Writer Sergey Vlasov tells about why this event of 555 years ago is important for modern Russia.
Turban and tiara
If we had been in the city on the eve of the Turkish assault, we would have found the defenders of the doomed Constantinople engaged in a rather strange occupation. They discussed the validity of the slogan "Better a turban than a papal tiara" until they were hoarse. This catchphrase, which can be heard in modern Russia, was first uttered by the Byzantine Luke Notaras, whose powers in 1453 roughly corresponded to the prime minister. In addition, he was an admiral and a Byzantine patriot.
As sometimes happens with patriots, Notaras stole from the treasury the money that the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI allocated for the repair of defensive walls. Later, when the Turkish Sultan Mehmed II entered the city through these very unrepaired walls, the admiral presented gold to him. He asked only one thing: to save his life big family. The Sultan accepted the money, and the admiral's family was executed in front of him. The latter was beheaded by Notaras himself.
- Did the West attempt to help Byzantium?
Yes. The defense of the city was commanded by the Genoese Giovanni Giustiniani Longo. His detachment, consisting of only 300 people, was the most combat-ready part of the defenders. Artillery was led by the German Johann Grant. By the way, the Byzantines could get into service the luminary of the then artillery - the Hungarian engineer Urban. But there was no money in the imperial treasury for the construction of his supergun. Then, offended, the Hungarian went to Mehmed II. The cannon, which fired stone cannonballs weighing 400 kilograms, was cast and became one of the reasons for the fall of Constantinople.
lazy romans
- Why did the history of Byzantium end in this way?
- The Byzantines themselves are primarily to blame for this. The empire was a country organically incapable of modernization. For example, slavery in Byzantium, which they tried to limit since the time of the first Christian emperor Constantine the Great in the 4th century, was completely abolished only in the 13th. This was done by the western barbarian crusaders who captured the city in 1204.
Many government positions in the empire were occupied by foreigners, they also took over trade. The reason, of course, was not that the insidious Catholic West was systematically destroying the economy of Orthodox Byzantium.
One of the most famous emperors, Alexei Komnenos, at the beginning of his career, tried to appoint compatriots to responsible government posts. But things were not going well: the Romans, accustomed to sybaritizing, rarely woke up before 9 am, they got down to business closer to noon ... But the nimble Italians, whom the emperor soon began to hire, began their working day at dawn.
- But from this the empire did not become less great.
- The greatness of empires is often inversely proportional to the happiness of its subjects. Emperor Justinian decided to restore the Roman Empire from Gibraltar to the Euphrates. His commanders (he himself did not take anything sharper than a fork) fought in Italy, Spain, Africa ... Rome alone was taken by storm 5 times! So what? After 30 years of glorious wars and high-profile victories, the empire was left with nothing. The economy was undermined, the treasury was empty, the best citizens died. But the conquered territories still had to be left ...
- What lessons can Russia draw from the Byzantine experience?
- Scientists name 6 reasons for the collapse of the greatest empire:
Excessively bloated and corrupt bureaucracy.
A striking stratification of society into the poor and the rich.
The impossibility for ordinary citizens to achieve justice in court.
Neglect and underfunding of the army and navy.
The indifferent attitude of the capital towards the province that feeds it.
The merging of spiritual and secular power, their unification in the person of the emperor.
How much they correspond to the current Russian realities, let everyone decide for himself.
7 things that a modern person needs to understand about the history of Byzantium: why the country of Byzantium did not exist, what the Byzantines thought about themselves, what language they wrote in, why they were disliked in the West and how their story ended
Prepared by Arkady Avdokhin, Varvara Zharkaya, Lev Lukhovitsky, Alena Chepel
1.
A country called Byzantium never existed
2.
The Byzantines didn't know they weren't Romans
3.
Byzantium was born when Antiquity adopted Christianity
4.
In Byzantium they spoke one language, but wrote in another
5.
There were iconoclasts in Byzantium - and this is a terrible mystery
6.
The West never liked Byzantium
7.
In 1453, Constantinople fell - but Byzantium did not die
Archangel Michael and Manuel II Palaiologos. 15th century Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, Italy / Bridgeman Images / Fotodom
1. A country called Byzantium never existed
If the Byzantines of the 6th, 10th or 14th centuries had heard from us that they were Byzantines, and their country was called Byzantium, the vast majority of them would simply not understand us. And those who did understand would think that we want to flatter them by calling them residents of the capital, and even in an outdated language that is used only by scientists who try to make their speech as refined as possible.
Part of the consular diptych of Justinian. Constantinople, 521 Diptychs were presented to consuls in honor of their assumption of office. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
There never was a country that its inhabitants would call Byzantium; the word "Byzantines" was never the self-name of the inhabitants of any state. The word "Byzantines" was sometimes used to refer to the inhabitants of Constantinople - after the name of the ancient city of Byzantium (Βυζάντιον), which in 330 was re-founded by Emperor Constantine under the name of Constantinople. They were called that only in texts written in a conventional literary language, stylized as ancient Greek, which no one had spoken for a long time. No one knew the other Byzantines, and these existed only in texts accessible to a narrow circle of educated elites who wrote in this archaic Greek and understood it.
The self-name of the Eastern Roman Empire, starting from the III-IV centuries (and after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453), there were several stable and understandable phrases and words: romean state, or Romans, (βασιλεία τῶν Ρωμαίων), romania (Ρωμανία), Romaida (Ρωμαΐς ).
The inhabitants themselves called themselves Romans- the Romans (Ρωμαίοι ), they were ruled by the Roman emperor - basileus(Βασιλεύς τῶν Ρωμαίων) and their capital was New Rome(Νέα Ρώμη) - this is how the city founded by Constantine was usually called.
Where did the word “Byzantium” come from and with it the idea of the Byzantine Empire as a state that arose after the fall of the Roman Empire on the territory of its eastern provinces? The fact is that in the 15th century, along with statehood, the Eastern Roman Empire (this is how Byzantium is often called in modern historical writings, and this is much closer to the self-consciousness of the Byzantines themselves), in fact, lost its voice heard beyond its borders: the Eastern Roman tradition of self-description turned out to be isolated within the Greek-speaking lands that belonged to Ottoman Empire; the only important thing now was that Western European scholars thought and wrote about Byzantium.
Jerome Wolf. Engraving by Dominicus Custos. 1580 Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum Braunschweig
In the Western European tradition, the state of Byzantium was actually created by Hieronymus Wolff, a German humanist and historian, who in 1577 published the Corpus of Byzantine History, a small anthology of works by historians of the Eastern Empire with a Latin translation. It was from the "Korpus" that the concept of "Byzantine" entered the Western European scientific circulation.
Wolf's work formed the basis of another collection of Byzantine historians, also called the "Corpus of Byzantine History", but much larger - it was published in 37 volumes with the assistance of King Louis XIV of France. Finally, the Venetian reprint of the second Corpus was used by the 18th-century English historian Edward Gibbon when he wrote his History of the Fall and Decline of the Roman Empire - perhaps no other book had such a huge and at the same time destructive influence on the creation and popularization of the modern image of Byzantium.
The Romans, with their historical and cultural tradition, were thus deprived not only of their voice, but also of the right to self-name and self-consciousness.
2. The Byzantines didn't know they weren't Romans
Autumn. Coptic panel. 4th century Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, UK / Bridgeman Images / Fotodom
For the Byzantines, who themselves called themselves Romans, the history of the great empire never ended. The very idea would seem absurd to them. Romulus and Remus, Numa, Augustus Octavian, Constantine I, Justinian, Phocas, Michael the Great Komnenos - all of them in the same way from time immemorial stood at the head of the Roman people.
Before the fall of Constantinople (and even after it), the Byzantines considered themselves inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Social institutions, laws, statehood - all this has been preserved in Byzantium since the time of the first Roman emperors. The adoption of Christianity had almost no effect on the legal, economic and administrative structure of the Roman Empire. If the Byzantines saw the origins of the Christian Church in the Old Testament, then, like the ancient Romans, they attributed the beginning of their own political history to the Trojan Aeneas, the hero of Virgil's poem fundamental to Roman identity.
The social order of the Roman Empire and the sense of belonging to the great Roman patria were combined in the Byzantine world with Greek scholarship and written culture: the Byzantines considered classical ancient Greek literature to be their own. For example, in the 11th century, the monk and scholar Michael Psellos seriously discusses in one treatise who writes poetry better - the Athenian tragedian Euripides or the Byzantine poet of the 7th century George Pisida, the author of a panegyric on the Avaro-Slavic siege of Constantinople in 626 and the theological poem "Shestodnev about the divine creation of the world. In this poem, later translated into Slavic, George paraphrases the ancient authors Plato, Plutarch, Ovid and Pliny the Elder.
At the same time, at the level of ideology, Byzantine culture often opposed itself to classical antiquity. Christian apologists noticed that all Greek antiquity - poetry, theater, sports, sculpture - was permeated with religious cults of pagan deities. Hellenic values (material and physical beauty, the pursuit of pleasure, human glory and honors, military and athletic victories, eroticism, rational philosophical thinking) were condemned as unworthy of Christians. Basil the Great, in his famous talk "To Young Men on How to Use Pagan Writings," sees the main danger for Christian youth in the attractive way of life that is offered to the reader in Hellenic writings. He advises to select in them for oneself only stories that are morally useful. The paradox is that Basil, like many other Fathers of the Church, himself received an excellent Hellenic education and wrote his compositions in a classical literary style, using the techniques of ancient rhetorical art and a language that by his time had already fallen into disuse and sounded like archaic.
In practice, ideological incompatibility with Hellenism did not prevent the Byzantines from carefully treating the ancient cultural heritage. Ancient texts were not destroyed, but copied, while the scribes tried to be accurate, except that in rare cases they could throw out a too frank erotic passage. Hellenic literature continued to be the basis of the school curriculum in Byzantium. An educated person had to read and know the epos of Homer, the tragedies of Euripides, the speeches of Demos-Phen and use the Hellenic cultural code in their own writings, for example, call the Arabs Persians, and Russia - Hyperborea. Many elements of ancient culture in Byzantium were preserved, although they changed beyond recognition and acquired new religious content: for example, rhetoric became homiletics (the science of church preaching), philosophy became theology, and the ancient love story influenced hagiographic genres.
3. Byzantium was born when Antiquity adopted Christianity
When does Byzantium begin? Probably, when the history of the Roman Empire ends - that's how we used to think. For the most part, this thought seems natural to us, due to the enormous influence of Edward Gibbon's monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Written in the 18th century, this book still prompts both historians and non-specialists to look at the period from the 3rd to the 7th century (now increasingly called late Antiquity) as the time of the decline of the former greatness of the Roman Empire under the influence of two main factors - the invasions of the Germanic tribes and the ever-growing social role of Christianity, which became the dominant religion in the 4th century. Byzantium, which exists in the mass consciousness primarily as a Christian empire, is drawn in this perspective as a natural heir to the cultural decline that occurred in late Antiquity due to mass Christianization: the focus of religious fanaticism and obscurantism, stretching for a whole millennium of stagnation.
Amulet that protects from the evil eye. Byzantium, V-VI centuries
On one side, an eye is depicted, at which arrows are directed and attacked by a lion, a snake, a scorpion and a stork.
The Walters Art Museum
Thus, if you look at history through the eyes of Gibbon, late Antiquity turns into a tragic and irreversible end of Antiquity. But was it just a time of destruction of beautiful antiquity? Historical science has been sure for more than half a century that this is not so.
Especially simplified is the idea of the supposedly fatal role of Christianization in the destruction of the culture of the Roman Empire. The culture of late Antiquity in reality was hardly built on the opposition of "pagan" (Roman) and "Christian" (Byzantine). The way late antique culture was organized for its creators and users was much more complex: Christians of that era would have found the very question of the conflict between the Roman and the religious strange. In the 4th century, Roman Christians could easily place images of pagan deities, made in antique style, on household items: for example, on one casket, donated to newlyweds, naked Venus is adjacent to the pious call "Seconds and Project, live in Christ."
On the territory of the future Byzantium there was an equally problem-free fusion of pagan and Christian in artistic techniques for contemporaries: in the 6th century, images of Christ and saints were made using the technique of a traditional Egyptian funeral portrait, the most famous type of which is the so-called Fayum portrait. Fayum portrait- a kind of funeral portraits common in Hellenized Egypt in the Ι-III centuries AD. e. The image was applied with hot paints on a heated wax layer. Christian visuality in late Antiquity did not necessarily strive to oppose itself to the pagan, Roman tradition: very often it deliberately (and perhaps, on the contrary, naturally and naturally) adhered to it. The same fusion of pagan and Christian is seen in the literature of late Antiquity. The poet Arator in the 6th century recites in the Roman cathedral a hexametric poem about the deeds of the apostles, written in the stylistic traditions of Virgil. In Christianized Egypt in the middle of the 5th century (by this time there were different forms of monasticism here for about a century and a half), the poet Nonn from the city of Panopol (modern Akmim) writes an adaptation (paraphrase) of the Gospel of John in the language of Homer, preserving not only the meter and style, but also deliberately borrowing whole verbal formulas and figurative layers from his epos Gospel of John 1:1-6 (synodal translation):
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. It was in the beginning with God. Everything came into being through Him, and without Him nothing came into being that came into being. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. There was a man sent from God; his name is John.
Nonn from Panopol. Paraphrase of the Gospel of John, Canto 1 (translated by Yu. A. Golubets, D. A. Pospelov, A. V. Markov):
Logos, God's Child, Light born from Light,
He is inseparable from the Father on the infinite throne!
Heavenly God, Logos, you are the primordial
He shone together with the Eternal, the Creator of the world,
Oh, Ancient of the universe! All things were done through Him,
What is breathless and in the spirit! Outside the Speech, which does a lot,
Is it manifest that it abides? And in Him exists from eternity
Life, which is inherent in everything, the light of a short-lived people ...<...>
In the bee-feeding more often
The wanderer on the mountain appeared, the inhabitant of the desert slopes,
He is the herald of the cornerstone baptism, the name is
God's husband, John, the leader ..
Christ Pantocrator. Icon from the monastery of St. Catherine. Sinai, mid 6th century Wikimedia Commons
The dynamic changes that took place in different layers of the culture of the Roman Empire in late Antiquity are difficult to directly relate to Christianization, since the Christians of that time were themselves such hunters for classical forms both in the visual arts and in literature (as well as in many other areas of life). The future Byzantium was born in an era in which the relationship between religion, artistic language, its audience, as well as the sociology of historical shifts were complex and indirect. They carried the potential of the complexity and diversity that developed later over the centuries of Byzantine history.
4. In Byzantium they spoke one language, but wrote in another
The language picture of Byzantium is paradoxical. The empire, which not only claimed succession from the Roman Empire and inherited its institutions, but was also the former Roman Empire in terms of its political ideology, never spoke Latin. It was spoken in the western provinces and the Balkans, until the 6th century it remained the official language of jurisprudence (the last legal code in Latin was the Code of Justinian, promulgated in 529, after which laws were already issued in Greek), it enriched Greek with many borrowings (before only in the military and administrative spheres), early Byzantine Constantinople attracted Latin grammarians with career opportunities. But still, Latin was not a real language even of early Byzantium. Let the Latin-speaking poets Corippus and Priscian live in Constantinople, we will not meet these names on the pages of the textbook of the history of Byzantine literature.
We cannot say at what exact moment the Roman emperor becomes Byzantine: the formal identity of institutions does not allow us to draw a clear boundary. In search of an answer to this question, it is necessary to turn to informal cultural differences. The Roman Empire differs from the Byzantine Empire in that the latter merged Roman institutions, Greek culture and Christianity and carried out this synthesis on the basis of the Greek language. Therefore, one of the criteria on which we could rely is the language: the Byzantine emperor, unlike his Roman counterpart, is easier to express himself in Greek than in Latin.
But what is this Greek? The alternative that bookstore shelves and programs of philological departments offer us is misleading: we can find either ancient or modern Greek in them. No other reference point is provided. Because of this, we are forced to proceed from the fact that the Greek language of Byzantium is either distorted ancient Greek (almost the dialogues of Plato, but not quite) or Proto-Greek (almost the negotiations of Tsipras with the IMF, but not quite yet). The history of 24 centuries of continuous development of the language is straightened out and simplified: it is either the inevitable decline and degradation of the ancient Greek (this is what the Western European classical philologists thought before the establishment of Byzantine studies as an independent scientific discipline), or the inevitable germination of the modern Greek (this is what the Greek scientists thought at the time of the formation of the Greek nation in the 19th century) .
Indeed, Byzantine Greek is elusive. Its development cannot be viewed as a series of progressive, successive changes, since for every step forward in language development there was a step back. The reason for this is the attitude towards the language of the Byzantines themselves. Socially prestigious was the language norm of Homer and the classics of Attic prose. To write well meant to write history indistinguishable from Xenophon or Thucydides (the last historian who dared to introduce into his text the Old Attic elements that seemed archaic already in the classical era is Laonik Chalkokondylus, a witness to the fall of Constantinople), and the epic is indistinguishable from Homer. From educated Byzantines throughout the history of the empire, it was required to literally speak one (changed) language and write another (frozen in classical immutability) language. The duality of linguistic consciousness is the most important feature of Byzantine culture.
Ostracon with a fragment of the Iliad in Coptic. Byzantine Egypt, 580-640
Ostraca - shards of clay vessels - were used to record Bible verses, legal documents, accounts, school assignments and prayers when papyrus was unavailable or too expensive.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
The situation was aggravated by the fact that from the time of classical antiquity, certain dialectal features were assigned to certain genres: epic poems were written in the language of Homer, and medical treatises were compiled in the Ionian dialect in imitation of Hippocrates. We see a similar picture in Byzantium. In ancient Greek, vowels were divided into long and short, and their ordered alternation formed the basis of ancient Greek poetic meters. In the Hellenistic era, the opposition of vowels by longitude left the Greek language, but nevertheless, even a thousand years later, heroic poems and epitaphs were written as if the phonetic system had remained unchanged since the time of Homer. Differences also permeated other linguistic levels: it was necessary to build a phrase, like Homer, select words, like Homer, and decline and conjugate them in accordance with a paradigm that died out in living speech millennia ago.
However, not everyone was able to write with antique liveliness and simplicity; often, in an attempt to achieve the Attic ideal, Byzantine authors lost their sense of proportion, trying to write more correctly than their idols. Thus, we know that the dative case, which existed in Ancient Greek, has almost completely disappeared in Modern Greek. It would be logical to assume that with each century in literature it will occur less and less until it gradually disappears altogether. However, recent studies have shown that the dative case is used much more often in Byzantine high literature than in the literature of classical antiquity. But it is precisely this increase in frequency that speaks of the loosening of the norm! Obsession in using one form or another will tell about your inability to use it correctly no less than its complete absence in your speech.
At the same time, the living linguistic element took its toll. We learn about how the spoken language changed thanks to the errors of manuscript copyists, non-literary inscriptions and the so-called vernacular literature. The term “folk-speaking” is not accidental: it describes the phenomenon of interest to us much better than the more familiar “folk”, since elements of simple urban colloquial speech were often used in monuments created in the circles of the Constantinople elite. It became a real literary fashion in the 12th century, when the same authors could work in several registers, today offering the reader exquisite prose, almost indistinguishable from Attic, and tomorrow - almost areal rhymes.
Diglossia, or bilingualism, also gave rise to another typically Byzantine phenomenon - metaphrasing, that is, transcription, retelling in half with translation, presentation of the content of the source with new words with a decrease or increase in the stylistic register. Moreover, the shift could go both along the line of complication (pretentious syntax, refined figures of speech, ancient allusions and quotations), and along the line of language simplification. Not a single work was considered inviolable, even the language of sacred texts in Byzantium did not have the status of sacred: the Gospel could be rewritten in a different stylistic key (as, for example, the already mentioned Nonn Panopolitansky did) - and this did not bring down anathema on the head of the author. It was necessary to wait until 1901, when the translation of the Gospels into colloquial Modern Greek (in fact, the same metaphrase) brought opponents and defenders of the language renewal to the streets and led to dozens of victims. In this sense, the indignant crowds who defended the “language of the ancestors” and demanded reprisals against the translator Alexandros Pallis were much further from Byzantine culture, not only than they would like, but also than Pallis himself.
5. There were iconoclasts in Byzantium - and this is a terrible mystery
Iconoclasts John the Grammarian and Bishop Anthony of Silea. Khludov Psalter. Byzantium, circa 850 Miniature to Psalm 68, verse 2: "They gave me gall to eat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink." The actions of the iconoclasts, covering the icon of Christ with lime, are compared with the crucifixion on Golgotha. The warrior on the right brings Christ a sponge with vinegar. At the foot of the mountain - John the Grammarian and Bishop Anthony of Silea. rijksmuseumamsterdam.blogspot.ru
Iconoclasm is the most famous for a wide audience and the most mysterious, even for specialists, period of the history of Byzantium. The depth of the trace that he left in the cultural memory of Europe is evidenced by the possibility, for example, in English to use the word iconoclast (“iconoclast”) outside of the historical context, in the timeless meaning of “rebel, overthrower of foundations”.
The event line is like this. By the turn of the 7th and 8th centuries, the theory of the worship of religious images was hopelessly lagging behind practice. The Arab conquests of the middle of the 7th century led the empire to a deep cultural crisis, which, in turn, gave rise to the growth of apocalyptic sentiments, the multiplication of superstitions and a surge of disordered forms of icon veneration, sometimes indistinguishable from magical practices. According to the collections of miracles of saints, drunk wax from a melted seal with the face of St. Artemy healed a hernia, and Saints Cosmas and Damian healed the suffering woman by ordering her to drink, mixing with water, the plaster from the fresco with their image.
Such veneration of icons, which did not receive a philosophical and theological justification, caused rejection among some clerics, who saw signs of paganism in it. Emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717-741), finding himself in a difficult political situation, used this discontent to create a new consolidating ideology. The first iconoclastic steps date back to 726/730, but both the theological justification of the iconoclastic dogma and full-fledged repressions against dissidents occurred during the reign of the most odious Byzantine emperor - Constantine V Copronymus (Gnoemeny) (741-775).
Claiming the status of the ecumenical, the iconoclastic council of 754 translated the dispute into new level: from now on, it was not about the fight against superstitions and the fulfillment of the Old Testament prohibition “Do not make an idol for yourself”, but about the hypostasis of Christ. Can He be considered pictorial if His divine nature is "indescribable"? The “Christological dilemma” was as follows: the iconodules are guilty either of imprinting on icons only the flesh of Christ without His deity (Nestorianism), or of limiting the deity of Christ through the description of His depicted flesh (Monophysitism).
However, already in 787, Empress Irina held a new council in Nicaea, the participants of which formulated the dogma of icon veneration as a response to the dogma of iconoclasm, thereby offering a full-fledged theological basis for previously unregulated practices. An intellectual breakthrough was, firstly, the separation of “official” and “relative” worship: the first can only be given to God, while with the second “the honor given to the image goes back to the prototype” (the words of Basil the Great, which became real motto of iconodules). Secondly, the theory of homonymy was proposed, that is, the same name, which removed the problem of portrait similarity between the image and the depicted: the icon of Christ was recognized as such not due to the similarity of features, but due to the spelling of the name - the act of naming.
Patriarch Nicephorus. Miniature from the Psalter of Theodore of Caesarea. 1066 British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images / Fotodom
In 815, Emperor Leo V the Armenian again turned to iconoclastic politics, hoping in this way to build a line of succession towards Constantine V, the most successful and most beloved ruler in the army in the last century. The so-called second iconoclasm accounts for both a new round of repressions and a new rise in theological thought. The iconoclastic era ends in 843, when iconoclasm is finally condemned as a heresy. But his ghost haunted the Byzantines until 1453: for centuries, the participants in any church disputes, using the most sophisticated rhetoric, accused each other of covert iconoclasm, and this accusation was more serious than accusation of any other heresy.
It would seem that everything is quite simple and clear. But as soon as we try to somehow clarify this general scheme, our constructions turn out to be rather unsteady.
The main difficulty is the state of the sources. The texts, thanks to which we know about the first iconoclasm, were written much later, and by iconodules. In the 40s of the 9th century, a full-fledged program was carried out to write the history of iconoclasm from icon-worshipping positions. As a result, the history of the dispute has been completely distorted: the iconoclasts' writings are available only in tendentious selections, and textual analysis shows that the iconodules' works, seemingly created to refute the teachings of Constantine V, could not have been written before the very end of the 8th century. The task of the icon-worshipping authors was to turn the history we have described inside out, to create the illusion of tradition: to show that the veneration of icons (and not spontaneous, but meaningful!) has been present in the church since apostolic times, and iconoclasm is just an innovation (the word καινοτομία - “innovation” on Greek - the most hated word for any Byzantine), and deliberately anti-Christian. Iconoclasts appeared not as fighters for the cleansing of Christianity from paganism, but as "Christian accusers" - this word began to designate precisely and exclusively iconoclasts. The parties in the iconoclastic dispute turned out to be not Christians, who interpret the same teaching in different ways, but Christians and some external force hostile to them.
The arsenal of polemical techniques that were used in these texts to denigrate the enemy was very large. Legends were created about the hatred of iconoclasts for education, for example, about the burning of the never-existing university in Constantinople by Leo III, and participation in pagan rites and human sacrifices, hatred of the Mother of God and doubts about the divine nature of Christ were attributed to Constantine V. If such myths seem simple and were debunked long ago, others remain at the center of scientific discussions to this day. For example, it was only very recently that it was possible to establish that the cruel massacre committed against Stefan the New, glorified as a martyr in 766, was connected not so much with his uncompromising icon-worshiping position, as life claims, but with his proximity to the conspiracy of political opponents of Constantine V. disputes about key questions: what is the role of Islamic influence in the genesis of iconoclasm? what was the true attitude of the iconoclasts towards the cult of saints and their relics?
Even the language we use to talk about iconoclasm is the language of the conquerors. The word "iconoclast" is not a self-designation, but an offensive polemical label invented and implemented by their opponents. No "iconoclast" would ever agree with such a name, simply because the Greek word εἰκών has many more meanings than the Russian "icon". This is any image, including non-material, which means that to call someone an iconoclast is to declare that he is struggling with the idea of God the Son as the image of God the Father, and man as the image of God, and the events of the Old Testament as prototypes of the events of the New etc. Moreover, the iconoclasts themselves claimed that they were defending the true image of Christ - the Eucharistic gifts, while what their opponents call an image is in fact not such, but is just an image.
In the end, defeat their teaching, it would be called Orthodox now, and we would contemptuously call the teaching of their opponents icon worship and talk not about the iconoclastic, but about the icon worship period in Byzantium. However, if it were so, the whole subsequent history and visual aesthetics of Eastern Christianity would have been different.
6. The West never liked Byzantium
Although trade, religious and diplomatic contacts between Byzantium and the states of Western Europe continued throughout the Middle Ages, it is difficult to talk about real cooperation or mutual understanding between them. At the end of the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire broke up into barbarian states and the tradition of "Romanness" was interrupted in the West, but preserved in the East. Within a few centuries, the new Western dynasties of Germany wanted to restore the continuity of their power with the Roman Empire and for this they entered into dynastic marriages with Byzantine princesses. The court of Charlemagne competed with Byzantium - this can be seen in architecture and in art. However, the imperial claims of Charles rather increased the misunderstanding between East and West: the culture of the Carolingian Renaissance wanted to see itself as the only legitimate heir of Rome.
Crusaders attack Constantinople. Miniature from the chronicle "The Conquest of Constantinople" by Geoffroy de Villehardouin. Approximately 1330, Villardouin was one of the leaders of the campaign. Bibliothèque nationale de France
By the 10th century, the overland routes from Constantinople to northern Italy through the Balkans and along the Danube were blocked by barbarian tribes. The only way left was by sea, which reduced the possibilities of communication and made cultural exchange more difficult. The division into East and West has become a physical reality. The ideological gap between East and West, fueled throughout the Middle Ages by theological disputes, deepened during the Crusades. The organizer of the Fourth Crusade, which ended with the capture of Constantinople in 1204, Pope Innocent III openly declared the primacy of the Roman Church over all the rest, referring to the divine establishment.
As a result, it turned out that the Byzantines and the inhabitants of Europe knew little about each other, but were unfriendly towards each other. In the 14th century, the West criticized the depravity of the Byzantine clergy and attributed the success of Islam to it. For example, Dante believed that Sultan Saladin could have converted to Christianity (and even placed him in his "Divine Comedy" in limbo - special place for virtuous non-Christians), but did not do so due to the unattractiveness of Byzantine Christianity. In Western countries, by the time of Dante, almost no one knew the Greek language. At the same time, Byzantine intellectuals learned Latin only to translate Thomas Aquinas and did not hear anything about Dante. The situation changed in the 15th century after the Turkish invasion and the fall of Constantinople, when Byzantine culture began to penetrate Europe along with Byzantine scholars who had fled from the Turks. The Greeks brought with them many manuscripts of ancient works, and humanists were able to study Greek antiquity from the originals, and not from Roman literature and the few Latin translations known in the West.
But Renaissance scholars and intellectuals were interested in classical antiquity, not in the society that preserved it. In addition, it was mainly intellectuals who fled to the West who were negatively inclined towards the ideas of monasticism and Orthodox theology of that time and who sympathized with the Roman Church; their opponents, supporters of Gregory Palamas, on the contrary, believed that it was better to try to negotiate with the Turks than to seek help from the pope. Therefore, Byzantine civilization continued to be perceived in a negative light. If the ancient Greeks and Romans were “their own”, then the image of Byzantium was fixed in European culture as oriental and exotic, sometimes attractive, but more often hostile and alien to European ideals of reason and progress.
The age of European enlightenment completely stigmatized Byzantium. The French Enlighteners Montesquieu and Voltaire associated it with despotism, luxury, lavish ceremonies, superstition, moral decay, civilizational decline and cultural barrenness. According to Voltaire, the history of Byzantium is "an unworthy collection of grandiloquent phrases and descriptions of miracles" that dishonors the human mind. Montesquieu sees the main reason for the fall of Constantinople in the pernicious and pervasive influence of religion on society and power. He speaks especially aggressively about Byzantine monasticism and clergy, about the veneration of icons, as well as about theological controversy:
The Greeks - great talkers, great debaters, sophists by nature - constantly entered into religious disputes. Since the monks enjoyed great influence in the court, which weakened as it became corrupted, it turned out that the monks and the court mutually corrupted each other and that evil infected both. As a result, all the attention of the emperors was absorbed in first calming down, then inciting theological disputes, regarding which it was noticed that they became the hotter, the more insignificant was the reason that caused them.
So Byzantium became part of the image of the barbaric dark East, which paradoxically also included the main enemies Byzantine Empire- Muslims. In the Orientalist model, Byzantium was opposed to a liberal and rational European society built on the ideals of ancient Greece and Rome. This model underlies, for example, the descriptions of the Byzantine court in the drama The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert:
“The king wipes fragrances from his face with his sleeve. He eats from sacred vessels, then breaks them; and mentally he counts his ships, his troops, his peoples. Now, out of a whim, he will take and burn his palace with all the guests. He thinks to restore the Tower of Babel and overthrow the Almighty from the throne. Antony reads from a distance on his forehead all his thoughts. They take possession of him, and he becomes Nebuchadnezzar."
The mythological view of Byzantium has not yet been completely overcome in historical science. Of course, there could be no question of any moral example of Byzantine history for the education of youth. School curricula were based on samples of classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, and Byzantine culture was excluded from them. In Russia, science and education followed Western patterns. In the 19th century, a dispute about the role of Byzantium in Russian history broke out between Westerners and Slavophiles. Peter Chaadaev, following the tradition of European enlightenment, bitterly complained about the Byzantine heritage of Russia:
“By the will of fateful fate, we turned for moral teaching, which was supposed to educate us, to corrupted Byzantium, to the subject of deep contempt of these peoples.”
Byzantine ideologist Konstantin Leontiev Konstantin Leontiev(1831-1891) - diplomat, writer, philosopher. In 1875, his work "Byzantism and Slavism" was published, in which he argued that "Byzantism" is a civilization or culture, " general idea which is composed of several components: autocracy, Christianity (different from Western, “from heresies and schisms”), disappointment in everything earthly, the absence of an “extremely exaggerated concept of the earthly human personality”, rejection of the hope for the general welfare of peoples, collections of some aesthetic ideas and so on. Since Vseslavism is not a civilization or culture at all, and European civilization is coming to an end, Russia - having inherited almost everything from Byzantium - needs Byzantism to flourish. pointed to the stereotypical idea of Byzantium, which has developed due to schooling and the lack of independence of Russian science:
"Byzantium seems to be something dry, boring, priestly, and not only boring, but even something pitiful and vile."
7. In 1453, Constantinople fell - but Byzantium did not die
Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. Miniature from the collection of Topkapı Palace. Istanbul, late 15th century Wikimedia Commons
In 1935, the book of the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga "Byzantium after Byzantium" was published - and its title established itself as a designation of the life of Byzantine culture after the fall of the empire in 1453. Byzantine life and institutions did not disappear overnight. They were preserved thanks to Byzantine emigrants who fled to Western Europe, in Constantinople itself, even under the rule of the Turks, as well as in the countries of the "Byzantine commonwealth", as the British historian Dmitry Obolensky called Eastern European medieval cultures that were directly influenced by Byzantium - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Russia. The participants in this supranational unity preserved the heritage of Byzantium in religion, the norms of Roman law, the standards of literature and art.
In the last hundred years of the existence of the empire, two factors - the cultural revival of the Palaiologos and the Palamite disputes - contributed, on the one hand, to the renewal of ties between the Orthodox peoples and Byzantium, and on the other hand, to a new surge in the spread of Byzantine culture, primarily through liturgical texts and monastic literature. In the XIV century Byzantine ideas, texts and even their authors got into the Slavic world through the city of Tarnovo, the capital of the Bulgarian Empire; in particular, the number of Byzantine works available in Russia doubled thanks to Bulgarian translations.
In addition, the Ottoman Empire officially recognized the Patriarch of Constantinople: as the head of the Orthodox millet (or community), he continued to manage the church, in whose jurisdiction both Russia and the Orthodox Balkan peoples remained. Finally, the rulers of the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, even after becoming subjects of the Sultan, retained Christian statehood and considered themselves the cultural and political heirs of the Byzantine Empire. They continued the traditions of the ceremonial of the royal court, Greek education and theology, and supported the Greek elite of Constantinople, the Phanariots. Phanariots- literally "inhabitants of Phanar", a quarter of Constantinople, in which the residence of the Greek patriarch was located. The Greek elite of the Ottoman Empire were called Phanariots because they lived predominantly in this quarter.
Greek uprising of 1821. Illustration from A History of All Nations from the Earliest Times by John Henry Wright. 1905 The Internet Archive
Iorga believes that Byzantium died after Byzantium during the unsuccessful uprising against the Turks in 1821, which was organized by Phanariot Alexander Ypsilanti. On one side of the banner of Ypsilanti there was the inscription “Conquer this” and the image of Emperor Constantine the Great, whose name is associated with the beginning of Byzantine history, and on the other, a phoenix reborn from the flame, a symbol of the revival of the Byzantine Empire. The uprising was crushed, the Patriarch of Constantinople was executed, and the ideology of the Byzantine Empire then dissolved into Greek nationalism.
BYZANTIAN STATE AND LAW
In 395, the Roman Empire was divided into Western (capital - Rome) and Eastern (capital - Constantinople). The first empire ceased to exist in 476 under the blows of the Germanic tribes. The Eastern Empire, or Byzantium, existed until 1453. Byzantium got its name from the ancient Greek colony of Megara, a small town of Byzantium, on the site of which Emperor Constantine
in 324-330 he founded the new capital of the Roman Empire - Constantinople. The Byzantines themselves called themselves "Romans", and the empire - "Roman", because for a long time the capital was called "New Rome".
Byzantium was in many ways a continuation of the Roman Empire, preserving its political and state traditions. At the same time, Constantinople and Rome became the two centers of political life - the "Latin" West and the "Greek" East.
The stability of Byzantium had its own reasons,
in the features of socio-economic and historical development. Firstly, the Byzantine state included economically developed regions: Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, the Balkan Peninsula (the territory of the empire exceeded 750,000 sq. km.
with a population of 50-65 million people), who conducted a brisk trade
with India, China, Iran, Arabia and North Africa. The decline of the economy based on slave labor was not felt here as strongly as in Western Rome, since the population was
in free or semi-free state. Agriculture was built not on forced labor in the form of large slave-owning latifundia, but on small peasant farms (communal peasantry). Therefore, small farms reacted faster to the changing market conditions and more quickly, compared to large farms, restructured their activities. And in the craft here the free workers played the main role. For these reasons, the eastern provinces suffered less than the western ones from the economic crisis of the 3rd century.
Secondly, Byzantium, having large material resources, had a strong army, navy and a strong branched state apparatus, which made it possible to contain the raids of the barbarians. There was a strong imperial power with a flexible administrative apparatus.
Thirdly, Byzantium was built on the basis of a new Christian religion, which, in comparison with the pagan Roman religion, had a progressive significance.
The Byzantine Empire reached its greatest power
during the reign of Emperor Justinian I (527-565), who carried out extensive conquests, and again the Mediterranean Sea became an inland sea, this time of Byzantium. After the death of the monarch, the state entered into a long crisis. The countries conquered by Justinian were quickly lost. In the VI century. clashes with the Slavs begin,
and in the 7th century - with the Arabs, who at the beginning of the VIII century. seized North Africa from Byzantium.
At the beginning of the same century, Byzantium was hardly beginning to emerge from the crisis. In 717, Leo III, nicknamed the Isaurian, came to power and founded the Isaurian dynasty (717-802). He carried out a number of reforms. In order to find funds for their implementation, as well as for the maintenance of the army and administration, he decided to liquidate the monastic land ownership. This was expressed in the fight against icons, since the church was accused of paganism - the worship of icons. The authorities used iconoclasm to strengthen their political and economic positions, to subjugate the church and its wealth. Laws are being issued against the veneration of icons, regarding it as idolatry. The struggle with icons made it possible to appropriate church treasures - utensils, icon frames, shrines with the relics of saints. 100 monastic patrimonies were also confiscated, the lands of which were distributed to the peasants, as well as in the form of remuneration to soldiers for their service.
These actions strengthened the internal and external position of Byzantium, which again annexed Greece, Macedonia, Crete, South Italy and Sicily.
In the second half of the 9th century, and especially in the 10th century, Byzantium reaches a new upsurge, because the powerful Arab Caliphate gradually broke up into a number of independent feudal states and Byzantium conquered Syria and numerous islands in the Mediterranean from the Arabs, and at the beginning of the 11th century. annexes Bulgaria.
At that time, Byzantium was ruled by the Macedonian dynasty (867-1056), under which the foundations of a socially centralized early feudal monarchy took shape. Under her, Kievan Rus in 988 accepts Christianity from the Greeks.
Under the next dynasty, Komnenos (1057-1059, 1081-1185),
in Byzantium, feudalization intensifies and the process of enslaving the peasants is completed. With her, the feudal institution is strengthened pronia("care"). Feudalization leads to the gradual disintegration of the state, small independent principalities appear in Asia Minor. The foreign policy situation is also becoming more complicated: the Normans were advancing from the west, the Pechenegs from the north, and the Seljuks from the east. Saved Byzantium from the Seljuk Turks the first crusade. Byzantium managed to return part of its possessions. However, Byzantium and the crusaders soon began to fight among themselves. Constantinople in 1204 was taken by the Crusaders. Byzantium broke up into a number of states, loosely connected with each other.
With the coming to power of the Palaiologos dynasty (1261-1453), Byzantium managed to strengthen itself, but its territory noticeably decreased. Soon, a new threat loomed over the state from the Ottoman Turks, who extended their power over Asia Minor, bringing it to the shores of the Sea of Marmara. In the fight against the Ottomans, the emperors began to hire foreign troops, who often turned their weapons against the employers. Byzantium was exhausted in the struggle, aggravated by peasant and urban uprisings. The state apparatus fell into decay, which leads to the decentralization of power and its weakening. The Byzantine emperors decide to seek help from the Catholic West. In 1439, the Union of Florence was signed, according to which the Eastern Orthodox Church submitted to the Pope. However, Byzantium never received real help from the West.
Upon the return of the Greeks to their homeland, the union was rejected by the majority of the people and the clergy.
In 1444, the crusaders suffered a severe defeat from the Ottoman Turks, who delivered the final blow to Byzantium. Emperor John VIII was forced to seek mercy from Sultan Murad II. In 1148 the Byzantine emperor dies. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, entered into a struggle with the new sultan Mehmed II Fatih (the Conqueror). On May 29, 1453, under the blows of Turkish troops, Constantinople was taken, and with its fall, the Byzantine Empire actually ceased to exist. Turkey becomes one
of the powerful powers of the medieval world, and Constantinople becomes the capital of the Ottoman Empire - Istanbul (from "Islambol" - "abundance of Islam").
The name of this new state was the "Kingdom of the Romans", in the Latin West it was called "Romania", and the Turks subsequently began to call it the "state of the Rum" or simply "Rum". Historians began to call this state “Byzantium” or “Byzantine Empire” in their writings after its fall.
History of Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium
Around 660 BC, on a cape washed by the waters of the Bosphorus, the Black Sea waves of the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara, immigrants and Greek city Megars founded a trading outpost on the way from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, named after the leader of the colonists Byzant. The new city was named Byzantium.
Byzantium existed for about seven hundred years, serving as a transit point on the way of merchants and sailors following from Greece to the Greek colonies of the northern shores of the Black Sea and Crimea and back. From the metropolis, merchants brought wine and olive oil, fabrics, ceramics, and other handicraft products, back - bread and furs, ship and timber timber, honey, wax, fish and livestock. The city grew, grew rich and therefore was constantly under the threat of enemy invasion. More than once its inhabitants repulsed the onslaught of barbarian tribes from Thrace, Persians, Spartans, Macedonians. Only in 196-198 AD the city fell under the onslaught of the legions of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus and was destroyed
Byzantium is perhaps the only state in history that has exact dates of birth and death: May 11, 330 - May 29, 1453
History of Byzantium. Briefly
- 324, November 8 - Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (306-337) founded the new capital of the Roman Empire on the site of ancient Byzantium. What prompted this decision is unknown. Perhaps Constantine sought to create a center of the empire, remote from Rome with its continuous strife in the struggle for the imperial throne.
- 330, May 11 - solemn ceremony of proclamation of Constantinople as the new capital of the Roman Empire
The ceremony was accompanied by Christian and pagan religious rites. In memory of the founding of the city, Constantine ordered the minting of a coin. On one side, the emperor himself was depicted in a helmet and with a spear in his hand. There was also an inscription - "Constantinople". On the other side is a woman with ears of corn and a cornucopia in her hands. The emperor granted Constantinople the municipal structure of Rome. A senate was established in it, Egyptian bread, which Rome had previously been supplied with, began to be directed to the needs of the population of Constantinople. Like Rome, built on seven hills, Constantinople is spread over the vast territory of the seven hills of the Bosphorus. During the reign of Constantine, about 30 magnificent palaces and temples were built here, more than 4 thousand large buildings in which the nobility lived, a circus, 2 theaters and a hippodrome, more than 150 baths, about the same number of bakeries, as well as 8 water pipes
- 378 - Battle of Adrianople, in which the Romans were defeated by an army of Goths
- 379 - Theodosius (379-395) becomes Roman emperor. He made peace with the Goths, but the position of the Roman Empire was precarious
- 394 - Theodosius proclaimed Christianity the sole religion of the empire and divided it among his sons. He gave the western one to Honorius, the eastern one to Arcadia
- 395 - Constantinople became the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, which later became the state of Byzantium
- 408 - Theodosius II became emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, during whose reign walls were built around Constantinople, defining the boundaries in which Constantinople existed for many centuries.
- 410, August 24 - the troops of the Visigoth king Alaric captured and sacked Rome
- 476 - Fall of the Western Roman Empire. The leader of the Germans, Odoacer, overthrew the last emperor of the Western Empire, Romulus.
The first centuries of the history of Byzantium. Iconoclasm
The structure of Byzantium included the eastern half of the Roman Empire along the line that ran through the western part of the Balkans to Cyrenaica. Located on three continents - at the junction of Europe, Asia and Africa - it occupied an area of up to 1 million square meters. km, including the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Cyrenaica, part of Mesopotamia and Armenia, islands, primarily Crete and Cyprus, strongholds in the Crimea (Chersonese), in the Caucasus (in Georgia), some regions of Arabia, islands of the Eastern Mediterranean. Its borders stretched from the Danube to the Euphrates. The territory of the empire was quite densely populated. According to some estimates, it had 30-35 million inhabitants. The main part was the Greeks and the Hellenized population. In addition to the Greeks, Syrians, Copts, Thracians and Illyrians, Armenians, Georgians, Arabs, Jews lived in Byzantium.
- V century, ending - VI century, beginning - the highest point of rise of early Byzantium. Peace reigned on the eastern frontier. They managed to remove the Ostrogoths from the Balkan Peninsula (488), giving them Italy. During the reign of Emperor Anastasius (491-518), the state had significant savings in the treasury.
- VI-VII centuries - Gradual liberation from Latin. The Greek language became not only the language of church and literature, but also of state administration.
- 527, August 1 - Justinian I became Emperor of Byzantium. Under him, the Code of Justinian was developed - a set of laws that regulated all aspects of the life of Byzantine society, the church of St. Sophia was built - a masterpiece of architecture, an example of the highest level of development of Byzantine culture; there was an uprising of the Constantinople mob, which went down in history under the name "Nika"
The 38-year reign of Justinian was the climax and period of early Byzantine history. His activities played a significant role in the consolidation of Byzantine society, the major successes of Byzantine weapons, which doubled the boundaries of the empire to limits that were never reached in the future. His policy strengthened the authority of the Byzantine state, and the glory of the brilliant capital - Constantinople and the emperor who ruled in it began to spread among the peoples. The explanation for this “rise” of Byzantium is the personality of Justinian himself: colossal ambition, intelligence, organizational talent, extraordinary capacity for work (“the emperor who never sleeps”), perseverance and perseverance in achieving his goals, simplicity and rigor in personal life, the cunning of the peasant who knew how to hide his thoughts and feelings under a feigned external impassivity and calmness
- 513 - The young and energetic Khosrow I Anushirvan came to power in Iran.
- 540-561 - the beginning of a large-scale war between Byzantium and Iran, in which Iran had the goal of blocking in Transcaucasia and South Arabia - Byzantium's connections with the countries of the East, go to the Black Sea and strike at the rich eastern provinces.
- 561 - peace treaty between Byzantium and Iran. Was achieved at acceptable levels for Byzantium, but left Byzantium ravaged and devastated by the once richest eastern provinces
- VI century - the invasion of the Huns and Slavs in the Balkan territories of Byzantium. Their defense was based on a system of border fortresses. However, as a result of continuous invasions, the Balkan provinces of Byzantium were also devastated.
To ensure the continuation of hostilities, Justinian had to increase the tax burden, introduce new extraordinary taxes, natural duties, turn a blind eye to the increasing extortion of officials, if only they would provide revenue to the treasury, he had to curtail not only construction, including military construction, but also sharply reduce army. When Justinian died, his contemporary wrote: (Justinian died) "after he filled the whole world with murmurings and troubles"
- VII century, the beginning - In many parts of the empire, uprisings of slaves and ruined peasants broke out. The poor in Constantinople rebelled
- 602 - the rebels enthroned one of their commanders - Foku. Slave-owning nobility, aristocracies, large landowners opposed him. A civil war began, which led to the destruction of most of the old landed aristocracy, the economic and political positions of this social stratum were sharply weakened
- October 3, 610 - The troops of the new emperor Heraclius entered Constantinople. Foka was executed. The civil war is over
- 626 - war with the Avar Khaganate, which almost ended with the sack of Constantinople
- 628 Heraclius defeats Iran
- 610-649 - Rise of the Arab tribes of Northern Arabia. The whole of Byzantine North Africa was in the hands of the Arabs.
- VII century, the second half - the Arabs smashed the seaside cities of Byzantium, repeatedly tried to capture Constantinople. They took control of the sea
- 681 - the formation of the First Bulgarian kingdom, which for a century became the main enemy of Byzantium in the Balkans
- VII century, ending - VIII century, beginning - a period of political anarchy in Byzantium, caused by the struggle for the imperial throne between groups of feudal nobility. After the overthrow of the emperor Justinian II in 695, six emperors were replaced on the throne in more than two decades.
- 717 - the throne was seized by Leo III the Isaurian - the founder of the new Isaurian (Syrian) dynasty, which ruled Byzantium for a century and a half
- 718 - Unsuccessful Arab attempt to capture Constantinople. The turning point in the history of the country is the beginning of the birth of medieval Byzantium.
- 726-843 - religious strife in Byzantium. Struggle between iconoclasts and iconodules
Byzantium in the era of feudalism
- VIII century - in Byzantium, the number and importance of cities decreased, most coastal cities turned into small port villages, the urban population thinned out, but the rural population increased, metal tools became more expensive and became scarce, trade became poorer, but the role of barter increased significantly. These are all signs of the formation of feudalism in Byzantium
- 821-823 - the first anti-feudal uprising of peasants under the leadership of Thomas the Slav. The people were dissatisfied with the increase in taxes. The uprising took on a general character. The army of Thomas the Slav almost captured Constantinople. Only by bribing some of the supporters of Thomas and having received the support of the Bulgarian Khan Omortag, Emperor Michael II managed to defeat the rebels.
- 867 - Basil I the Macedonian became emperor of Byzantium, the first emperor of a new dynasty - Macedonian
She ruled Byzantium from 867 to 1056, which became the heyday for Byzantium. Its borders expanded almost to the limits of early Byzantium (1 million sq. km). She again belonged to Antioch and northern Syria, the army stood on the Euphrates, the fleet - off the coast of Sicily, protecting southern Italy from attempts by Arab invasions. The power of Byzantium was recognized by Dalmatia and Serbia, and in Transcaucasia by many rulers of Armenia and Georgia. The long struggle with Bulgaria ended with its transformation in 1018 into a Byzantine province. The population of Byzantium reached 20-24 million people, of which 10% were citizens. There were about 400 cities, with the number of inhabitants from 1-2 thousand to tens of thousands. The most famous was Constantinople
Magnificent palaces and temples, many flourishing trade and craft establishments, a bustling port, at the berths of which there were countless ships, a multilingual, colorfully dressed crowd of citizens. The streets of the capital were full of people. Most crowded around the numerous shops in the central part of the city, in the rows of Artopolion, where bakeries and bakeries were located, as well as shops selling vegetables and fish, cheese and various hot snacks. The common people usually ate vegetables, fish and fruits. Countless pubs and taverns sold wine, cakes and fish. These institutions were a kind of clubs for the poor in Constantinople.
Commoners huddled in tall and very narrow houses, in which there were dozens of tiny apartments or closets. But this housing was also expensive and inaccessible to many. The development of residential areas was carried out very randomly. The houses were literally piled on top of each other, which was one of the reasons for the huge destruction during the frequent earthquakes here. The crooked and very narrow streets were incredibly dirty, littered with garbage. High houses did not pass daylight. At night, the streets of Constantinople were practically not illuminated. And although there was a night guard, numerous gangs of robbers were in charge of the city. All city gates were locked at night, and people who did not have time to get through before they closed had to spend the night in the open.
Crowds of beggars huddled at the foot of proud columns and at the pedestals of beautiful statues were an integral part of the picture of the city. The beggars of Constantinople were a kind of corporation. Not every working person had their daily earnings.
- 907, 911, 940 - the first contacts and treaties of the emperors of Byzantium with the princes Kievan Rus Oleg, Igor, Princess Olga: Russian merchants were granted the right to trade duty-free in the possessions of Byzantium, they were given free food and everything necessary for life in Constantinople for six months, as well as supplies for the return journey. Igor took upon himself the obligation to defend the possessions of Byzantium in the Crimea, and the emperor promised to provide military assistance, if necessary, to the prince of Kiev
- 976 - Vasily II took the imperial throne
The reign of Vasily II, endowed with extraordinary perseverance, merciless determination, administrative and military talent, was the pinnacle of Byzantine statehood. 16 thousand Bulgarians blinded by his order, who brought him the nickname "Bulgarian Fighters" - a demonstration of the determination to mercilessly crack down on any opposition. The military successes of Byzantium under Basil were its last major successes.
- XI century - the international position of Byzantium worsened. From the north, the Byzantines began to push the Pechenegs, from the east - the Seljuk Turks. In the 60s of the XI century. Byzantine emperors several times undertook campaigns against the Seljuks, but failed to stop their onslaught. By the end of the XI century. almost all Byzantine possessions in Asia Minor were under the rule of the Seljuks. The Normans gained a foothold in northern Greece and the Peloponnese. From the north, waves of Pecheneg invasions rolled almost to the walls of Constantinople. The limits of the empire were inexorably shrinking, and the ring around its capital was gradually shrinking.
- 1054 - The Christian Church split into Western (Catholic) and Eastern (Orthodox). it was the most important event for the fate of Byzantium
- 1081, April 4 - Alexei Komnenos, the first emperor of the new dynasty, ascended the Byzantine throne. His descendants John II and Maiuel I were distinguished by military prowess and attention to state affairs. The dynasty was able to return power to the empire for almost a century, and to the capital - brilliance and splendor
The economy of Byzantium experienced an upsurge. In the XII century. it became completely feudal and gave more and more marketable products, expanded the volume of its export to Italy, where cities grew rapidly, in need of grain, wine, oil, vegetables and fruits. The volume of commodity-money relations increased in the XII century. 5 times compared to the 9th century. The Comnenos government weakened the monopoly of Constantinople. In large provincial centers, industries similar to those in Constantinople developed (Athens, Corinth, Nicaea, Smyrna, Ephesus). Privileges were granted to the Italian merchants, which in the first half of the 12th century stimulated the rise of production and trade, the crafts of many provincial centers
The death of Byzantium
- 1096, 1147 - the knights of the first and second crusade came to Constantinople. The emperors bought them off with great difficulty.
- 1182, May - Constantinople mob staged a Latin pogrom.
The townspeople burned and robbed the houses of the Venetians and Genoese, who competed with local merchants, and killed them without regard to age or gender. When part of the Italians made an attempt to escape on their ships in the harbor, they were destroyed by "Greek fire". Many Latins were burned alive in their own homes. Rich and prosperous quarters were turned into ruins. The Byzantines sacked the churches of the Latins, their charities and hospitals. Many clerics were also killed, including the papal legate. Those Italians who managed to leave Constantinople before the massacre began, in revenge, began to ravage the Byzantine cities and villages on the banks of the Bosphorus and on the Princes' Islands. They began to call on the Latin West for retribution everywhere.
All these events further intensified the enmity between Byzantium and the states of Western Europe.
- 1187 - Byzantium and Venice made an alliance. Byzantium granted Venice all the previous privileges and complete tax immunity. Relying on the fleet of Venice, Byzantium reduced its fleet to a minimum
- April 13, 1204 - Participants of the Fourth Crusade stormed Constantinople.
The city was looted. Its destruction was completed by fires that raged until autumn. The fires destroyed the rich trade and craft quarters and completely ruined the merchants and artisans of Constantinople. After this terrible disaster, the trade and craft corporations of the city lost their former importance, and Constantinople lost its exclusive place in world trade for a long time. Many architectural monuments and outstanding works of art perished.
The treasures of the temples made up a huge part of the booty of the crusaders. The Venetians removed from Constantinople many of the rarest works of art. The former splendor of Byzantine cathedrals after the era of the Crusades could only be seen in the churches of Venice. Repositories of the most valuable handwritten books - the center of Byzantine science and culture - fell into the hands of vandals, who made bivouac fires from scrolls. The works of ancient thinkers and scientists, religious books flew into the fire.
The catastrophe of 1204 sharply slowed down the development of Byzantine culture
The conquest of Constantinople by the crusaders marked the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. Several states arose on its ruins.
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The crusaders created the Latin Empire with its capital in Constantinople. It included lands along the shores of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, part of Thrace and a number of islands in the Aegean Sea.
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Venice got the northern suburbs of Constantinople and several cities on the coast of the Sea of Marmara
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the head of the Fourth Crusade, Boniface of Montferrat, became the head of the Thessalonian kingdom, created on the territory of Macedonia and Thessaly
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The Morean Principality arose in Morea
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The Empire of Trebizond formed on the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor
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The Despotate of Epirus appeared in the west of the Balkan Peninsula.
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In the northwestern part of Asia Minor, the Nicene Empire was formed - the most powerful among all the new states
- 1261, July 25 - the army of the Emperor of the Nicaean Empire Michael VIII Palaiologos captured Constantinople. The Latin Empire ceased to exist, and the Byzantine Empire was restored. But the territory of the state was reduced several times. She owned only part of Thrace and Macedonia, several islands of the Archipelago, certain areas of the Peloponnesian Peninsula and the northwestern part of Asia Minor. Byzantium did not regain its trading power either.
- 1274 - Desiring to strengthen the state, Michael supported the idea of a union with the Roman Church, in order, relying on the assistance of the pope, to establish an alliance with the Latin West. This caused a split in Byzantine society.
- XIV century - the Byzantine Empire was steadily going to ruin. Civil strife shook her, she suffered defeat after defeat in wars with external enemies. The Imperial Court is mired in intrigue. Even talked about the sunset appearance Constantinople “it was evident to everyone that the imperial palaces and chambers of the nobles lay in ruins and served as latrines for those walking by and sewers; as well as the majestic buildings of the patriarchy that surrounded great temple St. Sophia ... were destroyed or completely exterminated "
- XIII century, end - XIV century, beginning - a strong state of the Ottoman Turks arose in the northwestern part of Asia Minor
- XIV century, end - XV century first half - Turkish sultans from the Osman dynasty completely subjugated Asia Minor, captured almost all the possessions of the Byzantine Empire on the Balkan Peninsula. The power of the Byzantine emperors by that time extended only to Constantinople and insignificant territories around it. The emperors were forced to recognize themselves as vassals of the Turkish sultans
- 1452, autumn - the Turks occupied the last Byzantine cities - Mesimvria, Anichal, Visa, Silivria
- 1453 March - Constantinople is surrounded by the huge Turkish army of Sultan Mehmed
- 1453. May 28 - as a result of the assault of the Turks, Constantinople fell. The history of Byzantium is over
Dynasties of Byzantine emperors
- Dynasty of Constantine (306-364)
- Dynasty Valentinian-Theodosius (364-457)
- Dynasty of Lions (457-518)
- Justinian dynasty (518-602)
- Heraclius dynasty (610-717)
- Isaurian dynasty (717-802)
- Nicephorus dynasty (802-820)
- Phrygian dynasty (820-866)
- Macedonian dynasty (866-1059)
- Duk dynasty (1059-1081)
- Komnenos dynasty (1081-1185)
- Dynasty of Angels (1185-1204)
- Palaiologan dynasty (1259-1453)
The main military rivals of Byzantium
- Barbarians: Vandals, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Avars, Lombards
- Iranian kingdom
- Bulgarian kingdom
- Kingdom of Hungary
- Arab Caliphate
- Kievan Rus
- Pechenegs
- Seljuk Turks
- Ottoman Turks
What does Greek fire mean?
The invention of the Constantinopolitan architect Kalinnik (end of the 7th century) is an incendiary mixture of resin, sulfur, saltpeter, combustible oils. Fire was thrown from special copper pipes. It was impossible to put it out
*used books
Y. Petrosyan "The ancient city on the banks of the Bosphorus"
G. Kurbatov "History of Byzantium"
We do not recognize Byzantium in early Byzantine history with its praetors, prefects, patricians and provinces, but this recognition will become more and more as emperors acquire beards, consuls turn into hypats, and senators into synclitics.
background
The birth of Byzantium will not be clear without a return to the events of the 3rd century, when the most severe economic and political crisis broke out in the Roman Empire, which actually led to the collapse of the state. In 284, Diocletian came to power (like almost all emperors of the 3rd century, he was just a Roman officer of humble origin - his father was a slave) and took measures to decentralize power. First, in 286, he divided the empire into two parts, entrusting the administration of the West to his friend Maximian Herculius, while keeping the East for himself. Then, in 293, wanting to increase the stability of the system of government and ensure the turnover of power, he introduced a system of tetrarchy - a four-part government, which was carried out by two senior Augustus emperors and two junior Caesar emperors. Each part of the empire had an August and a Caesar (each of which had its own geographical area responsibility - for example, the Augustus of the West controlled Italy and Spain, and the Caesar of the West - Gaul and Britain). After 20 years, the Augusts were to transfer power to the Caesars, so that they would become Augusts and elect new Caesars. However, this system proved unviable, and after the abdication of Diocletian and Maximian in 305, the empire again plunged into an era of civil wars.
Birth of Byzantium
1. 312 - Battle of the Mulvian Bridge
After the abdication of Diocletian and Maximian, the supreme power passed to the former Caesars - Galerius and Constantius Chlorus, they became Augusts, but under them, contrary to expectations, neither the son of Constantius Constantine (later Emperor Constantine I the Great, considered the first emperor of Byzantium), nor Maximian's son Maxentius. Nevertheless, both of them did not leave imperial ambitions and from 306 to 312 alternately entered into a tactical alliance in order to jointly oppose other contenders for power (for example, Flavius Severus, appointed Caesar after the abdication of Diocletian), then, on the contrary, entered the struggle. The final victory of Constantine over Maxentius in the battle on the Milvian bridge across the Tiber River (now within the boundaries of Rome) meant the unification of the western part of the Roman Empire under the rule of Constantine. Twelve years later, in 324, as a result of another war (now with Licinius - Augustus and the ruler of the East of the empire, who was appointed by Galerius), Constantine united East and West.
The miniature in the center depicts the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. From the homily of Gregory the Theologian. 879-882 years
MS grec 510 /
The Battle of the Milvian Bridge in the Byzantine mind was associated with the idea of the birth of the Christian empire. This was facilitated, firstly, by the legend of the miraculous sign of the Cross, which Constantine saw in the sky before the battle - Eusebius of Caesarea tells about this (albeit in completely different ways). Eusebius of Caesarea(c. 260-340) - Greek historian, author of the first church history. and Lactants lactation(c. 250---325) - Latin writer, apologist for Christianity, author of the essay "On the Death of the Persecutors", dedicated to the events of the era of Diocletian., and secondly, the fact that two edicts were issued at about the same time Edict- normative act, decree. about religious freedom, legalized Christianity and equalized all religions in rights. And although the publication of edicts on religious freedom was not directly related to the fight against Maxentius (the first was published in April 311 by the emperor Galerius, and the second - already in February 313 in Milan by Constantine together with Licinius), the legend reflects intercom seemingly independent political steps of Constantine, who was the first to feel that state centralization is impossible without the consolidation of society, primarily in the sphere of worship.
However, under Constantine Christianity was only one of the candidates for the role of a consolidating religion. The emperor himself was for a long time an adherent of the cult of the Invincible Sun, and the time of his Christian baptism is still the subject of scientific disputes.
2. 325 - I Ecumenical Council
In 325 Constantine summoned representatives of the local churches to the city of Nicaea. Nicaea- now the city of Iznik in Northwestern Turkey. to resolve a dispute between Bishop Alexander of Alexandria and Arius, a presbyter of one of the Alexandrian churches, about whether Jesus Christ was created by God Opponents of the Arians briefly summarized their teaching thus: "There was [such a time] when [Christ] did not exist.". This meeting was the first Ecumenical Council - a meeting of representatives of all local churches, with the right to formulate doctrine, which will then be recognized by all local churches. It is impossible to say exactly how many bishops participated in the council, since its acts have not been preserved. Tradition calls the number 318. Be that as it may, it is possible to speak about the “ecumenical” nature of the cathedral only with reservations, since in total at that time there were more than 1,500 episcopal sees.. The First Ecumenical Council is a key stage in the institutionalization of Christianity as an imperial religion: its meetings were held not in the temple, but in the imperial palace, the cathedral was opened by Constantine I himself, and the closing was combined with grandiose celebrations on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of his reign.
First Council of Nicaea. Fresco from the monastery of Stavropoleos. Bucharest, 18th century
Wikimedia Commons
The Councils of Nicaea I and the Councils of Constantinople that followed it (meeting in 381) condemned the Arian doctrine about the created nature of Christ and the inequality of the hypostases in the Trinity, and the Apollinarian one, about the incomplete perception of human nature by Christ, and formulated the Nicene-Tsargrad Creed, which recognized Jesus Christ not created, but born (but at the same time eternal), but all three hypostases - possessing one nature. The creed was recognized as true, not subject to further doubt and discussion The words of the Nicene-Tsargrad Creed about Christ, which caused the most fierce disputes, in the Slavonic translation sound like this: Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, uncreated, consubstantial with the Father, Whom all was.”.
Never before has any direction of thought in Christianity been condemned by the fullness of the universal church and imperial power, and no theological school has been recognized as heresy. The era of the Ecumenical Councils that has begun is the era of the struggle between orthodoxy and heresy, which are in constant self- and mutual determination. At the same time, the same doctrine could alternately be recognized either as heresy or right faith, depending on the political situation (this was the case in the 5th century), but the very idea of the possibility and necessity of protecting orthodoxy and condemning heresy with the help of the state was questioned in Byzantium has never been set.
3. 330 - transfer of the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople
Although Rome always remained the cultural center of the empire, the Tetrarchs chose cities on the periphery as their capitals, from which it was more convenient for them to repel external attacks: Nicomedia Nicomedia- now Izmit (Turkey)., Sirmius Sirmium- now Sremska Mitrovica (Serbia)., Milan and Trier. During the reign of the West, Constantine I transferred his residence to Milan, then to Sirmium, then to Thessalonica. His rival Licinius also changed the capital, but in 324, when a war broke out between him and Constantine, the ancient city of Byzantium on the banks of the Bosphorus, also known by Herodotus, became his stronghold in Europe.
Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror and the Serpent Column. Miniature of Naqqash Osman from the manuscript "Khyuner-name" by Seyid Lokman. 1584-1588 years Wikimedia Commons
During the siege of Byzantium, and then in preparation for the decisive battle of Chrysopolis on the Asian coast of the strait, Constantine assessed the position of Byzantium and, having defeated Licinius, immediately began a program to renew the city, personally participating in the marking of the city walls. The city gradually took over the functions of the capital: a senate was established in it and many Roman senatorial families were forcibly transported closer to the senate. It was in Constantinople that during his lifetime Constantine ordered to rebuild a tomb for himself. Various curiosities of the ancient world were brought to the city, for example, the bronze Serpentine Column, created in the 5th century BC in honor of the victory over the Persians at Plataea Battle of Plataea(479 BC) — one of the most important battles of the Greco-Persian wars, as a result of which the land forces of the Achaemenid Empire were finally defeated..
The chronicler of the 6th century, John Malala, tells that on May 11, 330, Emperor Constantine appeared at the solemn ceremony of consecrating the city in a diadem - a symbol of the power of the Eastern despots, which his Roman predecessors avoided in every possible way. The shift in the political vector was symbolically embodied in the spatial displacement of the center of the empire from west to east, which, in turn, had a decisive influence on the formation of Byzantine culture: the transfer of the capital to territories that had been speaking Greek for a thousand years determined its Greek-speaking character, and Constantinople itself turned out to be in the center of the mental map of the Byzantine and identified with the entire empire.
4. 395 - division of the Roman Empire into Eastern and Western
Despite the fact that in 324 Constantine, having defeated Licinius, formally united the East and West of the empire, ties between its parts remained weak, and cultural differences grew. No more than ten bishops arrived at the First Ecumenical Council from the western provinces (out of about 300 participants); most of the arrivals were not able to understand Constantine's welcoming speech, which he delivered in Latin, and it had to be translated into Greek.
Half silicone. Flavius Odoacer on the obverse of a coin from Ravenna. 477 year Odoacer is depicted without the imperial diadem - with an uncovered head, a shock of hair and a mustache. Such an image is uncharacteristic for emperors and is considered "barbaric". The Trustees of the British Museum
The final division occurred in 395, when Emperor Theodosius I the Great, who for several months before his death became the sole ruler of East and West, divided the state between his sons Arcadius (East) and Honorius (West). However, formally the West still remained connected with the East, and at the very decline of the Western Roman Empire, in the late 460s, the Byzantine emperor Leo I, at the request of the Senate of Rome, made a last unsuccessful attempt to elevate his protege to the western throne. In 476, the German barbarian mercenary Odoacer deposed the last emperor of the Roman Empire, Romulus Augustulus, and sent the imperial insignia (symbols of power) to Constantinople. Thus, from the point of view of the legitimacy of power, parts of the empire were again united: the emperor Zeno, who ruled at that time in Constantinople, de jure became the sole head of the entire empire, and Odoacer, who received the title of patrician, ruled Italy only as his representative. However, in reality, this was no longer reflected in the real political map of the Mediterranean.
5. 451 - Chalcedon Cathedral
IV Ecumenical (Chalcedon) Council, convened for the final approval of the doctrine of the incarnation of Christ in a single hypostasis and two natures and the complete condemnation of Monophysitism Monophysitism(from the Greek μόνος - the only one and φύσις - nature) - the doctrine that Christ did not have a perfect human nature, since his divine nature, during the incarnation, replaced it or merged with it. The opponents of the Monophysites were called dyophysites (from the Greek δύο - two)., led to a deep schism that has not been overcome by the Christian church to this day. The central government continued to flirt with the Monophysites under the usurper Basiliscus in 475-476, and in the first half of the 6th century, under the emperors Anastasius I and Justinian I. Emperor Zeno in 482 tried to reconcile supporters and opponents of the Council of Chalcedon, without going into dogmatic issues . His conciliatory message, called the Enoticon, ensured peace in the East, but led to a 35-year split with Rome.The main support of the Monophysites were the eastern provinces - Egypt, Armenia and Syria. In these regions, religious uprisings regularly broke out and an independent Monophysite hierarchy and its own church institutions parallel to the Chalcedonian (that is, recognizing the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon) formed, gradually developing into independent, non-Chalcedonian churches that still exist today - Syro-Jacobite, Armenian and Coptic. The problem finally lost its relevance for Constantinople only in the 7th century, when, as a result of the Arab conquests, the Monophysite provinces were torn away from the empire.
Rise of early Byzantium
6. 537 - completion of the construction of the church of Hagia Sophia under Justinian
Justinian I. Fragment of the church mosaic San Vitale in Ravenna. 6th century
Wikimedia Commons
Under Justinian I (527-565), the Byzantine Empire reached its peak. The Code of Civil Law summarized the centuries-old development of Roman law. As a result of military campaigns in the West, it was possible to expand the borders of the empire, including the entire Mediterranean - North Africa, Italy, part of Spain, Sardinia, Corsica and Sicily. Sometimes people talk about the "Justinian Reconquista". Rome became part of the empire again. Justinian launched extensive construction throughout the empire, and in 537 the construction of a new Hagia Sophia in Constantinople was completed. According to legend, the plan of the temple was suggested personally to the emperor by an angel in a vision. Never again in Byzantium was a building of such a scale built: a grandiose temple, in the Byzantine ceremonial called the "Great Church", became the center of power of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.
The era of Justinian at the same time and finally breaks with the pagan past (in 529 the Academy of Athens was closed Athens Academy - philosophical school in Athens, founded by Plato in the 380s BC. e.) and establishes a line of succession with antiquity. Medieval culture opposes itself to early Christian culture, appropriating the achievements of antiquity at all levels - from literature to architecture, but at the same time discarding their religious (pagan) dimension.
Coming from the bottom, seeking to change the way of life of the empire, Justinian met with rejection from the old aristocracy. It is this attitude, and not the personal hatred of the historian for the emperor, that is reflected in the vicious pamphlet on Justinian and his wife Theodora.
7. 626 - Avaro-Slavic siege of Constantinople
The reign of Heraclius (610-641), celebrated in court panegyric literature as the new Hercules, accounted for the last foreign policy successes of early Byzantium. In 626, Heraclius and Patriarch Sergius, who carried out the direct defense of the city, managed to repel the Avar-Slavic siege of Constantinople (the words that open the akathist to the Mother of God tell precisely about this victory In the Slavic translation, they sound like this: “To the chosen Voivode, victorious, as if we had got rid of the evil ones, with thanksgiving, we will describe Thy servants, the Mother of God, but as if having an invincible power, free us from all troubles, let us call Ty: rejoice, Bride of the Bride.”), and at the turn of the 20-30s of the 7th century during the Persian campaign against the power of the Sassanids Sasanian Empire- a Persian state centered on the territory of present-day Iraq and Iran, which existed in the years 224-651. the provinces in the East lost a few years earlier were recaptured: Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt and Palestine. The Holy Cross stolen by the Persians was solemnly returned to Jerusalem in 630, on which the Savior died. During the solemn procession, Heraclius personally brought the Cross into the city and laid it in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Under Heraclius, the last rise before the cultural break of the Dark Ages is experienced by the scientific and philosophical Neoplatonic tradition, which comes directly from antiquity: a representative of the last survivor comes to Constantinople at the imperial invitation to teach. ancient school in Alexandria, Stephen of Alexandria.
Plate from a cross with images of a cherub (left) and the Byzantine emperor Heraclius with the Shahinshah of the Sassanids Khosrow II. Valley of the Meuse, 1160-70s Wikimedia Commons
All these successes were brought to naught by the Arab invasion, which wiped out the Sassanids from the face of the earth in a few decades and forever wrested the eastern provinces from Byzantium. Legends tell how the prophet Muhammad offered Heraclius to convert to Islam, but in the cultural memory of the Muslim peoples, Heraclius remained precisely a fighter against the emerging Islam, and not with the Persians. These wars (generally unsuccessful for Byzantium) are described in the 18th-century epic poem The Book of Heraclius, the oldest written monument in Swahili.
Dark Ages and Iconoclasm
8. 642 Arab conquest of Egypt
The first wave of Arab conquests in the Byzantine lands lasted eight years - from 634 to 642. As a result, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt were torn away from Byzantium. Having lost the most ancient Patriarchates of Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria, the Byzantine Church, in fact, lost its universal character and became equal to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which within the empire had no church institutions equal to it in status.
In addition, having lost the fertile territories that provided it with grain, the empire plunged into a deep internal crisis. In the middle of the 7th century, there was a reduction in monetary circulation and the decline of cities (both in Asia Minor and in the Balkans, which were no longer threatened by the Arabs, but by the Slavs) - they turned into either villages or medieval fortresses. Constantinople remained the only major urban center, but the atmosphere in the city changed and the ancient monuments brought there back in the 4th century began to inspire irrational fears in the townspeople.
Fragment of a papyrus letter in the Coptic language of the monks Victor and Psan. Thebes, Byzantine Egypt, circa 580-640 English language on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website. The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Constantinople also lost access to papyrus, which was produced exclusively in Egypt, which led to an increase in the cost of books and, as a result, a decline in education. Many have disappeared literary genres, the previously flourishing genre of history gave way to prophecy - having lost their cultural connection with the past, the Byzantines lost interest in their history and lived with a constant feeling of the end of the world. Arab conquests, which served as the reason for this breakdown of the worldview, were not reflected in the literature of their time, their events are conveyed to us by the monuments of later eras, and the new historical consciousness reflects only an atmosphere of horror, and not facts. The cultural decline lasted for more than a hundred years, the first signs of a revival occur at the very end of the 8th century.
9. 726/730 year According to 9th-century icon-worshipping historians, Leo III issued an edict of iconoclasm in 726. But modern scientists doubt the reliability of this information: most likely, in 726, talks about the possibility of iconoclastic measures began in Byzantine society, the first real steps date back to 730.- start of iconoclastic controversy
Saint Mokios of Amphipolis and the angel killing the iconoclasts. Miniature from the Psalter of Theodore of Caesarea. 1066 The British Library Board, Add MS 19352, f.94r
One of the manifestations of the cultural decline of the second half of the 7th century is the rapid growth of disordered practices of icon veneration (the most zealous, scraped off and ate the plaster from the icons of saints). This caused rejection among some of the clergy, who saw in this a threat of a return to paganism. Emperor Leo III the Isaurian (717-741) used this discontent to create a new consolidating ideology, taking the first iconoclastic steps in 726/730. But the most fierce disputes about icons fell on the reign of Constantine V Copronymus (741-775). He carried out the necessary military and administrative reforms, significantly strengthening the role of the professional imperial guard (tagm), and successfully contained the Bulgarian threat on the borders of the empire. The authority of both Constantine and Leo, who repelled the Arabs from the walls of Constantinople in 717-718, was very high, therefore, when in 815, after the teaching of iconodules was approved at the VII Ecumenical Council (787), a new round of war with the Bulgarians provoked a new political crisis, the imperial power returned to the iconoclastic policy.
The controversy over icons gave rise to two powerful strands of theological thought. Although the teachings of the iconoclasts are much less well known than those of their opponents, indirect evidence suggests that the thought of the iconoclasts of Emperor Constantine Copronymus and the Patriarch of Constantinople John the Grammarian (837-843) was no less deeply rooted in the Greek philosophical tradition than the thought of the iconoclast theologian John Damaskin and the head of the anti-iconoclastic monastic opposition Theodore the Studite. In parallel, the dispute developed in the ecclesiastical and political plane, the boundaries of the power of the emperor, patriarch, monasticism and episcopate were redefined.
10. 843 - The triumph of Orthodoxy
In 843, under Empress Theodora and Patriarch Methodius, the dogma of icon veneration was finally approved. It became possible thanks to mutual concessions, for example, the posthumous forgiveness of the iconoclast emperor Theophilus, whose widow was Theodora. The feast of the "Triumph of Orthodoxy", arranged by Theodora on this occasion, ended the era of the Ecumenical Councils and marked a new stage in the life of the Byzantine state and church. In the Orthodox tradition, he still manages to this day, and anathemas against iconoclasts, named by name, sound every year on the first Sunday of Great Lent. Since then, iconoclasm, which became the last heresy condemned by the entirety of the church, began to be mythologized in the historical memory of Byzantium.
Empress Theodora's daughters learn to read icons from their grandmother Feoktista. Miniature from the Madrid Codex "Chronicle" of John Skylitzes. XII-XIII centuries Wikimedia Commons
Back in 787, at the VII Ecumenical Council, the theory of the image was approved, according to which, in the words of Basil the Great, “the honor given to the image goes back to the prototype,” which means that worship of the icon is not an idol service. Now this theory has become the official teaching of the church - the creation and worship of sacred images from now on was not only allowed, but made a duty for a Christian. From that time on, an avalanche-like growth of artistic production began, the habitual appearance of an Eastern Christian church with iconic decoration took shape, the use of icons was integrated into liturgical practice and changed the course of worship.
In addition, the iconoclastic dispute stimulated the reading, copying and study of sources to which the opposing sides turned in search of arguments. Overcoming the cultural crisis is largely due to philological work in the preparation of church councils. And the invention of the minuscule Minuscule- writing in lowercase letters, which radically simplified and cheapened the production of books., perhaps, was due to the needs of the icon-worshipping opposition that existed under the conditions of “samizdat”: icon-worshippers had to quickly copy texts and did not have the means to create expensive uncial Uncial, or majuscule,- writing in capital letters. manuscripts.
Macedonian era
11. 863 - the beginning of the Photian schism
Dogmatic and liturgical differences gradually grew between the Roman and Eastern churches (primarily with regard to the Latin addition to the text of the Creed of the words about the procession of the Holy Spirit not only from the Father, but “and from the Son”, the so-called Filioque filioque- literally "and from the Son" (lat.).). The Patriarchate of Constantinople and the Pope fought for spheres of influence (primarily in Bulgaria, southern Italy and Sicily). The proclamation of Charlemagne as Emperor of the West in 800 dealt a severe blow to the political ideology of Byzantium: the Byzantine emperor found a rival in the person of the Carolingians.
The miraculous salvation of Constantinople by Photius with the help of the robe of the Mother of God. Fresco from the Dormition Knyaginin Monastery. Vladimir, 1648 Wikimedia Commons
Two opposing parties within the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the so-called Ignatians (supporters of Patriarch Ignatius, who was deposed in 858) and the Photians (supporters of Photius who was erected - not without scandal - instead of him), sought support in Rome. Pope Nicholas used this situation to assert the authority of the papal throne and expand his spheres of influence. In 863, he withdrew the signatures of his envoys who approved the erection of Photius, but Emperor Michael III considered that this was not enough to remove the patriarch, and in 867 Photius anathematized Pope Nicholas. In 869-870, a new council in Constantinople (to this day recognized by Catholics as the VIII Ecumenical) deposed Photius and restored Ignatius. However, after the death of Ignatius, Photius returned to the patriarchal throne for another nine years (877-886).
Formal reconciliation followed in 879-880, but the anti-Latin line laid down by Photius in the District Epistle to the episcopal thrones of the East formed the basis of a centuries-old polemical tradition, the echoes of which were heard during the rupture between the churches in, and during the discussion of the possibility of a church union in XIII and fifteenth centuries.
12. 895 - the creation of the oldest known codex of Plato
Manuscript page E. D. Clarke 39 with the writings of Plato. 895 The rewriting of the tetralogy was commissioned by Aretha of Caesarea for 21 gold coins. It is assumed that the scholia (marginal comments) were left by Aretha himself. At the end of the 9th century, there is a new discovery of the ancient heritage in Byzantine culture. A circle developed around Patriarch Photius, which included his disciples: Emperor Leo VI the Wise, Bishop Aref of Caesarea and other philosophers and scientists. They copied, studied and commented on the works of ancient Greek authors. The oldest and most authoritative list of Plato's writings (it is kept under the cipher E. D. Clarke 39 in the Bodleian Library Oxford University) was created precisely at this time by order of Arefa.
Among the texts that interested the scholars of the era, especially high-ranking church hierarchs, there were also pagan works. Aretha ordered copies of the works of Aristotle, Aelius Aristides, Euclid, Homer, Lucian and Marcus Aurelius, and Patriarch Photius included in his Myriobiblion "Myriobiblion"(literally "Ten thousand books") - a review of the books read by Photius, which, however, in reality were not 10 thousand, but only 279. annotations to Hellenistic novels, evaluating not their seemingly anti-Christian content, but the style and manner of writing, and at the same time creating a new terminological apparatus of literary criticism, different from that used by ancient grammarians. Leo VI himself created not only solemn speeches on church holidays, which he personally delivered (often improvising) after services, but also wrote Anacreontic poetry in the ancient Greek manner. And the nickname Wise is associated with the collection of poetic prophecies attributed to him about the fall and reconquest of Constantinople, which were remembered back in the 17th century in Russia, when the Greeks tried to persuade Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich to campaign against the Ottoman Empire.
The era of Photius and Leo VI the Wise opens the period of the Macedonian Renaissance (named after the ruling dynasty) in Byzantium, which is also known as the era of encyclopedism or the first Byzantine humanism.
13. 952 - completion of work on the treatise "On the management of the empire"
Christ blesses Emperor Constantine VII. Carved panel. 945
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Under the patronage of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (913-959), a large-scale project was implemented to codify the knowledge of the Byzantines in all areas of human life. The measure of Constantine's direct participation cannot always be determined with accuracy, however, the personal interest and literary ambitions of the emperor, who knew from childhood that he was not destined to rule, and was forced to share the throne with a co-ruler for most of his life, are beyond doubt. By order of Constantine, the official history of the 9th century was written (the so-called Successor of Theophanes), information was collected about the peoples and lands adjacent to Byzantium (“On the management of the empire”), on the geography and history of the regions of the empire (“On the themes Fema- Byzantine military-administrative district.”), about agriculture (“Geoponics”), about the organization of military campaigns and embassies, and about court ceremonial (“On the ceremonies of the Byzantine court”). At the same time, church life was regulated: the Synaxarion and the Typicon were created. great church, defining the annual order of commemoration of saints and holding church services, and a few decades later (about 980), Simeon Metaphrastus embarks on a large-scale project to unify hagiographic literature. Around the same time, a comprehensive encyclopedic dictionary of the Court was compiled, including about 30 thousand entries. But the largest encyclopedia of Constantine is an anthology of information from ancient and early Byzantine authors about all spheres of life, conventionally called "Excerpts" It is known that this encyclopedia included 53 sections. Only the section “On Embassies” has reached its full extent, and partially – “On Virtues and Vices”, “On Conspiracies against Emperors”, and “On Opinions”. Among the missing chapters: “On the peoples”, “On the succession of emperors”, “On who invented what”, “On Caesars”, “On exploits”, “On settlements”, “On hunting”, “On messages”, “ About speeches, About marriages, About victory, About defeat, About strategies, About morals, About miracles, About battles, About inscriptions, About public administration”, “On Church Affairs”, “On Expression”, “On the Coronation of Emperors”, “On the Death (Deposition) of Emperors”, “On Fines”, “On Holidays”, “On Predictions”, “On Ranks”, “On cause of wars”, “On sieges”, “On fortresses”..
The nickname Porphyrogenitus was given to the children of reigning emperors, who were born in the Crimson Chamber of the Grand Palace in Constantinople. Constantine VII, son of Leo VI the Wise from his fourth marriage, was indeed born in this chamber, but formally was illegitimate. Apparently, the nickname was to emphasize his rights to the throne. His father made him his co-ruler, and after his death, the young Constantine ruled for six years under the tutelage of regents. In 919, under the pretext of protecting Constantine from the rebels, the military leader Roman I Lekapenus usurped power, he intermarried with the Macedonian dynasty, marrying his daughter to Constantine, and then was crowned co-ruler. By the time the independent reign began, Constantine had been formally considered emperor for more than 30 years, and he himself was almost 40.
14. 1018 - the conquest of the Bulgarian kingdom
Angels lay the imperial crown on Vasily II. Miniature from Basil's Psalter, Marchian Library. 11th century Ms. gr. 17 / Biblioteca Marciana
The reign of Basil II the Bulgar Slayers (976-1025) is the time of an unprecedented expansion of the church and political influence of Byzantium on neighboring countries: the so-called second (final) baptism of Russia takes place (the first, according to legend, took place in the 860s - when the princes Askold and Dir they allegedly were baptized with the boyars in Kyiv, where Patriarch Photius sent a bishop specially for this); in 1018, the conquest of the Bulgarian kingdom leads to the liquidation of the autonomous Bulgarian Patriarchate, which had existed for almost 100 years, and the establishment of the semi-independent Archdiocese of Ohrid in its place; as a result of Armenian campaigns, Byzantine possessions in the East were expanding.
In domestic politics Basil was forced to take tough measures to limit the influence of large landowning clans, who actually formed their own armies in the 970-980s during the civil wars that challenged Basil's power. He tried by harsh measures to stop the enrichment of large landowners (the so-called dinats Dinat ( from the Greek δυνατός) - strong, powerful.), in some cases even resorting to direct land confiscation. But this brought only a temporary effect, centralization in the administrative and military spheres neutralized powerful rivals, but in the long run made the empire vulnerable to new threats - the Normans, Seljuks and Pechenegs. The Macedonian dynasty, which ruled for more than a century and a half, formally ended only in 1056, but in reality, already in the 1020s and 30s, people from bureaucratic families and influential clans gained real power.
The descendants awarded Vasily with the nickname Bulgar Slayer for cruelty in the wars with the Bulgarians. For example, after winning the decisive battle near Mount Belasitsa in 1014, he ordered 14,000 captives to be blinded at once. When exactly this nickname originated is not known. It is certain that this happened before the end of the 12th century, when, according to the 13th century historian George Acropolitan, the Bulgarian Tsar Kaloyan (1197-1207) began to ravage the Byzantine cities in the Balkans, proudly calling himself a Romeo fighter and thereby opposing himself to Basil.
Crisis of the 11th century
15. 1071 - Battle of Manzikert
Battle of Manzikert. Miniature from the book "On the misfortunes of famous people" Boccaccio. 15th century
Bibliothèque nationale de France
The political crisis that began after the death of Basil II continued in the middle of the 11th century: clans continued to compete, dynasties constantly replaced each other - from 1028 to 1081, 11 emperors changed on the Byzantine throne, there was no such frequency even at the turn of the 7th-8th centuries . From the outside, Pechenegs and Seljuk Turks pressed on Byzantium The power of the Seljuk Turks in just a few decades in the 11th century conquered the territories of modern Iran, Iraq, Armenia, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan and became the main threat to Byzantium in the East.- the latter, having won the battle of Manzikert in 1071 Manzikert- now the small town of Malazgirt on the easternmost tip of Turkey near Lake Van., deprived the empire of most of its territories in Asia Minor. No less painful for Byzantium was the full-scale rupture of church relations with Rome in 1054, later called the Great Schism. Schism(from the Greek σχίζμα) - gap., because of which Byzantium finally lost ecclesiastical influence in Italy. However, contemporaries almost did not notice this event and did not attach due importance to it.
However, it was precisely this era of political instability, the fragility of social boundaries and, as a result, high social mobility that gave rise to the figure of Michael Psellos, unique even for Byzantium, an erudite and official who took an active part in the enthronement of emperors (his central work, Chronography, is very autobiographical) , thought about the most complex theological and philosophical issues, studied the pagan Chaldean oracles, created works in all conceivable genres - from literary criticism to hagiography. The situation of intellectual freedom gave impetus to a new typical Byzantine version of Neoplatonism: in the title of "hypata of philosophers" Ipat philosophers- in fact, the main philosopher of the empire, the head of the philosophical school in Constantinople. Psellus was replaced by John Italus, who studied not only Plato and Aristotle, but also such philosophers as Ammonius, Philopon, Porphyry and Proclus and, at least according to his opponents, taught about the transmigration of souls and the immortality of ideas.
Komnenoska revival
16. 1081 - coming to power of Alexei I Komnenos
Christ blesses Emperor Alexei I Komnenos. Miniature from "Dogmatic Panoply" by Euthymius Zigaben. 12th century In 1081, as a result of a compromise with the Duk, Melissene and Palaiologoi clans, the Komnenos family came to power. It gradually monopolized all state power and, thanks to complex dynastic marriages, absorbed former rivals. Beginning with Alexios I Comnenus (1081-1118), the aristocratization of Byzantine society took place, social mobility was reduced, intellectual freedoms were curtailed, and imperial power actively intervened in the spiritual sphere. The beginning of this process is marked by the church-state condemnation of John Ital for "Palatonic ideas" and paganism in 1082. Then follows the condemnation of Leo of Chalcedon, who opposed the confiscation of church property to cover military needs (at that time Byzantium was at war with the Sicilian Normans and Pechenegs) and almost accused Alexei of iconoclasm. Massacres against the Bogomils take place Bogomilstvo- a doctrine that arose in the Balkans in the 10th century, in many respects ascending to the religion of the Manichaeans. According to the Bogomils, the physical world was created by Satan cast down from heaven. The human body was also his creation, but the soul is still the gift of the good God. The Bogomils did not recognize the institution of the church and often opposed the secular authorities, raising numerous uprisings., one of them, Basil, was even burned at the stake - a unique phenomenon for Byzantine practice. In 1117, the commentator of Aristotle, Eustratius of Nicaea, appears before the court on charges of heresy.
Meanwhile, contemporaries and immediate descendants remembered Alexei I rather as a ruler who was successful in his foreign policy: he managed to conclude an alliance with the crusaders and inflict a sensitive blow on the Seljuks in Asia Minor.
In the satire "Timarion" the narration is conducted on behalf of the hero who made a journey to the afterlife. In his story, he also mentions John Itala, who wanted to take part in the conversation of ancient Greek philosophers, but was rejected by them: “I also witnessed how Pythagoras sharply pushed away John Itala, who wanted to join this community of sages. “Scum,” he said, “having put on a Galilean robe, which they call divine holy robes, in other words, having been baptized, you seek to communicate with us, whose life was given to science and knowledge? Either throw off this vulgar dress, or leave our brotherhood right now! ”” (translated by S. V. Polyakova, N. V. Felenkovskaya).
17. 1143 - coming to power of Manuel I Comnenus
The trends that emerged under Alexei I were developed under Manuel I Comnenus (1143-1180). He sought to establish personal control over the church life of the empire, sought to unify theological thought, and he himself took part in church disputes. One of the questions in which Manuel wanted to have his say was the following: what hypostases of the Trinity accept the sacrifice during the Eucharist - only God the Father or both the Son and the Holy Spirit? If the second answer is correct (and this is exactly what was decided at the council of 1156-1157), then the same Son will be both the one who is sacrificed and the one who receives it.
Manuel's foreign policy was marked by failures in the East (the most terrible was the defeat of the Byzantines at Myriokefal in 1176 at the hands of the Seljuks) and attempts at diplomatic rapprochement with the West. Manuel saw the ultimate goal of Western policy as unification with Rome based on the recognition of the supreme authority of a single Roman emperor, which Manuel himself was to become, and the unification of churches that were officially divided in. However, this project was not implemented.
In the era of Manuel, literary creativity becomes a profession, literary circles arise with their own artistic fashion, elements of the folk language penetrate into court aristocratic literature (they can be found in the works of the poet Theodore Prodrom or the chronicler Constantine Manasseh), the genre of Byzantine love story expanding the arsenal means of expression and the measure of the author's self-reflection is growing.
Sunset of Byzantium
18. 1204 - the fall of Constantinople at the hands of the crusaders
During the reign of Andronicus I Komnenos (1183-1185) there was a political crisis: he pursued a populist policy (reduced taxes, severed relations with the West and severely cracked down on corrupt officials), which restored a significant part of the elite against him and aggravated the foreign policy position of the empire.
Crusaders attack Constantinople. Miniature from the chronicle of the Conquest of Constantinople by Geoffroy de Villehardouin. Approximately 1330, Villardouin was one of the leaders of the campaign. Bibliothèque nationale de France
An attempt to establish a new dynasty of Angels did not bear fruit, the society was deconsolidated. To this were added failures on the periphery of the empire: an uprising rose in Bulgaria; the crusaders captured Cyprus; Sicilian Normans ravaged Thessalonica. The struggle between pretenders to the throne within the family of Angels gave the European countries a formal reason to intervene. On April 12, 1204, members of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople. We read the most vivid artistic description of these events in the "History" by Nikita Choniates and the postmodern novel "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco, who sometimes literally copies the pages of Choniates.
On the ruins of the former empire, several states arose under Venetian rule, only to a small extent inheriting the Byzantine state institutions. The Latin empire, centered in Constantinople, was rather a feudal formation of the Western European type, and the duchies and kingdoms that arose in Thessalonica, Athens and the Peloponnese had the same character.
Andronicus was one of the most eccentric rulers of the empire. Nikita Choniates says that he ordered to create in one of the churches of the capital his portrait in the guise of a poor farmer in high boots and with a scythe in his hand. There were also legends about the bestial cruelty of Andronicus. He arranged public burnings of his opponents at the hippodrome, during which the executioners pushed the victim into the fire with sharp peaks, and who dared to condemn his cruelty, the reader of Hagia Sophia George Disipat threatened to fry on a spit and send to his wife instead of food.
19. 1261 - the reconquest of Constantinople
The loss of Constantinople led to the emergence of three Greek states that equally claimed to be the full heirs of Byzantium: the Nicaean Empire in northwestern Asia Minor under the rule of the Laskar dynasty; The Empire of Trebizond in the northeastern part of the Black Sea coast of Asia Minor, where the descendants of the Komnenos settled - the Great Komnenos, who took the title of "emperors of the Romans", and the Kingdom of Epirus in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula with the dynasty of Angels. The revival of the Byzantine Empire in 1261 took place on the basis of the Nicaean Empire, which pushed aside competitors and skillfully used the help of the German emperor and the Genoese in the fight against the Venetians. As a result, the Latin emperor and patriarch fled, and Michael VIII Palaiologos occupied Constantinople, was re-crowned and proclaimed "the new Constantine."
In his policy, the founder of the new dynasty tried to reach a compromise with the Western powers, and in 1274 he even entered into a church union with Rome, which set the Greek episcopate and the Constantinopolitan elite against him.
Despite the fact that the empire was formally revived, its culture lost its former “Constantinopolecentricity”: the Palaiologians were forced to put up with the presence of the Venetians in the Balkans and the significant autonomy of Trebizond, whose rulers formally renounced the title of “Roman emperors”, but in reality did not leave imperial ambitions.
A vivid example of the imperial ambitions of Trebizond is the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia of the Wisdom of God, built there in the middle of the 13th century and still making a strong impression today. This temple simultaneously contrasted Trebizond with Constantinople with its Hagia Sophia, and at the symbolic level turned Trebizond into a new Constantinople.
20. 1351 - approval of the teachings of Gregory Palamas
Saint Gregory Palamas. Icon of the master of Northern Greece. Early 15th century
The second quarter of the 14th century saw the beginning of the Palamite controversy. St. Gregory Palamas (1296-1357) was an original thinker who developed the controversial doctrine of the difference in God between the divine essence (with which man can neither unite nor cognize it) and uncreated divine energies (with which connection is possible) and defended the possibility contemplation through the "intelligent feeling" of the Divine light, revealed, according to the Gospels, to the apostles during the transfiguration of Christ For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, this light is described as follows: “After six days, Jesus took Peter, James and John, his brother, and brought them up to a high mountain alone, and was transformed before them: and His face shone like the sun, and his clothes They became as white as the light” (Matt. 17:1-2)..
In the 40s and 50s of the XIV century, the theological dispute was closely intertwined with political confrontation: Palamas, his supporters (Patriarchs Kallistos I and Philotheus Kokkinos, Emperor John VI Kantakuzen) and opponents (later converted to Catholicism, the philosopher Barlaam of Calabria and his followers Gregory Akindin, Patriarch John IV Kalek, philosopher and writer Nicephorus Gregory) alternately won tactical victories, then suffered defeat.
The Council of 1351, which approved the victory of Palamas, nevertheless did not put an end to the dispute, the echoes of which were heard in the 15th century, but forever closed the way for the anti-Palamites to the highest church and state power. Some researchers following Igor Medvedev I. P. Medvedev. Byzantine humanism of the XIV-XV centuries. SPb., 1997. they see in the thought of the anti-Palamites, primarily Nikifor Grigora, tendencies close to the ideas of the Italian humanists. Humanistic ideas were even more fully reflected in the work of the Neoplatonist and ideologist of the pagan renewal of Byzantium, Georgy Gemist Plifon, whose works were destroyed by the official church.
Even in serious scholarly literature one can sometimes see that the words "(anti)palamites" and "(anti)hesychasts" are used interchangeably. This is not entirely true. Hesychasm (from the Greek ἡσυχία [hesychia] - silence) as a hermit prayer practice, which makes it possible to directly experience communication with God, was substantiated in the works of theologians of earlier eras, for example, Simeon the New Theologian in the X-XI centuries.
21. 1439 - Ferrara-Florence Union
Union of Florence by Pope Eugene IV. 1439 Compiled in two languages - Latin and Greek. British Library Board/Bridgeman Images/Fotodom
By the beginning of the 15th century, it became clear that the Ottoman military threat called into question the very existence of the empire. Byzantine diplomacy actively sought support in the West, negotiations were underway on the unification of churches in exchange for military assistance from Rome. In the 1430s, a fundamental decision on unification was made, but the venue of the cathedral (on Byzantine or Italian territory) and its status (whether it would be designated as “unifying” in advance) became the subject of bargaining. In the end, the meetings took place in Italy - first in Ferrara, then in Florence and in Rome. In June 1439, the Ferrara-Florence Union was signed. This meant that formally the Byzantine Church recognized the correctness of the Catholics in all respects. contentious issues, including on the issue. But the union did not find support from the Byzantine episcopate (Bishop Mark Eugenicus became the head of its opponents), which led to the coexistence in Constantinople of two parallel hierarchies - Uniate and Orthodox. 14 years later, immediately after the fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans decided to rely on the anti-Uniates and installed a follower of Mark Eugenicus, Gennady Scholarius, as patriarch, but formally the union was abolished only in 1484.
If in the history of the church the union remained only a short-lived failed experiment, then its trace in the history of culture is much more significant. Figures like Bessarion of Nicaea, a disciple of the neo-pagan Plethon, a Uniate metropolitan, and then a cardinal and titular Latin patriarch of Constantinople, played a key role in the transmission of Byzantine (and ancient) culture to the West. Vissarion, whose epitaph contains the words: “Through your labors, Greece moved to Rome,” translated Greek classical authors into Latin, patronized Greek emigrant intellectuals, and donated his library to Venice, which included more than 700 manuscripts (at that time the most extensive private library in Europe), which became the basis of the Library of St. Mark.
The Ottoman state (named after the first ruler Osman I) arose in 1299 on the ruins of the Seljuk Sultanate in Anatolia and during the 14th century increased its expansion in Asia Minor and the Balkans. A brief respite for Byzantium was given by the confrontation between the Ottomans and the troops of Tamerlane at the turn of the 14th-15th centuries, but with the coming to power of Mehmed I in 1413, the Ottomans again began to threaten Constantinople.
22. 1453 - the fall of the Byzantine Empire
Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror. Painting by Gentile Bellini. 1480
Wikimedia Commons
The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, made unsuccessful attempts to repel the Ottoman threat. By the early 1450s, Byzantium retained only a small region in the vicinity of Constantinople (Trapezund was actually independent from Constantinople), and the Ottomans controlled both most of Anatolia and the Balkans (Thessalonica fell in 1430, Peloponnese was devastated in 1446). In search of allies, the emperor turned to Venice, Aragon, Dubrovnik, Hungary, the Genoese, the Pope, but real help (and very limited) was offered only by the Venetians and Rome. In the spring of 1453, the battle for the city began, on May 29 Constantinople fell, and Constantine XI died in battle. About his death, the circumstances of which are not known to scientists, many incredible stories were composed; in Greek folk culture for many centuries there was a legend that the last Byzantine king was turned into marble by an angel and now rests in a secret cave at the Golden Gate, but is about to wake up and drive out the Ottomans.
Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror did not break the line of succession with Byzantium, but inherited the title of Roman Emperor, supported the Greek Church, and stimulated the development of Greek culture. The time of his reign is marked by projects that at first glance seem fantastic. The Greek-Italian Catholic humanist George of Trebizond wrote about building a world empire led by Mehmed, in which Islam and Christianity would unite into one religion. And the historian Mikhail Kritovul created a story in praise of Mehmed - a typical Byzantine panegyric with all the obligatory rhetoric, but in honor of the Muslim ruler, who, nevertheless, is not called the sultan, but in the Byzantine manner - the basil.
