The Roman Empire that carried on in the east: Constantine's new capital, the great walls, Justinian and Theodora, plague, silk, Greek fire, the war over icons, the conversion of the Slavs and the Rus, the schism with Rome, the disasters of 1071 and 1204, the last flowering at Mistra, the fall of 1453 and the long afterlife.
Stop 01 · 324–330
A New Rome on the Bosphorus
Picture a narrow strait where Europe almost touches Asia. In 324 Constantine won sole rule of the Roman world, and he chose this spot for a new capital. The old town of Byzantion stood here, with a fine harbour in the Golden Horn and access to both the Danube and the Euphrates. He declared the place a New Rome, enlarged the Hippodrome for chariot racing, and on 11 May 330 consecrated the city that would carry his name. Historians often start the Byzantine story on that day. Its people used the word only for the city's residents. They were Romans living in a Roman state, and they went on saying so for more than eleven centuries.
Constantine I The Great, Colossal bronze statue fragments, Capitoline MuseumsApaleutos25 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Picture a narrow strait where Europe almost touches Asia. In 324 Constantine won sole rule of the Roman world, and he chose this spot for a new capital. The old town of Byzantion stood here, with a fine harbour in the Golden Horn and access to both the Danube and the Euphrates. He declared the place a New Rome, enlarged the Hippodrome for chariot racing, and on 11 May 330 consecrated the city that would carry his name. Historians often start the Byzantine story on that day. Its people used the word only for the city's residents. They were Romans living in a Roman state, and they went on saying so for more than eleven centuries.
Even before the Goths took Rome in 410, the east was building. Anthemius, who ran the government for the boy emperor Theodosius II, gave Constantinople a new land wall, finished around 413 with 96 towers. Then in 447 earthquakes wrecked much of it, just as the Huns were raiding. The prefect Constantine took charge, and the Blues and the Greens, the rival racing factions, are said to have supplied 16,000 labourers between them. A lower second wall went up in front of the first, doubling the towers to 192, and a wide ditch lay beyond that. The whole barrier ran for about six kilometres, and it spared the city an attack by Attila. No foreign army would force the city's defences until the Fourth Crusade.
Theodora grew up in the world of the Hippodrome, where her father kept bears for the Green faction. She went on the stage as a child. In 524 the emperor Justin issued an edict letting actresses marry senators, and soon Justinian had married her. They reigned together from 527. In January 532 the Blues and Greens, normally enemies, turned on the throne together, and fires swept much of the city. The historian Procopius gives Theodora a defiant speech at the crisis: flight is wrong now, and royalty makes a good burial shroud. Scholars suspect the words are his. Troops under Belisarius and Mundus stormed the Hippodrome, and Procopius puts the dead at more than 30,000.
Roman law had become a mountain of statutes and old opinions, and Justinian set the official Tribonian to clear it. A new Code was finished on 7 April 529, then revised in 534. Next a commission of sixteen, made up of an official, four professors and eleven advocates, took on the writings of the great jurists. Some 2,000 books were boiled down to the fifty of the Digest, finished in 533. A student textbook, the Institutes, gained the force of law that December. All this was done in Latin. Around 1070 the work surfaced again in northern Italy, though nobody agrees exactly how. Taught at Bologna, it became the groundwork of Europe's civil law tradition.
The riots left the city's great church in ashes. On 23 February 532, only weeks later, Justinian began again. He handed the job to two architects, Anthemios of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, and asked for something worthy of the capital. On 27 December 537 he opened the new Hagia Sophia. The story goes that he cried out, 'Solomon, I have outdone thee!' Its huge dome looked too wide to stand. It very nearly was. Earthquakes in the 550s brought part of it down, and Isidore's nephew, Isidore the Younger, designed a new dome, finished in 562. That is essentially the building that stands today, and it will be the stage for much of this tour.
Justinian wanted the West back. In 533 Belisarius sailed for Africa and beat the Vandals by December. In 535 he went on to Italy, and in 540 he took Ravenna, where mosaics finished in 547 still show the emperor and Theodora in San Vitale. Then a new enemy came. Procopius says plague began at Pelusium in Egypt and reached the capital the next spring. He reports 5,000 dead a day, then 10,000, with bodies stacked in towers across the Golden Horn. Justinian caught it and lived. Italy took until 554. How deep the damage went is argued today: older estimates ran to tens of millions of deaths, while a 2019 study calls such figures exaggerated.
Silk was the luxury everyone wanted, and it reached the empire through Persia, which controlled the trade and cut it off in wartime. Around 552 two monks who had travelled as far as China came to Justinian. Hidden in their bamboo canes, the story says, they brought silkworm eggs or tiny larvae. Accounts differ on the details, but the empire could now raise its own silk for weavers in cities such as Constantinople, Beirut and Tyre. Silk became a business of state, paid out as money and sent as diplomatic gifts. The capital's rulebook, the Book of the Eparch, set out separate trades for silk merchants, importers, dressers and dyers, and it fixed their profits and their quarters. Silk dyed in Tyrian purple could not be sold abroad.
Heraclius was crowned in October 610 after a revolt launched from Africa, and things then got worse. The Persians took Jerusalem in 614, carrying off the True Cross, and invaded Egypt in 618. In 626 Avars and Persians assaulted the capital itself, and failed. The emperor struck back, broke the Persian army at Nineveh in 627, and on 21 March 629 or 630 returned the Cross to Jerusalem. Both empires were spent. Arab armies then came out of the south, and defeat at the Yarmuk in 636 cost him Syria. Egypt fell between 639 and 642. The state that survived was smaller and more Greek: Greek replaced Latin in government, and emperors now took the title basileus.
BattlesConstantinople, besieged 626 · Nineveh, 627 · The Yarmuk, 636
The chronicler Theophanes tells of Kallinikos, a craftsman from Heliopolis in Syria, who fled to the Romans with a new weapon. Pumped through bronze tubes, it spat flames that water could not put out. The recipe was a state secret, passed from emperor to emperor, and it is lost. It seems first to have been used during an Arab siege in the 670s, though that siege is itself disputed: one scholar moves it to 667–669, another calls the long blockade a myth. The next attack is beyond doubt. From summer 717 Maslama's army and fleet ringed the city. Fire, a brutal winter, famine and Bulgar attacks broke them, and they left on 15 August 718.
Christians had painted holy figures since about the 3rd century, and by the 6th they venerated the images. In the 720s that practice became a fight over God's anger. A volcano erupted in the Aegean in 726, and Leo III has traditionally been called the first emperor to take the iconoclast side. Tradition has him removing Christ's image from the palace gate, a story now doubted, and the quarrel may have begun in the provinces. A council at Hieria backed the iconoclasts in 754. The empress Irene reversed that at Nicaea in 787. The ban came back in 815, while the empress Theodora quietly kept her icons inside the palace. Widowed and regent, she ended the matter in 843. Orthodox churches still mark that victory every Lent.
Prince Rastislav of Moravia wanted a church that spoke his people's language. He asked Emperor Michael III for teachers, and around 863 two brothers from Thessalonica arrived, Constantine and Methodius. Constantine had devised a new alphabet, Glagolitic, so that Slavonic could be written at all, and together they translated scripture and the liturgy. Frankish clergy fought them. Constantine became a monk in Rome, took the name Cyril, and died there on 14 February 869, but the pope approved the Slavonic services. Methodius died in 885. His disciples were driven out and found shelter with Boris of Bulgaria. There, at Preslav, others developed the early Cyrillic script. A Byzantine mission had given much of eastern Europe its letters.
In 949 a young Italian envoy, Liudprand of Cremona, was shown into the palace of Constantine VII. He remembered a tree of gilded bronze filled with bronze birds, each singing in the voice of its kind. He also describes gilded lions guarding the throne, which roared and lashed their tails. Theatre was how this court governed. The emperor himself stood behind a Book of Ceremonies, setting down the festivals and processions, the coronations, weddings, births, funerals and Hippodrome triumphs. Outside, the capital was one of the world's great markets, drawing goods from Russia to Ethiopia, weighed with official standard measures. When Liudprand came back in 968 the wonder had gone. He was treated badly, and officials confiscated his silks on the way out.
The Rus had come to Constantinople as raiders. Now they came as allies. In 987 the general Bardas Phokas declared himself emperor, and Basil II needed soldiers. Vladimir of Kyiv sent 6,000 men. His price was Basil's sister Anna, a bride from the imperial house, on condition that he accepted baptism. Vladimir took Chersonesus in Crimea, was baptised, and married her. In Kyiv his people went down into the Dnieper to be baptised in turn. Scholars still argue over the year and the order of these events. The Primary Chronicle tells it differently: Vladimir's envoys tried each faith, and said of worship at Constantinople, 'we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth'.
Basil II ruled for almost half a century, never married, and spent much of his reign at war with Bulgaria. In 1014 he won a decisive victory at Kleidion. The chronicler Skylitzes reports that Basil blinded about 15,000 prisoners and sent them home in groups of a hundred, each led by a man left with one eye. Tsar Samuel, he says, collapsed at the sight and died that October. Skylitzes hedges with 'they say', and modern historians believe the number is exaggerated, since the Bulgarians went on raising armies. By 1018 Bulgaria was conquered. At his death in 1025 the empire reached from southern Italy to the Caucasus, its widest since the Arab conquests. The treasury held 14.4 million gold coins.
Greek East and Latin West had been arguing for a long time. They disagreed over the word filioque, added to the creed in the West, over leavened or unleavened bread, and above all over the pope's claim to rule the whole church. On Saturday 16 July 1054 Cardinal Humbert and his fellow envoys walked into Hagia Sophia during the liturgy and laid a charter of excommunication on the altar, aimed at Patriarch Michael Cerularius. The pope who sent them had died in April, so their authority was doubtful. Michael excommunicated the envoys in reply, a sentence aimed at them personally. The date 1054 is only a convention. Scholars have proposed other dates for the real break, and 1204 is one of them.
Romanos IV marched east to deal with the Seljuk Turks. Some sources give him 300,000 men, and modern estimates run from about 40,000 to 70,000. In August 1071 he met Sultan Alp Arslan near Manzikert in Armenia. A rumour of the emperor's death caused panic, and Romanos, his horse killed under him, was taken prisoner. The sultan treated him well, and terms were agreed: 1.5 million gold coins and 360,000 a year. Many historians now argue this was no military catastrophe, since much of the army got away. The catastrophe came afterwards. A rival took the throne as Michael VII, Romanos was blinded, and civil war left Asia Minor open. By about 1078 the Sultanate of Rum had formed there.
Alexios Komnenos took the throne by revolt in 1081, and he ran the empire like a family firm. Marriage joined the feuding Komnenos and Doukas clans, and relatives filled the top posts. He paid Venice for naval help against the Normans with free trade across the empire, a bargain that would prove costly, and he wrote to Pope Urban II asking for help in Asia Minor. His daughter Anna, born in the purple chamber of the palace in 1083, studied philosophy, mathematics and medicine. She probably plotted against her brother John after their father's death in 1118. Exiled to a convent, she wrote the Alexiad, her father's history and a key source for the First Crusade.
How a crusade came to attack Christian Constantinople has its own tour on this site. What matters here is the wound. On 12 April 1204 the crusaders broke in from the harbour side, and three days of looting followed. The eyewitness Niketas Choniates tells of the altar of Hagia Sophia smashed and shared out among soldiers, and of mules led into the sanctuary to carry off plunder. Sculpture, books, manuscripts and jewels were destroyed or melted down for coin. Many people were assaulted and killed. Venice took three-eighths of the city, and Baldwin of Flanders became Latin emperor. The Byzantines scattered into rival states at Nicaea, Trebizond and Epirus. Constantinople never regained its old standing.
The exile lasted 57 years. In July 1261 the Nicaean general Alexios Strategopoulos was near the capital with just 800 men, mostly Cumans, when he found the Latin garrison and the Venetian fleet away on a raid. He got in overnight, Baldwin II fled by ship, and on 15 August Michael VIII Palaiologos entered in triumph. The restored state was a fragment of Basil's, yet its art grew more natural and expressive. Theodore Metochites paid for the mosaics and frescoes of the Chora. In the Peloponnese, a Frankish fortress handed over in 1262 grew into Mistra, seat of a Byzantine despot from 1349 and the last centre of Byzantine learning. There the philosopher Plethon taught.
Stand inside the walls this time. Probably fewer than 50,000 people remained in the city, refugees included, when Sultan Mehmed II began his siege on 6 April. The tour of the Ottoman advance follows his guns. Here it is the last evening that counts. On 28 May a solemn final Vespers was held in Hagia Sophia. In the final assault the commander Giovanni Giustiniani was badly wounded, and his removal spread panic. Constantine XI probably died fighting in the streets, but his fate remains unknown. Three days of plunder followed, and many were enslaved. Mehmed went straight to Hagia Sophia, soon a mosque, and styled himself Caesar of the Romans. Mistra fell in 1460, Trebizond in 1461.
The Greek teachers had started coming before the end. Invited by the chancellor of Florence, Manuel Chrysoloras taught Greek there from 1397 to 1400, beginning with the basics, and his grammar became the first in general use in the West. Bessarion, born at Trebizond, spoke for unity at the church council of 1438 and stayed on as a Roman cardinal. Plethon lectured Florentines on Plato and Aristotle. After 1453 others followed, among them John Argyropoulos and Constantine Lascaris, and by 1500 Venice had some 5,000 Greek speakers. In 1468 Bessarion gave his library to Venice, as a safe home for Byzantine learning. The deed lists 482 Greek manuscripts. How far all this shaped the Renaissance is still debated.
The empire had many heirs. In 1472 Ivan III of Moscow married Sophia Palaiologina of the imperial family, and in the 1520s the monk Philotheus wrote that two Romes had fallen, a third stood, and there would be no fourth. The patriarch stayed in Constantinople, and he is still first among equals in a faith that Pew counted at nearly 260 million in 2017. Hagia Sophia became a museum in 1935 and a mosque again in 2020. The label came last. In 1557 the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf published a collection of sources under a Byzantine title, and the word slowly caught on. Greeks under the Ottomans were still called Romans. Byzantines is what we say. Romans is what they said.