution the fate of the failed Second Crusade's own armies, a generation earlier, should have taught him to take.

A column strangled in its own baggage train

The Turks had watched the whole approach from ambush along both sides of the pass. Once the Byzantine baggage train reached the valley's midpoint, they struck the front and rear simultaneously. The right wing, commanded by the empress's own brother Baldwin, was cut off from the rest of the army by the wagon train and annihilated where it stood; the Turks then dragged the captured wagons across the road to seal it and turned on the central division, where Manuel commanded in person, surrounded by his guard. The valley was too narrow for the heavy Byzantine cavalry - an arm that could have swept the lighter Turkish horsemen aside on open ground - to form any kind of line. Wagons, dead cattle, infantry and cavalry were crushed together in a single choked mass while fresh Turkish squadrons kept arriving from side ravines to renew the attack on both flanks at once.

A peace, and a mind that never recovered

The army survived the disaster rather than being destroyed outright - the vanguard held the high ground at the pass's exit and Manuel himself escaped the trap - but the losses and the humiliation ended any Byzantine ambition of conquering Rum outright. Manuel negotiated a peace with Kilij Arslan on terms neither side found fully satisfying and never again attempted an offensive war on that scale. Contemporaries agreed that his body recovered from Myriokephalon far faster than his mind did: he grew withdrawn and melancholy in his final years, and died in 1180 having spent the last of the Komnenian dynasty's confidence in a single afternoon in a mountain pass south of Konya.

1204

contractionDrafted from Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997)

The Fourth Crusade set out for Egypt, could not pay the Venetians for the fleet it had commissioned, worked off part of the debt by taking a Christian city on the Dalmatian coast for Venice, and then accepted an offer from a Byzantine claimant who promised money and troops if they restored his father. They restored him, he could not pay, the city rioted and killed him, and in April 1204 the crusaders stormed Constantinople and sacked it for three days.

The city had not been taken by an enemy in eight hundred and seventy-four years. The bronze horses now at San Marco came out of it, along with most of the relics of western Europe and an unrecoverable quantity of manuscripts and metalwork.

Basilica di San Marco, Venice · Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997) · Photograph: Tteske · CC BY 3.0

What broke

The empire, into pieces. A Latin empire in Constantinople. A Greek government at Nicaea, which retook the city in 1261. A second Greek state at Trebizond on the Black Sea, which outlasted everything and fell in 1461. A despotate in Epirus.

What the restoration of 1261 did not restore is the part that matters here. The population did not come back; fourteenth-century travellers describe fields and orchards inside the walls. The treasury did not. And the commercial position did not, because the concessions that Venice and then Genoa had been extracting since the 1080s in exchange for naval help had by the fourteenth century given the Italian republics the customs revenue of the straits.

The empire had lived on its land tax and the customs of the straits. By the 1340s a Byzantine emperor's customs revenue from the Bosphorus was reportedly a small fraction of the Genoese colony's on the opposite shore of the same waterway, and the empire fought a naval war with Genoa over it and lost.

The last choice

The civil wars of 1341 to 1354 are the last point at which the empire had a choice about anything.

Two of them, fought over the regency for a nine-year-old emperor. Both sides hired Turkish troops. One of them, John VI Kantakouzenos, married a daughter to the Ottoman emir Orhan and ferried Ottoman soldiers into Europe to fight for him; in 1354 an earthquake destroyed the walls of Gallipoli and the Ottomans, already there, kept it. Serbia took Macedonia, Thessaly and Epirus while the empire was occupied with itself, and Stefan Dušan had himself crowned emperor of the Serbs and Greeks.

At the end of it the empire was Constantinople, a strip of Thrace, Thessalonica and part of the Peloponnese, with an Ottoman state in Europe that it had brought across.

The rest is the last chapter, and it takes ninety-nine years.

1453

endDrafted from Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997)

By 1400 the emperor was an Ottoman vassal who had campaigned in Anatolia in the sultan's army. Manuel II spent the years from 1399 to 1403 travelling in western Europe asking for help, was received in Paris and London with great courtesy, and got very little. What saved the city was Timur, who destroyed the Ottoman army at Ankara in 1402 and set off a civil war among Bayezid's sons that bought Constantinople half a century.

Istanbul, Turkey · Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

In 1439 the emperor and the Greek church accepted union with Rome at the Council of Florence, in exchange for the help that was the only way the city could be held. The population of Constantinople substantially rejected it. The remark attributed to a senior official — better the sultan's turban than the cardinal's hat — is probably not authentic and is an accurate summary of the position.

Fifty-three days

Mehmed II brought something in the order of eighty thousand men and a siege train including a gun cast by a Hungarian engineer who had offered it to the emperor first and had not been able to be paid.

Fort Nelson, Hampshire · Treadgold, A History of the Byzantine State and Society (1997) · Photograph: Tim Sheerman-Chase · CC BY 2.0

The defence was about seven thousand, of whom perhaps two thousand were foreign, mostly Genoese and Venetian. The chain across the Golden Horn held until the Ottomans dragged ships overland into the harbour. The land walls of Anthemius, which had not been breached in a thousand and forty years, were breached on 29 May 1453. Constantine XI was killed somewhere in the fighting and his body was not identified.

What the fields say and do not

The conqueror took the title with the city. Mehmed II called himself Kayser-i Rûm, Caesar of Rome, and meant it — which is the same claim on the same name that the Ottomans had been making, and that half of Europe had been making, for centuries.

The difficulty in saying what ended in 1453 is that the state which ended called itself the empire of the Romans, its inhabitants called themselves Romans, and its neighbours agreed. Treating it as a different polity from the Roman empire is a convenience of periodisation and nothing else. There is no year in which anybody in Constantinople decided to stop being Roman — not 395, not 476, not the day Latin gave way to Greek in the chancery. The division is something later historians did, for their own reasons, and it is worth saying so wherever the question comes up.

Afterwards

Trebizond, the other Greek successor state, fell in 1461. The Morea in 1460. Mehmed rebuilt and repopulated Constantinople as his capital, kept the Greek patriarchate and appointed a patriarch, and used the imperial title — what he made of that inheritance is an Ottoman story rather than a Byzantine one.

Hagia Sophia became a mosque, which is why the dome raised under Justinian is still standing: a building in continuous use is maintained, and a building nobody needs is quarried.

The republic

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (2015)

Roughly half the emperors who reigned between 395 and 1453 were deposed. What you make of that number depends entirely on what you think the empire was.

The old picture

The standard account of Byzantine government, for most of the last two hundred years, is a sacral autocracy: an emperor chosen by God, ruling without constitutional limit, surrounded by a court ceremonial designed to make him appear more than human, in a state where church and throne were fused and politics consisted of palace intrigue. On that reading the depositions are evidence of instability — a system that did not work.

Kaldellis's argument

His case is that this gets the constitution backwards. The eastern Roman empire was a res publica — the word is in the sources, in Greek as politeia — whose emperor held power on behalf of the people and could lose it. The acclamation by senate, army and people at every accession was not decoration but the constitutive act. The emperor was not above the law in the sources' own account of him.

And the depositions are not evidence of a broken system. They are what a constitution without a formal removal mechanism looks like when it removes somebody, and they follow a recognisable pattern: the emperor loses a war or debases the coinage or raises taxes, the population of the capital riots, the army or the senate acts, and a successor is acclaimed.

Istanbul, Turkey · Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome (2015) · Photograph: Ninara · CC BY 2.0

On this reading, half the emperors being deposed is not chaos. It is a republic with an unusually violent recall procedure.

What is not in dispute

The argument is live, and Kaldellis has serious critics. But the disagreement is narrower than it looks, and it is worth being exact about where it falls.

Nobody disputes that every accession involved an acclamation, that the ceremony was recorded and described in detail, that usurpers went out of their way to obtain one, or that the sources treat an unacclaimed emperor as lacking something. What is disputed is whether the acclamation had teeth — whether it was a constitutional act or a ritual that had outlived its content.

That distinction matters here more than it might elsewhere, because the alternative reading has a history of its own. The picture of Byzantium as an oriental theocracy in permanent decline was built largely by western scholarship that had reasons to want the Roman inheritance for the Latin west, and it is the same scholarship that produced the name "Byzantine" for a state whose inhabitants called themselves Romans until the day the walls came down.

Nobody there called it Byzantium

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (1996)

The word Byzantine was applied to this empire by a German scholar in 1557, a century after it had ceased to exist. Its inhabitants called their state the Basileia Rhomaion, the empire of the Romans, and called themselves Rhomaioi, Romans, until the end. Their neighbours agreed: the Arabs called them Rum, and the Seljuk sultanate in Anatolia took its name from the Roman ground it sat on.

The renaming was not neutral. It let western European scholarship treat the medieval Roman empire as a separate and lesser thing — oriental, static, theocratic, in permanent decline for a thousand years — and reserve the Roman inheritance for the Latin west. Gibbon's account, which shaped English usage for two centuries, is the most influential version.

Great Palace Mosaic Museum, Istanbul · Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium, 600-1025 (1996) · Photograph: Ninara · CC BY 2.0

What the state actually did between 600 and 1025 was survive the loss of half its territory, reorganise its army and taxation from the ground up, hold Constantinople through two Arab sieges that would have ended it, convert the Slavs and the Rus and give them an alphabet, and then reconquer Anatolia, Bulgaria and northern Syria under a line of soldier-emperors. A polity in continuous decline does not do that.

The Cyrillic alphabet comes out of that missionary work: a script devised for a language that did not have one, transmitted outward deliberately, and still in use by hundreds of millions of people who have never given the empire that sent it a thought.

Be patriarch, and be at peace

afterlifeDrafted from Pears, The Destruction of the Greek Empire and the Story of the Capture of Constantinople by the Turks (1903)

Constantinople fell on 29 May 1453 and within a few months its conqueror had reinstalled the institution that had defined it, because he needed the city to work.

Mehmed II wanted Constantinople repopulated. It had been emptying for a century before he took it and the sack had finished the job, and a capital of empty streets was no use to him. So he gave the Christians permission to follow the customs of their churches — and, learning that they had no patriarch, ordered them to choose one.

He promised in advance to accept whoever they chose, and that the man should enjoy very nearly the same privileges as his predecessors.

The scene at the seraglio

A local synod met and elected George Scholarios, who took the name Gennadios. He was a monk, a scholar, and the leading opponent of the union with Rome that the last emperors had negotiated in order to get western help.

The sultan received him at the palace and with his own hands gave him a pastoral cross of silver and gold, and said:

Be patriarch and be at peace. Count upon our friendship as long as thou desirest it, and thou shalt enjoy all the privileges of thy predecessors.

Then he had him mounted on a richly caparisoned horse and conducted in procession to the Church of the Holy Apostles, which he gave him as the seat of the patriarchate, as it had formerly been.

Istanbul, Turkey · Pears, The Destruction of the Greek Empire and the Story of the Capture of Constantinople by the Turks (1903) · Photograph: Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

Afterwards, according to a contemporary Greek historian who wrote for Mehmed, the sultan went on seeing him — discussing questions about Christianity, urging him to speak freely, visiting him, and bringing along the learned men he had collected at his court.

What was actually being set up

Not toleration in the modern sense, and not a courtesy. An administration.

The patriarch became the head of the Orthodox population of the empire, with authority over its law, its courts, its marriages, its taxes on itself and its own internal discipline — an arrangement the Ottomans extended to other confessions and which lasted, in one form or another, into the twentieth century. The office survived the state that created it and then survived the state that destroyed the state that created it.

That is the largest single thing Byzantium left behind. Not the claim to Rome, which the sultan took for himself, and not the territory, which was gone. An institution: the church of the empire, continuing inside the empire that had conquered it, with its rank confirmed by the conqueror because a conqueror who wants a working city needs somebody the population will obey.

The building

There is a coda in a footnote, and it is the whole of the Ottoman century in one sentence.

The Church of the Holy Apostles — the burial church of the emperors, where Constantine and Justinian lay — was handed to Gennadios with ceremony as his official residence.

It was subsequently taken back from the Greeks, demolished, and replaced by a mosque built in honour of the conqueror.

The patriarchate moved, and moved again, and is still in the city. The church that was given to it lasted about a decade.