The Byzantine Empire has long maintained a
delicate balance of simultaneously doing fantastic and also being constantly in peril. Normally this would be a contradiction, but
the Byzantines made “Golden Disaster Empire” their entire damn brand. As we’ll see over the next 500 years, the
Dark Ages brought genuinely brilliant reforms while the Golden Age endured some catastrophic
failures — But just like the Romans of old, the Byzantines kept on keeping on despite
the odds, and earned their place as one of the longest-lasting empires in history. SO, to see how the Byzantines survived the
middle ages and gained their golden reputation, let’s do some History. When last we left our purple-robed friends,
the entire southern half of the empire had been swiftly yoinked by the shiny new Muslim
Caliphate, and within a century these new neighbors had landed on Constantinople’s
doorstep on two separate occasions, and were only repelled by the very fires of Hell itself. See, the Byzantines had a little trick called
Greek Fire, a secret substance that could be shot from a siphon at an incoming navy,
and burn down everything from the mast to even the water. But that’s not all the Byzantines had learned
from the Fall of Rome — In addition to their functionally-impenetrable Theodosian walls,
they maintained hundreds of underground cisterns to fortify their water supply. No city on Earth was better defended than
Constantinople, but the same couldn’t be said for the Byzantine provinces, as the Muslim
armies were having their run of the place all the way up into Anatolia. It was only in 740 that Emperor Leo III finally
held the Eastern line, and his son Constantine V fortified the other problematic frontier
by pushing back against the Bulgarians in the west. Hey, it took a century and a half, but solid
recovery. However, there’s a more literal reason that
this stretch is considered The Dark Ages, and it has to do with Icons. The Byzantines were a rather artistic bunch,
and they loved to have images of Jesus, Mary and friends in their churches and in their
homes. But in the eyes of people like Emperor Leo,
this was beginning to look a lot like Idolatry, where images are worshipped more piously than
even God. His response, simple enough, was to smash
every last image he could get his hands on. So starting in 726 he and his fellow Iconoclasts
destroyed every mosaic, fresco, statue, and doodle in sight. Constantine V, for his part, doubled down,
and began persecuting the clergy for spurring this apparent idolatry. Meanwhile, across the Adriatic, the Pope in
Rome was justifiably horrified, and Byzantine Ravenna took the occasion to declare independence,
which is why their mosaics are among the few to actually survive this mess. After Constantine died, his wife Irene called
a council to outlaw Iconoclasm, but Emperor Leo V reinstated it, and then eventually empress
Theodora re-outlawed it for good in 843. The final rules were that statues are No-Bueno,
but all 2D art was chill, so the Byzantines got back to work with gorgeous frescos and
mosaics. Greek art would proceed to snub visual realism
in favor of stylized figures with enough gold to give a protestant a seizure, and that style
governs eastern orthodox art to this day. So while I weep on a weekly basis for how
pathetically few pieces of original art survived Iconoclasm and the Ottomans — the dreaded
double-whammy — I can take comfort knowing that the Byzantine style has well over 1000
years of continuity. But for all the damage the Iconoclasts did
to art, they made some crucial reforms to the Byzantine military and government by,
as it happens, making them the same thing. See, back in the old Imperial days, Roman
Provinces had no innate defenses, and had to wait for the Legions to show up from Jupiter-Knows-Where. Clearly that model didn’t work anymore,
so the Byzantines reconfigured their armies and their provinces to fit. In the 6 and 700s, the provinces were gradually
redrawn as Themata, with the governor taking on the additional role of Strategos, and overseeing
both the civic and military care of his Thema. And in place of old-fashioned imperial legions,
Byzantine Themata each had their own army, staffed with citizens from that Thema, and
funded by land grants within that Thema, so every soldier had a tangible stake in the
wellbeing of the empire. Though the empire shrank to half its size
between 6 and 800, the extremely perilous eastern border went from an unmitigated disaster-zone
to a fortress — the Byzantines were stronger and safer than ever thanks to the Thema reforms. So that’s the big picture swerve, but the
tactics and composition of the Byzantine army also got an upgrade. While infantry remained a staple, the Byzantines
kept up with trends by remodeling the old Roman Legionary into the fancy new Skutatoi. Namely, they ditched the Scutum for the hotness
that is the Kite Shield, which explains why the name Skutatoi literally means “Shield
Boys”. There to support our favorite Shieldy Bois
were the Toxotai archers, but the biggest and baddest unit in the Byzantine army was
the Kataphrakt. They were basically hoplites on horses, with
the steed and rider decked out head to hoof in scale armor. Their name technically means “Fully Armored,”
but I like to translate it as “Full-Metal Cavalry”. Cataphracts were first introduced as a counter
to the Arabic cavalry, which otherwise ran circles around the poor Skutatoi, but eventually
the Cataphracts became the core of the Byzantine army, and a byword for Byzantine power. Infantry and archers would weaken an enemy
line, and then the Cataphracts would hammer through the weak points and shatter the enemy
formations. GG. And as an empire that’s about 75% coast,
the Byzantines had ports to protect on all sides, in the Aegean, along the Mediterranean,
and on the Black Sea, so they maintained a pretty beefy navy. In the world’s best case of “If It isn’t
broke, don’t fix it” the Byzantines still used a version of the Trireme, some 2,000
years later, as their primary ship. The Dromon, as it became known, had been upgraded
with a Lateen sail and got absolutely loaded with catapults and ballistae. Plus, instead of simply ramming into enemy
ships like some ancient Athenian doof, the Dromoi were equipped with spurs to smash enemy
oars and immobilize them, for ease of burning and/or boarding. Slick upgrade. Unfortunately, the Navy wasn’t enough to
stop repeated Muslim incursions into Crete, Sicily, and Sardinia, but they dutifully protected
the mainland coasts, the islands of the Aegean, and the many trade routes that passed through
Constantinople via the Bosphorus river. With Iconoclasm over and the empire no longer
teetering on the edge of total collapse, the Byzantines entered two centuries of prosperity
and relative peace. Starting with Basil I, who I can’t help
but picture as a leaf, a line of Macedonian emperors guided the Byzantine empire through
its Golden Age, the peak of imperial prestige and of its cultural influence abroad. With the Muslim armies to the east more or
less handled, the Byzantines turned their attention to the Bulgarians, and used a clever
mix of religious diplomacy to pacify them via conversion to Christianity. They did the same with Tsar Vladimir of the
Kievan Rus’, which set early Russia with its quasi-Greek Cyrillic alphabet and its
Byzantine-leaning brand of eastern Christianity. In return, Vladimir hooked the Byzantines
up with the Varangian guard, a legendary band of Scandinavian mercenaries who served as
the emperor’s royal guard for centuries. Now this was no Pax Romana — so the Byzantines
still had to fight on all fronts, and the Bulgarians even swiped northern Greece in
the 900s, later recovered by the efforts of Basil II a century later — but compared
to the way things were, the Byzantines were doing great. Meanwhile, Constantinople had never been better. By 1,000 it held half-a-million people, and
remained the largest, best-defended, and most magnificent city in the world. Hagia Sophia was one of countless churches
to get gorgeous new decorations after iconoclasm. Times clearly changed, but Constantinople
remained a gorgeous window into the classical world, with Roman-style churches, a cartoonishly
huge chariot stadium, and marble as far as the eye could see. And all across the empire, Byzantine architects
were hard at work building gorgeous urban cathedrals and cliffside monasteries. But funnily enough, our best looks at peak
Byzantine art come not just from outside the empire, but from its rivals. To the west, Venice and the Normans made for
some of Constantinople’s oddest frenemies, because as much as they used spears and ships
to snag some Byzantine power and prosperity for themselves, they were the most enthusiastic
adopters of the Byzantine style. Seriously, between Saint Mark’s Basilica
and the Palatine Chapel, Italy is the best place to see golden-age art. Then of course there’s the way the Ottomans
coopted the Byzantine aesthetic but WHOOF that is a problem for later. Culturally, things had never been better,
but politically, the cracks in the proverbial mosaic were starting to show. The Byzantines had been steadily reaching
back out to the Balkans and out of Anatolia, but the empire was more comfortable being
on the defensive than the offensive, and the carefully-constructed Themata system began
suffering from bloat. Strategoi got complacent and ignored their
civic duties to play Monopoly-Men within their Thema, and between Theodosian walls and gold-covered
domes, cushy bureaucrats in Constantinople barely raised their heads from their books. So each camp blamed the other for the empire’s
problems, and both did exactly nothing to fix it. The emperor didn’t help matters by ignoring
the Themata to rely more and more on the Tagma, a standing army meant primarily for campaigning. This put the Byzantines in an extremely precarious
position, spread too thin and poorly prepared to face new threats, like trying to stab your
enemies with a limp spaghetti. To the west, the Normans swooped into southern
Italy to conquer the last Byzantine pockets, and to the east, the Seljuk Turks dunked on
the Byzantines so hard that Anatolia just disappeared. And they didn’t even have to try that hard! Half the Byzantine army deserted en-route
to the battle of Manzikert in 1071, and the generals made a series of miscalculations
on their way to an entirely avoidable outcome. By 1075, the empire had never been smaller
or weaker. You’d think the Greeks would know a thing
or two about Hubris, but apparently not! And unfortunately for our Grekbois here, the
1000s only frayed the already dodgy relationship between the churches in Constantinople and
Rome. Justinian’s big idea of One Church and One
Empire went kaput as soon as the southern Mediterranean went poof, and Byzantine authority
in Rome remained nominal at best. When the Papal States officially split in
754 it was only a formality. Communication between east and west was already
tricky because of how few Byzantines spoke Latin and how few Romans spoke Greek. And tiffs like Iconoclasm exacerbated disagreements
about whether the Pope had supreme spiritual authority or whether Byzantines had the right
to mind their own business. These views were… fundamentally incompatible,
and this multicentury spat came to a head when a Roman delegate excommunicated the entire
Byzantine church in the middle of Hagia Sophia in the middle of mass, daaaaaaamn, so the
Greeks responded with excommunications of their own, and just like that we’ve got
a Schism. While nobody at the time quite realized the
implications, this marked the final split of ties between the Catholic church in Rome
and the Eastern Orthodox church. But one Byzantine emperor saw this as a rare
opportunity. Alexios I ended nearly a decade of civil war
to assume the throne in 1081, and his Komnenoi dynasty oversaw a remarkable revival of Byzantine
fortunes through the 1100s. He held the empire steady for nearly 4-decades,
made new trade agreements with the Venetians, and hatched a clever plan to regain Anatolia. He went to Pope Urban with the offer to recognize
Papal supremacy in exchange for a dispatch of soldiers to help with the Byzantine reconquest. But Urban’s hearing was a little selective,
because he ended up sending along several armies’-worth of European bandits who wanted
to, let me make sure im hearing this right: Retake The Holy Land? Huh… That wasn’t the plan at all. So now Alexios had to wrangle this box of
Oops All Crusaders and point them towards Jerusalem so they didn’t Crusade all over
his empire instead. Ultimately, the Crusaders were much more excited
to conquer their own new lands than restore lost Byzantine territories, and subsequent
crusades would only entangle the Byzantines further into the mess that is medieval European
politics, and earn them nothing but antagonism from their western neighbors. Meanwhile the Normans were constantly poking
and prodding into Greece, and soon enough the Venetians had a monopoly on Byzantine
trade. But despite all that, the Komnenoi left the
empire a lot better than they first got it, having reclaimed coastal Anatolia, modernized
the economy by Venetian supervision, and continued to make churchloads of gold-covered art. Honestly, I feel like that’s kinda the Byzantine
motto at this point — definitely precarious, but hey, it could’ve been a lot worse! We’ll find out how this eternally-perilous
situation resolves in part 3, but for now, let’s recap. When we picked up this chapter of Byzantine
history, the empire was in a really bad way, what with the hemorrhaging provinces and smashing
all of their art — it’s no accident that they went on to steady their empire and revitalize
their culture. The Byzantines survived, and then dug themselves
out of the dark ages by being clever and never giving up — The Thema System is a genius
innovation in statecraft, and it bought the Byzantines an entire Golden Age to work with
— And of course, as time went on they got a little careless, but then when things got
dire, they persevered and turned things around. I don’t just like Byzantine history in spite
of their setbacks, I love Byzantine history because they’re a Golden Disaster Empire. Remember, in life, it doesn’t matter how
you get knocked down, or how you lose all of North Africa, or all of Greece, or Anatolia
too, wow they’ve really been through a lot, What matters —heh— what matters, is that
you keep on trying no matter what, because golden ages can dawn when you least expect
it.
