Legacy

Byzantium has been seen in both positive and negative terms. Among the services with which it has been credited are the preservation of Greek learning, which its scholars transmitted to the Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the halting of the Muslim advance, which the West began to appreciate when Byzantium was replaced by the Ottoman Turks.

Byzantium also provided a living model of Roman imperium that both western and eastern rulers imitated in the Middle Ages and early modernity, especially tsarist Russia and the French monarchy. Obviously, the fundamental orders of Orthodox Christianity around the world have their origin in Byzantium, and its experience at the hands of the Crusades and the papal monarchy lie at the root of the deep distrust felt in all Orthodox nations for western “idealistic” interventions. The most damning assessments of Byzantium as superstitious, theocratic, and absolutist were produced by thinkers of the Enlightenment, but here too Byzantium was performing a service. The “Byzantium” of these thinkers was an imaginary construct that they needed in order to think and talk about the worst aspects of their own societies, precisely what they wanted reformed. It was easier to talk about these problems in connection with a long-extinct Orthodox empire than to make present references explicit. The task of historians for the future is to peel away the layers of prejudice that still envelop this fascinating society, the only one in history that spoke Greek, was Roman, and created the defining institutions of Orthodox Christianity. We can start from more recent images, including not only the “absolutist theocracy,” but also those which romanticize it as “mystical” and “spiritual,” and go back to the oldest prejudice in the West, namely that it was not a “true” Roman empire. Byzantium spanned the period from antiquity to early modernity and the geographical space from northern Mesopotamia to southern Italy, transmitting cultural elements from one side of each span to the other.

It was the crucible for much in western and eastern Europe and the Near East that was built upon its ruins.

Bibliography

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Heather, P. 2013. The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Peoples and Imperial Pretenders. Oxford.

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Moyseidou, G. 1995. Το Βυζάντιο και οι βόρειοι γείτονές του τον 10ο αιώνα. Athens. Neville, L. 2004. Authority in Byzantine Provincial Society, 950-1100. Cambridge. Oikonomides, N. 1996. Fiscalite et exemption fiscale a Byzance (IXe-XIe s.). Athens. Raffensperger, C. 2012. Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the Medieval World. Cambridge, MA. Romeney, B. 2012. “Ethnicity, Ethnogenesis, and the Identity of the Syriac Orthodox Christians.”

In W Pohl et al., eds., Visions of Community in the Post-Roman World: The West, Byzantium and the Islamic World, 300-1100, 183-204. Leiden.

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Treadgold, W 2006. “Byzantium, the Reluctant Warrior.” In N. Christie and M. Yazigi, eds., Noble Ideals and Bloody Realities: Warfare in the Middle Ages, 209-233. Leiden.

Woolf, G. 1998. Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul. Cambridge.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

Legacy

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