How was the Byzantine Empire able to survive and thrive? Just curious. :) Thank you. :)?

Question

in more detail...since Europe was left in turmoil after the fall of the western roman empire...how was the Byzantine Empire [eastern roman empire] able to evade the invaders that the western empire could not?

in more detail...since Europe was left in turmoil after the fall of the western roman empire...how was the Byzantine Empire [eastern roman empire] able to evade the invaders/and other obstacles that the western empire could not?

Answer 1

After the fall of Rome, the key challenge to the Empire was to maintain a set of relations between itself and its sundry neighbors. When these nations set about forging formal political institutions, they were dependent on Constantinople. Byzantine diplomacy soon managed to draw its neighbors into a network of international and inter-state relations. This network revolved around treaty making, and included the welcoming of the new ruler into the family of kings, and the assimilation of Byzantine social attitudes, values and institutions.Byzantines regarded diplomacy as a form of war by other means: the Bureau of Barbarians was the first foreign intelligence agency, gathering information on the empire's rivals from every imaginable source.

Answer 2

After the split of the Roman empire into Eastern and Western, the former was in a better position to survive because Anatolia and other adjacent provinces were extremely rich and fertile. Also, they were more populated which means they could provide more manpower for an army.

Being the heir of almost 1000 years of classical Greek and Roman culture, it was able to keep alive many of the knowledge that was lost when the Western Empire fell. This knowledge included literature, philosophy, medicine, agricultural techniques and also civil and military engineering skills. This gave them an advantage over the rest of Europe at the time, and also put them in equal levels with more advanced civilizations to the east.

Although we now see them as a fallen empire, you have to remember that they survived almost 900 years, more than the Spanish or British imperial system, and so far, much more than our American model of democracy. They were actually very successful.

Answer 3

First, remember, the Byzantine Empire is really just a displaced Roman Empire. Emp. Constantine moved the capital from Rome to Byzantium, so it's the same thing.

The Byzantines were masters of trade and also of organization. It will last until 1453 when Constantinople falls to the Turks. Byzantium also had a unifying religion, the Orthodox Church, which was the second half of the two-headed imperial eagle. Church and state operating together.

However, this also meant that, at times, the church was too heavy handed in persecution of minority religious groups and the state too controlled the church. We did get some good and interesting items out of this collaboration, however... including the Holy Bible was compiled under the authority of the Byzantine Empire ... no Holy Bible (as we know it today) existed before.

Answer 4

Compared to the earlier undivided Roman empire, the Byzantine empire (the eastern half of the Roman empire) was not based on expansion by conquest so it could focus more on it's own administration and defense. Another reason was that it was more unified- it had only one language- Greek and one religion- Christianity and this helped it's stability. These are just a few of many reasons why the empire in the east lasted another thousand years after the fall of the city of Rome.

Answer 5

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Answer 6

I guess the barbarians never quite got that far east. The Byzantine empire became the massive Ottoman Empire, ruled from the city now known as Istanbul, and although it's death blow came at the battle of Lepanto in around 1572, when a crusading christian army destroyed the Ottoman fleet, it continued in a weakened form until World War One.

Answer 7

the main enemies of the eastern empire were the nascent islamic states of turkey, egypt and the gulf.

for the most part the early arab states fought each other in preference to banding together against their real enemies, and even when they did find a common leader in saladin his effort was taken up mainly in repelling the western invasion of richard coeur de lion (the third crusade).

the main thing that protected the eastern empire was that its natural enemies were disorganised and busy fighting the crusaders.

as soon as the caliphate got its act together constantinople fell.

Answer 8

Constantine refounded an existing city. The site had been strategically and commercially important from the earliest times, lying as it does astride both the land route from Europe to Asia and the seaway from the Black or Euxine Sea to the Mediterranean, and being possessed of an excellent and spacious harbour in the Golden Horn. Thus a city was first founded on the site in the early days of Greek colonial expansion. Herodotus (4.144) describes the founding as 17 years after the founding of Chalcedon or about 668 BC; Eusebius much later dated the founding to 659 BC. Constantine identified the site of Byzantium as the correct place: a city where an emperor could sit, readily defended, with easy access to the Danube or the Euphrates frontiers, his court supplied from the rich gardens and sophisticated workshops of Roman Asia, his treasuries filled by the wealthiest provinces of the empire.
The byzantine Empire died of exhaustion, it carried the seeds of destruction. It inherited half of the Roman Empire, the Eastern one. It had been split between two successors. One in Rome and one in Constantinople.
The emperor Justinian I (527–565) was known for his successes in war, for his legal reforms and for his public works.The entire late Roman and early Byzantine period was one where Christianity was resolving fundamental questions of identity, and the dispute between the orthodox and the monophysites became the cause of serious disorder.
The social fabric of Constantinople was further damaged by the onset of bubonic plague between 541-542 A.D. Known to modern scholars as the Plague of Justinian, this pandemic took the lives of up to 5,000 people per day and killed 25 million people, greatly changing the course of history in the region.
Its ability to survive from that point on had much to do with its ability to negotiate with potential enemies and to have been allowed to barely maintain itself. Justinian was succeeded in turn by Justin II, Tiberius II and Maurice, able emperors who had to deal with a deteriorating military situation, especially on the eastern frontier.
In the early 7th century the Avars and later the Bulgars overwhelmed much of the Balkans, threatening Constantinople from the west. Simultaneously Persians attacked from the East, while the Sassanids invaded and conquered Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Armenia.
He relented, and while Constantinople withstood a siege by 80,000 Avars and the Persian fleet, Heraclius launched a spectacular campaign into the heart of the Persian empire. The Persians were defeated outside Nineveh, and their capital at Ctesiphon was surrounded by the Byzantines. Persian resistance collapsed, and all the lost territories were recovered in 627.

However, the unexpected appearance of the newly-converted and united Muslim Arabs took the territories by surprise from an empire exhausted from fighting against Persia, and the southern provinces were overrun. Byzantine Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and Africa were permanently incorporated into the Muslim Empire in the 7th century. Meanwhile, at much the same time Lombard invaders began an invasion of Italy which was in due course to lead to the peninsula being substantially lost once again to the Empire.
Constantinople was besieged twice by the Arabs, once in a long blockade between 674 and 678, and once again in 717.
The crushing victory of the Byzantines was a severe blow to Caliph Umar II, and the expansion of the Umayyad Caliphate was severely stunted during his reign.
Asia Minor became the heartland of the empire, and from this time onwards the Byzantines began a recovery that resulted in the recovery of parts of Greece, Macedonia and Thrace by the year 814. By the early years of the eleventh century, the Bulgarians had been utterly destroyed and annexed to the empire, the Slavs and the Rus' had converted to Orthodoxy. In Italy, the emperor Basil I (867-886) reconquered the whole of the south, restoring Byzantine power to a position stronger than at any time since the seventh century.
In the east, the imperial armies began a major advance during the tenth and eleventh centuries, resulting in the recovery of Crete, Cyprus, Cilicia, Armenia, eastern Anatolia and northern Syria, and the reconquest of the holy city of Antioch.
In the eighth and ninth centuries the iconoclast movement caused serious political unrest throughout the Empire. The emperor Leo III issued a decree in 726 against images, and ordered the destruction of a statue of Christ over one of the doors of the Chalke, an act which was fiercely resisted by the citizens. Constantine V convoked a church council in 754 which condemned the worship of images, after which many treasures were broken, burned, or painted over. Following the death of his son Leo IV in 780, the empress Irene restored the veneration of images through the agency of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787.
The iconoclast controversy returned in the early 9th century, only to be resolved once more in 843 during the regency of Empress Theodora (9th century), who restored the icons. These controversies contributed to the deterioration of relations with the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church.
The Vikings (who knew the city as Miklagarð - the great city) couldn't resist the city's riches. In 860 they plundered Constantinople for the first time, setting fire to churches and houses, plundering and looting.
In the late eleventh century, catastrophe struck the Byzantine empire. With the imperial armies weakened by years of insufficient funding and civil warfare, Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes suffered a surprise defeat at the hands of Alp Arslan (sultan of the Seljuk Turks) at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. Romanus was captured, and although the Sultan's peace terms were not excessive, the battle was catastrophic for the Byzantine Empire. That was the beginning of the end for Byzantium.
From this point on, Constantinople was hard pressed to keep all borders secure and soon it began to lose ground. The loss of Anatolia was a terrible strike to its hegemony and when that happened, the islamic empire had Constantinople by the throat. As a matter of fact, Byzantium began to live conditionally to the goodwill of islam. At the beginning of the 15th century, there was not much more left than the golden horn, and that survived only because of its strategic position. Finally it fell in 1453 under the cannonballs of a german built gun bought by the Ottomans under Mehmet II.
It´s such a big subject that there is much missing, sorry.