HIST 100: Part 3

HIST 100: Part 3

Late Antiquity, Early Chistrianity, Byzantine Empire And Early Islam

Dr. Lawrence E. Butler

Introduction

Welcome to George Mason University's Western Civilization. I'm Dr. Lawrence Butler. Rome fell. It must be true. We've seen it in the movies! Preachers and politicians rail about it today, warning that it will happen to US TOO if we don't--what? People have been drawing great lessons from the "fall of Rome" ever since, well--really, ever since long before the empire ever even reached its greatest extent. Okay, the Roman empire is certainly not there today, so something happened sometime. But when? And what, exactly? Historians have proposed a number of dates and crucial events that marked The End. Here are some examples--don't write these down! Maybe Rome fell in 476 AD. That's when the last boy king was deposed.

Or, maybe Rome really fell a century earlier, in 378? That's when a German tribe, the Visigoths, managed to defeat the eastern divisions of the Roman empire within a days' march of the eastern capital, and kill the emperor himself. A few years later in 406 more German tribes burst across the Rhine frontier. We've all seen this sort of thing in movies. Maybe that was the end.

And in 410, the world really changed. Alaric, the leader of the Visigoths, managed to invade, sack and loot the great city of Rome itself. Roman society was shocked to its core. St. Augustine, then a bishop in North Africa, heard of these events, and was sure it was all over. In a sense it was. The world he thought he knew, centered on the urban Mediterranean--on the ancient and holy city of Rome, so serene and strong and civilized-that world was shown to be the insecure, changing place it really was. But wait: how about 1453? By one definition, the Roman empire lasted until then--the fifteenth century!--in the form of the Byzantine Empire, that I'll be talking about today.

Truth is, the "fall of Rome" is a hard thing to pinpoint, and any one date is just a milestone marking a long road. It's much more accurate to say that the Roman empire was radically transformed over the centuries between the time of the pagan Caesars and the early middle ages. In the last few decades, historians have come to recognize a "world of late antiquity," a period when the ancient Roman cultures and the new Christian religion overlapped. A period when the peoples of the Roman Mediterranean, and the so-called "barbarians" from beyond the old borders, were forced to coexist, and work out new cultural arrangements, new boundaries, new ideas.

For me, late antiquity is one of the most exciting, dynamic periods of Western history. It is so much more than the story of collapse and decay. Late antiquity-let's say, roughly, the third through seventh centuries in the Mediterranean world- In late antiquity we can see the origin of much of the modern western world-the boundaries, the major religions, the languages, the institutions. That's the story I want to tell here today.

Late Antiquity

First let's take a look at the evidence, the geography and the economy of the world of late antiquity. To understand this world, we have a great deal of evidence to work with--at least from the fourth century on-both written and visual. Roman pagan writers were fascinated, horrified by the changes all around them. Christianity stimulated a tremendous amount of soul-searching writing, by educated people like St. Augustine, and by less sophisticated writers as well. Much of this has been preserved and handed down to us today by the Church. Unfortunately, very little by way of unofficial or contrary views have come down to us, so we have to read carefully. Archeology is beginning to help us fill out the picture. Some small works of art have survived, though usually out of context. Finally, there are the cities themselves, monuments to Greco-Roman urban life and prime sources of evidence on the world of late antiquity.

Let's review the enormous extent of the Roman empire. In the second and third centuries, the Roman Empire embraced the entire Mediterranean world and more- from Hadrian's Wall here, in northern England, to the deserty Tigris and Euphrates frontier with Persia; from ancient Egypt and North Africa to the rich German Rhineland. It included a huge variety of peoples, languages, cultures and religions. Here's a little portrait of this world: The Mediterranean and Near East have always been lands of marginal subsistence and limited resources, divided by mountains and deserts, with thin soil and limited water.Though very beautiful, the Mediterranean landscape requires hard work-- as does the seascape-- and it requires a great deal of trade in raw materials and manufactured goods.

The pax romana, or Roman peace, allowed a tremendous increase in long-distance trade and cultural contact, especially in the urban Mediterranean. Important cities included Rome itself, of course; but also Greek cities like Ephesos, here, in present-day Turkey. Athens still had an important university, and in Delphi the oracle continued to be consulted. Smaller cities flourished around the Mediterranean, each laid out around a central forum, with temples, baths, theatres and arenas to accommodate Roman civic life. Model Roman cities were built close to the far-flung military frontiers, such as here in Trier in the German Rhineland, or far off to the east, like Baalbek, on the Asian trade routes. But the Mediterranean seacoast was always the heart. Economic activity, like the empire itself, was strongest in the old classical poleis of the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Empire. They continued in great numbers through the sixth century; their mass demise in the seventh marks the end of late antiquity.

One of the most profound transformations of the late Roman empire was sparked by military reforms in the course of the third century. Faced with terrible pressure on the ever-more-distant borders, commands were placed in the hands of competent, professional soldiers-no longer were generals drawn only from ranks of upper-class amateurs in the Senate.

The Roman army increasingly served to mix populations, exposing Romans to new places and ideas, while integrating new peoples into the Roman system. And from the third century on, it was these tough new competent soldiers who rose to become commanders--and emperors. They represented a new class of educated, ambitious men, representing families from all the social strata, regions, and religions of the empire, and they were taking charge.

For all its diversity, the Roman world was remarkably cohesive in its urban and cultural life. But how to keep a huge, multicultural empire together, in an age before quick communication and travel? One solution was to develop rituals of civic life that focused on a deified Roman emperor and Greco-Roman cultural forms, while still tolerating a tremendous variety of cultures, languages and religions. Late Roman emperors used court ritual, public art, and architecture more and more to set themselves apart from ordinary humanity; to be perceived as god-like.

The emperor Diocletian, around 300, tried to shore up the crumbling administration and defenses of the empire by dividing the responsibilities amongst four co-emperors, or tetrarchs, with himself at the head. Look at this map and you'll see how he divided the Empire into east and west. The pink and brown areas of Western Europe, Italy and North Africa were predominantly Latin-speaking, governed directly from Rome itself. To the east, the green and pink areas mark the rich, urbanized, Greek-speaking provinces-Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor and Greece itself. That dotted line of political division, running north-south through Dalmatia, coincides with the most important cultural divide of the Empire. The urbanized Eastern Mediterranean, where Greek had become the common language of public life was also the heartland of early Christianity. The Western, Latinized half, was less urban, less economically vibrant-and was the part of the Roman empire that would eventually "fall", or at least fall into pieces, in the course of the fifth century.

Diocletian himself retired to this vast palace that still shows the architecture of divinity. It now forms the core of the old city of Split, in Croatia. Here, under this great arch, the emperor would hold court as a divinity-in heavy robes and makeup, silent, surrounded by incense, music and courtiers. A Roman emperor was divine, the embodiment of the State. Regardless of religion and origin, all Romans were expected to pay homage. The unity of the Empire depended on it.

One of the most striking aspects of late antiquity is the proliferation of new, or transplanted religions. This is especially clear from the third century on. It was a time of upheaval that affected the government, society, economy, security, and religious life of the Empire profoundly. Old and new eastern religious practices became widely popular across the Empire, in this time of instability. New exotic spiritual movements competed for converts, and promised their followers wisdom revealed only through initiation into "mysteries."

One example is the cult of the hero Mithras here, a fairly macho figure from Iranian religion, who became very popular with the Roman army. Like many of these new religions from the East, the cult of Mithras required initiation, ritual sacrifice, salvation, and afterlife gained through allegiance to the hero figure. Another very popular cult came from Egypt--the cult of Isis, associated with virgin birth and miraculous resurrections.

It was in this world of empire and wars, cultures in contact, and cultures in conflict, that the Jews of Palestine and their spiritual descendents, the early Christians, became prominent in the Roman world, especially in the cities. Judaism does not fit the pattern of "mystery religion." The Jews' insistence on monotheism and their close reliance on sacred texts set them apart from other contemporary religious movements. Jews had been widely scattered throughout the commercial centers of the Mediterranean and Middle East for centuries. Romans were familiar with them through their urban populations, and became more familiar as the Roman Empire conquered the provinces of Judaea and Palestine. Here is the ruined synagogue at Capernaum which dates from our period. Strict monotheism prevented the Jews from cooperating with the official cult of the deified emperor, so important to the Roman sense of cohesion. Both Jews and Christians--and the Roman writers could not always tell them apart--were associated with trouble--disloyalty to Emperor and the customary sacrifices. Trouble in the provinces. Roman emperors repeatedly cracked down on the Jews militarily to bring them into compliance. This arch in the Roman Forum commemorates the triumph of the Emperor Titus, who conquered Jerusalem in the year 70. Inside the arch, this carving shows the menorah from the Temple of Jerusalem, and other treasures from the sacking of the city, being paraded in the emperor's triumphal procession.

Other emperors, notably Diocletian, persecuted Christians relentlessly, seeing them as a subversive force. By the third century, the Roman sources show increasing alarm over the spread of Christianity, an offshoot of Judaism. Here's the astonishing thing: Within a decade of Emperor Diocletian's death, his eventual successor Constantine embraced Christianity, and in 313 legalized it throughout the empire. What exactly happened? We wish we knew!

The conversion of Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century is one of the key events in western history--and one of the most debated. Constantine was a military figure, and one of the tetrarchs who shared the rule of the Empire. The traditional story is that his conversion came before a crucial battle, as he competed for control of Rome in 312.

Was his conversion genuine? The Church says yes. Members of his family had already converted earlier. Some skeptics say no--that his conversion was completely opportunistic, or at least shallow. Our best evidence for the life of Constantine comes from the writings of his own Christian confessor, Bishop Eusebius--hardly an unbiased source. I suspect the answer is somewhere in between. He seems genuinely to have considered himself to be Christian, but here's some of the conflicting evidence: He seems only to have been baptized on his deathbed--but that may have been a common practice then. But he also venerated Helios, the Sun god, a traditional guardian of Roman emperors! For that matter, Constantine's state propaganda portrays him as divine, as Roman emperors were widely believed to be.

Understanding Constantine's motives may turn on another hard question: How widespread was Christianity before Constantine? How prominent and powerful were its adherents?

The written sources certainly show that Christianity had become prominent enough in the third century to alarm the traditionalists-witness Diocletian's persecution of it. Actual numbers are not possible. One frequently-cited estimate is that 5% of the Roman empire was Christian at the beginning of the fourth century, while the overwhelming majority were Christian by the end of it.

It seems to me anachronistic--that is, historically out-of-place--to see the mass conversions as simply politically opportunistic--to downplay the importance of belief and moral persuasion. It is equally anachronistic to assume Constantine followed a modern understanding of monotheism--that one god is exclusive, that one religion at a time is all you can have. He may well have been hedging his bets. We have to be careful not to force fourth century motives into a modern religious mold--it leads to bad questions and bad answers. Whatever Constantine's own beliefs and motives, the short-term and long-term effects of the legalization of Christianity were profound. Constantine did not just join the Church, he dominated it.

In 325, at the Council of Nicaea, Constantine managed to bring the Christian bishops to agreement on the essential points of Christianity for the first time. The result is the Nicene Creed, the basic statement of faith by Christians to the present day. In the process, the emperor brought the Church under imperial patronage--and control. This had profound implications for the rest of Western history, as we'll learn in later lectures.

Constantine's conversion also affected architecture. Imagine what it must have been like when the richest, most powerful man in the world suddenly became the patron of a grass-roots religious movement.

Early Christians tended to gather for worship, teaching, and community in converted houses, found in the shabbier quarters of Roman cities, like this, throughout the Mediterranean world. The earliest Christian churches are simple and inconspicuous--not surprising, given the persecutions. But already by the 3rd century they show a well-developed system of symbolic art and liturgical spaces, with altars like this for ritual commemorative meals. Like other Mediterranean "mystery cults," Christianity attached great importance to the burial of its own, in cemeteries where ordinary folk sought to be close to the honored dead and where the community would celebrate its blessed departed through memorial meals.

In Rome, the soft soil led Christians, Jews, and others to excavated catacombs, or underground cemeteries, with entrances just outside the city limits, since burial was forbidden inside the classical polis. But with Christianity legalized in 313, an imperial family like Constantine's is hardly to be expected to put up with shabby, half-hidden churches, or to be buried in crumbly tunnels underground. Rather, they poured money into grand new buildings to house the ceremonies and the developing bureaucratic apparatus of the religion. The model developed by Constantine's architect was the basilica.

Basilicas--the word implies "royal"--were the giant colonnaded structures that had been built for public business for centuries throughout the Roman world. Here are the ruins of one in the Roman forum, completed by Constantine and used as a law court. What we see today is only the three arches of a side aisle; the main space in front of that was almost eighty feet wide and 120 feet high inside. At the far end of its long axis sat this giant statue of Constantine, in its own semicircular apse, or niche, presiding over the public business.

These are the basic parts of any Roman basilica:

The nave is the high center space.
There are lower aisles on either side, that might support second-story galleries. Both nave and aisles are long, and lead the eye towards...
An apse, a semicircular niche that holds the main statue or altar.

This sort of Roman basilica was the inspiration for Constantine's huge new churches. This diagram shows a cross-section of one--see the nave in the center, the side aisles, and the apse at the end?

The basilica design was a good choice to house the ceremonies of the new religion. They were long--good for processions--with a focal point at the far end. Replace the statue of the Emperor in the apse with an altar, and you have an excellent space for Christian worship. Everyone can be accommodated, and everyone knows which way to face. Processions with incense and songs could honor the God-King Christ, just as they had honored Roman god-emperors for centuries. Early Christian basilicas were large, but could be built cheaply and quickly, using wooden roofs over the vast spaces. The great Christian basilicas of Rome today--St. Peter's, St. Paul's, or Sta. Maria Maggiore--still occupy the sites of those first Christian basilicas built by Constantine and his immediate successors.

St. Peter's Basilica, here, rose over the site of St. Peter's execution and burial, just outside the old Roman city walls. It has been rebuilt since, but the foundations of Constantine's basilica are still visible today in its crypt. The pope--the spiritual successor to St. Peter--lives in the Vatican Palace, that adjoins it.

While Constantine was building great churches in the capital cities, his mother, St. Helena here, toured the Holy Land, declaring the important places of Christ's life and death to be sacred. Shrines were erected on spots such as the Holy Sepulchre, or Christ's tomb, in Jerusalem. These sacred shrines, much rebuilt, are still major destinations of pilgrimage today.

Constantine's conversion to Christianity marks one of the most thorough transformations of the late Roman world. But it was not his only contribution to the new world of late Antiquity. In a move just as dramatic, Constantine actually moved the capital--east, out of Rome altogether, to the Greek city of Byzantium which he renamed Constantinople after himself. Today, this city is Istanbul, the fabulous metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean in Western Turkey.

Why on earth would he move the capital of Rome out of Rome, to the other end of the empire? Again, motives are hard to guess at this distance. Modern historians' explanations range from the spiritual: "He wanted to found an entirely Christian capital"--to the practical--"It was a better location"--to political--"To disrupt the power of the old Roman senatorial class"--to megalomaniacal. I tend to favor the latter, more practical motives. Here's why. First, just look at the location:

Constantinople, the old part of modern Istanbul, sits at the very edge of Europe, facing Asia across the Bosphorus Straits. The site pins the Roman world together. Not only was it an important location of east-west trade; even more important, it controlled the sea trade between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. And the Danube empties into the Black Sea. This puts the city in the heart of the trade routes between the older, Greek-speaking cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, always the center of the Roman Empire's commercial wealth. It is far closer to the major contested borders than Rome: the Danube frontier, and the vast, poorly defined eastern frontier with the Persian Empire.

Look at the city today. It has a superb natural harbor, known as the Golden Horn for the wealth that poured in and out of it. And it forms a peninsula, protected on the sea side by ferocious currents. Constantine knew all this; he'd become familiar with the site during his earlier military career, and clearly noted its potential.

In fact, this was not the first attempt by a Roman emperor to shift the capital eastward. But this time, the whole apparatus of the Roman state was actually moved. It did in fact become a Christian capital; and yes, the emperor was probably delighted that the move disrupted the older sources of power in Rome. After all, new states in modern times have set up new capitals to symbolize a break with the past: our own city of Washington is one an example; Brasilia is another.

Streets were laid out, a new palace built, an old hippodrome, or chariot arena was refurbished. The empire was scoured for works of art, brought here in triumph to the new capital. All of these things were customary for founding great Roman cities, and were carried out with the ancient ceremonies. Constantine renamed the city after himself, or as Bishop Eusebius says, "He bestowed upon it an eternal name by the commandment of God." Not very modest, but Roman emperors weren't expected to be modest--they were divine. Here is the only monument in Constantinople remaining today from Constantine's time: a column that once bore his statue--as Helios, the sun god.

Finally, Constantine had built a magnificent basilica church for his own and his family's burial, the Church of the Holy Apostles. It contained relics of all twelve apostles--and in the middle, he had his own tomb placed. Clearly, he wanted to be remembered as the Thirteenth Apostle of Christianity. His successors moved the tomb to a somewhat more modest position.

Let's review some of the major events of Emperor Constantine's reign:

After wresting sole control of power from his rivals, in 312; Constantine Legalizes Christianity in 313, based on his own apparent conversion experience the year before.
He develops the basilica as the model for Christian church architecture.
He moves the capital of the Roman empire east, to the old Greek city of Byzantium, which he renamed after himself as new founder: Constantinople.
Finally, he organizes the Christian church hierarchy at the Council of Nicaea in 325, to produce the first unified statement of Christian belief-and incidentally, starts the pattern of Imperial domination of Church affairs.

Constantinople was splendid, an immediate success. It was dubbed "The New Rome," and within a generation had acquired all the prerogatives of Old Rome--a Senate, consuls, splendid public buildings and the rest. Its bishop was elevated to the rank of "patriarch," making him second in honor only to the Bishop of Rome himself-the Pope.

The Court was here to stay. Here they are, a late fourth-century emperor, his family, his court, and his soldiers. They are watching the chariot races at the Hippodrome, while representatives of the captured barbarians grovel down below. The Roman emperor, now in Constantinople, still ruled the world. Constantine's walls enclosed a huge area, but within a century the city had to be enlarged.

New land walls nearly doubled the size of the city, securing the peninsula's land side and protecting the city for the next thousand years. They still stand today, as you can see here.

By the end of the fourth century, his successors had made Christianity the official and only religion of the empire, destroying the great temples, oracles and universities of the Greco-Roman pagan world. Here is a decree from Constantine's son, Emperor Constantius, in 346, banning pagan sacrifices: "It is our pleasure that the temples shall be immediately closed in all places and in all cities, and access to them forbidden, so as to deny to all abandoned men the opportunity to commit sin. It is also our will that all men shall abstain from sacrifices. But if perchance any man should perpetrate any such criminality, he shall be struck down with the avenging sword, and his property confiscated by the State."

The Oracle of Delphi was closed in 390, and its trophies hauled off to adorn the new capital, such as this great bronze serpent column, decorating the site of the Hippodrome of Constantinople still today.

Constantinople fulfilled Constantine's vision. It did indeed become the capital of the Roman empire, but a profoundly different Roman empire. It was now a Christian empire, where the Emperor became known as "God's viceroy on earth."It was understood, at least within the Empire, that it was the anointed emperor's role to gather all the Christians of the earth under his protection and thus to await the Second Coming of Christ, when the emperor would lead the faithful to the New Jerusalem. From our point of view, the western Roman empire may have been falling apart. But to contemporaries, the Roman empire seemed strong and timeless.

Several great medieval civilizations emerged from these upheavals and transformations of late Roman antiquity. Through the actions of Constantine and his successors, the Roman empire was so thoroughly transformed that historians give a new name to it: the Byzantine Empire, named after the older name of the capital city.

The Byzantine Empire

So what exactly is the Byzantine Empire?

Here are the most important points:

It is the eastern Roman empire, that continued under the line of Roman emperors and Roman law right into the fifteenth century. It was ruled from Constantinople, which after the seventh century was its only city of any size.
It quickly became Greek-speaking, due to its location in the eastern, Greek-speaking half of the Mediterranean. It can also be understood as the medieval Greek empire, though they never saw it that way themselves. To the emperor and the empire, they were always "Rome."
It was Christian. The local head of the church, the Patriarch of Constantinople, never claimed to be superior to the bishop of Rome, but did claim to be a peer. The emperor, however, considered himself and was considered the protector and head of Christians on earth.

The Byzantine Empire continued in one form or another into the fifteenth century, governed from Constantinople by a Greek-speaking Christian emperor who considered himself "Roman" to the end. The art, architecture and rituals associated with the cult of Roman emperors were adapted for use as the art and ritual of the Christian church. Some of the monuments of Byzantine Constantinople still stand today. They help us see how closely church and state were intertwined.

Here it is, the basilica of Hagia Sophia, in Istanbul today. This was the cathedral of the Byzantine Empire, built not by Constantine but two hundred years later, at the command of emperor Justinian, in the sixth century. When you enter the building today, you can see the two of them above the door--Constantine, holding a model of the city, and Justinian, holding the model of the church, offering both to the Virgin Mary with the Christ child in her lap. It's a clear visual explanation of the Byzantine world view. To understand it, we need a little Christian theology. Christianity understands God as having three aspects, indivisibly united. God is a trinity: the "Father, Son and Holy Spirit." This does not mean that there are three gods; rather, it means that the concept of God includes three different aspects, or "persons," representing different manifestations of divinity. The "Son" is Jesus Christ. He is understood as God consenting to be made human, to live and die as a human in human time, and to be sacrificed ultimately for the sake of humanity.

Why? In part, to present humanity with an aspect of God we can comprehend in our own terms. Jesus Christ also represents divine wisdom, the wisdom that can guide humankind's actions. His mother, the Virgin Mary, represents his human ancestry. She's the person closest to him and acts as intermediary between the human rulers and Christ, the God-King in her lap. The name of this great church, "Hagia Sophia," is Greek for "Divine Wisdom." It is, in fact, a church dedicated to Christ--the Divine Wisdom that guides--who else?--the Divinely anointed Emperor, leader of Christians on earth.

In other words, this building was not just any church. It was sort of an audience hall of the divinely-guided emperor, built next to the palace. When the emperor and patriarch met to exchange the kiss of peace under its great dome, they represented the two aspects of God on earth: power and holiness. This, even more than the palace, was the center of power in the Byzantine Empire--and the one great building that was maintained until the bitter end, when there was no money for anything else but the army.

Justinian was an activist sort of emperor; and a bit of a tyrant. His long reign was filled with ambitious, expensive wars and building projects--projects a Roman emperor was expected to carry out. The Hagia Sophia was the biggest project undertaken in the empire in the 530's, paid for by spoils of conquest in North Africa. He built it over the smoking ruins of an older cathedral, destroyed in riots that nearly did him in. He vowed fast reconstruction. It happened! This enormous building went up in a mere five years and ten months. Justinian was present for the consecration, on Christmas Eve of 537. What you see today, by the way, is a 1500-year-old structure that has been through transformations. It spent almost 500 years as a mosque, which is why it now has four minarets and Arabic calligraphy inside, the names Allah and Mohammed. But structurally, the building is intact inside, and still retains much of its original decoration.

Let's look at its design. It is a basilica, like the ones Constantine's architects built in Rome. It is long, and had an altar in the apse at the east end. But it is much more complex. Two stories of aisle and gallery wrap around the space. The center of the space is covered by an enormous dome, a hundred Roman feet in diameter, pierced at its base with forty windows. What supports it? It doesn't just sit like a lid on a pot, like the larger dome of the Pantheon in Rome. It sits at the pinnacle of a matrix of half-domes, minor domes, arches and vaults, covering a space larger than any the earlier Romans ever dared to cover without intervening supports. See these curved triangles in the corners, under the rim of the dome? They are a new, completely audacious structural feature, called pendentives. Think of them as triangular segments of a larger, imaginary sphere. They bridge the geometric gap between the square space on the floor and the round space occupied by the dome.

Why did they build such a daring structure? Clearly, the emperor wanted a building that would outshine all others, and he got that. And the design itself tells us much about the culture and values of sixth-century Christianity. To begin with, the two architects were not professional builders. They were math professors--two visionary professors of geometry who dabbled in structural theory. So not surprisingly, their building is based on perfect geometric shapes: squares, circles and spheres. Those new pendentives represent parts of a theoretical sphere, holding part of a smaller sphere above a square space. Look here--I'll build you a model.

The point is this: Eastern Christians were well-acquainted with Greek philosophy, and often used its insights in the construction of Christian theology--and even sacred architecture. In Constantinople, they applied Plato's ideas about geometry being a key to the understanding of the universe, a window on the Divine plan. Geometry was appropriate for representing the Hagia Sophia, or holy wisdom of Christ. What about those windows? Unprecedented numbers of them letting in a flood of light. Again, Christian theology, based on ancient Greek philosophy, is the probably the reason. Light was a well known metaphor for the working of Christ's divine wisdom, which illuminated the emperor and all Christians. Together, the use of sacred geometry and seemingly divine light make the building a powerful model of the Byzantine conception of the Christian universe.

Have you ever heard the term "byzantine" used negatively? Maybe, meaning "complex, secretive, scheming"--like a "byzantine plot"? How did Byzantium get that reputation? Well, in some small measure it might be due to Emperor Justinian and his wife, the Empress Theodora. Right into the present day, Justinian is controversial with historians. For instance: the Hagia Sophia is a glorious building, the grandest of Justinian's many building projects. This is a great achievement, from the point of view of architects. But the Empire was nearly bankrupted by Justinian's building and military programs. He fought endless wars to try and reclaim Rome's historic 2nd-century boundaries.

His reign was quite long, and encompassed devastating earthquakes in major cities, and terrible outbreaks of plague. His taxation policies were ruinous, and his religious policies tyrranical. From a modern point of view, his reign is very troubling. But in the official histories of his time, Justinian is praised for imposing drastic measures to maintain the Empire, and Roman prestige: grand buildings, military conquest, and religious harmony. In modern terms, "At least he made the trains run on time."The controversy is understandable. Consider the works by Justinian's own official court historian, Procopius. Procopius's official histories of Justinian's reign, are careful, thorough works, based on classic Roman models. He praises the emperor and approves his motives, as we might expect. But what to make of his Secret History? In this slim, one-volume work, Procopios claims to write the real story of Justinian and his wife, Theodora, seen here with her escorts. She is one of the most notorious figures in Byzantine history--daughter of a bear-keeper, a dancing girl, who caught the emperor's eye, and ascended to the imperial throne--the ultimate example of social mobility in a socially mobile age. She ran the secret police, while at the same time sheltering the very religious heretics that her husband the Emperor was trying to suppress.

In his Secret History, Procopios blasts the imperial couple in terms ranging from burlesque to pornographic. "Justinian is a demon--his head turns around on his shoulders. And his wife is a whore--albeit a reformed one. He set out to ruin the empire--God's own Christian empire; and she is downright a heretic. Together they must have been plotting to confuse Christians and send them all to damnation!"

The very qualities Procopius praises in his official histories are turned on their heads in the Secret History. "Justinian works hard, and works late into the night." "Well of course: demons don't require sleep, do they?" "Theodora patronizes charities for fallen women." "Well...wouldn't she just," Procopius snickers. If two different historians had written these works, it would be easier for us to evaluate.

So what was Procopius getting at? It's hard to know. Did something annoy him at court? Did he get in trouble? Or was he really as cynical about his employers as all that? Both his books are based on classic Roman rhetoric, both of praise and of satire. Perhaps we can say that the two books represent real conflicts within Late Roman society itself, conflicted views over the nouveau-riche ruling class, the traditional role of the Roman emperor, and the still-evolving role of the Christian emperor in a world of where Orthodox Christianity is confronted with enemies on all sides.

The Empire was changing, constantly, through this period of late antiquity. By the fifth century, the conversion to Christianity was nearly universal, except amongst a few populations such as the Jews, or in a few traditionalist pockets of rural paganism. But Christianity itself was hardly uniform. Regional variations in belief and practice persisted. Distant provinces like Syria, Armenia and Egypt, with ancient Christian traditions and languages of their own, refused to take religious direction from the Orthodox church in Constantinople. Worse, these religious grievances were aggravated by fury over the ruinous taxes and endless border wars. The provinces became increasingly disaffected from the center. A striking new feature of popular religion was the cult of the holy person. This might be a martyr or saint of the Christian church, whose life and death were virtuous, and whose grave became the center of a popular cult. It might be the man or woman who came into the city to preach--and protest. People flocked around these figures, the only figures in such an authoritarian society allowed to speak their minds and give voice to popular dissent.

This picture shows one such figure, St. Anthony of Egypt. Not just a holy man, he is a monk. One of the first we know of. By the fifth century, we hear of monks, or nuns living in groups in the deserts of Syria and Egypt. In the East, monasteries were independent, never clearly under the jurisdiction either of the church's bishops, or of the government. Monasteries became the main sources of opposition to official government policy.

Another defining feature of Byzantine Christianity is the icon, like this one that shows the Virgin Mary and Christ. The use of icons lies at the heart of one of the biggest problems in Western monotheism. The second commandment forbids idolatry, and specifically forbids the depiction of living things. How to square this with the long--Roman tradition of depicting the human figure in sacred art?

The problem's an old one, and very serious in a theological society. Judaism rejects the use of images. Islam, as we'll see, does the same. In Hagia Sophia originally, here were not very many images--the ones you see there today were all added later. Even in Justinian's time, there were grumblings in the clergy about the popularity of graven images.

It really did take a civil war to settle the problem of using images in religious worship. In 726, a Byzantine emperor banned imagery in Christian worship. For over a hundred years Byzantine emperors, monks, bishops, and laity were locked in a terrible, real and violent civil war over the propriety of images in worship: the Iconoclast Controversy. This may strike us as arcane. But most historians looking other, more fundamental causes for the controversy--economic problems, social class struggle, etc--have returned to religion as the primary explanation. It was finally settled in 843, when a Byzantine emperor declared that the use of images in worship was acceptable, for complex theological reasons. Simply put, since Christ was a human, and since Christ was God, to make a portrait of Christ or his mother was an act of faith in the incarnation--in the notion that God was once human and walked the earth as a human. To deny the propriety of images of Christ was to deny this central tenet of Christian faith. It's also true that images had become so much a part of popular religious devotion, no amount of top-down imperial coercion could force people to abandon them. To this day, the making and veneration of icons, or religious images, is central to Eastern, or Orthodox, Christianity. The triumph of the icon is the triumph of popular religion.

Let's look at this icon. A worshipper does not worship the icon--that would be idolatry. Rather, one worships through the icon to the prototype, the divine person represented. The saints on either side hear our prayers, and pass them along towards the center of this icon--to the Virgin and Christ--child. It's a procedure that would have seemed natural to the citizen of late Antiquity, used to dealing with great patrons through their underlings.

Icons are philosophical too. Plato, and Christian Neo-Platonic theologians, taught that there is a chain of reality. God is most real, at the center of the universe and so forth. An icon is not to be confused with the real figure it represents--that would be idolatry. But yet--pale reflection though it may be--it is not without its spark of divinity, and that's true of people too. It is hard for us today to appreciate the gravity of religious ideas in a theological society such as the Byzantine Empire. Western Christianity--that is, the church of Western Europe, led by the Pope--eventually went a different way.

By the eleventh century, the churches of Rome and Constantinople had grown so far apart--linguistically and geographically, as well as theologically--that they split into two. This is the famous "Great Schism" of 1054, much in the news recently as the Pope has travelled east. Today the Catholic church of the West, and the Orthodox church of the East, perpetuate that split between the two halves of the Roman empire, east and west.

So what were the Christian Church Issues in the Byzantine Empire?

The Imperial Protection and control of the church
The rise of Monasticism
Icons, the Iconoclast controversy, and the eventual acceptance of icons in Orthodox Christian worship
And finally, the Orthodox/ Roman Catholic split in the 11th Century: the Great Schism of 1054

When does "the world of late antiquity" come to an end? It's an arbitrary judgment, of course, like the "fall of Rome." But the late sixth or seventh century does seem to represent the end of an era. Here's why:

In the mid-seventh century, the new empire of Islam conquered the eastern Roman provinces of Syria, Palestine and Egypt, and demolished Rome's long-time enemy to the east, the Persian Empire. The classical polis disappeared from the eastern Mediterranean world in the course of the late sixth and seventh centuries, due to natural calamities, wars, and to the continuing centralization of power and culture in the capital. By the end of the Iconoclast Controversy, in 843, the Empire consisted mainly of Constantinople itself, and outlying rural provinces in what is now Turkey, Greece and the Balkans. Even in the capital, the old forms of public life--theatres, arenas, baths--had disappeared, replaced by the more sober public processions of church and court. Houses, clothing, even diet had changed profoundly. Still, throughout the Middle Ages, the legacy of Late Antiquity and the eastern Roman empire lived on in a number of successor civilizations. Later Byzantium itself is one. Let's look briefly at the Later Byzantine Empire and its medieval neighbor

Later Byzantium

Constantinople was probably the largest city in the Western world during the Middle Ages. But the tremendous and growing cultural gulf between east and west limited the real impact of the Roman emperor in the East on the affairs of the West after Justinian's time. Ironically, the crusading movement of Western Europe inflamed hostilities between the Eastern and Western branches of Christianity and created new threats to the Byzantine Empire.

Here's Venice, for instance, for many centuries a Byzantine trading post in Northern Italy. Although it was Roman Catholic, not Orthodox Christian, its culture was deeply influenced by Byzantium. Its great church, the Basilica of St. Mark (seen in the background on the left), was modeled on Byzantine architecture, and its merchants filled the harbor quarters of Constantinople. In 1203, Venice manipulated the Fourth Crusaders into diverting their mission away from Jerusalem altogether. They ended up sacking Christian Constantinople instead, in 1204. Many of the treasures that still adorn St. Mark's are trophies shipped back from the looting of Constantinople.

The Byzantine Empire regrouped after a few years, and threw out the European invaders, but never fully recovered. In the end, there was only money for the army, for tribute to hostile neighbors, and for the upkeep of the Hagia Sophia itself. The final collapse of the Byzantine Empire in 1453--the final fall of Rome, if you will, comes as something of an anticlimax. There wasn't much left when the sultan Mehmet the II, Ottoman Turkish conqueror marched into the city. Ottoman Istanbul eventually became a great city in its own right. Here's the great Topkapi Palace of the Ottoman sultans. Ottoman Turkey owed much to the legacy of Byzantium, in trade, architecture, and organization-- but more to its own Islamic and Turkish heritage.

Let's review:

The later Byzantine Empire, 9th-15th Centuries Empire was reduced to its core area, eventually to the city of Constantinople itself.
In 1054, the "Great Schism" divided Christianity east and west.
Conflicts with Western Europe increased over the Crusading movement, which brought Western armies marching through the Empire on their way to fight in formerly Imperial provinces to the East.
This culminated in the Fourth Crusade, which turned into a Venetian invasion of Constantinople and temporary takeover of the Empire.
The weakened Byzantine Empire finally disappeared in the invasion of Constantinople by Ottoman Turks in 1453, who made it the capital of their own world empire.
After the collapse of the Byzantine empire, its legacy continues in the Orthodox Christian civilizations of Greece, Russia, and Slavic world.

The direct cultural heirs of Byzantium today are the Orthodox Christian Greeks and Eastern Slavs. Slavic states in Eastern Europe were converted to Orthodox Christianity beginning in the 9th century, in a series of brilliant foreign policy initiatives. The Byzantine Church and State competed directly with the Western Catholicism and the Popes of Rome for influence in Central and Eastern Europe. Missionaries translated the Gospels into a new "Church Slavonic" language, using a new Slavic alphabet based on the Greek alphabet. Although these Slav states remained politically independent of the Byzantine Empire, the Empire was careful to cultivate close ties between all the Orthodox states, counting on them as allies and trading partners.

The greatest prize in this game of diplomacy was the conversion of Russia, accomplished in 988. The story shows us the close links between Byzantine statecraft, religion, and art. The first Russian state emerges in the late 9th century, on the Dnieper River system, that links the Baltic world to the Black Sea, and Constantinople, as you see here on the map. The Norse or Viking traders who used this route organized the local Slavic population and developed the town of Kiev into an important trading state. Historians call it "Kievan Rus'" to distinguish it from the later Russian state that developed around Moscow. A series of strong rulers made Kiev into a power to be reckoned with--here is a reconstruction of its walls. After some military encounters, it was actively courted by the Byzantine Empire and Orthodox Church. Now, the rulers of Kiev also realized that in medieval geopolitics, it was important to be aligned with one of the major competing religious camps--Western Roman Christianity, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, or Islam. A delegation was sent abroad from Kiev to investigate the options. The Russian Primary Chronicle tells us what the diplomats found in Constantinople: "The Greeks led us to the edifices in which they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in Heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty...we know only that God dwells there among men..." And so Prince Vladimir of Kiev made the decision in 988 to accept Orthodox Christianity--a crucial decision in Russian history, as we'll hear in a later lecture. Here is the Church of St. Sophia built in Kiev soon afterwards. Although much altered in later centuries. Inside we can still see the icons, mosaics, and domes of Byzantine art. Medieval Russia adopted its religion, and cultural forms of Orthodox Christianity without abandoning its own Slavic culture, or ever accepting Byzantine political control. It absorbed and built upon the art, religion and statecraft of Orthodox Byzantium. Even today, Russian monasteries, like the Byzantine ones, are guardians of traditional spirituality and treasure houses of religious art.

Byzantium bequeathed to Russia the notion of the Christian emperor who guards the Church and the Orthodox people. The Moscow Kremlin, here, is a replica of the Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors, with its mix of palaces and cathedrals. After the fall of Byzantine Constantinople, the leadership of the Orthodox world was assumed by the rulers of Russia, who were crowned in this great Kremlin cathedral of the Assumption of the Virgin. To traditionalists in Russia today, Moscow is the "Third Rome." What does it mean that Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Republic, was inaugurated here as well?

Islam

Islam may be considered one of the other great successor civilizations of late antiquity. Meccah, the home of the prophet Muhammad, was an ancient center of pilgrimage, and well-positioned along the Red Sea trade routes to be open to influences from all the great religions and empires of late antiquity. The Qur'an is believed to be the actual word of God, revealed to the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century. Islam, properly speaking, is not a new religion, but a reform and perfection of the older "religions of the Book," Judaism and Christianity, on whose scriptures Islam builds.

Early Islam emerged in the early seventh century as a political as well as religious rival to Christian Byzantium in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Islamic Empire took over many of the lands and cities of the former Roman empire, such as Jerusalem, here, where the Dome of the Rock sits on the Temple Mount, enshrining the spot of the Prophet Muhammad's ascension to Heaven.

Let me introduce GMU History Prof. Sumaiya Hamdani, an authority on the history of the Middle East: The Great Mosque of Damascus, here, illustrates Prof. Hamdani's point, with its Roman columns, dome, Byzantine mosaics. But it is not just a copy of Byzantine buildings. It is Islamic in its plan, and in the lack of figural imagery in the decoration. Islam is a major inheritor of Mediterranean civilization, among others. And as we've heard, medieval Islam transmitted and built upon this heritage. An important part of the story of Western culture is the Islamic contribution to medieval Spain, as you see here in the Alhambra, and from Spain to Medieval Christian Europe.

When Constantine and the Roman emperors abandoned the city of Rome, they laid the basis for another, unexpected victory of the Christian Church in the West: the elevation of the Popes to sovereign supremacy. In Western Europe, as the Roman empire crumbled in its original heartland, the Pope-Bishop of Rome and his church took over many of the roles of the absent emperor and imperial government. When we see the Pope on television today, we are witnessing the oldest continuous remaining monarchy on earth. His lineage goes back to the first century, in an unbroken line of Bishops of Rome. As we have seen, the ceremony, the robes, the incense, even the basilica buildings of the Christian church, have their roots in the Roman imperial court. Just as Byzantine and Russian emperors continued that tradition in the Eastern Mediterranean world, the Pope has continued the Roman Imperial tradition to the present day in Western Europe and beyond. But that's a story for another lecture.

Conclusion

In this tape, we've been looking at the major successor civilizations to the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean world. I focused on late antiquity, and the transformation of the eastern Roman Empire into the Byzantine Empire of the Middle Ages. Though the Byzantine Empire is no more--Rome did, finally, indeed, fall--it's important to notice that direct descendents of late antiquity are still with us today: the Orthodox Christian world of Eastern Europe and Russia, and the western Islamic world.

Thanks for joining me in this discussion of Late Antiquity, Early Christianity, the Byzantine Empire, and Early Islam. For George Mason University, I'm Dr. Lawrence Butler.