Візантійська імперія 3

Byzantine Empire

Roman Balan

Lutsk

2001

Byzantine Empire , eastern part of the Roman Empire (Roman Empire), which survived after the breakup of the Western Empire in the 5th century AD. Its capital was Constantinople (now Эstanbul, Turkey).

Constantinople became a capital of the Roman Empire in 330 after Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor, refounded the city of Byzantium and named it after himself. Only gradually did it develop into the true capital of the eastern Roman provinces—those areas of the empire in southeastern Europe, southwestern Asia, and the northeast corner of Africa, which included the present-day countries of the Balkan Peninsula, and Syria, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Cyprus, Egypt, and the eastern part of Libya. Scholars have called the empire Byzantine after the ancient name of its capital, Byzantium, or the Eastern Roman Empire, but to contemporaries and in official terminology of the time, it was simply Roman, and its subjects were Romans (Rhomaioi ). Its predominant language was Greek, although some of its subjects spoke Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and other local languages during its long (330-1453) history. Its emperors regarded the one-time geographical limits of the Roman Empire as theirs, and they looked to Rome for their traditions, symbols, and institutions. The empire, ruled by an emperor (basileus ) without any formal constitution, slowly formed a synthesis of late Roman institutions, orthodox Christianity, and Greek language and culture.

EARLY PERIOD
Constantine the Great established precedents for the harmony of church and imperial authorities that persisted throughout the history of the empire. These included his creation of a successful new monetary system based on the gold solidus, or nomisma, which lasted into the middle of the 11th century. The commercial prosperity of the 4th through the 6th century enabled many ancient cities to flourish. Large estates dominated agriculture, and while heavy taxation resulted in much abandonment of land, agriculture continued to be productive. The church acquired vast landed estates and, along with the emperor himself, was the largest landholder during most of the empire's history. Rigorous imperial regulation of the purity and supply of precious metals, as well as the organization of commerce and artisanship, characterized economic life.

Emperor Justinian I and his wife, Theodora, attempted to restore the former majesty, intellectual quality, and geographic limits of the Roman Empire. At great cost, they reconquered, between 534 and 565, North Africa, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and parts of Spain. This effort, however, together with substantial expenses incurred in erecting public buildings and churches—in particular, Hagia Sophia (Church of the Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople—overstrained the empire's resources, while plagues reduced its population.

THE EMPIRE BESIEGED
The empire had survived Germanic and Hunnic tribal migrations and raids in the 5th and 6th centuries and had stabilized a reasonably secure eastern frontier against the Sassanid Persian Empire, but it could not recover, hold, and govern the entire Mediterranean world. During the second half of the 6th century the Lombards invaded and gradually occupied much of former Byzantine Italy—except for Rome, Ravenna, Naples, and the far south—while Turkic Avar cavalry raided and depopulated much of the Byzantine Balkans.

Many features of the empire and its culture changed during the 7th century. Most of the Balkans were lost to the Avars and to Slavic tribes, who resettled abandoned sites. Meanwhile, the assassination of Mauricius, the first Byzantine emperor to fall to a violent death, led to civil and external war. Emperor Heraclius finally terminated a long series of wars with the Persians by a decisive victory in 628 and the recovery of Persian-occupied Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Exhaustion from this struggle and bitter religious disputes between rival Christian sects weakened Byzantine defenses and morale, leaving the empire unprepared to face another danger in the decade that followed. Between 634 and 642, Arabs, inspired by a new religion, Islam, conquered Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Constantinople weathered major Arab sieges in the 670s and in 717-18, and Byzantine Asia Minor survived almost annual Arab raids. Byzantium, by a process that remains controversial among historians, transformed its armies into an elite expeditionary guard named tagmata and into army corps called themes (themata ). Each was commanded by a strategos, or general, who acquired civil and military authority over his army district; thematic armies became army corps districts, and their soldiers, who acquired tax-exempt lands, preserved the core of the empire while avoiding the ruinous drain of cash that had overstrained the salaried armies of the period before the Arab invasions. Urban life and commerce declined except in Thessalonнki and Constantinople. Warfare and resulting insecurity inhibited agriculture and education. The empire, with limited resources, could no longer maintain the full dimensions, infrastructure, and complexity of the late Roman Empire. It managed to endure and adapt to its straitened circumstances.

AGE OF RECONQUEST
Beginning in the 9th century,

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