Byzantine Empire

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The Byzantine Empire is the modern name for the Eastern Roman Empire: the Greek-speaking, Christian continuation of Rome that was governed from Constantinople for more than a thousand years, until the city fell to the Ottomans in 1453. Its people did not call themselves Byzantine. They were Rhōmaioi — Romans — and held, with reason, that they were not the heirs of the Roman state but the thing itself, unbroken, merely relocated east.

The break the name marks is a historian’s convenience. Constantine refounded the old town of Byzantium as his capital and dedicated it in 330; the western provinces fell away over the following centuries while the east held. There is no year in which Rome became Byzantium. What slowly changed was the texture: Latin gave way to Greek as the language of state and church, and Roman law and administration fused with Greek thought and Orthodox Christianity into something with its own character. Under Justinian in the sixth century the empire codified that law, reconquered much of the Mediterranean for a time, and raised Hagia Sophia. It was also Justinian who, in 529, ordered the Athenian school of philosophy closed — the same emperor presiding over the end of the pagan Academy and the height of Christian Constantinople.

The empire’s lasting weight, for the history of ideas, lies in what it kept. Byzantine scribes copied and recopied the Greek classics through centuries when the Latin West had largely lost them; most of the ancient Greek texts that survive at all survive because Byzantine hands preserved them. When scholars carried manuscripts and Greek learning westward in the empire’s last generations, that transmission helped feed the Italian Renaissance. The corpus attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite — anonymous Greek writings of around 500 that wed Neoplatonist metaphysics to Christian worship — was a Byzantine inheritance before it became a foundation of Western mysticism.

Byzantium also developed a contemplative tradition of its own. Hesychasm, from the Greek for stillness, was the monastic practice of inner quiet and ceaseless prayer cultivated above all on Mount Athos, aimed at the direct experience of God. In the fourteenth century its defenders, led by Gregory Palamas, argued that monks could perceive the uncreated light of God — the light, they said, that the disciples had seen on Mount Tabor. Critics held this impossible: God in his essence is beyond all perceiving. Palamas answered by distinguishing God’s unknowable essence from his energies, in which he genuinely makes himself known. The church of the empire affirmed his position, and Orthodox theology has held to that distinction since — a claim Eastern Christians take as the settled teaching of their tradition, where Western theology took a different road.

The relations between Eastern and Western Christendom soured across the same centuries, from the schism conventionally dated to 1054 to the sack of Constantinople by a crusading army in 1204, a wound the empire never fully recovered from. It survived, diminished, for two more centuries. When the walls were finally breached in 1453, an institution that traced an unbroken line back to Augustus came to an end. Its learning had already gone west; its faith continued, unbroken, in the Orthodox churches that outlived the throne.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

→ Related: Christianity · Neoplatonism · Ancient Greece · Crusades · Middle Ages