Byzantine Empire

V

Decline and Fall

Emperor Alexius I, founder of the Comnenian dynasty, nevertheless appealed to the pope for aid against the Turks. Western Europe responded with the First Crusade (1096-99).

Although Byzantium initially benefited from the Crusades, recovering some land in Asia Minor, in the long run they hastened the empire's decline. Italian merchant cities won special trading privileges in Byzantine territory and gained control of much of the empire's commerce and wealth. The Byzantines experienced a superficial prosperity in the 12th century, but their political and military power waned. Crusaders allied with Venice, then took advantage of internal Byzantine strife to seize and plunder Constantinople in 1204, establishing their own Latin Empire of Constantinople. Byzantine resistance sprang up in Epirus, Trebizond, and especially in the city and region of Nicaea, in Asia Minor. Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus recaptured Constantinople from the Latins in 1261 and founded the Palaeologan dynasty, which ruled the empire until 1453. The Palaeologan Empire's resources were very limited in terms of finances, land, and central authority. Agricultural conditions worsened for the rural population. The emergent Ottoman Turks conquered the remnants of Byzantine Asia Minor early in the 14th century. After 1354 they overran the Balkans and finally took Constantinople, bringing the empire to an end in 1453.

VI

The Imperial Office

The Byzantine Empire was ruled by autocratic emperors who were the source of governmental authority. Emperors were responsible for upholding correct religious doctrine by placing the full force of imperial power behind doctrinal uniformity. Emperors strove for religious unanimity, in part to cultivate favor from church officials, but also because they believed that the survival and welfare of the empire depended on divine favor. The emperor embodied living law, issued legislation, and was the final interpreter of secular law. Ultimate responsibility for all political and military appointments rested with him, and he had a decisive role in selecting and removing the patriarch of Constantinople and other church officials. The emperor was at the summit of a splendid formal etiquette, and Byzantine society was characterized by rank consciousness and minute attention to protocol.

VII

The Byzantine Legacy

This conception of imperial authority, together with the creation of the Cyrillic alphabet for the Slavs by Byzantine missionaries, and the preservation of ancient Greek manuscripts and culture by Byzantine scholars, were the most important contributions of Byzantium to posterity. The Byzantine intellectual tradition did not die in 1453: Byzantine scholars who visited Italy as individuals or imperial envoys in the 14th and 15th centuries exerted a strong influence on the Italian Renaissance. The Palaeologan revival of elements of Greek classicism, especially in encyclopedism, history, literature, philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy, was transmitted to a rarefied audience of Italian scholars and Greek residents of Italy, and in this fashion Byzantine scholarship long survived the disappearance of the Byzantine Empire. Byzantine traditions and procedures also survived among the Greek and Slavic peoples. Conversion of the rulers of the Bulgars, Serbs, and Russians to Orthodox Christianity in the 9th and 10th centuries drew these peoples into the Byzantine cultural and ecclesiastical sphere and greatly influenced their development in medieval and early modern times.

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See also Byzantine Art and Architecture; Iconoclasm; and biographies of individual emperors.