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.