Byzantine Empire

Venice: A New History

by Thomas F. Madden  · 24 Oct 2012  · 466pp  · 146,982 words

the increasingly Oriental character of the imperial court in Constantinople have led modern historians to refer to the empire from this period forward as the Byzantine Empire. We shall do so here as well. However, it is important to remember that the term is a modern one. Although he might speak

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repudiate loyalty to Constantinople. Owners of merchant vessels were especially unwilling to do anything that might jeopardize their access to the rich markets of the Byzantine Empire. In an attempt to hold the lagoon, the imperial government in Constantinople sent rich gifts and vaunted titles to the new doge, hoping to

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Mediterranean in search of profit. Invariably, he turned left, as Venetians did virtually all their overseas trade in the eastern Mediterranean—primarily in the Byzantine Empire. The markets there were larger than anything in Europe and the goods they offered were in high demand back home. This cycle of buying and

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Adriatic became intolerable. Slavic pirates raided coastal towns and plundered Venetian vessels at will. Even worse, Muslim armies were wresting control of Sicily from the Byzantine Empire. Twice in the 840s the Venetians outfitted fleets to help the Byzantines battle the Muslims, but with little success. As for the Adriatic, the Venetians

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tolls and tariffs they paid while doing business in eastern ports. In this important document, one can see the changing relationship between Venice and the Byzantine Empire. Slowly over centuries, Venice had become an independent entity. It was no longer a province or client of Constantinople. And yet, neither was it

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few years the Turks had established a new state, the sultanate of Rum (Rome) with its capital at Nicaea. All that remained of the battered Byzantine Empire was the city of Constantinople, now within sight of the Turkish empire, and Greece. In desperate need, Emperor Alexius I Comnenus sent an appeal

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three decades. Venetians were not much affected by this struggle between church and state—at least not in the eleventh century—but a persistent weakened Byzantine Empire spelled economic trouble for them. Venice’s prosperity was built on a peaceful Adriatic and profitable trade in the East. The former was essential

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Like William the Conqueror, Robert longed for a grand conquest of a new kingdom, and his attention was naturally drawn to the wounded and weak Byzantine Empire. The seat of imperial power and the richest city in the Western world, Constantinople seemed like the burial goods of a dying world. For Robert

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fury, the Normans stormed the city, killing or capturing hundreds of Venetians. After securing Durazzo, Robert Guiscard began his march into the heart of the Byzantine Empire. Yet events in Rome intervened. The German emperor, Henry IV, was moving south through Italy, bent on capturing his enemy, Pope Gregory VII. At

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that his vessels set sail for Corfu. Well informed of the danger, Emperor Alexius again summoned Venice to muster an armada in defense of the Byzantine Empire, and once again, Doge Silvio complied, sending a fleet south where it joined with Alexius’s own makeshift navy. Learning of the defenders’ movements,

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Venice, Dalmatia and Croatia and also imperial protosebastos.” It was quite a mouthful. The chrysobull of Alexius I forever changed relations between Venice and the Byzantine Empire. Most important was the tax exemption, which gave Venetian merchants a sizable advantage over their Genoese, Pisan, and even Greek competitors. In effect, Venetian

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, he had returned to Constantinople. When the crusaders learned of Alexius’s betrayal, they disclaimed their oaths to restore the Crusade’s conquests to the Byzantine Empire, and instead kept Antioch for themselves. From Alexius’s perspective, therefore, the crusaders had become almost as dangerous as the Turks. This is the

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Guiscard and the Normans was still powerful in the lagoon, for they had fought long and hard, and paid a heavy price to protect the Byzantine Empire. They would not now be dismissed out of hand by this young emperor. If John II would not honor his father’s promises, then

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Byzantine island of Corfu. From there they proceeded to plunder the Greek coast with little opposition. Once again the Normans were poised to invade the Byzantine Empire, and once again the emperor in Constantinople turned to Venice for help. There was never any question that the Venetians would oblige. Merchant families,

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like the Dandolos and the Polanis, had an enormous interest in a stable and peaceful Byzantine Empire. A Norman conquest of Greece or Constantinople would be economically and strategically cataclysmic for Venice. The son of John II, Emperor Manuel I Comnenus (1143

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the Genoese Quarter, spreading death and ruin until the imperial guard finally quelled the violence. This blatant act of disobedience convinced Emperor Manuel that the Byzantine Empire no longer needed Venice. It was a bold decision—one scarcely conceivable just a century earlier. But since then other Italian maritime states had grown

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and formed the arengo, the theoretical basis of all authority in Venice. As a group the people of Venice demanded a retaliatory strike against the Byzantine Empire. They ordered the doge to personally lead a war fleet of a hundred galleys and twenty transports to exact revenge against Manuel and win the

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surprisingly, these are precisely the attributes that businessmen most value in a government. Venice had been harmed gravely—but by no means mortally—by the Byzantine Empire. Banned from trading in Greek ports, the Venetians made up the business in the markets of the crusader states, especially the city of Tyre.

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expensive. Why, then, did the doge and his court think it a worthwhile expenditure at a time when Venice remained at war with the Byzantine Empire and many thousands of their countrymen were still held hostage abroad? Perhaps it was an outward expression of Venice’s independence from the parent that

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but the Venetians were willing to wait. What mattered most was that the hostages were home and good relations had finally been restored with the Byzantine Empire. When the aged doge Mastropiero abdicated the throne in May 1192, the doge’s council again called the people of the lagoon to assemble at

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Alexius III Angelus (1195–1203), made a point of favoring the recently reconciled Pisans, whom he hoped to enlist for the naval defense of the Byzantine Empire. This naturally caused friction with the Venetians, yet aside from some skirmishes in the Adriatic, matters remained at peace. The imperial chrysobull affirmed that Venetians

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from Europe to the Holy Land. This had the benefit of being more direct and less troublesome than the traditional land route across Hungary, the Byzantine Empire, and the Turkish lands of Anatolia. But the Third Crusade was led by kings with treasure chests—especially Richard the Lionheart, who brought the

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wanted the Crusade to succeed, but he recognized the dangers for his city and people. Venetians did the bulk of their overseas trade in the Byzantine Empire. The Venetian Quarter of Constantinople was a vibrant and profitable city within a city. Why would they wish to upset all of that? Doge

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a ruby the size of an apple that had formerly belonged to Manuel I Comnenus. At once a committee was assembled to divide up the Byzantine Empire among the victors. There were a few areas that were off-limits to the committee. Crete was one. A strategic and commercially important island,

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the emperor and the other three-quarters split between the Venetians and the French. In other words, Venice stood to receive three-eighths of the Byzantine Empire. The partition committee awarded Venice a large section of Constantinople near the harbor, the Sea of Marmara shoreline from Heraclea to the end of

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their merchants some portions of Constantinople, although he still excluded Venice from the Black Sea. Finally, in 1268, the Venetians were fully reinstated in the Byzantine Empire. Once again they returned to their quarter in Constantinople, where they had done business for centuries. Genoa, of course, was less than pleased. Although

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their will. Perhaps the well-traveled Venetians saw enough of the carnage and ruin that factional warfare had produced in other Italian cities and the Byzantine Empire to acquire a healthy fear of it at home. Or perhaps their aversion to factionalism was simply a determination by each wealthy family that

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the republic’s first gold coin, the Venetian ducat, which would remain a rock-solid currency for Europeans for centuries. The decline of the Byzantine Empire in the east was mirrored by a rise of prosperity in western Europe. The German empire and Italy remained fractured and turbulent, but the kingdoms

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of which could now be confiscated. Throughout their history, a large portion of the Venetian population had lived outside Venice. Those who were in the Byzantine Empire, Crete, or other Venetian ports in the East were safe from the pope’s decree. But the wealth, property, and lives of Venetians doing

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to exert its authority in Italy. The future seemed bright. Of course, plenty of dangers remained. The Turks continued to press westward, threatening the teetering Byzantine Empire and commercial shipping from Europe. The Genoese were a constant worry. But no one guessed the direction of the gravest danger, for it seemed like

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itself. Its seeds were sown not just in the banquet brawl, but in the overall political morass of the East. Although the once-great Byzantine Empire was but the faintest shadow of its former glory, the Venetians and the Genoese continued to jockey for position in Constantinople and its access to

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those waters. In 1351 another in a long line of civil wars between those contending for the ruined throne of Constantinople raged across the shrinking Byzantine Empire. Fearful that he would lose his crown, Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus enlisted the powerful Turks to fight on his side. He rowed an army

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and sufficient payments made, the Venetians were allowed to keep all their new acquisitions. Venice moved quickly to gather up these crumbling fragments of the Byzantine Empire, in part to keep them away from Genoa but also as insurance against the day when the ancient empire would be no more. By

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his hosts promised never did materialize. With little help against an implacable foe, it seemed that the last chapter of the long history of the Byzantine Empire had at last been written. But remarkably Constantinople was saved by powerful forces that it neither controlled nor truly understood. A Turkish/Mongol leader named

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the continued civil war. Fearing a new Crusade from the West to save Constantinople, in 1403 Suleiman returned a number of lost territories to the Byzantine Empire, including Thracian ports, the Peloponnese, various Aegean islands, and even the city of Thessalonica. He furthermore abolished the annual tribute and the vassalage of

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Venetians were Roman citizens, refugees of the empire’s collapse in the West, and loyal subjects of its emperors, who still reigned in Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire was in every way the parent of Venice, and as the centuries passed, the child grew to independence, maturity, and strength. There were, of

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course, quarrels, but Byzantium and Venice were simply too closely related to forever go their separate ways. By 1400 the Byzantine Empire, then over a thousand years old, had grown withered, weak, and sick. The Republic of Venice, approaching the pinnacle of its own power and glory

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Timur. Sultan Murad II (1421–44), reigning in the Ottoman capital of Adrianople, was determined to wipe away the last remnants of the Christian Byzantine Empire. In 1422 he began sieges of both Constantinople and Thessalonica. The latter, long known as the second city of the

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Byzantine Empire, had been restored to the Byzantines by Suleiman in 1403, but Murad meant to have it back. Venice’s foreign policy in the East

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five years they dutifully sought an imperial chrysobull—an elaborate gold-sealed document bestowing privileges on the Venetians and permission to do business throughout the Byzantine Empire. Although the emperors still owed Venice a great deal of money (a fact noted in the chrysobulls themselves), the Venetians could not bring themselves

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policy of acquiring Greek islands and colonies along the trade routes to Constantinople and Syria. This policy was stepped up as the Turks dismembered the Byzantine Empire. The Venetian Senate had no illusion that it could challenge Turkish power as it spread across Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Albania. But it was

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senators did not take long to accept the offer, but it was an emotional, not a practical, choice. To have the second city of the Byzantine Empire, the coveted jewel of Macedonia, offered to Venice seemed impossible to turn down. Even the senators emphasized that they accepted Thessalonica “for the honor

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stories of bravery and defeat. The fall of Constantinople shook western Europe in a way that is hard for us to imagine today. Although the Byzantine Empire had long been weak, the frequent and unfulfilled prophecies of its impending doom had led many to assume that it would weather this storm,

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their own, which weighed less than half a gram and had 25 percent silver content. For large commercial transactions they used the coins of the Byzantine Empire or the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem. However, the monetary situation in the Middle Ages shifted as quickly as the political picture. The decline of

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By 1187, when Saladin conquered Jerusalem, gold coins minted in the Holy Land were only 68 percent fine. Matters were not much better in the Byzantine Empire. Venetian merchants often stipulated payments in the Byzantine hyperper, a high-value gold coin seven-eighths fine. Because the physical hyperper was relatively rare (like

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the end of his colleganza period. This freewheeling way of doing business was greatly moderated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The collapse of the Byzantine Empire made the waters of the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean far more dangerous—especially during periods of war. To provide safety for Venice’s merchants, the

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of beauty. As we have seen, Venice lived in the West, but its gaze was ever on the East. As a child of the Byzantine Empire, Venice naturally adopted the artistic style of its sophisticated parent. This can still be seen, staring out from the mosaic-covered walls of scattered churches

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, 147, 148 books, 318–20 Bragadin, Marcantonio, 329–32, 334 bubonic plague, 196–202, 210, 231–32 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 381–85, 390, 397 Byzantine Empire, 20–21, 30–31, 36, 47, 48, 53, 58–60, 64–65, 72, 76, 82–83, 93, 99, 109, 110, 112–13, 158, 182,

The the Rough Guide to Turkey

by Rough Guides  · 15 Oct 2023

and successful government was interrupted briefly, in Justinian’s reign, by the Nika riots in 532. Half a century later, however, the dissolution of the Byzantine Empire had begun, as waves of Persians, Avars and Slavs attacked from the east and north. The empire was overrun by Arab invaders in the seventh

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form part of Istanbul’s commuter belt, but also have a few architectural attractions and decent shops, restaurants and clubs. The Ottoman conquest As the Byzantine Empire declined, the Ottoman Empire expanded. The Ottomans established first Bursa, then Edirne, as their capital, and Ottoman territory effectively surrounded the city long before it

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their time in Sultanahmet, home to Istanbul’s main sightseeing attractions: the church (present-day mosque) of Hagia Sophia (Ayasofya), the greatest legacy of the Byzantine Empire; the Topkapı Palace, heart of the Ottoman Empire; and the massive Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet Camii). Here also are the ancient Hippodrome, the Museum of Turkish

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columns are supported by Medusa heads, clearly relics of an earlier building. The Hippodrome The arena of the Hippodrome, formerly the cultural focus of the Byzantine Empire, is now a long paved municipal park known as At Meydanı, or ‘Square of Horses’. An Egyptian Obelisk adorns what was once the spina or

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Sipylus was an important Roman centre. For a short time during the thirteenth century, after the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople, Manisa became capital of the Byzantine Empire. In 1313, it was captured by Seljuk chieftain Saruhan Bey, responsible for the earliest of the surviving local monuments. Later, the Ottomans sent heirs to

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defeat on the Rhodians, who were tricked into allowing her entire fleet into their port. After a period of little importance under the Roman and Byzantine empires, and brief shuffling among Seljuk, Menteşe and Ottoman occupiers, the Knights of St John slipped over from Rhodes in 1402 and erected the castle that

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as Turkish. Arab influence in the Hatay goes back to the seventh century AD, when Arab raiders began hacking at the edges of the collapsing Byzantine Empire. Although they were never able to secure long-lasting political control over the region, the Arabs did establish themselves as permanent settlers, remaining even when

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importance under the Phrygians. In AD 17–18, renamed Caesarea in honour of Tiberius, it became the capital of Roman Cappadocia. As part of the Byzantine Empire, Caesarea was relocated 2km north of the ancient acropolis, allegedly around a church and monastery built by St Basil, the founder of eastern monasticism. Strategic

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exceeding one hundred thousand, Ani rivalled Baghdad and Constantinople themselves. By the middle of the eleventh century, however, wars of succession took their toll. The Byzantine Empire annexed the city in 1045, but in the process dissolved an effective bulwark against the approaching Seljuks, who took Ani with little resistance in 1064

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rim of ancient Mesopotamia (literally ‘between two rivers’), the region has been of importance since the Neolithic period. The eastern boundaries of the Roman and Byzantine empires lay here, and the two rivers were crossed by Arab Muslim invaders from the south and east after the birth of Islam in AD 632

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the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches 1071 The Byzantines lose disastrously to the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert 1204 Decline of the Byzantine Empire is hastened by the sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade 1243 The Mongols crush the Seljuk Turks at the battle of Köse Dağ in

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his death formally split into two realms: the western one Latin-speaking and Rome-based, the eastern part Greek-speaking and focused on Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire The western provinces, always financially dependent on the east, were plagued by barbarian invasions from the north. The wealthier, more densely populated eastern

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Byzantine Empire had abler rulers and more defensible frontiers, but was severely weakened by religious tensions. Constantinople’s writ was resented in the southeastern provinces of Egypt,

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radically. All his peripheral conquests were lost: the western realms to the Lombards and Goths, the southeastern provinces to Persians and Arabs. By 711, the Byzantine Empire consisted only of the Balkan coasts, parts of Italy, and Asia Minor. Equally significantly, it had acquired a strongly Greek character, both linguistically and philosophically

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to terms with the Byzantines. Following the occupation of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the Seljuks continued their good relations with the provisional Byzantine Empire of Nicaea; with peace assured, the Sultanate of Rum evolved into a highly cultured mini-empire, reaching its zenith in the first half of the

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the mid-fourteenth century the Ottomans had entered Thrace, and in 1362 Sultan Murad I took Adrianople (Edirne). Constantinople was surrounded, and the almost-vanished Byzantine Empire existed on Ottoman sufferance. With Latin and Orthodox Christians at each other’s throats, Ottoman ascendancy was assured, and Murad further isolated Constantinople with new

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about in a cage for a year before his demise, while laying waste to much of Anatolia. Even though the Mongols soon vanished, the remnant Byzantine Empire was granted a fifty-year reprieve, and for a decade the fate of the Ottoman line hung in the balance as Bayezid’s four sons

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from the second century BC onwards, Greek language and culture remained dominant in the Greek city-states that the Romans absorbed into their empire. The Byzantine Empire subsequently developed as a Christian, Greek-speaking entity, with its capital in Constantinople. It is to these Byzantine, Eastern Orthodox Christian roots that today’s

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have been Jews in Anatolia since the fifth century BC. By and large they were tolerated by the Greeks, the Romans and, later, the Christian Byzantine Empire. Following the capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, many Jews from elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire were compelled to move to, and

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Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century. The definitive study of how the Byzantine Empire culturally became the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman history Caroline Finkel Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923. Meticulously researched yet engaging history

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

by Peter Frankopan  · 26 Aug 2015  · 1,042pp  · 273,092 words

the Black Sea, rather than moving along the Volga and towards the Caspian. Their attention began to turn away from the Muslim world to the Byzantine Empire and to the great city of Constantinople, fabled in Norse folklore as ‘Mikli-garðr’ (or Miklegarth) – that is, ‘the great city’. The Byzantines were wary

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of understandable kudos.66 Exposure to the Holy City also underlined the paucity of the Christian heritage of western Europe – particularly when compared to the Byzantine Empire. Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, had begun the process of bringing relics to Constantinople in the fourth century. By the eleventh century, the

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the ground and placed his foot on his neck.80 In fact, the Seljuks and the regime in Baghdad were much less concerned with the Byzantine Empire than they were with the Fāimid caliphate in Shīa Egypt. The two forces quickly locked horns, wrestling over control of Jerusalem. While this was going

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for themselves that made them virtually independent of Baghdad – and serious thorns in the side of Byzantium.81 With one calamity following another, the Christian Byzantine Empire was rapidly brought to its knees. With few cards left to play, the Emperor took drastic action: appeals were sent to leading magnates all over

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knights who had marched thousands of miles to Jerusalem. The Holy City had been liberated by the Christians – not the Greek Orthodox Christians of the Byzantine Empire, but those of Normandy, France and Flanders who made up the overwhelming majority of the expedition. The Muslims had been expelled from a city they

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also stamped on their souls.22 The background to this particular fracas was that in 1092 Venice had been granted extensive trading concessions across the Byzantine Empire as part of a grand strategy by the Emperor Alexios to stimulate the economy. This saw the Venetians awarded landing pontoons in the harbour of

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had so brilliantly built in the east. With preferential access to Constantinople as well as to the main cities on the coast of both the Byzantine Empire and Palestine, Venice’s stepping stones now extended right the way across the eastern Mediterranean, not only to the Levant, but before long to Egypt

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trade with the Muslims that lay at the heart of the economic and social blossoming of Europe in the twelfth century, for Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire were a major motor in the commerce of the Christian Mediterranean – responsible for half the international trade of Venice, to judge from the surviving documents

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dog.53 This was just the start of rising animosities between the Christians of the two halves of Europe. In 1185, Thessaloniki, one of the Byzantine Empire’s most important cities, was sacked by a western force from southern Italy. The west had sunk a harpoon into the eastern Mediterranean with the

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other purposes. The sack of Constantinople was the obvious culmination of the desire of Europe to connect and embed itself in the east. As the Byzantine Empire was dismantled, the Europeans led by the Italian city-states Pisa, Genoa and Venice rushed to seize strategically and economically important regions, towns and islands

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. Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity: AD 395–700 (London, 1993), pp. 113ff.; D. Stathakopoulos, Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire: A Systematic Survey of Subsistence Crises and Epidemics (Birmingham, 2004), pp. 110–65. 5Sarris, Empires of Faith, pp. 145ff. 6Procopius, The Secret History, tr. P

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, George W., here, here, here, here Bushihr, here, here, here nuclear site, here, here Bustani, José, here Būyid caliphate, here, here Buyl, Bernardo, here Byzantium (Byzantine empire) alliances with Khazars, here collapse of, here, here competition with Viking Rus’, here and Crusades, here deteriorating relations with west, here golden age of, here

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, here, here and Black Sea trade, here and competition with Portugal, here conflict with Pisa, here decline of, here economic flourishing, here and end of Byzantine empire, here and Hippodrome sculptures, here plague in, here, here and slave trade, here, here, here Verona, here Vespucci, Amerigo, here Victoria, Queen, here, here Vienna

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession

by Peter L. Bernstein  · 1 Jan 2000  · 497pp  · 153,755 words

. We look first at Constantinople, in part because its history is less familiar than Europe's. More important, gold was a dominant factor in the Byzantine Empire long before it became such a preoccupation in the West. The Byzantine emperors ruled from Constantinople for over one thousand years. By and large, they

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, but the integrity, purity, fame, and acceptability of Constantine's golden bezant was an overriding preoccupation with all of them. The entire history of the Byzantine Empire is marked by its obsessive focus on gold, not only as money but also as an advertisement of unrivaled opulence. Gold served as the key

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economic stagnation. Lopez hypothesizes that the deeper reasons for the contrasts he cites may have developed from significant differences in national structure. "England and the Byzantine empire were centralized monarchies with powerful landed aristocracies," he writes, "whereas merchants and other businessmen were at the helm in the Italian communes, and bankers and

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, and sound money has been the driving force of economic policy in the German and Swiss republics since World War II. Whatever the reason, the Byzantine Empire, with all its power and wealth, lacked the dynamic to sustain itself in the face of Europe's vigorous recovery from the barbarian invasions. Perhaps

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. 211. 18. Ibid., p. 214. 19. Encyclopedia Britannica On-Line: Leo III and the Age of Iconoclasm. 20. Ibid.: Irene. 21. Ibid.: Coinage in the Byzantine Empire. 22. Lopez, 1951, p. 214. 23. Ibid., p. 215. 24. Ibid., p. 221. 25. Ibid., p. 221. CHAPTER 5 GOLD, SALT, AND THE BLESSED TOWN

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future

by Ian Morris  · 11 Oct 2010  · 1,152pp  · 266,246 words

Jin dynasty ruled the southern part of the old empire, but saw themselves as rightful heirs to the whole realm. Similarly, in the West a Byzantine Empire (so called because its capital, Constantinople, stood on the site of the earlier Greek city Byzantium) ruled the eastern part of the old Roman Empire

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but claimed its entirety (Figure 6.8). The Eastern Jin and Byzantine Empires remained high-end states, with bureaucrats, taxes, and salaried armies. Each boasted great cities and learned scholars, and the farms of the Nile and Yangzi

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overcome the rich but weak south. Justinian, by contrast, was trying to conquer a multitude of mostly poor but strong “barbarian” kingdoms from the rich Byzantine Empire. Reuniting the core in a single campaign, like Wendi’s in 589, was impossible. Justinian also had to deal with Persia. For a century a

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chiefs replaced Byzantine and Persian officials or not. For centuries both empires had persecuted many of their Christian subjects over doctrinal fine print. In the Byzantine Empire, for instance, since 451 the official position had been that Jesus had had two natures, one human and one divine, fused in a single body

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, though, came from his closeness to the late prophet. Considering the fractiousness of the Arab chiefs (some of whom wanted to plunder the Persian and Byzantine empires, others to parcel the empires out and settle as landowners, and others still to anoint new prophets), the first few caliphs did remarkably well. They

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to afford ships, ended up renting itself out as muscle to Venetian financiers and sacking not Jerusalem but Constantinople. Neither the crusading movement nor the Byzantine Empire recovered from this disgrace. The West was changing shape under the pressures of the Medieval Warm Period. The Muslim lands remained the core, but as

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they had already got the better of their rivals and established a European bridgehead. By the 1380s they were bullying the pitiful remnants of the Byzantine Empire, and by 1396 they scared Christendom so badly that the squabbling popes of Rome and Avignon briefly agreed to join forces in sending a crusade

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67 (1857), pp. 445–85. Stark, Miriam, ed. Archaeology of Asia. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Stathakopoulos, Dionysios. Famine and Pestilence in the Late Roman and Early Byzantine Empire. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. Steffens, Lincoln. The Letters of Lincoln Steffens I. New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1938. Steinhardt, Paul, and Neil Turok. Endless Universe

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with, 324–28 in Japan, 440 Mahayana, 322, 324, 325 Bulgaria, 313 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 608 Bush, George W., 588 Business Week, 553 Byzantine Empire, 317, 343–49, 363, 373, 457, 566, 616 Arabs and, 352, 356–57 religious conflicts in, 352, 361–62 Turkic attacks on, 366, 372, 401

Lonely Planet Greek Islands

by Lonely Planet, Alexis Averbuck, Michael S Clark, Des Hannigan, Victoria Kyriakopoulos and Korina Miller  · 31 Mar 2012

declined, and between 1200 and 1450, Athens was continually invaded: by the Franks, Catalans, Florentines and Venetians, all preoccupied with grabbing principalities from the crumbling Byzantine Empire. OTTOMAN RULE & INDEPENDENCE Athens was captured by the Turks in 1456, and nearly 400 years of Ottoman rule followed. The Acropolis became the home of

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Cyrenaica, with Gortyna its capital. After the Roman empire’s division in AD 395, Crete fell under the jurisdiction of Greek-speaking Constantinople – the emerging Byzantine Empire. Things went more or less fine until AD 824, when Arabs appropriated the island. In AD 961, Byzantine general and ill-fated emperor Nikiforas Fokas

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civilizations, it’s all here. The atmospheric old town of Rhodes is a maze of cobbled streets spiriting you back to the days of the Byzantine Empire and beyond. Further south is the picture-perfect town of Lindos, a weave-world of sugarcube houses spilling down to a turquoise bay. Family friendly

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be controlling Greece. By the end of the 3rd century BC, the Romans ruled and, following their decline, the islands suffered waves of invaders. The Byzantine Empire held sway until after the fall of Constantinople, when Venice took over. Corfu was never fully a part of the Ottoman Empire; the exception was

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of Ptolemy I of Egypt, while the remainder of the Aegean islands became part of the League of Islands ruled by the Antigonids of Macedon. Byzantine Empire & the Crusades The Pax Romana began to crumble in AD 250 when the Goths invaded Greece, the first of a succession of invaders. Medieval & Venetian

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were replaced by the Saracens (Arabs) in 653. The Arabs also captured Crete in 824. Other islands in the Aegean remained under Byzantine control. The Byzantine Empire began to fracture when the renegade Frankish leaders of the Fourth Crusade decided that Constantinople presented richer pickings than Jerusalem. Constantinople was sacked in 1204

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and much of the Byzantine Empire was partitioned into fiefdoms ruled by self-styled ‘Latin’ (mostly Frankish or western-Germanic) princes. The Venetians, meanwhile, had also secured a foothold in Greece

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demise. 1453 Greece becomes a dominion of the Ottoman Turks after they seize control of Constantinople (modern-day İstanbul), sounding the death knell for the Byzantine Empire. 1669 Venetian-ruled Crete falls under Ottoman rule after keeping the Turks at bay in a fierce 20-year siege (Spinalonga Island and Souda hold

Israel & the Palestinian Territories Travel Guide

by Lonely Planet

persecuted religions. Eleven years after this, Constantine defeated Licinius in a civil war and became sole Emperor of the Roman Empire (later known as the Byzantine Empire). He legalised Christianity and his mother Helena visited the Holy Land in 326–28 CE searching for Christian holy places. This sparked off the building

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of basilicas and churches, and the city quickly grew to the size it had been under Herod the Great. The Byzantine Empire was defeated by the Persians, who conquered Jerusalem in 614 CE. Their rule lasted just 15 years before the Byzantines succeeded in retaking the city

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with Jesus’s life. Many of the most important Christian sites, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, date from this period. The Byzantine Empire – the Christian successor to the eastern part of the Roman Empire – ruled Palestine from the 4th to the early 7th centuries CE. During this time

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science

by Jim Al-Khalili  · 28 Sep 2010  · 467pp  · 114,570 words

time of the arrival of Islam in the early seventh century CE, what we now call the Middle East was divided between the Persian and Byzantine empires. But with the spread of this new religion from Arabia, a powerful empire emerged, and with it a flourishing civilization and a glorious golden age

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given him what is thought to have been the world’s largest emerald. Al-Rashīd took a personal interest in many campaigns against the neighbouring Byzantine Empire, leading military expeditions against them throughout his reign. In 797 the defeated Empress Irene agreed to pay a large sum of money to al-Rashīd

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time of the fall of Rome itself, the centre of imperial power in Europe had long since moved eastwards to Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. Its rule covered Anatolia, Greece, southern Italy, Sicily, Syria, Egypt and the North African coast, with an eastern border that ran roughly north–south between

…

leads us to the third widely perceived origin for the movement; that it was Greek-speaking Christians living in the lands previously part of the Byzantine Empire and well versed in Greek science, who should be thanked for transmitting this knowledge on to the Abbāsids. The reality is somewhat different. The study

…

to explain what happened. But together, they offer a compelling argument. Unlike the Umayyad dynasty, whose capital, Damascus, had been part of the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire, the Abbāsids had moved the whole operation further east into the heart of what had been part of the Persian Empire of the Sasanians. This

…

–8 book production 43, 62 see also printing Brahmagupta 100 algebra 115, 117 astronomy 210, 211 Siddhanta 41–2, 100 Bukhtishū family, translation movement 46 Byzantine Empire 18–19 defeat by Muslim army 23–4 war with Abbāsid Empire 5 Cairo, Dar al-Hikma 155 calculus 182 calendar 262n7 Hijri 22 Jalali

…

a Physician 145 al-Rashīd, Harūn choice of heir 9–10 library 70–71 trade with Charlemagne 4–5 translation movement 44, 46 war with Byzantine Empire 5 al-Rashidūn 23 rationalism, Greek, in Baghdad 15–17 al-Rāzi, Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya 56, 64–5 blindness 143 Book of Secrets

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BCE; Roman empire (Seleucid empire): 200 BCE; Roman empire: 150, 100, 50 BCE, 1, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400 CE; Byzantine empire (Western Roman empire): 450; Byzantine empire: 500, 550, 600, 650; Umayyad empire: 700, 750; Frankish empire: 800, 850, 900, 950; Fatimid empire: 1000, 1050; Holy Roman Empire (France): 1100

…

: 250, 200, 150, 100, 50 BCE, 1, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250, 300, 350, 400 CE; Western Roman empire: 450; Ostrogothic kingdom/Visigothic kingdom: 500; Byzantine empire (Frankish empire): 550; Frankish empire: 600, 650, 700, 750, 800, 850; Frankish empire: 900, 950; Holy Roman Empire: 1000, 1050, 1100, 1150, 1200, 1250; France

…

victories over all three parts of the Frankish domain between 899 and 910. At various points, the German kingdom, several of its princes, and the Byzantine empire acceded to tributary demands. In 942 the Magyars even briefly entered the Iberian peninsula. Only decisive defeat in 955 ended their incursions. Although Otto I

…

we can only guess what counterfactual post-Roman empires in Europe might have looked like, it is tempting—and not entirely hopeless—to try. The Byzantine empire conveniently provides a real-life model. Centered on Constantinople, the Roman state, however much diminished in scale, continued for fully another millennium. In striking contrast

…

. In the Sarmatian-populated Hungarian Plain and Wallachia, diplomacy alternated with episodic clashes, but the limited grasslands did not support any larger confederations. Later, the Byzantine empire proved adept at containing steppe powers through diplomacy and subsidies. 81. Taaffe 1990: 37 (conduits); Asher and Talbot 2006: 12 (pastoralists); Roy 2015: 50 (Maurya

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press. The decline and rise of democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stathakopoulos, Dionysios C. 2004. Famine and pestilence in the late Roman and early Byzantine empire: A systematic survey of subsistence crises and epidemics. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Ste. Croix, Geoffrey E. M. de. 1981. The class struggle in the ancient Greek

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Buddhism, 224, 317–20, 322, 329 Bulgars, 136, 137, 152, 155, 175, 290 Burgundians, 132, 134, 153, 165, 166, 193 Burma, 182, 303, 306, 457 Byzantine empire (Byzantium), 136, 143, 168, 187, 316, 508–9, 511, 572n80. See also Constantinople; East Roman restoration (sixth century) California school of scholarship, 575n1 Calvin, Jean

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gems and prime sights. Begin with a few days among mosques, palaces and some 20 million folk in İstanbul, former capital of the Ottoman and Byzantine Empires. Next, head east to Safranbolu, with its winding streets of Ottoman mansions, before turning north to Amasra, where Turkish holidaymakers wander the Byzantine castle and

…

Byzantium was the capital of a series of empires. The Aya Sofya, a church-turned-mosque-turned-museum-mosque, is the grandest remnant of the Byzantine Empire; Ottoman landmarks include the Blue Mosque and Topkapı Palace. Beyoğlu Bars Between the dusk and dawn calls to prayer, up-for-it crowds swirl through

…

1261, when soldiers under Michael VIII Palaiologos, a Byzantine aristocrat in exile who had risen to become co-emperor of Nicaea, successfully recaptured it. The Byzantine Empire was restored. İstanbul Two decades after Michael VIII reclaimed Constantinople, a Turkish warlord named Ertuğrul died in the village of Söğüt near Nicaea. He left

…

faced down a Byzantine army at Manzikert. The nimble Turkish cavalry prevailed, laying Anatolia open to wandering Turkic bands and beginning the demise of the Byzantine Empire. However, not everything went the Seljuks’ way. The 12th and 13th centuries saw incursions by Crusaders, who established short-lived statelets at Antioch (modern-day

…

diplomats. Meanwhile, a Greek force pushed out from İzmir. The Greeks saw an opportunity to realise their megali idea (great idea) of re-establishing the Byzantine Empire. They took Bursa and Edirne – just the provocation that Mustafa Kemal needed to galvanise Turkish support. After initial skirmishes, the Greeks pressed on for Ankara

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