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History of the Byzantine Empire
Constantine established precedents for the harmony of Church and imperial authorities that persisted throughout the history of the empire. These included his creation of a successful monetary system based on the gold solidus, or Νόμισμα, which lasted until the middle of the 11th century. The commercial prosperity of the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries enabled many ancient cities to flourish. Large estates dominated the rural countryside, and while heavy taxation resulted in much abandonment of land, agriculture remained the empire's principal source of wealth. Church and emperor acquired vast landed estates thus becoming the empire's largest landholders. Rigorous imperial regulation of the purity and supply of precious metals, as well as the organisation of commerce and artisanship, characterized economic life. Emperor Justinian I and his wife, Theodora, attempted to restore the former majesty, intellectual quality, and geographic limits of the Roman Empire. Between 534 and 565, they reconquered North Africa, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and parts of Spain. This effort, however, together with substantial expenses incurred in erecting public buildings and churches, such as Hagia Sophia (Church of the Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople, overstrained the empire's resources, while plagues reduced its population. The Empire BesiegedThe empire had survived the migrations and raids of the Goths and Huns in the 5th and 6th centuries and had established a reasonably secure eastern frontier against the Sassanid Persian Empire, but it could not recover, hold, and govern the entire Mediterranean world. During the second half of the 6th century the Lombards invaded and gradually occupied much of former Byzantine Italy, except for Rome, Ravenna, Naples, and the far south, while Turkic Avars raided and depopulated much of the Byzantine Balkans. Many features of the empire and its culture changed during the 7th century. Most of the Balkans were lost to the Avars and Slavic tribes, who resettled abandoned sites. Meanwhile, the assassination of Maurice (reigned 582-602), the first Byzantine emperor to meet a violent death, led to civil and external war. Emperor Heraclius finally terminated a long series of wars with the Persians by a decisive victory in 628 and the recovery of Persian-occupied Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Exhaustion from this struggle and bitter religious disputes between rival Christian sects weakened Byzantine defences and morale, leaving the empire ill-prepared to face another danger in the decade that followed. Between 634 and 642, Arabs, inspired by a new religion, Islam, conquered Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. Constantinople weathered major Arab sieges in the 670s and in 717-718, and Byzantine Asia Minor survived almost annual Arab raids. By a process that remains controversial among historians, the armies of the Byzantine Empire were transformed into an elite expeditionary guard named tagmata and into military districts called themes (themata). Each theme was commanded by a strategos, or general, with civil and military authority over his district; the soldiers of thematic armies acquired tax-exempt lands and preserved the core of the empire while avoiding the ruinous drain of cash that had overstrained the salaried armies of the period before the Arab invasions. Urban life and commerce declined except in Thessaloniki (in present-day Greece) and Constantinople. Warfare and resulting insecurity inhibited agriculture and education. The empire, with limited resources, could no longer maintain the full dimensions, infrastructure, and complexity of the late Roman Empire. Nevertheless, it managed to endure and adapt to its straitened circumstances.
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