The city's location and imperial patronage saw its status rise to new heights, becoming known around the world by multiple names such as the Queen of Cities.
Famous for its seemingly impregnable sets of walls and defenses, architecture, culture, and economic might, it would be governed by Roman law, observe Christianity and adopt Greek as its primary language, although it would serve as a melting pot of races and cultures due to its unique geographic location straddling Europe and Asia.
Continue reading from History. The city of Constantinople was a highly valued prize to many would-be conquerors due to the geographic strength of its location. While many tried to breach its defenses over the ages including the 4th Crusade, which did sack the city and hold it for some time before it was reclaimed by Christian Greeks , only Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire managed to definitively seize and hold the city, dealing the Byzantine Empire a conclusive final blow and establishing a strong geographic foothold for Muslim expansion into previously Christian Europe.
On May 29, , Mehmed II concluded a 55 day siege of the city in which he bombarded its defenses with cannon and seized control of the waters surrounding the city. How far they made amendments is not recorded and, in the main, cannot be known because most of the originals have not survived.
The text was composed and distributed almost entirely in Latin, which was still the official language of the government of the Byzantine Empire in , whereas the prevalent language of merchants, farmers, seamen, and other citizens was Greek. Many of the laws contained in the Codex were aimed at regulating religious practice, included numerous provisions served to secure the status of Christianity as the state religion of the empire, uniting church and state, and making anyone who was not connected to the Christian church a non-citizen.
It also contained laws forbidding particular pagan practices; for example, all persons present at a pagan sacrifice may be indicted as if for murder.
Other laws, some influenced by his wife, Theodora, include those to protect prostitutes from exploitation, and women from being forced into prostitution.
Rapists were treated severely. Further, by his policies, women charged with major crimes should be guarded by other women to prevent sexual abuse; if a woman was widowed, her dowry should be returned; and a husband could not take on a major debt without his wife giving her consent twice. Lugduni apud Gulielmum Rouillium, The Corpus forms the basis of Latin jurisprudence including ecclesiastical Canon Law and, for historians, provides a valuable insight into the concerns and activities of the later Roman Empire.
The only western province where the Justinian Code was introduced was Italy, from where it was to pass to western Europe in the 12th century, and become the basis of much European law code. It eventually passed to eastern Europe, where it appeared in Slavic editions, and it also passed on to Russia. It was not in general use during the Early Middle Ages. After the Early Middle Ages, interest in it revived.
The revived Roman law, in turn, became the foundation of law in all civil law jurisdictions. The provisions of the Corpus Juris Civilis also influenced the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church; it was said that ecclesia vivit lege romana —the church lives by Roman law.
The Corpus continues to have a major influence on public international law. Its four parts thus constitute the foundation documents of the western legal tradition. Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. The Byzantine Empire. Search for:. Byzantium: The New Rome. Learning Objectives Describe identifying characteristics of the Byzantine Empire. Although the Byzantine Empire had a multi-ethnic character during most of its history and preserved Romano-Hellenistic traditions, it became identified with its increasingly predominant Greek element and its own unique cultural developments.
Today the city is known as Istanbul. The founder of the Byzantine Empire and its first emperor, Constantine the Great, moved the capital of the Roman Empire to the city of Byzantium in CE, and renamed it Constantinople. Constantine the Great also legalized Christianity, which had previously been persecuted in the Roman Empire. Christianity would become a major element of Byzantine culture.
Constantinople became the largest city in the empire and a major commercial center, while the Western Roman Empire fell in CE. Key Terms Germanic barbarians : An uncivilized or uncultured person, originally compared to the hellenistic Greco-Roman civilization; often associated with fighting or other such shows of strength. Christianity : An Abrahamic religion based on the teachings of Jesus Christ and various scholars who wrote the Christian Bible. It was legalized in the Byzantine Empire by Constantine the Great, and the religion became a major element of Byzantine culture.
Justinian was responsible for the construction of the Hagia Sophia, the center of Christianity in Constantinople. Even today, the Hagia Sophia is recognized as one of the greatest buildings in the world. Justinian also systematized the Roman legal code that served as the basis for law in the Byzantine Empire. After a plague reduced the Byzantine population, they lost Rome and Italy to the Ostrogoths, and several important cities to the Persians. Key Terms Hagia Sophia : A church built by Byzantine Emperor Justinian; the center of Christianity in Constantinople and one of the greatest buildings in the world to this day.
It is now a mosque in the Muslim Istanbul. Nika riots : When angry racing fans, already angry over rising taxes, became enraged at Emperor Justinian for arresting two popular charioteers, and tried to depose him in CE. Early in his reign, Justinian appointed an official, Tribonian, to oversee this task. The project as a whole became known as Corpus juris civilis , or the Justinian Code. Though the beginnings of the Byzantine Empire are unclear, its demise is not.
The history of the Eastern Roman Empire, from its foundation in to its conquest in , is one of war, plague, architectural triumphs and fear of God's wrath. T he Byzantine empire means different things to different people. Some associate it with gold: the golden tesserae in the mosaics of Ravenna, the golden background in icons, the much coveted golden coins, the golden-hued threads of Byzantine silks used to shroud Charlemagne.
Others think of court intrigues, poisonings and scores of eunuchs. Little else perhaps exists in the collective imagination. All this is indeed evocative of Byzantium, but there is so much more to explore. To begin at the beginning is tricky. Did the empire begin when the emperor Constantine moved his capital from Rome to Constantinople in ? When the city was consecrated by both pagan and Christian priests in May ?
Or did it begin in when the two halves of the vast Roman empire were officially divided into East and West, or even later in the late 5th century when Rome was sacked, conquered and governed by the Goths, leaving Constantinople and the East as the sole heir of the empire?
But, if its beginning is unclear, its demise is not: on 29 May , the armies of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II entered the city and brought the existence of this state to an end after more than a millennium. When Constantine moved his capital from Rome to the hitherto relatively obscure, though strategically placed, city of Byzantium and gave the city his name, it signalled a shift of interest towards the East, but perhaps little else initially.
After the troubled third century a number of cities had functioned as imperial residences without necessarily challenging the idea of Rome as the centre: Trier, Split, Thessalonica, Nicomedia modern Izmit.
But with the advantage of hindsight we can see that this case was different: Constantinople was enlarged, decorated with famous statues and objects from the whole empire some of which are still in place today , endowed with a Senate and its citizens given the traditional free bread handed out to Romans.
A number of the most important constituting traits of the Byzantine empire date back to this early era. The Byzantine state was, more or less from the beginning, a Christian Roman empire.
After the edict of Milan in ended the persecutions and made Christianity a tolerated religion, Constantine showed a marked though not exclusive preference for Christianity. He presided over the first ecumenical Council in Nicaea in which defined the creed and dealt with heresies, thus setting the tone for the intimate relation between Church and state.
This bond was made clear by a number of sacred buildings that Constantine erected, in his capital as well as in Palestine both the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Nativity go back to this period , and by a number of relics of Christ and the Virgin that his mother, Helena, purchased in the Holy Land and sent back to Constantinople.
Unlike Rome or Antioch, the new capital had not been graced by the presence of any apostle, but certainly entered Christian topography with the bonus of imperial patronage. In the eleven hundred years that separate the first Constantine from the last emperor, another Constantine the XI , the empire underwent many and significant changes.
First came expansion. From the fourth to the early sixth centuries the East flourished: population boomed, cities proliferated and Constantinople itself grew to be the largest city in Europe with over , inhabitants. To support this growth its city walls were yet again enlarged in between and , a triple system of inner wall, outer wall and moat that did not fail to protect it until the very end large parts of which are still visible, albeit over-restored, today.
The ecclesiastical head of the city, the patriarch of the new Rome, had risen to the second position in the hierarchy of the Church just below the old Rome, the result of political pressure that was to breed discontent between the two sees in the centuries to come. Together with Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem they formed the Pentarchy, the ultimate authority of the Church as decided by councils bringing together the senior clergy of the five sees.
While the city expanded, the empire underwent a transformation. In , Theodosius I r. A demarcation line running roughly from Belgrade to Libya turned, in the fifth century, into a true frontier.
In the West, disaster: Huns and Goths overran the Roman world. In the East, Germanic officials were integrated into the government and occupied important positions in the state machinery up until the reign of the emperor Zeno r. The Eastern Empire was an unbroken continuation of the Roman state, though with Greek as the dominant language. The West was now divided into several Germanic kingdoms who adopted Latin for their administration.
With the overwhelming size of his armed forces, and additional advantages gained by the use of gunpowder, he succeeded where his predecessors failed, claiming Constantinople for Muslim rule on May 29, While the early decades of an Ottoman Empire-ruled Constantinople were marked by the transformation of churches into mosques, Mehmed II spared the church of the Holy Apostles and allowed a diverse population to remain.
Following the conqueror, the most prominent ruler of the Ottomans was Suleyman the Magnificent who ruled from to Along with developing a series of public works, Suleyman transformed the judicial system, championed the arts and continued to expand the empire.
In the 19th century, the declining Ottoman state underwent major changes with the implementation of the Tanzimat Reforms, which guaranteed property rights and outlawed execution without a trial. The Treaty of Lausanne formally established the Republic of Turkey, which moved its capital to Ankara.
Old Constantinople, long known informally as Istanbul, officially adopted the name in Ancient History Encyclopedia. The Age of Suleyman the Magnificent. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Washington Post. The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Syria is home to one of the oldest civilizations in the world, with a rich artistic and cultural heritage. From its ancient roots to its recent political instability and the Syrian Civil War, the country has a complex and, at times, tumultuous history. Ancient Syria The Ottoman Empire was one of the mightiest and longest-lasting dynasties in world history.
The chief leader, known as the Sultan, was given absolute
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