What Happened to the Roman Empire After Constantineã¢â‚¬â„¢s Death?

The Byzantine Empire was a vast and powerful civilization with origins that can be traced to 330 A.D., when the Roman emperor Constantine I dedicated a "New Rome" on the site of the aboriginal Greek colony of Byzantium. Though the western half of the Roman Empire crumbled and brutal in 476 A.D., the eastern half survived for 1,000 more than years, spawning a rich tradition of art, literature and learning and serving as a war machine buffer betwixt Europe and Asia. The Byzantine Empire finally roughshod in 1453, after an Ottoman army stormed Constantinople during the reign of Constantine Eleven.

Byzantium

The term "Byzantine" derives from Byzantium, an ancient Greek colony founded by a man named Byzas. Located on the European side of the Bosporus (the strait linking the Black Ocean to the Mediterranean), the site of Byzantium was ideally located to serve every bit a transit and trade indicate between Europe and Asia.

In 330 A.D., Roman Emperor Constantine I chose Byzantium as the site of a "New Rome" with an eponymous capital urban center, Constantinople. V years earlier, at the Council of Nicaea, Constantine had established Christianity — once an obscure Jewish sect — as Rome'southward official faith.

The citizens of Constantinople and the residual of the Eastern Roman Empire identified strongly as Romans and Christians, though many of them spoke Greek and non Latin.

Though Constantine ruled over a unified Roman Empire, this unity proved illusory later on his decease in 337. In 364, Emperor Valentinian I once more divided the empire into western and eastern sections, putting himself in power in the west and his brother Valens in the eastward.

The fate of the ii regions diverged profoundly over the next several centuries. In the west, constant attacks from German language invaders such every bit the Visigoths broke the struggling empire downward slice past piece until Italian republic was the merely territory left under Roman control. In 476, the barbaric Odoacer overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, and Rome had fallen.

Byzantine Empire Flourishes

The eastern half of the Roman Empire proved less vulnerable to external assault, thank you in part to its geographic location.

With Constantinople located on a strait, it was extremely difficult to alienation the uppercase's defenses; in improver, the eastern empire had a much smaller common borderland with Europe.

It as well benefited greatly from a stronger authoritative center and internal political stability, likewise as great wealth compared with other states of the early medieval period. The eastern emperors were able to exert more than command over the empire's economic resources and more than effectively muster sufficient manpower to combat invasion.

Eastern Roman Empire

As a result of these advantages, the Eastern Roman Empire, variously known as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, was able to survive for centuries after the autumn of Rome.

Though Byzantium was ruled by Roman law and Roman political institutions, and its official language was Latin, Greek was likewise widely spoken, and students received education in Greek history, literature and civilisation.

In terms of religion, the Council of Chalcedon in 451 officially established the division of the Christian world into dissever patriarchates, including Rome (where the patriarch would later call himself pope), Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem.

Even later on the Islamic empire absorbed Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem in the seventh century, the Byzantine emperor would remain the spiritual leader of near eastern Christians.

Justinian I

Justinian I, who took ability in 527 and would rule until his death in 565, was the outset bang-up ruler of the Byzantine Empire. During the years of his reign, the empire included nigh of the land surrounding the Mediterranean Body of water, as Justinian'southward armies conquered part of the former Western Roman Empire, including Due north Africa.

Many great monuments of the empire would be built under Justinian, including the spectacular domed Church of Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia. Justinian also reformed and codified Roman law, establishing a Byzantine legal lawmaking that would endure for centuries and help shape the modern concept of the state.

At the time of Justinian's decease, the Byzantine Empire reigned supreme as the largest and virtually powerful state in Europe. Debts incurred through war had left the empire in dire financial straits, however, and his successors were forced to heavily tax Byzantine citizens in order to keep the empire afloat.

In addition, the imperial ground forces was stretched too thin, and would struggle in vain to maintain the territory conquered during Justinian's dominion. During the seventh and eighth centuries, attacks from the Persian Empire and from Slavs, combined with internal political instability and economic regression, threatened the vast empire.

A new, even more serious threat arose in the form of Islam, founded past the prophet Muhammad in Mecca in 622. In 634, Muslim armies began their assault on the Byzantine Empire past storming into Syria.

By the end of the century, Byzantium would lose Syria, the Holy Country, Egypt and North Africa (among other territories) to Islamic forces.

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Iconoclasm

During the eighth and early ninth centuries, Byzantine emperors (get-go with Leo III in 730) spearheaded a movement that denied the holiness of icons, or religious images, and prohibited their worship or veneration.

Known as Iconoclasm—literally "the great of images"—the movement waxed and waned nether various rulers, but did not end definitively until 843, when a Church council under Emperor Michael 3 ruled in favor of the display of religious images.

Byzantine Fine art

During the late tenth and early on 11th centuries, under the rule of the Macedonian dynasty founded by Michael Iii's successor, Basil, the Byzantine Empire enjoyed a gold historic period.

Though it stretched over less territory, Byzantium had more control over trade, more wealth and more than international prestige than under Justinian. The strong imperial regime patronized Byzantine art, including at present-cherished Byzantine mosaics.

Rulers also began restoring churches, palaces and other cultural institutions and promoting the study of ancient Greek history and literature.

Greek became the official language of the state, and a flourishing civilization of monasticism was centered on Mount Athos in northeastern Greece. Monks administered many institutions (orphanages, schools, hospitals) in everyday life, and Byzantine missionaries won many converts to Christianity among the Slavic peoples of the central and eastern Balkans (including Republic of bulgaria and Serbia) and Russian federation.

The Crusades

The finish of the 11th century saw the beginning of the Crusades, the series of holy wars waged by European Christians against Muslims in the Well-nigh East from 1095 to 1291.

With the Seijuk Turks of cardinal Asia bearing down on Constantinople, Emperor Alexius I turned to the West for assistance, resulting in the declaration of "holy war" past Pope Urban II at Clermont, France, that began the Start Crusade.

Every bit armies from French republic, Federal republic of germany and Italia poured into Byzantium, Alexius tried to force their leaders to swear an oath of loyalty to him in order to guarantee that state regained from the Turks would exist restored to his empire. After Western and Byzantine forces recaptured Nicaea in Asia Minor from the Turks, Alexius and his army retreated, drawing accusations of expose from the Crusaders.

During the subsequent Crusades, antagonism continued to build betwixt Byzantium and the West, culminating in the conquest and annexation of Constantinople during the Quaternary Crusade in 1204.

The Latin government established in Constantinople existed on shaky footing due to the open hostility of the metropolis's population and its lack of coin. Many refugees from Constantinople fled to Nicaea, site of a Byzantine government-in-exile that would retake the capital and overthrow Latin rule in 1261.

Fall of Constantinople

During the rule of the Palaiologan emperors, beginning with Michael VIII in 1261, the economy of the once-mighty Byzantine country was crippled, and never regained its former stature.

In 1369, Emperor John Five unsuccessfully sought fiscal help from the West to confront the growing Turkish threat, but he was arrested as an insolvent debtor in Venice. Four years afterward, he was forced–similar the Serbian princes and the ruler of Bulgaria–to go a vassal of the mighty Turks.

Equally a vassal state, Byzantium paid tribute to the sultan and provided him with military back up. Under John'south successors, the empire gained sporadic relief from Ottoman oppression, but the ascension of Murad 2 equally sultan in 1421 marked the end of the final respite.

Murad revoked all privileges given to the Byzantines and laid siege to Constantinople; his successor, Mehmed II, completed this process when he launched the terminal attack on the city. On May 29, 1453, after an Ottoman army stormed Constantinople, Mehmed triumphantly entered the Hagia Sophia, which would before long be converted to the city'due south leading mosque.

The fall of Constantinople marked the finish of a glorious era for the Byzantine Empire. Emperor Constantine XI died in boxing that twenty-four hour period, and the Byzantine Empire complanate, ushering in the long reign of the Ottoman Empire.

Legacy of the Byzantine Empire

In the centuries leading upward to the final Ottoman conquest in 1453, the civilization of the Byzantine Empire–including literature, art, architecture, police and theology–flourished fifty-fifty equally the empire itself faltered.

Byzantine culture would exert a dandy influence on the Western intellectual tradition, every bit scholars of the Italian Renaissance sought help from Byzantine scholars in translating Greek pagan and Christian writings. (This procedure would proceed afterward 1453, when many of these scholars fled from Constantinople to Italy.)

Long after its end, Byzantine culture and civilisation connected to exercise an influence on countries that expert its Eastern Orthodox religion, including Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece, among others.

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Source: https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/byzantine-empire

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