Download The Byzantine Empire and Italy

BYZANTIUM AFTER BYZANTIUM
COMENIUS MULTILATERAL PROJECT (2008-2010)
“Virgil Madgearu” High School (coordinator) Iasi, Romania
“Stenio” High School (partner) Termini Imerese, Italy
“Fevzi Cakmak” High School (partner) Adiyaman, Turkey
Realized with financial support of “Socrates Comenius Programme"
THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE AND ITALY
“Byzantine Empire” is the name taken by the Eastern Roman Empire after the split of the Roman
Empire. Historians do not agree upon the date when the term Roman is to be replaced by “
Byzantine”. Some historians date the beginning of the Byzantine Empire to AD 330
(
foundation of Constantinople by Constantine I ),others to AD 395 ( death of Theodosius I) , others to
AD 476 ( fall of the Western Roman Empire), others to AD 565 ( death of Justinian I), others to AD
610 ( accession to the throne of Heraclius I ).
It is sure , however, that the Byzantines called themselves Rhomaioi, i.e. “ Romans” in the Greek
language, and they called their state Basileia Rhomaion, i.e.“ the Romans’ kingdom”.
In theory the Eastern and Western Roman Empire was a single unit, but actually it was made up of
two worlds that had never merged: the Greek- Hellenistic one and the Latin one.
In time the differences between the two parts of the empire became so deep that Diocletian
separated the administration of the East from the one of the West by means of the tetrarchy.
Subsequently Constantine, after defeating the Roman emperor Licinius, concentrated the imperial
power in his hands and transferred the capital city to Byzantium, the Nova Roma, which, on his
death, was named Constantinople. The transfer of the capital city was a very important event which
shifted the axis of the Roman world and accentuated the division of the empire.
Constantine made many reforms, the most
important of which were: the institution of
the great prefectures; the introduction of
the hereditary principle in the succession to
the throne; the ordering of the imperial
bureaucracy; the acknowledgement of the
freedom of worship by the Edict of tolerance
in 313.
As
regards
religion,Constantine
was
ambiguous; in fact he maintained the office
of Pontifex Maximus of the pagan religion
but he tried to bring together all the
religions of the empire.
It was arranged for the main religious feasts
of the Christianity and of the solar religion to
coincide, so the birthday of the Sun and of
the god Mithra, the 25th of December,
became also Jesus’s birthday.
In the economic field Constantine abolished the
silver coin and made the golden coin minted, which
was called solidus (from which the Italian word
soldo originated).
The reforms made by Constantine lasted up to the
end of the Western Empire and survived in the
Eastern Empire, which was often upset by invasions,
but the Byzantines assimilated the various ethnic
groups, acculturized the foreign élites in the
political field, ensuring the turnover of the ruling
class. The multi-ethnicity of the ruling class was one
of the features of the millenary history of the
Byzantine empire, begun in the times of the
barbarian invasions. The barbarian peoples were
soon evangelized and accepted the Arian
interpretation of Christianity.
On Constantine’s death the war of succession
between his children started again; afterwards, for
about fifty years, there were periods when only one
emperor reigned and periods in which two
emperors reigned.
By that time the empire was divided into two stumps (pieces), each directed to a different fortune: the West,
poor, in decline, near the end and the rich East with a lot of big cities with a long future.
The Byzantine Empire, instead of fighting the peoples pressing on the borders, diverted them to the
West.Towards the end of the 4th century the pressure of the Huns pushed westwards the peoples living
north of the Black Sea, the Ostrogoths and the Visigoths.
The Ostrogoths were subdued, while, in 376, the Visigoths obtained from the Emperor Valens to cross the
Danube and were welcomed as federates, so they maintained their autonomy and their king, but they
undertook to defend the empire.
But very soon the Visigoths rebelled and in Adrianople they defeated the troops of Valens, who died in
battle.
The general Theodosius succeeded Valens, first in the Eastern part and later, after Gratian’s death, in all the
empire. Theodosius had the support of the Christian Catholics and, in 392, by the Edict of Constantinople ,
he proclaimed the Christian Catholic religion State religion, prohibiting the other religions.
On his death, in 395, the empire was definitively divided between his sons Arcadius ( the Eastern Empire)
and Honorius (the Western Empire).
In Ravenna, capital city of the Western Empire, lived also the Roman empress Galla Placidia who took part in
many intrigues at Honorius’s court. On Honorius’s death the empire passed to her, who was regent for her
son Valentinian III. On her death, in 450, she was buried in the famous mausoleum, an outstanding
monument of Byzantine architecture, which contains some of the finest examples of early Byzantine
mosaics.
In 476 Odoacer deposed Romulus Augustus and asked the Emperor
Zeno to govern Italy as a “patrician”. Very soon, however, Zeno
pushed the Ostrogoths against the West, convincing Theodoric to
attack Odoacer in the hope of regaining the full control of the Italian
peninsula.
From the Byzantine Emperor Zeno, Theodoric got the title of king
but only towards the Germans, while towards the Italic people he
exercised power on behalf of the emperor.
In the Italian peninsula Theodoric set up a real kingdom, lasted from
493 to 526 and based on the principle of the separation and
peaceful coexistence between the Latin component and the
Germanic one. He concentrated a great power in his person and in
his court. The duties were divided: he entrusted the Goths with the
military offices, the Latins with the civil ones.
Theodoric surrounded himself with the greatest Latin intellectuals,
like Cassiodorus and Severinus Boethius. The cooperation with the
Byzantine sovereigns broke down on the religious question.
In fact the Eastern emperor had launched a new battle against the
Arians. Theodoric, fearing that the Pope and the court of
Constantinople wanted to take advantage of this fight in order to
limit the power of the Ostrogoths in Italy, made the Pope
imprisoned and the intellectuals executed (among them Boethius
and Cassiodorus).
After Theodoric’s death the emperor Justinian sent to the West the
general Belisarius, who, by the
Greek-Gothic war, succeeded in reconquering all the territories occupied
by the Ostrogoths, included Ravenna, which became the capital city of
the Byzantine imperial government in Italy. It was a period of splendour,
testified by the buildings and the mosaics which have kept up to the
present time.
Around 525 Justinian married Theodora, an ex mime (actress) in a circus
in Constantinople and a woman of great beauty and extraordinary
intelligence, who was crowned empress (augusta) and exercised a
considerable influence in political affairs.
The greatest deed of Justinian was the rearrangement of the laws. He
aimed at the unification of the Roman law in all the empire so that every
subject could feel protected. He entrusted the task to a committee of
experts who reread and compared thousands of manuscripts and at last
issued the Corpus iuris civilis ( Body of civil law), which is the foundation
of any legislation up to now.
The Corpus iuris civilis is divided into three sections: the Codex
Justinianeus or Code of Justinian, a body of laws enacted since emperor
Hadrian’s times; the Digest or Pandects ,
another body of laws ( iura); and the Novellae Constitutiones, which
grouped all the constitutions of Justinian, promulgated after the issuing
of the Code. A law handbook called “Istitutiones” was also published.
The Corpus iuris was sent to Ravenna along with the
Pragmatica Sanctio (Pragmatic sanction), with the intention of
organising the province. The military power, entrusted to the
patrician ( later exarch) was separated from the civil and the
judicial power, entrusted to the Prefect of the praetorium, but
actually all powers were concentrated in the Emperor’s hands.
On the other hand the temporal power of the bishops grew:
they were entrusted with the protectorship of the people
(taken away from the defensor plebis or defender of the
plebs), the care of buildings and prisons, the supervision over
provincial and municipal magistrates, while it was confirmed
their right of arbitration (umpirage) for laymen (laics) and the
ordinary civil jurisdiction over monks and clergy ( Ecclesiastical
court).
Justinian’s religious policy was based on the conviction that
the unity of the Empire presupposed the unity of faith, so he
had to fight both against the Roman Church and against the
Monophysites supported by Theodora.
The social and economic restoration made by Justinian annulled all the previous provisions.
By virtue of this restoration the manorial economy spread all over Italy. The villas of large landowners
became the vital centres of the Italian history: a part of the estates ( pars dominica or landlord’s part)
was cultivated thanks to the slaves’ work and to the corvées (forced labour) of the farmers, another
part ( tributary or bailiff’s lands) was assigned to farmers bound to the glebe.
In the centre of the vast dominion ( villa, curtis or court) it was carried out the exchange of the
products needed to the existence of everyone who lived inside it. Therefore the economic power of the
laical and ecclesiastical aristocracy was strengthened as these classes acquired a more important
political position ( greater than the one they had before). The recovery of Italy was temporary
(ephemeral) as new barbarians were coming to the borders. After Justinian’s death, in 565, many
territories were lost. In 568 the Lombards of Alboin conquered most of Northern Italy. In the following
years the Slavs occupied a large part of the Balkans, the Visigoths drove the Byzantines out of Southern
Spain and the Sasanian Persians attacked the empire many times. The Emperor Heraclius succeeded in
defeating the Sasanians in Nineveh in 627 and signed the peace treaty but the war weakened the
Byzantines. In fact they were defeated by the Arabs, who controlled Syria and the East and between
674 and 678 besieged Constantinople. The siege was not successful and a thirty-year truce was signed
with the Arab caliphate. Heraclius hellenized the Empire, replacing Latin with Greek as the official
language and taking the title of basileus instead of the Latin term augustus.
The Byzantines recovered some territories but in the West
they did not succeed to stop the Lombards. The Byzantines
kept the largest islands (Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica),the
Roman region administered by the Pope, Apulia, Calabria
and the exarchate of Ravenna.
For Italy this was a period of decline and poverty during
which the bishops gained a different power, in fact they
were acknowledged not only as heads of the ecclesiastical
administration, but also of the civil administration.
At the beginning of the 7th century the Catholic
Theodolinda persuaded the Lombard King Agilulf to be
converted to Catholicism, thus contributing to improve the
cohabitation between Lombards and Latins. The Lombards
tried to drive the Byzantines out of Italy in the period when
the Emperor Leo III the Isaurian wanted to show his
supremacy also in the religious field, in fact he engaged in
the battle against the sacred images ( Iconoclasm). The
Lombard King Liudprand declared war to the Byzantines
and invaded the Roman Duchy which belonged to the
Byzantines by right. The Pope succeeded in convincing
Liudprand to retreat so he got the Sutri Castle as a gift ( this
was the first official donation to the Church).
Afterwards the Pope, as he could no more rely upon the
protection from Byzantium, called the Franks for help.
Pepin descended on Italy twice, defeated the Lombards,
took some territories from them and gave them to the
Pope. Latium, Romagna with Ravenna, the Pentapolis, the
Sutri Castle were the basis of the Pope’s temporal power,
as he became sovereign over those lands.
Subsequently the Franks and the Lombards became
reconciled with each other and the daughter of the
Lombard king Desiderius became Charlemagne’s bride.
About fifteen years later Desiderius reconquered
Romagna but once again the Pope called the Franks for
help. The Franks, led by Charlemagne, descended on Italy
and defeated the Lombards definitively.
Charlemagne was a great military leader, he fought
victoriously against the Saxons, the Bavarians and the
Arabs, driving them back to the Pyrenees. Later he
profited from the fact that a woman, Irene, was empress
and made himself crowned emperor in St.Peter’s in Rome
on Christmas Day 800
The Holy Western Roman Empire began, but the emperor who
succeeded Irene did not accept the fact and declared war. At
last they came to a compromise: the Byzantine emperor
acknowledged Charlemagne as a “ brother emperor”, in
exchange for territorial concessions. Therefore Venice, Istria and
Dalmatia went back to the Byzantine empire. The centre of the
empire was no more Rome but Aachen. Charles succeeded in
restoring the central power, which was based on three main
points: the extension of vassalage relations, the assignment of
the territory control to imperial officials, the Earls, and , in the
borderlands, the Marquises, with the function of managing the
sovereign’s possessions and administering justice; the control of
periphery by the missi dominici.
Every year the laical and ecclesiastical dignitaries were called to
a solemn audience in Aachen, during which the Capitularies
(documents equal to laws) were issued. Charles took care of the
clergy’s education, improved the level of schools and promoted
the study of Latin, the language that all cultured men had to
learn.
On Charles’s death (814) the civil wars among his heirs led to the
breaking up of the empire and to the affirmation of the Pope’s
power.
Between the 9th and the 10th century Europe underwent new
invasions by Hungarians, Arabs and Vikings. The Hungarians
were definitively defeated by the Emperor Otto I in 955.
In 827 the Arabs started the conquest of Sicily which ended at
the beginning of the 10th century with the expulsion of the
Byzantines.
The Vikings, called “Normans” by the Franks, occupied some
French territories and, subsequently, they obtained the Duchy of
Normandy, from which, in the 11th century they left to conquer
Great Britain and Southern Italy.
The Byzantine empire recovered with the Macedonian emperors
between the end of the 9th century and the beginning of the
11th , when it resumed control of the Adriatic Sea, part of Italy
and many territories which were in the Bulgarians’ hands. The
Byzantine armies had the support of the Pisans and the
Genoeses in the struggle against the Saracens, to whom they
took Sardinia in 1022.
On Basil III’ s death the empire went through a
serious political crisis; the religious questions
started again and there was the final break with
the Church of Rome ( the Byzantine Schism or the
Great Schism in 1054). The internal crisis
weakened the Byzantines who lost the coastal
area of Dalmatia, the islands of the Adriatic Sea,
occupied by the Venetians, and Southern Italy,
occupied by the Normans who were
acknowledged as vassals by Pope Leo IX. In fact he
gave Robert of Altavilla ( called “ the guiscardo”,
that is “ the astute” ), the title of Duke of Calabria
and Apulia.
Subsequently, in 1130, Roger II of Altavilla unified
all the possessions conquered and, to celebrate
his power, he had some buildings erected with a
lot of golden mosaics
The most important dates in the economic and political history
of the empire in the second half of the 11th century were two.
The first was 1071, year when the Battle of Mantzikert took
place and the Byzantine emperor Roman IV Diogenes was taken
prisoner by the Turks. The second was 1082 when the emperor
Alexius I Comnenus, a year after a military coup d’état, granted
the first commercial privileges to Venice in exchange for the help
of its fleet. This event marked the beginning of the decline of
Byzantium’s economic and commercial supremacy over the
West and the beginning of the economic growth of the maritime
republics.
The privileges granted to Venice were eight. The most important
were the fifth and the seventh. The fifth provided for the
establishment of a permanent merchants’ colony in
Constantinople, on the Golden Horn, to whom annuities and
real estates were awarded. Moreover the merchants had the
right to go into and out of the quarter (area) with no control.
The seventh privilege granted the Venetians the right to buy and
sell every kind of goods in all the regions of the empire with
exemption from any duties, taxes or interests owing to the
Imperial Treasury, both in Constantinople and in any other
Byzantine market.
Alexius Comnenus, with the Venetians’ help,
succeeded in recovering some territories but the
Turkish Seljuqs continued to threaten the
Byzantine Empire. Once again the Emperor Alexius
Comnenus turned to the West and Pope Urban II
publicly announced the first crusade.
The crusades were a sort of world war which
lasted two centuries. At the beginning the
crusaders, under the command of the great
French, Norman and Italian feudatories, along with
the most famous monastic and chivalrous orders,
fought to free Jerusalem, but the real aim was to
take possession of the Byzantine Empire. This was
evident during the fourth crusade, in 1204, when
the crusaders first occupied Zara and then they
sacked Constantinople.
The Venetians took away the four wonderful
bronze horses which adorn the façade of St. Mark’s
Basilica.
It was created the Latin Eastern Empire and the crown fell to Baldwin of Flanders, but the
real winner was Venice which obtained favourable conditions for its merchants. The
people, however, refused obedience to the Westerners who were Catholics and this
contributed to the redemption of the Byzantines.
In 1261 Michael Palaeologus, with the help of Genoeses and Pisans, reconquered
Constantinople, driving the Venetians out of the city and putting an end to the Latin
Eastern Empire. For some time the empire survived as Seljuqs, Tartars and Persians were
too divided to be able to attack, but in the end the Ottoman Turks invaded some
possessions. The empire asked for help to the West but the European states imposed as a
condition the reunification of the Catholic church and the Orthodox one. Therefore
Michael acknowledged the supremacy of Pope Gregory X on the Eastern Church,
provided that the Pope prevented the Latins from helping Charles of Anjou, who had
allied with Venice, Bulgarians and Serbs. But the religious union was unsuccessful and
Charles of Anjou restarted the offensive, which was interrupted by the break of the war
of Vespers (1282).
This revolt was supported by Michael VIII and ended with the defeat of the Angevins in
Sicily and the beginning of Peter of Aragon’s kingdom. In the meanwhile the Turks moved
from Asia to Europe, occupying the peninsula of Gallipoli (1354).
Among the Westerners only Amadeus VI of Savoy
(“ the Green Earl”) moved and succeeded in taking
Gallipoli from the Turks. The other European
countries did nothing to stop the advance of the
Turks and, when the Ottoman sultan Bayezid
besieged Constantinople, the city was defended
only by Genoeses and Venetians.
The successes of the Turks were temporarily
stopped by the invasion of Front Asia by the
Tartars, led by Tamburlaine, who defeated Bayezid
in Ankara in 1402 .
The Byzantines, helped by the Genoeses only, tried
to withstand the other sieges.
On the death of the Ottoman sultan Murad ,
Mohammed II gathered a large army and besieged
Constantinople, which was conquered on the 29th
May 1453, while the last Emperor Constantine XI
fell in battle.
The fall of Constantinople had very important
political and economic consequences. In fact
France, Spain, Portugal, England and Venice
itself sought other routes for the spices and
for the other eastern products as the Turks
prevented them from getting them directly
through the caravan routes of Asia.
The Byzantine Empire played an important
role in the preservation of the old Greek
manuscripts and of the classical culture. The
Byzantine cultural tradition did not die away in
1453; the Byzantine scholars who came to
Italy in the 15th century exerted a strong
influence on the Italian Renaissance; the
recovery of the classics was transmitted to a
refined public of scholars so that the Byzantine
culture survived the disintegration of the
Empire.