In Maturity, Eighth To Eleventh Centuries
The history of the empire, after the greatest Arab onslaughts had been
faced and their results assimilated, offered a dizzying series of weak and
strong emperors, periods of vigor alternating with seeming decay. Arab
pressure continued. Conquest of the island of Crete in the 9th century allowed
Muslim harassment of Byzantine shipping in the Mediterranean for several
centuries. Slavic kingdoms, especially that of Bulgaria, periodically pressed
Byzantine territory in the Balkans, though at times military success and
marriage alliances brought Byzantine control over the feisty Bulgarian
kingdom. Thus while a Bulgarian king in the 10th century took the title of
tsar, a Slavic version of the word Caesar, steady Byzantine pressure through
war eroded the regional kingdom. In the 11th century the Byzantine emperor
Basil II, known appropriately enough as Bulgaroktonos, or slayer of the
Bulgarians, used the empire's wealth to bribe many Bulgarian nobles and
generals. He defeated the Bulgarian army in 1014, blinding as many as 15,000
captive soldiers - the sight of whom brought on the Bulgarian king's death.
Thus did Bulgaria become part of the empire, its aristocracy settling in
Constantinople and merging with the leading Greek families.
The Empire's Fluctuating Fortunes
Obviously, the Byzantine Empire was a state frequently beleaguered, where
military arrangements continued to command great attention. On balance,
however, the empire flourished until the 11th century. It entered a
particularly stable period during the 9th and 10th centuries, when a new
ruling dynasty managed to avoid the quarrels over succession to the imperial
throne that had bedeviled many heirs before and after Justinian. The result
was growing prosperity and solid political rule. The luxury of the court and
its buildings steadily increased. Elaborate ceremonies and rich imperial
processions created a magnificence designed to dazzle the empire's subjects.
Briefly, at the end of the 10th century, the Byzantine emperor may have been
the most powerful single monarch on earth, with a capital city whose rich
buildings and abundant popular entertainments awed visitors from western
Europe and elsewhere, while giving Eastern rulers a growing confidence in the
validity of their own institutions and values.
Rather than charting the details of specific rulers and some of the
bloody battles the empire won or lost, it is important to emphasize the three
crucial features of Byzantine society before its long but definitive decline:
first, what the main social and political characteristics were - what defined
the Byzantine; second, how the empire moved steadily apart from Western
Christendom; and third, how Byzantine influence spread steadily northward.
Byzantine Society And Politics
The Byzantine political system bore unusual resemblance to the earlier
patterns in China. The emperor was held to be ordained by God, head of church
as well as state. He appointed church bishops and passed religious and secular
laws. The elaborate court rituals symbolized the ideals of a divinely
inspired, all-powerful ruler, though they also often immobilized rulers and
inhibited innovative policy. At key points women held the imperial throne,
while maintaining the ceremonial power of the office.
Supplementing the centralized imperial authority was one of history's
most elaborate bureaucracies. Trained in Greek classics, philosophy, and
science in a secular school system that paralleled but contrasted with church
education for the priesthood, Byzantine bureaucrats could be recruited from
all social classes. As in China, aristocrats predominated, but there was some
openness to talent among this elite of highly educated scholars. Bureaucrats
were specialized into various offices, with officials close to the emperor
being mainly eunuchs. Provincial governors were appointed from the center and
charged with keeping tabs on military authorities. An elaborate system of
spies helped preserve loyalty, while also creating intense distrust even among
friends. It is small wonder that the word Byzantine came to refer to complex
and convoluted institutional arrangements. At the same time, the system was
sufficiently successful to constitute one of the cements that preserved the
longest-lived single government structure the Mediterranean world has ever
known.
Much of the empire's success depended on careful military organization.
Byzantine rulers adapted the later Roman system by recruiting troops locally
and rewarding them with grants of land in return for their military service.
The land could not be sold, but sons inherited its administration in return
for continued military responsibility. Many outsiders, particularly Slavs and
Armenian Christians, were recruited for the army in this fashion.
Increasingly, hereditary military leaders assumed considerable regional power,
displacing more traditional and better-educated aristocrats. One emperor,
Michael II, was a product of this system and was notorious for his hatred of
Greek education and his overall personal ignorance. On the other hand, the
military system had obvious advantages in protecting a state recurrently under
attack from Muslims of various sorts - Persians, Arabs, and later Turks - as
well as nomadic intruders from central Asia. Until the 15th century, the
Byzantine Empire effectively blocked the path to Europe for most of these
groups.
Socially and economically the empire depended on Constantinople's control
over the countryside, with the bureaucracy regulating trade and controlling
food prices. The large peasant class was vital in supplying goods and also in
providing the bulk of tax revenues; food prices were kept artificially low -
in order to content the numerous urban lower classes - in a system supported
largely by taxes on the hard-pressed peasantry. Other cities were modest in
size - Athens, for example, dwindled - with the focus on the capital city and
its food needs. The empire developed a far-flung trading network with Asia to
the east and Russia and Scandinavia to the north. Silk production expanded in
the empire - with silk worms and techniques initially imported from China -
and various luxury products, including cloth, carpets, and spices were sent
northward. This gave the empire a favorable trading position with less
sophisticated lands. Only China produced luxury goods of comparable quality.
The empire also traded actively with India, the Arabs, and East Asia, while
receiving simple products from western Europe and Africa. At the same time the
large merchant class never gained significant political power, in part because
of the elaborate network of governmental controls. In this, Byzantium again
resembled China somewhat and differed notably from the looser social and
political networks of the West, where rising merchants gained greater voice.
Byzantine cultural life centered on the secular traditions of Hellenism,
so important in the education of bureaucrats, and on the evolving traditions
of Eastern, or Orthodox, Christianity. While a host of literary and artistic
creations resulted from this climate, there was little fundamental innovation
outside of art and architecture. The Byzantine strength lay in preserving and
commenting on past forms more than in developing new ones. A distinct
Byzantine style had developed fairly early in art and architecture. The
adaptation of Roman domed buildings, the elaboration of powerful and richly
colored religious mosaics, and a tradition of icon painting - paintings of
saints and other religious figures, often richly ornamented - expressed this
artistic impulse and its marriage with Christianity. The blue and gold
backgrounds set with richly dressed religious figures were meant to display on
earth the unchanging brilliance of heaven. The important controversy over
religious art arose in the 8th century, when a new emperor attacked the use of
religious images in worship (probably responding to Muslim claims that
C ristians were idol-worshipers). This attack, called iconoclasm because of
the breaking of images, roused huge p otest from Byzantine monks, which
briefly threatened a split between church and stater After a long and complex
battle, icon use was gradually restored, while the tradition of state control
over church affairs was also reasserted. Cultural issues in Byzantium
reflected strong feelings, in part the fruit of the great diversity of peoples
and cultural habits under the empire's sway, even if major new intellectual
principles did not result. A certain amount of diversity could be accepted,
because of common allegiance to Christianity and the military and
administrative effectiveness of the empire at its best.
The Schism Between East And West
Byzantine culture and politics, as well as its economic orientation
toward Asia and northeastern Europe, helped explain the growing break between
its Eastern version of Christianity and the Western version headed by the pope
in Rome. There were many milestones in this rift. Different rituals opened as
the West translated the Greek Bible into Latin in the 4th century. Later,
Byzantine emperors deeply resented papal attempts to interfere in the
iconoclastic dispute, for the popes, understandably enough, hoped to loosen
state control over the Eastern church in order to make it conform more fully
to their own idea of church-state relations. There was also scornful hostility
to efforts by a Frankish ruler, Charlemagne, to proclaim himself a Roman
emperor in the 9th century - Byzantine officials knew full well that they were
the true heirs of Rome and that Western rulers were crude and unsophisticated.
They did, however, extend some recognition to the "Emperor of the Franks."
Contact between the two branches of Christianity trailed off, though
neither East nor West cared to make a definitive break. Then in 1054 an
ambitious church patriarch in Constantinople raised a host of old issues,
including a quarrel over what kind of bread to use for the celebration of
Christ's last supper in church mass. He also attacked the Roman Catholic
practice, developed some centuries earlier, of insisting on celibacy for its
priests; Eastern Orthodox priests could marry. Delegations of the two churches
discussed these disputes, but this led only to new bitterness. The Roman pope
finally excommunicated the patriarch and his followers - that is, banished
them from Christian fellowship and the sacraments; the patriarch, no slouch,
responded by excommunicating all Roman Catholics. Thus the split between the
Roman Catholic church and Eastern Orthodoxy - the Byzantine or Greek, as well
as the Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, and others - became formal and has
endured to this day.
The East-West split fell short of complete divorce. A common Christianity
with many shared or revived classical traditions and frequent commercial and
cultural contacts continued to enliven the relationship between the two
European civilizations. But the split did represent more than a passing
quarrel or even the numerous differences that had developed in religious
practices. It also reflected significant distinctions in political systems,
most obviously in the principles of church-state relations but also between an
imperial administration and the more divided Western state system. And it
reflected the different patterns of development the two civilizations followed
during the postclassical millennium. Byzantium, for all its ups and downs, was
well aware of its advantages over the West during the early centuries
following Rome's collapse. The East-West split occurred right at the end of
Byzantium's period of greatest glory. By this point, however, the West was
beginning to develop new strengths of its own, and its dynamism would over the
next few centuries eclipse that of most of eastern Europe.
The Empire's Decline
Shortly after the schism between East and West, the Byzantine Empire
entered a long period of decline. Turkish invaders who had converted to Islam
in central Asia began to press on its eastern borders, having already gained
increasing influence in the Muslim caliphate. In the later 11th century,
Turkish troops, the Seljuks, seized almost all the Asiatic provinces of the
empire, thus cutting off the most prosperous sources of tax revenue as well as
the territories that had supplied most of the empire's food. The empire
staggered along for another four centuries, but its doom, at least as a
significant power, was virtually sealed.
Eastern emperors appealed to Western leaders for help against the Turks,
but their requests were largely ignored. The appeal helped motivate Western
Crusades to the Holy Land, but this did not help the Byzantines. At the same
time, Italian cities, blessed with powerful navies, gained in Constantinople
increasing advantages, such as special trading privileges, a sign of the shift
in power balance between East and West. One Western Crusade, in 1204,
ostensibly set up to conquer the Holy Land from the Muslims, actually turned
against Byzantium. Led by greedy Venetian merchants, the Crusade attacked and
conquered Constantinople, briefly unseating the emperor altogether and
weakening the whole imperial structure. But the West was not yet powerful
enough to hold this ground, and a small Byzantine Empire was restored, able
through careful diplomacy to survive for another two centuries. Not only
Western and Turkish pressure but also the creation of new, independent Slavic
kingdoms in the Balkans, such as Serbia, showed the empire's diminished power.
Turkish settlements pressed ever closer to Constantinople in the northern
Middle East - in the area that is now Turkey - and finally, in 1453, a Turkish
sultan brought a powerful army, equipped by artillery purchased from the West,
against the city, which fell after two months. By 1461 the Turks had conquered
remaining pockets of Byzantine control, including most of the Balkans,
bringing Islamic power farther into eastern Europe than ever before. The great
Eastern Empire was no more.
The fall of Byzantium was one of the great events in world history, and
we will deal with its impact in several later chapters. It was a great event
because the Byzantine Empire had been so durable and important, anchoring a
vital corner of the Mediterranean even amid the rapid surge of Islam. The
empire's trading contacts and its ability to preserve and disseminate
classical and Christian learning made it a vital unit during the whole
postclassical period. Its influence e sily survived its demise. The Turks as
well as the major Slavic regions carried on the key Byzantine traditions.
Ottoman Turkish administration, once installed in Constantinople, reproduced
many Byzantine administrative procedures and some of their military
techniques. Turkish architects began to build bigger domed mosques, as they
learned how the Byzantines had built their churches. The Ottoman Empire,
pushed through much of the Middle East, was an Islamic state, and no single
set of traditions defined its operation. Particularly as it functioned in what
is now Turkey and southeastern Europe, however, it carried on many of the
features that had marked its Byzantine predecessor and made it so successful.
