Byzantine Empire

This survival set the stage for the sixth-century reign of Justinian I, an era that represents both the glittering summit and the exhausting limit of the East Roman state. Ascending the throne in 527 CE, Justinian sought to restore the ancient boundaries of the empire. His brilliant general Belisarius shattered the Vandal Kingdom of North Africa in 533 CE and then launched a grueling campaign to reclaim Italy from the Ostrogoths. But this grand reconquest came at a terrible price. In the 540s, fortune turned. A devastating pandemic, the Plague of Justinian, swept through the empire, decimating the population and crippling its tax base. Seizing upon Constantinople's distraction in the West, the Sasanian Persian king Khosrow I invaded from the east, sacking the great metropolis of Antioch in 540 CE. Though Justinian left behind enduring monuments—most notably the rewritten Roman legal code, the Corpus Juris Civilis, and the breathtaking, domed cathedral of Hagia Sophia—he left the treasury empty and the frontiers dangerously overextended.

The reckoning was swift and severe. By the early seventh century, the empire was fighting for its life. A mutiny in 602 CE led to the execution of the emperor Maurice, triggering a destructive civil war that allowed the Sasanian Persians to overrun the Levant and Egypt, while Avars and Slavs devastated the Balkans. The emperor Heraclius managed to save the state, leading a desperate, holy counter-offensive that culminated in a decisive victory over the Persians at Nineveh in 627 CE. Yet this triumph was instantly overshadowed by a new force emerging from the Arabian Peninsula. Exhausted by decades of total war, the Byzantine armies could not withstand the sudden, rapid expansion of the Arab Rashidun Caliphate in the 630s and 640s. In a matter of years, the empire permanently lost its wealthiest provinces: Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The loss of Egypt alone stripped Constantinople of three-quarters of its imperial revenue and its primary source of grain.

Reduced to its core territories of Asia Minor, parts of Greece, and the southern Balkans, the empire underwent a profound metamorphosis. Latin, which had persisted as the language of the military and the law, was finally abandoned for Greek in official administration. The state stabilized, adapting to a defensive posture under the Isaurian dynasty and later experiencing a brilliant two-century renaissance under the Macedonian dynasty. During this medieval golden age, the empire expanded once more, pushing its borders back into the Balkans and northern Syria. Constantinople remained the largest, most opulent city in Europe, a beacon of classical learning, artistic mastery, and Orthodox Christian theology, unmatched by any Western capital until it was finally overtaken in size and wealth by Paris in the thirteenth century.

Yet the cycles of decline and recovery could not endure forever. The eleventh century brought new enemies, notably the Seljuk Turks, who began eroding the imperial hold on Asia Minor. Though the Komnenian dynasty initiated a major military and economic restoration, the fatal blow to the empire’s integrity came not from the East, but from the West. In 1204 CE, the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade, diverted from their original campaign by Venetian financial interests and Byzantine dynastic intrigue, breached the walls of Constantinople. The resulting sack of the city was a catastrophe of looting, fires, and destruction from which the capital never fully recovered. The empire was carved up into a patchwork of Latin crusader states and Greek successor realms.

Although the Greeks of the Empire of Nicaea managed to recapture Constantinople in 1261 CE and restore the empire, the reconstituted state was a shadow of its former self. No longer a great Mediterranean power, it was a regional actor, bankrupt and fractured, ruling over a dying capital and a handful of isolated territories. Over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the rising Ottoman Empire systematically annexed the remaining Byzantine lands. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Roman Empire consisted of little more than the city of Constantinople itself, surrounded by Ottoman territory. When the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II breached the ancient Theodosian Walls with modern gunpowder artillery on May 29, 1453 CE, the last Roman emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died fighting on the ramparts. The fall of the city did not just signal the end of a medieval state; it closed the final, long chapter of classical Roman history, dispersing its scholars and manuscripts westward to help ignite the European Renaissance, while leaving its imperial legacy to be absorbed and adapted by the Islamic world that succeeded it.

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