CULTURE OF BYZANTINE

[edit] Economy
For more details on this topic, see Byzantine economy.
The Byzantine economy was among the most advanced in Europe and the Mediterranean for many centuries. Europe, in particular, was unable to match Byzantine economic strength until late in the Middle Ages. Constantinople was a prime hub in a trading network that at various times extended across nearly all of Eurasia and North Africa, in particular being the primary western terminus of the famous silk road. Some scholars argue that, up until the arrival of the Arabs in the 7th century, the Empire had the most powerful economy in the world. The Arab conquests, however, would represent a substantial reversal of fortunes contributing to a period of decline and stagnation. Constantine V's reforms (c. 765) marked the beginning of a revival that continued until 1204. From the 10th century until the end of the 12th, the Byzantine Empire projected an image of luxury, and the travelers were impressed by the wealth accumulated in the capital. All this changed with the arrival of the Fourth Crusade, which was an economic catastrophe.[128] The Palaiologoi tried to revive the economy, but the late Byzantine state would not gain full control of either the foreign or domestic economic forces. Gradually, it also lost its influence on the modalities of trade and the price mechanisms, and its control over the outflow of precious metals and, according to some scholars, even over the minting of coins.[129]

Solidus of Justinian II, second reign, after 705
One of the economic foundations of the empire was trade. Textiles must have been by far the most important item of export; silks were certainly imported into Egypt, and appeared also in Bulgaria, and the West.[130] The state strictly controlled both the internal and the international trade, and retained the monopoly of issuing coinage. The government exercised formal control over interest rates, and set the parameters for the activity of the guilds and corporations, in which it had a special interest. The emperor and its officials intervened at times of crisis to ensure the provisioning of the capital, and to keep down the price of cereals. Finally, the government often collected part of the surplus through taxation, and put it back into circulation, through redistribution in the form of salaries to state officials, or in the form of investment in public works.[131]

[edit] Science, Medicine, Law

The frontispiece of the Vienna Dioscurides, which shows a set of seven famous physicians.
For more details on this topic, see Byzantine science.
See also: Byzantine medicine and Byzantine law
The writings of Classical antiquity never ceased to be cultivated in Byzantium. Therefore, Byzantine science was in every period closely connected with ancient philosophy, and metaphysics.[132] Although at various times the Byzantines made magnificent achievements in the application of the sciences (notably in the construction of the Hagia Sophia), after the 6th century Byzantine scholars made few novel contributions to science in terms of developing new theories or extending the ideas of classical authors.[133] Scholarship particularly lagged during the dark years of plague and the Arab conquests, but then during the so-called Byzantine Renaissance at the end of the first millennium Byzantine scholars re-asserted themselves becoming experts in the scientific developments of the Arabs and Persians, particularly in astronomy and mathematics.[134]
In the final century of the Empire, Byzantine grammarians were those principally responsible for carrying, in person and in writing, ancient Greek grammatical and literary studies to early Renaissance Italy.[135] During this period astronomy and other mathematical sciences were taught in Trebizond; medicine attracted the interest of almost all scholars.[136]
In the field of law, Justinian I's reforms had a clear effect on the evolution of jurisprudence, and Leo III's Ecloga influenced the formation of legal institutions in the Slav world.[137]

[edit] Religion
Further information: Eastern Orthodox Church

As a symbol and expression of the universal prestige of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, Justinian built the Church of the Holy Wisdom of God, Hagia Sophia, which was completed in the short period of four and a half years (532–537).
According to Joseph Raya, "Byzantine culture and Orthodoxy are one and the same."[138] The survival of the Empire in the East assured an active role of the Emperor in the affairs of the Church. The Byzantine state inherited from pagan times the administrative, and financial routine of administering religious affairs, and this routine was applied to the Christian Church. Following the pattern set by Eusebius of Caesarea, the Byzantines thought of the Emperor as a representative or messenger of Christ, responsible particularly for the propagation of Christianity among pagans, and for the "externals" of the religion, such as administration and finances. The imperial role, however, in the affairs of the Church never developed into a fixed, legally defined system.[139]
With the decline of Rome, and internal dissension in the other Eastern patriarchates, the church of Constantinople became, between the 6th and 11th centuries, the richest and most influential center of Christendom.[140] Even when the Empire was reduced to only a shadow of itself, the Church, as an institution, had never exercised so much influence both inside and outside of the imperial frontiers. As George Ostrogorsky points out:
The Patriarchate of Constantinople remained the center of the Orthodox world, with subordinate metropolitan sees and archbishoprics in the territory of Asia Minor and the Balkans, now lost to Byzantium, as well as in Caucasus, Russia and Lithuania. The Church remained the most stable element in the Byzantine Empire.[141]

[edit] Art and literature
Main articles: Byzantine art and Byzantine literature
See also: Byzantine music and Byzantine dress

Miniatures of the 6th-century Rabula Gospel display the more abstract and symbolic nature of Byzantine art.
Architecture, painting, and other visual arts produced in the Byzantine Empire and in various areas that came under its influence. Byzantine art is almost entirely concerned with religious expression and, more specifically, with the impersonal translation of carefully controlled church theology into artistic terms. Byzantine forms were spread by trade and conquest to Italy and Sicily, where they persisted in modified form through the 12th century, and became formative influences on Italian Renaissance art. By means of the expansion of the Eastern Orthodox church, Byzantine forms spread to eastern European centers, particularly Russia.[142] Influences from Byzantine architecture, particularly in religious buildings, can be found in diverse regions from Egypt and Arabia to Russia and Romania.
In Byzantine literature, therefore, four different cultural elements are to be reckoned with: the Greek, the Christian, the Roman, and the Oriental. Byzantine literature is often classified in five groups: historians and annalists, encyclopedists (Patriarch Photios, Michael Psellos, and Michael Choniates are regarded as the greatest encyclopedists of Byzantium) and essayists, and writers of secular poetry (The only genuine heroic epic of the Byzantines is the Digenis Acritas). The remaining two groups include the new literary species: ecclesiastical and theological literature, and popular poetry. Of the approximately two to three thousand volumes of Byzantine literature that survive, only three hundred and thirty consist of secular poetry, history, science and pseudo-science.[143] While the most flourishing period of the secular literature of Byzantium runs from the ninth to the twelfth century, its religious literature (sermons, liturgical books and poetry, theology, devotional treatises etc.) developed much earlier with Romanos the Melodist being its most prominent representative.[144]

[edit] Government and bureaucracy

The themes c. 650

The themes c. 950
See also: Byzantine aristocracy and bureaucracy
In the Byzantine state, the emperor was the sole and absolute ruler, and his power was regarded as having divine origin.[126] By the end of the 8th century, a civil administration focused on the court was formed as part of a large-scale consolidation of power in the capital (the rise to pre-eminence of the position of sakellarios is related to this change).[145] The most important reform of this period is the creation of themes, where civil and military administration is exercised by one person, the strategos.[126]
Despite the occasionally derogatory use of the word "Byzantine", the Byzantine bureaucracy had a distinct ability for reinventing itself in accordance with the Empire's situation. The Byzantine system of titulature and precedence makes the imperial administration look like an ordered bureaucracy to modern observers. Officials were arranged in strict order around the emperor, and depended upon the imperial will for their ranks. There were also actual administrative jobs, but authority could be vested in individuals rather than offices.[146] In the 8th and 9th centuries civil service constituted the clearest path to aristocratic status, but, starting in the 9th century, the civil aristocracy was rivaled by an aristocracy of nobility. According to some studies of Byzantine government, 11th-century politics were dominated by competition between the civil and the military aristocracy. During this period, Alexios I undertook important administrative reforms, including the creation of new courtly dignities and offices.[147]

[edit] Diplomacy
For more details on this topic, see Byzantine diplomacy.

Olga, ruler of Kievan Rus', along with her escort in Constantinople (Madrid Skylitzes, Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid)
After the fall of Rome, the key challenge to the Empire was to maintain a set of relations between itself and its sundry neighbors. When these nations set about forging formal political institutions, they were dependent on Constantinople. Byzantine diplomacy soon managed to draw its neighbors into a network of international and inter-state relations.[148] This network revolved around treaty making, and included the welcoming of the new ruler into the family of kings, and the assimilation of Byzantine social attitudes, values and institutions.[149] Byzantines regarded diplomacy as a form of war by other means: the Bureau of Barbarians was the first foreign intelligence agency, gathering information on the empire's rivals from every imaginable source.[150]
Byzantines availed themselves of a number of diplomatic practices. For example, embassies to the capital would often stay on for years. A member of other royal houses would routinely be requested to stay on in Constantinople, not only as a potential hostage, but also as a useful pawn in case political conditions where he came from changed. Another key practice was to overwhelm visitors by sumptuous displays.[148] According to Dimitri Obolensky, the preservation of civilization in Eastern Europe was due to the skill and resourcefulness of Byzantine diplomacy, which remains one of Byzantium's lasting contributions to the history of Europe.[151]

[edit] Language
For more details on this topic, see Medieval Greek.



Left: The Mudil Psalter, the oldest complete psalter in the Coptic language (Coptic Museum, Egypt, Coptic Cairo).
Middle: The Codex Armenicus Rescriptus, a 6th/10th century parchment containing Armenian and Syriac liturgy (The Schøyen Collection).Right: The Joshua Roll, a 10th century illuminated Greek manuscript probably made in Constantinople (Vatican Library, Rome).
The original language of the government of the Empire, which owed its origins to Rome, had been Latin. As a literary language, it had never been widely cultivated among the educated classes of the East. Its importance gradually diminished however, and by the 7th century it had effectively been abandoned as the empire's 'official' language in favour of Greek; after his victory over the Persians in 629, Heraclius broke with a centuries-old tradition by officially styling himself Basileus over the traditional title Augustus, although Latin would continue to be at least a ceremonial part of the Empire's culture for some time.[152] In the Balkans, Vulgar Latin continued to be a minority language which gave birth to the Vlach languages,[153] and in Italy, as elsewhere in the Western Mediterranean, Latin remained in use both as a spoken language and one of culture and (local) administration; an illustration of this is the late 7th century mosaic from the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare in Classe in Ravenna portraying Constantine IV.[154]
Apart from the Imperial court, the primary language used in the eastern Roman provinces (i.e. the Eastern Roman Empire) even before the decline of the Western Empire had always been Greek.[155] Indeed early on in the life of the Roman Empire Greek had become the common language in the Christian Church, the language of scholarship and the arts, and, to a large degree, the lingua franca for trade between provinces and with other nations.[156] The language itself for a time gained a dual nature with the primary spoken language, Koine, existing alongside an older literary language with Koine eventually evolving into the standard dialect.[157]
Many other languages existed in the multi-ethnic Empire as well, and some of these were given limited official status in their provinces at various times. Notably, by the beginning of the Middle Ages, Syriac and Aramaic had become more widely used by the educated classes in the far eastern provinces.[158] Similarly Coptic, Armenian, and Georgian became significant among the educated in their provinces,[159] and later foreign contacts made the Slavonic, Vlach, and Arabic languages important in the Empire and its sphere of influence.[160]
Aside from these, since Constantinople was a prime trading center in the Mediterranean region and beyond, virtually every known language of the Middle Ages was spoken in the Empire at some time, even Chinese.[161] As the Empire entered its final decline the Empire's citizens became more culturally homogeneous and the Greek language became synonymous with their identity and their religion.[162]

[edit] Legacy

King David in robes of a Byzantine Emperor. Minature from the Paris Psalter.
As the only stable long-term state in Europe during the Middle Ages, Byzantium isolated Western Europe from newly emerging forces to the East. Constantly under attack, it distanced Western Europe from Persians, Arabs, Seljuk Turks, and for a time, the Ottomans. The Byzantine-Arab Wars, for example, are recognized by some historians as being a key factor behind the rise of Charlemagne,[163] and a huge stimulus to feudalism and economic self-sufficiency.
For centuries, Western historians have used the terms Byzantine and Byzantinism as bywords for decadence, duplicitous politics and complex bureaucracy, and there was a strongly negative assessment of Byzantine civilization and its legacy in Southeastern Europe.[164] Byzantinism in general was defined as a body of religious, political, and philosophical ideas which ran contrary to those of the West.[165] Similarly until the 20th century the term East, in the context of Eastern and Western culture, was commonly used to refer to cultures that had strong influences from the Byzantine Empire, often pejoratively (including by extension the Arabs and the Ottomans). The 20th and 21st centuries, however, have seen attempts by historians in the West to understand the Empire in a more balanced and accurate fashion including its influences on the West, and as a result the complex character of Byzantine culture has received more attention and a more objective treatment than previously.[165]