PAUL FREEDMAN: We in the
midst of the laughs,
attempted to look at the
seventh century last time as a
turning point in the history
of the period that we're dealing
with, the post-Roman
world, the early Middle Ages.
Certainly among the major shifts
was the rise of Islam
and the consequent radical
changes in the Mediterranean
territories, particularly, of
course, the areas conquered
from the Eastern Roman Empire
by Byzantium, namely Syria,
Palestine, Egypt, and eventually
North Africa.
The seventh century, therefore,
changed the shape
of the Byzantine Empire,
and so its
orientation as well as culture.
Here I have a kind
of periodization.
We've spoken about Justinian's
expansion.
Very shortly after his death,
there begins what seems in
retrospect, at least
in part, to be a
reaction to imperial overreach.
Imperial overreach is a
phenomenon seen throughout
history, described most
memorably, perhaps, by our own
Paul Kennedy, the tendency for
empires simply, in order to
protect themselves or in order
to fulfill their ambitions to
get too large for their own
ability to hold onto their
possessions.
This is an economic problem, a
logistical problem, a resource
problem, and even a
cultural problem.
In general, it's hard to say
what provokes the crisis.
That is, with the Roman Empire
as with the Abbasids, we can
say, "Oh, well it
was too big".
On the other hand, it
was too big and did
just fine for centuries.
In the case of the Abbasid
Empire, maybe not centuries,
but 150 years, which as
these things go is
a pretty long time.
Here, however, we're talking
about something that is much
more obviously related to
some kind of overreach.
Justinian formed his expanded
empire, which is the first map
in the handout.
And merely a few years
after his death,
it started to unravel.
You'll recall that we said
that he had at great cost
conquered Italy.
After the easy conquest of North
Africa, this looked like
it would be easy as well.
But in fact, while North
Africa, occupied by the
Vandals, fell within a year or
two, Italy took twenty years
to wrest from the Ostrogoths.
And the peninsula was devastated
and in radical
economic decline when
Byzantium took over.
A mere three years after
Justinian's death in 568,
Italy was invaded
by yet another
barbarian tribe, the Lombards.
The Lombards did not take
over all of it.
The Byzantine Empire--
Eastern Roman Empire-- managed
to hold on to Sicily, much of
southern Italy, the east
coast, particularly the
capital of the Byzantine
province, Ravenna.
But nevertheless, the Lombards
occupied most of the peninsula.
And as we'll discuss in a
moment, other disasters piled
up in this period that I have
just called contraction.
But it's not just a question of
the empire getting smaller.
It's really a radical crisis and
an ongoing crisis with the
appearance of many enemies and
the radical shrinking of the
borders of this empire.
So again, look at the
empire in 565.
It's making a good attempt at
Justinian's death to mimic the
Roman Empire at the beginning
of our course, at its height
in the third century.
It doesn't have northwestern
Europe, but it has most of the
Mediterranean.
And to the degree that the Roman
Empire was, as we with
fatiguing repetition have said,
a Mediterranean-centered
empire, this empire of
Justinian's does a good job of
restoring that Mediterranean
orientation.
If you look at the second map
during this period of what the
author of this book that I took
the map from, Haldon,
H-A-L-D-O-N, calls "the process
of devastation", you
can see how much has been lost.
The Empire at this point
consists mostly of Anatolia,
a little bit of
Italy, a few islands.
Even the Balkans is mostly
occupied by Slavs and Bulgars.
There then follows a period
of reconstruction, of the
stabilization of borders, of
taking back some lands in the
Balkans and in Anatolia from the
Arabs in Anatolia and from
various groups in the Balkans.
This is also the period of the
iconoclastic emperors.
And then finally, an expansion
of the Byzantine Empire.
The golden age of the Byzantine
Empire is this
period after the settlement of
Iconoclasm in 843, until the
appearance of a new enemy, the
Seljuk Turks, who won a
devastating victory in 1071 and
begin a process of what
ultimately--
but, in this case, ultimately
means 350 years-- what
ultimately would be the final
crisis for the Byzantine
Empire, which would
be extinguished by
the Turks in 1453.
So if you look at map number
three, the Byzantine Empire
around the year 1000--
Ignore Bulgaria for the time
being; that is a separate
kingdom, and we're going
to talk about it soon.
This is a compact empire
compared to that of Justinian.
It is not in control of
the Mediterranean.
It has two bases, really, the
Balkans and Asia Minor.
And it has a little bit of
territory in Italy still.
But this empire made logistic
sense, was never
easy to keep together.
Nevertheless, it was stable,
had enough money for its
substantial military expenses,
and even to create a kind of
cultural efflorescence.
So here we have a story not
merely of survival, but of
survival, adaptation,
and expansion.
And that's what I want to
discuss with you today.
The reason we're doing this is
because this is part of early
medieval history.
We've talked about the legacy
of the Roman Empire, a
three-part kind of legacy
in our formulation.
On Wednesday, we'll start
talking again about Europe,
northern Europe and the degree
to which Charlemagne in
particular it is a
self-conscious heir to the
Roman Empire.
He revised the title
of Roman Emperor.
In the case of the East, these
people have never abandoned
the title of Roman Emperor.
And indeed, the key thing about
the Byzantine crisis in
contrast to the crisis of
the West is that the
Empire never falls.
It is never destroyed.
But it does undergo many
of the same crises and
consequences of the crises
that the West did
in the fifth century.
I said last time that to some
extent, while we don't like
the term "Dark Ages", certainly
after the collapse
of the Western Roman Empire in
the fifth century, Europe
enters into a period
of radical material
simplification: That is to
say, it is more rural.
There's less commerce.
It is politically more
decentralized.
It is militarized.
And its culture is the preserve
of a relatively small
group of clergy.
A lot of the same things happen
in the Byzantine Empire
in the seventh and
eighth centuries.
This is a kind of dark
age for Byzantium.
We don't have a lot of written
sources, for example.
There seems to be an almost
complete desertion of the
ancient cities, with the
exception of Constantinople
itself and one or two others,
the same kind of ruralization
of society.
It is a militarized society,
although as we'll see, with
more central governmental
role.
But it is a society built
around warfare.
And it is a society in which
culture is also somewhat
restricted.
The libraries don't get
destroyed exactly, but they
certainly don't get a whole lot
of use, at least in terms
of things that we can understand
or follow.
And the Byzantine Empire faced
an awful lot of enemies.
The history of Byzantium is to
some extent the history of
emperors you've never heard of,
writers you've never heard
of, a lot of really neat art,
heresies that you may have
never heard of before but you
have to learn anyway, and
invaders, some of whom you've
heard of, some of whom not.
But heresies and invaders
are really the story.
I didn't make this history,
but it is very important.
And actually, I think heresies
are kind of neat, although who
am I to say since I went
into this for a living?
So I must've liked them.
The most dramatic enemy of
Byzantium in this period is
Caliphate, the Arab
empire of Islam.
And so in terms of the shocks
and crises of this period of
contraction after Justinian,
the rise of Islam, and in
particular the two dramatic
sieges of Constantinople in
674, where a naval battle
finally defeated the Arab
forces, and the siege of 717.
So 674, 717, two sieges of
Constantinople by the Caliphate.
So what was the problem of
imperial overreach--
just to take this back
to its origins?
Justinian in particular, as we
said, was focused on the
conquest of the Western Roman
Empire, which he saw, of
course, not as a conquest but as
a reconquest, a restoration
of territories taken unjustly by
barbarian rulers, which he
was determined to take back.
He already had one enemy,
however, and that was Persia
on the eastern front.
This is nothing new.
We started the course with the
Rhine and Danube frontier as
one front and the
Persian frontier
in the East as another.
The only difference is now the
Rhine and Danube frontier has
been breached.
Justinian pacified the Persians,
paid them off, made
a treaty with them in order to
have a free hand to undertake
the conquests in the West.
In retrospect, with the
historian's ability to
quarterback after the game,
the lack of attention to
Persia was a mistake.
The Persians in fact invaded
despite this peace
treaty in the 540s.
The Italian campaign
didn't go well.
Things were patched up.
Justinian died in peace.
But his empire was
quite fragile.
In addition to everything else,
there's a plague in
541-542 that's kills a very
large proportion of the
population.
And as I said, after Justinian's
death in 568, the
Lombards invade Italy.
And beginning just a few years
later, in the 570s, we start
to have another force
that's a little more
difficult to describe.
Just in the manner of the
convenient term "Lombards" we
don't really know what
"Lombards" means.
We don't really know who
these people are.
I mean, we know a
bit about them.
But it's a pseudo-ethnic name.
We don't really know how people
identified themselves.
But it becomes even more
confusing with the groups that
invaded the Balkans.
The conventional way of
describing these is that the
leaders were a group called
the "Avars" and their
subordinates, their sort of cast
of thousands, their slave
armies, whatever you want to
call them, were "Slavs".
The Avars are a Turkic
or Mongol people.
The Slavs are Indo-European
Slavs.
This is to some extent how the
Slavs get into the Balkans.
How this worked, relations
between the Slavs and the
Avars, is not completely
clear.
But we certainly know that they
took over much of the
Balkans, including Greece.
Greece in this case has to be
considered part of the Balkans.
So the southeastern corner
of Europe, modern Greece,
Bulgaria, European Turkey,
Albania, Croatia, Serbia,
Kosovo, Bosnia, Herzegovina, all
of these countries are a
heartland of the Byzantine
Empire in its post-Justinianic
form, but now invaded by Avars
and Slavs beginning in 570.
The emperor Maurice was murdered
by his troops in 602,
campaigning in the Balkans
against the Avars and the
Slavs. He was succeeded by a
cruel but hapless general
named Phocas, whose disastrous
rule as emperor involved not
only the uprising or invasion
of Avars and Slavs in the
Balkans, but a Persian invasion
in the East. Phocas
was overthrown in 610.
The Persians, Avars, and Slavs
allied against Constantinople.
And in 626, the city was
besieged from both sides.
The Persians camped out across
the Bosphorus in the end of
Asiatic Turkey.
And the Avars and the Slavs
camped out outside the great
Theodosian Walls of the city
that were on its land side,
its western side.
The fact that the city managed
to overcome this was
attributed to various miracles
of saints, and particularly
the protection of
the Virgin Mary.
And it's very important in terms
of the later history of
iconoclasm to point out that
they had icons and all sorts
of wonder-working portrayals
of powerful saints on the
walls in order to protect
the city.
And it worked--
or at least certainly it
looked like it worked.
The invasions were foiled.
How did the Byzantine
Empire fight?
How did manage to withstand
these invasions?
Very briefly, one factor is
the strategic position of
Constantinople, a
city extremely
difficult to take by force.
Indeed, it would not be taken
by a flat-out assault until
1204, when Western crusaders,
an alliance of the Venetians
and the Franks, as
they're called--
basically various Western
European groups--
took Constantinople.
How they took Constantinople;
why they didn't go to
Jerusalem, which was the
original plan; how they took a
Christian city instead of the
Muslim-held city of Jerusalem
is a topic for the
next semester.
But that is the first
time that the walls
were breached by force.
There are very successful
sneak attacks.
So for example, in our period,
the emperor Justinian II had
been deposed and had his
nose and tongue slit.
This form of mutilation
was to prevent him
from coming back again.
It was considered more humane
to mutilate someone than to
kill them, but the
mutilation was
considered to be disabling.
You can't have an emperor whose
nose is basically gone.
But they were wrong about him.
In fact, he came back with a
force of people from-- if you
look at that third map--
Chersonesos, the Crimean
peninsula that's sticking out
into the Black Sea.
They besieged the city, and he
and some followers snuck in at
a point where one of the
aqueducts met the wall.
There was a little sort
of space to sneak in.
And they managed to, by a
surprise attack and by
acclamation of the noseless
Emperor Justinian, win the
city for themselves.
So this is an example of a
successful siege, but not a
flat-out open assault.
Justinian had a reign of terror
for another six or
seven years after 705, the
date of the siege.
He was a very angry man.
And he got his revenge on as
many people as possible,
including people who had
nothing to do with his
mutilation.
And he was eventually killed.
An awful lot of these emperors
died violent deaths.
They're they're tough guys, but
it's a fairly tough time.
So Persian/Avar/Slav siege of
626, the seeming victory of
Heraclius over these forces, and
then its virtual undoing
by the Islamic conquests of much
of the Byzantine Empire.
Remember, the conquest of
Syria in the 630s, the
capitulation of Alexandria
in 642?
We looked at all of these from
the Muslim side very recently.
Meanwhile, while Byzantine was
busy losing much of its empire
in the East, the Slavs were
permanently settling in the
Balkans and in Greece.
And they were now joined
by another
invading people, the Bulgars.
The Bulgars--
that is, the people who
live in Bulgaria now--
are a Slavic people.
But the original Bulgars were
a more Turkic people who
formed a kind of what
was called khanate--
that is, a state ruled by a
military leader, a khan.
But here again, who are the
Bulgars ethnically?
How many of them have
Slavic followers?
It's both very controversial--
that is, the modern Bulgarians
hate the notion of being
thought of as ancestrally Turks,
so what I'm saying is
heresy in some quarters.
But these ethnic designations
are not as meaningful, or at
least as stable, as we often
tend to think they are.
The Bulgars would intermarry
with the Slavs. And they would
eventually convert
to Orthodoxy.
But they would be a problem for
Byzantium from about 700
until just after 1000.
So how was this empire
rebuilt?
It was rebuilt on the basis
of control over
the Balkans and Anatolia.
It was also rebuilt
on the basis of
reorganization of the army.
Obviously, the position of
Constantinople and its walls
is not enough to assure victory
in battle once you get
away from Constantinople.
There's certain kinds of
weapons that they had.
There's this mysterious one that
I mentioned before called
"Greek fire", which is certainly
part of the victory
of 674, the naval battle
against the Caliphs.
It's a some sort of burning
substance that explodes on
impact and is useful
to burn ships.
But the army is reorganized.
And this is one of the key
aspects of this period of
contraction and of
reconstruction, of crisis and
of recovery.
And we'll come to that
in a moment.
During this era of crisis, it
should not be thought that
they didn't have time for
religious controversies.
In the seventh century, the big
controversies continued to
be those related to the natures
of Christ. Even though
the territories that were
Monophysite had been taken by
Islam, or at least the most
Monophsite territories, there
still are controversies trying
to compromise this question of
does Christ have one or two
natures, how, if he has two
natures, are these
two related?
Rather than saying he has two
natures, the emperors proposed
two possible solutions.
Christ is both God and human,
but he's got one energy,
Mono-energism.
Well maybe he's both God and
man, but he's got one will,
Monothelitism.
The emperors in the seventh
century tried to impose
Monothelitism, or tried to
impose Monotheletism and then
prohibit discussion, or just
prohibit discussion about it.
The Papacy was adamant
in upholding the two
natures, one person.
And this eventually won.
But a huge amount of energy
was expended in this
controversy.
And in the eighth and early
ninth centuries, we then have
Iconoclasm, which as we've
spoken about, is the
prohibition on the
worship of icons.
Icons, again, are a form of
religious art that remains
characteristic of the
Eastern Church.
And the difference between
icons and other forms of
religious art is that
they're portable.
You can carry them around.
And they are non-narrative.
They don't tell a story.
So an icon doesn't have a
depiction of the Annunciation
or a depiction of events.
They don't come in series,
showing, for example, the life
of a saint or the life
of the Virgin.
They are a single depiction.
The iconoclasts were
worried about this
as a form of idolatry.
We're not sure where this
concern came from.
There is no evidence that it
comes directly as a reaction
to Islamic or Jewish criticism,
although of course
Islam and Judaism patrol the
frontier against idol worship
or image worship much more
severely than does
Christianity.
It does seem to be a reaction
to the crisis.
It does seem to be part of an
effort to remake Byzantium
into what I guess now would be
called a leaner, more adroit,
responsive, or that obnoxious
business word, now, "robust",
a robust response to the crisis
imposed by Islam.
Certainly it has something
to do with that.
But what it really shows
us is the role of
the emperor in religion.
The role of the secular ruler
in the West is not as
extensive, even as we will see
soon under Charlemagne.
Remember Chlothar and his
attempts to dictate religious
doctrine to Gregory of Tours,
who, scared though he is of
Chlothar, basically
laughs at him?
That shows a ruler who does not
really have control, at
least over the doctrine of his
church, even if he's got a lot
of control over the wealth
of the Church.
The Western tradition would tend
to separate out ruler of
the state and ruler
of doctrine.
The East less so.
This is partly just the
way the Patriarch of
Constantinople is situated.
He's right next to the palace of
the emperor, and so can be
intimidated by the emperor.
It is in the tradition of the
Orthodox Church that there is
less resistance to state
authority on the part of the
Church, more collaboration with
state authority, and less
controversy.
This is the way it's normally
taught, is that the emperor
functions kind of like the Pope
in the West. The emperor
defines doctrine.
But actually, however much
deference is paid to the
emperor, and however much the
emperor tries to define
doctrine, the real story,
certainly for our period, is
of the lack of success
of the emperors.
The emperors constantly come
down on the wrong side or come
up with compromises or doctrines
that don't work.
They propose what in a sense
seems like a rational
compromise over Monophysitism,
but theology
doesn't work that way.
Just because you come up with
a compromise doesn't mean
everybody's going
to accept it.
In fact, often compromises mean
that nobody accepts it.
It's not like a negotiation
over political trade-offs.
This is a theological truth.
So the emperors then
create their
own theological position.
Iconoclasm is very much
an imperial demand.
And for a time, they succeed
in imposing it.
They succeed in imposing it
for 120 years, off and on.
Sometimes there will be an
emperor who is a moderate
iconoclast, but lets the
icons come back.
Sometimes there's an emperor's
who's a moderate iconodule or
iconophile.
But the emperors, even in the
East, even where the emperor
is so heavily involved in
religion, have limitations on
their ability to define
doctrine.
Nevertheless, clearly, they are
the leaders of a besieged
people who sees itself both as
Christians against pagans or
Muslims, or at least infidels,
and as a religious people and
as a secular population.
So with all of these crises,
sieges, invaders, how did the
Empire survive?
We can see some of the plans
of the emperors.
One plan was simply to get out
of Constantinople and rebuild
a kind of Western empire based
in the West. So Constans II--
you'll remember I
said in 661--
moved his capital to
Syracuse in Sicily.
This was intended in part to
guard the possessions in Italy
and in part to hold
onto North Africa.
Constans was murdered
in his bath in 668.
The capitol was moved back to
Constantinople, and within
thirty years, all of
North Africa had
been lost to the Arabs.
And you start to get the shape
of the Empire to resemble that
of the map that we looked
at last, that of 1000, a
Balkan/Anatolian empire.
Constans is very important,
though, even though his plans
come to naught.
Because it seems to be
under his reign--
not exclusively, but very
much forwarded by him--
that two things develop
that are crucial
for Byzantine success.
One is the practice of deporting
whole peoples and
settling them on new lands.
This extremely brutal
practice--
you can imagine what it's
like at any time.
Of course, this is practiced
a considerable amount, for
example, in the former Soviet
Union, where you just tell
people to get up and you're
going to move
them 2,000 miles away.
They're going to have better
opportunities there or whatever.
But in the meantime, some of
them are going to starve.
Many of them are going
to fall to disease.
This is a brutal kind of
transporting of peoples,
manipulation of peoples from
one area to another.
The peoples manipulated in this
case were often Slavic
prisoners or groups taken over
as the Empire expanded, and
often sent to Anatolia to
resettle lands that had been
deserted in the Arab invasions
and now seized
back from the Arabs.
This policy, against what one
might expect, actually seems
to work, to the extent that it
does increase the population
of these key frontier regions
in the East with militarized
forces transported
from the Balkans.
Related to this is the
organization of the army by
locality instead of as a mobile
and very large force.
And this is related to the
problems of paying the army.
As far back as the beginning of
the course, we said that a
lot of imperial policy, just
as it's true of the state
today, is dictated by the
need to pay for troops.
The most expensive thing that
most states, including the
United States, does is maintain
an army and use it.
For a number of reasons, this is
just a very, very expensive
thing, and clearly a necessary
thing, something that is not
easy to dispense with.
Diocletian's reforms indeed, the
whole restructuring of the
Empire in the late third century
and early fourth
century was oriented
around increasing
the size of the army--
basically, doubling it--
and figuring out a tax
regime to pay for it.
This no longer works in the
post-Justinianic world, in the
crucial era here and beyond.
Because the state does
not have enough
money to pay these.
It does not have a tax base.
It cannot raise the money for a
large army to operate in the
Balkans and to oppose the Arabs
without the tax revenues
from its richest province,
Egypt, and from other very
wealthy and important provinces
such as Syria.
How, then is, it going to
have an army at all?
To some extent, it is going to
do this by creating local
armies paid for not so much
money as by kind--
that is to say, grain, leather,
weapons, and things
manufactured locally, harvested
locally, and that
stay locally.
This is the so-called
theme system.
And Wickham doesn't talk too
much about it because
historians are in the process
of drawing back from this.
This is one of those frustrating
things about
progress in history.
A lot of progress in history
is the dismantling of
convenient kinds of formulae.
So when I started teaching
this, the themes were
everything.
I would have spent sixty
percent of this lecture
talking about the theme
situation and how it saved the
Byzantine Empire.
The themes look like soldiers
who are peasants.
In other words, to some extent
the deal that's offered to
these troops is, we will give
you land, and we will allow
you to keep most of what you
produce, rather than paying it
as tribute to a landlord.
But you've got to be willing
to fight for it.
You've got to owe military
service.
You've got to be ready
for military service.
And indeed, the land was often
in places that were dangerous,
places that were liable
to invasion.
This is to some extent true,
but it's a little less of a
kind of Homestead Act deal.
If you look at the map number
three, the year 1000--
see the things that are in
italic capitals like Opsikion,
Armeniakon, Anatolikon?
These are themes.
They are large agglomerations
of provinces.
They are what might be called
"military provinces".
And as such, they combine
civilian and military rule.
The Empire is now divided
into military provinces.
Nothing terribly new about that,
even though the shape
and the size is different.
What's new is that, rather than
the revenue being raised
in cash from taxes paid all
over the Empire, and then
transported to Constantinople,
and then disbursed to
mercenaries or to standing
armies, the money that's
raised in the Opsikion tends
to stay in the Opsikion.
These provinces tend to be
responsible for their soldiers
and for paying their soldiers.
The state is very heavily
involved.
This is not a militia in the
sense of a bunch of trusty
guys getting their muskets
or whatever they
used off the wall.
This is not Paul Revere,
or something like that.
But it is an army that is closer
to the population and
in which the male population
is largely involved in the
military forces.
Another word that I don't
particularly care for in its
modern use" "stakeholder".
They're stakeholders in the
sense that it makes a big
difference to them.
They're not just civilians
in this case.
This is, then, a militarization
of society.
It is a new way of paying for
things in an economy that is
less productive of revenues, at
least of taxable revenues.
And it is, above all, whatever
its exact nature, an
innovation that works.
The basis for this expansion
that takes place after 843,
and indeed for the stabilization
of the frontiers
that proceeds it is a
reorganization of the army,
the theme system, a
reorganization of revenues,
and a kind of strategic plan to
define the Byzantine Empire
in a way that is ultimately
feasible and defensible.
From 717 to 843, the Empire
recovers slowly.
We choose 843 because that's
the end of the iconoclast
controversy.
The Empire continued to have
to fight on both fronts
against the Arabs
and the Bulgars.
But it had a viable state, a
viable military structure, and
some capable emperors.
After 843, we see a real
rebirth and expansion.
From 843 to 1000, the Empire
grew by about one third.
Even though that map, the third
one, for the year 1000,
doesn't seem very imposing, if
you take a look at it, you'll
see that its frontiers with
Islam are much more secure
than they have been before.
The Empire extends eastward as
far as Armenia, for a long
time a frontier province, and it
is on the borders of Syria.
It has the great city
of Antioch again.
It has all of Anatolia.
It has the islands of Cyprus
and Crete, which had been
occupied by Islamic
forces for years.
It has control over all of
modern Greece and has held
onto some possessions
in Italy.
This is an era of great
splendor, ceremony, the
restoration of education,
and of learning.
The Bulgars will be defeated
definitively by 1019.
Constantinople would be besieged
by them twice.
You can't have a century without
a couple of sieges of
Constantinople.
The Abbasids are defeated, and
the expansion of the Byzantine
Empire, as you see, as far south
as modern Lebanon and as
far east as modern Armenia--
well, historic Armenia.
This is a society that is still
involved in religious
controversy.
This is--
in the ninth century with the
Carolingians, there would be a
controversy over the holy ghost
in relation to the son
and the father, the so-called
"filioque controversy".
But it is a world of great
energy: artistic, cultural,
and actually religious.
Perhaps the most lasting and
significant accomplishment of
this era is the conversion of
the Slavs and the conversion
of much of Eastern Europe--
conversion to what would become
the Orthodox as opposed
to Catholic form of
Christianity.
The official split between the
Orthodox world and the
Catholic world won't
occur until 1054.
In 1054, the Patriarch of
Constantinople excommunicated
the Pope and the Pope
excommunicated the Patriarch
of Constantinople.
I think they've taken it back,
but obviously the churches are
not joined.
They have differences already,
however, that are visible in
the ninth and tenth centuries.
Orthodoxy is less politically
centralized.
If, as we just said, it's very
dependent on the ruler, if the
ruler is different, then
the Church has a
sort of national identity.
Thus, there is no Pope in
the Orthodox Church.
The Bulgarian Orthodox, Greek
Orthodox, Russian Orthodox
essentially form a confederation
under their own
patriarchs.
They also have their
own languages.
The Bible could be translated
into vernacular, and the
liturgy was not in one
language necessarily.
So Slavonic, the ancestor of
modern Slavic languages, would
be instituted as the
liturgy in many of
these converted places.
Priests are allowed to marry
in the Orthodox Church.
There were just, sort of,
questions of style.
For example, the Orthodox
Church, even when it has
admitted icons back, does not
have statues, does not have
three-dimensional statues,
whereas the Catholic world, of
course, does.
Think of Notre Dame of Paris and
its sculptural program or
Chartres or the Michelangelo and
Bernini sacred sculptures.
This is partly because, while
icons are OK because they're
two-dimensional, statues were
thought of as being too much
like the idols denounced
again and
again by the Old Testament.
Greek Orthodox priests
have beards;
Catholic priests don't.
They're different styles
of worship.
In Orthodox churches, you stand;
there aren't seats.
Some of this is style.
Some of this is theology.
Some of this is just culture.
But of course, this would be
in the ninth century and
remain a very strong
difference.
So you can see that those
countries converted by the
Catholics have a Latin liturgy
and a Western or Latin or
Roman orientation.
Poland is Catholic.
Russia, on the other hand,
would be converted to
Byzantine Christianity.
The division is clear and
unfortunately tragic in the
former Yugoslavia.
Serbian and Croatian are almost
the same language.
Serbian is written in Cyrillic,
Croatian in Roman.
The Croatians are Catholics;
the Serbians are Orthodox.
Their hatred for each other,
and then of course the
complication of having an
Islamic people, the Bosnians,
was the background to the tragic
Yugoslav Civil War of
the early 1990s.
So these religious boundaries,
which sort of correspond to
ethnic boundaries--
even though those ethnic
definitions are themselves
invented, to some extent--
these religious boundaries
continue to be very meaningful
and to define culture
in Europe.
The conversion of this world
is, then, one of the most
important events of the
renascent Byzantine Empire.
The coronation of the king of
Russia, the king of Kievan
Russia, in 989 at Cherson on
the Crimean Peninsula,
presided over by emissaries of
the Byzantine Emperor is one
symbol of this.
The conversion of the Bulgars.
The conversion of many of the
peoples of the Balkans.
And indeed, there is a kind
of aftermath of Byzantine
civilization.
The closest heir to the Eastern
Roman Empire is the
Russian Empire.
The look of Orthodox worship,
the look of the Russian
churches, the icons, the gold,
the imperial style is very
closely related,
self-consciously, to the model
established by the Byzantine
emperors.
Indeed, in the sixteenth
century, after the fall of
Constantinople, Russian monks
claimed that there had been
three Romes.
The Rome of the West, the
original one, had fallen in
the fifth century; the great
Eastern Rome, that of
Constantinople, had fallen in
the fifteenth; and the third
Rome was Moscow.
I don't think that outside of
the Russian orbit most people
think of Moscow as the third
Rome for a number of reasons,
whatever its power and its
own form of splendor.
But the degree to which Russia
in its history is the heir to
the world that we have briefly
described cannot be denied,
even if to some extent it is a
self-formed or self-conscious
manifestation.
Moving from Byzantium, on
Wednesday, we will come back
to friendly old Francia and
discuss the rise and
efflorescence of the
Carolingians.
Thanks.
