Defending Byzantium

Al-Ahram ^ | 20 - 26 November 2008, Issue No. 923 | David Tresilian

[SunkenCiv]

Lasting some 11 centuries from the foundation of the city of Constantinople, today's Istanbul, on the site of the Greek city of Byzantium by the Roman emperor Constantine in 330 CE to its final defeat at the hands of the Ottomans in 1453, at its height the Byzantine Empire took in the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and stretched from Anatolia and the Balkans to Egypt and north Africa. It always styled itself the heir of the Roman Empire and of classical civilisation as a whole.

Examples of Byzantine architecture can still be seen in Istanbul in the shape of the Hagia Sophia, the church of the holy wisdom, built by the emperor Justinian in the 6th century CE, and in the ruins of the Byzantine city walls. Memories of the empire are scattered across the Mediterranean, from the mosaics of the Byzantine emperors in the churches of the Italian coastal city of Ravenna to the traditions continued by the monks of St. Catherine's Monastery in the Egyptian Sinai.

However, Byzantium has sometimes suffered from a bad press, at least in western Europe, and this is summed up in views expressed by the 18th- century English historian Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "In the revolution of ten centuries" of Byzantine history, Gibbon wrote, "not a single discovery was made to exalt the dignity or promote the happiness of mankind."

...Anyone interested in the history of the eastern Mediterranean, of Christianity, or of relations between Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman Turkish civilisations can not fail to learn from visiting this exhibition.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks. My pleasure. :’)

[SunkenCiv]

:’) There’s a quarter of the city called Stamboul (something like that), I’ve often wondered what the connection is.

[SunkenCiv]

Byzantium by Steve Lawhead

[neb52]

Their link is from the marriage of the “first” Tsar Ivan III or Ivan the Great. He married Sophia Paleologue who was the niece of Emperor Constantine XI, last Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire. She eventually convinced Ivan to style his court after the Byzantium fashion and many of the palaces and government buildings still in use today were built by him.

[Scothia]

I read a great book, entitled, “Byzantium,” by Stephen Lawhead. If you enjoy historical fiction, I would recommend it.

One of my favorites! Think I'll read it again. Thanks for the reminder.

[Lucius Cornelius Sulla]

If it wasn’t for the Later Roman (or Byzantine) Empire, it is a virtual certainty that Europe would have been absorbed into Islam. It took 400 years from the Arab invasion of the Holy land uintil the Muslims first pushed the Byzantines back into Asia Minor, and 300 more years until they first entered Eastern Europe. The final extinction of the Empire took another 150 years. If Islam had arrived in the Balkans at the same time as the Moors were entering France from Spain, Europe would have died before Charlemagne.