CivStory

Byzantium: The Thousand-Year Empire

The eastern Roman empire from Constantine to Mehmed II: a new capital, a domed church, the last war with Sasanian Iran, a long dispute over icons, a mission to Kyiv and the crusader sack of 1204.

Start this guided tour on the map

Part 1

In 324 CE Constantine I, now sole emperor, chose the old Greek city of Byzantion on the Bosporus for a new capital and dedicated it in 330 as Constantinople. It received a Senate, a hippodrome and free grain like Rome, and new churches rose beside older monuments. Its people called themselves Romans; 'Byzantine' is a name later given by Western scholars.

Sources:

Part 2

In January 532 the Blue and Green chariot-racing factions joined in revolt against Justinian I, burned much of the city centre and proclaimed a rival emperor. The historian Procopius says Justinian was ready to flee until the empress Theodora declared she would rather die in the imperial purple; the speech may be partly Procopius' own composition. Troops then trapped the crowd in the Hippodrome and killed, by Procopius' figure, some 30,000 people.

Sources:

Part 3

Weeks after the riots, Justinian began rebuilding the burned church of Hagia Sophia, 'Holy Wisdom'. Designed by Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus and dedicated in 537, it set a vast dome on pendentives over a basilica; the first dome collapsed in 558 and was rebuilt higher. After 1453 it became a mosque, from 1934 a museum, and since 2020 a mosque again.

Sources:

Part 4

From 603, after the murder of the emperor Maurice, who had helped restore him to his throne, the Sasanian king Khosrow II went to war and conquered Roman Syria, Jerusalem and Egypt, and in 626 his army stood on the Asian shore of the Bosporus while the Avars besieged Constantinople. Heraclius answered by campaigning through the Caucasus into Iran; in 627–628 he sacked Khosrow's palace at Dastgerd, and Khosrow was overthrown and killed in a palace coup. Both empires were exhausted when the Arab conquests began in the 630s.

Sources:

Part 5

From the reign of Leo III, traditionally from 726 or 730, emperors and church councils restricted or banned the veneration of icons, and a council in 754 condemned them. Icons were restored in 787, banned again in 815 and finally restored in 843 under the empress-regent Theodora, an event the Orthodox Church still celebrates. Almost all surviving sources were written by the victorious supporters of icons, and recent scholarship argues that Leo III's own measures were limited.

Sources:

Part 6

Around 988 Vladimir I, prince of Kyiv, accepted baptism as part of a bargain with the emperor Basil II: he sent warriors to help crush a revolt and married the emperor's sister Anna. The Primary Chronicle, compiled in Kyiv more than a century later, tells how he weighed several faiths, a story historians treat as a literary set piece. The church of Kyivan Rus' is heritage shared by Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians.

Sources:

Part 7

The Fourth Crusade set out for Egypt but, deep in debt to Venice for its fleet, was drawn into a Byzantine succession dispute. In April 1204 the crusaders stormed Constantinople and plundered it for three days, carrying relics and treasures west, among them the bronze horses now in Venice. They set up a Latin empire; Byzantine rulers retook the city in 1261, but the empire never regained its earlier strength.

Sources:

Part 8

By the 15th century the empire was little more than its capital. On 29 May 1453, after a siege of about seven weeks in which cannon battered the land walls, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople; the last emperor, Constantine XI, is thought to have died in the fighting. Mehmed made the city his capital and repopulated it, and Greek scholars who left for Italy carried Byzantine learning with them.

Sources:
Start this guided tour on the map

Further reading