Byzantine Empire Notes

As Western Europe was overcome by Germanic invasions, the Byzantine Empire (the eastern part of the Roman Empire) gained imperial power.
Constantinople became the empire's only capital until Charlemagne successfully revived the western empire in the 8th century.

The reign of Emperor Justinian (r. 537-565) and his wife Empress Theodora (d. 548) marked the height of the first period of Byzantine history (324-632).

The imperial goal in the East was to:

Justinian collated and revised Roman law.
His armies reconquer much of former Roman territory
His Corpus Juris Civilis (body of civil law) had little effect on medieval common law.
However, beginning with the Renaissance, it provided the foundation for most European law down to the 19th century.

The Code contained nearly 5,000 Roman laws that were still considered useful for the Byzantine Empire.
The Digest quoted and summarized the opinions of Rome’s greatest legal thinkers about the laws. This massive work ran to a total of 50 volumes.
The Institutes was a textbook that told law students how to use the laws.
The Novellae (New Laws) presented legislation passed after 534.

Religion as well as law served imperial centralization.
In 380, Christianity had been proclaimed the official religion of the eastern empire.
Now all other religions were considered “demented and insane.”

Between the 4th and 6th centuries, the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem acquired enormous wealth in the form of land and gold.

During Justinian’s reign, the empire’s strength was its more than 1,500 cities.
The largest with 350,000 inhabitants, was Constantinople, the cultural crossroads of Asian and European civilizations.
Quote from Robert of Clari, a French crusader: "Not since the world was made was there . . . so much wealth as was found in Constantinople. For the Greeks say that two-thirds of the wealth of this world is in Constantinople and the other third scattered throughout the world."

Between the 4th and 5th centuries, councils were made up of local wealthy landowners, who were not necessarily loyal to the emperor.
By the 6th century, special governors and bishops replaced the councils and proved to be more loyal to the emperor.

Justinian was an ambitious builder.
His greatest monument was the magnificent domed church of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), which was constructed in just five years.

The Iconoclastic Controversy, a movement that denied the holiness of religious images, devastated much of the empire for over a hundred years.
During the eighth and early ninth centuries the use of such images was prohibited, but icons were restored by 843.

In 1453, the city was finally and permanently conquered by the Ottoman Turks and renamed Istanbul.
Byzantine culture, law, and administration came to its final end.

Throughout the early Middle Ages, the Byzantine Empire remained a protective barrier between western Europe and hostile Persian, Arab, and Turkish armies.
The Byzantines were also a major conduit of classical learning and science into the West down to the Renaissance.
While western Europeans were fumbling to create a culture of their own, the cities of the Byzantine Empire provided them a model of a civilized society.

Because of political conflicts and differences in belief, Christianity will split East and West in 1054
Western church continues as the Roman Catholic Church
East will become Eastern Orthodox Church

As West and East grew apart, the two traditions of Christianity competed for converts.
Missionaries from the Orthodox took their form of Christianity to the Slavs, groups that inhabited the forests north of the Black Sea.
Two of the most successful Eastern missionaries, Saint Methodius and Saint Cyril (SEER•uhl), worked among the Slavs in the ninth century.

Cyril and Methodius invented an alphabet for the Slavic languages.
With an alphabet, Slavs would be able to read the Bible in their own tongues.
Slavic languages, including Russian, are now written in what is called the Cyrillic alphabet.
the Slavs themselves were creating a culture that would form one of history’s most influential countries: Russia.