Byzantium, the Lost Empire
How Constantinople Preserved the Roman Empire in Anatolia until 1453
Many people remember how Rome fell in 476 C.E. But fewer know that the Roman Empire survived until 1453 as the Byzantine Empire.
The Byzantine Empire was the greatest realm of Europe and western Asia in the Middle Ages. Its capital, Constantinople, on the straits separating the Mediterranean from the Black Sea was, at its height under Justinian I in the sixth century, possibly the largest city in the world. But that is no surprise-since the Byzantine Empire was nothing more or less than the Roman Empire in the east.
In 330 C.E., the Emperor Constantine founded a new capital of the Roman Empire next to a small town in Anatolia on the straits of the Black Sea called "Byzantium". After his death, the inhabitants gave their capital the Greek name "Constantinopolis" (Constantine's City). After the Empire split in two in 395, Rome lost its territories in the west and failed as an empire. Meanwhile, Constantinople became the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Differences from the old Empire included, most notably, Greek as the main language and culture rather than Latin and Christianity (since Constantine had converted from paganism, probably on his deathbed) rather than the old Roman religion. But many historians now acknowledge the Byzantine Empire as a direct continuation of the Roman Empire. The bureaucracy and laws in Constantinople were direct descendants of the bureaucracy and law codes in Rome. The emperors who ruled did so in a direct line from Constantine. It was Constantinople, not the Irish or the Arabs, that first preserved the continuity of ancient Mediterranean culture and ensured that we still can read the classic works of Aristotle and Caesar.
Constantinople was an extremely powerful empire until the 10th century, with territories encompassing Eastern Europe, Palestine, North Africa, Greece and all Anatolia in the east and extending as far as southern Italy in the west. It reached its greatest extent under Basil the Bulgar-Slayer (958-1025), despite major setbacks following the expansion of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries.
In the 11th century, imperial power fragmented into a series of fights over succession. Asian invaders, collectively called "Turks", pushed into Anatolia from the east. One turning point was the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 when Romanos IV was captured by the Seljuk Turks. The Empire rallied under Alexios the Great (1048-1118), the emperor who sparked the First Crusade in 1095 with his famous letter to the Pope asking for mercenaries to help in the reclamation of the Holy Land. But after his grandson's death in 1180, it continued to lose ground, even being captured by the Franks (Western Europeans) in 1204. By the time Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, only the city itself remained. Renamed "Istanbul", it became the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
