Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire

by Judith Herrin

  The creation of Ottoman power took place over many centuries in continuous interaction with Byzantium. As the former expanded and grew stronger, the latter shrank and became weaker. The long period of political rivalry, coupled with close relations, led to mutual influence. The Byzantine princesses sent to marry Turkish husbands introduced a Christian presence into their courts. The Byzantine system of land grants (pronoia) was transformed into the Ottoman timar, while Muslim tax registers continued to be maintained by Christian officials in the Byzantine style. For social services, Byzantines and Ottomans adopted similar patterns of philanthropy, although the Islamic insistence on giving alms meant that a proportion of every Muslim’s income would be set aside for this purpose, while in the Christian world it was left to the individual’s conscience. Institutions like the Muslim wakf closely resembled the Christian monastery with its myriad social functions. But during the Ottoman conquest, Christian resources, population, church property and taxes were redirected to Islamic institutions: caravanserais, medressehs and mosques, often staffed by Christian converts (gulams). Although they provided free accommodation and food for travellers of all faiths, wakf foundations strengthened Islam at the expense of Christianity.

  This is evident from the number of active metropolitans and bishops in Asia Minor, which declined sharply as churches were converted into mosques, church property was confiscated by the conquerors, and Christian peasants found it more profitable to renounce their faith and convert to Islam. As Kydones reported in a speech urging the emperors to seek western aid:

  The entire region which used to sustain us, extending to the East from the Hellespont to the mountains of Armenia, they have stripped away. They have completely destroyed cities, despoiled churches, looted graves and filled everything with blood and corpses. They have even polluted the souls of the inhabitants, forcing them to reject the true God and to take part in their own filth.

  Episcopal sees in the European provinces replaced the traditional dominance of Asia Minor in the hierarchy of ecclesiastical centres. In 1324, when the Patriarch of Constantinople appealed for financial assistance, only three major sees were named: Kyzikos, Proikonessos and Lopadion. Many clerics appointed to churches in Asia Minor were unable to reside in their sees and became refugees in the capital, dependent on patriarchal support. And by the late fifteenth century, an official notitia (list of churches) records that in Asia Minor ‘fifty-one metropolitanates, eighteen archbishoprics and four hundred and seventy-eight bishoprics are desolate’. Only one archbishop and three bishops survived.

  In artistic terms, the Seljuks had already adopted the double-headed eagle from Byzantium and, inspired by Hagia Sophia, fourteenth-century mosques had adapted domes and ceramic tiles for their own use. The Green Mosque at Bursa, built with a fine dome in 1424 by Mehmed I, served as a model for many later mosques, for example at Edirne, and achieved a new distinction in sixteenth-century buildings built by the architect Sinan, notably the Blue Mosque in Constantinople–Istanbul. Sinan, born a Christian, was enslaved by the Muslims in their regular forced recruitment of boys for palace service (devşirme), and attained great honour through his designs for magnificent baths and secular structures, as well as mosques.

  Despite this long process of mutual influence, major differences in the realm of family law and customs continued to set Islam apart. Against the Christian insistence on monogamy and reluctance to permit remarriage, Muslim men were allowed four wives, if they could support them appropriately. Sultans indulged their sexual preferences not only with their official wives but also with numerous concubines who formed the core of their harem. These women hoped to produce a large number of sons, who all wanted to inherit their father’s power. The result was a tremendous rivalry among the mothers, as well as fratricidal warfare among the brothers and half-brothers when a sultan died. Islam did not recognize the medieval practice of primogeniture, which ensured that the eldest son inherited his father’s land. The sultan might favour a younger son born to his favourite concubine over his older half-brothers. The civil war of 1402–13, between Bayezid’s sons, was a portent of many similar struggles to come.

  Of course, such conflicts were also familiar in Byzantium and the West. Andronikos II had been challenged by his grandson Andronikos III in the years 1321–8, and John VI Kantakouzenos provoked a six-year struggle when he claimed the throne inherited by John V (1341–7). When John VIII (1425–48) and Constantine XI (1449–53) called on their younger brothers Theodore and Demetrios for help in defending the capital, the despots of Morea were too busy fighting each other. But in the Muslim world, the court structure and harem encouraged greater competition and instability at moments of succession. And since the Ottomans had adopted monarchy as their political form, one ruler had to establish his authority over all his rivals. Each sultan usually came to power after a series of fratricides and murders, which heightened his own determination to survive. And each wanted to be the Ottoman ruler who captured the Christian metropolis of Constantinople.

  In 1422, Murad II anticipated this triumph and gave precise instructions regarding the expected booty. An eyewitness records:

  The despot of the Turks also dispatched heralds to proclaim to all the ends of the earth that the emir promised to deliver all the riches and people of the city to the Muslims. This he did to gather all the Muslims… they came to profit, not only the profiteers in looting and war, but the adventurers and the merchants, perfumers, shoemakers, and even some Turkish monks… Some came to buy prisoners, some women; others came to take the men and still others, the infants; others came to seize the animals, and others goods; and the Turkish monks came to get our nuns and free booty from the despot of the Turks.

  On this occasion, according to John Kananos, who witnessed the siege, the Mother of God protected Constantinople; even the Turks saw her fighting on the battlements. Emperor Manuel, however, managed to secure the proclamation of a rival sultan in Bursa, which forced Murad II to abandon the siege.

  Thwarted in his ambitions, the sultan turned his attention to the Morea and forced Demetrios and Thomas Palaiologos to pay tribute. While Demetrios welcomed this alliance with Murad II, Thomas led an anti-Turkish coalition in alliance with his Genoese relations, the Zaccaria family. In 1448, when Emperor John VIII died, his mother Helena insisted that Constantine, who was older than Demetrios and Thomas, should be crowned emperor. Since it was clear that Constantinople was threatened more seriously than ever before, Constantine immediately appealed to his brothers for military help. But they refused and by 1451 it was already too late.

  In that year Mehmed II succeeded his father Murad as sultan. He was only nineteen but determined to complete the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. Both he and Constantine XI knew that the survival of Byzantium was at stake. The construction of a second major Ottoman castle at Rumeli Hisar on the European shore achieved the Ottoman aim of controlling all shipping in the Bosphoros, and prevented any large-scale military aid from reaching the city. From that point on, Constantinople’s fate was decided. Had Constantine XI been able to pay the Hungarian engineer who offered to cast new cannon for the defence of the city, it might have survived for a few years. But the Byzantine ruler was very short of money, and so the engineer took his invention to the Turks. It was this giant weapon, larger than any previous cannon, that ensured their victory. No late antique city walls of the fifth century, built in a straight line of triple fortifications, could withstand the power of gunpowder at this fifteenth-century strength.

  The Byzantine emperor sent copious appeals to the West, to which some allies responded. In the autumn of 1452, the papal legate Cardinal Isidore (previously Bishop of Kiev) and Leonard of Chios arrived in the city with the body of archers recruited and paid by the cardinal. Ships from Ancona, Provence and Castile added to the naval forces, and a group of Greeks from Crete elected to remain in the city, though six ships later slipped away. The inhabitants were greatly cheered by the arrival in January 1453 of the Genoese co
ndottiere, Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, who braved the Turkish blockade and got through with his two ships and about seven hundred men. Constantine XI put him in charge of the weakest part of the land walls, the section by the Gate of Romanos, and

  he invigorated and even instructed the people so that they would not lose hope and maintain unswerving trust in God… All people admired and obeyed him in all things.

  In his diary of the siege, Nicolò Barbaro, a surgeon from Venice, records his experience of living through the last days of Byzantium. When people realized that only a miracle could save them from ‘the fury of these wicked pagans’, they wept and prayed and

  when the tocsin was sounded, to make everyone take up their posts… women, and children too, carried stones to the walls to put them on the battlements so that they could be hurled down upon the Turks.

  His vivid account is naturally biased in favour of the Venetians, and he accuses Giustiniani of abandoning his post at the Romanos Gate. After master-minding the defence with the emperor, the Genoese leader had been hit by an arrow and died later at Chios.

  Constantine XI’s appeals to General Hunyadi resulted in an embassy which arrived to negotiate with Mehmed II in April 1453. But by that stage the sultan sensed victory and dismissed the Hungarian threat to attack him. He had assembled a vast army of perhaps 60,000 soldiers and up to 140,000 extras, while Constantine could muster at most 8,000 defenders. With the boom in place across the Golden Horn, the emperor concentrated on defending the 19 kilo-metres of perimeter wall against overwhelming Turkish forces. The siege was dominated by the sultan’s new longer-barrelled cannon, nicknamed ‘the imperial’, which fired cannon balls weighing between 12,000 and 13,000lbs at the walls. Despite valiant efforts to repair the defences with barrels, rubble and any other material, after twenty days of bombardment a breach was opened through which the Turks forced their entry. On 29 May 1453, they raised their flag over the city.

  The heroic emperor, Constantine XI, who inspired the resistance, was lost during the attack, and his body was never found, creating a Byzantine rumour that he had been swallowed up into the walls and would return. The night before the final attack, he rode out on one last tour of the walls with his adviser, Sphrantzes, who records how they saw the vast encampment of the Ottomans, their bonfires and preparations, and knew that only divine intervention could save Byzantium. Instead, the city was subjected to a three-day plunder, in which Sphrantzes and many others were taken prisoner. When Mehmed II finally entered the city, some reports claim that he wept at the losses and at the beauty of the buildings; others note that the Turks dressed themselves and even their dogs in ecclesiastical robes, threw all the icons onto a huge bonfire over which they roasted meat, and drank unwatered wine from chalices.

  The sultan ordered what remained of the population to stay in the city under Ottoman rule, and organized 5,000 extra families to move in, thus beginning the process of Islamicization. He installed the well-known scholar and monk Gennadios Scholarios as patriarch in 1454. As leader of the Greek millet (an ethnic grouping employed by the Ottomans to control conquered people), he tried to protect the orthodox from injustice. To this day, his successor, now Patriarch Bartholomeus of Constantinople, resides in his see, through terms negotiated with the first ruler of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal – better known as Atatürk – at the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Although there are few Christians in the city, the Church of New Rome, recognized by Constantine I and elevated to the same position as Old Rome by Theodosius I, persists as a beacon of orthodox faith. But it is the young Mehmed the Conqueror whose victory is commemorated in the Mosque of the Conqueror, Fatih Camii, erected on the site of the church of the Holy Apostles. With this symbolic replacement, he made Byzantium the capital of what became the Ottoman Empire.

  1. Mount Athos on the Chalkidike peninsula, northern Greece, from the sea, the site of numerous Byzantine monasteries from the ninth century onwards.

  2. St Catherine’s monastery, Mount Sinai, Egypt, built by Justinian in the mid sixth century. The enclosure protects the Burning Bush, which had attracted Christian monks as early as the fourth century.

  3. Land walls of Constantinople, a triple line of defence completed in 413 under Theodosius II, from the west, showing the moat (now filled) and outer wall, the middle wall with towers and the inner wall with taller towers.

  4. The walls of the citadel of Thessalonike, probably constructed in the mid fifth century, with over twenty gates and a hundred towers, from the north.

  5. The Aqueduct of Valens, inaugurated in 373, central Constantinople (photograph taken in 1966 during the construction of the underpass at Saraçhane).

  6. The base of the obelisk of Theodosius I in the Hippodrome, Constantinople, south side, showing the emperor and his sons seated in the imperial box, flanked by senators and soldiers, receiving tribute from kneeling barbarians, erected in 390.

  7. Silk roundel (22cm × 19cm), probably from Syria or Egypt, of mounted Amazons hunting leopards, late seventh to eighth century. It reflects the persistence of secular and mythical subjects woven on silks in the Christian world of Byzantium.

  8. Lead seal of Synetos and Niketas, general kommerkiarioi of Koloneia, Kamacha and Fourth Armenia during the reign of Anastasios II (713–15). The emperor is shown standing on the front (left) with the titles of the officials on the back (right).

  9. Clay pilgrim’s flask (ampulla), with St Menas standing between his two camels, probably from Egypt, sixth or seventh century.

  10. Frontispiece of the Bible of Leo, made in Constantinople, c. 940, showing Leo presenting his Bible to the Virgin, who in turn gestures to the figure of Christ. Leo’s beardless face and childish fair hair indicate that he was a eunuch, a fact confirmed by the titles noted in the inscription beside him: patrikios (of patrician status), sakellarios (treasurer) and praipositos (major-domo of the palace). The inscription on the frame is an epigram Leo composed, which compares his humble offering with that of monks who offer their souls to the Virgin.

  11. Gold coins all from the mint of Constantinople.

  11a. Justinian II (685–95): solidus with a portrait of Christ, bearded and with long hair on the front (left), and of the emperor standing and holding a cross on the back (right).

  11b. Justinian II (second reign, 705–11): solidus with a portrait of the youthful Christ with short curly hair on the front (left) and of the emperor and his young son Tiberios holding a cross on the back (right).

  11c. The Empress Irene (797–802): solidus with her own portrait on both front and back, in marked contrast to normal imperial coins.

  11d. Constantine VII (945–59): solidus with a portrait of Christ on the front (left) and of the emperor holding an orb and a cross on the back (right).

  12. Karanlik Kilise, Cappadocia, Turkey, a rock-cut church of the eleventh/twelfth century. The volcanic tufa of this region allows churches, monasteries and houses to be excavated, creating underground structures that are warm in winter and cool in summer.

  13. Karanlik Kilise, Cappadocia, Turkey, interior fresco of the Last Supper showing Christ with the Apostles and two-pronged fork, twelfth century.

  14. Tenth-century ivory plaque of Christ crowning Otto II and Theophano, to mark their wedding in 972, with inscriptions in Latin and Greek that identify the two figures. The smaller figure kneeling at Christ’s feet below Otto’s stool is John Philagathos, who begs Christ to help him with the familiar Greek formula, ‘Lord help thy servant’. He may have commissioned the plaque.

  15. Two miniatures from the Khludov Psalter, mid ninth century, illustrating Psalm 68 (left; folio 67r), with Jews at the crucifixion likened to iconoclasts whitewashing an icon of Christ, and Psalm 52 (right; folio 51v), with St Peter trampling on Simon Magus, the first heretic, while the iconophile Patriarch Nikephoros tramples on John Grammatikos, the iconoclast heretic. The heretics’ love of money is represented by a sack of gold coins.

  16. The sea view of Hagia Sophia, the Great Church of Constantinople de
dicated by Justinian in 537, showing the eastern apse and the central dome.

  17. Mosaic of Christ flanked by Emperor Constantine IX and Empress Zoe, from the gallery of Hagia Sophia. Originally, Zoe’s previous husbands had been depicted. In June 1042, when she married Constantine, her third husband, the inscription identifying him was changed and all three faces were reset. Constantine presents a bag of gold to Christ, and Zoe holds a scroll with her husband’s name: Konstantinos, Emperor of the Romans, faithful in Christ.

  18. Interior of Hagia Sophia showing the east end and the dome, with Muslim invocations on the shields hung at the level of the galleries, where the imperial mosaics are just visible. Above these the pendentives, decorated with sixth-century mosaics of seraphim (winged creatures with faces), support the dome from the four corners of the base.

  19. Mosaic panel from the church of San Vitale, Ravenna, dedicated in 547, showing Theodora and her ladies-in-waiting. While the empress wears her formal crown, jewelled collar and purple cloak, the silk dresses, jewellery and red shoes of her companions reflect elegant court style.