The Byzantine Empire: a Sketch

In AD 284 a powerful Roman general named Diocletian seized control of the Roman Empire and split it in two. Diocletian’s compatriot Maximian took the reigns over the western part of the Empire (consisting of Italy, Gaul, Britain, the Iberian peninsula, and Africa), and Diocletian made himself emperor over the eastern half (which was also the wealthiest part and consisted of Greece, Anatolia [Asia Minor], Syria, Palestine, and Egypt). From this point on, Rome was split into the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. Though the western Roman Empire disintegrated into a patchwork of feudal kingdoms after AD 476, it’s incorrect to say that the days of the Roman Empire were over, as the Eastern Roman Empire remained intact and would continue for a millennium, from the 5th century until the 15th, before being overwhelmed by the Ottoman Turks.

Most historians refer to the eastern part of the Roman Empire post-AD 476 as the “Byzantine Empire,” but this is a misnomer: her citizens saw themselves as Romaioi, or “Romans,” and up until the back half of the 6th century, they still lived, breathed, and operated as traditional Romans. They spoke a common Latin language, used Roman coinage, fought in the manner of the Roman legions, and patterned their cities off Roman urban networks, judged by Roman laws, and praised Roman civic culture. However, the end of the 6th and beginning of the 7th century saw many of these traditional Roman values and modes of operation fall by the wayside in favor of more ‘eastern’ ways of doing things: Greek supplanted Latin as the predominant language, and Greek culture began to seep into the empire’s skeletal supports. This new culture, which developed sometime around the beginning of the Middle Ages, has been called ‘Byzantine.’

The name ‘Byzantine’ is derived from ‘Byzantium’, the ancient Greek city on the western side of the Bosporus Straits, midway between the Mediterranean and Black Sea. The city’s prime location made it a natural transit point between Europe and Anatolia (Asia Minor), and thus whoever controlled the city had access to immeasurable trade from both water and land. Emperor Constantine re-founded Byzantium as the ‘new Rome’ in AD 330; at the time it was the most populated and wealthiest city in Roman territory, and it came to be called ‘Constantinople’ (or ‘the city of Constantine’) in contemporaneous language. As the western Roman Empire collapsed in the mid-late 5th century, Byzantine emperors lacked the funds and manpower to prevent its collapse. Their best hope to survive the western scourge was to focus on defending their eastern boundaries via a policy of warfare against the barbarians and paying tribute to foreign nations. While the western Roman Empire battled against barbarians, the Eastern Empire’s biggest threat was Persians from the east and Muslims from the south.

The Byzantine Empire reached its height under Emperor Justinian the Great (r. 527-565). The western Roman Empire was overcome by barbarians—the Vandals, the Visigoths, and the Ostrogoths—but these peoples met their match in Justinian. By 554 Justinian’s armies had annihilated the Vandal Kingdom in North Africa and brought it under Byzantine rule; he forced the Visigoths in Spain to hand over the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula; and he was victorious over the Ostrogoths in Italy (but, sadly, he couldn’t defend the Italian territories, and they fell to subsequent invaders). To the east Justinian managed a rough peace with the Persians. Within the Byzantine Empire, Justinian promoted law and order; in 528 he ordered a systematic codification of Roman law. The result—the Corpus Iuris Civilis, known down history as ‘Justinian’s Code’—consisted of four compilations: the Codex, an arrangement of imperial edicts by topic; the Digest (or Pandects), a summary of legal opinions; the Institutes, a textbook to familiarize students with the reformed system; and the Novellae, a collection of imperial edicts issued after 534. Justinian’s triumphant work lasted through the Middle Ages and was the basis for international, commercial, and Church law; and to this day most western legal systems are roughly based around the principles preserved in Justinian’s Code.

Justinian’s successors couldn’t keep up with his expansionist policies, and the Byzantine Empire began to suffer constriction from eastern enemies, notably the Persians and the Muslims in their various dynasties and emergent nations. Bit by bit the Byzantine Empire shrunk, whittled away by foreign enemies from outside and from corruption within. Arab peoples, energized by an Islamic faith intent on world domination, pushed Byzantine emperors to their limits. When the Seljuk Turks occupied Nicaea, just a few miles from Constantinople, Byzantium called for aid from the west, initiating the Crusades of the Middle Ages. While Byzantium was able, with western assistance, to withstand the Muslim onslaughts, she suffered cruelly at the hands of an Italian-based enemy: the Venetians. The Venetians sacked Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade and turned it into a Latin empire, but the Byzantines retook the city in the early 13th century. Nonetheless, the Byzantine Empire was but an echo of its former glory; in the mid-1400s its power was restricted to Greece, the Aegean Sea, and the city of Constantinople and its environs. The Turks, who had come close to wiping Byzantium off the political map, managed to weather the Crusades but were crushed by the Mongols in the 1400s. The Mongols became the greatest threat facing Byzantium, but they, too, tasted defeat. Their destruction came at the hands of an emergent Middle Eastern empire, that of the Ottomans. The Ottomans would succeed where the Persians, Arabs, and Turks had failed: they would bring down Byzantium and spell the end for the last vestiges of the ancient Roman Empire.

Osman I, the founder of the Ottoman Dynasty

The name ‘Ottoman’ comes from its founding ruler, Osman, who ruled from 1290 to 1326. The Seljuk Turks had wrenched Anatolia from Byzantine control, and these Anatolian territories were turned into the ‘Sultanate of Rum’ (Rum was a Turkish synonym for ‘Greek’). As the Sultanate declined in the 14th century, it was divided into a hodgepodge patchwork of independent Turkish principalities known as the Anatolian Beyliks. One of these beyliks, situated in Bithynia on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire, was led by a Turkish leader known as Osman. Osman founded a dynasty that would last six hundred years, but historians have no idea how Osman was able to get his empire started. The outdated Gaza Thesis states that he rallied religious warriors to fight in the name of Islam, but this theory is no longer supported by historians. In its place we have nothing; how Osman managed to do it is unknown, but do it he did. His early followers consisted of Turkish tribal groups and Byzantine defectors (most of whom converted to Islam). Osman conquered Byzantine towns along the Sakarya River and subjugated his Turkish neighbors. In the century after his death, his successors began spreading their rule across Anatolia and the Balkans. Osman’s son Orhan captured Bursa in northwest Anatolia in 1326 and made it his capital, supplanting Byzantine control in the region. In 1387 the Ottomans captured the Venetian port city of Thessaloniki; in 1389 they were victorious at Kosovo, ending Serbian dominance in the region and opening the door to advancements into Europe; and in 1396, at the Battle of Nicopolis, the Ottomans decisively defeated a coalition of western armies intent on checking Muslim expansion into Europe.

All of Europe knew that Constantinople, the capital city of the Byzantine Empire, was the last great bastion against the Ottomans; the Ottomans knew this, too, and began making plans to make it theirs. Byzantine hopes soared in 1402 when Timur, founder of the Timurid Empire, bested the Ottomans at the Battle of Ankara. Timur took the Ottoman sultan captive, and the Ottoman Empire imploded into civil war as the imprisoned sultan’s sons squabbled over the refuse. His son Mehmed emerged from the civil war victorious, and he restored Ottoman power in 1413. The Byzantine emperors hoped that the incessant wars between the Timurids and Ottomans would keep the eastern threat to a minimum, but in the 1430s the Ottoman sultan Murad II began retaking lost territories from the Timurids. Thessaloniki, Macedonia, and Kosovo returned to Ottoman control. Polish and Hungarian armies set their teeth against the waxing Ottomans, but Murad repelled them. The Europeans were soundly defeated at the Battle of Varna in 1444 and again at the Second Battle of Kosovo in 1448. Murad II’s son, Mehmed II (who would be known to history as Mehmed the Conqueror) reorganized the Ottoman state and military and set his sights on Constantinople. By taking Constantinople, the Ottomans would seize control of the Bosporus straits and have an open door to the Mediterranean—and to Europe.