Ruled from Constantinople (ancient Byzantium and present-day Istanbul), the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire survived the collapse of the Western Roman Empire by over a millennium. This state on the crossroads of Europe and Asia was Roman in law, civil administration, and military tradition, but predominantly Greek in language, and Eastern Christian in religion. The course explores one of the greatest civilisations the world has known, tracing the experiences of its majority and minority groups through the dramatic centuries of the Islamic conquests, Iconoclasm, and the Crusades, until its final fall to the Ottoman Turks.
Ever wondered what the world would have looked like had the Roman Empire not fallen? Well, this is not a hypothetical scenario. As you’ll find out in this course, the Roman state not only survived for another thousand years after the end of antiquity, but was extraordinarily successful. Its power was admired and feared by the nascent polities at its frontiers – from Germany and Russia to Egypt and Iran – and attentively studied by elites as far afield as Central Asia and China. We shall examine the empire’s institutions of domestic government, its diplomatic strategies, and its military technology. We shall learn why its unprecedented capacity to dominate the economy through the centuries has meant its gold coinage is considered to have been the ‘dollar of the Middle Ages’. We shall study its art, culture and belief-systems (from the Orthodox icon to Fermat’s Theorem), seeing how these continue to influence aesthetics, religion, and science today. And we shall consider its society’s distinctive approach to fundamental questions of identity – such as race and ethnicity, gender, and disability – in order to understand why later eras of colonialism and imperialism dismissively renamed the civilisation "Byzantium" and engaged in the erasure of its history.