4 - Byzantium to the twelfth century

Summary

Consecrated as the new capital of the Roman world in the year 330 ce, Constantinople was the ancient city of Byzantion, in origin a colony of Megara in Attica, and renamed the ‘city of Constantine’ by the first Christian emperor of the Roman world. He made it his capital in an effort to establish a new strategic focus for the vast Roman state, as well as to distance himself from the politics of the previous centuries. By the middle of the fifth century, the western parts of the Roman Empire were already in the process of transformation which was to produce the barbarian successor kingdoms, such as those of the Franks, Visigoths and Ostrogoths, and the Burgundians, while the eastern parts remained largely unaffected by these changes. When exactly ‘Byzantine’ begins and ‘late Roman’ ends is a moot point. Some prefer to use Byzantine for the eastern part of the Roman Empire from the time of Constantine I – that is to say, from the 320s and 330s; others apply it to the Eastern Empire from the later fifth or sixth century, especially from the reign of Justinian (527–65). In either case, the term ‘Byzantine’ legitimately covers the period from the late Roman era on, and is used to describe the history of the politics, society, and culture of the medieval East Roman Empire until its demise at the hands of the Ottomans in the fifteenth century.