BYZANTIUM AFTER BYZANTIUM COMENIUS MULTILATERAL PROJECT (2008-2010)

1. BYZANTIUM AFTER BYZANTIUM COMENIUS MULTILATERAL PROJECT (2008-2010) “Virgil Madgearu” High School (coordinator) Iasi, Romania “Stenio” High School (partner) Termini Imerese, Italy “Fevzi Cakmak” High School (partner) Adiyaman, Turkey Realized with financial support of “Socrates Comenius Programme"

2. THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE AND ITALY

3. “Byzantine Empire” is the name taken by the Eastern Roman Empire after the split of the Roman Empire. Historians do not agree upon the date when the term Roman is to be replaced by“ Byzantine”. Some historians date the beginning of the Byzantine Empire to AD 330 ( foundation of Constantinople by Constantine I ),others to AD 395 ( death of Theodosius I) , others to AD 476 ( fall of the Western Roman Empire), others to AD 565 ( death of Justinian I), others to AD 610 ( accession to the throne of Heraclius I ). It is sure , however, that the Byzantines called themselves Rhomaioi, i.e. “ Romans” in the Greek language, and they called their state BasileiaRhomaion, i.e.“ the Romans’ kingdom”. In theory the Eastern and Western Roman Empire was a single unit, but actually it was made up of two worlds that had never merged: the Greek- Hellenistic one and the Latin one. In time the differences between the two parts of the empire became so deep that Diocletian separated the administration of the East from the one of the West by means of the tetrarchy. Subsequently Constantine, after defeating the Roman emperor Licinius, concentrated the imperial power in his hands and transferred the capital city to Byzantium, the Nova Roma, which, on his death, was named Constantinople. The transfer of the capital city was a very important event which shifted the axis of the Roman world and accentuated the division of the empire.

4. Constantine made many reforms, the most important of which were: the institution of the great prefectures; the introduction of the hereditary principle in the succession to the throne; the ordering of the imperial bureaucracy; the acknowledgement of the freedom of worship by the Edict of tolerance in 313. As regards religion,Constantine was ambiguous; in fact he maintained the office of Pontifex Maximus of the pagan religion but he tried to bring together all the religions of the empire. It was arranged for the main religious feasts of the Christianity and of the solar religion to coincide, so the birthday of the Sun and of the god Mithra, the 25th of December, became also Jesus’s birthday.

5. In the economic field Constantine abolished the silver coin and made the golden coin minted, which was called solidus (from which the Italian word soldo originated). The reforms made by Constantine lasted up to the end of the Western Empire and survived in the Eastern Empire, which was often upset by invasions, but the Byzantines assimilated the various ethnic groups, acculturized the foreign élitesin the political field, ensuring the turnover of the ruling class. The multi-ethnicity of the ruling class was one of the features of the millenary history of the Byzantine empire, begun in the times of the barbarian invasions. The barbarian peoples were soon evangelized and accepted the Arian interpretation of Christianity. On Constantine’s death the war of succession between his children started again; afterwards, for about fifty years, there were periods when only one emperor reigned and periods in which two emperors reigned.

6. By that time the empire was divided into two stumps (pieces), each directed to a different fortune: the West, poor, in decline, near the end and the rich East with a lot of big cities with a long future. The Byzantine Empire, instead of fighting the peoples pressing on the borders, diverted them to the West.Towardsthe end of the 4th century the pressure of the Huns pushed westwards the peoples living north of the Black Sea, the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths. The Ostrogoths were subdued, while, in 376, the Visigoths obtained from the Emperor Valens to cross the Danube and were welcomed as federates, so they maintained their autonomy and their king, but they undertook to defend the empire. But very soon the Visigoths rebelled and in Adrianople they defeated the troops of Valens, who died in battle. The general Theodosius succeeded Valens, first in the Eastern part and later, after Gratian’s death, in all the empire. Theodosius had the support of the Christian Catholics and, in 392, by the Edict of Constantinople , he proclaimed the Christian Catholic religion State religion, prohibiting the other religions. On his death, in 395, the empire was definitively divided between his sons Arcadius ( the Eastern Empire) and Honorius (the Western Empire). In Ravenna, capital city of the Western Empire, lived also the Roman empress GallaPlacidia who took part in many intrigues at Honorius’s court. On Honorius’s death the empire passed to her, who was regent for her son Valentinian III. On her death, in 450, she was buried in the famous mausoleum, an outstanding monument of Byzantine architecture, which contains some of the finest examples of early Byzantine mosaics.

7. In 476 Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustus and asked the Emperor Zeno to govern Italy as a “patrician”. Very soon, however, Zeno pushed the Ostrogoths against the West, convincing Theodoric to attack Odoacer in the hope of regaining the full control of the Italian peninsula. From the Byzantine Emperor Zeno, Theodoric got the title of king but only towards the Germans, while towards the Italic people he exercised power on behalf of the emperor. In the Italian peninsula Theodoric set up a real kingdom, lasted from 493 to 526 and based on the principle of the separation and peaceful coexistence between the Latin component and the Germanic one. He concentrated a great power in his person and in his court. The duties were divided: he entrusted the Goths with the military offices, the Latins with the civil ones. Theodoric surrounded himself with the greatest Latin intellectuals, like Cassiodorus and Severinus Boethius. The cooperation with the Byzantine sovereigns broke down on the religious question. In fact the Eastern emperor had launched a new battle against the Arians. Theodoric, fearing that the Pope and the court of Constantinople wanted to take advantage of this fight in order to limit the power of the Ostrogoths in Italy, made the Pope imprisoned and the intellectuals executed (among them Boethius and Cassiodorus).

8. After Theodoric’s death the emperor Justinian sent to the West the general Belisarius, who, by the Greek-Gothic war, succeeded in reconquering all the territories occupied by the Ostrogoths, included Ravenna, which became the capital city of the Byzantine imperial government in Italy. It was a period of splendour, testified by the buildings and the mosaics which have kept up to the present time. Around 525 Justinian married Theodora, an ex mime (actress) in a circus in Constantinople and a woman of great beauty and extraordinary intelligence, who was crowned empress (augusta) and exercised a considerable influence in political affairs. The greatest deed of Justinian was the rearrangement of the laws. He aimed at the unification of the Roman law in all the empire so that every subject could feel protected. He entrusted the task to a committee of experts who reread and compared thousands of manuscripts and at last issued the Corpus iuris civilis ( Body of civil law), which is the foundation of any legislation up to now. The Corpus iuris civilis is divided into three sections: the Codex Justinianeus or Code of Justinian, a body of laws enacted since emperor Hadrian’s times; the Digest or Pandects , another body of laws ( iura); and the Novellae Constitutiones, which grouped all the constitutions of Justinian, promulgated after the issuing of the Code. A law handbook called “Istitutiones” was also published.

9. The Corpus iuris was sent to Ravenna along with the Pragmatica Sanctio (Pragmatic sanction), with the intention of organising the province. The military power, entrusted to the patrician ( later exarch) was separated from the civil and the judicial power, entrusted to the Prefect of the praetorium, but actually all powers were concentrated in the Emperor’s hands. On the other hand the temporal power of the bishops grew: they were entrusted with the protectorship of the people (taken away from the defensor plebis or defender of the plebs), the care of buildings and prisons, the supervision over provincial and municipal magistrates, while it was confirmed their right of arbitration (umpirage) for laymen (laics) and the ordinary civil jurisdiction over monks and clergy ( Ecclesiastical court). Justinian’s religious policy was based on the conviction that the unity of the Empire presupposed the unity of faith, so he had to fight both against the Roman Church and against the Monophysites supported by Theodora.

10. The social and economic restoration made by Justinian annulled all the previous provisions. By virtue of this restoration the manorial economy spread all over Italy. The villas of large landowners became the vital centres of the Italian history: a part of the estates ( pars dominica or landlord’s part) was cultivated thanks to the slaves’ work and to the corvées (forced labour) of the farmers, another part ( tributary or bailiff’s lands) was assigned to farmers bound to the glebe. In the centre of the vast dominion ( villa, curtis or court) it was carried out the exchange of the products needed to the existence of everyone who lived inside it. Therefore the economic power of the laical and ecclesiastical aristocracy was strengthened as these classes acquired a more important political position ( greater than the one they had before). The recovery of Italy was temporary (ephemeral) as new barbarians were coming to the borders. After Justinian’s death, in 565, many territories were lost. In 568 the Lombards of Alboin conquered most of Northern Italy. In the following years the Slavs occupied a large part of the Balkans, the Visigoths drove the Byzantines out of Southern Spain and the Sasanian Persians attacked the empire many times. The Emperor Heraclius succeeded in defeating the Sasanians in Nineveh in 627 and signed the peace treaty but the war weakened the Byzantines. In fact they were defeated by the Arabs, who controlled Syria and the East and between 674 and 678 besieged Constantinople. The siege was not successful and a thirty-year truce was signed with the Arab caliphate. Heraclius hellenized the Empire, replacing Latin with Greek as the official language and taking the title of basileus instead of the Latin term augustus.

11. The Byzantines recovered some territories but in the West they did not succeed to stop the Lombards. The Byzantines kept the largest islands (Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica),the Roman region administered by the Pope, Apulia, Calabria and the exarchate of Ravenna. For Italy this was a period of decline and poverty during which the bishops gained a different power, in fact they were acknowledged not only as heads of the ecclesiastical administration, but also of the civil administration. At the beginning of the 7th century the Catholic Theodolinda persuaded the Lombard King Agilulf to be converted to Catholicism, thus contributing to improve the cohabitation between Lombards and Latins. The Lombards tried to drive the Byzantines out of Italy in the period when the Emperor Leo III the Isaurian wanted to show his supremacy also in the religious field, in fact he engaged in the battle against the sacred images ( Iconoclasm). The Lombard King Liudprand declared war to the Byzantines and invaded the Roman Duchy which belonged to the Byzantines by right. The Pope succeeded in convincing Liudprand to retreat so he got the Sutri Castle as a gift ( this was the first official donation to the Church).

12. Afterwards the Pope, as he could no more rely upon the protection from Byzantium, called the Franks for help. Pepin descended on Italy twice, defeated the Lombards, took some territories from them and gave them to the Pope. Latium, Romagna with Ravenna, the Pentapolis, the Sutri Castle were the basis of the Pope’s temporal power, as he became sovereign over those lands. Subsequently the Franks and the Lombards became reconciled with each other and the daughter of the Lombard king Desiderius became Charlemagne’s bride. About fifteen years later DesideriusreconqueredRomagna but once again the Pope called the Franks for help. The Franks, led by Charlemagne, descended on Italy and defeated the Lombards definitively. Charlemagne was a great military leader, he fought victoriously against the Saxons, the Bavarians and the Arabs, driving them back to the Pyrenees. Later he profited from the fact that a woman, Irene, was empress and made himself crowned emperor in St.Peter’s in Rome on Christmas Day 800

13. The Holy Western Roman Empire began, but the emperor who succeeded Irene did not accept the fact and declared war. At last they came to a compromise: the Byzantine emperor acknowledged Charlemagne as a “ brother emperor”, in exchange for territorial concessions. Therefore Venice, Istria and Dalmatia went back to the Byzantine empire. The centre of the empire was no more Rome but Aachen. Charles succeeded in restoring the central power, which was based on three main points: the extension of vassalage relations, the assignment of the territory control to imperial officials, the Earls, and , in the borderlands, the Marquises, with the function of managing the sovereign’s possessions and administering justice; the control of periphery by the missi dominici. Every year the laical and ecclesiastical dignitaries were called to a solemn audience in Aachen, during which the Capitularies (documents equal to laws) were issued. Charles took care of the clergy’s education, improved the level of schools and promoted the study of Latin, the language that all cultured men had to learn.

14. On Charles’s death (814) the civil wars among his heirs led to the breaking up of the empire and to the affirmation of the Pope’s power. Between the 9th and the 10th century Europe underwent new invasions by Hungarians, Arabs and Vikings. The Hungarians were definitively defeated by the Emperor Otto I in 955. In 827 the Arabs started the conquest of Sicily which ended at the beginning of the 10th century with the expulsion of the Byzantines. The Vikings, called “Normans” by the Franks, occupied some French territories and, subsequently, they obtained the Duchy of Normandy, from which, in the 11th century they left to conquer Great Britain and Southern Italy. The Byzantine empire recovered with the Macedonian emperors between the end of the 9th century and the beginning of the 11th , when it resumed control of the Adriatic Sea, part of Italy and many territories which were in the Bulgarians’ hands. The Byzantine armies had the support of the Pisans and the Genoeses in the struggle against the Saracens, to whom they took Sardinia in 1022.

15. On Basil III’ s death the empire went through a serious political crisis; the religious questions started again and there was the final break with the Church of Rome ( the Byzantine Schism or the Great Schism in 1054). The internal crisis weakened the Byzantines who lost the coastal area of Dalmatia, the islands of the Adriatic Sea, occupied by the Venetians, and Southern Italy, occupied by the Normans who were acknowledged as vassals by Pope Leo IX. In fact he gave Robert of Altavilla ( called “ the guiscardo”, that is “ the astute” ), the title of Duke of Calabria and Apulia. Subsequently, in 1130, Roger II of Altavilla unified all the possessions conquered and, to celebrate his power, he had some buildings erected with a lot of golden mosaics

16. The most important dates in the economic and political history of the empire in the second half of the 11th century were two. The first was 1071, year when the Battle of Mantzikert took place and the Byzantine emperor Roman IV Diogenes was taken prisoner by the Turks. The second was 1082 when the emperor Alexius I Comnenus, a year after a military coup d’état, granted the first commercial privileges to Venice in exchange for the help of its fleet. This event marked the beginning of the decline of Byzantium’s economic and commercial supremacy over the West and the beginning of the economic growth of the maritime republics. The privileges granted to Venice were eight. The most important were the fifth and the seventh. The fifth provided for the establishment of a permanent merchants’ colony in Constantinople, on the Golden Horn, to whom annuities and real estates were awarded. Moreover the merchants had the right to go into and out of the quarter (area) with no control. The seventh privilege granted the Venetians the right to buy and sell every kind of goods in all the regions of the empire with exemption from any duties, taxes or interests owing to the Imperial Treasury, both in Constantinople and in any other Byzantine market.

17. Alexius Comnenus, with the Venetians’ help, succeeded in recovering some territories but the Turkish Seljuqs continued to threaten the Byzantine Empire. Once again the Emperor Alexius Comnenus turned to the West and Pope Urban II publicly announced the first crusade. The crusades were a sort of world war which lasted two centuries. At the beginning the crusaders, under the command of the great French, Norman and Italian feudatories, along with the most famous monastic and chivalrous orders, fought to free Jerusalem, but the real aim was to take possession of the Byzantine Empire. This was evident during the fourth crusade, in 1204, when the crusaders first occupied Zara and then they sacked Constantinople. The Venetians took away the four wonderful bronze horses which adorn the façade of St. Mark’s Basilica.

18. It was created the Latin Eastern Empire and the crown fell to Baldwin of Flanders, but the real winner was Venice which obtained favourable conditions for its merchants. The people, however, refused obedience to the Westerners who were Catholics and this contributed to the redemption of the Byzantines. In 1261 Michael Palaeologus, with the help of Genoeses and Pisans, reconquered Constantinople, driving the Venetians out of the city and putting an end to the Latin Eastern Empire. For some time the empire survived as Seljuqs, Tartars and Persians were too divided to be able to attack, but in the end the Ottoman Turks invaded some possessions. The empire asked for help to the West but the European states imposed as a condition the reunification of the Catholic church and the Orthodox one. Therefore Michael acknowledged the supremacy of Pope Gregory X on the Eastern Church, provided that the Pope prevented the Latins from helping Charles of Anjou, who had allied with Venice, Bulgarians and Serbs. But the religious union was unsuccessful and Charles of Anjou restarted the offensive, which was interrupted by the break of the war of Vespers (1282). This revolt was supported by Michael VIII and ended with the defeat of the Angevins in Sicily and the beginning of Peter of Aragon’s kingdom. In the meanwhile the Turks moved from Asia to Europe, occupying the peninsula of Gallipoli (1354).

19. Among the Westerners only Amadeus VI of Savoy (“ the Green Earl”) moved and succeeded in taking Gallipoli from the Turks. The other European countries did nothing to stop the advance of the Turks and, when the Ottoman sultan Bayezid besieged Constantinople, the city was defended only by Genoeses and Venetians. The successes of the Turks were temporarily stopped by the invasion of Front Asia by the Tartars, led by Tamburlaine, who defeated Bayezid in Ankara in 1402 . The Byzantines, helped by the Genoeses only, tried to withstand the other sieges. On the death of the Ottoman sultan Murad , Mohammed II gathered a large army and besieged Constantinople, which was conquered on the 29th May 1453, while the last Emperor Constantine XI fell in battle.

20. The fall of Constantinople had very important political and economic consequences. In fact France, Spain, Portugal, England and Venice itself sought other routes for the spices and for the other eastern products as the Turks prevented them from getting them directly through the caravan routes of Asia. The Byzantine Empire played an important role in the preservation of the old Greek manuscripts and of the classical culture. The Byzantine cultural tradition did not die away in 1453; the Byzantine scholars who came to Italy in the 15th century exerted a strong influence on the Italian Renaissance; the recovery of the classics was transmitted to a refined public of scholars so that the Byzantine culture survived the disintegration of the Empire.