Byzantium

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East vs. West

Why was it that the west had fallen into political fragmentation while the east remained rich, powerful, and united?  There are a few major reasons.  First, Constantinople itself played a major role in the power and wealth of the east.  Whereas Rome had shrunk steadily over the years, especially after its sacking in 410 and the move of the western imperial government to the Italian city of Ravenna (which was more easily defensible), Constantinople had somewhere around 500,000 residents.  That can be compared to the capital of the Gothic kingdom of Gaul, Toulouse, which had 15,000 (which was a large city by the standards of the time for western Europe!).  Not only was Constantinople impregnable to invaders, but its population of proud Romans repeatedly massacred barbarians who tried to seize power, and they deposed unpopular emperors who tried to rule as military tyrants rather than true emperors possessing sufficient Roman “virtue.”

The east had long been the richest part of the empire, and because of its efficient bureaucracy and tax-collecting systems, much more wealth flowed into the imperial coffers in the east than it did in the west.  Each year, the imperial government in Constantinople brought in roughly 270,000 pounds of gold in tax revenue, as compared to about 20,000 in the west.  This made vastly better-equipped, trained, and provisioned armies possible in the east.  Furthermore, the west was still dominated by various families of unbelievably rich Roman elites who undermined the power, authority, and financial solvency of the western imperial government by refusing to sacrifice their own prerogatives in the name of a stronger united empire.  In the east, while nobles were certainly rich and powerful, they were nowhere near as powerful as their western counterparts.

There is another factor to consider, one that is more difficult to pin down than the amount of tax revenue or the existence of Constantinople’s walls.  Simply put, Roman identity – the degree to which social elites, soldiers, and possibly regular citizens considered themselves “Roman” and remained loyal to the Empire – seems to have been stronger in the east than the west.   In the east, the strength of the capital, the success of the armies, and the allegiance of elites to Rome as an idea encouraged the continued strength of Roman identity.  Even if poor farmers still had little to thank the Roman state for in their daily lives, their farms were intact and local leaders were still Roman, not Gothic or Frankish or Vandal.

Lastly, the east enjoyed a simple stroke of good luck in the threats it faced from outside of the borders: the barbarians went west and Persia did not launch major invasions.   Eastern Roman armies had to repulse threats and maintain the borders, but they did not face the overwhelming odds of their western Roman counterparts.  Finally, despite Persia’s overall strength and coherence, there was a lull in Persian militarism that lasted through the entire fifth century.

Justinian

The most important early emperor of Byzantium was Justinian, who ruled from 527 to 565.  Justinian was the last Roman emperor to speak Latin as his native tongue; afterwards, all emperors spoke Greek.  He is remembered for being both an incredibly fervent Christian, a major military leader, the sponsor of some of the most beautiful and enduring Byzantine architecture in existence (such as the Hagia Sophia discussed in the video below), and the husband of probably the most powerful empress in the history of the empire, a former actress and courtesan named Theodora.

Justinian created a tradition that was to last for all of Byzantine history: that of the emperor being both the spiritual leader of the Christian Church and the secular ruler of the empire itself.  By the time the western empire fell, the archbishops of Rome had begun their attempts to assert their authority over the church (they would not succeed even in the west for many centuries, however).  Those claims were never accepted in the east, where it was the emperor who was responsible for laying down the final word on matters of religious doctrine.  Justinian felt that it was his sacred duty as leader of the greatest Christian empire in the world to enforce religious uniformity among his subjects and to stamp out heresy.  He called himself “beloved of Christ,” a title the later emperors would adopt as well.  While he was never able to force all of his subjects to conform to Christian orthodoxy (especially in rural regions far from the capital city), he did launch a number of attacks and persecutory campaigns against heretical sects.

The word persecution comes from the Latin persequi, meaning to hunt down.

One aspect of Justinian’s focus on Christian purification was the destruction of the ancient traditions of paganism in Greece and the surrounding areas initiated by his Christian predecessors.  The Olympics had already been shut down by the emperor Theodosius I back in 393 CE (he objected to their status as a pagan religious festival, not an athletic competition).  Justinian insisted that all teachers and tutors convert to Christianity and renounce their teaching of the Greek classics; when they refused in 528, he shut down Plato’s Academy, functioning at that point for almost 1,000 years. 

Justinian did not just enforce religious uniformity, he also imposed Roman law on all of his subjects.  The empire had traditionally left local customs and laws alone so long as they did not interfere in the important business of tax collection, troop recruitment, and loyalty to the empire.  Justinian saw Roman law as an aspect of Roman unity, however, and sought to stamp out other forms of law under his jurisdiction.  He had legal experts go through the entire corpus of Roman law, weed out the contradictions, and figure out the laws that needed to be enforced.  He codified this project in the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law or the Justinian Code), which forms the direct textual antecedent for most of the legal systems still in use in Europe. 

 

The word antecedent comes from the Latin antecedere, meaning to go before or precede.

The word precede comes from the Latin prae, meaning before, and cedere, meaning to go.

Although the Justinian Code was based on the previous nine centuries of gathered law, Roman Law itself had changed over the course of the fifth century with the Christianization of the Empire. By the time of Justinian’s law code, Jews had lost civil rights to the extent that the law forbade them from testifying in court against Christians. Jews would further lose civil rights in those Germanic kingdoms whose law was influenced by Roman law as well. The reason for this lack of Jewish civil rights was that many Christians blamed Jews for the execution of Jesus and also believed that Jews refused out of stubbornness to believe that Jesus had been the messiah. A Christian Empire was thus one that was often extremely unfriendly to Jews.

Justinian’s wife, Theodora, who had come from decidedly humble origins as an entertainer, worked diligently both to free prostitutes from sexual slavery, expand the legal rights and protections of women, and protect children from infanticide.  She was Justinian’s confidant and supporter throughout their lives together, helping to conceive of not just legal revisions, but the splendid new building projects they supervised in Constantinople.  In a famous episode from early in Justinian’s reign, Theodora prevented Justinian and his advisors from fleeing from a massive riot against his rule, instead inspiring Justinian to order a counter-attack that may well have saved his reign.  While most political marriages in Byzantium, as in practically every pre-modern society, had nothing whatsoever to do with love or even attraction, Theodora and Justinian clearly shared both genuine affection for one another and intellectual kinship.

Justinian was intent on re-conquering the western empire from the Germanic kings that had taken over.  He was equally interested in imposing Christian uniformity through the elimination of Christian heresies.  He sent a brilliant general, Belisarius, to Vandal-controlled North Africa in 533 with a fairly small force of soldiers and cavalry, and within a year Belisarius soundly defeated the Vandal army and retook North Africa for the empire.  From there, Justinian dispatched Belisarius and his force to Italy to seize it from the Ostrogoths.

What followed was twenty years of war between the Byzantines and the Gothic kingdom of Italy.  The Goths had won over the support of most Italians through fair rule and reasonable levels of taxation, and most Italians thus fought against the Byzantines, even though the latter represented the legitimate Roman government.  In the end, the Byzantines succeeded in destroying the Gothic kingdom and retaking Italy, but the war both crippled the Italian economy and drained the Byzantine coffers.  Italy was left devastated; it was the Byzantine invasion, not the “fall of Rome” earlier, that crippled the Italian economy until the late Middle Ages. 

In 542, during the midst of the Italian campaign, a horrendous plague (the “Plague of Justinian”) killed off half the population of Constantinople and one-third of the empire’s population as a whole.  This had an obvious impact on military recruiting and morale.  In the long term, the more important impact of the plague was in severing many of the trade ties between the two halves of the empire. 

Economies in the west became more localized and less connected to long-distance trade, which ultimately impoverished them.  A few years earlier, in 536, a major volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed so much debris in the air that Europe’s climate cooled considerably with “years without a summer,” badly undermining the economy as well. 

The Years Without a Summer:

The Byzantine historian Procopius recorded in 536 CE in his report on the wars with the Vandals, “during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness … and it seemed exceedingly like the sun in eclipse, for the beams it shed were not clear”.

Some believe the decline of the Mayan city Teotihuacán, the collapse of the Gupta Empire, and the migration of the Mongolians to the west could possibly be blamed on the droughts related to the climate change caused by the eruption.

War, natural disaster, and disease helped usher in the bleakest period of the Middle Ages in the west, as well as leading to a strong economic and cultural division between west and east.

Even as the Byzantine forces struggled to retake Italy, Justinian, like the emperors to follow him, had a huge problem on his eastern flank: the Persian Empire.  Still ruled by the Sasanians, the Persians were sophisticated and well-organized rivals of the empire who had never been conquered by Rome.  Ongoing wars with Persia represented the single greatest expense Justinian faced, even as he oversaw the campaigns in Italy.  The Byzantines and Persians battled over Armenia, which was heavily populated, and Syria, which was very rich. 

Toward the end of his reign, Justinian simply made peace with the Persian king Khusro I by agreeing to pay an annual tribute of 30,000 gold coins a year.  It was ultimately less expensive to spend huge sums of gold as bribes than it was to pay for the wars.

The problem with Justinian’s wars, both the reconquest in the west and the ongoing battles with the Persians in the east, was that they were enormously expensive.  Because his forces won enough battles to consistently loot, and because the empire was relatively stable and prosperous under his reign, he was able to sustain these efforts during his lifetime.  After he died,  however, Byzantium slowly re-lost its conquests in the west to another round of Germanic invasions, and the Persians pressed steadily on the eastern territories as well.

A new threat to Byzantium was growing in the south.  In 630 CE the Islamic Prophet Muhammad returned to his native city of Mecca in the Arabian Peninsula with the first army of Muslims.  Byzantium would soon face a threat even greater than that of the Persians: the Arab caliphates.

Constantinople

Constantinople (the capital city of the Byzantine Empire) had as many as a million people in the late eighth century. A major factor in the success of Orthodox conversion among the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe was the splendor of the city.  Numerous accounts survive of the sheer impact Constantinople’s size, prosperity, and beauty had on visitors.  Constantinople was simply the largest, richest, and most glorious city in Europe and the Mediterranean region at the time.  It enjoyed a cash economy, impregnable defensive fortifications, and abundant food thanks to the availability of Anatolian grain and fish from the Aegean Sea. 

Silkworms were smuggled out of China in roughly 550, at which point Constantinople became the heart of a European silk industry, an imperial monopoly which generated tremendous wealth.  The entire economy was regulated by the imperial government through a system of guilds, which helped ensure steady tax revenues. Even the poor lived better lives in Constantinople during its golden age than did the relatively well-off in Western Europe, much of which was barbaric by comparison.

The Final Decline

The happy times for Byzantium ended when the emperor Basil II died in 1025 with no male heirs.  Simultaneously, a series of bad harvests hit the empire.  Byzantium’s military success was based on the themes (a theme was a territory, originally about a quarter of the empire in size, organized around military recruitment.), which were in turn based on the existence of reasonably prosperous independent farmers.  Bad harvests saw those farmers vanish, their lands swallowed up by the holdings of wealthy aristocrats.  As had happened in the Roman Republic so long ago, the problem was that there were thus no soldiers to recruit, and the armies shrank.

Likewise, the relative calm of the Macedonian period ended with the rise of a new group of invaders from the east: the Seljuk Turks.  A powerful group of nomadic raiders from the western part of Central Asia, the Turks had converted to Islam centuries earlier.  Despite having no centralized leadership (the Seljuks themselves were just one of the dominant clans with no real authority over most of their fellow raiders), by about the year 1000 CE they began invading both Byzantine territories and those of their fellow Muslims, the Arabs.  Over the next few centuries, the Turks grew in power, steadily encroaching on Byzantium’s territories in Anatolia.

The armies of Byzantium became dominated by foreign mercenaries paid out of the imperial treasury, representing an enormous financial burden for the empire.  Another disaster occurred in 1199 when Constantinople itself was invaded and sacked by crusaders (during the Fourth Crusade) from Western Europe who were supposed to be sailing to fight in the Holy Land.  For about fifty years, Byzantium (already reduced to a fraction of its former size) was ruled by a Catholic king.  Even when the king was deposed and a Greek dynasty restored, nothing could be done to recapture lost territory. 

The Muslim empires that surrounded Byzantium occupied its territory until Constantinople finally fell in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks.  With it, the last vestige of Roman civilization, founded over two thousand years earlier on the banks of the Tiber River in Italy, ceased to exist as a political reality.

Note: A mild curse word is used in this video.

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