The Byzantine Empire

For a thousand years after the western provinces of the Roman Empire collapsed, a Roman state survived in the east, governed from a city built expressly to be a new Rome. This state, whose subjects called themselves Rhomaioi — Romans — is known to history as the Byzantine Empire, a label coined by sixteenth-century scholars long after it ceased to exist. The Byzantines themselves never used the term and would have been astonished by it. They ruled in unbroken legal continuity from Augustus and Diocletian, spoke Greek, prayed in churches decorated with mosaics of Christ Pantokrator, and faced a parade of enemies — Sassanid Persians, Arab caliphs, Bulgar khans, Rus’ princes, Norman adventurers, and Seljuk Turks — that would have overwhelmed almost any other medieval polity. Their survival is one of the central facts of the Early Middle Ages.

This article surveys that thousand-year Roman continuation from its foundation under Constantine I in 330 to the eve of the great Macedonian renaissance, when emperors such as Basil II stretched Byzantine power from southern Italy to the Caucasus and from the Danube to Syria. For deeper treatment of specific topics, see the Emperor Justinian and his reign, Byzantine government and administration, Byzantine religion and the Orthodox Church, and Byzantine economy and trade.

A New Rome on the Bosphorus

The Roman Empire had long recognized that it could not be governed efficiently from a single city. Diocletian’s Tetrarchy of the late third century divided authority among multiple augusti and caesars, and it was in this context that Constantine, son of Helena and ruler of the western provinces after his defeat of Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312, began to favor the ancient Greek colony of Byzantion. On 11 May 330, Constantine dedicated a new city on the site, calling it Nova Roma — New Rome. Almost immediately, however, it became known as Constantinopolis, the city of Constantine, and the name stuck.

Constantinople occupied a remarkable strategic position. It sat on a peninsula between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, commanding the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, the narrow straits that connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. From its walls a single fleet could regulate the grain, timber, fish, and slaves that flowed out of Scythia and the Pontic steppe. Constantine encircled the new capital with land walls, populated it with citizens drawn from every province, endowed it with a senate and a hippodrome modeled on Rome, and built a Great Palace connected to the imperial box in the circus. He also commissioned the original great church that would be replaced, after the Nika riots of 532, by the Hagia Sophia of Justinian. Within a generation, Constantinople was the largest Christian city in the world.

The eastern half of the empire that surrounded the new capital was wealthier, more urbanized, and more culturally Hellenized than the western provinces. Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, and the Balkans each produced tax revenues, grain, glass, silk, and soldiers on a scale the Latin west could not match. Cities such as Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Nicomedia, and Thessalonica had long histories of Hellenistic culture and commerce, and their tax revenues funded a standing army and a complex civil service that the fragmented western provinces could no longer afford after 400. The road network, the cursus publicus (imperial postal service), the imperial mints, the annona (grain dole), the senatorial order, and the Roman law courts all continued in the east more or less unchanged for centuries. When barbarian invasions and internal collapse stripped Rome itself of its imperial court in the fifth century — the subject of the broader narrative of the fall of the Western Roman Empire — the eastern empire continued largely intact. The survival of the eastern Roman state during the fifth century is detailed in survival of the Eastern Roman Empire.

The Theodosian Dynasty and the Fifth Century

For the first century of Constantinople’s existence, the city was governed by members of the house of Theodosius. Theodosius I (r. 379–395) had been the last emperor to rule a united empire. After his death, the empire was divided between his sons, Honorius in the west and Arcadius in the east, and the two halves drifted apart. The eastern court at Constantinople navigated the fifth century with more success than its western counterpart, partly because the eastern provinces retained more taxable wealth and partly because the Theodosian dynasty proved willing to bargain with barbarian neighbors — paying subsidies to the Huns, accepting Gothic settlers in the Balkans, and shifting armies from the Danube frontier to confront Persia.

The fifth century was, for the eastern empire, a century of consolidation rather than catastrophe. Theodosius II, who ruled from 408 to 450, built the great land walls that would protect the capital for a thousand years, founded the University of Constantinople with its thirty-one chairs of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, law, and medicine, and codified the law in the Theodosian Code of 438. The reign of his successor Marcian saw the convening of the Council of Chalcedon, and the reigns of Leo I (457–474) and Zeno (474–491) saw the survival of the eastern throne through the turmoil surrounding the fall of Romulus Augustulus in 476. Crucially, the eastern court continued to mint gold solidi, maintain a professional navy, and field substantial armies, capabilities the western empire had already lost. The eastern empire thus became, by default, the senior surviving Roman state long before the last western emperor was deposed.

Major religious councils of the fourth and fifth centuries also consolidated the east’s influence. The Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Constantinople in 381 gave the city of Constantine a permanent place in Christian hierarchy second only to Rome, and the Council of Chalcedon in 451, although it provoked the Monophysite schism that would haunt Byzantine religious life for centuries, defined the orthodox Christology accepted in Constantinople. By the time the western empire fell in 476, the eastern emperor Zeno was already treating Constantinople as the senior capital of Roman government.

The Age of Justinian

The single most consequential reign in Byzantine history is that of the Justinian I (r. 527–565). A Latin-speaking peasant from Tauresium in the Balkans, Justinian had been raised in the palace of his uncle, the emperor Justin I, and inherited a state that was fiscally solvent, militarily strong, and culturally ambitious. He was determined to restore the Roman Empire to the boundaries it had enjoyed under the Antonines and to base that restoration on a single, rational, written law.

Between 528 and 534, a commission under the jurist Tribonian compiled the Corpus Juris Civilis, comprising the Codex of imperial constitutions, the Digesta of juristic opinions, and the Institutiones for legal education. The fourth part, the Novellae, gathered Justinian’s own later laws. The Corpus would be rediscovered in the eleventh century and become the foundation of civil law across Europe; its medieval influence is comparable only to the Bible’s. For a full account of this legal project, see the Code of Justinian.

In 532 Justinian survived the Nika riots, a week-long urban insurrection that nearly toppled him and burned much of Constantinople. His wife, the former actress Theodora, reportedly persuaded him to stay and fight; the suppression of the riots killed an estimated 30,000 citizens. Within weeks of the ashes cooling, Justinian commissioned the Hagia Sophia, the church of Holy Wisdom, which would remain the largest cathedral in Christendom for nearly a thousand years.

His generals, especially Belisarius and then Narses, recovered North Africa from the Vandals (534), Italy from the Ostrogoths (552), and parts of southern Spain from the Visigoths (552). These conquests were ephemeral: within two decades of his death most of the Italian and African gains had been lost to new invaders, and the cost of the wars crippled the treasury. But for a generation, the Mediterranean was once again a Roman lake, and Justinian’s architects, working in brick, marble, and mosaic, gave the early Middle Ages one of its most enduring artistic languages, a style now called Early Byzantine, described in detail in early Christian and Byzantine art.

The Crisis of the Seventh Century

Justinian’s achievements masked structural problems that emerged in the following decades. The plague that struck Constantinople in 541 — the so-called Plague of Justinian, the first recorded bubonic pandemic — recurred repeatedly throughout the sixth and seventh centuries and killed perhaps a third of the empire’s population. The eastern frontier, which Justinian had pushed into the Caucasus, came under sustained assault from the Sassanid Persians under Khosrow II, whose armies sacked Jerusalem in 614, seized the True Cross, and reached the walls of Constantinople itself in 626 in coordination with the Avars and Slavs. The emperor Heraclius (r. 610–641) mounted a brilliant counter-offensive, reformulating the empire on Greek lines, reforming the army, and marching his troops deep into Persian Mesopotamia; he culminated the war by recapturing Jerusalem in 630 and the True Cross. But he had only just won when an entirely new threat emerged from the Arabian peninsula.

The rise of Islam and the Arab conquests of the 630s and 640s stripped the empire of its southern and eastern provinces in a single generation. Egypt, the grain basket of the Mediterranean, fell to the Rashidun Caliphate by 642. Syria, Palestine, the wealthy exarchate of North Africa, and the Mediterranean islands followed within a decade. The great cities of Alexandria, Antioch, and Carthage — once the urban heart of the eastern Mediterranean — were lost almost without recovery. The empire’s tax base collapsed, its armies were repeatedly defeated on open Syrian and Egyptian terrain by the mobile Arab cavalry, and Constantinople itself was besieged twice, in 674–678 and again in 717–718, the second time saved by the new weapon of Greek fire and by the Bulgar Khan Tervel’s timely intervention.

By the time of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, Byzantine territory had shrunk from the largest in the Mediterranean to a Greek-speaking rump consisting of Anatolia, parts of the Balkans, southern Italy, and a few islands. For the context of the Arab conquests, see the Arab conquests.

This catastrophe forced one of the most remarkable transformations in pre-modern statecraft: the theme system. Rather than maintain expensive professional armies and a vast tax-collecting bureaucracy, the empire settled soldier-farmers on hereditary military lands in Anatolia, organized in regional themes, each commanded by a strategos and supported by local taxes. Themes are examined in the Byzantine government and administration. The thematic reforms are usually associated with the emperor Heraclius’s grandson Constans II and his successors, although their precise origins are debated; some historians credit the emperor Constans II (r. 641–668), others the reforms of the Heraclian dynasty more broadly. Either way, the thematic system allowed the empire to mobilize larger numbers of defenders at lower cost than the old limitanei and comitatenses system of late antiquity.

Simultaneously, the empire’s religious life was convulsed by the Byzantine iconoclasm, an imperial policy begun under Leo III in 726 that prohibited the production and veneration of religious images. Iconoclasm lasted, with interruptions, until 843, when the empress Theodora restored the icons. The controversy is treated in the broader context of the iconoclasm controversy in early medieval Christianity, and in why Byzantine icons were destroyed. Iconoclasm is sometimes read as a religious controversy and sometimes as a political one; in either case, it shaped the visual and theological culture of Orthodoxy for centuries.

The Isaurian and Amorian Dynasties

The Isaurian dynasty (717–802), named for the Anatolian origin of Leo III, presided over the empire’s defense during the second great Arab siege of Constantinople (717–718) and consolidated the thematic system. The successful repulse of the Umayyad siege, in which the emperor’s army and the Bulgars under Khan Tervel destroyed the besieging Arab host, is often cited as one of the most consequential battles in world history, since it prevented the Arab conquest of Europe through Anatolia. Leo’s son Constantine V (r. 741–775) was an active iconoclast and a successful general against both the Arabs and the Bulgars; he campaigned annually across Anatolia and across the Balkan frontier, rebuilding the ruined Bulgar state and ultimately forcing it to acknowledge Byzantine suzerainty. The decades from 730 to 775 are, by some measures, the most successful in Byzantine military history between the age of Belisarius and the age of Nikephoros Phokas, and Constantine V remains one of the empire’s most capable soldier-emperors.

Under his successors, the political situation grew more troubled. The empress Irene of Athens (r. 797–802) convened the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, restoring icons in a first attempt that would prove only temporary; she was also the first woman to rule the empire in her own right, with the title basileus rather than basilissa, a precedent of considerable constitutional importance. The iconoclast reaction of 815–843 meant that the restoration of 787 had to be repeated, in a way that the Orthodox Church still celebrates annually on the first Sunday of Lent as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.

The Amorian dynasty (820–867) suffered a series of military reverses. The emperor Theophilus lost Amorion to the Caliphate in 838; he died in 842, leaving the throne to his son Michael III. Theodora, Michael’s mother and regent, ended iconoclasm definitively in 843, an event still celebrated in the Orthodox Church as the Triumph of Orthodoxy. The dynasty ended in bloodshed in 867 when Basil I, an Armenian peasant who had risen in the palace, murdered Michael and founded the dynasty that would give the empire its most famous century.

The Macedonian Renaissance

The Macedonian dynasty (867–1056), named by historians after the supposed Macedonian origin of Basil I, presided over a long revival in every dimension of Byzantine life. Population recovered, Anatolian cities were rebuilt, new themes were created on the recovered frontier, and a self-conscious revival of classical learning produced the encyclopedic works of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (r. 913–959), the legal compilations of Basil I and Leo VI, and the chronicles of John Skylitzes and others.

Military success returned as well. The general John Kourkouas recovered Crete from the Emirate of Córdoba in 961. The emperor Nikephoros II Phokas (r. 963–969), a professional soldier, reconquered Cilicia, Cyprus, and much of Syria, and obtained from his Armenian vassals the first Christian foothold in the region in three centuries. His successor John I Tzimiskes (r. 969–976) drove the Hamdanid Arabs from Antioch and the upper Euphrates. The dynasty reached its apex under Basil II (r. 976–1025), the “Bulgar-Slayer,” whose decisive victory at Kleidion in 1014 extinguished the First Bulgarian Empire and extended Byzantine authority across the Balkans.

The Macedonian renaissance is also visible in art, architecture, and the codification of the Orthodox liturgy. The Nea Ekklesia of Basil I and the surviving mosaics of Hagia Sophia, including the great Deësis panel, all date from this period. On the broader context, see the early Christian and Byzantine art and the illuminated manuscripts of the early Middle Ages.

The Photian Schism and the Conversion of the Slavs

The cultural reach of Byzantium in the ninth and tenth centuries can be measured by the conversion of the Slavic world. In 862, the Slavic duke of Great Moravia, Rastislav, appealed to Constantinople for missionaries who knew the Slavic tongue; the patriarch Photius sent his former student Constantine (later known as Cyril) and his brother Methodius, who devised the Glagolitic alphabet to translate the Gospels and the liturgy into Old Church Slavonic. The mission, contested by the Latin clergy of Bavaria and ultimately expelled from Moravia, was welcomed in the First Bulgarian Empire, where Boris I (r. 852–889) accepted baptism in 864 and his son Simeon established a Slavic-speaking literary culture based on the Cyrillic alphabet, a development detailed in the Cyril and Methodius.

The Photian schism of 863–867, an estrangement between Pope Nicholas I and Patriarch Photius over jurisdiction in Bulgaria, foreshadowed the deeper break of 1054. The conversion of the Bulgars drew them into the orbit of Constantinople, and Bulgaria soon produced its own remarkable literary golden age under Tsar Simeon, whose royal court at Preslav consciously imitated the imperial culture of Byzantium. To the north, the conversion of Grand Prince Vladimir of Kyiv in 988 brought the Rus’ permanently into the Orthodox world; the cathedral of Hagia Sophia in Kiev, built in the eleventh century, was a direct copy of the Justinianic original.

Constantinople as the Christian Capital

The fall of the western empire had not deprived the city of its founder of primacy, but it had changed the meaning of primacy. The bishop of Rome, standing in the apostolic see of Peter, claimed universal jurisdiction over the Christian oikoumene; the patriarch of Constantinople, seated in the new Rome, presided over a body of bishops in the empire’s surviving capital. The two thrones of Christendom competed for influence throughout the early Middle Ages, and their competition shaped the Christianization of the Slavic and Balkan peoples. Missionaries from Constantinople, the most famous being Cyril and Methodius, converted the Bulgars, the Serbs, and eventually the Rus’, drawing them into the orbit of the Byzantine Church.

The schism of 1054, in which Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida and Patriarch Michael Cerularius exchanged mutual excommunications, is often cited as the formal separation of Eastern and Western Christianity, but the underlying tensions were much older. The use of leavened or unleavened bread in the Eucharist, the Filioque clause in the Latin Creed, the authority of the pope, and the relationship between secular and ecclesiastical power had all been contested for centuries. By the time the Macedonian dynasty ended, the Orthodox and Catholic churches had already developed distinct theological, liturgical, and political identities that would shape the medieval Mediterranean.

Government, Law, and Administration

The Byzantine emperor was conceived as God’s chosen vicegerent on earth, an autocrat whose authority derived ultimately from heaven rather than from any earthly institution. In practice, however, every emperor ruled through a complex and evolving bureaucracy whose offices are described in the Byzantine government and administration. Provincial governors, theme strategoi, the eunuch officials of the imperial household, the quaestor who drafted laws, the logothetes who managed finance, and the Patriarch of Constantinople who crowned the new emperor all participated in the constant negotiation between autocracy and the rule of law that defined Byzantine government. After Justinian, the Basilika, a Greek compilation promulgated under the Macedonian dynasty, systematized Roman law for the Greek-speaking east.

The court was a stage. The emperor was surrounded by elaborate ritual drawn from late Roman precedent: the purple birth chamber (the Porphyra, named for the porphyry stone in which imperial children were born), the red shoes, the crown, the proskynesis (prostration) of courtiers, and the public ceremonies of the hippodrome, the Church, and the Great Palace. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, who never expected to reign and wrote extensively when he was a sidelined prince, preserved many of these ceremonies in his De Ceremoniis for posterity. The imperial cult of the sovereign, however, was never fully separate from the Christian cult of Christ; from the time of Constantine, the emperor was understood to be a Christian ruler, and his authority was exercised within the discipline of the Church even when he sometimes defied it.

The City of Constantinople

Constantinople was, in population and wealth, the largest city in the early medieval world. Sixth-century estimates suggest half a million or more inhabitants, declining to perhaps 100,000 in the darkest years of the eighth century, and rising again to several hundred thousand by the Macedonian renaissance. The city was ringed by the great land walls of Theodosius II, three lines of defense protecting the land approach; the seaward defenses, including the chain that could be drawn across the Golden Horn, were also formidable. Within the walls lay the Great Palace, the hippodrome, the Augusteum with its many churches, the aqueduct of Valens, the covered bazaars, the imperial libraries, the warehouses and porticoes of the Mese, the great cisterns that still survive, and the population of Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, Jews, Italians, and Slavs that made up a cosmopolitan Mediterranean population.

The Great Church of Hagia Sophia, rebuilt in 532–537 under Justinian and dedicated to Holy Wisdom, was the religious heart of the city. The Patriarch of Constantinople officiated in it; the emperor attended major feasts in it; and ambassadors from foreign powers were received in it as a way of demonstrating the empire’s reach. The cathedral, the imperial palace, and the hippodrome formed a kind of sacred civic triangle in which the political, religious, and ceremonial life of the city was concentrated. The surviving Hagia Sophia programme is examined in early Christian and Byzantine art.

The Byzantine Economy

The Byzantine economy, examined in detail in the Byzantine economy and trade, was the most developed in the early medieval Mediterranean. Constantinople alone may have contained half a million inhabitants in the sixth century, fed in part by Egyptian grain and supplied by Mediterranean trade in silk, olive oil, wine, and manufactured goods. The empire’s gold coin, the solidus (or hyperpyron in its later form), was the most reliable currency in the medieval world and was imitated from Anglo-Saxon England to Central Asia. The seventh-century loss of Egypt and Syria forced the empire to develop new economic relationships, especially with the Slavic Balkans, the Italian city-states of Venice and Amalfi, and eventually the Caliphate of Baghdad, whose Abbasid rulers were major trading partners.

Silk is a case in point. Justinian’s famous acquisition of silkworm eggs, smuggled from Central Asia by Nestorian monks in the sixth century, allowed the empire to produce its own silk and to break the Persian monopoly on the trade; silk production became a major state industry, with imperial factories and workshops. Porphyry, the imperial red stone, came only from a single quarry in the eastern desert of Egypt; when the Arabs seized Egypt, the supply of porphyry was cut off, and the quarries of Cappadocia, Phrygia, and Greece were worked to supply imperial building. Glass, wine, olive oil, wheat, cured fish, and timber were major export items, and the empire’s merchants, working in close partnership with the Italians, dominated Levantine trade for centuries. The economic ties between Byzantium and the Italian maritime republics — Venice, Genoa, and Pisa — would become, in the long run, as politically significant as they were commercially important.

Language and Identity

The Byzantines spoke a medieval form of Greek that evolved continuously from the classical and Hellenistic koine. Latin remained the official language of the army and of imperial law until the seventh century; the laws of Justinian were issued in Latin, and the famous legal collection described in the article on the Code of Justinian was still a Latin compilation. But soldiers, merchants, and the imperial family itself increasingly spoke Greek, and by the time of Heraclius Greek had become the empire’s principal administrative language. For more on this transition, see language spoken by the Byzantines.

On the identity question, see why the Byzantines called themselves Romans. Briefly, they did so because they believed they were Romans, the surviving Roman state in a world of new kingdoms. The citizens of Charlemagne’s empire called them “Greeks” in an attempt to deny their Roman claim, but the Byzantines regarded the Carolingian imperial title of 800 as an act of usurpation; see the Carolingian Empire for that context.

Enemies and Neighbors

The Byzantines faced a succession of formidable neighbors. The Sassanid Persians, conquered by Heraclius, gave way to the Caliphate after 636; the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates remained the principal eastern enemy until the ninth century. The Bulgars, who established a state south of the Danube under Khan Krum in the early ninth century, ruled the most powerful Slavic state of the early Middle Ages and at times rivaled Byzantium itself; Krum defeated the emperor Nikephoros I in battle in 811 and used the latter’s skull as a drinking cup. The conversion of their tsar Boris I to Christianity in 864 brought them into the cultural orbit of Constantinople, and Boris’s son Simeon built a court at Preslav that consciously imitated the imperial culture of the Macedonian renaissance. The Rus’, Scandinavian and Slavic founders of Kyivan Rus’, raided Constantinople in 860 and 907 and traded with it as a great commercial emporium; the commercial treaty of 911 and the conversion of the Vladimir the Great in 988 drew Rus’ permanently into the Orthodox Christian world. To the west, the Lombards, the Carolingians, and the Normans contested Byzantine holdings in southern Italy; the Italian peninsula is treated in the Lombards in Italy and the Carolingian Empire.

The Byzantines handled these relationships with a mixture of war, diplomacy, marriage alliance, and ceremonial reception. Foreign envoys were received at the Great Palace in elaborate rituals codified in the tenth-century De Ceremoniis of Constantine VII, and foreign brides were sometimes married into the imperial family — the most famous example being Theophanu, a Byzantine princess almost certainly related to John I Tzimiskes (her exact parentage is debated, but she was probably his niece or grand-niece), who married Holy Roman Emperor Otto II in 972. Diplomatic gifts — silks, relics, icons, gold coin — moved in both directions, and the Byzantines were past masters of using the display of imperial wealth to overawe and divide their enemies.

Art, Architecture, and the Survival of Antiquity

The Byzantine world preserved an astonishing amount of classical Greek learning, even as western Europe forgot it. Greek manuscripts of Homer, Plato, Thucydides, and the Church Fathers circulated in monastic and imperial libraries in far greater numbers than in the Latin west. The library of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the libraries of imperial foundations, and the great monastic libraries of Mount Athos, Patmos, and the Studite monastery in Constantinople preserved a continuous record of Greek letters. Byzantine art (see early Christian and Byzantine art) developed a distinctive visual language: gold-ground mosaics, hierarchical frontality, the icon of the Pantokrator, and the domed centralized plan exemplified by Hagia Sophia and propagated across the Orthodox world. Theodora’s patronage of Hagia Sophia after the Nika riots established a template for monumental church building that would be repeated in monastic centers on Mount Athos, in the Balkans, and in Kyivan Rus’. On the broader architectural context, see pre-Romanesque architecture in the early Middle Ages.

The great age of Byzantine art and architecture falls in two phases. The first, the Justinianic, is best represented by the surviving fabric of Hagia Sophia, with its innovative pendentive dome, marble revetments, and gold-ground mosaics. The second, the Macedonian, is represented by the great surviving mosaic programs of Hagia Sophia — including the enthroned Virgin and Child in the apse and the great Deësis panel of Christ flanked by the Virgin and John the Baptist — and by the apse mosaics of the church of Hagia Sophia in Thessalonica. The Macedonian period also produced the great ivory triptychs, the so-called Romanos ivories, the Paris Psalter illuminations, and the work of artists whose names, like the famous tenth-century mosaicist who signed his work in Hagia Sophia, occasionally survive.

Byzantine art and learning reached the wider medieval world through several channels. Missionaries such as Cyril and Methodius translated Greek liturgical and theological texts into Old Church Slavonic using the Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts they had devised, drawing Bulgaria and the Slavic world into the cultural orbit of Byzantium. The conversion of Grand Prince Vladimir of Kyivan Rus’ in 988 brought Byzantine architectural and iconographic conventions into the great cathedrals of Kyivan Rus’, from the original Hagia Sophia of Kiev to the great cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir. By the eleventh century, the artistic and ecclesiastical traditions of Constantinople reached from southern Italy to the upper Volga.

A Roman State in a Medieval World

The Byzantine Empire is, in many ways, the most important institution of the Early Middle Ages. While the Germanic successor kingdoms in the west reinvented Roman forms of government, taxation, and literacy from fragments, the eastern empire carried the Roman state forward, mostly intact, for another seven centuries after the western collapse. It preserved Roman law in Greek, Roman administration in modified form, and the Greek classical heritage that would eventually return to western Europe through the Crusades and through the Arabic translations produced in Abbasid Baghdad.

By the year 1000, the Byzantine Empire of Basil II stood at the apex of its medieval power. Its currency circulated from the Indus to the Atlantic. Its patriarch presided over the largest Christian communion in the world. Its diplomatic service corresponded with every major court from Cordoba to Peking. Its legal tradition, codified by Justinian and codified again in the Macedonian Basilika, remained the most sophisticated in Europe. Its art and liturgy shaped the Christian world from the Balkans to the Rus’ and from the Caucasus to Ethiopia. And it had done all of this while surviving three of the most destructive forces in early medieval history: the Justinianic plague, the Arab conquests, and the iconoclast controversy.

For deeper treatment of any of the topics raised here, the reader is encouraged to follow the cross-references linked above. The reign of the Emperor Justinian is treated separately, as are government and administration, religion and the Orthodox Church, and economy and trade. For the political and military context in which the empire emerged, see the broader treatment of the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the early Middle Ages as a whole.