You ever lie awake at night thinking wistfully about the Roman Empire, or is that just a me thing? Sigh, this is so sad, Alexa, play Roman Empire 2. *byzantine chanting* Oh HELL yeah, this is my jam. See, the big plot twist of the Fall of Rome is that it didn’t. While the West was off transforming into medieval Europe, the East continued being The Roman Empire for another thousand years. First question, HOW? And two, a millennium is a long time, what traits stuck to the classical roots, and what innovations came in during the medieval period? To see how we got from point R(ome) to point B(yzantines), let’s do some history. Our story begins in the early 300s AD, with a barely-standing Roman empire now split into 4 administrative regions in the hopes of easing the govern—ohhh no they’re already fighting each other. Look away kids, this is real messy. Flash forward 2 decades, Constantine reconquers everything, picks up Christianity along the way, and decides that the empire really needs a new capital. So he chose the ancient site of Byzantium at the northeast corner of the Aegean sea, as it stood at the crossroads of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and was closer to the rich and well-urbanized provinces of the east, so it would be the perfect spot for a new imperial city. After 6 years of whirlwind construction, Constantine consecrated the city in 330 as New Rome, much to the annoyance of the Romans back in, you know, the first Rome. But reunifying an empire and introducing an entirely new religion comes with challenges, and Constantine soon found Christians fiercely debating the nuances of trinitarian theology. Academic discussion about church doctrine is all well and good until the Alexandrians started rioting about it, so Constantine exerted some imperial authority to keep Christianity under control. Instead of the vivid but ultimately-ahistorical method of lions, he held the church-wide Council of Nicaea, for bishops to negotiate a universal, legally binding orthodoxy of the empire. Now, this being the Roman empire we’re talking about, nothing can stop these people from finding an excuse to throttle each other, but broadly speaking, the Council of Nicaea did the trick by establishing a consistent theological and political framework for Roman Christianity. In doing so, they coopted an intrinsically disruptive social force into Roman power structures. Slick move. These two changes marked the start of the East’s geographical and religious divergence from the Old empire, but things really accelerated in the century after. After Constantine’s 3 sons got into a civil war with each other, the world’s most tragic introvert Julian got dragged kicking and screaming into being the Roman emperor, whereupon he spent two years trying and failing to reconvert the empire to paganism before being speared to death while on a poorly-organized campaign in Persia. Then a series of unremarkable emperors took turns doing absolutely nothing to solve the serious problems the Empire still faced after Constantine: wars, weak administration, and a wimpier army than Rome was used to having. Sure, Constantine pulled the hard-carry to give the empire another century of life, but things were still looking mighty grim. In came Theodosius, an emperor who had the wildcard idea (not actually all that wildcard) to permanently split the empire into an independent Eastern and Western half. Other Emperors cut their administration in halves or quarters, but it always came back together one way or another; only Theodosius made it stick. So it’s here in 395 that the Byzantine empire officially gets going, but that’s somewhat of a misnomer, as the Eastern Empire wasn’t widely called “Byzantine” until the 1500s. Confusingly enough, that name was used as early as the 500s, but in specific cases and usually for poetic effect. But for the empire’s whole runtime, as far as its inhabitants were concerned, they were Rhomaīoi living in Rhomāniā. No ambiguity. Still Rome! Back to the western imperial collapse at hand, this bisection went pretty poorly for them, but it put the East in a position to stay strong, productive, and cohesive. So if Theodosius indirectly sentenced Western Rome to death, then his successors plunged the knives by responding to the perilous threat of Goths by bribing them to go bother the west instead. Classy. Meanwhile the Western emperors were too feckless to stop very simple problems from boiling over into Rome getting sacked… twice. But the Byzantine defense strategy was more than just making everything Italy’s problem. At the turn of the 5th century, Constantinople outgrew its first fortifications and began building the Theodosian walls, a massive set of three-tiered ramparts that defended the city for the next thousand years. But even the strongest walls couldn’t save the empire from its greatest danger: Sports. See, Romans loved their chariot races, and aligned themselves with either the blue or the green team. Ah yes, I see no way in which this rabid tribalism could ever go wrong. But this rapidly spun out of control as the blues and greens evolved into entire social clans and began butting heads on politics and religion and started throwing hands about it in the middle of church. But by far, the worst riots broke out during the reign of emperor Justinian. For context, him and his uncle and adoptive-father Justin came from humble beginnings and rose through the military ranks to rule the empire in one of history’s rare-few reverse regencies, where the younger Justinian was the power behind his father’s throne. While he wasn’t pulling the imperial strings, Justinian was falling in love with the famed actress Theodora, and they together would become the ultimate power-couple of the 6th century. But back to the riots, Emperor Justinian tried to curb the influence of the Blues and Greens in politics, and succeeded only in irritating both of them so badly that they teamed up in open revolt. These wiley sportsfans shouted victory chants (Νίκα) and poured out of the chariot stadium to light Constantinople on fire for five straight days. This might seem excessive, but it was a standard mode of political demonstration. The races were one of a few spots where the citizens of Constantinople would regularly see their emperor, and this proximity meant that mass demonstration was an effective and ultimately common way of expressing political discontent and demanding that the emperor step down. Just as Roman armies often acclaimed a new emperor while on campaign, the centralization of power in Constantinople meant that citizens could de-acclaim them! Even in a monarchy, the citizens held considerable sway, and the old idea of the SPQR wasn’t truly dead. That’s bad news for Justinian, who was ready to hop on a ship and bail the hell out of there, but Empress Theodora told him to face his fate with honor and live, or die, as an emperor. Quote: “May I never see the day when those who meet me do not call me Empress. If you wish to save yourself, my lord, there is no difficulty. We are rich; over there is the sea, and yonder are the ships. Yet reflect for a moment whether, when you have once escaped to a place of security, you would not gladly exchange such safety for death. As for me, I agree with the adage, that Royal Purple is the noblest shroud.” YES Basileia, SLAYYYY. That is only part of why she is the biggest Hellenic badass this side of Cleopatra. Ahem, it’s good, I’m good, we’re good. The Nika Riots ultimately fell to the blade during a bloody massacre in the stadium, and Justinian was left to pick up the charred pieces of his ruined city, having earned the brutal honor of being the only roman emperor to violently oppose de-acclamation and succeed. So he made up for it by giving the people a win, immediately setting about rebuilding Constantinople even shinier than before, and that meant a new centerpiece church: the Hagia Sophia. In an evolution from your standard Roman Temples, this one’s got a dome. And in a doubly brilliant move, the dome is ringed with windows, which cast an ever-changing light onto the gold mosaics, and the halo-effect makes the dome look like it’s damn-near floating. When Justinian first entered the completed church, he exclaimed “Solomon, I have surpassed thee”. We’re extremely lucky to still have this masterpiece of a church around today, and you can see the influence of its design all throughout the eastern Mediterranean and well beyond the empire’s lifetime. Good. Dome. Meanwhile, Justinian was also hard at work codifying hundreds of years of Roman laws into one standard law book. The Corpus Juris Civilis remains the basis of most European law codes to this day. Justinian liked big ideas: one law, one church, and one empire. But this last one was a sticking point, because the Roman Empire had been missing its Rome for over 50 years. Now, you likely wouldn’t have seen the Italians complaining, because the Ostrogothic kings were decidedly much better at their jobs than the latter Western emperors, and Italy still saw itself as Romans living in a Roman state with Roman institutions – Heck, these Gothic Kings still consulted with the Senate! However, this was of no concern to Justinian, who simply wanted to paint the map purple, so he put Belisarius in charge of retaking the West. And retake he did, because Belisarius, is a boss. For his first act, he reclaimed Carthage and the north-African coast from the Vandals of all people, with minimal casualties, in just under a year. To celebrate his spectacular victory, Justinian awarded Belisarius with a triumph, an honor exclusively reserved for Emperors ever since Augustus. With this foothold in the west, Belisarius launched his reconquest of Italy. This would prove trickier, but with careful progression up the peninsula and inventive tactics like storming Naples by aqueduct, Belisarius pushed all the way into Rome and made Hannibal look like a chump. Marching on Rome is a right reserved only to Roman generals, thank you very much. The Ostrogoths put up a fierce counterattack, and surrounded the city of Rome for nearly a year, but Belisarius held out, and continued up to Milan and the political capital of Ravenna. But the problem with investing manpower into the strategically-dubious west is that the much-more-consequential East lay severely exposed. The Sasanian Persian King Khosrau was well aware of this, as he even joked with Justinian that he was just as much to thank for the victory as Belisarius, because he had the good manners to not invade the east while they were busy. Justinian obligingly paid Khosrau a share of the spoils for his “help”. This is par for the course with that scamp Khosrau, because 6 years later he did invade, sacked the city of Antioch, and then built a city he literally named Khosrau’s Better Antioch. What a champion. This dynamic was no mere joke, but after an entire millennium of Roman-Persian history, the two rivals were so deeply familiar they couldn’t help but respect each other, and many of their rulers maintained genuine friendships even in the middle of great power conflict. In Khosrau II’s words, Rome and Persia were the Two Eyes of the world, chosen by God to illuminate human civilization. Sure they fought, business is business, but as such, they were professionals. That said… Khosrau did proceed to invade Mesopotamia in 540. So now Justinian found himself split between two distant fronts, with the Ostrogoths still carving out pockets of resistance in Italy. And all of this was made worse by the sudden guest appearance of the Black Death, which ravaged Byzantines and Persians alike. The empire would have surely collapsed if not for the herculean efforts of Theodora, who kept it all in one piece while Justinian was actively in a plague-coma. In the middle of all this battling back-and-forth, Ostrogoths sacked and destroyed Rome, leaving the city a complete ghost town, and forcing Belisarius to re-reconquer Italy from the boot to the alps. The one bright spot amid all this is the city of Ravenna, which soon became home to some splendid and miraculously preserved feats of Byzantine art and architecture. As early as the 500s, Byzantines had already gotten their golden aesthetic and talent for mosaics to near perfection. Over the course of his four decades in power, Justinian survived de-acclamation, rebuilt Constantinople, codified the laws, standardized the church hierarchy, survived a plague, and reconquered the west, or at least what was left of it. For better and definitely worse, Justinian’s reign was a massive step in the evolution of the Byzantine empire. And for all his (arguably-misguided) efforts to reclaim Rome, Justinian’s lasting legacy proved the empire no longer needed it. And it’s just as well, because 3 years after Justinian died, the Lombards came across the alps, and by the end of the century they’d swiped 2/3 of Italy. Oops. Meanwhile, back in Constantinople, things were going somewhere between eh and oof. Emperor Maurice was deposed by the army in favor of the completely incompetent Phocas, so the Persian king Khosrau II, who really liked Maurice and was personally indebted to him for his help in an earlier civil war – vowed revenge, declared war, and pushed all the way into Anatolia, before diverting south to capture the levant and Egypt. This is really bad, and would have probably been a total game-over if not for the miraculous arrival of Heraclius, the son of North Africa’s governor. He showed up, booted Phocas right on out of there, and assumed control of the Empire. By combining civil and military authority, his government was flexible and better able to repel the Persian threat. Earlier Roman armies just threw legions at a problem until it went away, knowing they could always raise more, but Heraclius the army he had, and that was it. Byzantine armies from here out needed to be reserved and efficient in their use of force. So after a long and hard-fought campaign that nearly bankrupted the empire, Heraclius impressively pushed into the heart of Persia and brokered a peace. Everything reverted to pre-war status, and both empires stood battered to within an inch of their life. But the long-term consequences of this would become all-too clear all-too soon, as the newfound Muslim caliphate soon began expanding out of Arabia, and neither Persia nor Byzantium had the means to stop them. In 8 short years, the Rashidun caliphate conquered the entire levant, and within another 10 they had Egypt and Persia as well. Constantinople itself was threatened by an Arab siege, but they held out thanks to a little trick called Basically Napalm. This was a colossal break from the status quo that Rome and Persia had held for a millennium, to the point where the Byzantines even sent help to the Sasanians against the Caliphate. But by the end of the century, the Byzantine empire found itself shut out of the entire southern Mediterranean for good. Meanwhile, the other front wasn’t looking much better; What other front, you ask? Well, Slavic forces had pushed down into the Peloponnese, splitting Greece in half and leaving the empire looking like a checkerboard. It’s at least good to see that the time-honored Roman tradition of spectacular territorial implosion is alive and well. Let’s take solace in at least that. It’s no coincidence that this chapter in Byzantine history is considered the beginning of the so-called “Dark Ages”, hereafter exclusively referred to as the “Ouch Times”, but we’ve still got over 700 years left on the clock, so as we’ll see, the empire’s best years still lay ahead of them. Amid all the land getting yoinked, it’s easy to miss what else has changed and to easy forget what continuity is still there. The empire in 300 was Pagan, bilingual in Greek-and-Latin, and spread out over the whole Mediterranean. The empire now maintained the same core laws and form of government that Rome’s had for several centuries, but geographically and culturally, this newly-Christianized empire was becoming far more Greek. They’d still call themselves Romans, and they were, but we can associate them with distinctly Greek traits. Its borders much more closely reflected the classical Greek world, Greek became the main language, and the empire’s strongest literary legacy was in its preservation and continuation of ancient scholarship. Some 2/3 of all the ancient Greek texts we have today came to us from the Byzantines. Forget the library of Alexandria, it’s the Library of Constantinople that did the Hard Carry. On the one hand, all this Greekness and newfangled Christianity lets historians take pot shots saying the Byzantine empire isn’t really the authentic Roman empire nyehhhh, but we’ll see how the Byzantines maintain that fundamentally Roman capacity to adapt and evolve to survive in changing circumstances. Both literally and figuratively, the Byzantine golden age was just over the horizon. My god, like, so much gold mosaic, it’s honestly kind of insane. The Byzantine Empire has long maintained a delicate balance of simultaneously doing fantastic and also being constantly in peril. Normally this would be a contradiction, but the Byzantines made “Golden Disaster Empire” their entire damn brand. As we’ll see over the next 500 years, the Ouch Times brought genuinely brilliant reforms while the Golden Age endured some catastrophic failures – But just like the Romans of old, the Byzantines kept on keeping on despite the odds, and earned their place as one of the longest-lasting empires in history. SO, let’s see how the Byzantines survived the middle ages and gained their golden reputation. When last we left our purple-robéd friends, the entire southern half of the empire had been swiftly yoinked by the shiny new Muslim Caliphate, and within a century these new neighbors had landed on Constantinople’s doorstep on two separate occasions, only to be repelled by the very fires of Hell itself. See, the Byzantines had a little trick called Greek Fire, a secret substance that could be shot from a siphon at an incoming navy, burning everything from the mast down to the surface of the water. But that’s not all the Byzantines had learned from the Fall of Rome — In addition to their functionally-impenetrable Theodosian walls, they maintained hundreds of underground cisterns to fortify their water supply. No city on Earth was better defended than Constantinople, but the same couldn’t be said for the Byzantine provinces, as the Muslim armies were having their run of the place all the way up into Anatolia. It was only in 740 that Emperor Leo III finally held the Eastern line, and his son Constantine V fortified the other troublesome frontier by pushing back against the Slavic peoples in the west. Hey, it took a century and a half, but solid recovery. However, there’s a more literal reason that some historians have described this age as “Dark”, and it has to do with Icons. The Byzantines were a rather artistic bunch, and they loved to have images of Jesus, Mary and friends in their churches and in their homes. But in the eyes of people like Emperor Leo, this was beginning to look a lot like Idolatry, where images are worshipped more piously than even God. His response, simple enough, was to smash every last image he could get his hands on. So starting in 726 he and his fellow Iconoclasts destroyed every mosaic, fresco, statue, and doodle in sight. Constantine V, for his part, doubled down, and began persecuting the clergy for spurring this apparent idolatry. Meanwhile, across the Adriatic, the Pope in Rome was justifiably horrified, and the Byzantine province of Ravenna took the occasion to declare independence, which is why their mosaics are among the few to actually survive this mess. After Constantine died, his wife Irene called a council to outlaw Iconoclasm, but Emperor Leo V reinstated it, and then eventually empress Theodora re-outlawed it for good in 843. The final rules were that statues are No-Bueno, but all 2D art was chill, so the Byzantines got back to work with gorgeous frescos and mosaics. Greek art would proceed to snub visual realism in favor of stylized figures with enough gold to give a protestant a seizure, and that style governs eastern orthodox art to this day. So while I weep on a weekly basis for how pathetically few pieces of original art survived Iconoclasm and the Ottomans — the dreaded double-whammy — I can take comfort knowing that the Byzantine style has well over 1500 years of continuity. For all the well-meaning damage the Iconoclasts did to art, they made some crucial reforms to the Byzantine military and government by, as it happens, making them the same thing. See, back in the classical days, Roman Provinces had no innate defenses, and had to wait for stationed Legions to show up from Jupiter-Knows-Where. Clearly that model didn’t work anymore, so the Byzantines reconfigured their armies and their provinces to fit. In the 6 and 700s, the provinces were gradually redrawn as Themata, with the governor taking on the additional role of Strategos, overseeing both the civic and military care of his Thema. And in place of old-fashioned imperial legions, Byzantine Themata each had their own army, staffed with citizens from that Thema, and funded by land grants within that Thema, so every soldier had a tangible stake in the wellbeing of the state. Though the empire shrank to half its size between 6 and 800, the extremely perilous eastern front went from an unmitigated disaster-zone to a fortress — the Byzantines were stronger and safer than ever thanks to the Thema reforms. Meanwhile, the boys in the libraries were also hard at work protecting the empire, as scholars and historians were writing and revising military manuals. Books like the Strategikon laid out grand strategy and pinpoint tactics to help generals in the field. The empire was well past the expansionist glory days where they could slog it out in big decisive battles and raise a fresh army the next year. With potential enemies on each frontier waiting to pounce at the first sign of frailty, every victory was a pyrrhic victory. So campaigns were won by carefully calculated strategy and good intelligence operations. It was all a game of restraint and flexibility, so the empire kept on top of trends by voraciously adopting outside ideas. Those are the big picture swerves, but the tactics and composition of the Byzantine army also got an upgrade, trading raw manpower for peak efficiency. While infantry remained a staple, the Byzantines stayed in fashion by remodeling the old Roman Legionary into the fancy new Skutatoi. Namely, they ditched the Scutum for the hotness that is the Kite Shield, which explains why the name Skutatoi literally means “Shield Boys”. There to support our favorite Shieldy Bois were the Toxotai archers, but the biggest and baddest unit in the Byzantine army was the Kataphraktos. They were basically hoplites on horses, with the steed and rider decked out head to hoof in scale armor. Their name technically means “Fully Armored,” but I like to translate it as “Full-Metal Cavalry”. Kataphrakts traced their origins to the Parthian wars of the late Republic, but came to prominence here as a counter to the Arabic cavalry – At first the Arabs ran circles around the poor Skutatoi, but eventually the Kataphrakts became the core of the Byzantine army, and a byword for Byzantine power. Infantry and archers would weaken an enemy line, and then the Kataphraktoi would hammer through the weak points and shatter the enemy formations. GG. And like, saying it in English – Karaphracts – it’s cool enough, but when you get real the Greek into it you get Kataphraktos, and then you really feel the Byzantine power, y’know? … What, just me? Ah fine whatever. So as an empire that’s about 75% coast, the Byzantines also had ports to protect on all sides: in the Aegean, along the Mediterranean, and on the Black Sea – so they maintained a pretty beefy navy. In the world’s best case of “If It isn’t broke, don’t fix it” the Byzantines still used a version of the Trireme, some 2,000 years later, as their primary ship. The Dromon, as it became known, had been upgraded with a Lateen sail and got absolutely loaded with catapults, ballistae, and of course, Greek fire siphons. Plus, instead of simply ramming into enemy ships like some ancient Athenian doof, the Dromoi were equipped with spurs to smash enemy oars and immobilize them, for ease of boarding and/or burning. Slick upgrade. Unfortunately, the Navy wasn’t enough to stop repeated Muslim incursions into Crete, Sicily, and Sardinia, but they dutifully protected the mainland coasts, the islands of the Aegean, and the many trade routes that passed through Constantinople via the Bosphorus river. With Iconoclasm over and the empire no longer teetering on the edge of total collapse, the Byzantines entered two centuries of prosperity and relative peace. Starting with Basil I, who I can’t help but picture as a leaf, a line of Macedonian emperors guided the Byzantine empire through its Golden Age, the peak of imperial prestige and of its cultural influence abroad. With the Muslim armies to the east & south at least somewhat handled, the Byzantines turned their attention to the Bulgarians, and used a clever mix of religious diplomacy to pacify them via conversion to Christianity. They did the same with Prince Volodymyr of the Kyivan Rus’, which set Eastern Europe with their quasi-Greek Cyrillic alphabet and their Byzantine-leaning brand of Orthodox Christianity. In return, Volodymyr hooked the Byzantines up with the Varangian guard, a legendary band of Scandinavian mercenaries who served as the emperor’s royal guard for centuries. Now this was no Pax Romana – the Byzantines still had to fight on all fronts, and the Bulgarians even swiped northern Greece in the 900s, later recovered by the efforts of Basil II a century later – but compared to the way things were, the Byzantines were doing great. Meanwhile, Constantinople had never been better. By the year 1,000 it held half-a-million people, and remained the largest, best-defended, and most magnificent city in the world. Hagia Sophia was one of countless churches to get gorgeous new decorations after iconoclasm. Times clearly changed, but Constantinoupoli remained a gorgeous window into the classical world, with Roman-style churches, a cartoonishly huge chariot stadium, and marble and porphyry as far as the eye could see. But Constantinople wasn’t just a Roman capital: it was the keystone city of the Mediterranean, a Cosmopolis where people from all over could come, trade, work, and live – Just as there were Catholic churches in the Italian quarters of the city, so too was there a Mosque for the city’s Muslim population and diplomatic guests. The Romans never missed an opportunity to commemorate culture through architecture! And all across the empire, Byzantine architects were hard at work building gorgeous urban cathedrals and cliffside monasteries. But funnily enough, our best looks at peak Byzantine art come not just from outside the empire, but from its rivals. To the west, Venice and the Normans made for some of Constantinople’s oddest frenemies, because as much as they used spears and ships to snag some Byzantine power and prosperity for themselves, they were the most enthusiastic adopters of the Byzantine style. Seriously, between Saint Mark’s Basilica and the Palatine Chapel, Italy is the best place to see golden-age art. Then to the north is Saint Sophia cathedral in Kyiv, still to this day the pride of Ukraine’s Byzantine Orthodox legacy. Culturally, things had never been better, but politically, the cracks in the proverbial mosaic were starting to show. The Byzantines had been steadily reaching back out to the Balkans and out of Anatolia, but the empire was more comfortable being on the defensive than the offensive, and the carefully-constructed Themata system began suffering from bloat. Strategoi got complacent and ignored their civic duties to play Monopoly-Men within their Thema, and between Theodosian walls and gold-covered domes, cushy bureaucrats in Constantinople barely raised their heads from their books. So each camp blamed the other for the empire’s problems, and both did exactly nothing to fix it. The emperor didn’t help matters by ignoring the Themata to rely more and more on the Tagma, a standing army meant primarily for campaigning. This put the Byzantines in an extremely precarious position, spread too thin and poorly prepared to face new threats, like trying to stab your enemies with a limp spaghetti. To the west, the Normans swooped into southern Italy to conquer the last Byzantine pockets, and to the east, the Seljuk Turks dunked on the Byzantines so hard that Anatolia just disappeared. And they didn’t even have to try that hard! Half the Byzantine army deserted en-route to the battle of Manzikert in 1071, and the generals made a series of miscalculations on their way to an entirely avoidable outcome. It was hardly even the battle that doomed them, after Manzikert, the Byzantines kind of shrugged and let them have the rest. By 1075, the empire had never been smaller or weaker. You’d think the Greeks would know a thing or two about Hubris, but apparently not! And unfortunately for our Grekbois here, the 1000s only frayed the already dodgy relationship between the churches in Constantinople and Rome. Justinian’s big idea of One Church and One Empire went kaput as soon as the southern Mediterranean went poof, and Byzantine authority in Rome remained nominal at best. When the Papal States officially split in 754 it was only a formality. Communication between east and west was already tricky because of how few Byzantines spoke Latin and how few Italians spoke Greek. And tiffs like Iconoclasm exacerbated disagreements about whether the Pope had supreme spiritual authority or whether Byzantines had the right to mind their own business. These views were… fundamentally incompatible, and this multicentury spat came to a head when a Roman delegate excommunicated the entire Byzantine church in the middle of Hagia Sophia in the middle of service, daaaaaaamn (but like literalllyyyyy), so the Greeks responded with excommunications of their own, and just like that we’ve got a Schism. While nobody at the time quite realized the implications, this marked the final split of ties between the Catholic church in Rome and the Eastern Orthodox church. But one Byzantine emperor saw this as a rare opportunity. Alexios I ended nearly a decade of civil war to assume the throne in 1081, and his Komninos dynasty oversaw a remarkable revival of Byzantine fortunes throughout the 1100s. He held the empire steady for nearly 4 decades, made new trade agreements with the Venetians, and hatched a clever plan to regain Anatolia. He went to Pope Urban with the offer to recognize Papal supremacy in exchange for a dispatch of soldiers to help with the Byzantine reconquest. But Urban’s hearing was a little selective, because he ended up sending along several armies’-worth of European bandits who wanted to, lemme make sure im hearing this right: Retake The Holy Land? That wasn’t the plan at all! *sigh, Well I guess this is our life now, so now Alexios had to wrangle this box of Oops All Crusaders and point them towards Jerusalem so they didn’t Deus Vult all over his empire instead. Ultimately, the Crusaders were much more excited to conquer their own new lands than restore lost Byzantine territories, and subsequent crusades would only entangle the Byzantines further into the mess that is medieval European politics, earning nothing but antagonism from their western neighbors. Meanwhile the Normans were constantly poking and prodding into Greece, and soon enough the Venetians would have a monopoly on Byzantine trade. But despite all that, the Komninoi left the empire a lot better than they first got it, having reclaimed coastal Anatolia, modernized the economy by Venetian supervision, and continued to make churchloads of gold-covered art. Also during this time, princess Anna Komnene composed an epic poem about the reign of her father Alexios, and in so doing became the first woman historian and absolute literary badass! Honestly, I feel like that’s kinda the Byzantine motto at this point — definitely precarious, but hey, it could’ve been a lot worse! When we picked up this chapter of Byzantine history, the empire was in a really bad way, what with the hemorrhaging provinces and smashing all of their art — but it’s no accident that they went on to steady their empire and revitalize their culture. The Byzantines survived, and then dug themselves out of the Ouch Times by being clever and never giving up — The Thema System is a genius innovation in statecraft, and it bought the Byzantines an entire Golden Age to work with — And of course, as time went on they got a little careless, but then when things got dire, they persevered and turned things around, again! I don’t just like Byzantine history in spite of their setbacks, I love Byzantine history because they’re a Golden Disaster Empire dammit. Remember, in life, it doesn’t matter how you get knocked down, or how you lose all of North Africa, or all of Greece, or Anatolia too, wow they’ve really been through it haven’t they? What matters – What matters, is that you keep on trying no matter what, because golden ages can dawn when you least expect it. It’s easy to lose track of just how long-running the Byzantines are. While the Roman Empire in the west was getting Goth-smacked into oblivion in 476 AD, the eastern half of the empire, with its capital of Constantinople, was, by comparison, doing pretty great. For one, they existed, so that’s a plus, and the Byzantine Empire evolved into a gorgeous gold-coated hybrid of classical Greco-Roman and medieval Christian culture. But unfortunately for our Byz-Bois, shiny mosaics and ginormous domes couldn’t prevent the infinite abyss of disasters that lay in wait over the millennium to come. Between Persians, Goths, Arabs, Turks, Normans, and the more-than-occasional civil war, it’s safe to say the Byzantines could not catch a break. And the latter medieval period continued this distinctly Promethean trend, where they suffer a constant and arduous Evisceration by Eagle without ever actually dying from it. As we will indeed see in just a moment, our favorite Golden Disaster Empire managed to keep on thriving and defying the specter of death despite even the most Garbâge of circumstances. So, let’s see how the Byzantine Empire procrastinated its own death and even then, kinda slipped past the deadline. I tell ya, those Romans are crafty bastards. Now, we begin, contradictorily, with the fall of the Empire – about two centuries ahead of the typical 1453. I know, we’re making great time. Because long before the Ottomans ever enter the picture, the Byzantines were struggling to coexist with the Italian merchant empires they were growing so reliant on. Venetian and Genoese traders tussled in the Latin neighborhoods of Constantinople like they were street gangs in Shakespearean Verona, but the Byzantines poured the proverbial Greek Fire on the problem by arresting and then murdering tens of thousands of Latin citizens in the city. Bad look. This Giant Yikes was compounded by the baffling ineptitude of the ruling Angelos dynasty, whose constant infighting left the empire woefully mismanaged. This got… infinitely worse when the powers of Europe launched Crusade Numero 4 on the promise of: “This Time It Might Actually Work”. To the ensuing surprise of precisely nobody, it got off to a rocky start, with their understaffed army getting excommunicated by the Pope before they even left the Adriatic sea. But the light at the end of the Crusaders’ tunnel was prince Alexios Angelos, who offered Byzantine money and military support in exchange for reinstating his deposed father. Money he distinctly did not have. So here we see Mr Angelos ignoring the key rules from Alexios Komnenos’ Declassified Crusading Survival Guide: Rule #1: Under Any Circumstances, Do Not Ask Crusaders for Help. We’ve been through this before, it is not worth it. Rule #2: If the Crusaders arrive anyway, transport your Crusaders across your empire as fast as humanly possible. Do Not let them get any ideas. Rule #3: While your Crusaders are inside your empire, never for any reason provoke your Crusaders. They are armed, violent, and prone to fits of disproportionate holy rage. Yet, in 1204, the Angeloi failed spectacularly on every point – And, spying an opportunity to quit while they were ahead, the Crusaders simply sacked Constantinople. Venice deliberately instigated the pillaging, but by this point the Byzantines Really Should Have Known Better than to Tee Them Up. So, The Sack. Beyond being a rough approximation of Literal Hell On Earth for the Byzantines unfortunate to be on the receiving end, the Crusaders desolated the art and architecture of the city. Venetians had the good sense to steal the priceless relics of Constantinople for The Glory Of The Republic instead of mindlessly burning and/or murdering everything and/or one — but whether trashed or taken, Constantinople still ended up ruined, and the rest of the Empire was next on the To-Thieve list. Venice, the crafty little devils, chose to swipe up the islands of the Aegean, while the Franks installed a Latin emperor on the Byzantine throne and carved up the Greek mainland. On paper, the Byzantine Empire breaks right here: the capital was now kaput, and the Aegean Basin which so long preserved the Greco-Roman world went poof. But even The End Of The Empire couldn’t shake that damn Hellenic persistence, as Byzantine nobles in Survival-Mode quickly carved out states in the wake of the Crusade, in Trebizond, Nicaea, and Epirus. Each became a haven for Greeks fleeing their new Frankish overlords in Mainland Greece, whose Latin Empire proved to be little more than a post-crusade money-pot. But the Franks quickly got bored by the prospect of actually governing and soon became weaker than the assorted Byzantines they had so recently stomped. Are we actually surprised? The three Hellenic states started out on the defensive, to put it mildly, but some shifty strategy and good old-fashioned luck gave Nicaea a leg up. The man in charge Michael Palaiologos was an old-fashioned Big Ideas guy, and he retooled his army away from pure defense to be more nimble and aggressive, allowing him to campaign on four fronts at once, spread out over the Western Anatolian coast and gain a foothold in Thrace and Macedonia. And then the Nicaeans reconquered Constantinople kind of by accident. While a small army scouted around the city to suss out its defenses, they learned that the Frankish army was out on campaign, so the Byzantines snuck through a small break in the wall, opened a gate, and then took the city. For all the disasters to befall the Byzantines, it’s only fair that the RNG Just This Once works out in their favor. That said, Emperor Mikey-mike Pabbity-labbity soon found his work cut out for him, as the city had hardly been cleaned since the crusade half a century earlier, and sliding so close to death’s door prevented the Byzantines from cutting quite as Imperial a figure as they used to. Still, it was better than the alternative. As we’ve seen, it was hard enough to defend the Byzantine dominion back in the good old days, but with the emperor now presiding over a kingdom and a capital that were both hollow shells of their former selves, the more impressive achievement was not in retaking Constantinople, but in keeping it. Tricky, but not impossible, as Romans in every era adapted their military to the needs of the moment, and a weakened empire on the backfoot had to win harder fights with inconsistent resources. So they got clever: their solution was to update a taxation system called the Pronoia by applying it to the military – essentially staffing your heavy cavalry by giving them local taxation rights rather than paying and equipping them yourself. The Emperor was still in charge of all the contracts and could revoke or transfer them at will, so weirdly enough, this functions like a militarized version of the tax-farming Publicani system from way back in the Republic! And according to contemporary sources, the army’s infantry manpower seems to have just… shown up whenever there was a battle?? So the late Byzantine army retained the iconic heavy cavalry, paid for by a medieval innovation on a Republic-era system, and all supported by a throwback to Polis-era farmers-turned-soldiers – A patchy system to be sure, and the implied desperation is apparent, but it did the trick, and it’s one hell of an illustration for how old Greek and Roman ideas were still at play in the Byzantine world. Otherwise, clever diplomacy was the sharpest weapon in the Byzantine arsenal; and as ever, the rivalry between Venice and Genoa made this difficult, as their schoolyard slapfight had a conspicuous habit of always going down in Constantinople. And of course, there were a few strategic flubs, such as when the Byzantines hired a band of Catalan mercenaries who went rogue at the slightest provocation and claimed the Duchy of Athens for the next 7 decades. But even this wasn’t the worst mercenary customer experience the Byzantines would endure. As, in 1343, the royal treasury was too thin to pay for Venetian help, so the former-empress Anna pawned what she had, which was the empire’s crown jewels. Despite selling Constantinople’s royal honor for some warships, Anna lost her war, which, I should say, was a civil war, against the empire. This one really illuminates what kind of fuster-clucks the Byzantines regularly threw themselves into, because the death of the last emperor Andronikos left a beeby 9 year old John Palaiologos in charge. His mother Anna sought to rule as regent, but Andronikos’ second-in-command John Kantakouzenos wanted to be co-emperors until the kiddo was old enough. That civil war split Byzantine society across class lines and featured its very own religious controversy. So when John Kantakouzenos and his wife Irene were officially coronated in 1347, the original crown jewels were off in Venice, like every other Byzantine artifact, so their crowns were copies made of tinted glass – augh God that’s so sad it Hurts; forget the crusade, that’s what kills me. Naturally, Johnny P turned 20 a few years later and threw another civil war to kick out his co-emperor, so this whole tragedy was a giant waste. Yet, somehow, despite all of that, hardly the worst thing to happen in the 1340s, because, fun surprise: Plague. Man, it does not let up. Population is ravaged, economy in ruins, let us not dally here, friends, we all know the drill, and this would provide a golden opportunity for the Ottomans over in Anatolia. See, back while our Byz-bois were busy reconstituting their empire, several tiny principalities sprung up in the east after the collapse of the Sultanate of Rum. No, not the drink, that’s the Arabic and Turkish word for Rome. But where had the Rum gone? Well, each individual Beylik was eager to carve out its own space, and the state of Osman Bey was the most adept and dynamic of the bunch. From their starting spot on Nicaea’s doorstep, they leveraged their own military skill, a diplomatic talent for playing rival Byzantine factions against each other, and the convenient apparition of Plague to recast the entire Eastern Roman world in only a century. Of course, the Ottomans were not Roman in the way the Byzantines were Roman – they were a Sunni Muslim state with unique institutions and culture – but they were one of many, many societies who found themselves in the Roman orbit and slowly began to scoot themselves toward the center. This wasn’t a rivalry between the Two Eyes of the World like back with Persia, and this wasn’t a surprise arrival of a brand-new society like the early Caliphate, this was, in the grand scheme of Roman history, the last in a long line of a very familiar situation. The Roman world was a lush and expansive grove, and a lot of societies fancied themselves enjoying that fruit. The Ottomans’ rise would not be immediate, but they quickly made it clear they were the next big Muslim power, at the direct expense of the last big Roman one. So, about a century after the reconquest of Constantinople, there were four fundamental and unavoidable problems to the empire’s long-term health: The Ottomans were gaining strength and pushing west, Venice and Genoa turned the Aegean into their personal battlefield, and the complete lack of a Byzantine economy meant they were fully dependent on those two for trade, then, to cap it off we’ve got the endless internal power struggles and succession crises — let’s not kid ourselves, this is still the Romans we’re talking about here. With worries like that, fully rebuilding the empire was a no-go, so the Byzantines were picking their battles and biding their time, which meant putting themselves under the protection of the Ottomans. But, ever defiant in the face of peril, giving up was never an option. While The Empire was shrinking down to Just Constantinople, things looked shockingly different on the other side of the Aegean. Back when Michael Palaiologos was tripping ass-first into retaking Constantinople in 1261, he also had the good fortune of capturing the Latin Prince of Achaea in a battle, and ransomed him back in exchange for a few castles down in the Peloponnese. They weren’t much, but they were well-fortified among the mountains, much like the ancient Spartans had been way back when. Over the next two centuries, this distant Byzantine outpost in Lakonia became a prosperous corner of the Hellenic world, as Greeks from the Morea and beyond flocked into the city of Mystras to try and pick up where the empire left off. So in the 13 and 1400s, Mystras became a haven of Byzantine culture and scholarship. And, I mean, look, I’m not going to pretend like one decently well-off corner of the Greek world is on par with the empire pre-crusade, because of course it’s not, but I will come to bat for the Morea as a paragon of that Romano-Hellenic perseverance, to keep on trying even after everything seemed lost. No I’m not getting sentimental, that’s just marble dust in my eye, shut up. *Ahem. Anyway, like with Constantinople, keeping this territory safe required a gentle diplomatic touch, but the game was a hell of a lot easier with water on 3 sides and mountains on the 4th. And with Constantinople sweating javelins at the sight of incoming Ottomans, it became clear that the Morea could handle itself, so it gained autonomy in 1349. By the early 1400s they expanded outside Lakonia onto almost the entire Peloponnese, and briefly had authority over Attica. The Byzantine Morea also had a practical benefit to Constantinople, as emperors-in-waiting got their political training as governors down in the Peloponnese, to the point where the last emperor Constantine XI was actually crowned in Mystras rather than up in the capital. Uh oh, did I say last? Yeah, about that. The thing with the Ottomans is they didn’t… stop. Despite the empire’s best efforts and the too-little-too-late help of European Crusader armies that disintegrated on impact, it was clear the show was wrapping up. By 1453, Sultan Mehmet finally had the means to take the city of Constantinople, and by means I mean cannons the size of a house. After blockading the Bosphorus and cutting off the city’s line of supply, the Ottomans blasted open the Theodosian walls and poured in. Emperor Constantine is said to have given a rousing speech to his countrymen before charging into where the fighting was fiercest, never to be seen again. After the battle, the Sultan toured the city and was so awed by the beauty of Hagia Sophia that he preserved it and converted it into a mosque, rather than blasting it and starting from scratch, as was more often the move. But even after this (he said, moving the goalpost back for dramatic effect), it wasn’t The End for the Byzantines. For one, the Ottomans continued the time-honored love of ultra-domed architecture, and ethnic Rhomaioi would play a meaningful role in Ottoman history and culture as artists, administrators, artisans, sailors, soldiers, and people. After all, Kostantiniyye remained the keystone city of the Mediterranean, more prosperous and secure than it had been in centuries. It’s disingenuous to pretend that nothing was lost when Mehmet breached the Theodosian walls in 1453, that blood was not spilled and a state did not end, but when the man declares himself Kaysar-I Rum, he's declaring in Rome’s own terms that, as its new Caesar, he is both conqueror and builder – That civilization was now his responsibility; he took it, yes, but he did not destroy it. It's a similar case in other corners of the once-Greek world, where Hellenic culture persevered and prospered for centuries despite being part of Other People’s Empires. There’s an old saying that “Rome conquered Greece but Greece conquered Rome” describing how Hellenic culture always pervades whatever state it becomes part of, and that has never stopped being true, be it Rome, the Ottomans, or anyone else. The Venetian Republic’s outlying territories in the Aegean and Ionian seas were also majority-Greek, and here they played an outsized role in bringing classical ideas to a Catholic European audience. Venetian Greece contributed mightily to the budding Renaissance, and Crete especially became a beacon for art and scholarship that mixed traditional Hellenism with Renaissance innovations. So, despite the earth-shattering treachery of Crusading Venetians centuries prior, the painfully ironic end-result is that Venice played a vital part in the long-term preservation of Byzantine culture — Man that is uncomfortable to say out loud. But as we enter the 15 and 1600s, the days of Greeks in Constantinople ruling their ancient empire are long, long gone – so let’s wrap up. The standard question of the Byzantine Empire is essentially “Why didn't they die way the hell sooner when everything was always on fire?” Because, on one level, yeah, the Byzantine story is over 1,000 straight years of the map getting smaller, but that time-lapse would have been swift if they didn’t persevere. Let’s not forget they had over 1,000 years. By some metrics, that’s The Longest Empire. And it got that far because at no point in Byzantine history was it too late to care, or too late to try, because they believed that they had something about their state, their people, their faith, and their identity that was worth dying for and worth living for. And even when the last mini-golden-age was a distant memory, that tireless determination to Do Their Best kept them going in even the most dire circumstances to create the next mini-golden-age. So when we look back at the empire to ask why the Byzantines endured after Rome falls in 476, it’s for the same reason as when Constantinople fell in 1204, but the Byzantines, the greeks, the Rhomaioi, endured. Thank you so much for watching! This was a very meaningful video for me to make, so I sincerely hope you enjoyed it. I often talk about how ancient Rome is exciting, or Venice is flashy, but the Byzantines are really special to me, and I’ll count myself satisfied if I was able to convey why. Now with my 4-part re-summarized series done, all I’ve got to do now is ah ~ stitch these videos together, right? ~~ I’ll see ya soon~~~