In what year did Byzantium appear? Fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire

On May 29, 1453, the capital of the Byzantine Empire fell to the Turks. Tuesday May 29 is one of the most important dates in the world. On this day, the Byzantine Empire, created back in 395, ceased to exist as a result of the final division of the Roman Empire after the death of Emperor Theodosius I into western and eastern parts. With her death, a huge period of human history ended. In the lives of many peoples of Europe, Asia and North Africa, a radical change occurred due to the establishment of Turkish rule and the creation of the Ottoman Empire.

It is clear that the fall of Constantinople is not a clear line between the two eras. The Turks established themselves in Europe a century before the fall of the great capital. And by the time of its fall, the Byzantine Empire was already a fragment of its former greatness - the emperor’s power extended only to Constantinople with its suburbs and part of the territory of Greece with the islands. Byzantium of the 13th-15th centuries can only be called an empire conditionally. At the same time, Constantinople was a symbol of the ancient empire and was considered the “Second Rome”.

Background of the fall

In the 13th century, one of the Turkic tribes - the Kays - led by Ertogrul Bey, forced out of their nomadic camps in the Turkmen steppes, migrated westward and stopped in Asia Minor. The tribe assisted the Sultan of the largest Turkish state (founded by the Seljuk Turks) - the Rum (Konya) Sultanate - Alaeddin Kay-Kubad in his fight against the Byzantine Empire. For this, the Sultan gave Ertogrul land in the region of Bithynia as fief. The son of the leader Ertogrul - Osman I (1281-1326), despite his constantly growing power, recognized his dependence on Konya. Only in 1299 did he accept the title of Sultan and soon subjugated the entire western part of Asia Minor, winning a series of victories over the Byzantines. By the name of Sultan Osman, his subjects began to be called Ottoman Turks, or Ottomans (Ottomans). In addition to wars with the Byzantines, the Ottomans fought for the subjugation of other Muslim possessions - by 1487, the Ottoman Turks established their power over all Muslim possessions of the Asia Minor Peninsula.

The Muslim clergy, including local dervish orders, played a major role in strengthening the power of Osman and his successors. The clergy not only played a significant role in the creation of a new great power, but justified the policy of expansion as a “struggle for faith.” In 1326, the largest trading city of Bursa, the most important point of transit caravan trade between the West and the East, was captured by the Ottoman Turks. Then Nicaea and Nicomedia fell. The sultans distributed the lands captured from the Byzantines to the nobility and distinguished warriors as timars - conditional possessions received for serving (estates). Gradually, the Timar system became the basis of the socio-economic and military-administrative structure of the Ottoman state. Under Sultan Orhan I (ruled from 1326 to 1359) and his son Murad I (ruled from 1359 to 1389), important military reforms were carried out: the irregular cavalry was reorganized - cavalry and infantry troops convened from Turk farmers were created. Warriors of the cavalry and infantry troops were farmers in peacetime, receiving benefits, and during the war they were obliged to join the army. In addition, the army was supplemented by a militia of peasants of the Christian faith and a corps of Janissaries. The Janissaries initially took captured Christian youths who were forced to convert to Islam, and from the first half of the 15th century - from the sons of Christian subjects of the Ottoman Sultan (in the form of a special tax). The sipahis (a kind of nobles of the Ottoman state who received income from the timars) and the janissaries became the core of the army of the Ottoman sultans. In addition, units of gunners, gunsmiths and other units were created in the army. As a result, a powerful power arose on the borders of Byzantium, which claimed dominance in the region.

It must be said that the Byzantine Empire and the Balkan states themselves accelerated their fall. During this period, there was a sharp struggle between Byzantium, Genoa, Venice and the Balkan states. Often the fighting parties sought to gain military support from the Ottomans. Naturally, this greatly facilitated the expansion of the Ottoman power. The Ottomans received information about routes, possible crossings, fortifications, strengths and weaknesses of the enemy troops, the internal situation, etc. Christians themselves helped cross the straits to Europe.

The Ottoman Turks achieved great success under Sultan Murad II (ruled 1421-1444 and 1446-1451). Under him, the Turks recovered from the heavy defeat inflicted by Tamerlane in the Battle of Angora in 1402. In many ways, it was this defeat that delayed the death of Constantinople for half a century. The Sultan suppressed all the uprisings of the Muslim rulers. In June 1422, Murad besieged Constantinople, but was unable to take it. The lack of a fleet and powerful artillery had an effect. In 1430, the large city of Thessalonica in northern Greece was captured; it belonged to the Venetians. Murad II won a number of important victories on the Balkan Peninsula, significantly expanding the possessions of his power. So in October 1448 the battle took place on the Kosovo Field. In this battle, the Ottoman army opposed the combined forces of Hungary and Wallachia under the command of the Hungarian general Janos Hunyadi. The fierce three-day battle ended with the complete victory of the Ottomans, and decided the fate of the Balkan peoples - for several centuries they found themselves under the rule of the Turks. After this battle, the Crusaders suffered a final defeat and made no further serious attempts to recapture the Balkan Peninsula from the Ottoman Empire. The fate of Constantinople was decided, the Turks had the opportunity to solve the problem of capturing the ancient city. Byzantium itself no longer posed a great threat to the Turks, but a coalition of Christian countries, relying on Constantinople, could cause significant harm. The city was located practically in the middle of the Ottoman possessions, between Europe and Asia. The task of capturing Constantinople was decided by Sultan Mehmed II.

Byzantium. By the 15th century, the Byzantine power had lost most of its possessions. The entire 14th century was a period of political failure. For several decades it seemed that Serbia would be able to capture Constantinople. Various internal strife were a constant source of civil wars. Thus, the Byzantine emperor John V Palaiologos (who reigned from 1341 to 1391) was overthrown from the throne three times: by his father-in-law, his son and then his grandson. In 1347, the Black Death epidemic swept through, killing at least a third of the population of Byzantium. The Turks crossed to Europe, and taking advantage of the troubles of Byzantium and the Balkan countries, by the end of the century they reached the Danube. As a result, Constantinople was surrounded on almost all sides. In 1357, the Turks captured Gallipoli, and in 1361, Adrianople, which became the center of Turkish possessions on the Balkan Peninsula. In 1368, Nissa (the suburban seat of the Byzantine emperors) submitted to Sultan Murad I, and the Ottomans were already under the walls of Constantinople.

In addition, there was the problem of the struggle between supporters and opponents of the union with the Catholic Church. For many Byzantine politicians it was obvious that without the help of the West, the empire could not survive. Back in 1274, at the Council of Lyon, the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII promised the pope to seek reconciliation of the churches for political and economic reasons. True, his son Emperor Andronikos II convened a council of the Eastern Church, which rejected the decisions of the Lyon Council. Then John Palaiologos went to Rome, where he solemnly accepted the faith according to the Latin rite, but did not receive help from the West. Supporters of union with Rome were mainly politicians or belonged to the intellectual elite. The lower clergy were the open enemies of the union. John VIII Palaiologos (Byzantine emperor in 1425-1448) believed that Constantinople could only be saved with the help of the West, so he tried to conclude a union with the Roman Church as quickly as possible. In 1437, together with the patriarch and a delegation of Orthodox bishops, the Byzantine emperor went to Italy and spent more than two years there, first in Ferrara, and then at the Ecumenical Council in Florence. At these meetings, both sides often reached an impasse and were ready to stop negotiations. But John forbade his bishops to leave the council until a compromise decision was made. In the end, the Orthodox delegation was forced to concede to the Catholics on almost all major issues. On July 6, 1439, the Union of Florence was adopted, and the Eastern churches were reunited with the Latin. True, the union turned out to be fragile; after a few years, many Orthodox hierarchs present at the Council began to openly deny their agreement with the union or say that the decisions of the Council were caused by bribery and threats from Catholics. As a result, the union was rejected by most Eastern churches. The majority of the clergy and people did not accept this union. In 1444, the Pope was able to organize a crusade against the Turks (the main force was the Hungarians), but at Varna the crusaders suffered a crushing defeat.

Disputes about the union took place against the backdrop of the country's economic decline. Constantinople at the end of the 14th century was a sad city, a city of decline and destruction. The loss of Anatolia deprived the capital of the empire of almost all agricultural land. The population of Constantinople, which in the 12th century numbered up to 1 million people (together with the suburbs), fell to 100 thousand and continued to decline - by the time of the fall there were approximately 50 thousand people in the city. The suburb on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus was captured by the Turks. The suburb of Pera (Galata) on the other side of the Golden Horn was a colony of Genoa. The city itself, surrounded by a 14-mile wall, lost a number of neighborhoods. In fact, the city turned into several separate settlements, separated by vegetable gardens, orchards, abandoned parks, and ruins of buildings. Many had their own walls and fences. The most populous villages were located along the banks of the Golden Horn. The richest quarter adjacent to the bay belonged to the Venetians. Nearby were streets where Westerners lived - Florentines, Anconans, Ragusians, Catalans and Jews. But the piers and bazaars were still full of traders from Italian cities, Slavic and Muslim lands. Pilgrims, mainly from Rus', arrived in the city every year.

Last years before the fall of Constantinople, preparation for war

The last emperor of Byzantium was Constantine XI Palaiologos (who ruled in 1449-1453). Before becoming emperor, he was the despot of Morea, a Greek province of Byzantium. Konstantin had a sound mind, was a good warrior and administrator. He had the gift of arousing the love and respect of his subjects; he was greeted in the capital with great joy. During the short years of his reign, he prepared Constantinople for a siege, sought help and alliance in the West, and tried to calm the turmoil caused by the union with the Roman Church. He appointed Luka Notaras as his first minister and commander-in-chief of the fleet.

Sultan Mehmed II received the throne in 1451. He was a purposeful, energetic, intelligent person. Although it was initially believed that this was not a young man brimming with talents, this impression was formed from the first attempt to rule in 1444-1446, when his father Murad II (he transferred the throne to his son in order to distance himself from state affairs) had to return to the throne to resolve emerging issues. problems. This calmed the European rulers; they all had their own problems. Already in the winter of 1451-1452. Sultan Mehmed ordered the construction of a fortress to begin at the narrowest point of the Bosphorus Strait, thereby cutting off Constantinople from the Black Sea. The Byzantines were confused - this was the first step towards a siege. An embassy was sent with a reminder of the oath of the Sultan, who promised to preserve the territorial integrity of Byzantium. The embassy left no response. Constantine sent envoys with gifts and asked not to touch the Greek villages located on the Bosphorus. The Sultan ignored this mission too. In June, a third embassy was sent - this time the Greeks were arrested and then beheaded. In fact, it was a declaration of war.

By the end of August 1452, the Bogaz-Kesen fortress (“cutting the strait” or “cutting the throat”) was built. Powerful guns were installed in the fortress and a ban was announced on passing the Bosphorus without inspection. Two Venetian ships were driven off and the third was sunk. The crew was beheaded and the captain was impaled - this dispelled all illusions about Mehmed's intentions. The actions of the Ottomans caused concern not only in Constantinople. The Venetians owned an entire quarter in the Byzantine capital; they had significant privileges and benefits from trade. It was clear that after the fall of Constantinople the Turks would not stop; Venice’s possessions in Greece and the Aegean Sea were under attack. The problem was that the Venetians were bogged down in a costly war in Lombardy. An alliance with Genoa was impossible; relations with Rome were strained. And I didn’t want to spoil relations with the Turks - the Venetians also carried out profitable trade in Ottoman ports. Venice allowed Constantine to recruit soldiers and sailors in Crete. In general, Venice remained neutral during this war.

Genoa found itself in approximately the same situation. The fate of Pera and the Black Sea colonies caused concern. The Genoese, like the Venetians, showed flexibility. The government appealed to the Christian world to send assistance to Constantinople, but they themselves did not provide such support. Private citizens were given the right to act as they wished. The administrations of Pera and the island of Chios were instructed to follow such a policy towards the Turks as they considered most appropriate in the current situation.

The Ragusans, residents of the city of Ragus (Dubrovnik), as well as the Venetians, recently received confirmation of their privileges in Constantinople from the Byzantine emperor. But the Dubrovnik Republic did not want to put its trade in Ottoman ports at risk. In addition, the city-state had a small fleet and did not want to risk it unless there was a broad coalition of Christian states.

Pope Nicholas V (head of the Catholic Church from 1447 to 1455), having received a letter from Constantine agreeing to accept the union, appealed in vain to various sovereigns for help. There was no proper response to these calls. Only in October 1452, the papal legate to the emperor Isidore brought with him 200 archers hired in Naples. The problem of union with Rome again caused controversy and unrest in Constantinople. December 12, 1452 in the church of St. Sophia served a solemn liturgy in the presence of the emperor and the entire court. It mentioned the names of the Pope and Patriarch and officially proclaimed the provisions of the Union of Florence. Most of the townspeople accepted this news with sullen passivity. Many hoped that if the city stood, it would be possible to reject the union. But having paid this price for help, the Byzantine elite miscalculated - ships with soldiers from Western states did not arrive to help the dying empire.

At the end of January 1453, the issue of war was finally resolved. Turkish troops in Europe were ordered to attack Byzantine cities in Thrace. The cities on the Black Sea surrendered without a fight and escaped pogrom. Some cities on the coast of the Sea of Marmara tried to defend themselves and were destroyed. Part of the army invaded the Peloponnese and attacked the brothers of Emperor Constantine so that they could not come to the aid of the capital. The Sultan took into account the fact that a number of previous attempts to take Constantinople (by his predecessors) failed due to the lack of a fleet. The Byzantines had the opportunity to transport reinforcements and supplies by sea. In March, all the ships at the Turks' disposal are brought to Gallipoli. Some of the ships were new, built within the last few months. The Turkish fleet had 6 triremes (two-masted sailing and rowing ships, one oar was held by three oarsmen), 10 biremes (a single-masted ship, where there were two rowers on one oar), 15 galleys, about 75 fustas (light, fast ships), 20 parandarii (heavy transport barges) and a mass of small sailing boats and lifeboats. The head of the Turkish fleet was Suleiman Baltoglu. The rowers and sailors were prisoners, criminals, slaves and some volunteers. At the end of March, the Turkish fleet passed through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmara, causing horror among the Greeks and Italians. This was another blow to the Byzantine elite; they did not expect that the Turks would prepare such significant naval forces and be able to blockade the city from the sea.

At the same time, an army was being prepared in Thrace. All winter, gunsmiths tirelessly worked on various types of weapons, engineers created battering and stone-throwing machines. A powerful strike force of approximately 100 thousand people was assembled. Of these, 80 thousand were regular troops - cavalry and infantry, Janissaries (12 thousand). There were approximately 20-25 thousand irregular troops - militias, bashi-bazouks (irregular cavalry, the “crazy” did not receive pay and “rewarded” themselves with looting), rear units. The Sultan also paid great attention to artillery - the Hungarian master Urban cast several powerful cannons capable of sinking ships (with the help of one of them a Venetian ship was sunk) and destroying powerful fortifications. The largest of them was pulled by 60 oxen, and a team of several hundred people was assigned to it. The gun fired cannonballs weighing approximately 1,200 pounds (about 500 kg). During March, the Sultan's huge army began to gradually move towards the Bosphorus. On April 5, Mehmed II himself arrived under the walls of Constantinople. The morale of the army was high, everyone believed in success and hoped for rich booty.

The people in Constantinople were depressed. The huge Turkish fleet in the Sea of Marmara and strong enemy artillery only increased anxiety. People recalled predictions about the fall of the empire and the coming of the Antichrist. But it cannot be said that the threat deprived all people of the will to resist. All winter, men and women, encouraged by the emperor, worked to clear ditches and strengthen the walls. A fund was created for unforeseen expenses - the emperor, churches, monasteries and private individuals made investments in it. It should be noted that the problem was not the availability of money, but the lack of the required number of people, weapons (especially firearms), and the problem of food. All weapons were collected in one place so that, if necessary, they could be distributed to the most threatened areas.

There was no hope for external help. Only a few private individuals provided support to Byzantium. Thus, the Venetian colony in Constantinople offered its assistance to the emperor. Two captains of Venetian ships returning from the Black Sea, Gabriele Trevisano and Alviso Diedo, took an oath to participate in the fight. In total, the fleet defending Constantinople consisted of 26 ships: 10 of them belonged to the Byzantines themselves, 5 to the Venetians, 5 to the Genoese, 3 to the Cretans, 1 came from Catalonia, 1 from Ancona and 1 from Provence. Several noble Genoese arrived to fight for the Christian faith. For example, a volunteer from Genoa, Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, brought 700 soldiers with him. Giustiniani was known as an experienced military man, so he was appointed by the emperor to command the defense of the land walls. In total, the Byzantine emperor, not including his allies, had about 5-7 thousand soldiers. It should be noted that part of the city’s population left Constantinople before the siege began. Some of the Genoese - the colony of Pera and the Venetians - remained neutral. On the night of February 26, seven ships - 1 from Venice and 6 from Crete - left the Golden Horn, taking away 700 Italians.

To be continued…

"The Death of an Empire. Byzantine lesson"- a journalistic film by the abbot of the Moscow Sretensky Monastery, Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov). The premiere took place on the state channel “Russia” on January 30, 2008. The presenter, Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov), gives his version of the collapse of the Byzantine Empire in the first person.

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7 things that modern people need to understand about the history of Byzantium: why the country of Byzantium did not exist, what the Byzantines thought about themselves, what language they wrote in, why they were disliked in the West and how their history ended

Prepared by Arkady Avdokhin, Varvara Zharkaya, Lev Lukhovitsky, Alena Chepel

1. A country called Byzantium never existed
2. The Byzantines did not know that they were not Romans
3. Byzantium was born when Antiquity adopted Christianity
4. In Byzantium they spoke one language and wrote in another
5. There were iconoclasts in Byzantium - and this is a terrible mystery
6. The West never liked Byzantium
7. In 1453, Constantinople fell - but Byzantium did not die

Archangel Michael and Manuel II Palaiologos. 15th century Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, Italy / Bridgeman Images / Fotodom

1. A country called Byzantium never existed

If the Byzantines of the 6th, 10th or 14th centuries had heard from us that they were Byzantines, and their country was called Byzantium, the vast majority of them simply would not have understood us. And those who did understand would have decided that we wanted to flatter them by calling them residents of the capital, and even in an outdated language, which is used only by scientists trying to make their speech as refined as possible.

Part of Justinian's consular diptych. Constantinople, 521 Diptychs were presented to consuls in honor of their assumption of office. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

There never was a country that its inhabitants would call Byzantium; the word “Byzantines” was never the self-name of the inhabitants of any state. The word "Byzantines" was sometimes used to refer to the inhabitants of Constantinople - after the name of the ancient city of Byzantium (Βυζάντιον), which was refounded in 330 by Emperor Constantine under the name Constantinople. They were called that only in texts written in a conventional literary language, stylized as ancient Greek, which no one had spoken for a long time. No one knew the other Byzantines, and even these existed only in texts accessible to a narrow circle of the educated elite who wrote in this archaic Greek language and understood it.

The self-name of the Eastern Roman Empire, starting from the 3rd-4th centuries (and after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453), had several stable and understandable phrases and words: state of the Romans, or Romans, (βασιλεία τῶν Ρωμαίων), Romagna (Ρωμανία), Romaida (Ρωμαΐς ).

The residents themselves called themselves Romans- Romans (Ρωμαίοι), they were ruled by a Roman emperor - basileus(Βασιλεύς τῶν Ρωμαίων), and their capital was New Rome(Νέα Ρώμη) - this is what the city founded by Constantine was usually called.

Where did the word “Byzantium” come from and with it the idea of the Byzantine Empire as a state that arose after the fall of the Roman Empire on the territory of its eastern provinces? The fact is that in the 15th century, along with statehood, the Eastern Roman Empire (as Byzantium is often called in modern historical works, and this is much closer to the self-awareness of the Byzantines themselves), essentially lost its voice heard beyond its borders: the Eastern Roman tradition of self-description turned out to be isolated within the Greek-speaking lands that belonged to the Ottoman Empire; What was important now was only what Western European scientists thought and wrote about Byzantium.

Hieronymus Wolf. Engraving by Dominicus Custos. 1580 Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig

In the Western European tradition, the state of Byzantium was actually created by Hieronymus Wolf, a German humanist and historian, who 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 “Corpus” that the concept of “Byzantine” entered Western European scientific circulation.

Wolf's work formed the basis of another collection of Byzantine historians, also called the “Corpus of Byzantine History,” but much larger - it was published in 37 volumes with the assistance of King Louis XIV of France. Finally, the Venetian reprint of the second “Corpus” was used by the English historian of the 18th century Edward Gibbon when he wrote his “History of the Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire” - perhaps no book had such a huge and at the same time destructive influence on the creation and popularization of the modern image of Byzantium.

The Romans, with their historical and cultural tradition, were thus deprived not only of their voice, but also of the right to self-name and self-awareness.

2. The Byzantines didn’t know they weren’t Romans

Autumn. Coptic panel. IV century Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, UK / Bridgeman Images / Fotodom

For the Byzantines, who themselves called themselves Romans, the history of the great empire never ended. The very idea would seem absurd to them. Romulus and Remus, Numa, Augustus Octavian, Constantine I, Justinian, Phocas, Michael the Great Comnenus - all of them in the same way from time immemorial stood at the head of the Roman people.

Before the fall of Constantinople (and even after it), the Byzantines considered themselves residents of the Roman Empire. Social institutions, laws, statehood - all this was preserved in Byzantium since the time of the first Roman emperors. The adoption of Christianity had almost no impact on the legal, economic and administrative structure of the Roman Empire. If the Byzantines saw the origins of the Christian church in the Old Testament, then the beginning of their own political history, like the ancient Romans, was attributed to the Trojan Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s poem fundamental to Roman identity.

The social order of the Roman Empire and the sense of belonging to the great Roman patria were combined in the Byzantine world with Greek science and written culture: the Byzantines considered classical ancient Greek literature to be theirs. For example, in the 11th century, the monk and scientist Michael Psellus seriously discussed in one treatise who writes poetry better - the Athenian tragedian Euripides or the Byzantine poet of the 7th century George Pisis, the author of a panegyric about the Avar-Slavic siege of Constantinople in 626 and the theological poem “The Sixth Day” "about the divine creation of the world. In this poem, subsequently translated into Slavic, George paraphrases the ancient authors Plato, Plutarch, Ovid and Pliny the Elder.

At the same time, at the ideological level, Byzantine culture often contrasted itself with classical antiquity. Christian apologists noticed that all of Greek antiquity - poetry, theater, sports, sculpture - was permeated with religious cults of pagan deities. Hellenic values (material and physical beauty, the pursuit of pleasure, human glory and honor, military and athletic victories, eroticism, rational philosophical thinking) were condemned as unworthy of Christians. Basil the Great, in his famous conversation “To young men on how to use pagan writings,” sees the main danger for Christian youth in the attractive way of life that is offered to the reader in Hellenic writings. He advises selecting for yourself only stories that are morally useful. The paradox is that Vasily, like many other Fathers of the Church, himself received an excellent Hellenic education and wrote his works in a classical literary style, using the techniques of ancient rhetorical art and a language that by his time had already fallen out of use and sounded archaic.

In practice, ideological incompatibility with Hellenism did not prevent the Byzantines from treating the ancient cultural heritage with care. Ancient texts were not destroyed, but copied, while the scribes tried to maintain accuracy, except that in rare cases they could throw out a too frank erotic passage. Hellenic literature continued to be the basis of the school curriculum in Byzantium. An educated person had to read and know the epic of Homer, the tragedies of Euripides, the speeches of Demos-phenes and use the Hellenic cultural code in his own writings, for example, calling the Arabs Persians, and Rus' - Hyperborea. Many elements of ancient culture in Byzantium were preserved, although they changed beyond recognition and acquired new religious content: for example, rhetoric became homiletics (the science of church preaching), philosophy became theology, and the ancient love story influenced the hagiographic genres.

3. Byzantium was born when Antiquity adopted Christianity

When does Byzantium begin? Probably when the history of the Roman Empire ends - that’s what we used to think. Much of this thought seems natural to us, thanks to the enormous influence of Edward Gibbon's monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Written in the 18th century, this book still provides both historians and non-specialists with a view of the period from the 3rd to the 7th centuries (now increasingly called late Antiquity) as a time of decline of the former greatness of the Roman Empire under the influence of two main factors - the Germanic invasions tribes and the ever-growing social role of Christianity, which became the dominant religion in the 4th century. Byzantium, which exists in the popular consciousness primarily as a Christian empire, is depicted in this perspective as the natural heir to the cultural decline that occurred in late Antiquity due to mass Christianization: a center of religious fanaticism and obscurantism, stagnation stretching for a whole millennium.

An amulet that protects against the evil eye. Byzantium, V-VI centuries

On one side there is an eye, which is targeted by arrows and attacked by a lion, snake, scorpion and stork.

The Walters Art Museum

Thus, if you look at history through the eyes of Gibbon, late Antiquity turns into a tragic and irreversible end of Antiquity. But was it only a time of destruction of beautiful antiquity? Historical science has been confident for more than half a century that this is not so.

Particularly simplified is the idea of the supposedly fatal role of Christianization in the destruction of the culture of the Roman Empire. The culture of late Antiquity in reality was hardly built on the opposition of “pagan” (Roman) and “Christian” (Byzantine). The way Late Antique culture was structured for its creators and users was much more complex: Christians of that era would have found the very question of the conflict between the Roman and the religious strange. In the 4th century, Roman Christians could easily place images of pagan deities, made in the ancient style, on household items: for example, on one casket given to newlyweds, a naked Venus is adjacent to the pious call “Seconds and Projecta, live in Christ.”

On the territory of the future Byzantium, an equally unproblematic fusion of pagan and Christian artistic techniques took place for contemporaries: in the 6th century, images of Christ and saints were made using the technique of a traditional Egyptian funeral portrait, the most famous type of which is the so-called Fayum portrait Fayum portrait- a type of funeral portraits common in Hellenized Egypt in the 1st-3rd centuries AD. e. The image was applied with hot paints onto a heated wax layer. Christian visuality in late Antiquity did not necessarily strive to oppose itself to the pagan, Roman tradition: very often it deliberately (or perhaps, on the contrary, naturally and naturally) adhered to it. The same fusion of pagan and Christian is visible in the literature of late Antiquity. The poet Arator in the 6th century recites in the Roman cathedral a hexametric poem about the acts of the apostles, written in the stylistic traditions of Virgil. In Christianized Egypt in the mid-5th century (by this time, various forms of monasticism had existed here for about a century and a half), the poet Nonnus from the city of Panopolis (modern Akmim) wrote a paraphrase of the Gospel of John in the language of Homer, preserving not only the meter and style, but also consciously borrowing entire verbal formulas and figurative layers from his epic Gospel of John, 1:1-6 (Japanese translation):
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It was in the beginning with God. Everything came into being through Him, and without Him nothing came into being that came into being. In Him was life, and life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. There was a man sent from God; his name is John.

Nonnus from Panopolis. Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, canto 1 (translated by Yu. A. Golubets, D. A. Pospelova, A. V. Markova):
Logos, Child of God, Light born from Light,
He is inseparable from the Father on the infinite throne!
Heavenly God, Logos, because You were the original
Shone together with the Eternal, the Creator of the world,
O Ancient One of the Universe! Everything was accomplished through Him,
What is breathless and in spirit! Outside of Speech, which does a lot,
Is it revealed that it remains? And exists in Him from eternity
Life, which is inherent in everything, the light of short-lived people...<...>
In the bee-feeding thicket
The wanderer of the mountains appeared, inhabitant of the desert slopes,
He is the herald of the cornerstone baptism, the name is
Man of God, John, counselor...

Christ Pantocrator. Icon from the Monastery of St. Catherine. Sinai, mid-6th century Wikimedia Commons

The dynamic changes that took place in different layers of the culture of the Roman Empire in late Antiquity are difficult to directly connect with Christianization, since the Christians of that time themselves were such hunters of classical forms both in the visual arts and in literature (as in many other areas of life). The future Byzantium was born in an era in which the relationships between religion, artistic language, its audience, and the sociology of historical shifts were complex and indirect. They carried within themselves the potential for the complexity and versatility that later unfolded over the centuries of Byzantine history.

4. In Byzantium they spoke one language and wrote in another

The linguistic picture of Byzantium is paradoxical. The Empire, which not only claimed succession to the Roman Empire and inherited its institutions, but also from the point of view of its political ideology was the former Roman Empire, never spoke Latin. It was spoken in the western provinces and the Balkans, until the 6th century it remained the official language of jurisprudence (the last legislative code in Latin was the Code of Justinian, promulgated in 529 - after which laws were issued in Greek), it enriched Greek with many borrowings (formerly only in the military and administrative spheres), early Byzantine Constantinople attracted Latin grammarians with career opportunities. But still, Latin was not the real language of even early Byzantium. Even though the Latin-language poets Corippus and Priscian lived in Constantinople, we will not find these names on the pages of a textbook on the history of Byzantine literature.

We cannot say at what exact moment a Roman emperor becomes a Byzantine emperor: the formal identity of institutions does not allow us to draw a clear boundary. In search of an answer to this question, it is necessary to turn to informal cultural differences. The Roman Empire differs from the Byzantine Empire in that the latter merges Roman institutions, Greek culture and Christianity, and this synthesis is carried out on the basis of the Greek language. Therefore, one of the criteria that we could rely on is language: the Byzantine emperor, unlike his Roman counterpart, found it easier to express himself in Greek than in Latin.

But what is this Greek? The alternative that bookstore shelves and philological department programs offer us is deceptive: we can find in them either ancient or modern Greek. No other reference point is provided. Because of this, we are forced to assume that the Greek language of Byzantium is either a distorted ancient Greek (almost Plato’s dialogues, but not quite) or proto-Greek (almost Tsipras’s negotiations with the IMF, but not quite yet). The history of 24 centuries of continuous development of the language is straightened out and simplified: it is either the inevitable decline and degradation of ancient Greek (as Western European classical philologists thought before the establishment of Byzantine studies as an independent scientific discipline), or the inevitable germination of modern Greek (as Greek scientists believed during the formation of the Greek nation in the 19th century) .

Indeed, Byzantine Greek is elusive. Its development cannot be considered as a series of progressive, consistent changes, since for every step forward in linguistic development there was also a step back. The reason for this is the attitude of the Byzantines themselves to the language. The language norm of Homer and the classics of Attic prose was socially prestigious. To write well meant to write history indistinguishable from Xenophon or Thucydides (the last historian who decided to introduce Old Attic elements into his text, which seemed archaic already in the classical era, was the witness of the fall of Constantinople, Laonicus Chalkokondylus), and the epic was indistinguishable from Homer. Throughout the history of the empire, educated Byzantines were literally required to speak one (changed) language and write in another (frozen in classical immutability) language. The duality of linguistic consciousness is the most important feature of Byzantine culture.

Ostracon with a fragment of the Iliad in Coptic. Byzantine Egypt, 580-640

Ostracons, shards of pottery vessels, were used to record Bible verses, legal documents, bills, school assignments, and prayers when papyrus was unavailable or too expensive.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The situation was aggravated by the fact that since the times of classical antiquity, certain dialectal characteristics were assigned to certain genres: epic poems were written in the language of Homer, and medical treatises were compiled in the Ionian dialect in imitation of Hippocrates. We see a similar picture in Byzantium. In the ancient Greek language, vowels were divided into long and short, and their orderly alternation formed the basis of ancient Greek poetic meters. In the Hellenistic era, the contrast of vowels by length disappeared from the Greek language, but nevertheless, even after a thousand years, heroic poems and epitaphs were written as if the phonetic system had remained unchanged since the time of Homer. Differences permeated other levels of language: it was necessary to construct a phrase like Homer, select words like Homer, and inflect and conjugate them in accordance with a paradigm that had died out in living speech thousands of years ago.

However, not everyone was able to write with ancient vivacity and simplicity; Often, in an attempt to achieve the Attic ideal, Byzantine authors lost their sense of proportion, trying to write more correctly than their idols. Thus, we know that the dative case, which existed in ancient Greek, almost completely disappeared in modern Greek. It would be logical to assume that with each century it will appear in literature less and less often, until it gradually disappears altogether. However, recent studies have shown that in Byzantine high literature the dative case is used much more often than in the literature of classical antiquity. But it is precisely this increase in frequency that indicates a loosening of the norm! Obsession in using one form or another will say no less about your inability to use it correctly than its complete absence in your speech.

At the same time, the living linguistic element took its toll. We learn about how the spoken language changed thanks to the mistakes of manuscript copyists, non-literary inscriptions and the so-called vernacular literature. The term “vernacular” is not accidental: it describes the phenomenon of interest to us much better than the more familiar “folk”, since elements of simple urban colloquial speech were often used in monuments created in the circles of the Constantinople elite. This became a real literary fashion in the 12th century, when the same authors could work in several registers, today offering the reader exquisite prose, almost indistinguishable from Attic, and tomorrow - almost vulgar verses.

Diglossia, or bilingualism, gave rise to another typically Byzantine phenomenon - metaphrasing, that is, transposition, retelling in half with translation, presentation of the content of the source in new words with a decrease or increase in the stylistic register. Moreover, the shift could go both along the line of complication (pretentious syntax, sophisticated figures of speech, ancient allusions and quotations) and along the line of simplifying the language. Not a single work was considered inviolable, even the language of sacred texts in Byzantium did not have sacred status: the Gospel could be rewritten in a different stylistic key (as, for example, the already mentioned Nonnus of Panopolitan did) - and this would not bring down anathema on the author’s head. It was necessary to wait until 1901, when the translation of the Gospels into colloquial Modern Greek (essentially the same metaphrase) brought opponents and defenders of linguistic renewal into the streets and led to dozens of victims. In this sense, the indignant crowds who defended the “language of the ancestors” and demanded reprisals against the translator Alexandros Pallis were much further from Byzantine culture not only than they would have liked, but also than Pallis himself.

5. There were iconoclasts in Byzantium - and this is a terrible mystery

Iconoclasts John the Grammar and Bishop Anthony of Silea. Khludov Psalter. Byzantium, approximately 850 Miniature for Psalm 68, verse 2: “And they gave me gall for food, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” The actions of the iconoclasts, covering the icon of Christ with lime, are compared with the crucifixion on Golgotha. The warrior on the right brings Christ a sponge with vinegar. At the foot of the mountain are John the Grammar and Bishop Anthony of Silea. rijksmuseumamsterdam.blogspot.ru

Iconoclasm is the most famous period in the history of Byzantium for a wide audience and the most mysterious even for specialists. The depth of the mark that he left in the cultural memory of Europe is evidenced by the possibility, for example, in English to use the word iconoclast (“iconoclast”) outside the historical context, in the timeless meaning of “rebel, subverter of foundations.”

The event outline is as follows. By the turn of the 7th and 8th centuries, the theory of worship of religious images was hopelessly behind practice. The Arab conquests of the mid-7th century led the empire to a deep cultural crisis, which, in turn, gave rise to the growth of apocalyptic sentiments, the multiplication of superstitions and a surge in disordered forms of icon veneration, sometimes indistinguishable from magical practices. According to the collections of miracles of saints, drinking wax from a melted seal with the face of St. Artemy healed a hernia, and Saints Cosmas and Damian healed the sufferer by ordering her to drink, mixed with water, plaster from a fresco with their image.

Such veneration of icons, which did not receive philosophical and theological justification, caused rejection among some clergy who saw in it signs of paganism. Emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717-741), finding himself in a difficult political situation, used this discontent to create a new consolidating ideology. The first iconoclastic steps date back to the year 726/730, but both the theological justification of the iconoclastic dogma and full-fledged repressions against dissidents occurred during the reign of the most odious Byzantine emperor - Constantine V Copronymus (the Eminent) (741-775).

The iconoclastic council of 754, which claimed ecumenical status, took the dispute to a new level: from now on it was not about the fight against superstitions and the implementation of the Old Testament prohibition “Thou shalt not make for yourself an idol,” but about the hypostasis of Christ. Can He be considered imageable if His divine nature is “indescribable”? The “Christological dilemma” was this: icon worshipers are guilty of either depicting on icons only the flesh of Christ without His deity (Nestorianism), or of limiting the deity of Christ through the description of His depicted flesh (Monophysitism).

However, already in 787, Empress Irene held a new council in Nicaea, the participants of which formulated the dogma of icon veneration as a response to the dogma of iconoclasm, thereby offering a full-fledged theological basis for previously unregulated practices. An intellectual breakthrough was, firstly, the separation of “service” and “relative” worship: the first can only be given to God, while in the second “the honor given to the image goes back to the prototype” (the words of Basil the Great, which became the real motto of icon worshipers). Secondly, the theory of homonymy was proposed, that is, the same name, which removed the problem of portrait similarity between the image and the depicted: the icon of Christ was recognized as such not due to the similarity of features, but due to the writing of the name - the act of naming.

In 815, Emperor Leo V the Armenian again turned to iconoclastic policies, thus hoping to build a line of succession with Constantine V, the most successful and most beloved ruler among the troops in the last century. The so-called second iconoclasm accounts for both a new round of repression and a new rise in theological thought. The iconoclastic era ends in 843, when iconoclasm is finally condemned as a heresy. But his ghost haunted the Byzantines until 1453: for centuries, participants in any church disputes, using the most sophisticated rhetoric, accused each other of hidden iconoclasm, and this accusation was more serious than the accusation of any other heresy.

It would seem that everything is quite simple and clear. But as soon as we try to somehow clarify this general scheme, our constructions turn out to be very shaky.

The main difficulty is the state of the sources. The texts through which we know about the first iconoclasm were written much later, and by icon worshipers. In the 40s of the 9th century, a full-fledged program was carried out to write the history of iconoclasm from an icon-worshipping perspective. As a result, the history of the dispute was completely distorted: the works of the iconoclasts are available only in biased samples, and textual analysis shows that the works of the iconoclasts, seemingly created to refute the teachings of Constantine V, could not have been written before the very end of the 8th century. The task of the icon-worshipping authors was to turn the history we have described inside out, to create the illusion of tradition: to show that the veneration of icons (and not spontaneous, but meaningful!) has been present in the church since apostolic times, and iconoclasm is just an innovation (the word καινοτομία is “innovation” in in Greek is the most hated word for any Byzantine), and deliberately anti-Christian. The iconoclasts were presented not as fighters for the purification of Christianity from paganism, but as “Christian accusers” - this word came to mean specifically and exclusively iconoclasts. The parties to the iconoclastic dispute were not Christians, who interpreted the same teaching differently, but Christians and some external force hostile to them.

The arsenal of polemical techniques that were used in these texts to denigrate the enemy was very large. Legends were created about the iconoclasts’ hatred of education, for example, about the burning of the university in Constantinople by Leo III, and Constantine V was credited with participation in pagan rites and human sacrifices, hatred of the Mother of God and doubts about the divine nature of Christ. While such myths seem simple and have long been debunked, others remain at the center of scientific discussions to this day. For example, only very recently it was possible to establish that the brutal reprisal inflicted on Stephen the New, glorified among the martyrs in 766, was connected not so much with his uncompromising icon-worshipping position, as life states, but with his closeness to the conspiracy of political opponents of Constantine V. They do not stop debates about key questions: what is the role of Islamic influence in the genesis of iconoclasm? What was the true attitude of the iconoclasts to the cult of saints and their relics?

Even the language in which we speak about iconoclasm is the language of the victors. The word “iconoclast” is not a self-designation, but an offensive polemical label that their opponents invented and implemented. No “iconoclast” would ever agree with such a name, simply because the Greek word εἰκών has much more meaning than the Russian “icon”. This is any image, including an immaterial one, which means to call someone an iconoclast is to declare that he is fighting both the idea of God the Son as the image of God the Father, and man as the image of God, and the events of the Old Testament as prototypes of the events of the New etc. Moreover, the iconoclasts themselves claimed that they were defending the true image of Christ - the Eucharistic gifts, while what their opponents call an image is in fact not such, but is just an image.

Had their teaching been defeated in the end, it would now be called Orthodox, and we would contemptuously call the teaching of their opponents icon-worship and would talk not about the iconoclastic, but about the icon-worshipping period in Byzantium. However, if this had happened, the entire subsequent history and visual aesthetics of Eastern Christianity would have been different.

6. The West never liked Byzantium

Although trade, religious and diplomatic contacts between Byzantium and the states of Western Europe continued throughout the Middle Ages, it is difficult to talk about real cooperation or understanding between them. At the end of the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire fell apart into barbarian states and the tradition of “Romanity” was interrupted in the West, but preserved in the East. Within a few centuries, the new Western dynasties of Germany wanted to restore the continuity of their power with the Roman Empire and, for this purpose, entered into dynastic marriages with Byzantine princesses. Charlemagne's court competed with Byzantium - this can be seen in architecture and art. However, Charles's imperial claims rather strengthened the misunderstanding between East and West: the culture of the Carolingian Renaissance wanted to see itself as the only legitimate heir of Rome.

The Crusaders attack Constantinople. Miniature from the chronicle “The Conquest of Constantinople” by Geoffroy de Villehardouin. Around 1330, Villehardouin was one of the leaders of the campaign. Bibliothèque nationale de France

By the 10th century, the routes from Constantinople to Northern Italy overland through the Balkans and along the Danube were blocked by barbarian tribes. The only route left was by sea, which reduced communication opportunities and hampered cultural exchange. The division between East and West has become a physical reality. The ideological divide between West and East, fueled by theological disputes throughout the Middle Ages, deepened during the Crusades. The organizer of the Fourth Crusade, which ended with the capture of Constantinople in 1204, Pope Innocent III openly declared the primacy of the Roman Church over all others, citing divine decree.

As a result, it turned out that the Byzantines and the inhabitants of Europe knew little about each other, but were unfriendly towards each other. In the 14th century, the West criticized the corruption of the Byzantine clergy and explained the success of Islam by it. For example, Dante believed that Sultan Saladin could have converted to Christianity (and even placed him in Limbo, a special place for virtuous non-Christians, in his Divine Comedy), but did not do so due to the unattractiveness of Byzantine Christianity. In Western countries, by the time of Dante, almost no one knew Greek. At the same time, Byzantine intellectuals studied Latin only to translate Thomas Aquinas, and did not hear anything about Dante. The situation changed in the 15th century after the Turkish invasion and the fall of Constantinople, when Byzantine culture began to penetrate into Europe along with Byzantine scholars who fled from the Turks. The Greeks brought with them many manuscripts of ancient works, and humanists were able to study Greek antiquity from the originals, and not from Roman literature and the few Latin translations known in the West.

But Renaissance scholars and intellectuals were interested in classical antiquity, not the society that preserved it. In addition, it was mainly intellectuals who fled to the West who were negatively disposed towards the ideas of monasticism and Orthodox theology of that time and who sympathized with the Roman Church; their opponents, supporters of Gregory Palamas, on the contrary, believed that it was better to try to come to an agreement with the Turks than to seek help from the pope. Therefore, Byzantine civilization continued to be perceived in a negative light. If the ancient Greeks and Romans were “theirs,” then the image of Byzantium was entrenched in European culture as oriental and exotic, sometimes attractive, but more often hostile and alien to the European ideals of reason and progress.

The century of European enlightenment completely branded Byzantium. The French enlighteners Montesquieu and Voltaire associated it with despotism, luxury, pomp and ceremony, superstition, moral decay, civilizational decline and cultural sterility. According to Voltaire, the history of Byzantium is “an unworthy collection of pompous phrases and descriptions of miracles” that disgraces the human mind. Montesquieu sees the main reason for the fall of Constantinople in the pernicious and pervasive influence of religion on society and government. He speaks especially aggressively about Byzantine monasticism and clergy, about the veneration of icons, as well as about theological polemics:

“The Greeks - great talkers, great debaters, sophists by nature - constantly entered into religious disputes. Since the monks enjoyed great influence at the court, which weakened as it became corrupted, it turned out that the monks and the court mutually corrupted each other and that evil infected both. As a result, all the attention of the emperors was absorbed in either calming or arousing theological disputes, regarding which it was noticed that they became the more heated, the more insignificant the reason that caused them.”

Thus, Byzantium became part of the image of the barbaric dark East, which, paradoxically, also included the main enemies of the Byzantine Empire - Muslims. In the Orientalist model, Byzantium was contrasted with a liberal and rational European society built on the ideals of Ancient Greece and Rome. This model underlies, for example, the descriptions of the Byzantine court in Gustave Flaubert's drama The Temptation of Saint Anthony:

“The king wipes the scents from his face with his sleeve. He eats from sacred vessels, then breaks them; and mentally he counts his ships, his troops, his people. Now, on a whim, he will burn down his palace with all its guests. He is thinking of rebuilding the Tower of Babel and dethroning the Almighty. Anthony reads all his thoughts from afar on his brow. They take possession of him and he becomes Nebuchadnezzar."

The mythological view of Byzantium has not yet been completely overcome in historical science. Of course, there could be no talk of any moral example from Byzantine history for the education of youth. School curricula were based on the models of classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, and Byzantine culture was excluded from them. In Russia, science and education followed Western models. In the 19th century, a dispute about the role of Byzantium in Russian history broke out between Westerners and Slavophiles. Peter Chaadaev, following the tradition of European enlightenment, bitterly complained about the Byzantine heritage of Rus':

“By the will of fate, we turned for moral teaching, which was supposed to educate us, to the corrupted Byzantium, to the object of deep contempt of these peoples.”

Ideologist of Byzantinism Konstantin Leontyev Konstantin Leontyev(1831-1891) - diplomat, writer, philosopher. In 1875, his work “Byzantism and the Slavs” was published, in which he argued that “Byzantism” is a civilization or culture, the “general idea” of which is made up of several components: autocracy, Christianity (different from Western, “from heresies and schisms”), disappointment in everything earthly, the absence of “an extremely exaggerated concept of the earthly human personality,” rejection of hope for the general well-being of peoples, the totality of some aesthetic ideas, and so on. Since Vseslavism is not a civilization or culture at all, and European civilization is coming to an end, Russia - which inherited almost everything from Byzantium - needs Byzantism to flourish. pointed to the stereotypical idea of Byzantium, which developed due to schooling and the lack of independence of Russian science:

“Byzantium seems to be something dry, boring, priestly, and not only boring, but even something pitiful and vile.”

7. In 1453, Constantinople fell - but Byzantium did not die

Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. Miniature from the Topkapi Palace collection. Istanbul, late 15th century Wikimedia Commons

In 1935, the book “Byzantium after Byzantium” by the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga was published - and its name was established as a designation for the life of Byzantine culture after the fall of the empire in 1453. Byzantine life and institutions did not disappear overnight. They were preserved thanks to Byzantine emigrants who fled to Western Europe, in Constantinople itself, even under the rule of the Turks, as well as in the countries of the “Byzantine commonwealth,” as the British historian Dmitry Obolensky called the Eastern European medieval cultures that were directly influenced by Byzantium - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Rus'. The participants in this supernational unity preserved the legacy of Byzantium in religion, the norms of Roman law, and standards of literature and art.

In the last hundred years of the empire's existence, two factors - the cultural revival of the Palaiologans and the Palamite disputes - contributed, on the one hand, to the renewal of ties between Orthodox peoples and Byzantium, and on the other, to a new surge in the spread of Byzantine culture, primarily through liturgical texts and monastic literature. In the 14th century, Byzantine ideas, texts and even their authors entered the Slavic world through the city of Tarnovo, the capital of the Bulgarian Empire; in particular, the number of Byzantine works available in Rus' doubled thanks to Bulgarian translations.

In addition, the Ottoman Empire officially recognized the Patriarch of Constantinople: as the head of the Orthodox millet (or community), he continued to govern the church, under whose jurisdiction both Rus' and the Orthodox Balkan peoples remained. Finally, the rulers of the Danube principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, even becoming subjects of the Sultan, retained Christian statehood and considered themselves cultural and political heirs of the Byzantine Empire. They continued the traditions of royal court ceremonial, Greek learning and theology, and supported the Constantinople Greek elite, the Phanariots Phanariots- literally “residents of Phanar,” the quarter of Constantinople in which the residence of the Greek patriarch was located. The Greek elite of the Ottoman Empire were called Phanariotes because they lived primarily in this quarter.

Greek revolt of 1821. Illustration from the book “A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times” by John Henry Wright. 1905 The Internet Archive

Iorga believes that Byzantium after Byzantium died during the unsuccessful uprising against the Turks in 1821, which was organized by the Phanariot Alexander Ypsilanti. On one side of the Ypsilanti banner there was the inscription “By this victory” and the image of Emperor Constantine the Great, with whose name the beginning of Byzantine history is associated, and on the other there was a phoenix reborn from the flame, a symbol of the revival of the Byzantine Empire. The uprising was crushed, the Patriarch of Constantinople was executed, and the ideology of the Byzantine Empire subsequently dissolved in Greek nationalism.

Archangel Michael and Manuel II Palaiologos. 15th century Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, Italy / Bridgeman Images / Fotodom

1. A country called Byzantium never existed

Part of Justinian's consular diptych. Constantinople, 521 Diptychs were presented to consuls in honor of their assumption of office. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The residents themselves called themselves Romans- the Romans (Ρωμαίοι), they were ruled by the Roman emperor - basileus(Βασιλεύς τῶν Ρωμαίων), and their capital was New Rome(Νέα Ρώμη) - this is what the city founded by Constantine was usually called.

Where did the word “Byzantium” come from and with it the idea of the Byzantine Empire as a state that arose after the fall of the Roman Empire on the territory of its eastern provinces? The fact is that in the 15th century, along with statehood, the Eastern Roman Empire (as Byzantium is often called in modern historical works, and this is much closer to the self-awareness of the Byzantines themselves), essentially lost a voice heard beyond its borders: the Eastern Roman tradition of self-description found itself isolated within the Greek-speaking lands that belonged to the Ottoman Empire; What was important now was only what Western European scientists thought and wrote about Byzantium.

Hieronymus Wolf. Engraving by Dominicus Custos. 1580 Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig

The Romans, with their historical and cultural tradition, were thus deprived not only of their voice, but also of the right to self-name and self-awareness.

2. The Byzantines didn’t know they weren’t Romans

Autumn. Coptic panel. IV century Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, UK / Bridgeman Images / Fotodom

3. Byzantium was born when Antiquity adopted Christianity

An amulet that protects against the evil eye. Byzantium, V–VI centuries

On one side there is an eye, which is targeted by arrows and attacked by a lion, snake, scorpion and stork.

Hematite amulet. Byzantine Egypt, 6th–7th centuries

The inscriptions identify him as “the woman who suffered from hemorrhage” (Luke 8:43–48). Hematite was believed to help stop bleeding and was very popular in amulets related to women's health and the menstrual cycle.

On the territory of the future Byzantium, an equally unproblematic fusion of pagan and Christian artistic techniques took place for contemporaries: in the 6th century, images of Christ and saints were made using the technique of a traditional Egyptian funeral portrait, the most famous type of which is the so-called Fayum portrait Fayum portrait- a type of funeral portraits common in Hellenized Egypt in the 1st-3rd centuries AD. e. The image was applied with hot paints onto a heated wax layer.. Christian visuality in late Antiquity did not necessarily strive to oppose itself to the pagan, Roman tradition: very often it deliberately (or perhaps, on the contrary, naturally and naturally) adhered to it. The same fusion of pagan and Christian is visible in the literature of late Antiquity. The poet Arator in the 6th century recites in the Roman cathedral a hexametric poem about the acts of the apostles, written in the stylistic traditions of Virgil. In Christianized Egypt in the mid-5th century (by this time, various forms of monasticism had existed here for about a century and a half), the poet Nonnus from the city of Panopolis (modern Akmim) wrote a paraphrase of the Gospel of John in the language of Homer, preserving not only the meter and style, but also consciously borrowing entire verbal formulas and figurative layers from his epic Gospel of John, 1:1-6 (Japanese translation):
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It was in the beginning with God. Everything came into being through Him, and without Him nothing came into being that came into being. In Him was life, and life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. There was a man sent from God; his name is John.

Nonnus from Panopolis. Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, canto 1 (translated by Yu. A. Golubets, D. A. Pospelova, A. V. Markova):
Logos, Child of God, Light born from Light,
He is inseparable from the Father on the infinite throne!
Heavenly God, Logos, because You were the original
Shone together with the Eternal, the Creator of the world,
O Ancient One of the Universe! Everything was accomplished through Him,
What is breathless and in spirit! Outside of Speech, which does a lot,
Is it revealed that it remains? And exists in Him from eternity
Life, which is inherent in everything, the light of short-lived people...<…>
In the bee-feeding thicket
The wanderer of the mountains appeared, inhabitant of the desert slopes,
He is the herald of the cornerstone baptism, the name is
Man of God, John, counselor. .

Portrait of a young girl. 2nd century© Google Cultural Institute

Funeral portrait of a man. III century© Google Cultural Institute

Christ Pantocrator. Icon from the Monastery of St. Catherine. Sinai, mid-6th century Wikimedia Commons

St. Peter. Icon from the Monastery of St. Catherine. Sinai, 7th century© campus.belmont.edu

4. In Byzantium they spoke one language and wrote in another

Indeed, Byzantine Greek is elusive. Its development cannot be considered as a series of progressive, consistent changes, since for every step forward in linguistic development there was also a step back. The reason for this is the attitude of the Byzantines themselves to the language. The language norm of Homer and the classics of Attic prose was socially prestigious. To write well meant to write history indistinguishable from Xenophon or Thucydides (the last historian who decided to introduce into his text old Attic elements that seemed archaic already in the classical era was the witness of the fall of Constantinople Laonikos Chalkokondylos), and epic - indistinguishable from Homer. Throughout the history of the empire, educated Byzantines were literally required to speak one (changed) language and write in another (frozen in classical immutability) language. The duality of linguistic consciousness is the most important feature of Byzantine culture.

Ostracon with a fragment of the Iliad in Coptic. Byzantine Egypt, 580–640

Ostracons, shards of pottery vessels, were used to record Bible verses, legal documents, bills, school assignments, and prayers when papyrus was unavailable or too expensive.

Ostracon with the troparion to the Virgin Mary in Coptic. Byzantine Egypt, 580–640© The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Diglossia, or bilingualism, gave rise to another typically Byzantine phenomenon - metaphrasing, that is, transposition, retelling in half with translation, presentation of the content of the source in new words with a decrease or increase in the stylistic register. Moreover, the shift could go both along the line of complication (pretentious syntax, sophisticated figures of speech, ancient allusions and quotations) and along the line of simplifying the language. Not a single work was considered inviolable, even the language of sacred texts in Byzantium did not have sacred status: the Gospel could be rewritten in a different stylistic key (as, for example, the already mentioned Nonnus of Panopolitanus did) - and this would not bring down anathema on the author’s head. It was necessary to wait until 1901, when the translation of the Gospels into colloquial Modern Greek (essentially the same metaphrase) brought opponents and defenders of linguistic renewal into the streets and led to dozens of victims. In this sense, the indignant crowds who defended the “language of the ancestors” and demanded reprisals against the translator Alexandros Pallis were much further from Byzantine culture not only than they would have liked, but also than Pallis himself.

5. There were iconoclasts in Byzantium - and this is a terrible mystery

Iconoclasm is the most famous period for a wide audience and the most mysterious even for specialists period in the history of Byzantium. The depth of the mark that he left in the cultural memory of Europe is evidenced by the possibility, for example, in English to use the word iconoclast (“iconoclast”) outside the historical context, in the timeless meaning of “rebel, subverter of foundations.”

Such veneration of icons, which did not receive philosophical and theological justification, caused rejection among some clergy who saw in it signs of paganism. Emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717-741), finding himself in a difficult political situation, used this discontent to create a new consolidating ideology. The first iconoclastic steps date back to the years 726-730, but both the theological justification of the iconoclastic dogma and full-fledged repressions against dissidents occurred during the reign of the most odious Byzantine emperor - Constantine V Copronymus (the Eminent) (741-775).

However, already in 787, Empress Irene held a new council in Nicaea, the participants of which formulated the dogma of icon veneration as a response to the dogma of iconoclasm, thereby offering a full-fledged theological basis for previously unregulated practices. An intellectual breakthrough was, firstly, the separation of “service” and “relative” worship: the first can only be given to God, while in the second “the honor given to the image goes back to the prototype” (the words of Basil the Great, which became the real motto of icon worshipers). Secondly, the theory of homonymy, that is, the same name, was proposed, which removed the problem of portrait similarity between the image and the depicted: the icon of Christ was recognized as such not due to the similarity of features, but due to the writing of the name - the act of naming.

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 shaky.

6. The West never liked Byzantium

Although trade, religious and diplomatic contacts between Byzantium and the states of Western Europe continued throughout the Middle Ages, it is difficult to talk about real cooperation or understanding between them. At the end of the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire fell apart into barbarian states and the tradition of “Romanity” was interrupted in the West, but preserved in the East. Within a few centuries, the new Western dynasties of Germany wanted to restore the continuity of their power with the Roman Empire and, for this purpose, entered into dynastic marriages with Byzantine princesses. The court of Charlemagne competed with Byzantium - this can be seen in architecture and art. However, Charles's imperial claims rather strengthened the misunderstanding between East and West: the culture of the Carolingian Renaissance wanted to see itself as the only legitimate heir of Rome.

As a result, it turned out that the Byzantines and the inhabitants of Europe knew little about each other, but were unfriendly towards each other. In the 14th century, the West criticized the corruption of the Byzantine clergy and explained the success of Islam by it. For example, Dante believed that Sultan Saladin could have converted to Christianity (and even placed him in limbo, a special place for virtuous non-Christians, in his Divine Comedy), but did not do so due to the unattractiveness of Byzantine Christianity. In Western countries, by the time of Dante, almost no one knew Greek. At the same time, Byzantine intellectuals studied Latin only to translate Thomas Aquinas, and did not hear anything about Dante. The situation changed in the 15th century after the Turkish invasion and the fall of Constantinople, when Byzantine culture began to penetrate into Europe along with Byzantine scholars who fled from the Turks. The Greeks brought with them many manuscripts of ancient works, and humanists were able to study Greek antiquity from the originals, and not from Roman literature and the few Latin translations known in the West.

“The Greeks - great talkers, great debaters, sophists by nature - constantly entered into religious disputes. Since the monks enjoyed great influence at the court, which weakened as it became corrupted, it turned out that the monks and the court mutually corrupted each other and that evil infected both. As a result, all the attention of the emperors was absorbed in either calming or arousing theological disputes, regarding which it was noticed that they became the more heated, the more insignificant the reason that caused them.”

Thus, Byzantium became part of the image of the barbaric dark East, which paradoxically also included the main enemies of the Byzantine Empire - Muslims. In the Orientalist model, Byzantium was contrasted with a liberal and rational European society built on the ideals of Ancient Greece and Rome. This model underlies, for example, the descriptions of the Byzantine court in Gustave Flaubert's drama The Temptation of Saint Anthony:

“The king wipes the scents from his face with his sleeve. He eats from sacred vessels, then breaks them; and mentally he counts his ships, his troops, his people. Now, on a whim, he will burn down his palace with all its guests. He is thinking of rebuilding the Tower of Babel and dethroning the Almighty. Anthony reads all his thoughts from afar on his brow. They take possession of him and he becomes Nebuchadnezzar."

“By the will of fate, we turned for moral teaching, which was supposed to educate us, to the corrupted Byzantium, to the object of deep contempt of these peoples.”

“Byzantium seems to be something dry, boring, priestly, and not only boring, but even something pitiful and vile.”

7. In 1453, Constantinople fell - but Byzantium did not die

Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. Miniature from the Topkapi Palace collection. Istanbul, late 15th century Wikimedia Commons

In 1935, the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga’s book “Byzantium after Byzantium” was published - and its name became established as a designation for the life of Byzantine culture after the fall of the empire in 1453. Byzantine life and institutions did not disappear overnight. They were preserved thanks to Byzantine emigrants who fled to Western Europe, in Constantinople itself, even under the rule of the Turks, as well as in the countries of the “Byzantine commonwealth,” as the British historian Dmitry Obolensky called the Eastern European medieval cultures that were directly influenced by Byzantium - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Rus'. The participants in this supernational unity preserved the legacy of Byzantium in religion, the norms of Roman law, and standards of literature and art.

Greek revolt of 1821. Illustration from the book “A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times” by John Henry Wright. 1905 The Internet Archive

BYZANTIUM(Byzantine Empire), the Roman Empire in the Middle Ages with its capital in Constantinople - New Rome. The name "Byzantium" comes from the ancient name of its capital (Byzantium was located on the site of Constantinople) and can be traced according to Western sources no earlier than the 14th century.

Problems of ancient succession

The symbolic beginning of Byzantium is considered to be the year of the founding of Constantinople (330), with the fall of which on May 29, 1453 the empire ceased to exist. The “division” of the Roman Empire 395 into Western and Eastern represented only a formal legal boundary of eras, while the historical transition from late antique state legal institutions to medieval ones took place in the 7-8 centuries. But even after that, Byzantium retained many traditions of ancient statehood and culture, which made it possible to distinguish it into a special civilization, modern, but not identical to the medieval Western European community of peoples. Among its value guidelines, the most important place was occupied by the ideas of the so-called “political orthodoxy,” which combined the Christian faith, preserved by the Orthodox Church, with the imperial ideology of the “Sacred Power” (Reichstheologie), which went back to the ideas of Roman statehood. Together with the Greek language and Hellenistic culture, these factors ensured the unity of the state for almost a millennium. Periodically revised and adapted to the realities of life, Roman law formed the basis of Byzantine legislation. Ethnic identity for a long time (until the 12th-13th centuries) did not play a significant role in the self-identification of imperial citizens, who were officially called Romans (in Greek - Romans). In the history of the Byzantine Empire, one can distinguish the early Byzantine (4-8 centuries), middle Byzantine (9-12 centuries) and late Byzantine (13-15 centuries) periods.

Early Byzantine period

In the initial period, the borders of Byzantium (Eastern Roman Empire) included lands east of the dividing line 395 - the Balkans with Illyricum, Thrace, Asia Minor, Syro-Palestine, Egypt with a predominantly Hellenized population. After the barbarians captured the western Roman provinces, Constantinople rose even more as the seat of emperors and the center of the imperial idea. From here in the 6th century. under Emperor Justinian I (527-565), the “restoration of the Roman state” was carried out, after many years of wars, which returned Italy with Rome and Ravenna, northern Africa with Carthage and part of Spain under the rule of the empire. In these territories, Roman provincial government was restored and the application of Roman legislation in its Justinian edition ("Justinian Code") was extended. However, in the 7th century. The appearance of the Mediterranean was completely transformed as a result of the invasion of the Arabs and Slavs. The Empire lost the richest lands of the East, Egypt and the African coast, and its greatly reduced Balkan possessions were cut off from the Latin-speaking Western European world. The rejection of the eastern provinces resulted in an increase in the dominant role of the Greek ethnos and the cessation of polemics with the Monophysites, which had been such an important factor in the internal policy of the empire in the east in the previous period. Latin, formerly the official state language, falls out of use and is replaced by Greek. In the 7th-8th centuries. under the emperors Heraclius (610-641) and Leo III (717-740), the late Roman provincial division was transformed into a thematic structure, which ensured the viability of the empire for subsequent centuries. Iconoclastic upheavals of the 8th-9th centuries. on the whole, did not shake its strength, contributing to the consolidation and self-determination of its most important institutions - the state and the Church.

Middle Byzantine period

The empire of the Middle Byzantine period was a global "superpower" whose stable, centralized statehood, military might, and sophisticated culture stood in stark contrast to the fragmented powers of the Latin West and Muslim East of the period. The "Golden Age" of the Byzantine Empire lasted from approximately 850 to 1050. During these centuries, its possessions extended from southern Italy and Dalmatia to Armenia, Syria and Mesopotamia, the long-standing problem of the security of the northern borders of the empire was solved by the annexation of Bulgaria (1018) and the restoration of the former Roman border along the Danube. The Slavs who settled Greece in the previous period were assimilated and subordinated to the empire. The stability of the economy was based on developed commodity-money relations and the circulation of gold solidus, minted since the time of Constantine I. The fem system made it possible to maintain the military power of the state and the immutability of its economic institutions, which ensured dominance in the political life of the capital's bureaucratic aristocracy, and therefore was steadily supported throughout the 10th century. - early 11th centuries The emperors of the Macedonian dynasty (867-1056) embodied the idea of chosenness and permanence of the power established by God, the only source of earthly blessings. The return to icon veneration in 843 marked reconciliation and the resumption of the symphony of “concord” between the state and the Church. The authority of the Patriarchate of Constantinople was restored, and in the 9th century. it already claims dominance in Eastern Christendom. The baptism of the Bulgarians, Serbs, and then the Slavic Kievan Rus expanded the boundaries of Byzantine civilization, outlining the area of spiritual community of the Eastern European Orthodox peoples. In the Middle Byzantine period, the foundations were laid for what modern researchers have defined as the “Byzantine Commonwealth,” the visible expression of which was the hierarchy of Christian rulers who recognized the emperor as the head of the earthly world order, and the Patriarch of Constantinople as the head of the Church. In the east, such rulers were the Armenian and Georgian kings, whose independent possessions bordered the empire and the Muslim world.

Soon after the death of the most prominent representative of the Macedonian dynasty, Basil II the Bulgarian Slayer (976-1025), decline began. It was caused by the self-destruction of the feminine system, which occurred as the stratum of the landowning, military-dominated aristocracy grew. The inevitable increase in private forms of dependence of the Byzantine peasantry weakened state control over it and led to a clash of interests between the capital's bureaucrats and the provincial nobility. Contradictions within the ruling class and unfavorable external circumstances caused by the invasions of the Seljuk Turks and Normans led to the loss of Byzantium in Asia Minor (1071) and southern Italian possessions (1081). Only the accession of Alexei I, the founder of the Komnenos dynasty (1081-1185) and the head of the military-aristocratic clan that came to power with him, made it possible to bring the country out of a protracted crisis. As a result of the energetic policy of the Komnenos, Byzantium in the 12th century. reborn as a powerful nation. She again began to play an active role in world politics, keeping the Balkan Peninsula under her control and claiming the return of Southern Italy, but the main problems in the east were never fully resolved. Most of Asia Minor remained in Seljuk hands, and the defeat of Manuel I (1143-80) in 1176 at Myriokephalon ended hopes of its return.

In the economy of Byzantium, Venice began to play an increasingly important place, which, in exchange for military assistance, sought from the emperors unprecedented privileges in eastern trade. The femme system is being replaced by a system of pronias, based on private legal forms of exploitation of the peasantry and which existed until the end of Byzantine history.

The emerging decline of Byzantium occurred simultaneously with the renewal of life in medieval Europe. The Latins flocked to the East, first as pilgrims, then as merchants and crusaders. Their military and economic expansion, which did not stop since the end of the 11th century, aggravated the spiritual alienation that was growing in relations between Eastern and Western Christians. Its symptom was the Great Schism of 1054, which marked the final divergence of Eastern and Western theological traditions and led to the separation of Christian denominations. The Crusades and the establishment of the Latin Eastern Patriarchates further contributed to the tension between the West and Byzantium. The capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 and the subsequent division of the empire brought an end to the thousand-year existence of Byzantium as a great world power.

Late Byzantine period

After 1204, several states, Latin and Greek, were formed in the territories that were once part of Byzantium. The most significant among the Greeks was the Nicene Empire of Asia Minor, whose rulers led the struggle to recreate Byzantium. With the end of the "Nicene exile" and the return of the empire to Constantinople (1261), the last period of the existence of Byzantium begins, called after the ruling dynasty Paleologus (1261-1453). Its economic and military weakness in these years was compensated by the growth of the spiritual authority of the primate of the See of Constantinople within the Orthodox world, and the general revival of monastic life caused by the spread of the teachings of the hesychasts. Church reforms of the late 14th century. unified the written tradition and liturgical practice and spread it to all areas of the Byzantine Commonwealth. The arts and learning at the imperial court experienced a brilliant flourishing (the so-called Palaiologan Renaissance).

From the beginning of the 14th century. The Ottoman Turks took Asia Minor from Byzantium, and from the middle of the same century began to seize its possessions in the Balkans. Of particular importance for the political survival of the Palaiologos empire were relations with the West and the inevitable union of churches as a guarantee of assistance against foreign invaders. Church unity was formally restored at the Ferraro-Florence Council of 1438-1439, but it had no effect on the fate of Byzantium; the majority of the population of the Orthodox world did not accept the belated union, considering it a betrayal of the true faith. Constantinople is all that remains of the 15th century. from the once great empire - was left to its own devices, and on May 29, 1453 fell under the onslaught of the Ottoman Turks. With his fall, the thousand-year-old stronghold of Eastern Christianity collapsed and the history of the state founded by Augustus in the 1st century ended. BC e. The subsequent (16-17) centuries are often distinguished in the so-called post-Byzantine period, when there was a gradual decline and conservation of the typological features of Byzantine culture, whose stronghold became the monasteries of Athos.

Iconography in Byzantium

Characteristic features of Byzantine icons are the frontality of the image, strict symmetry in relation to the central figure of Christ or the Mother of God. The saints on the icons are static, in a state of ascetic, dispassionate peace. The gold and purple colors on the icons express the idea of royalty, blue - divinity, white symbolizes moral purity. The icon of the Mother of God of Vladimir (early 12th century), brought to Rus' from Constantinople in 1155, is considered a masterpiece of Byzantine icon painting. The image of the Mother of God expresses the idea of sacrifice and maternal love.

M. N. Butyrsky

The Eastern Roman Empire arose at the beginning of the 4th century. n. e. In 330, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, founded the city of Constantinople on the site of the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium (hence the name given by historians to the “Christian Empire of the Romans” after its fall). The Byzantines themselves considered themselves "Romans", i.e. "Romans", the power - "Roman", and the emperor - Basileus - a continuer of the traditions of the Roman emperors. Byzantium was a state in which a centralized bureaucratic apparatus and religious unity (as a result of the struggle of religious movements in Christianity, Orthodoxy became the dominant religion of Byzantium) were of great importance for maintaining the continuity of state power and territorial integrity during almost 11 centuries of its existence.

In the history of the development of Byzantium, five stages can be roughly distinguished.

At the first stage (IV century - mid-VII century), the empire is a multinational state in which the slave system is replaced by early feudal relations. The political system of Byzantium is a military-bureaucratic monarchy. All power belonged to the emperor. Power was not hereditary; the emperor was proclaimed by the army, the senate and the people (although this was often nominal). The advisory body under the emperor was the Senate. The free population was divided into classes. The system of feudal relations almost did not develop. Their peculiarity was the preservation of a significant number of free peasants, peasant communities, the spread of colony and the distribution of a large fund of state lands to slaves.

Early Byzantium was called the “country of cities,” numbering in the thousands. Centers such as Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch each had 200-300 thousand inhabitants. In dozens of medium-sized cities (Damascus, Nicaea, Ephesus, Thessaloniki, Edessa, Beirut, etc.) 30-80 thousand people lived. Cities that had polis self-government occupied a large place in the economic life of the empire. The largest city and trading center was Constantinople.

Byzantium traded with China and India, and after conquering the Western Mediterranean under Emperor Justinian, it established hegemony over trade with Western countries, turning the Mediterranean Sea into a “Roman lake” again.

In terms of the level of development of crafts, Byzantium had no equal among Western European countries.

During the reign of Emperor Justinian I (527-565), Byzantium reached its peak. The reforms carried out under him contributed to the centralization of the state, and the Justinian Code (a code of civil law), developed during his reign, was in effect throughout the existence of the state, having a great influence on the development of law in the countries of feudal Europe.

At this time, the empire was experiencing an era of grandiose construction: military fortifications were being erected, cities, palaces and temples were being built. The construction of the magnificent Church of St. Sophia, which became famous throughout the world, dates back to this period.

The end of this period was marked by a renewed intensification of the struggle between the church and the imperial power.

The second stage (second half of the 7th century - first half of the 9th century) took place in an intense struggle with the Arabs and Slavic invasions. The territory of the power was halved, and now the empire became much more homogeneous in national composition: it was a Greek-Slavic state. Its economic basis was the free peasantry. The barbarian invasions created favorable conditions for the liberation of peasants from dependence, and the main legislative act that regulated agrarian relations in the empire was based on the fact that the land was at the disposal of the peasant community. The number of cities and the number of citizens are sharply decreasing. Of the large centers, only Constantinople remains, and its population is reduced to 30-40 thousand. Other cities of the empire have 8-10 thousand inhabitants. In small ones, life freezes. The decline of cities and the “barbarization” of the population (i.e., the increase in the number of “barbarians,” primarily Slavs, among the basileus’ subjects) could not but lead to the decline of culture. The number of schools, and therefore the number of educated people, is declining sharply. Enlightenment is concentrated in monasteries.

It was during this difficult period that the decisive clash took place between the basileus and the church. The main role at this stage is played by the emperors of the Isaurian dynasty. The first of them - Leo III - was a brave warrior and a subtle diplomat, he had to fight at the head of the cavalry, attack Arab ships in a light boat, make promises and immediately break them. It was he who led the defense of Constantinople when in 717 the Muslim army blocked the city from both land and sea. The Arabs surrounded the capital of the Romans with a wall with siege towers opposite the gates, and a huge fleet of 1800 ships entered the Bosporus. And yet Constantinople was saved. The Byzantines burned the Arab fleet with “Greek fire” (a special mixture of oil and sulfur, invented by the Greek scientist Kallinnik, which was not extinguished by water; enemy ships were doused with it through special siphons). The naval blockade was broken, and the strength of the Arab land army was undermined by the harsh winter: the snow lay for 100 days, which is surprising for these places. Famine began in the Arab camp; the soldiers ate first the horses and then the corpses of the dead. In the spring of 718, the Byzantines defeated the second squadron, and the empire’s allies, the Bulgarians, appeared in the rear of the Arab army. After standing under the city walls for almost a year, the Muslims retreated. But the war with them continued for more than two decades, and only in 740 Leo III inflicted a decisive defeat on the enemy.

In 730, at the height of the war with the Arabs, Leo III brought down brutal repressions on supporters of icon veneration. Icons were removed from the walls in all churches and destroyed. They were replaced by an image of a cross and patterns of flowers and trees (the emperor's enemies quipped that the temples began to resemble gardens and forests). Iconoclasm was the last and unsuccessful attempt of Caesar to spiritually defeat the church. From this point on, emperors were limited to the role of defenders and guardians of tradition. The appearance of the iconographic subject “The Emperor Bowing Before Christ” at precisely this time reflects the significance of the change that had taken place.

In all areas of the life of the empire, conservative and protective traditionalism is increasingly established.

The third stage (second half of the 9th century - mid-11th century) takes place under the rule of the emperors of the Macedonian dynasty. This is the “golden age” of the empire, a period of economic growth and cultural flourishing.

Even during the reign of the Isaurian dynasty, a situation arose when the predominant form of land ownership was state, and the basis of the army was made up of stratiot warriors who served for the land allotment. With the Macedonian dynasty, the practice of widespread distribution of large lands and empty lands to the nobility and military commanders began. Dependent peasants-parikis (communal members who lost their land) worked on these farms. From the layer of landowners (dinats) a class of feudal lords is formed. The character of the army also changed: the militia of the stratiots was replaced in the 10th century. heavily armed, armored cavalry (cataphracts), which became the main striking force of the Byzantine army.

IX-XI centuries - period of urban growth. An outstanding technical discovery - the invention of the oblique sail - and state support for craft and trading corporations made the cities of the empire masters of Mediterranean trade for a long time. First of all, this applies, of course, to Constantinople, which becomes the most important center of transit trade between the West and the East, the richest city in Europe. The products of Constantinople artisans - weavers, jewelers, blacksmiths - will become the standard for European artisans for centuries. Along with the capital, provincial cities are also experiencing growth: Thessaloniki, Trebizond, Ephesus and others. Black Sea trade is reviving again. The monasteries, which became centers of highly productive crafts and agriculture, also contributed to the economic rise of the empire.

Economic recovery is closely linked to the revival of culture. In 842, the activities of the University of Constantinople were restored, in which the largest scientist of Byzantium, Leo the Mathematician, played an outstanding role. He compiled a medical encyclopedia and wrote poetry. His library included books by the church fathers and ancient philosophers and scientists: Plato and Proclus, Archimedes and Euclid. Several inventions are associated with the name of Leo the Mathematician: the use of letters as arithmetic symbols (i.e., the beginning of algebra), the invention of light signaling connecting Constantinople with the border, the creation of moving statues in the palace. Singing birds and roaring lions (the figures were moved by water) amazed the foreign ambassadors. The university was located in the hall of the palace called Magnavra, and received the name Magnavra. Grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, arithmetic, astronomy, and music were taught.

Simultaneously with the university, a theological patriarchal school was created in Constantinople. The education system is being revived throughout the country.

At the end of the 11th century, under Patriarch Photius, an exceptionally educated man who had collected the best library of his time (hundreds of titles of books by outstanding minds of antiquity), extensive missionary activity began to Christianize the barbarians. Priests and preachers trained in Constantinople are sent to the pagans - the Bulgarians and Serbs. The mission of Cyril and Methodius to the Great Moravian Principality was of great importance, during which they created Slavic writing and translated the Bible and church literature into Slavic. This lays the foundations for spiritual and political upsurge in the Slavic world. At the same time, the Kiev prince Askold converted to Christianity. Another century later, in 988, the Kiev prince Vladimir was baptized in Chersonesos, took the name Vasily (“royal”) and took the sister of the Byzantine emperor Vasily Anna as his wife. The replacement of paganism with Christianity in Kievan Rus influenced the development of architecture, painting, literature, and contributed to the enrichment of Slavic culture.

It was during the reign of Vasily II (976-1026) that the Roman power reached the apogee of its foreign policy power. The intelligent and energetic emperor was a harsh and cruel ruler. Having dealt with his internal political enemies with the help of the Kyiv squad, the basileus began a difficult war with Bulgaria, which lasted intermittently for 28 years, and finally inflicted a decisive defeat on his enemy, the Bulgarian Tsar Samuil.

At the same time, Vasily waged constant wars in the East and by the end of his reign he returned Northern Syria and part of Mesopotamia to the empire, and established control over Georgia and Armenia. When the emperor died during preparations for a campaign in Italy in 1025, Byzantium was the most powerful state in Europe. However, it was his reign that demonstrated a disease that would erode its power for centuries to come. From the point of view of Constantinople, the introduction of barbarians to the Orthodox religion and Greek culture automatically meant their subordination to the Basileus of the Romans, the main custodian of this spiritual heritage. Greek priests and teachers, icon painters and architects contributed to the spiritual awakening of the Bulgarians and Serbs. The attempt of the basileus to preserve the universal character of their power, relying on the power of a centralized state, contradicted the objective course of the process of Christianization of the barbarians and only depleted the strength of the empire.

The tension of all the forces of Byzantium under Vasily II led to a financial crisis. The situation became even more aggravated due to the constant struggle between the capital and provincial nobility. As a result of the unrest, Emperor Roman IV (1068-1071) was betrayed by his entourage and suffered a severe defeat in the war with a new wave of Muslim conquerors - the Seljuk Turks. After the victory in 1071 at Manzikert, the Muslim cavalry took control of all of Asia Minor within a decade.

However, the defeats of the end of the 11th century. were not the end of the empire. Byzantium had enormous vitality.

The next, fourth (1081-1204) stage of its existence was a period of new growth. The emperors of the Komnenos dynasty were able to consolidate the forces of the Romans and revive their glory for another century. The first three emperors of this dynasty - Alexei (1081-1118), John (1118-1143) and Manuel (1143-1180) - proved themselves to be brave and talented military leaders, subtle diplomats and far-sighted politicians. Relying on the provincial nobility, they stopped the internal unrest and conquered the Asia Minor coast from the Turks, bringing the Danube states under control. The Komnenos entered the history of Byzantium as “Westernizing” emperors. Despite the split between the Orthodox and Catholic churches in 1054, they turned to Western European kingdoms for help in the fight against the Turks (for the first time in the history of the empire). Constantinople became a gathering place for participants in the 1st and 2nd Crusades. The Crusaders promised to recognize themselves as vassals of the empire after they reconquered Syria and Palestine, and after the victory, Emperors John and Manuel forced them to fulfill their promises and recognize the power of the empire. Surrounded by Western knights, the Komnenos were very similar to Western European kings. But, although the support of this dynasty - the provincial nobility - also surrounded itself with dependent vassals, the feudal ladder did not arise in the empire. The vassals of the local nobility were simply warriors. It is also characteristic that the basis of the army in this dynasty were mercenaries from Western Europe and knights who settled in the empire and received lands and castles here. Emperor Manuel subjugated Serbia and Hungary to the empire. His troops fought in Italy, where even Milan recognized the power of the empire; tried to subjugate Egypt by making expeditions to the Nile Delta. The century-long reign of the Komnenos ends in unrest and civil war.

The new dynasty of Angels (1185-1204) only deepens the crisis by patronizing Italian merchants and dealing an irreparable blow to domestic crafts and trade. Therefore, when in 1204 the knights of the 1st Crusade suddenly changed their route, intervened in the internal political struggle of the empire, captured Constantinople and founded the Latin Empire on the Bosphorus, the disaster was natural.

The inhabitants and defenders of Constantinople outnumbered the crusaders tens of times, and yet the city fell, although it withstood the siege and onslaught of a more serious enemy. The reason for the defeat was, of course, that the Byzantines were demoralized by internal turmoil. An important role was also played by the fact that the policy of the Komnenos in the second half of the 12th century. (for all its external success) was contrary to the interests of the empire, because the limited resources of the Balkan Peninsula and parts of Asia Minor did not allow them to claim the role of a “universal empire”. At that time, the real universal significance was no longer so much the imperial power as the power of the ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. It was no longer possible to ensure the unity of the Orthodox world (Byzantium, Serbia, Rus', Georgia) relying on the military power of the state, but relying on church unity was still quite realistic. It turned out that the religious foundations of the unity and strength of Byzantium were undermined, and for half a century the Latin Empire of the Crusaders established itself in the place of the Roman Empire.

However, the terrible defeat could not destroy Byzantium. The Romans retained their statehood in Asia Minor and Epirus. The most important stronghold for gathering forces was the Nicene Empire, which, under Emperor John Vatatzes (1222-1254), accumulated the economic potential necessary to create a strong army and preserve culture.

In 1261, Emperor Michael Palaiologos liberated Constantinople from the Latins, and this event began the fifth stage of the existence of Byzantium, which would last until 1453. The military potential of the power was small, the economy was devastated by Turkish raids and internal strife, crafts and trade fell into decline. When the Palaiologi, continuing the policy of the Angels, relied on Italian merchants, Venetians and Genoese, local artisans and merchants could not resist the competition. The decline of the craft undermined the economic power of Constantinople and deprived it of its last strength.

The main significance of the Palaiologos empire is that it preserved the culture of Byzantium until the 15th century, when the peoples of Europe were able to adopt it. Two centuries are the flowering of philosophy and theology, architecture and icon painting. It seemed that the disastrous economic and political situation only stimulated the rise of the spirit, and this time is called the “Palaeologian revival.”

The Athos Monastery, founded in the 10th century, became the center of religious life. Under Komnenos it grew in number, and in the 14th century. The Holy Mountain (the monastery was located on the mountain) became a whole city in which thousands of monks of different nationalities lived. Great was the role of the Patriarch of Constantinople, who led the churches of independent Bulgaria, Serbia, and Rus' and pursued universal policies.

Under the Palaiologos, the University of Constantinople was revived. There are trends in philosophy that seek to revive ancient culture. An extreme representative of this trend was George Plithon (1360-1452), who created an original philosophy and religion based on the teachings of Plato and Zoroaster.

The "Palaeologian Revival" is the flowering of architecture and painting. To this day, viewers are amazed by the beautiful buildings and amazing frescoes of Mystras (a city near ancient Sparta).

The ideological and political life of the empire from the end of the 13th century. to the 15th century takes place in the struggle over the union between Catholics and Orthodox. The growing onslaught of the Muslim Turks forced the Palaiologos to seek military assistance from the West. In exchange for saving Constantinople, the emperors promised to achieve the subordination of the Orthodox Church to the Pope (union). The first such attempt was made by Michael Paleologus in 1274. This caused an explosion of indignation among the Orthodox population. And when, just before the death of the city, in 1439, the union was nevertheless signed in Florence, it was unanimously rejected by the inhabitants of Constantinople. The reasons for this were, of course, the hatred that the Greeks felt for the “Latins” after the pogrom of 1204 and the half-century of Catholic domination on the Bosporus. In addition, the West was never able (or did not want) to provide effective military assistance to Constantinople and the empire. The two crusades of 1396 and 1440 ended in the defeat of European armies. But no less important was the fact that union for the Greeks meant abandoning the mission of guardians of the Orthodox tradition, which they had undertaken. This abdication would have erased the centuries-old history of the empire. That is why the monks of Athos, and after them the overwhelming majority of the Byzantines, rejected the union and began to prepare for the defense of the doomed Constantinople. In 1453, a huge Turkish army besieged and took “New Rome” by storm. The "Power of the Romans" ceased to exist.

The importance of the Byzantine Empire in the history of mankind is difficult to overestimate. In the dark ages of barbarism and the early Middle Ages, she conveyed to her descendants the heritage of Hellas and Rome and preserved Christian culture. Achievements in the field of science (mathematics), literature, fine arts, book miniatures, decorative and applied arts (ivory, metal, artistic fabrics, cloisonne enamels), architecture, and military affairs had a significant impact on the further development of the culture of Western Europe and Kievan Rus. And the life of modern society cannot be imagined without Byzantine influence. Sometimes Constantinople is called the "golden bridge" between the West and the East. This is true, but it is even more correct to consider the power of the Romans as a “golden bridge” between antiquity and modern times.

The Byzantine Empire, in short, is a state that appeared in 395, after the collapse of the Great Roman Empire. It could not withstand the invasion of barbarian tribes and was divided into two parts. Less than a century after its collapse, the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist. But she left behind a strong successor - the Byzantine Empire. The Roman Empire lasted for 500 years, and its eastern successor for more than a thousand, from the 4th to the 15th centuries.
Initially, the Eastern Roman Empire was called "Romania". In the West, for a long time it was called the “Greek Empire”, since most of its population was Greek. But the inhabitants of Byzantium themselves called themselves Romans (in Greek - Romans). It was only after its fall in the 15th century that the Eastern Roman Empire began to be called "Byzantium".

This name comes from the word Byzantium - this is how Constantinople, the capital of the empire, was first called.
The Byzantine Empire, in short, occupied a huge territory - almost 1 million square meters. kilometers. It was located on three continents - Europe, Africa and Asia.
The capital of the state is the city of Constantinople, founded during the time of the Great Roman Empire. At first it was the Greek colony of Byzantium. In 330, Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the empire here and named the city by his own name - Constantinople. In the Middle Ages it was the richest city in Europe.

The Byzantine Empire could not avoid the invasion of the barbarians, but it avoided such losses as the west of the Roman Empire thanks to wise policies. For example, Slavic tribes participating in the great migration of peoples were allowed to settle on the outskirts of the empire. Thus, Byzantium received populated borders, the population of which was a shield against the remaining invaders.
The basis of the Byzantine economy was production and trade. It included many rich cities that produced almost all goods. In the V - VIII centuries, the heyday of Byzantine ports began. Land roads became unsafe for merchants due to long wars in Europe, so the sea route became the only possible one.
The Empire was a multi-ethnic country, so the culture was amazingly diverse. Its basis was the ancient heritage.
On May 30, 1453, after two months of stubborn resistance by the Turkish army, Constantinople fell. Thus ended the thousand-year history of one of the great powers of the world.