Byzantium

January 12, 2009 at 7:14 pm · Filed under history and tagged: Byzantine, Byzantium, Constantinople, Rome

The Byzantine Empire has become an object of fascination for me in the past few months. This is new for me. The Eastern Roman Empire never captured my imagination in the past. I remember learning about it in high school and feeling an emotion bordering on offense. Byzantium was to me a betrayal of the glory, majesty and continuity of classical Rome. It was offensive to me that Constantine would have the gall to uproot the empire from its eponymous capital and stick it in a patchwork city on the edge of the known world and still call it Rome at the end of the day. Byzantium stood for the fall of antiquity in all of its splendour and the dawn of the Middle Ages in all of their mediocrity. Twelve years later the very things that offended me about Byzantium, the qualities which set it apart from classical Rome, are the very things that draw me to it. It’s true that the Eastern Empire lacked the clarity and order of its predecessor in Old Rome, but it is the ambiguity of Byzantium that makes it so fascinating. Before, I interpreted the ambiguity of Byzantium as a sign of its weakness as an empire and culture. In some ways it is true that Byzantium never equaled Rome-that-was in its unrivaled power, its ruthless efficiency or the clarity of its presence throughout the known world; but in other ways Byzantium’s ambiguity suggests not weakness but rather a subtle and rich layering of hundreds of cultural, religious, military and social forces at work within its hallowed walls. It is also a tribute to the strength and majesty of New Rome that it managed to keep these walls unbreached for one thousand years, far longer than Old Rome, in a world far less certain and orderly than the one in years gone by. It is the fault of Byzantium that there was no Pax Byzantina, but it is also the strength of Byzantium that it stood in the absence of that peace, a testament not to the abandonment of the glory of Old Rome, but to the continuity of its splendour. And besides, at least for me, Byzantium has a mysterious quality that Rome has always lacked. Even the name Constantinople is a far more evocative name than Rome.

As I said, it is the complexity and subtlety of Constantinople that draws me to it. It’s like an endless maze of contradiction. We even get the English adjective byzantine, meaning needlessly complicated, from this very city. The first set of contradictions lies within the names the Byzantine Empire has been given. For starters, Byzantium. The Byzantine Empire was not Byzantium at all. That city had long since fallen and faded into obscurity by the time Constantine drew his spear across the sands on the shores of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, marking the boundaries of his new capital. Byzantine is an artificial construction introduced by historians to keep the events of western Rome separate from eastern Rome. The name Constantine gave the city was Nova Roma, New Rome, and it was by the name Romans that the people of his city were known until its collapse over a thousand years later. But his own people did not even call his city Nova Roma, but Constantinople, the City of Constantine.

Which brings me to the second set of contradictions: language and culture. It is true that the citizens of Constantinople called themselves Romans, as did everyone around them, but they were not Roman. They were Greek. They spoke Greek, they read and wrote Greek. Their theology and philosophy both reflected Greek esotericism rather than Roman pragmatism. The city of Rome did not even belong to their empire for the majority of its history. Yet it was the Roman imperial line of the Augusti that the Constantinopolitans preserved, along with Roman law. In a way their Greekness was the death of Rome, yet their very existence was the preservation of Rome.

Perhaps the biggest area of contradiction in Constantinople was in the area of religion. Constantine I made his empire enough of a paradox by transplanting the capital of Rome to a city far away from Rome itself, but even bigger than that was replacing the traditional religion of Rome with Christianity and still calling it Roman. The Christianity that Constantinople developed was itself a further contradiction. On the one hand, Constantine I, and the empire he recreated, saved Christianity time and again from internal and external disasters – internally, heresies like Arianism, monophysitism and Nestorianism; externally, invasion and forced conversion to Islam by Saracens and Turks. Without the Byzantine Empire there would be no finalized canon of scripture and no formulated doctrine of the Trinity. Let’s face it, without the Byzantine Empire, there might not be any Christianity at all. The near-invincible walls of Constantinople were time and again the only things stopping the Islamic hordes from marching across Europe and putting an end to the faith of the Apostles. On the other hand, Constantine’s empire is responsible for some of the greatest perversions of Christianity ever to infect the faith. The empire may have crushed the old heresies of Arianism, monophysitism and Nestorianism, but it also gave birth to them. It was by an Arian bishop that Constantine I himself was baptized. The Byzantine emperors wore their crown in the name of Christ and, as Constantine’s vision demanded, conquered in the sign of the Cross, but they were more murderous, rapacious, hedonistic and cruel than their pagan Roman predecessors. And this, to me, is the most fascinating, and tragic, quality of Constantinople.

The Byzantine Empire is the perfect glimpse at what God’s Kingdom here on earth would look like without Christ. That’s precisely what it was. When Constantine traded the Unconquered Sun for the Cross of Christ, he knew what he was doing. He was inextricably joining religion and politics so that a challenge to his imperial authority became a challenge to God Himself. The emperor, therefore, was not just God’s instrument on this earth but his vice-regent; the protector of state, yes, but more importantly, the protector of the Church. Just as there is one body of Christ on this earth, there could be only one empire and one emperor. The Byzantine Empire became, then, the Kingdom of God, and oddly enough, it lasted almost exactly one thousand years – a millennial kingdom. But this kingdom, far from bringing the peace, righteousness and justice it promised; it brought only plotting, murder, betrayal, perversion and infighting. Constantine’s Empire set itself up to be everything Christ’s future reign will be, and failed to achieve all of it. There is no clearer proof on this earth that man cannot establish God’s kingdom in its fullest, political form, without Christ on the throne. And that, if nothing else, makes the Byzantine Empire fascinating.

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