Which City Was Not Called New Rome Art History
The Byzantine Empire was a vast and powerful civilization with origins that tin can be traced to 330 A.D., when the Roman emperor Constantine I defended 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 i,000 more than years, spawning a rich tradition of art, literature and learning and serving as a military machine buffer between Europe and Asia. The Byzantine Empire finally fell in 1453, afterward an Ottoman regular army stormed Constantinople during the reign of Constantine XI.
Byzantium
The term "Byzantine" derives from Byzantium, an aboriginal Greek colony founded by a man named Byzas. Located on the European side of the Bosporus (the strait linking the Blackness Sea to the Mediterranean), the site of Byzantium was ideally located to serve as a transit and trade point 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 metropolis, Constantinople. Five years earlier, at the Council of Nicaea, Constantine had established Christianity — once an obscure Jewish sect — as Rome's official faith.
The citizens of Constantinople and the balance of the Eastern Roman Empire identified strongly as Romans and Christians, though many of them spoke Greek and not Latin.
Though Constantine ruled over a unified Roman Empire, this unity proved illusory after his death in 337. In 364, Emperor Valentinian I again divided the empire into western and eastern sections, putting himself in power in the due west and his brother Valens in the east.
The fate of the two regions diverged greatly over the next several centuries. In the due west, abiding attacks from High german invaders such every bit the Visigoths broke the struggling empire down piece by piece until Italy was the only 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, thanks in role to its geographic location.
With Constantinople located on a strait, it was extremely difficult to alienation the capital letter's defenses; in add-on, the eastern empire had a much smaller common frontier with Europe.
It also benefited greatly from a stronger administrative middle and internal political stability, besides as great wealth compared with other states of the early medieval flow. The eastern emperors were able to exert more control over the empire'southward economic resources and more finer muster sufficient manpower to combat invasion.
Eastern Roman Empire
Equally a upshot of these advantages, the Eastern Roman Empire, variously known as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, was able to survive for centuries later the fall of Rome.
Though Byzantium was ruled past Roman police force and Roman political institutions, and its official linguistic communication was Latin, Greek was also widely spoken, and students received pedagogy in Greek history, literature and culture.
In terms of faith, the Council of Chalcedon in 451 officially established the division of the Christian earth into separate patriarchates, including Rome (where the patriarch would subsequently call himself pope), Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem.
Even after the Islamic empire captivated Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem in the 7th century, the Byzantine emperor would remain the spiritual leader of near eastern Christians.
Justinian I
Justinian I, who took power in 527 and would dominion until his death in 565, was the outset nifty ruler of the Byzantine Empire. During the years of his reign, the empire included most of the country surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, every bit Justinian's armies conquered part of the old Western Roman Empire, including North Africa.
Many great monuments of the empire would exist built under Justinian, including the spectacular domed Church of Holy Wisdom, or Hagia Sophia. Justinian as well reformed and codified Roman law, establishing a Byzantine legal code that would endure for centuries and help shape the modern concept of the country.
At the fourth dimension of Justinian'southward death, 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 lodge to go on the empire adrift.
In addition, the royal army was stretched too thin, and would struggle in vain to maintain the territory conquered during Justinian'southward dominion. During the 7th 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 attack on the Byzantine Empire by storming into Syrian arab republic.
By the end of the century, Byzantium would lose Syria, the Holy Land, Egypt and North Africa (amongst other territories) to Islamic forces.
Gyre to Keep
Iconoclasm
During the 8th and early on 9th centuries, Byzantine emperors (get-go with Leo Three in 730) spearheaded a motion that denied the holiness of icons, or religious images, and prohibited their worship or veneration.
Known as Iconoclasm—literally "the bully of images"—the motility waxed and waned under various rulers, but did not end definitively until 843, when a Church council under Emperor Michael III ruled in favor of the display of religious images.
Byzantine Art
During the belatedly tenth and early 11th centuries, under the dominion of the Macedonian dynasty founded by Michael III's successor, Basil, the Byzantine Empire enjoyed a golden age.
Though it stretched over less territory, Byzantium had more control over trade, more wealth and more international prestige than under Justinian. The strong imperial authorities patronized Byzantine art, including now-cherished Byzantine mosaics.
Rulers likewise began restoring churches, palaces and other cultural institutions and promoting the written report of ancient Greek history and literature.
Greek became the official language of the land, and a flourishing culture 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 Russia.
The Crusades
The stop of the 11th century saw the beginning of the Crusades, the series of holy wars waged by European Christians against Muslims in the Nearly East from 1095 to 1291.
With the Seijuk Turks of central Asia bearing downwardly on Constantinople, Emperor Alexius I turned to the West for help, resulting in the declaration of "holy state of war" by Pope Urban II at Clermont, France, that began the First Cause.
As armies from France, Germany and Italy poured into Byzantium, Alexius tried to force their leaders to swear an oath of loyalty to him in guild to guarantee that land regained from the Turks would be 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 betrayal from the Crusaders.
During the subsequent Crusades, animosity continued to build between Byzantium and the Westward, culminating in the conquest and looting of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204.
The Latin regime established in Constantinople existed on shaky ground due to the open hostility of the metropolis'due south 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, first with Michael VIII in 1261, the economy of the once-mighty Byzantine country was bedridden, and never regained its former stature.
In 1369, Emperor John V unsuccessfully sought fiscal help from the Westward to face up the growing Turkish threat, but he was arrested as an insolvent debtor in Venice. Four years afterward, he was forced–like the Serbian princes and the ruler of Bulgaria–to become a vassal of the mighty Turks.
As a vassal state, Byzantium paid tribute to the sultan and provided him with military back up. Under John'south successors, the empire gained desultory relief from Ottoman oppression, but the rise of Murad 2 every bit sultan in 1421 marked the stop of the final respite.
Murad revoked all privileges given to the Byzantines and laid siege to Constantinople; his successor, Mehmed Two, completed this process when he launched the concluding set on on the urban center. On May 29, 1453, later an Ottoman army stormed Constantinople, Mehmed triumphantly entered the Hagia Sophia, which would soon be converted to the city'southward leading mosque.
The fall of Constantinople marked the stop of a glorious era for the Byzantine Empire. Emperor Constantine XI died in boxing that day, and the Byzantine Empire complanate, ushering in the long reign of the Ottoman Empire.
Legacy of the Byzantine Empire
In the centuries leading up to the concluding Ottoman conquest in 1453, the culture of the Byzantine Empire–including literature, fine art, architecture, constabulary and theology–flourished even as the empire itself faltered.
Byzantine civilisation would exert a bang-up influence on the Western intellectual tradition, as scholars of the Italian Renaissance sought help from Byzantine scholars in translating Greek pagan and Christian writings. (This process would continue afterward 1453, when many of these scholars fled from Constantinople to Italia.)
Long after its terminate, Byzantine culture and civilization continued to exercise an influence on countries that good its Eastern Orthodox religion, including Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece, amid others.
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Source: https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-middle-east/byzantine-empire
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