While the Roman Empire in the west was getting Goth-smacked into oblivion in 476 AD, the
eastern half of the empire, with its capital of Constantinople, was, by comparison, doing
pretty great.
For one, they existed, so that’s a plus, and the Byzantine Empire evolved into a gorgeous
gold-coated hybrid of classical Greco-Roman and medieval Christian culture.
But unfortunately for our Byz-Bois, shiny mosaics and ginormous domes couldn’t prevent
the infinite abyss of disasters that lay in wait over the millennium to come.
Between Persians, Goths, Arabs, Turks, Normans, and the more-than-occasional civil war, it’s
safe to say the Byzantines could not catch a break.
And the latter medieval period continues this distinctly Promethean trend, where they suffer
a constant and arduous Evisceration by Eagle without ever actually dying from it.
As we will indeed see in just a moment, our favorite Golden Disaster Empire managed to
keep on thriving and defying the specter of death despite even the most Garbâge of circumstances.
So, to see how the Byzantine Empire procrastinated its own death and even then kinda slipped
past the deadline, Let’s Do Some History.
Now, this video’s timeline will start, incidentally, with the fall of the Empire — about two
centuries ahead of the typical 1453.
I know, we’re making great time.
Because long before the Ottomans ever enter the picture, the Byzantines were struggling
to coexist with the Italian merchant empires they were growing so reliant on.
Venetian and Genoese traders tussled in the Latin neighborhoods of Constantinople like
they were street gangs in Shakespearean Verona, but the Byzantines poured the proverbial Greek
Fire on the problem by arresting and then murdering tens of thousands of Latin citizens
in the city.
Bad look.
This Giant Yikes was compounded by the baffling ineptitude of the ruling Angelos dynasty,
whose constant infighting left the empire woefully mismanaged.
This got… infinitely worse when the powers of Europe launched Crusade Numero 4 on the
promise of: “This Time It Might Actually Work”.
To the ensuing surprise of precisely nobody, it got off to a rocky start, with their understaffed
army getting excommunicated by the Pope before they even left the Adriatic sea.
But the light at the end of the Crusaders’ tunnel was prince Alexios Angelos, who offered
Byzantine military support in exchange for reinstating his deposed father.
So here we see the Angeloi ignoring the key rules from Alexios Komnenos’ Declassified
Crusading Survival Guide: Rule #1: Under Any Circumstances, Do Not Ask Crusaders for Help.
We’ve been through this before, it is not worth it.
Rule #2: If the Crusaders arrive anyway, transport your Crusaders across your empire as fast
as humanly possible.
Do Not let them get any ideas.
Rule #3: While your Crusaders are inside your empire, never under any circumstances provoke
your Crusaders.
They are armed, violent, and prone to fits of disproportionate rage.
Yet, in 1204, the Angeloi failed spectacularly on every point — And, spying an opportunity
to quit while they were ahead, the Crusaders simply sacked Constantinople.
Venice deliberately instigated the pillaging, but by this point the Byzantines Really Should
Have Known Better than to Tee Them Up.
So, The Sack.
Beyond being a rough approximation of Literal Hell On Earth for the Byzantines unfortunate
to be on the receiving end, the Crusaders desolated the art and architecture of the
city.
Venetians had the good sense to steal the priceless relics of Constantinople for The
Glory Of The Republic instead of mindlessly burning and/or murdering everything and/or
one — but whether trashed or taken, Constantinople still ended up ruined, and the rest of the
Empire was next on the To-Thieve list.
Venice, the crafty little devils, chose to swipe up the islands of the Aegean, while
the Franks installed a Latin emperor on the Byzantine throne and carved up the Greek mainland.
On paper, the Byzantine Empire ends right here: the capital was now kaput, and the Aegean
Basin which so long preserved the Greco-Roman world went poof.
But even the end of the Empire couldn’t shake that damn Hellenic persistence, as Byzantine
nobles in Survival-Mode quickly laid out successor states in the wake of the Crusade, in Trebizond,
Nicaea, and Epirus.
Each became a haven for Greeks fleeing their new Frankish overlords in Mainland Greece,
whose Latin Empire proved to be little more than a post-crusade money-pot.
But the Franks quickly got bored by the prospect of actually governing and soon became weaker
than the assorted Byzantines they had so recently stomped.
Are we actually surprised?
The three Hellenic states started out on the defensive, to put it mildly, but some shifty
strategy and good old-fashioned luck gave Nicaea a leg up.
After spreading out over the Western Anatolian coast and gaining a foothold in Thrace and
Macedonia, the Nicaeans reconquered Constantinople kind of by accident.
While a small army scouted around the city to suss out its defenses, they learned that
the Frankish army was out on campaign, so the Byzantines snuck through a small break
in the wall, opened a gate, and then took the city.
For all the disasters to befall the Byzantines, it’s only fair that the RNG just this once
works out in their favor.
Though, Emperor Michael Palaiologos soon found his work cut out for him, as the city had
hardly been cleaned since the crusade half a century earlier, and sliding so close to
death’s door prevented the Byzantines from cutting quite as Imperial a figure as they
used to.
Still, it was better than the alternative.
As we’ve seen, it was hard enough to defend the Byzantine dominion back in the good old
days, but with the emperor now presiding over a kingdom and a capital that were both hollow
shells of their former selves, clever diplomacy was the sharpest weapon in the arsenal.
Fair to say the more impressive achievement was not in retaking Constantinople, but in
keeping it.
As ever, the rivalry between Venice and Genoa made this difficult, as their schoolyard slapfight
had a conspicuous habit of always going down in Constantinople.
And of course, there were a few strategic flubs, such as when the Byzantines hired a
band of Catalan mercenaries who went rogue at the slightest provocation and claimed the
Duchy of Athens for the next 7 decades.
But even this wasn’t the worst mercenary customer experience the Byzantines would endure.
As, in 1343, the royal treasury was too thin to pay for Venetian help, so the former-empress
Anna pawned what she had, which was the empire’s crown jewels.
Despite selling Constantinople’s royal honor for some warships, Anna lost her war, which,
I should say, was a civil war, against the empire.
So when acting-emperor John Kantakouzenos and his wife Irene were officially coronated
in 1347, the crowns were copies made of tinted glass, because the originals were off in Venice,
like every other Byzantine artifact.
Yet, somehow, despite all of that, hardly the worst thing to happen in the 1340s, because,
as we know…
Plague.
Man, it does not let up.
Population is ravaged, economy in ruins, let us not dally here, friends, we all know the
drill, and this would provide a golden opportunity for the Ottomans over in Anatolia, who quickly
made it clear they were the next big Muslim power.
So, about a century after the reconquest of Constantinople, there were four fundamental
and unavoidable problems to the empire’s long-term health: The Ottomans were gaining
strength and pushing west, Venice and Genoa turned the Aegean into their personal battlefield,
and the complete lack of a Byzantine economy meant they were fully dependent on those two
for trade, then, to cap it off we’ve got the endless internal power struggles and succession
crises — let’s not kid ourselves, this is still the Romans we’re talking about
here.
With worries like that, fully rebuilding the empire was a no-go, so the Byzantines picked
their battles and bought their time, which meant putting themselves under the protection
of the Ottomans.
But, ever defiant in the face of peril, giving up was never an option.
While The Empire was shrinking down to Just Constantinople, things looked shockingly different
on the other side of the Aegean.
Right when Michael Palaiologos was tripping ass-first into retaking Constantinople in
1261, he also had the good fortune of capturing the Latin Prince of Achaea in a battle, and
ransomed him back in exchange for a few castles down in the Peloponnese.
They weren’t much, but they were well-fortified among the mountains, much like the ancient
Spartans had been way back when.
Over the next two centuries, this distant Byzantine outpost in Lakonia became a prosperous
corner of the Hellenic world, as Greeks from the Morea and beyond flocked into the city
of Mystras to try and pick up where the empire left off.
So in the 13 and 1400s, Mystras became a haven of Byzantine culture and scholarship.
And, I mean, look, I’m not going to pretend like one decently well-off corner of the Greek
world is just on par with the empire pre-crusade, because of course it’s not, but I will come
to bat for the Morea as a paragon of that Romano-Hellenic perseverance, to keep on trying
even after everything seemed lost.
No I’m not getting sentimental, that’s just marble dust in my eye, shut up.
*Ahem.
Anyway, like with Constantinople, keeping this territory safe required a gentle diplomatic
touch, but the game was hell of a lot easier with water on 3 sides and mountains on the
4th.
And with Constantinople sweating javelins at the sight of incoming Ottomans, it became
clear that the Morea could handle itself, so it gained autonomy in 1349.
By the early 1400s they expanded outside Lakonia onto almost the entire Peloponnese, and briefly
had authority over Attica.
The Byzantine Morea also had a practical benefit to Constantinople, as emperors-in-waiting
got their political training as governors down in the Peloponnese, to the point where
the last emperor Constantine XI was actually crowned in Mystras rather than up in the capital.
Uh oh, did I say last?
Yeah, about that.
The thing with the Ottomans is they didn’t…
stop.
Despite the empire’s best efforts and the too-little-too-late help of European Crusader
armies that disintegrated on impact, it was clear the show was wrapping up.
By 1453, Sultan Mehmed finally had the means to take the city of Constantinople, and by
means I mean cannons the size of a house.
After blockading the Bosphorus and cutting off the city’s line of supply, the Ottomans
blasted open the Theodosian walls and poured in.
Emperor Constantine is said to have given a rousing speech to his countrymen before
charging into where the fighting was fiercest, never to be seen again.
After the battle, the Sultan toured the city and was so awed by the beauty of Hagia Sophia
that he preserved it and converted it into a mosque, rather than blasting it and starting
from scratch, as was more often the move.
But even after this (he said, moving the goalpost back for dramatic effect), it wasn’t The
End for the Byzantines.
For one, the Ottomans continued the time-honored love of ultra-domed architecture.
But also, the Venetian Republic’s outlying territories in the Aegean and Ionian seas
were majority-Greek, further preserving Hellenic culture for centuries.
Venetian Crete later became a beacon for art and scholarship that mixed the Italian Renaissance
with traditional Hellenism.
So, despite the earth-shattering treachery of Crusading Venetians, the painfully ironic
end-result is that Venice played a vital part in the long-term preservation of Byzantine
culture — Man that is uncomfortable to say out loud.
And though Crete fell to the Ottomans in 1669… nice, the Ionian islands remained stubbornly
Non-Ottoman until they became Part of Modern Greece, but that’s really pushing the timeline,
so let’s wrap up.
The standard question of the Byzantine Empire is essentially “Why didn't they die way
the hell sooner when everything was always on fire?”
Because, on one level, yeah, the Byzantine story is over 1,000 straight years of the
map getting smaller, but that time-lapse would have been swift if they didn’t persevere.
Let’s not forget they had over 1,000 years.
By some metrics, that’s The Longest Empire.
And it got that far because at no point in Byzantine history was it too late to care,
or too late to try, because they believed that they had something about their state,
their people, their faith, and their identity that was worth living for and dying for.
And even when the last mini-golden-age was a distant memory, that tireless determination
to Do Their Best kept them going in even the most dire circumstances to create the next
mini-golden-age.
So when we look back at the empire to ask why the Byzantines kept going after Rome falls
in 476, it’s for the same reason as when Constantinople fell in 1204, but those Byzantines
kept going.
Thank you so much for watching!
This video was an absolute joy to make, even though I had to do some clever mental finagling
to reconcile my competing loves of Venice And the Byzantines.
But the most wild thing is how this video means I’ve finally finished the Rome series,
after 11 videos and just over 3 whole years.
Man, what a ride.
In any case, I will see you all in the next video!