Byzantine Empire

The Roman Empire, continuing for a further thousand years after the western half collapsed, under a name its own people never used. Its inhabitants called themselves Romans and their state the Roman Empire throughout; Byzantine is a term coined by a German scholar in 1557 and adopted because western historians wanted a word for the eastern empire that did not concede its claim. Constantine refounded Byzantium as his capital in 330, and the eastern half survived the fifth century because it was richer, more urban, and had a shorter and more defensible land frontier - and because Constantinople sat on a peninsula behind the Theodosian walls, which held for a thousand years. Justinian reconquered Italy, Africa and southern Spain in the sixth century, codified Roman law in a compilation that transmitted it to the whole of later Europe, and built Hagia Sophia; the effort exhausted the treasury and the army, and the gains were lost within two generations. Plague arrived in 541 and killed perhaps a quarter of the population. The Arab conquests of the seventh century took Syria, Egypt and North Africa permanently, leaving a Greek-speaking Orthodox state reorganised around military provinces that survived by diplomacy, fortification and Greek fire, a naval incendiary whose recipe is still unknown. Greek replaced Latin as the language of government in the same century. Iconoclasm split the empire for over a hundred years. The Macedonian dynasty reconquered much of the Balkans and Syria between 867 and 1025, and then Manzikert in 1071 lost Anatolia to the Seljuks. Its missionaries converted the Slavs and gave them the Cyrillic alphabet, which is why Russian is written as it is. The empire was fatally damaged not by Muslims but by the Fourth Crusade, which sacked Constantinople in 1204 and partitioned it among Venetians and Franks. It recovered the city in 1261 but never the strength, and spent its last two centuries as a client of whoever was strongest. Constantine XI died on the walls on 29 May 1453 when Mehmed II took the city with gunpowder artillery. Its scholars carried Greek texts west and helped start the Renaissance. Constantinople held perhaps half a million people at its peak, its land walls resisted every attacker for eight centuries, and its gold solidus kept its weight for seven hundred years as the reserve currency of the Mediterranean.

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