Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Byzantine and medieval Greece: 330-1460 AD
he
Byzantine Empire
was founded in May 330 when the
emperor Constantine
declared Nova Roma (as he called the city of Byzantium - known today as Istanbul)
the new capital of the Roman Empire. Founded on the banks of the Bosphorus by
Greek colonists in the seventh century BC, Byzantium occupied a commanding point
from where the entire trade between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean could be
controlled.
Constantinople
, the city of Constantine, as it became popularly known, was
perfectly positioned for the supreme strategic task confronting the empire: the defence
of the Danube and the Euphrates frontiers. Moreover, the new capital stood astride the
flow of goods and culture from the East, that part of the empire richest in economic
resources, most densely populated and rife with intellectual and religious activity.
The Christian empire
Constantine's other act with decisive consequences was to
legalize
and patronize the
Christian Church
. Here again Constantinople was important, for while Rome's pagan
traditions could not yet be disturbed, the new capital was conceived as a Christian city.
Within the century Christianity was established as the religion of state, with its
liturgies (still in use in the Greek Orthodox Church), the Creed and the New
Testament all in Greek.
In 391 emperor
Theodosius I
issued an edict banning all expressions of
paganism
throughout the empire. In Greece the mysteries at Eleusis ceased to be celebrated the
following year, and in 395 the Olympic Games were suppressed, their athletic nudity
an offence to Christianity. Around this time too the Delphic oracle fell silent. The
conversion of pagan buildings to Christian use began in the fifth century. Under an
imperial law of 435 the Parthenon and the Erechtheion on the Acropolis, the
mausoleum of Galerius (the Rotunda) in Thessaloníki and other temples elsewhere
became churches. Even this did not eradicate pagan teaching: philosophy and law
continued to be taught at the Academy in Athens, founded by Plato in 385 BC, until
prohibited by the emperor Justinian in 529.
In 395 the Roman Empire split into
Western and Eastern empires
, and in 476
Rome
fell
to the barbarians. As the Dark Ages settled on Western Europe, Byzantium
inherited the sole mantle of the empire. Latin remained its official language, though
after the reign of Justinian (527-565) the emperors joined the people in speaking and
writing Greek.
Thessaloníki
, the second city of the Byzantine Empire, was relatively close to
Constantinople, yet even so the journey by land or sea took five or six days. The rest of
Greece was that much farther and Attica and the Peloponnese grew decidedly
provincial. Conditions worsened sharply in the late sixth century when Greece was
devastated by
plague
. In Athens after 580 life came almost to an end, as the remaining
inhabitants withdrew to the Acropolis, while at Corinth the population removed itself
entirely to the island of Égina. Only Thessaloníki fully recovered.
The rise of Islam and the Crusades
The advent of
Islam
in the mid-seventh century had its effect on Greece. The loss to the
Arabs of the Christian provinces of Syria in 636, and Egypt in 642, was followed by an
attack by an Arab fleet in 677 on Constantinople itself. In 717-718 a combined Arab
435
600-700
730
The Parthenon
and other Greek
temples converted
to churches.
For historians and classicists, the
Christianization of Greece in the sixth
century marks the end of the Ancient
Greek era.
Icons and other images banned in the
Orthodox Church for being idolatrous; the
height of the iconoclastic controversy.
