The Byzantine Empire lasted, by most reckonings, about eleven hundred years, from the founding of Constantinople in 330 to its fall in 1453. Its legacy is all around us, often unrecognized.
Roman law
Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis was largely forgotten in Western Europe for centuries. In the late eleventh century, a copy of the Digest was rediscovered in Italy, and scholars at Bologna, beginning with a teacher named Irnerius, made it the center of legal study at what became Europe's oldest university. From Bologna, Roman law spread across Europe, shaping church law and the legal systems of most continental countries. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 and the legal systems of France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Latin America and many other places owe a great deal to it. Ideas such as contract, property and the rights of persons in law reached the modern world largely through Justinian's compilers.
Preserving Greek learning
Most of the ancient Greek literature that survives today, including Homer, Plato, Aristotle, the tragedians, Euclid and much of Greek science and medicine, survives because Byzantine scribes copied it. Monasteries and scholars kept texts alive and studied them for a thousand years. In the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Byzantine scholars brought this learning to Italy. In 1397, Manuel Chrysoloras began teaching Greek in Florence, inspiring a generation of Italian humanists. Cardinal Bessarion, a Byzantine scholar who joined the Roman church, gave his great library of Greek manuscripts to Venice in 1468, where it became the core of the Marciana Library. Byzantine scholars helped fuel the Renaissance.
Byzantine learning also passed east. During the eighth to tenth centuries, scholars in the Abbasid caliphate translated many Greek works into Arabic, often from manuscripts obtained from the Byzantine world, and Islamic scholars built on them.
Orthodox Christianity
The Eastern Orthodox Church, with hundreds of millions of members today in Greece, Russia, Ukraine, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia and elsewhere, is the most direct living legacy of Byzantium. Its liturgy, music, icons and church architecture descend from Byzantine practice. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople still has his seat in Istanbul.
Third Rome
After 1453, some Russians claimed that Moscow had inherited Byzantium's role. In the early sixteenth century, a monk named Philotheus wrote that two Romes had fallen, the third, Moscow, stood, and a fourth would never be. Russian rulers adopted the title tsar, from Caesar, and the Byzantine double-headed eagle. The idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome” has been invoked by Russian nationalists ever since.
Art and architecture
Byzantine mosaics, domes and icons influenced art across Europe and the Islamic world. Venice's St. Mark's Basilica was modeled on a Byzantine church. The domed design of Hagia Sophia inspired the great Ottoman mosques, including those built by the architect Sinan in the sixteenth century.
Hagia Sophia's changing roles
Hagia Sophia itself tells the story of the city. A church for over nine hundred years, it became a mosque in 1453. In 1934, the government of the new Turkish Republic made it a museum, open to all. In 2020, a Turkish court and the president of Turkey reconverted it into a mosque, a decision welcomed by many Turks and criticized by Orthodox Christians, UNESCO and others. It remains open to visitors outside prayer times.
An unfair word
In English, “byzantine” has come to mean overly complicated, secretive and devious, as in “byzantine regulations.” This reflects centuries of Western prejudice. The eighteenth century historian Edward Gibbon, in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, portrayed Byzantium as a long, dreary decline, and writers of the Enlightenment often treated it as a symbol of superstition and despotism. Modern historians have largely rejected that view. An empire that survived for over a thousand years, against enemies on every side, preserved ancient learning, created lasting law and art, and adapted again and again, was hardly a stagnant failure.
Worked example: what is inherited?
Imagine a law student in Brazil, a priest in Serbia and a visitor to Istanbul. Trace what each inherits from Byzantium.
- The law student studies a civil code whose concepts of contract and property descend from Justinian's Digest, through Bologna and Napoleon.
- The priest celebrates a liturgy in a language and form shaped by Byzantine practice and the missions of Cyril and Methodius, and prays before icons whose use was defended at Nicaea in 787.
- The visitor stands under Justinian's dome, now in a mosque, in a city that has been an imperial capital for more than fifteen hundred years.
None of them may think of themselves as heirs of Byzantium. Yet each lives with its legacy. History is often like this: civilizations do not simply end; their ideas and institutions flow into those that follow, sometimes under new names.