The Byzantine Empire

The single greatest Byzantine contribution to world history is a law book. Justinian’s commission in the 530s gathered a thousand years of Roman jurisprudence into the Corpus Juris Civilis: the Digest of juristic opinion, the Code of imperial legislation and the Institutes as a textbook. In doing so it preserved classical Roman law when the western empire that produced it had ceased to exist.

Its rediscovery in eleventh-century Bologna is the foundation of the European civil law tradition, which now governs most of the world outside the Anglosphere. Every legal system descending from the Napoleonic Code descends, through it, from a Byzantine compilation.

The empire’s own governance evolved continuously and pragmatically. The seventh-century crisis, the loss of Syria, Egypt and North Africa within a generation, forced a reorganisation into themes, military districts under a general holding both civil and military authority and garrisoned by soldiers settled on land in return for hereditary service. It turned a cash-paid professional army the state could no longer afford into a self-supporting one, and it is why the empire survived at all.

Legitimacy was a permanent problem. There was no fixed succession law. An emperor ruled because he held the palace, the army and the acclamation of the people, and a usurper who succeeded became legitimate by succeeding. The empire had roughly ninety emperors and a great many violent depositions, which is a structural weakness and, seen differently, a mechanism that repeatedly removed incompetents.

Byzantine strategy was built on the assumption that war is expensive and usually avoidable. The military manuals, the Strategikon attributed to Maurice and the Taktika of Leo VI, are unsentimental documents advising commanders to avoid battle unless the odds are favourable, to prefer ambush, delay and negotiation, and to study each enemy’s particular habits.

This produced a reputation for deviousness that the word ‘byzantine’ still carries. It also produced eleven centuries of survival on the most exposed strategic position in the medieval world, surrounded on every side by opponents who mostly could not be defeated outright.

The famous technological asset was Greek fire, a petroleum-based incendiary projected under pressure from siphons that burned on water and could not be extinguished conventionally. It broke two Arab sieges of Constantinople and its composition was so closely guarded that it is still not certainly known.

The theme armies of the middle period gave way to a system leaning on foreign mercenaries and grants of revenue. Its best-known unit was the Varangian Guard, Scandinavian and later Anglo-Saxon axemen who made good personal troops for an emperor because they had no local political loyalties. The catastrophe was Manzikert in 1071, where defeat by the Seljuks was compounded by the civil war that followed, and Anatolia, the empire’s recruiting ground, was lost.

The solidus, called the nomisma by its users and the bezant by western merchants, held its gold content almost unchanged for seven centuries, which makes it one of the most stable currencies in recorded history. It was the international reserve currency of the medieval Mediterranean, accepted from Ireland to China, and its stability was a deliberate policy that outlasted dozens of dynasties.

Constantinople’s position did the rest. The city sat on the crossing between Europe and Asia and controlled the passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, and taxed everything moving in either direction. The customs revenue alone financed a state apparatus no western kingdom could approach.

Silk was the strategic commodity, and how the empire got it is one of the better stories in the Archives. Monks in Justinian’s reign allegedly smuggled silkworm eggs out of China in hollow canes, breaking the Persian monopoly on the trade and founding an imperial silk industry run as a state monopoly, with the finest purple-dyed cloth reserved by law for the emperor.

The long decline is economic before it is military. Trade concessions granted to Venice and Genoa in exchange for naval help progressively transferred the empire’s commerce and its customs revenue to Italian merchants. By the fourteenth century the Genoese colony at Galata, across the Golden Horn, was collecting several times the customs revenue of Constantinople itself.

Byzantine identity is the interesting question, and it shifted. The inhabitants were Roman in law and self-description, Greek in language, and Orthodox in religion, and over the centuries the religious criterion became the decisive one. To be Roman came to mean being an Orthodox Christian subject of the emperor, which opened the category to Slavs, Armenians and Anatolians and closed it to Latin Christians.

Women’s position was more visible than the reputation for seclusion suggests. Byzantine law protected women’s property and dowry rights, and the empire produced rulers: Irene, who governed in her own name and signed herself basileus; Theodora, whose influence on Justinian’s reign is attested by a hostile source and therefore probably understated; Zoe and Theodora of the Macedonian line, who ruled jointly; and Anna Komnene, whose Alexiad is the most substantial history written by a woman before the modern period.

Monasticism was a mass institution rather than a marginal one, absorbing enormous landed wealth and providing the empire’s welfare infrastructure of hospitals, orphanages and poor relief, as well as its intellectual reserve. Monastic hospitals in Constantinople had specialised wards and salaried physicians.

The city itself organised social life: the Hippodrome, where chariot-racing factions carried real political weight and the Nika riots of 532 nearly ended Justinian’s reign; the great processions; and a civic culture in which imperial ceremonial and public spectacle were the same activity.

In Byzantium religion and the state were the same thing. Emperors convened councils, deposed patriarchs, and legislated on doctrine, and theological positions were political positions, which is why the christological controversies mattered so much and why they map so closely onto regional loyalties.

That entanglement had a cost the empire paid in full. The Monophysite communities of Syria and Egypt, alienated by imperial insistence on the Chalcedonian formula, had little reason to resist the Arab conquests in the 630s, and in places welcomed rulers who taxed them and left their doctrine alone.

Iconoclasm was the great internal rupture. For over a century the empire tore itself apart over whether images of Christ and the saints were legitimate or idolatrous, with emperors on both sides, monasteries destroyed, and a great deal of earlier religious art lost. Its resolution in 843, the Triumph of Orthodoxy, settled the theology of the image that Orthodox Christianity has held ever since. An icon is a window rather than a picture, and veneration offered to it passes to the person depicted.

The missionary achievement is the most consequential legacy. Cyril and Methodius devised an alphabet for Slavonic and translated the liturgy into it, and the conversion of Bulgaria, Serbia and then the Rus created a religious and cultural commonwealth that outlived the empire by centuries and shapes eastern Europe now.

Hagia Sophia is the argument. Built in five years under Justinian by two men described as mathematicians rather than architects, it spans a dome of over thirty metres on pendentives above a square, a structural problem nobody had solved at that scale, pierced at its base by a ring of windows so that the dome appears to float on light. Procopius wrote that it seemed suspended from heaven by a golden chain, and the building was designed to produce exactly that impression.

It held the record as the largest interior space in the world for close to a thousand years, and it is the reason Byzantine architecture is a subject at all, since everything after it responds to it.

Byzantine art is theological by intent. The abandonment of classical naturalism was a choice rather than a decline in skill. Gold grounds remove figures from ordinary space, frontality addresses the viewer directly, and hierarchical scale ranks by significance rather than position. An icon is trying to do something a portrait is not.

The mosaics are the medium at its height: Ravenna’s Justinian and Theodora panels, the Deesis at Hagia Sophia, and the fourteenth-century programme at the Chora church, a late flowering of great subtlety at a point when the empire itself was nearly finished.

Byzantium’s intellectual role was custodial before it was creative, and the custody was decisive. Virtually every surviving work of classical Greek literature reaches us through Byzantine manuscripts. Plato, Aristotle, the tragedians, the historians, Euclid, Ptolemy and Galen survived because Byzantine scribes kept copying them for a thousand years.

The transition from papyrus roll to parchment codex and then the ninth-century shift to minuscule script were the mechanical acts that saved the corpus, and each was a moment of selection, because whatever was not transcribed into the new format did not continue.

There was original work too. Michael Psellos in the eleventh century revived serious Platonic study, and the twelfth-century commentators on Aristotle produced substantial philosophical work. Byzantine medicine maintained and extended the Galenic tradition in working teaching hospitals, and the mathematical tradition that produced Hagia Sophia’s engineers was not trivial.

The final transmission is the most consequential. Byzantine scholars carrying Greek manuscripts west in the fifteenth century, before and after 1453, put Plato and the Greek corpus into Italian hands and supplied the Renaissance with a substantial part of its raw material. The empire’s last export was its library.

Byzantium is exceptionally well documented, in chronicles, saints’ lives, imperial legislation, military manuals, ceremonial handbooks, letters, seals and an administrative record of real depth. Yet it has been more consistently misread than almost anything else in the Archives, because of what its interpreters wanted it to be.

Procopius is the paradigm case. As the official historian of Justinian’s wars he is careful and well informed. In the Buildings he is an outright panegyrist. And in the Secret History he pours out vitriolic private allegations against the same emperor and empress, accusing Theodora of every degradation available. The three exist in the same corpus and cannot all be taken at face value, which makes him a superb exercise in source criticism.

The historiographical problem is larger than any one author. Gibbon set the terms of a millennium of decline and a state without virtue, and the judgement suited both Enlightenment anticlericalism and a western tradition invested in Rome’s inheritance passing to the Latin west rather than to Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians.

The correction is recent and substantial. Work by scholars including Anthony Kaldellis has argued that the empire was a real continuation of the Roman state with a politically engaged populace, that ‘Byzantine’ is a term that obscures more than it clarifies, and that the standard periodisation of decline reflects western preoccupations rather than the evidence. This is a field currently rewriting its own foundations.