Those who follow my blog’s historical posts may recall that I have an odd fascination with that peculiar historical entity we call the “Byzantine Empire.”  My interest in this subject always comes to the fore on this date, May 29, since this is the date that the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottoman Turks.  The fall of Byzantium ushered in a new era, and it is a convenient if inaccurate date to pinpoint the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era.  It would be more correct to postulate that rather than triggering the Renaissance, the fall of the Byzantine Empire was the event that caused Europeans to look to the south, and more importantly the west, for new trade routes to the riches of China and India.  Without the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, Columbus would not have been the discoverer of America.  That momentous event would have happened 30, 50 or even 100 years later.

In the opening sentence of this post, I described the Byzantine Empire as a “peculiar” historical entity.  “Peculiar” is an apt word for the Byzantine Empire.  First of all, the people of that realm never referred to their state as “Byzantine.”  From the moment of the empire’s supposed creation, when Constantine the Great converted the old Greek city of Byzantium into a splendid new Roman imperial capital which he named for himself, the people under that city’s suzerainty called themselves “Romans.”  Even on the day before the city’s fall to the Turks, the emperor, Constantine XI, still referred to his subjects as “Romans,” despite the fact that Greek, not Latin, had been the language of the city and the court for over 800 years, and it had been nearly as long since the city of Rome, which had been restored to the empire under Justinian, was last under imperial control.  The term “Byzantine” is actually an unflattering 19^th century moniker first coined by a German historian to differentiate the medieval empire of Constantinople from the glory that was Rome.

Another peculiar aspect of the Byzantine Empire is the fact that there is no real agreement on when to date its beginning.  Some claim the Byzantine Empire begins when Constantine made the city on the Bosphorus his new capital.  Others use the fall of Rome to Germanic tribes as the more appropriate date, an event that happened about 150 years later.  Some would say the Byzantine Empire begins with the reign of Justinian, who a half century after the fall of Rome sought to enforce a strict brand of Christian Orthodoxy on the population, and pursued an antagonistic expansionist policy against Italy and the city of Rome.  I would choose an even later date as the empire’s genesis.  In the early 7^th century, an emperor named Heraclius completely reorganized the administrative structure of the empire and replaced Latin with Greek as the language of the court.  At the end of Heraclius’s reign, Arabs took control of Syria and Egypt, which drastically reduced the empire’s geographic reach.  From then on, the empire was usually limited to the Balkans and Asia Minor, and bore little resemblance to the huge supernational Roman Empire of old.

If you have followed me this far into my post, you’re probably thinking, “Who cares?  Who gives a flying flip about an obscure medieval oddity called the Byzantine Empire anyway?”  You would be justified in thinking that way.  Heck, by May 29, 1453, the date the empire ceased to exist, it was already an afterthought to most of the people of Europe and the Middle East.  By then, the “empire” was nothing but a loose confederation of a few city states, of which poverty-stricken Constantinople was simply the largest.  The emperor’s authority did not extend outside his dwindling capital.  Other members of his family controlled a few towns in the southern-most part of the Greek peninsula, but they usually acted independent of the wishes of the emperor.  The remainder of the empire's Greek heartland had already fallen to the Turks, or was under the control of foreign dukes and counts whose feudal allegiance belonged to rulers in western Europe, especially Venice and Genoa.  By the time the final siege of Constantinople began, the Sultan probably had more soldiers massed before the city walls than there were inhabitants in the entire realm of the Byzantine Empire.  It was a sad remnant of a long moribund and nearly irrelevant little kingdom.

So why do I care about this place?  Mainly, I suppose, because the story of the Byzantine Empire is so full of drama.  It is a story of grandeur, when for 800 years Constantinople was by far the greatest city in Europe, and ranked among the greatest cities in the world.  It was a time when classical civilization thrived while Western Europe wallowed in poverty, violence, and illiteracy.

It is a story of brutality, when a deposed ruler or rival could expect to be tortured and physically mutilated.  One deposed emperor famously had his nose cut off.  Many were cruelly blinded, a punishment that often resulted in terrible infection and a slow, agonizing death.  Once, an entire defeated army's soldiers, perhaps as many as 15,000 men, had their eyes speared.  One man out of a hundred was left with one eye to lead the pathetic horde home.  In the empire's later years, seething ethnic tensions could explode into vicious riots whose violence could reach genocidal proportions.

It is a story of tragedy, when its proud population was betrayed and exiled by French and Italian Crusaders in the year 1204, an event whose ramifications are still felt today in the distrust and antipathy many citizens of the Balkan peninsula have toward the West.  The tragedy of 1204 was repeated in 1453, when not only was an army defeated and independence lost; on that date entire families were often slaughtered, or wives and daughters forced to live in the harem of wealthy Turkish overlords, women and young girls forever lost to their husbands and parents.

It is also a story of heroism, when an unlikely prince, the 8th child of Emperor Manuel II, donned the imperial purple, fully aware that his reign would likely be the last.  Just a few short years after he came to power, the great Ottoman army gathered before the city’s massive, but crumbling walls.  The night before the final attack began, Emperor Constantine XI made his way to the great cathedral, Haggia Sophia, where the bulk of the city’s population had already gathered to beseech their God to protect them against the Moslem onslaught.  Outside the church, Constantine spoke to the men who would soon face the Ottoman attack.  He said a man should always be prepared to die either for his faith, his country, his family, or his sovereign.  Now, his soldiers must be ready to fight and die for all four causes.  He reminded his people of the glory of their past and the high traditions of their ancient city. He reminded them that they were the proud descendants of Rome and Greece, carrying on the heritage of Augustus and the first Constantine, of Pericles and Alexander the Great.  Most importantly, they were the soldiers of the One True Faith.

After his speech, Constantine went inside the great church and took his last communion.  Then he rode the entire length of the city's land walls, offering encouragement to the sentries keeping watch while his meager army assumed its defensive positions.  When he returned to the palace, he gathered his royal attendants and closest advisors to ask their forgiveness for any unkindness he may have committed against them.  At midnight he and his closest friend, a man named George Phrantzes, climbed the tower on the northwestern corner of the city’s wall and listened to the sound of heavy artillery being hauled into place for the morning bombardment.  In the distance he could see flickering lights on board the Sultan’s ships as they assumed their positions along the sea walls of the city’s harbor.  He thanked Phrantzes for his loyal service to emperor and country, and bade him farewell.  He would never see his good friend again.  In 10 hours, Constantine would be dead, his body unnoticed by the conquering Turks as they swept past the hundreds of Greek corpses that lay where Constantinople’s thousand year old walls were first breached.