William Tyler
The Rise and Fall of The Byzantine Empire

William Tyler - The Rise and Fall of the Byzantine Empire

- Welcome to everyone for this talk, which is about Byzantine. Byzantium, the very word itself has something magical about it, Byzantium. The city was first founded by the Greeks as a trading centre because it’s geographical position. It’s not only between Asia and Europe linking trade both ways, but also on trade routes, northwards from the caucuses up to Russia. So it’s a key trading place. In addition to which through the Bosphorus, it links the Black Sea with the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. And as a result of that, it was easily defensible in the times of the Middle Ages. So it is both a strategic place in terms of trade and a strategic place in terms of defence. So Byzantium was an excellent place for the Greeks to build a trading port. Yet this was not enough to change Byzantium into an imperial city. First, an imperial city of Rome, then an imperial city of Byzantium itself. And finally, the imperial city of the Ottoman Turks. The first change came in 330 CE AD, the first change in three 330. When the Roman Emperor in Rome, Constantine rebuilt the Greek port and renamed it Nova Roma. That is to say New Rome. However, it soon became known after him, Constantine as Constantinople. The frontal bit is from the Greek word Polis, meaning a city. So Constantinople is what Byzantium became. So the city is Constantinople, today’s Istanbul, but the empire is called Byzantine. The Byzantine Empire named after the Greek who founded it so many centuries before Byzantium. So the Byzantine Empire with its capital at what is the day Istanbul, and was before that Constantinople. This is what Gordon Kerr, in his book, “A Short History of the Middle East” writes, He writes this, “Constantinople took on the role of capital of the eastern part of the Roman Empire. The western part, of course, remained under the control of Rome.

They split it in two, it became the capital of the eastern part of the Roman Empire was soon vying with its ancient twin Rome for glory and splendour. When the Emperor Theodosius died in 392 CE, the Roman Empire was split between his two sons.” But as you know, the western half that is Rome itself had a very short life to come. The western part based on Rome collapsed, the eastern part that is Constantinople survived. So Kerr goes on to say, “Based at would Roman side would soon collapse in the face of increasingly devastating barbarian invasions while in the East, the Byzantine Empire was born. At this point, Byzantium retained control of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, the Balkans, and Asia Minor, and would hold onto the Middle East for further three centuries.” Now, I didn’t send out maps on purpose because the Byzantine Empire kits change it, but basically at the beginning it controlled parts of Europe, which we would describe as Eastern Europe, places like Greece and so on. But it also controlled the Middle East. By the time it falls to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, it’s only a tiny little bit of Asia left, basically a round Constantinople itself. But in Europe, it still controlled Thrace that is on the European side of the Bosphorus, and it controlled most of Greece. The fact that it controlled Thrace is interesting because today, Turkey, the inheritor of the Ottoman Empire still controls Thrace, a small part of it on the European side.

Hence why Turkey enters the European song contest. It’s in Europe. And those of you who visited Constantinople/Istanbul will have seen and probably travelled across between the two. That is to say between Asia and Europe. So the Byzantine Empire began as a divide in the whole Roman empire between West and East. The western Roman empire based on Rome simply collapsed because it was taken over by the barbarians, as the Romans would’ve called them by the Goths and the Illarics and all the rest of them. Whilst Constantinople continued, this Byzantine empire became Greek speaking rather than Latin speaking, although its population, in particularly in Constantinople itself, regarded themselves as Romani or Rome. We think of this Byzantine empire as quite different from Rome and we’re wrong to say think so. The Byzantine Empire is the successor to Rome in the East. It is a continuation of the Roman empire in eastern Europe and in the Middle East. The great book by the historian, Gibbon, “The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire”, is a story takes you into the Byzantine story and not simply the Roman story. So the Roman Empire doesn’t cease all together as we learned at school, but actually moves to become the Byzantine empire in the East. This eastern Empire, based on Constantinople, was in trouble by the end of the seventh century, the 600 AD CE, why? Because it came up against another empire from further east, the Persian Empire. And Peter Sarris in his book, “Byzantium”. I apologise for those who saw my synopsis. I didn’t put a book list on, I was still suffering from this pain in the shoulder. And I typed the synopsis and I was in such pain. I didn’t type the book list and I haven’t got round to doing it, but I promise that I will put up the book list. This is in the Oxford series, “A Very Short Introduction: Byzantium” by Peter Sarris. For those who want to know more, this is the easiest way to get into it.

And Peter Sarris writes in this way. “The East Roman Empire…” that’s Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire. “In the 640s was in a state of political, military and demographic collapse. Demographic collapse by virtue of repeated bouts of the Bubonic plague, and was too exhausted for the emperor’s, Constance II and Justinian II, who reigned in the latter half of the seventh century to roll back the enemy tide, even at his Persians, even when two outbreaks of bloodletting and civil war within the Islamic Empire appear to present opportunities. Unlike the Persian empire, however, Byzantium survived.” The Persian empire was to be destroyed by the rising power of the Arabs. Remember last week, the spread of Islamic power from Saudi Arabia after the death of Muhammad, Persia fell to Islam. Hence why Iran, Persia, Iran is in fact Islamic today. It’s right back to the very early days of the after the death of Muhammad. So Byzantium survived, but now faced a worse enemy in the sense of a stronger enemy in terms of the Arab Caliphate, which was established in the Middle East, following the death of Muhammad. The destruction of the Persian Empire, we now have, again, two empires in the Middle East Byzantine and the Arab. Before that we had by and the Persian. Now it’s Byzantium. Now, in talking like that, in terms of Byzantium and Byzantium and, you can see that Byzantium was the, in the frontline of the defence of Christian Europe because the enemies lay to the East. If Byzantium was to fall, then it would mean that Europe itself was exposed to the East, which after Muhammad means it was exposed to Islam.

Now, last week we learned that in the very early days, Islam spread into, across the Gibraltar Straits into Spain and up into France, let it gone. Although southern Spain remained Islamic, but the threat to Europe was not to come from the Muslims in southern Spain who remained there until the 15th century, but was to come in the end, was to come from the Turks who took Constantinople and came over the border, but they’d already come over the border into Europe. Long before we get to into the Balkans, long before we get to 1453. And before the Constantinople itself. The Ottoman Empire was extremely strong and twice threatened Western Europe by reaching Vienna. It also meant that today, Albania and Kosovo remain Islamic because the Ottomans were there, and Spain, sorry, and Greece, only escaped Islam in the 1820s. This is an ongoing problem that Western Europe faced right up to the time of the First World War. So let’s sort of bear that in mind as we go forward. Although the Persian empire was to fall, Byzantium was actually weakened. And let me explain how it was weakened by the Arabs, and that’s an important part of the story. It was weakened by the Arabs because of the way that they took the main sentence in the seventh century in the Middle East, away from the notional controller Byzantium, remain places like Damascus where the Arabs establish themselves as the rulers, as the capital, if you like, and places like Jerusalem, and Gaza, and all the other places fall to the Arabs. They are pushing forward, and this is causing major problems. But Byzantium reorganised itself.

That is to say it reorganised its military, social and political structure. It abandoned the structures of ancient Rome, which of course it had simply taken over. It now set up its own. And Peter Sarris writes this of the way that they dealt with the problem. He writes this, “In particular, the emperors in Byzantium oversaw the root and branch reform of the empire’s administrative system. The late Roman offices of states such as the Pretorian Prefecture of the East, on which the Empire depended, was simply swept away as was the regimental structure of the old Roman army and its system of provisioning and supply.” Instead, they introduced a new system. They divided up the Middle Eastern part of the Byzantine empire into administrative districts. In English terms, we’d say counties, in American terms, we’d say states, they divided it up in a different way than the Romans. In other words, they devolved authority to people who were only responsible directly to the emperor in Constantinople, they did the same with the Army. And so they were better prepared when attacks came from the Arabs to the further south, and later from the Turks in the East, they were better prepared to hold them back. Finally, that Sarris writes this, “The people appointed were directly in supporting emperor and his court in Constantinople and received regular inspections from imperial agents who were the emperor’s eyes and ears in the provinces. As a result, the core territories of the Byzantine Empire of the late seventh and eighth centuries were probably the most tightly administered regions anywhere in the west, probably not as much as China, but anywhere else.

It was very well organised. It’s very difficult, I think, to talk about the Byzantine Empire as a whole because it stretches from this period of the collapse of Rome in the fifth century, right through to its own collapse in the middle of the 15th century. It’s a huge period of time. It’s a 1,000 years. It adapted, well, of course it had to adapt because it had to adapt to the new situation it faced in the Middle East. The Allops as I said, proved an effective foes. And in a book called "Byzantium” by Judith Herrin, which I again will put on my blog so that people who are interested can have the details. She writes, “This using camels…” This is the Arabs. “Using camels accustomed to the desert. They developed successful military tactics of rapid raiding and effective siege technology.” Siege technology was important because of the cities that lay in the Middle East. As I said just now, “The great citizen of the Near East fell in quick succession, Damascus in 634, Gaza and Antioch in 637 and Jerusalem itself in 638. And in northern Syria in 636, the Byzantines faced an enormous defeat. And in truth, the Arabs then controlled what we today would describe as a Middle East and the data that again, is 636. And as Judith Herrin said, "It proved impossible to reverse that.”

The Muslims establishing their capital at Damascus. So that is the end of Byzantine control in the Middle East as early as the seventh century. Hence why maps are so difficult. But that isn’t the end of the story, of course, because the authorities in Constantinople appeal after their terrible defeat by the Arabs in 1071. They appeal for help from western Europe, and that is what we saw last week, appealing for help from Western Europe, launch the Crusades from Western Europe to recover the holy places, places that I’ve just mentioned, like Jerusalem. But also of course all the other places that the Arabs had taken in the Middle East. And as we saw last week, those westerners established kingdoms in those areas, which were western kingdoms. So the advance of the Westerners into the Middle East stem the tide of Arab advance. That is until the 13th century when the last Western Christian city of Acre fell to Islam. So although it held it for a time, it didn’t hold it for long enough. In fact, there’s a funny twist in this story, because we have over 50 years of rule by the Venetians in Istanbul itself. Now the Venetians were leading the fourth crusade, but they never got to what they called the Holy Land. We would simply describe as the Middle East. They stopped in Constantinople and they sat Constantinople and they put a westerner in charge. So Constantinople became a western city for 50 odd years. Why did the Venetians do that? It’s money, it’s the economy stupid as Clinton might say. It was the economy. Constantinople was this great trading city made rich because of its position between Europe and Asia, and because of its position northwards to the caucuses to Russia. And so the Venetians wanted it.

Now, they had set out with great Christian, what shall I say, bells and trumpets to recover Jerusalem. But the do had no intention of recovering Jerusalem. He wanted Constantinople for economic reasons. And those of you who’ve been to Venice will have seen those statues from Byzantium taken into St. Mark Square. So Venice is a interruption in the Greek Byzantine empire. The Greeks recovered their empire and went on to rule right through after the crusading years were over right through to 1453. So you can see why this story is complex. So let’s meet, recap. The whole story of the Middle East from our very first lecture was within the Roman Empire. Then the Roman Empire under Constantine was created a second capital to the new Rome that is Constantinople. And when Rome itself fell in 476, A Constantinople was left on its own as the Eastern Empire. The western empire had fallen. The Eastern Empire did control parts of Europe, Eastern Europe as well as the Middle East. But with the rise of Muhammad and Islam, it lost the Middle East when felt itself directly threatened by Islam in the 11th century, it called upon the West to help to preserve Christianity.

And there was an element of making sure Constantinople survived as a bulwark against the expansion of Islam into Europe. But there was also, of course, the religious intent to recover the holy places of Christianity, in particular Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem. But they succeeded and they established, you remember those frankish kingdoms, but that wasn’t enough for the Venetians who actually took Constantinople itself. So for a period of just under 60 years, it was controlled in the Middle East by Westerners when the crusades ended and the crusaders were thrown out, the last bastion of crusading cities being acre when acre fell. And the Byzantines had managed to recover their own capital. That is the imperial family of Byzantine had recovered Constantinople we’re left with the situation that there was before. No Westerners in the Middle East, but the rise of Islamic countries and in particular, not Arabs, they’re the least important to the story now, but the conversion Seljuk, S-E-L-J-U-K, which was a tribal name, Seljuk Turks. And they came from the Asian steps and they were converted to Islam and their conversion to Islam presented Byzantium with a greater threat. And in the end, Europe to a greater threat because it is those Celtic Turks that a subtribe called the Ottomans, named after their leader Offman, took Constantinople in 1453, having already established themselves in Eastern Europe and were twice to threaten Vienna and thus to threaten Western Europe.

It’s the Ottoman Turks from the East and migratory people who had traditionally not been Islamic, of course they had been worshipers of sort of nature rocks and so on. Once they’re converted Islam, they have this burning desire to convert the world to Islam, beginning with the taking of the holy city of Istanbul. Now, there is something I need to say about the holy city of Constantinople/Istanbul. We’ve seen how Constantinople was left adrift with the fall of Rome in 476. But in 1064, 1064 2 years before the Battle of Hastings, they broke with the church in Rome. They broke with the Pope and Christianity snaps into two. In the west is Rome and Catholicism, in the east is orthodoxy, Greek orthodoxy because the Byzantines are Greek speaking and Greek. So there’s Greek orthodoxy in the Eastern church, Roman Catholicism in the Western Church. And those, that big division exists today. You say it might say, well, what’s today? That’s not a particular interest, William. It’s that’s a sort of Christian division. Why should it bother us? It should bother us because Russia was converted to Christianity, not by the Western Catholic Church, but by the Eastern Orthodox Church. And with the fall of Marxism in the early 1990s, it left a gap or hole which was filled by the Orthodox Church, supported, well supported by Yetson who I think was a genuine believer. His wife certainly had always been Christian, and I think he became a genuine believer.

Putin, Putin maintains that he is Orthodox. But I suspect that Putin’s real intention is to use the Orthodox Church for political means. And you’ve seen pictures even since the war against Ukraine of the Orthodox Church supporting Putin right up, you know, right up and beyond, if you like what it should be doing. It’s complicit in the invasion of Ukraine. Not least because the Ukrainian church broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church, okay? You say, well, you’re boring us again, William, no, listen, because the Russians have always wanted since 1453 in the fall of Christian Constantinople to recover it, to recover it from Islam, the enemy of Christianity. And so they have a religious reason for wanting Constantinople to be Russian. And indeed the czar Nicholas II was promised Constantinople by the French and British allies during the First World War. Now, of course, the Russian Empire collapsed in the revolution of 1917, and the Russians never ever got their hands on Constantinople. Thank God they didn’t. But there’s another reason that they wanted, and that’s Putin’s real reason. He wants to have a straightforward Russian control of the Bosphorus, allowing Russian ships to go from the Crimea, which they’ve now of course retaken or largely from have want to take from the Crimea down to the Eastern Mediterranean.

They want the Black Sea fleet of the Russians, which Ukrainians have largely destroyed. They want that fleet to be able to move into the Eastern Mediterranean. And therefore, rather like the American fleet stands off the Middle East, they want the Russian fleet to stand off the Middle East, but not with the same intentions. So the Orthodox Christianity moving from Constantinople and converting the Russians via the Ukraine because the first centre in Russia was key that became Orthodox and from there, moved up to Moscow. Because of that, the Russians have always wanted to restore Constantinople/Istanbul to Christianity, but they also wanted access from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean for political. We would now say geopolitical reasons, and there’s no change in the Russian view. And Putin, if you put him on the spot, if we ever could, would I think admit those two things because they’re certainly the driving forces of Russia today. And I think that’s a rather important thing to know. What can we say about this strange Byzantine empire? Well, at different times it had different members or peoples as members of the Empire. It had Albanians, it had Arabs, it had Armenians, it had Syrians, it had Greeks, it had Bulgarians, it had Goths, it had Latins, it had Slads, it had Frasians. And of course it had Jews following the diaspora of the Jewish people. Many remained in the Middle East, under first Rome, then under the Ottomans. Sorry, then under the Byzantines, then under the Arabs. And finally of course, under the Ottomans bringing us up to the modern day, there were Jews who were living there. So how did the Jews find themselves under this Christian rule of Byzantium? The Orthodox faith was a very, is quite distinct from Roman Catholicism.

I’m not quite sure how to describe it. It’s more saleable than political in many ways. And it had distinctly anti-Semitic views as in fact it does today. Just think of the pogroms in Russia during the 19th century conducted and orchestrated by orthodox believers, both priests and civil and by the Czars, Alexander III for example, you know that story. The famous Byzantine author, A man called John Tzetsis, T-Z-E-T-S-I-S. He was writing in the 12th century. And in his writings, he gives an overwhelmingly anti-Semitic view. And his anti-Semitic view has been taken by his historians to be the view of the majority of Byzantine’s Christian population. And he writes in his book the following, and this is from the 12th century, and he writes this. This is Judith Herrin writing in her book called “Byzantium”. “In his attitude towards the Jews, John represents one of the prevalent Byzantine Jews, namely that the Jews had failed to understand the universal message of Christianity and still clung to their own tribal faith.” In other words, Jews refused to accept that Christ was indeed the Jewish Messiah. And she quotes, John Tzetsis in this way, “You stony Jew, the Lord has come, lightning be upon your head.” In other words, the Messiah has come and you’ve refused to accept him.

She adds, “Yet since God had revealed the law to Moses as recorded in the Christian Old Testament, the Jews were also a chosen people and could not be dismissed as heretics.” You have to be a heretic. You have to be a Christian first “And could not be dismissed as heretics or pagans. The Jewish communities had lived and worked in the major cities of Byzantium ever since the time of Constantine. They were not obliged to reside in distinct ghettos, but probably gathered in areas close to their own synagogues. Although they must have spoken Hebrew from the sixth century. They had used the Greek translation of the Torah and were thoroughly hellenized.” In other words, make came Greek. I find that interesting ‘cause what it says is very much the story of the Jewish diaspora in Asia as well as in Europe. And here in the Byzantine Empire, the Jews assimilated into the population in the same way that Jews assimilated into the British population from when the large immigration took place in the 19th century. So that although they remained Jewish, although their culture remained Jewish, although they worshipped in synagogues, they regarded themselves in Britain as all my Jewish friends do, as British Jews. So these Jews in Byzantium regarded themselves as Byzantine Jews. they saw nothing unusual in that, except of course, as you might well guess, they weren’t always regarded. So what’s the right word? So they weren’t always regarded so well by the Byzantines whose view of Judaism would break out into antisemitic violence from time to time.

Exactly, of course, as in mediaeval Europe and the horror stories of antisemitism in Britain, the the disaster at York when so many Jews committed suicide at York Castle. Here we have in Byzantium the same sort of stories of antisemitism and Herrin rights in this way. “Thanks to the itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, a Spanish rabbi, which records his visit to nearly 30 Jewish communities in Byzantium during the 1160s.” How lucky we are to have educated Jews who have written a record. And this is Benjamin of Tudela. “He records his visit to nearly 30 Jewish communities in Byzantium during the 1160s. We learn of about 9,000 Jews who followed a variety of activities.” So actually this is a really valuable source 'cause it tells us not only there were Jews there, how many Jews, but it tells us what they were doing. “They range from one poor agricultural community of 200 on Mount Parnassus near Delphi in Greece.” Remember the Byzantine empire is over on into Eastern Europe, “To small and larger urban groups, including the Jews resident in Constantinople itself, especially in Galata, the settlement north of the golden form, which formed the 13th region of the capital city, and which Benjamin knows by its later name of Pera, P-E-R-A.” some of you may have visited it, I’m sure. “He found that Byzantine Jews.” Remember the phrase I used just now comparing British Jews, Byzantine Jews? “He found that Byzantine Jews there and in Thips and Thessaloniki were prominent in the silt working industry and all enjoyed quite a high standard of living. He doesn’t appear to have visited the community of historia in northern Greece, which produced new hymns for use in synagogue services at the end of the 11th century.

But everywhere he notes the names of rabbis and outstanding Talmudic scholars.” So we’re told a great deal. We’re told that although they were using a western European term, there were peasant agricultural Jewish communities, rather like Russia at a later stage. There were also these big entrepreneurial traders and merchants working in and dealing in things like the silk industry, of which there was great demand in western Europe from the east. But there also, he tells us very much remained Jewish in culture, Jewish in culture in terms of educated rabbis who were leading that cultural. Not cultural revival, so much as cultural continuation of Judaism under the Byzantine Empire. It’s a live community producing new hymns for the synagogues. This is a live and vibrant community and an important one for Constantinople/Byzantium as a whole because they’re into the trading. And he goes on to say, “In Constantinople itself, Benjamin of Tudela was amazed at the stir and bustle caused by merchant from all parts of the world. He includes Mesopotamia, Babylon, Persia, Egypt, and Palestine, as well as northern and western countries.” That’s why the Jews are centering on Constantinople because it’s where trade is and where they can live without too aggressive antisemitism because the state needs them. But he goes on, “He mentions the Empress doctor.” Guess what? A Jewish doctor. “Rabbi Solomon, who is the only Jew allowed to ride on horseback.” That’s right, nice, isn’t it? The only Jew who’s allowed to ride on horseback is the emperor’s doctor. So there’s another insight into the Jewish community. In the Middle Ages, if you couldn’t get an Islamic doctor, you got a Jewish doctor. It was medicine which developed through Islam. If you couldn’t get a Islamic doctor, you got a Jewish doctor. Hence why Queen Elizabeth at first has a Jewish doctor, even though Jews are technically banned from England because you couldn’t get an Islamic doctor. So the next best thing was a Jewish doctor.

And whatever you do, do not have a European doctor. And European doctors were, I mean, we all know the phrase doctor death. Well, that could have applied to the horrors of Western medicine, which so horrified the Arabs and Turks in the Middle East when they came across western medicine. Western medicine was always ready to chop bits of you off. Whereas Eastern medicine, which of course then developed into Jewish medicine, looked to see if they could cure it by various uses of drugs and so on. So he tells us that. He goes on to tell us about this area of Galata in Constantinople itself. “In Galata, the Byzantines made a point of emptying their filthy water in front of Jewish houses.” So there’s this casual antisemitism, throw your dirty water from the tanneries, which smelt to kingdom come of course, you throw it in front of Jewish houses. “Which engendered hatred and bad relations.” Well, what a surprise that is. “But the Byzantine communities were not disturbed by anything approaching the degree of hostility witness in the Rhineland during the first crusade.” Where the Germans of the first crusade simply never got to the Middle East and murdered the Jews. They found in the Rhineland. As far as I can gather Byzantium and later the Ottomans. So that’s a Christian and later an Islamic empire. Were with some exceptions, far more tolerant of Jews than were the western countries of Germany, France, and England. To take three examples. In the East, they were at worst tolerated and at best welcomed, I think is the way I would put it. I better finish what I was reading. “During his later travels in Persia, Benjamin did record it, Jews there were wealthier than those Byzantium. He emphasised that he’d seen no city like Constantinople. It is only equaled by Baghdad.” Now, some of you listening might well be Persian Jews.

And here is a reference right back to the early Middle Ages from the 1160s where Benjamin, the rabbi from Spain is saying, having visited Iran, that the Jews in Persia, Iran, Persia, that the Jews in Persia were richer than the Jews in Constantinople. Now, whether that is actually true, of course we can’t tell what it does tell us that both in Islam and in Christianity in the east Eastern Christianity, Jews were more than tolerated more often than not, and could become important, rich and powerful men, not women of course, but powerful men in both Baghdad and Constantinople. Susan Herrin ends with one sentence. “The Jews were a permanent part of the cosmopolitan society of Byzantium.” And so it was to remain even when Byzantium fell to the Turks, it remained. Compared to Western Europe, a heaven for Jews. And of course you all know I’m teaching grandmother to suck eggs here. You all know that when Jews were thrown out of Spain, many of them moved across to Constantinople, better there than to go to France or England. And so there is this link right the way through history. I find it absolutely fascinating. There’s another role which Jews performed, which I must add into the story. And it’s the same role that Jews operated in Christian Western Europe. According to mediaeval theology, both of Catholicism and orthodoxy, Christians were not allowed to charge interest on loans. So why would you make a loan if you couldn’t make any money out of it?

The the Jews fulfilled this role and became bankers in the eastern part of Christianity Byzantine Empire, as well as they became bankers in places like France and Britain, until Christians found a way round it by not charging interest, but charging administrative charges rather, like my bank statement says, administrative charges and a huge sum. And you begin to wonder what the administrative charges are and the administrative charges charged by Christians in particular the Knight’s templar in the Middle Ages, surprise, surprise, match the interest charged by Jewish bankers. Incidentally, and those of you who are listening in England have heard me say this before. It’s why in England, often Jewish houses, Jewish mediaeval houses are of stone, rather than wattle and do, or whatever you’ve got are of stone because they kept money there as bankers. It’s gold and silver is the bank. And so it was stone houses so that they couldn’t be broken into in the way that normal mediaeval houses, you’ve simply cut a hole in the middle of the night, not yourself. So we have stone houses, any of you who are not English and are visiting England, the best example can be found in Lincoln. There is an example in Barris Edmonds, but it’s not right. It’s called a Jews’ house because it’s stone, but it isn’t in the part of the town at Barris Edmonds, which was Jewish. So it wasn’t a Jewish house, it just happens to be a stone house. But because stone houses were associated with Jews, that’s called the Jews house. So banking was an important element of the whole business. And banking and trading go hand in hand. Not surprising that Jews both in Baghdad and Constantinople became rich. I mentioned the Jews as being in the silk trade, but they were in the rag trade in general. They producing cloth that came from the Middle East to the west. They were finishers of cloth. And finally, I want to say, I think I’ve got the right page. I will read it if I can.

I think, yeah, here we’re, let me repeat the sentence I read just now. And Judith Herrin writes, “The Jews were a permanent part of the cosmopolitan society of Byzantium.” Because Byzantium needed the Jews as much as the Jews needed it. So there is this ongoing story, and again, if you ask questions, why is this important? It’s important in terms of where we are today and the presence of Jews in the Middle East throughout these centuries. And not simply a ride from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, the late ‘40s. These are settled Middle Eastern Jews. And as I say, those of you who are Iranian Jews of who Persian Jews, and I know people who are, who are living in England, you can see that your ancestors in Persia were part of a long, long tradition after the Jewish diaspora, which we spoke about two weeks ago. With the exception of the rule of the Venetians who put a western emperor on the throne of Byzantium from 1204 to 1261, roughly 60 years, Byzantium was a Greek city. It was known in the West as The City, hoi polis in Greek, The City, hoi polis. If you said The City, it’s like in England, if you say the city, you mean The city of London, not London, but the banking centre, the square mile of the city of London, the heart of London’s business community. But in the Middle Ages, if you said the city, you did not mean Rome. You meant Constantinople. Rome could be referred to as the eternal city, but The city with a big capital T was in fact Constantinople. And it became again Greek. And it remained Greek from 1261 until its final collapse in 1453.

Now, the end of Byzantine empire wasn’t a one-off affair, it was a slow decline. It’s interesting to look at empires to see how they decline. This empire declined over many, many centuries. I mentioned right at the beginning, to provide you with a map would be mind boggling. It gradually, gradually lost territory until by the middle of the 15th century, roughly 1450. It controls southern Greece, Thrace, that is the part of Turkey, which is now in Europe, on the European side of the Bosphorus, the city of Constantinople on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, and a small piece of territory around Constantinople. The rest, including the Balkans, places like Kosovo, Serbia and so on, as well as the whole of the Middle East and Anatolia, Anatolia, Turkey is ottoman. The Ottoman Turks had gradually weakened the Byzantine Empire until you could have simply blown it away. It had gone by the time it was surrounded in 1453, there was, I just said, almost nothing left. Greece and Thrace could easily be taken, not just come brothers Ottomans coming from east, but the Ottomans who were even further west coming backwards towards East to take it. And so Constantinople as a great empire, has gone by the time it collapses. If my turn again to Peter Sarris’s book, he talks about it in this way. Interestingly, he refers, as I did at the beginning, to Edward Gibbon. “In Edward Gibbon, whose decline of fall of the Roman Empire was to make such an imprint on the educated anglophone mind Byzantine history was quote, "A tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery. On the throne in the camp in the schools,” said Gibbon, “We search perhaps with fruitless diligence, the names and characters that deserve to be rescued from oblivion.”“ In other words, the story is so complex that even a historian like Gibbon says, it’s impossible to follow the story.

There are no great people that emerge. He goes on to say. This is Peter Sarris goes on to say, "To Voltaire, Byzantine empires was worthless collection over rations and miracles, a disgrace to the human mind. His fellow from Montesquieu concurred, describing the complicated politics, the empire as nothing but a tissue of rebellion, sedition and treachery.” Hence was born the word Byzantine, which we use today to refer to as Sarris says, “To chronic bureaucratic complexity, in terminable intrigue, an endemic corruption.” Well, that’s a useful word to have in our locker in both American politics and British politics today, Byzantine. So the story of Byzantium they indicate is not worth following. And that’s true. I mean if you can read it if you want, but you’ll just get totally confused. That’s why it’s seldom taught. But I’ve omitted one important factor, which is of huge importance. Because Byzantium was Novar Roma, the new Rome, it kept a lot of classical literature, classical writings in Byzantium after the fall of Rome when so much in western Europe from the Roman Empire was lost. And once Constantinople had fallen in 1453, as it fell sort of before and afterwards, scholars escaped to the West. Greek scholars escaped with bundles of documents, bundles of scrolls to the West. And that, ladies and gentlemen, if it didn’t spark the Renaissance, ignited the Renaissance into this great fire of change in Western Europe. The Renaissance and the Renaissance then followed by the Enlightenment, had Constantinople held out until the middle of the 15th century, we might well have lost absolutely priceless pieces of information and knowledge.

And I will come back to that in due cause on another talk. So there is this important link. So to describe Byzantium as Byzantine applies to its politics, I think applies to orthodoxy, Christian orthodoxy, which is very odd to a western Christian, but it also gives us a fantastic opportunity in the west of the Renaissance. So how does it fail? By the time it fell in 1453, it was a mere shadow of itself, a shadow of its former self. It fell on the 29th of May, 1453 when the Turkish leader, the Ottoman leader, Ottoman Turk, Ottoman Turkish leader, Mehmed II, laid siege to Constantinople and took it. This is a new book which I discovered by accident in a bookshop here, it’s called “To The City” and the city Constantinople. It’s by Alexander Christie-Miller. Now I’ll put you on my book list. Now this is not a history book in the normal sense. He is a journalist and he interviewed people and he walked the walls of modern Istanbul, the odd wars. And he, in his walk and interviews, he talks about both the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire. It isn’t a book that’s easy to categorise, but it is a book easy to read and I find absolutely fascinating. And I’ve got one quote that I was going to read from it, which is this, and it goes in this way. “By the time that the young sultan Mehmed II was planning his assault on Constantinople, an air of irretrievable decline had long settled over the city. The city was more like a ruin than an imperial capital. Its population which had once numbered a million inhabitants had shrunk by the eve of the siege to no more than 50,000 emptied out by successive waves of plague and ebbing fortunes. The sat by the fourth crusade in 1204.” The Venetian attack on the Constantinople, the attack by the fourth crusade in 1204 dealt the most damage with the European invaders plunder in the city and carrying off most of its wealth to Venice.

The 14th century was a catalogue of disaster in which the empire, or what now remained of it was by civil war, invasions by the Ottomans and in Europe, invasion by the Serbs and the Black Death, which devastated Constantinople population. By the early 1,400, the city resembled a series of villages spread out among orchards and fields within the compass of the old walls of the city. And the thriving trade its position once afforded had shifted to the genoese colony of peril on the other side of the golden horn. The Byzantine domain, which once stretched from Italy to Syria now barely extended beyond Constantinople itself and included only a few villages and fortresses along the coast and some territories in the Peloponnese. It was ready to fall. And so it did. And we have a Venetian surgeon who happened to be in a Constantinople at the time of its falling. A man called Nicolo Barbaro and Nicolo Barbaro kept the diary of the siege of Mehmed II, which led to the collapse finally of the Byzantine empire, as I said on the 29th of May, 1453. And in his book he writes this. This is Barbaro himself. “On the 29th of May, our Lord God decided that he was willing for the city to fall on this day in order to fulfil all the ancient prophecies. All these three had come to pass seeing that the Turks had passed into Greece. There was an emperor called Constantine, son of a woman called Helen and the moon had given a sign in the sky.” Very superstitious.

This is the Middle Ages still, they were very superstitious people. So it’s down to God has decided to let Constantinople fall. Azusa Henry writes on in this way. She says this. “In his diary of the siege, Barbaro records his experience of living through these last days of Byzantium. When people realised that only a miracle could save them from the fury of these weaky pagans, they wept and prayed and quote, "When the moon, when the toxin 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 on the Turks.” They had appealed for western aid. No western aid was going to come. No western aid. Trade had past Italy. The Italian city states weren’t interested. France and England, well, England’s involved in civil war, The War of the Roses. France itself is of course in not in a good state at this time. There is no help from the West. Constantinople is on its own. And the emperor Constantine XI died in the last defence of the city. He took off his imperial armour and put on the armour of an ordinary soldier and was last seen in one of the breaches in the war. He died, of course, rumour said he never died and one day he would come back again, but he died in battle.

And of that, Henry writes, “The night before the final attack, the emperor rode out on one last tour of the walls with his advisor who records who, how they saw the vast encampments of the ottomans, their bonfires and preparations and knew that only divine intervention could save by Byzantine. Instead, the city was subjected to a three day plunder in which many were taken prisoner. When they Mehmed II finally entered the city, some reports claimed that he wept at the losses and at the beauty of the buildings. Others noted that the Turks dressed themselves in even their dogs in ecclesiastical robes, threw all the icons onto a huge bonfire over which they roasted meat and grant unwatered wine from chalices. The Salton ordered what remained of the population to stay in the city under Ottoman rule and organise 5,000 extra families to move in. That’s beginning the process of islamicization something that Russians hate to this very day. There is a poster to this story. It’s a very odd post, come with me, take my hand and come down to the southwest of England, to the county of Cornwall And there in a tiny village of Landulph, L-A-N-D, land, ulph, U-L-P-H. In this quiet English countryside church, you can see where one of the last members of the Byzantine Imperial family was buried.

He was called Theodore Pallia Lucas. And he was buried here in England to which he had come escaping various charges of murder, I have to say in Europe. He came and was buried, died and buried in 1635, 1636. In 1828, the Greek government was looking for a king. It had thrown off the Ottoman yolk and was independent and wanted a king. And it sent a delegation to this little tiny English village to see if there was a descendant of the last of the imperial house living there. They didn’t find anyone, but as you well know, in the end they find German princes. And one of those was Philip who became the Duke of Edinburgh, husband of the late queen in England. And in 1962, for reasons that the royal family never explained on a visit to Cornwall, Philip Duke of Edinburgh and the late queen visited Landulph of parish church. Well, we know why now. Philip a Greek was looking at the burial place of the last Greek emperor of Byzantium on the descendant. It was the great great grandson of the last emperor of Byzantium. So there ends my story for today. We pick it up next week with the Ottomans. So when, not only the Middle East, but Constantinople and a large slice of Eastern Europe is Ottoman, Islamic. And that takes our story further on into history. Thank you for listening. Have I got any questions?

Q&A and Comments:

Thank you, Rochelle, my tooth is fine. I was meant to be going in. It’s going to cost me 3,300 ponds, I was meant to be going in today, but I’ve still got a bad shoulder. And I couldn’t sit for an hour and a half in a dentist chair.

Yes, yes, Tim, you are right. It is the same area as Eastern Roman Empire. The Western Empire fell plus bits in Eastern Europe and then it began.

Q: Why was the empire split?

A: Because it was too big for one man to rule is how they fought.

Adrianne, welcome back.

Q: Tim, why did they become Greek speaking?

A: No, they didn’t. They were already Greek speaking. That’s the point. The Roman empire doesn’t mean everyone spoke Latin and in the East they spoke Greek because they were Greeks, not Romans. They described themselves as Romans after the fall of Rome because they saw themselves as the last part of the Roman empire. But they might have called themselves Roman, but they always spoke Greek. The modern meaning by Byzantine means very complicated, involving great deal of immense detail, e.g Byzantine insurance regulations from the Oxford Dictionary, absolutely.

Q: Could you explain the difference between Arab and Muslim?

A: Yes, Honey. Muslim is a religion, Arab is an ethnicity. Not all Muslims are Arab by any means and the Ottoman Turks, Turks, not Arabs, were Islamic. So Muslim is a religion, Arab is an ethnicity, and Stephen adds Arabs are Arab are mostly Muslim, but some Arabs are Christian Muslims follow Islam, but not necessarily Arab. Yeah, exactly, exactly, right.

Tim, so the Russian Orthodox Church evolved from the Greek Orthodox. Yes, yes, yes to that. The Orthodox Church set up what they call autocephalous churches, that is with their own head. So the Greek Orthodox Church today operates from Athens. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church operates from Kyiv. The seperate Orthodox Church operates from Nicosia. The Russian Orthodox Church operates from Moscow. Autocephalous, one head. So it branches of it. When Finland broke from the Russian Empire in 1917, the Russian Orthodox who lived in Finland refused to still be Russian Orthodox. And they applied to Athens and became Greek Orthodox. So if you go to Finland and you go into the fantastic Orthodox Cathedral in Helsinki, which was one of the very last to be built by in the time of the Czars that Orthodox Church is today Greek Orthodox. Isn’t religion wonderful.

Q: Why would the Russians care of Istanbul is Christian or not?

A: Because it’s the centre of their religion. Tim, it’s the same as Jews will feel about Jerusalem. I don’t think I said Jerusalem is a holy site in Islam. Jerusalem is a holy site in Christianity. If I gave the other, if I gave a wrong impression, I’m sorry, but I didn’t mean that Jerusalem is wholly to the Christians. Why the Crusades wanted to take Jerusalem.

Oh, and other people are arguing about yeah, yeah. Amir, history repeats this very day. Mohammad’s claim claimed the entire world and here it’s come. Global islamization ever existing. And we’re all living through a voracious and brutal tsunami currently. But the western world is silent out of shock and horror and also being paid off in billions, well, I’m not sure about being paid off in billions. But it is true that Islam, Islam at various stages has always wanted to spread Islam across the world. Today we have Islamists who are committed to doing that and we of course we have Muslims who are not committed to doing that, but it’s the same as Christianity who thought they were bringing civilization to Africa in the 19th century.

Blog on your site doesn’t open for me. Sorry Rosso, It should, there’s no reason it doesn’t. You put in talk historian.com/blog and it will open. I promise, I’ve done it today.

Because of the exaggerated accounts, Benjamin, today they became known as the Munchhausen of the Talmud. Well, yes, that’s interesting an Anthony. But I think nevertheless, some of the things he said particularly about what trades people were doing were true. I said I didn’t think for example, that the Jews in Baghdad were any richer than in those in Constantinople, but we’ve no way of checking that. But when he says that he met agriculturalists, he met Jewish agriculturalists, Jewish workers in silk and so on. Yes, we can take that. What language Byzantine emperor adupt to speak.

Answer, from Amir. Thank you for doing my work for me, Amir. Absolutely 100% right, Greek. Remember these people, it’s the same as Jews in the diaspora anywhere would speak, would have Hebrew, but would also have the language of the country they live in. So some of you today would be fluent in Hebrew but not living in Israel, but would also speak English. And if you are living in Israel, you probably speak another language as well.

Yaz, the silk trade had a major centre in the city of Bursa, in what is now northwest Turkey, which was not incorporated in the Ottoman Empire until the 1300s, but Jewish population continued in Bursa to at least the 20th century. Now absolutely, this is what I’m saying that in terms of the modern day, we have to remember that the Jewish diaspora across the Middle East, did not cease, it grew and there were large Jewish communities there into the 20th century. Very small, my very close friend from Istanbul, he attended a Jewish day school as I did in South Africa, currently dwindling about 14,500 in Bursa today. I think Baghdad is in not Iran.

So not Persian, is that correct? Yeah, I’m sorry if I said Iran. I beg your pardon. I beg your pardon, yeah. What I said about Persian Jews is however relevant. One wonders that Russia’s need for the Black sea ports when the eastern ports and the West northern ports are becoming so much more important and accessible. Well, one of the views of the Eastern ports is that it gives potential control of the Mediterranean shoreline of the Middle East in the same way that America has been deploying, deploying warships there since the Israeli-Hamas war. And if there were Russian ships there, it would certainly complicate things, no end.

Galaxy says, "For those living in Britain, tonight at 10:40 on BBC One, there’s a programme called "Growing Up Jewish” explores the different versions of the bar and bar mitzvah that is celebrated. Yona says not hoi polis city, but he polished to the city. Well, I always learned that it was hoi polis, The City. So I think we, and yet it can be said as to The City. I always had learned from a tender age it was The City, hoi polis. So I don’t know whether your, maybe there’s a difference in teaching in one country to another.

Q: Does Alexandria come into the picture of the Byzantine Emperor?

A: No, it was very quickly taken. Egypt remained outside and by 1453 it’s the Egyptian Mahmeds. Egypt is a different story and I didn’t want to get involved with Egypt, but I may have to, and you are going to force me to do that.

Carol, so I may say something about Egypt. On Netflix is a brilliant docudrama called Ottoman Empire. Excellent delivery and production. Thank you for all of that. The patriarchy of the Greek author rising Istanbul, I’m sorry I said Athens. I’m sorry, but the centre is Athens and that is Greek orthodoxy. Stuart, Constantinople be holds a special place of honour within orthodoxy serves as the seated ecumenical Petra, who enjoys the status of primas into power is first among equals among the world’s Eastern Orthodox prelates and is regarded as the representative, spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians. Muhammad ascended to heaven and brought the Koran from Jerusalem so it’s holy to Muslims. Wow, don’t forget the Yiddish language.

No Judy, I didn’t forget the Yiddish language. Well, I didn’t want go down that path. You’re all too knowledgeable. And I choose sometimes not to say things, not too ignorant. I do say things too ignorant, but sometimes I missay things and sometimes I deliberately don’t say things in order to try and make it simpler. You can’t win. You can’t win. I’ve been in this game long enough to know that lecturers and adult education lose continuously and you just have to lose with a smile on your face. But I thank you for those who said they enjoyed it. I hope you all enjoyed it and I hope those who want to read more, when I feel that I can type again, I’ll type a book list for you. I’ll probably do it alongside next week’s book list. So you’ve got both together, both Byzantine and Ottoman. That sounds more sensible than doing it twice. So I will do that for you before we meet again, which next week is on a Monday.

So we’re back on Monday and we’re to look at the Ottoman Empire, not the whole story of the Ottoman empire because long and too important to scrabble together in one week. It’s going to be over a really a period of three weeks, until the third week takes us to the defeat of the Ottoman empire in the First World War and really brings us up to the modern day. Thank you so much for listening, I appreciate it. Hope to see you all next week. See you then.