Why do We Forget Byzantium?

There are several areas of history I sometimes get a little annoyed that people know so little of. Partly, I guess, is that history is written by winners. The legatees of the legatees. But sadly, it often leads to a skewed perspective of history.

The main myth that really annoys me is the myth of the dark age. It's a pernicious myth . The universal era of ignorance. It never happened, not in the way it is presented. The common perception is that with the fall of Rome in 486 AD, all knowledge was lost, Europe looted by ignorant thugs and then all knowledge lost as an ignorant church taught everybody the world was flat.

It's a myth, of course, invented to suit Anglocentric perceptions. Because what actually happened with the fall of the Western Empire, was that Britain dropped out of European culture and was lost for a time. And only gradually came back. Britain went through a dark age, but it went through it alone. Scandinavia too, was in a dark age, but then, it had been in one before. It hadn't been part of the classical world.

The reality is, for most of Europe, the period between the fall of Rome in 486 and the eleventh century isn't a dark period at all, civilisation soldiered on, largely due to the unifying power of the universal church, but also due to something else.

The fact that the Roman Empire didn't end with the fall of Rome.

I suppose to us Brits, when we study the anglo saxon invaders and we look back at the murky period between the last legions leaving and the conversion of Ethelred of Kent, we kind of see it as universal. Rome collapsed, Barbarians invaded, civilisation returned slowly, the medieval culture was a new start. It wasn't.

The Barbarians who invaded the rest of the Empire didn't replace those they conquered. Roman civilisation never died. The reason why France and Spain still speak Romance languages, is because Roman culture carried on.

The real truth is to do with the Emperor Constantine. Whatever you say about him, he was a visionary. And he seems to have grasped something crucial. Firstly, that Rome was on the wane unless something drastic was done. Secondly, he realised that the civilisation the Roman Empire made possible, was the real thing to save.

His first decision seems to have been that Christianity could provide a unifying force to keep that civilisation intact. His second decision was that the capital of a Christian Imperium would be better off in the heart of the strongest Christian provinces- he decided to abandon Rome. To tactically divide the Empire. Persians on one side, Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks etc on the other.

From his time on, there were two Empires- a Western one, based in Rome, and an eastern one, based in the city of Byzantium- now renamed Constantinople.

The Western one lasted under a hundred and fifty years after his death. The Eastern one had a thousand years yet to live.

The collapse of the Western one wasn't so very dramatic. What happened was that the barbarians kept coming in and pillaging, so the Emperors began to make deals. They gave them provinces. But these provinces retained Roman Law. In fact, the early Visigoth Kings in Spain technically held a dual mandate. They weren't Kings of Spain. They were Kings of the Goths IN Spain and Consul for the Emperor, OF Spain.

The chieftain who finally removed the last, and by this time wholly insignificant Western emperor, was the ruler of a people called the Heruli, but his victory was short lived, the Ostrogoths kicked him out, and even their victory was a flash in the pan.

For, during a period when no one really knows anything about the island of Britain at all, a kind of Roman revival happened.

Justinian the Great was possibly one of the Greatest roman emperors of all time. Because at this time, the Eastern Empire is still, essentially, a Roman one. In fact, when you hear the words 'Roman Canon Law' referred to, this is your man. The Code of Justinian, a compilation of all Roman Law ever issued, was the work of this Emperor.

But also, he restored the empire to ALMOST the giddy heights of old. He reconquered much of Southern Italy and ALL of North Africa, bringing most of the old Empire back under a single rule. In fact, the only bits he DIDN'T reconquer, were Gaul, Spain- and Britain.



But the Frankish Kingdoms in Gaul were hardly uncivilised. They still retained Roman law and Roman officials. In Gaul, the Roman period would pass seamlessly into the medieval. The Dux Bellorum, would becomes the Duke, the Comes Civitas, the Count.

Civilisation progressed in these areas, it never declined. The learned of the Middle ages knew many things they had learned in the so-called dark ages. What caused tides, the fact that diseases were caused by contagion, for most of Europe, life still marched forward.
And if you lived in Spain, they marched forward even faster. The Muslim conquest of Spain created a society Islamophobes like to ignore, a stark contrast to the religious intolerance of it's later Christian rulers, a Muslim state where Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together quite happily, and Muslim scholars invented algebra, named most of the stars, first distilled alcohol and first experimented with what became known as alchemy.

But at the heart of this world, the crucial factor in it, was that the Mediterranean remained a hub of culture. At no point did civilisation disappear from its rim.

And for much of its existence, the Byzantine Empire was the standard bearer of Christian states. The inheritor of Rome's mantle. The bulwark of Europe against the East, first Persia, then the Islamic world. It guarded the knowledge of the ages, it guarded the culture that later Europe would spring from.

It's history is so central to the history of Europe. For example, it is why there is an Eastern Orthodox church. The reason is simple. The rise of the Franks to become the main power in Western Europe, meant the Pope found he had a potential ally in his power struggles with the Emperor. So he made Charlemagne, the Frankish King an Emperor. Roman Emperor, in fact. Thus begun the Holy Roman Empire. This resulted into the separation of Europe into two spheres, a Western world in which the Pope was supreme and all rulers were subject to him, including a Western emperor, who was really a Frankish King, the language of this sphere being Latin.
And an Eastern Europe, where the Byzantine emperor is paramount, all states in this region owe him allegiance, and the Church is subject to him.

Incidentally, the cultural dividing line is still with us. Serbs and Croats speak the same language. They can understand eachother's speech.
Just not their writing.
Croats use the Latin alphabet and are Roman Catholics. Serbs write in Cyrillic and are Eastern Orthodox.
All Eastern Orthodox countries were at some time or other in the Eastern sphere and recognised, in some sense, that the Byzantine Emperor was head of the Christian faith.

In a sense, the Empire becomes less important to Western Europeans after Charlemagne's coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in 800AD- the next two hundred years would see the 'Western' sphere solidify into pretty much the same states that would exist up until Napoleon's time. But it still dominates the history of Eastern Europe and much of the Middle East. The curious ethnic mix that is the Balkans was largely determined by Byzantine history, the history of the Crusades makes less sense unless we understand Byzantine history, indeed the plunder of Constantinople by the army of the Fourth crusade in 1204 is one of the most fascinating and inglorious events of European history.
We cannot even really understand the history of Christianity without it.

And of course, in a very major way, it affects Europe today. Still. In one of those funny little awarenesses that no one quite gets.

The mindless plundering of the Fourth Crusade was largely motivated by greed. The fact was, the crusading leaders owed too much money to the Venetians and couldn't afford to fight the Infidel, so they thought they'd try a get rich quick plan. And since the Byzantines happened to be going through a bit of a political crisis at the time, and since they were the wrong sort of Christians, they were fair game.

The Empire never really recovered. The crusader states set up in 1204 over its territory were soon destroyed by a kind of Greek revival, but it was a swansong. The Ottoman Turks picked its provinces off piecemeal, and by 1453, the Muslim Sultans of Turkey ruled over most of what Justinian once had.

It was no more, the world of Eastern Christendom, that other Christian world, where the Emperor, not the Pope, ruled over church and state.
And yet- it was. Byzantium had an heir.
When the new Slavic states had appeared and decided to become respectable by embracing Christianity, they'd had to choose which sphere to belong to. Poland and Croatia, of course, opted for the west. Bulgaria and Serbia, decided for the East. But Bulgaria and Serbia were no more, just provinces of the Ottoman Empire.



But there remained a Slavic people, a Slavic state, just one, that had embraced the religion and culture of the Byzantine state and still survived. And whose rulers were now conscious that they were the sole heir of an entire culture not under infidel rule. And the irony was, their country was far beyond the bounds of land ever trod by Roman legions.

The Grand Dukes of Moscow.

But it was not long before their rulers decided that as the sole heirs of the Orthodox Imperium, they should honour that legacy.
And they took the title of Caesar. Tsar.



The rest of Europe always looked askance at Russia. It has always been seen as not really Europe, even though most of its main cities are in European Russia. I don't think this is because of its vast Asian outback. It's that separate legacy, the fact that until last century, the heirs of Byzantium were Muslim Turkey, and Orthodox Russia. Turkey had the land, Russia had the culture. And it's that, that Russia was the outsider to WESTERN Christendom, that alive in Russia was- and still is- a history that does not belong to Western Europe. Russia could never have been, had not Byzantium survived long enough to pass the embers of the torch it had carried since Constantine to the Russian Grand Dukes, the last defenders of its culture.

The strangeness of Russia, isn't the strangeness of Asia, it's the strangeness of Byzantium. Far from being Asian, it's distinctly European. It's just the only remaining example of that OTHER type of Christendom that most people are unaware ever existed. Because we can no longer count the Orthodox states of the Balkans in this category. They are something different now, Christian countries that were once ruled by the Turks. Only in Russia can we see what all Eastern Europe might have been like, had the Fourth crusade never happened.

I realise this post hasn't remotely done justice to the fascinating history of this Empire- how can it, it lasted over a thousand years, over twice as long as Emperors sat in Rome. I note that I haven't even said much of any of it's more interesting rulers. I suppose I just wanted to direct people's attention to this fundamentally important story in world history that is so often neglected. If you want to read more on it, the best history ever written of it, is probably George Ostrogorsky's History of the Byzantine State, which I'm guessing you can probably still get in most bookshops. But even if you don't fancy going into it in great depth, if you're remotely interested in history, this is one Empire, that really cannot be ignored to the degree it so often is.

Everyone alive today can give thanks, that for a time, it held civilisation together.