The Byzantine Empire experienced cycles of growth and decay over the course of nearly a thousand years, including major losses during the early Muslim conquests of the 7th century. But the Empire's final decline started in the 11th century, and ended 400 years later in the Byzantine Empire's destruction in the 15th century.
201-643: The Byzantine Greeks were the Greek-speaking Eastern Romans throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages . They were the main inhabitants of the lands of the Byzantine Empire ( Eastern Roman Empire ), of Constantinople and Asia Minor (modern Turkey), the Greek islands , Cyprus , and portions of the southern Balkans , and formed large minorities, or pluralities, in the coastal urban centres of
402-430: A 14th-century survey of the village of Aphetos, donated to the monastery of Chilandar , the average size of a landholding is only 3.5 modioi (0.08 ha). Taxes placed on rural populations included the kapnikon (Greek: καπνικόν) or hearth tax, the synone (Greek: συνονή) or cash payment frequently affiliated with the kapnikon , the ennomion (Greek: εννόμιον) or pasture tax, and the aerikon (Greek: αέρικον, meaning "of
603-533: A Byzantine Greek woman could be divided into three phases: girlhood , motherhood , and widowhood . Childhood was brief and perilous, even more so for girls than boys. Parents would celebrate the birth of a boy twice as much and there is some evidence of female infanticide (i.e. roadside abandonment and suffocation), though it was contrary to both civil and canon law. Educational opportunities for girls were few: they did not attend regular schools but were taught in groups at home by tutors. With few exceptions, education
804-554: A collection of heroic sagas from the 12th century that was later collated in a verse epic , was the first literary work completely written in the vernacular. The Greek vernacular verse epic appeared in the 12th century, around the time of the French romance novel, almost as a backlash to the Attic renaissance during the dynasty of the Komnenoi in works like Psellos 's Chronography (in the middle of
1005-458: A complete philosophical system, whose theory and apologetics were heavily indebted to the Classic word, this changed. In addition, Constantine, as Pontifex Maximus , was responsible for the correct cultus or veneratio of the deity which was in accordance with former Roman practice. The move from the old religion to the new entailed some elements of continuity as well as break with the past, though
1206-418: A constant supply of muscle power for the building projects and rural work. Their numbers apparently increased in the late fourth and early fifth centuries as barbarian raids and a desire to avoid taxation pushed rural populations into cities. Since Homeric times, there were several categories of poverty: the ptochos ( πτωχός , "passive poor") was lower than the penes ( πένης , "active poor"). They formed
1407-570: A defenseless Asia Minor. Turks raided at will, ever further to the west.” Though the Crusades assisted Byzantium in driving back some of the Turks, they went far beyond the military assistance envisaged by Alexios I. Instead of following the strategic necessities of the war against the Turks, the Crusaders were focussed on the quest of re-conquering Jerusalem , and instead of returning territory to Byzantium,
1608-757: A domain in north-western Asia Minor. Attempts by the Byzantine Emperors to drive back the Ottomans were unsuccessful, and ceased in 1329 with the Battle of Pelekanon . Following a number of civil disputes in the Byzantine Empire, the Ottomans subjugated the Byzantines as vassals in the late 14th century and attempts to relieve this vassal status culminated in the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Apostolos Vakalopoulos Describes
1809-659: A heresy. The Persecution of Armenians had enormous consequences for the eastern defenses of the Byzantine empire. The Conquests of the Seljuk turks was made much easier than it otherwise would have been due to the Christian peoples fighting among themselves. Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos was frustrated with the continued resistance of the Armenians and so secretly contacted the Seljuk sultan Tugrul Beg in 1044 and urged him to attack
2010-482: A major imperial residence like other cities such as Trier , Milan and Sirmium , was not officially a capital until 359. Nonetheless, the imperial court resided there and the city was the political centre of the eastern parts of the Roman Empire where Greek was the dominant language. At first, Latin remained the language of both the court and the army. It was used for official documents, but its influence waned. From
2211-480: A normal part of everyday life, much more so than in modern Western societies. While it is difficult to draw a distinction between Roman and Byzantine soldiers from an organizational aspect, it is easier to do so in terms of their social profile. The military handbooks known as the Taktika continued a Hellenistic and Roman tradition, and contain a wealth of information about the appearance, customs, habits, and life of
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#17330850435362412-470: A rule of Medieval Greek phonotactics that would persist into Early Modern Greek . When dialects started deleting unstressed /i/ and /u/ between two consonants (such as when Myzithras became Mystras ), new clusters were formed and similarly assimilated by sandhi; on the other hand it is arguable that the dissimilation of voiceless obstruents occurred before the loss of close vowels, as the clusters resulting from this development do not necessarily undergo
2613-574: A series of disastrous trade deals with the Italian states; drying up one of the empire's final sources of revenue. This further led to competition between Venice, and Genoa to get emperors on the throne who supported their respective trade agenda to the detriment of the other, adding another level of instability to the Byzantine political process. By the time of the Byzantine–Genoese War (1348–49) , only thirteen percent of custom dues passing through
2814-553: A slate pencil. This cursive script already showed descenders and ascenders, as well as combinations of letters. In the third century, the Greek uncial developed under the influence of the Latin script because of the need to write on papyrus with a reed pen. In the Middle Ages, uncial became the main script for the Greek language. A common feature of the medieval majuscule script like the uncial
3015-642: A synod was convoked at the Hagia Sophia on 16 July where both Nikephoros and John were anathematized in return. John called a final synod at Neopatras in December 1277, where an anti-unionist council of eight bishops, a few abbots, and one hundred monks, again anathematized the Emperor, Patriarch, and Pope. The Armenians were persecuted due to their belief in Monophysite Christianity which the Byzantines saw as
3216-501: A very strong position in international trade. Despite the challenges posed by rival Italian merchants, they held their own throughout the latter half of the Byzantine Empire's existence. The clergy also held a special place, not only having more freedom than their Western counterparts, but also maintaining a patriarch in Constantinople who was considered the equivalent of the pope . This position of strength had built up over time, for at
3417-548: A viable long-term alternative, and the result was an empire that depended more than ever before on the strengths of each individual emperor or dynasty. The collapse of imperial power and authority after 1185 revealed the inadequacy of this approach. After the deposition of Andronikos I Komnenos in 1185, the dynasty of the Angeloi oversaw a period of military decline. From 1185 onwards, Byzantine emperors found it increasingly difficult to muster and pay for sufficient military forces, while
3618-429: A wide border with a large and powerful empire of Nomadic horse archers whose style of fighting they were not used to, and they could no longer rely on the Armenians (who they had disarmed and persecuted) for assistance. After a century of successful expansions due to the competent warrior Emperors Basil I and Basil II, a false sense of security seemed to have prevailed among the new Byzantine leadership. Rule “passed into
3819-527: Is synizesis ("merging" of vowels). In many words with the combinations [ˈea] , [ˈeo] , [ˈia] and [ˈio] , the stress shifted to the second vowel, and the first became a glide [j] . Thus: Ῥωμαῖος [ro'meos] → Ῥωμιός [ro'mɲos] ('Roman'), ἐννέα [e'nea] → ἐννιά [e'ɲa] ('nine'), ποῖος ['pios] → ποιός ['pços] ('which'), τα παιδία [ta pe'ðia] → τα παιδιά [ta pe'ðʝa] ('the children'). This accentual shift
4020-556: Is a bitter narration, worthy of copious tears. The persecution that the Armenians suffered at the hands of the Byzantine government became so bad that many Armenian troops upon which the Byzantines were relying to man the border defenses deserted their posts, leading Lastivertsi to lament: “The cavalry wanders about lordlessly, some in Persia, some in Greece, some in Georgia.” Some Armenians even joined
4221-497: Is a striking reduction of inflectional categories inherited from Indo-European , especially in the verbal system, and a complementary tendency of developing new analytical formations and periphrastic constructions. In morphology , the inflectional paradigms of declension , conjugation and comparison were regularised through analogy. Thus, in nouns, the Ancient Greek third declension, which showed an unequal number of syllables in
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#17330850435364422-475: Is already reflected in the metre of the 6th century hymns of Romanos the Melodist . In many cases, the vowel o disappeared in the endings -ιον [-ion] and -ιος [-ios] ( σακκίον [sa'cion] → σακκίν [sa'cin] , χαρτίον [xar'tion] → χαρτίν [xar'tin] , κύριος ['cyrios] → κύρις ['cyris] ). This phenomenon
4623-576: Is also significant as being the home of Saints Cyril and Methodius , two Greek brothers from Thessaloniki (Salonika) who were sent on state-sponsored missions to proselytize among the Slavs of the Balkans and east-central Europe. This involved Cyril and Methodius having to translate the Christian Bible into the Slavs' own language, for which they invented an alphabet that became known as Old Church Slavonic . In
4824-629: Is an exonym applied by later historians like Hieronymus Wolf ; "Byzantine" citizens continued to call themselves Romaioi (Romans) in their language. Despite the shift in terminology in the West, the Byzantines Empire's eastern neighbors, such as the Arabs, continued to refer to the Byzantines as "Romans", as for instance in the 30th Surah of the Quran ( Ar-Rum ). The signifier "Roman" ( Rum millet , "Roman nation")
5025-540: Is an abundance of abbreviations (e.g. ΧϹ for "Christos") and ligatures. Several letters of the uncial ( ϵ for Ε , Ϲ for Σ , Ѡ for Ω ) were also used as majuscules especially in a sacral context. The lunate sigma was adopted in this form as " С " in the Cyrillic script. The Greek uncial used the interpunct in order to separate sentences for the first time, but there were still no spaces between words. The Greek minuscule script, which probably emerged from
5226-534: Is assumed that most of the developments leading to the phonology of Modern Greek had either already taken place in Medieval Greek and its Hellenistic period predecessor Koine Greek , or were continuing to develop during this period. Above all, these developments included the establishment of dynamic stress , which had already replaced the tonal system of Ancient Greek during the Hellenistic period. In addition,
5427-939: Is attested to have begun earlier, in the Hellenistic Koine Greek papyri. The shift in the consonant system from voiced plosives /b/ ( β ), /d/ ( δ ), /ɡ/ ( γ ) and aspirated voiceless plosives /pʰ/ ( φ ), /tʰ/ ( θ ), /kʰ/ ( χ ) to corresponding fricatives ( /v, ð, ɣ/ and /f, θ, x/ , respectively) was already completed during Late Antiquity . However, the original voiced plosives remained as such after nasal consonants, with [mb] ( μβ ), [nd] ( νδ ), [ŋɡ] ( γγ ). The velar sounds /k, x, ɣ, ŋk, ŋɡ/ ( κ , χ , γ , γκ , γγ ) were realised as palatal allophones ( [c, ç, ʝ, ɲc, ɲɟ] ) before front vowels. The fricative /h/ , which had been present in Classical Greek, had been lost early on, although it continued to be reflected in spelling through
5628-422: Is beginning to change for that of mobile, pro-active agents. The merchant class, particularly that of Constantinople , became a force of its own that could, at times, even threaten the Emperor as it did in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This was achieved through efficient use of credit and other monetary innovations. Merchants invested surplus funds in financial products called chreokoinonia ( χρεοκοινωνία ),
5829-412: Is grouped together with ε /e̞/ ; ει and η together with ι /i/ ; ο with ω /o̞/ , and οι with υ /y/ . At least in educated speech, the vowel /y/ , which had also merged with υι , likely did not lose lip-rounding and become /i/ until the 10th/11th centuries. Up to this point, transliterations into Georgian continue using a different letter for υ/οι than for ι/ει/η , and in
6030-561: Is more an assumption of political, as opposed to cultural and linguistic, developments. Indeed, by this time the spoken language, particularly pronunciation, had already shifted towards modern forms. The conquests of Alexander the Great , and the ensuing Hellenistic period , had caused Greek to spread to peoples throughout Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean, altering the spoken language's pronunciation and structure. Medieval Greek
6231-404: Is no hope of escaping the murderous blade." Historian Warren Treadgold gives a summary on the historical background highlighting the cumulative effects of the relentless Turkish Muslim depredations against the Byzantine Empire in its Anatolian heartland by the late 14th century: As the Turks raided and conquered, they enslaved many Christians, selling some in other Muslim regions and hindering
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6432-403: Is reduced to the forms λαμβ- [lamb-] ( imperfective or present system) and λαβ- [lav-] ( perfective or aorist system). One of the numerous forms that disappeared was the dative . It was replaced in the 10th century by the genitive and the prepositional construction of εἰς [is] ('in, to') + accusative . In addition, nearly all the participles and
6633-453: Is said, 100,000 people perished, and at Touch 120,000 were massacred and 150,000 sold into slavery—thus the destruction went on. Whole districts were depopulated. ‘When the Turks had passed by, such as were left alive feared to return...trusting in neither the walls of their cities, nor the crags of the mountains, they crowded into Constantinople where they were decimated by plague. In a few years Cappadocia, Phrygia, Bithynia, and Paphlagonia lost
6834-578: Is situated between the Hellenistic ( Koine ) and modern phases of the language. Since as early as the Hellenistic era, Greek had been the lingua franca of the educated elites of the Eastern Mediterranean , spoken natively in the southern Balkans , the Greek islands, Asia Minor, and the ancient and Hellenistic Greek colonies of Southern Italy , the Black Sea , Western Asia and North Africa . At
7035-459: Is some dispute as to when exactly this development took place but apparently it began during the Byzantine period. The graphemes μπ , ντ and γκ for /b/ , /d/ and /ɡ/ can already be found in transcriptions from neighboring languages in Byzantine sources, like in ντερβίσης [der'visis] , from Turkish : derviş (' dervish '). On the other hand, some scholars contend that post-nasal voicing of voiceless plosives began already in
7236-441: Is still an open question. From then on, professional recruiting replaced conscription, and the increasing use of mercenaries in the army was ruinous for the treasury. From the 10th century onwards, there were laws connecting land ownership and military service. While the state never allotted land for obligatory service, soldiers could and did use their pay to buy landed estates, and taxes would be decreased or waived in some cases. What
7437-429: Is strictly differentiated from ἔρως [ˈeros] , ('physical love'). In everyday usage, some old Greek stems were replaced, for example, the expression for "wine" where the word κρασίον [kraˈsion] ('mixture') replaced the old Greek οἶνος [oînos] . The word ὄψον [ˈopson] (meaning 'something you eat with bread') combined with the suffix -αριον [-arion] , which
7638-433: Is the almost complete loss of the infinitive , which has been replaced by subordinate clauses with the particle να. Possibly transmitted through Greek, this phenomenon can also be found in the adjacent languages and dialects of the Balkans. Bulgarian and Romanian , for example, are in many respects typologically similar to medieval and present day Greek, although genealogically they are not closely related. Besides
7839-669: Is the link between this vernacular , known as Koine Greek , and Modern Greek . Though Byzantine Greek literature was still strongly influenced by Attic Greek , it was also influenced by vernacular Koine Greek, which is the language of the New Testament and the liturgical language of the Greek Orthodox Church . Constantine (the Great) moved the capital of the Roman Empire to Byzantium (renamed Constantinople) in 330. The city, though
8040-453: Is the stage of the Greek language between the end of classical antiquity in the 5th–6th centuries and the end of the Middle Ages , conventionally dated to the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. From the 7th century onwards, Greek was the only language of administration and government in the Byzantine Empire . This stage of language is thus described as Byzantine Greek. The study of
8241-464: Is what happened to the district of Sangarius, for example, which Michael VIII Palaeologus had known formerly as a prosperous, cultivated land, but whose utter desolation he afterwards surveyed in utmost despair…. The mountainous region between Nicaea and Nicomedia, opposite Constantinople, once clustered with castles, cities, and villages, was depopulated. A few towns escaped total destruction—Laodicea, Iconium, Bursa (then Prusa), and Sinope, for example—but
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8442-508: The Attic literary language and the constantly developing vernacular Koine . By late antiquity, the gap had become impossible to ignore. In the Byzantine era, written Greek manifested itself in a whole spectrum of divergent registers , all of which were consciously archaic in comparison with the contemporary spoken vernacular, but in different degrees. They ranged from a moderately archaic style employed for most every-day writing and based mostly on
8643-448: The Bible and classical Greek paideia which could not be left out, however, since so much of Christian scholarship and philosophy depended on it. These shaped Byzantine Greek character and the perceptions of themselves and others. Christians at the time of Constantine's conversion made up only 10% of the population. This would rise to 50% by the end of the fourth century and 90% by the end of
8844-590: The Byzantine Empire by the Serbs, whose ruler took advantage of the chaos to proclaim himself emperor of the Serbs and Greeks. The Serbian king Stefan Uroš IV Dušan made significant territorial gains in Byzantine Macedonia in 1345 and conquered large swathes of Thessaly and Epirus in 1348. In order to secure his authority during the civil war, Kantakouzenos hired Turkish mercenaries. Although these mercenaries were of some use, in 1352 they seized Gallipoli from
9045-489: The Empire of Nicaea , the damage was never reversed and the empire never returned to anywhere near its former territorial extent, wealth and military power. The third period of civil war took place in the 14th century. Two separate periods of civil war, again making extensive use of Turkish, Serbian and even Catalan troops, often operating independently under their own commanders, and often raiding and destroying Byzantine lands in
9246-537: The Levant and northern Egypt . Throughout their history, the Byzantine Greeks self-identified as Romans ( Greek : Ῥωμαῖοι , romanized : Rhōmaîoi ), but are referred to as "Byzantine Greeks" in modern historiography. Latin speakers identified them simply as Greeks or with the term Romaei . The social structure of the Byzantine Greeks was primarily supported by a rural, agrarian base that consisted of
9447-550: The Pope in Rome . The ecclesiastical provinces were called eparchies and were headed by archbishops or metropolitans who supervised their subordinate bishops or episkopoi . For most people, however, it was their parish priest or papas (from the Greek word for "father") that was the most recognizable face of the clergy. The Eastern Roman Empire was in language and civilization a Greek society. Linguistically, Byzantine or medieval Greek
9648-739: The Sack of Constantinople in 1204. Constantinople was now itself a Crusader state , known as the Latin Empire in historiography, but from the Greek perspective as Frankokratia or "rule of the Franks". Vestiges of imperial power were preserved in regional realms, the Nicaean Empire , Trebizond and Epirus . Much of the Nicaean Emperors' efforts now went into combating the Latins, and even after Constantinople
9849-412: The Sack of Constantinople ; Constantinople was burned, pillaged and destroyed, thousands of its citizens were killed, many of the surviving inhabitants fled, and much of the city became a depopulated ruin. The damage to Byzantium was incalculable; many historians point to this moment as a fatal blow in the empire's history. Although the empire was reformed in 1261 by the recapture of the city by forces from
10050-562: The Varangian Guard like Greece runestones and the Piraeus Lion which we meet the terms Grikkland (Greece) and Grikkr referring to their ventures in Byzantine Empire and their interaction with the Byzantines. While social mobility was not unknown in Byzantium the order of society was thought of as more enduring, with the average man regarding the court of Heaven to be the archetype of
10251-456: The comparative of adjectives ending in -ων , -ιον , [-oːn, -ion] which was partly irregular, was gradually replaced by the formation using the more regular suffix -τερος , -τέρα (-τερη) , -τερο(ν) , [-teros, -tera (-teri), -tero(n)] : µείζων [méːzdoːn] → µειζότερος [mi'zoteros] ('the bigger'). The enclitic genitive forms of the first and second person personal pronoun , as well as
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#173308504353610452-441: The contracted verbs ending in -άω [-aoː] , -έω [-eoː] etc., which earlier showed a complex set of vowel alternations, readopted the endings of the regular forms: ἀγαπᾷ [aɡapâːi] → ἀγαπάει [aɣaˈpai] ('he loves'). The use of the past tense prefix, known as augment , was gradually limited to regular forms in which the augment was required to carry word stress. Reduplication in
10653-509: The laymen , the clergy of the Eastern Roman Empire remained in close contact with the rest of society. Readers and subdeacons were drawn from the laity and expected to be at least twenty years of age while priests and bishops had to be at least 30. Unlike the Latin church , the Byzantine church allowed married priests and deacons, as long as they were married before ordination . Bishops, however, were required to be unmarried. While
10854-418: The particles να and θενά , the negation particle δέν [ðen] ('not') was derived from Ancient Greek : oὐδέν [uːdén] ('nothing'). Lexicographic changes in Medieval Greek influenced by Christianity can be found for instance in words like ἄγγελος [ˈaɲɟelos] ('messenger') → heavenly messenger → angel) or ἀγάπη [aˈɣapi] 'love' → 'altruistic love', which
11055-487: The peasantry , and a small fraction of the poor. These peasants lived within three kinds of settlements: the chorion or village, the agridion or hamlet , and the proasteion or estate . Many civil disturbances that occurred during the time of the Byzantine Empire were attributed to political factions within the Empire rather than to this large popular base. Soldiers among the Byzantine Greeks were at first conscripted amongst
11256-412: The rough breathing , a diacritic mark added to vowels. Changes in the phonological system mainly affect consonant clusters that show sandhi processes. In clusters of two different plosives or two different fricatives , there is a tendency for dissimilation such that the first consonant becomes a fricative and/or the second becomes a plosive ultimately favoring a fricative-plosive cluster. But if
11457-448: The theme system , played a role in its decline. Under this arrangement, which was in its heyday from about 650 to 1025, the empire was divided into several regions which contributed locally raised troops to the imperial armies. The system provided an effective means of cheaply mobilizing large numbers of men, and the result was a comparatively large and powerful force – the army of the theme of Thrakesion alone had provided about 9,600 men in
11658-619: The 10th century the Byzantine Empire had followed a policy of removing prominent nakharars (Armenian lords) from their native lands, absorbing those lands in the structure of the empire, and giving the nakharars in exchange lands and titles elsewhere. The Byzantine policy of removing important lords from their Armenian lands and settling them elsewhere (principally on imperial territory, in Cappadocia and northern Mesopotamia) proved to be extremely shortsighted in two ways. First, it left eastern Asia Minor devoid of its native defenders. Second, it worsened
11859-636: The 11th century) or the Alexiad , the biography of Emperor Alexios I Komnenos written by his daughter Anna Komnena about a century later. In fifteen-syllable blank verse (versus politicus), the Digenes Akritas deals with both ancient and medieval heroic sagas, but also with stories of animals and plants. The Chronicle of the Morea , a verse chronicle from the 14th century, is unique. It has also been preserved in French, Italian and Aragonese versions, and covers
12060-434: The 11th, 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. The 11th century saw increasing tensions between Courtly, and Military factions. Until the 11th century, the empire had long been under the control of the military factions with leaders such as Basil II , and John I Tzimiskes , however, the crisis of Basil II's succession led to increasing uncertainty in the future of politics. The army demanded Constantine VIII's daughters ascend to
12261-453: The 12th century and possibly earlier. Vernacular Greek continued to be known as "Romaic" ("Roman") until the 20th century. At the time of Constantine the Great (r. 306–337), barely 10% of the Roman Empire's population were Christians , with most of them being urban population and generally found in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. The majority of people still honoured the old gods in the public Roman way of religio . As Christianity became
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#173308504353612462-500: The 13th century onward, while tensions with the West led to the Sack of Constantinople by the forces of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and the dismemberment of the empire. Although a number of small Byzantine successor states survived, one of which eventually reclaimed Constantinople in 1261, the empire had been severely weakened. The Byzantines had withdrawn to Bithynia relocating their capital to Nicaea (present-day Iznik) during
12663-410: The 13th century, examples of texts written in vernacular Greek are very rare. They are restricted to isolated passages of popular acclamations , sayings, and particularly common or untranslatable formulations which occasionally made their way into Greek literature. Since the end of the 11th century, vernacular Greek poems from the literary realm of Constantinople are documented. The Digenes Akritas ,
12864-435: The 5th century BC. It comprised a tripartite system of education that, taking shape during the Hellenistic era, was maintained, with inevitable changes, up until the fall of Constantinople . The stages of education were the elementary school, where pupils ranged from six to ten years, secondary school, where pupils ranged from ten to sixteen, and higher education. Elementary education was widely available throughout most of
13065-475: The Anatolian peasants whom the Byzantines relied on for many centuries drastically fell; “indifferent foreigners were enlisted, arms, artillery and warlike stores neglected, and castles and fortresses allowed to fall in ruin.” In short, “the legacy of the civilian bureaucrats and of the emperors who were their nominees and puppets—profligate spenders on their own ostentations and miserly providers for their armies—was
13266-499: The Arabs in the course of the Muslim conquests a few years later. Alexandria , a centre of Greek culture and language, fell to the Arabs in 642. During the seventh and eighth centuries, Greek was gradually replaced by Arabic as an official language in conquered territories such as Egypt, as more people learned Arabic. Thus, the use of Greek declined early on in Syria and Egypt. The invasion of
13467-597: The Armenian capital of Ani, in an effort to destabilise them. When the Turks invaded their land, the Armenians doggedly resisted and likely would have continued to defend themselves, but in 1045 Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos , (believing that this mountainous region would serve as an effective barrier against any eastern powers) annexed and disarmed significant areas of their kingdom, and took much of its wealth back to Constantinople. An Armenian Chronicler explains that in this manner, “the sterile, effeminate and ignoble nation
13668-667: The Black Sea coast of Asia Minor, and Cappadocian , spoken in central Asia Minor, began to diverge. In Griko , a language spoken in the southern Italian exclaves , and in Tsakonian , which is spoken on the Peloponnese, dialects of older origin continue to be used today. Cypriot Greek was already in a literary form in the late Middle Ages, being used in the Assizes of Cyprus and the chronicles of Leontios Makhairas and Georgios Boustronios . It
13869-607: The Bosporus strait were going to the Empire. The remaining 87 percent was collected by the Genoese from their colony of Galata . Genoa collected 200,000 hyperpyra from annual custom revenues from Galata, while Constantinople collected a mere 30,000. The loss of control over its revenue sources drastically weakened the Byzantine Empire, hastening its decline. At the same time, the system of Pronoia (land grants in exchange for military service), became increasingly corrupt and dysfunctional by
14070-474: The Byzantine Empire's existence, in towns and occasionally in the countryside. This, in turn, ensured that literacy was much more widespread than in Western Europe, at least until the twelfth century. Secondary education was confined to the larger cities while higher education was the exclusive provenance of Constantinople . Though not a society of mass literacy like modern societies, Byzantine society
14271-481: The Byzantine Empire, noting how the Greek Christian inhabitants of Anatolia "have fled to the clefts in the rocks, to the forests, and to the mountain heights in an effort to escape a death from which there is no escape, a very cruel and inhuman death without any semblance of justice…. Nobody is spared, neither very young children nor defenseless women. For those whom old age or illness prevents from running away there
14472-638: The Byzantine emperors were active writers themselves and wrote chronicles or works on the running of the Byzantine state and strategic or philological works. Furthermore, letters, legal texts, and numerous registers and lists in Medieval Greek exist. Concessions to spoken Greek can be found, for example, in John Malalas's Chronography from the 6th century, the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor (9th century) and
14673-417: The Byzantine state, the demise of the theme system left the empire lacking in underlying structural strengths. As far back as the invasion of Africa by the general Belisarius , foreign soldiers were used in war. While the foreign military intervention was not an altogether new occurrence, the reliance on it, and its ability to damage political, social, and economic institutions were dramatically increased in
14874-578: The Byzantines were not considered by Western Europeans as heirs of the Roman Empire, but rather as part of an Eastern Greek kingdom. As the Byzantine Empire declined , the Roman identity survived until its fall in 1453 and beyond. The Ottomans used the designation " Rûm " ("Roman") distinctly for the Ottoman Greeks and the term " Rum millet " ("Roman nation") for all the Eastern Orthodox populations. It
15075-486: The Byzantines. By 1354, the empire's territory consisted of Constantinople and Thrace , the city of Thessalonica , and some territory in the Morea . “At that time,” writes Nicephorus Gregoras, “the inhabitants of Constaninople, as well as the population of most of the Byzantine towns of Thrace, suffered from a lack of victuals. While civil war was exhausting Byzantium, the Turks conducted frequent [naval] incursions from Asia with
15276-404: The Christian society of Byzantium to create a large network of hospitals ( iatreia , ιατρεία ) and almshouses, and a religious and social model largely justified by the existence of the poor and born out of the Christian transformation of classical society. Byzantine state and society relied on the Hellenistic system of joint tax liability due to the easy handling, fast and simple revenue for
15477-461: The Crusaders established their own principalities , becoming a territorial rival to Byzantine interests in their own right. This was true already during the Third Crusade , which induced emperor Isaac II Angelos to make a secret alliance with Saladin to impede the progress of Frederick Barbarossa , but open conflict between Crusaders and Byzantium erupted in the Fourth Crusade , resulting in
15678-543: The Devastation the seljuk raids had on Anatolia: At the beginning of the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks forced their way into Armenia and there crushed the armies of several petty Armenian states. No fewer than forty thousand souls fled before the organized pillage of the Seljuk host to the western part of Asia Minor…. From the middle of the eleventh century, and especially after the battle of Malazgirt [Manzikurt] (1071),
15879-456: The Emperor. "From the intensity of these disorders, tantamount almost to civil wars," concludes Geanakoplos, "it might appear that too great a price had been paid for the sake of union." The religious situation only worsened for Michael. The Arsenite party found widespread support amongst the discontented in the Anatolian provinces, and Michael responded there with similar viciousness: according to Vryonis, "These elements were either removed from
16080-505: The Fourth Crusade of 1204. While this Latin term for the ancient Hellenes could be used neutrally, its use by Westerners from the 9th century onwards in order to challenge Byzantine claims to ancient Roman heritage rendered it a derogatory exonym for the Byzantines who barely used it, mostly in contexts relating to the West, such as texts relating to the Council of Florence , to present
16281-614: The Fourth Crusade. It would be nearly 60 years before they returned to the capital, leaving Bithynia weak and vulnerable. The early history of the eventual rise of Ottoman power remains shrouded in obscurity. One Byzantine chronicle refers to a skirmish between "Othman" and Byzantine forces in 1302 in the Marmara region near present day Yalova . What historians can agree on is that by the early 1330s Ottomans had taken Byzantine towns in Prusa (Bursa), Nicaea (Iznik) and Nicomedia (Izmit). Constantinople
16482-452: The Greek concepts of charity for the sake of the polis ; nevertheless it was the Christian concepts attested in the Bible that animated their giving habits, and specifically the examples of Basil of Caesarea (who is the Greek equivalent of Santa Claus ), Gregory of Nyssa , and John Chrysostom . The number of the poor fluctuated in the many centuries of Byzantium's existence, but they provided
16683-608: The Greek language, for example ὁσπίτιον [oˈspition] ( Latin : hospitium , 'hostel', therefore "house", σπίτι [ˈspiti] in Modern Greek ), σέλλα [ˈsela] ('saddle'), ταβέρνα [taˈverna] ('tavern'), κανδήλιον [kanˈdilion] ( Latin : candela , 'candle'), φούρνος [ˈfurnos] ( Latin : furnus , 'oven') and φλάσκα [ˈflaska] ( Latin : flasco , 'wine bottle'). Other influences on Medieval Greek arose from contact with neighboring languages and
16884-639: The Greeks, delivered up [Armenia] to the Turks,” In the middle of the eleventh century, The Armenian historian Aristakes Lastivertsi recounts the Byzantine campaigns in Armenia: In these days Byzantine armies entered the land of Armenia four times in succession until they had rendered the whole country uninhabited through sword, fire, and captive-taking. When I think about these calamities my senses take leave of me, my brain becomes befuddled, and terror makes my hands tremble so that I cannot continue my composition. For it
17085-527: The Koine , as interchanges with β , δ , and γ in this position are found in the papyri. The prenasalized voiced spirants μβ , νδ and γγ were still plosives by this time, causing a merger between μβ/μπ , νδ/ντ and γγ/γκ , which would remain except within educated varieties, where spelling pronunciations did make for segments such as [ɱv, n̪ð, ŋɣ] Many decisive changes between Ancient and Modern Greek were completed by c. 1100 AD. There
17286-421: The Medieval Greek language and literature is a branch of Byzantine studies , the study of the history and culture of the Byzantine Empire. The beginning of Medieval Greek is occasionally dated back to as early as the 4th century, either to 330 AD, when the political centre of the Roman Empire was moved to Constantinople , or to 395 AD, the division of the empire. However, this approach is rather arbitrary as it
17487-472: The Modern Greek future particle θα Medieval Greek : [θa] , which replaced the old future forms. Ancient formations like the genitive absolute , the accusative and infinitive and nearly all common participle constructions were gradually substituted by the constructions of subordinate clauses and the newly emerged gerund . The most noticeable grammatical change in comparison to ancient Greek
17688-565: The Muslim slave markets. Byzantine princess Anna Komnene says: And since the succession of Diogenes the barbarians tread upon the boundaries of the empire of the Rhomaioi…the barbarian hand was not restricted until the reign of my father. Swords and spears were whetted against the Christians, and also battles, wars, and massacres. Cities were obliterated, lands were plundered, and the whole land of
17889-464: The Peloponnese in 1459 or 1460, the Empire of Trebizond in 1461, Athens in 1465, and two centuries later the Duchy of Candia in 1669, the Greek language lost its status as a national language until the emergence of modern Greece in the year 1821. Language varieties after 1453 are referred to as Modern Greek. As early as in the Hellenistic period , there was a tendency towards a state of diglossia between
18090-511: The Rhomaic boundaries), lamenting, cried, the one for his son, the other for his daughter. One bewailed his brother, another his cousin who had died previously, and like women shed hot tears. And there was at that time not one relationship which was without tears and without sadness. A Letter written by Manuel II Palaiologos in 1391 to Demetrios Kydones makes specific reference to the Turkish threat to
18291-496: The Rhomaioi was stained by blood of Christians. Some fell piteously [the victims] of arrows and spears, other being driven away from their homes were carried off captive to the cities of Persia. Terror reigned over all and they hastened to hide in the caves, forests, mountains, and hills. Among them some cried aloud in horror at those things which they suffered, being led off to Persia; and others who yet survived (if some did remain within
18492-598: The Seljuks in their jihad raids into Byzantine territory. While all of this was happening, a portion of the Byzantine army rebelled against the emperor Michael VI. The Turks were well aware of the infighting among the Christians and took full advantage of the situation. Lastivertsi says: “As soon as the Persians [Turks] realized that [the Byzantine nobles] were fighting and opposing one another, they boldly arose and came against us, ceaselessly raiding, destructively ravaging.” Since
18693-568: The Seljuks spread throughout the whole Asia Minor peninsula, leaving terror, panic and destruction in their wake. Byzantine, Turkish and other contemporary sources are unanimous in their agreement on the extent of havoc wrought and the protracted anguish of the local population…evidence as we have proves that the Hellenic population of Asia Minor, whose very vigor had so long sustained the Empire and might indeed be said to have constituted its greatest strength, succumbed so rapidly to Turkish pressure that by
18894-644: The Slavs into the Balkan Peninsula reduced the area where Greek and Latin was spoken (roughly north of a line from Montenegro to Varna on the Black Sea in Bulgaria ). Sicily and parts of Magna Graecia , Cyprus, Asia Minor and more generally Anatolia, parts of the Crimean Peninsula remained Greek-speaking. The southern Balkans which would henceforth be contested between Byzantium and various Slavic kingdoms or empires. The Greek language spoken by one-third of
19095-568: The Turks with their tents and their flocks wandered over them contentedly, as they had done in the deserts out of which they had come" Demetrios Cydones on the Turkish depredations in Anatolia: They took from us all the lands which we enjoyed from the Hellespont eastward to the mountains of Armenia. The cities they razed to the ground, pillaged the religious sanctuaries, broke open the graves, and filled all with blood and corpses. They outraged
19296-622: The Western attack, but the policy had mixed results. The empire's Western enemies attempted to reclaim the Latin Empire in spite of the union, while the social divisions the deeply unpopular union created inside the empire were damaging to Byzantine society. Byzantine envoys presented themselves at the Second Council of Lyons on 24 June 1274. On the fourth session of the Council the formal act of union
19497-577: The Western viewpoint. The ancient name Hellenes was synonymous to " pagan " in popular use, but was revived as an ethnonym in the Middle Byzantine period (11th century). While in the West the term "Roman" acquired a new meaning in connection with the Catholic Church and the Bishop of Rome , the Greek form "Romaioi" remained attached to the Greeks of the Eastern Roman Empire. The term "Byzantine Greeks"
19698-494: The administrative and financial routine of organising religious affairs, and this routine was applied to the Christian Church . Following the pattern set by Eusebius of Caesarea , the Byzantines viewed the emperor as a representative or messenger of Christ , responsible particularly for the propagation of Christianity among pagans, and for the "externals" of the religion, such as administration and finances. The imperial role in
19899-519: The affairs of the Church never developed into a fixed, legally defined system, however. With the decline of Rome, and internal dissension in the other Eastern patriarchates, the church of Constantinople became, between the 6th and 11th centuries, the richest and most influential centre of Christendom . Even when the Byzantine Empire was reduced to only a shadow of its former self, the Church, as an institution, exercised so much influence both inside and outside
20100-435: The air") which depended on the village's population and ranged between 4 and 20 gold coins annually. Their diet consisted of mainly grains and beans and in fishing communities fish was usually substituted for meat . Bread , wine , and olives were important staples of Byzantine diet with soldiers on campaign eating double-baked and dried bread called paximadion (Greek: παξιμάδιον). As in antiquity and modern times,
20301-422: The anti-unionists through persuasion, but eventually, the virulence of the protests led him to resort to force. Many anti-unionists were blinded or exiled. Two prominent monks, Meletios and Ignatios, were punished: the first had his tongue cut out, and the second was blinded. Even imperial officials were harshly treated, and the death penalty was decreed even for simply reading or possessing pamphlets directed against
20502-566: The armies or else, alienated, they deserted to the Turks". Another attempt to clear the encroaching Turkmen from the Meaender valley in 1278 found limited success, but Antioch on the Maeander was irretrievably lost as were Tralles and Nyssa four years later. On 1 May 1277, John the Bastard convoked a synod at Neopatras that anathematized the Emperor, Patriarch, and Pope as heretics. In response,
20703-403: The artistic heritage of paganism was literally broken by Christian zeal. Christianity led to the development of a few phenomena characteristic of Byzantium. Namely, the intimate connection between Church and State, a legacy of Roman cultus . Also, the creation of a Christian philosophy that guided Byzantine Greeks in their everyday lives. And finally, the dichotomy between the Christian ideals of
20904-538: The beginning of the 6th century, amendments to the law were mostly written in Greek. Furthermore, parts of the Roman Corpus Iuris Civilis were gradually translated into Greek. Under the rule of Emperor Heraclius (610–641 AD), who also assumed the Greek title Basileus ( Greek : βασιλεύς , 'monarch') in 610, Greek became the official language of the Eastern Roman Empire . This was in spite of
21105-449: The beginning of the Byzantine Empire, under Emperor Constantine the Great ( r. 306–337 ), only a small part, about 10%, of the population was Christian . Use of the Greek language was already widespread in the eastern parts of the Roman Empire when Constantine moved its capital to Constantinople, although Latin was the language of the imperial administration. From the reign of Emperor Heraclius ( r. 610–641 ), Greek
21306-438: The beginning of the Byzantine millennium, the koine (Greek: κοινή) remained the basis for spoken Greek and Christian writings, while Attic Greek was the language of the philosophers and orators. As Christianity became the dominant religion, Attic began to be used in Christian writings in addition to and often interspersed with koine Greek. Nonetheless, from the 6th at least until the 12th century, Attic remained entrenched in
21507-805: The change to [fricative + stop], e.g. κ(ου)τί as [kti] not [xti] . The resulting clusters were: For plosives: For fricatives where the second was not /s/ : For fricatives where the second was /s/ : The disappearance of /n/ in word-final position, which had begun sporadically in Late Antiquity, became more widespread, excluding certain dialects such as South Italian and Cypriot. The nasals /m/ and /n/ also disappeared before voiceless fricatives, for example νύμφη ['nyɱfi] → νύφη ['nifi] , ἄνθος ['an̪θos] → ἄθος ['aθos] . A new set of voiced plosives [(m)b] , [(n)d] and [(ŋ)ɡ] developed through voicing of voiceless plosives after nasals . There
21708-511: The conquests of Asia Minor were in operation over a period of four centuries. Thus the Christian societies of Asia Minor were submitted to extensive periods of intense warfare, incursions, and destructions which undermined the existence of the Christian church. In the first century of Turkish conquests and invasions from the mid-eleventh to the late twelfth century, the sources reveal that some 63 towns and villages were destroyed. The inhabitants of other towns and villages were enslaved and taken off to
21909-501: The court of her daughter Maria Palaiologina Kantakouzene , Tsarina of the Bulgars, from where she intrigued unsuccessfully against Michael. More serious was the opposition of the sons of Michael of Epirus, Nikephoros I Komnenos Doukas and his half-brother John the Bastard : they posed as the defenders of Orthodoxy and gave support to the anti-unionists fleeing Constantinople. Michael at first responded with comparative leniency, hoping to win
22110-554: The cursive writing in Syria , appears more and more frequently from the 9th century onwards. It is the first script that regularly uses accents and spiritus, which had already been developed in the 3rd century BC. This very fluent script, with ascenders and descenders and many possible combinations of letters, is the first to use gaps between words. The last forms which developed in the 12th century were Iota subscript and word-final sigma ( ς ). The type for Greek majuscules and minuscules that
22311-407: The different cases, was adjusted to the regular first and second declension by forming a new nominative form out of the oblique case forms: Ancient Greek ὁ πατήρ [ho patɛ́ːr] → Modern Greek ὁ πατέρας [o pa'teras] , in analogy to the accusative form τὸν πατέρα [tom ba'tera] . Feminine nouns ending in -ις [-is] and -ας [-as] formed
22512-411: The east, had become extinct and replaced by Greek by the 5th century. In any case, all cities of the Eastern Roman Empire were strongly influenced by the Greek language. In the period between 603 and 619, the southern and eastern parts of the empire ( Syria , Egypt , North Africa ) were occupied by Persian Sassanids and, after being recaptured by Heraclius in the years 622 to 628, were conquered by
22713-614: The eastern shore of the Hellespont , which out of 173 households classifies 113 as peasant and 60 as urban , which indicate other kinds of ancillary activities. The Treatise on Taxation , preserved in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, distinguishes between three types of rural settlements, the chorion (Greek: χωρίον) or village, the agridion (Greek: αγρίδιον) or hamlet, and the proasteion (Greek: προάστειον) or estate. According to
22914-584: The educational system; while further changes to the spoken language can be postulated for the early and middle Byzantine periods. The population of the Byzantine Empire, at least in its early stages, had a variety of mother tongues including Greek. These included Latin, Aramaic , Coptic , and Caucasian languages , while Cyril Mango also cites evidence for bilingualism in the south and southeast. These influences, as well as an influx of people of Arabic, Celtic, Germanic, Turkic, and Slavic backgrounds, supplied medieval Greek with many loanwords that have survived in
23115-636: The empire lost its last territory in Italy to the Norman Kingdom of Sicily and faced repeated attacks on its territory in the Balkans. These events created the context for Emperor Alexios I Komnenos to call to the West for help, which led to the First Crusade . However, economic concessions to the Italian Republics of Venice and Genoa weakened the empire's control over its own finances, especially from
23316-481: The end of the eleventh century when political machinations allowed the landed aristocracy to secure the throne for a century and more. Following that phase, however, the enterprising merchants bounced back and wielded real clout during the time of the Third Crusade . The reason Byzantine Greek merchants have often been neglected in historiography is not that they were any less able than their ancient or modern Greek colleagues in matters of trade. It rather originated with
23517-448: The equivalent and perhaps ancestor of the later Italian commenda . Eventually, the purchasing power of Byzantine merchants became such that it could influence prices in markets as far afield as Cairo and Alexandria . In reflection of their success, emperors gave merchants the right to become members of the Senate , that is to integrate themselves with the ruling elite. This had an end by
23718-424: The ethnic tensions between the Greeks and the Armenians due to the introduction of thousands of Armenian newcomers into Cappadocia. The Byzantine empire worsened this error by disbanding a 50,000-man local Armenian army, ostensibly to save money. As a result, the land was left defenseless as well as leaderless in the face of the Turkish invasions that came soon after. The second wave of Armenians that moved westwards
23919-412: The extent of devastation elsewhere was such as to make a profound impression on visitors for may years to come. The fate of Antioch provides a graphic illustration of the kind of havoc wrought by the Turkish invaders: in 1432, only three hundred dwellings could be counted inside its walls, and its predominantly Turkish or Arab inhabitants subsisted by raising camels, goats, cattle, and sheep. Other cities in
24120-399: The fact that the inhabitants of the empire still considered themselves Rhomaioi ('Romans') until its end in 1453, as they saw their State as the perpetuation of Roman rule. Latin continued to be used on the coinage until the ninth century and in certain court ceremonies for even longer. Despite the absence of reliable demographic figures, it has been estimated that less than one third of
24321-461: The failure of their efforts to sustain their empire exposed the limitations of the entire Byzantine military system, dependent as it was on competent personal direction from the emperor. Despite the restoration under the Palaiologoi , Byzantium never reached the heights of its pre-1204 past. By the 13th century, the imperial army numbered a mere 6,000 men. As one of the main institutional strengths of
24522-519: The fall of Trebizond the last truly Byzantine outpost in Anatolia was lost. While conflict continued between the Ottomans and other Muslims in Anatolia, the Ottomans mostly ignored them to focus on westward expansion into the Christian lands of southeastern Europe. The most significant events generally agreed by historians to have played a role in the decline of the Byzantine Empire are summarised below: The period from 1071 to 1081 saw eight revolts: This
24723-578: The fifteenth…. With the extermination of local populations or their precipitate flight, entire villages, cities, and sometimes whole provinces fell into decay. There were some fertile districts like the valley of the Maeander River, once stocked with thousands of sheep and cattle, which were laid waste and thereafter ceased to be in any way productive. Other districts were literally transformed into wildernesses. Impenetrable thickets sprang up in places where once there had been luxuriant fields and pastures. This
24924-485: The fifth century. Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565) then brutally mopped up the rest of the pagans, highly literate academics on one end of the scale and illiterate peasants on the other. A conversion so rapid seems to have been rather the result of expediency than of conviction. The survival of the Empire in the East assured an active role of the emperor in the affairs of the Church. The Byzantine state inherited from pagan times
25125-431: The first consonant was a fricative and the second consonant was /s/ , the first consonant instead became a plosive, favoring a plosive- /s/ cluster. Medieval Greek also had cluster voicing harmony favoring the voice of the final plosive or fricative; when the resulting clusters became voiceless, the aforementioned sandhi would further apply. This process of assimilation and sandhi was highly regular and predictable, forming
25326-426: The fourteenth century, it was confined to a few limited areas. By that time, Asia Minor was already being called Turkey…one after another, bishoprics and metropolitan sees which once throbbed with Christian vitality became vacant and ecclesiastical buildings fell into ruins. The metropolitan see of Chalcedon, for example, disappeared in the fourteenth century, and the sees of Laodicea, Kotyaeon (now Kutahya) and Synada in
25527-403: The genitive forms of the third person demonstrative pronoun , developed into unstressed enclitic possessive pronouns that were attached to nouns: µου [mu] , σου [su] , του [tu] , της [tis] , µας [mas] , σας [sas] , των [ton] . Irregularities in verb inflection were also reduced through analogy. Thus,
25728-426: The greater part of their Greek population.” J. Laurent writes further:“In brief, the population of Asia Minor vanished before the Turks. The people fled far away, or shut themselves up in their Cities, or sought refuge in the mountains which border the central plateau of the peninsula. The valleys and the plains which stretch from Caesarea and Sebaste to Nicaea and Sardes remained all but empty. And as they fell fallow,
25929-449: The hands of a series of dotards, sensualists and courtesans—female rule once again predominated.” During her 29-year reign Empress Zoe Porphyrogenita married and divorced (often by blinding or murdering) several men. Concern for the frontier and its defence was largely dropped; the empire’s resources were spent on the luxuries of the civil bureaucracy, which came to dominate the byzantine government and ruled in all but name. While Armenia
26130-447: The help of monemes and triremes [galley ships], making their way with impunity into Thrace, especially during harvest season, seizing livestock, carrying off women and children into slavery, and causing such evils that these regions afterward remained depopulated and uncultivated. That was one of the reasons for the famine that the Byzantines had to endure.” The disintegration of the Byzantine Empire's traditional military organization,
26331-667: The history of Frankish feudalism on the Peloponnese during the Latinokratia of the Principality of Achaea , a crusader state set up after the Fourth Crusade and the 13th century fall of Constantinople . The earliest evidence of prose vernacular Greek exists in some documents from southern Italy written in the tenth century. Later prose literature consists of statute books, chronicles and fragments of religious, historical and medical works. The dualism of literary language and vernacular
26532-513: The imperative forms of the 3rd person were lost. The subjunctive was replaced by the construction of subordinate clauses with the conjunctions ὅτι [ˈoti] ('that') and ἵνα [ˈina] ('so that'). ἵνα first became ἱνά [iˈna] and was later shortened to να [na] . By the end of the Byzantine era, the construction θέλω να [ˈθelo na] ('I want that…') + subordinate clause developed into θενά [θeˈna] . Eventually, θενά became
26733-478: The imperial court in Constantinople . This society included various classes of people that were neither exclusive nor immutable. The most characteristic were the poor, the peasants, the soldiers, the teachers, entrepreneurs, and clergy. According to a text dated to AD 533, a man was termed "poor" if he did not have 50 gold coins ( aurei ), which was a modest though not negligible sum. The Byzantines were heirs to
26934-426: The imperial court's life like Αὔγουστος [ˈavɣustos] ('Augustus'), πρίγκιψ [ˈpriɲɟips] ( Latin : princeps , 'Prince'), μάγιστρος [ˈmaʝistros] ( Latin : magister , 'Master'), κοιαίστωρ [cyˈestor] ( Latin : quaestor , 'Quaestor'), ὀφφικιάλος [ofiˈcalos] ( Latin : officialis , 'official'). In addition, Latin words from everyday life entered
27135-549: The imperial frontiers as never before. As George Ostrogorsky points out: "The Patriarchate of Constantinople remained the center of the Orthodox world, with subordinate metropolitan sees and archbishoprics in the territory of Asia Minor and the Balkans, now lost to Byzantium, as well as in Caucasus, Russia and Lithuania. The Church remained the most stable element in the Byzantine Empire." In terms of religion, Byzantine Greek Macedonia
27336-510: The inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire, around eight million people, were native speakers of Greek. The number of those who were able to communicate in Greek may have been far higher. The native Greek speakers consisted of many of the inhabitants of the southern Balkan Peninsula , south of the Jireček Line , and all of the inhabitants of Asia Minor , where the native tongues ( Phrygian , Lycian , Lydian , Carian etc.), except Armenian in
27537-551: The interior of the empire, and by giving the Turks an increasing presence in Byzantine politics. These interventions also led to further destabilization of the political system. Reliance on foreign military intervention, and sponsorship for political motives, continued even during the Komnenian Restoration, Alexius I used Turkish mercenaries in the civil wars he participated in with Nikephoros III Botaneiates . In 1204, Alexios IV Angelos relied on Latin soldiers to claim
27738-473: The keeping of bees , was as highly developed in Byzantium as it had been in Ancient Greece . Aside from agriculture, the peasants also laboured in the crafts, fiscal inventories mentioning smiths (Greek: χαλκεύς, chalkeus ), tailors (Greek: ράπτης, rhaptes ), and cobblers (Greek: τζαγγάριος, tzangarios ). During the Byzantine millennium, hardly a year passed without a military campaign. Soldiers were
27939-461: The languages of Venetian, Frankish and Arab conquerors. Some of the loanwords from these languages have been permanently retained in Greek or in its dialects: Middle Greek used the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet which, until the end of antiquity, were predominantly used as lapidary and majuscule letters and without a space between words and with diacritics. The first Greek script, a cursive script, developed from quick carving into wax tablets with
28140-467: The later empire, and by the 14th century many of the empire's nobles were not paying any tax, nor were they serving in the empire's armies. This further undermined the financial basis of the state and placed further reliance on unreliable mercenaries, which only hasted the empire's demise. Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos signed a union with the Catholic church in the 13th century in the hope of staving off
28341-552: The majority of the infamous Constantinopolitan mob whose function was similar to the mob of the First Rome . However, while there are instances of riots attributed to the poor, the majority of civil disturbances were specifically attributable to the various factions of the Hippodrome like the Greens and Blues. The poor made up a non-negligible percentage of the population, but they influenced
28542-453: The modern Greek language. From the 11th century onward, there was also a steady rise in the literary use of the vernacular. Following the Fourth Crusade , there was increased contact with the West; and the lingua franca of commerce became Italian. In the areas of the Crusader kingdoms a classical education (Greek: παιδεία, paideia ) ceased to be a sine qua non of social status, leading to
28743-435: The most common cultivations in the choraphia (Greek: χωράφια) were olive groves and vineyards . While Liutprand of Cremona , a visitor from Italy , found Greek wine irritating as it was often flavoured with resin ( retsina ) most other Westerners admired Greek wines, Cretan in particular being famous. While both hunting and fishing were common, the peasants mostly hunted to protect their herds and crops. Apiculture ,
28944-409: The name "Rhomaioi" (Romans) in their languages was most commonly translated as "Greki" (Greeks). Some Slavonic texts during the early medieval era also used the terms Rimljani or Romei . At least one 11th-century Bulgarian source is attested which refers to "Ellini rimski" (Roman Hellenes). In most medieval Bulgarian sources the Byzantine Emperors were the "Tsars of the Greeks" and the Byzantine Empire
29145-499: The name 'Hellene' rise to replace it, given the prior revival as self-identification from the 13th century onward by the Nicaenean elite and in the intellectual circles by Georgios Gemistos Plethon and John Argyropoulos , that sowed the seed for it. Today, the modern Greek people still sometimes use, in addition to the terms "Greeks" and "Hellenes", the Byzantine term "Romaioi," or "Romioi," ("Romans") to refer to themselves, as well as
29346-561: The nominative according to the accusative -ιδα [-iða] -αδα [-aða] , as in ἐλπίς [elpís] → ἐλπίδα [elˈpiða] ('hope'), πατρίς [patrís] → πατρίδα [paˈtriða] ('homeland'), and in Ἑλλάς [hellás] → Ἑλλάδα [eˈlaða] ('Greece'). Only a few nouns remained unaffected by this simplification, such as τὸ φῶς [to fos] (both nominative and accusative ), τοῦ φωτός [tu fo'tos] ( genitive ). The Ancient Greek formation of
29547-515: The onset of puberty , which was followed shortly after by betrothal and marriage. Although marriage arranged by the family was the norm, romantic love was not unknown. Most women bore many children but few survived infancy, and grief for the loss of a loved one was an inalienable part of life. The main form of birth control was abstinence, and while there is evidence of contraception it seems to have been mainly used by prostitutes. Due to prevailing norms of modesty, women would wear clothing that covered
29748-401: The peasantry ( geōrgikē , γεωργική , "farmers") and the soldiers ( stratiōtikē , στρατιωτική ). Peasants lived mostly in villages, whose name changed slowly from the classical kome ( κώμη ) to the modern chorio ( χωριό ). While agriculture and herding were the dominant occupations of villagers they were not the only ones. There are records for the small town of Lampsakos , situated on
29949-468: The period 902–936, for example. But from the 11th century onwards, the theme system was allowed to decay. This played a major role in the loss of Anatolia to the Turks at the end of that century. In the 12th century, the Komnenian dynasty re-established an effective military force . Manuel I Komnenos , for example, was able to muster an army of over 40,000 men. However, the theme system was never replaced by
30150-405: The pillage of wealthy estates and the torture and assassination of the Orthodox metropolitan of Ceasarea . Gagik was eventually killed by the local Greek landowners. The Annexation of Armenia ultimately proved to be a strategic disaster for the Byzantines. The Armenian Princes provided a secure buffer zone on the Byzantines eastern border. The overextended Byzantines had found themselves sharing
30351-455: The population of Sicily at the time of the Norman conquest 1060–1090 remained vibrant for more than a century, but slowly died out (as did Arabic) to a deliberate policy of Latinization in language and religion from the mid-1160s. From the late 11th century onwards, the interior of Anatolia was invaded by Seljuq Turks, who advanced westwards. With the Ottoman conquests of Constantinople in 1453,
30552-482: The process, ruined the domestic economy and left the state virtually powerless and overrun by its enemies. Conflicts between Andronikos II and Andronikos III , and then later between John VI Kantakouzenos and John V Palaiologos , marked the final ruin of Byzantium. The Byzantine civil war of 1321–1328 allowed the Turks to make notable gains in Anatolia and set up their capital in Prusa 100 kilometers from Constantinople . The civil war of 1341–1347 saw exploitation of
30753-447: The process, this cemented the Greek brothers' status as the pioneers of Slavic literature and those who first introduced Byzantine civilization and Orthodox Christianity to the hitherto illiterate and pagan Slavs. In modern Byzantine scholarship , there are currently three main schools of thought on medieval eastern Roman identity. Medieval Greek Medieval Greek (also known as Middle Greek , Byzantine Greek , or Romaic )
30954-643: The relationship between them and the West, particularly with Latin Europe , deteriorated. Relations were further damaged by a schism between the Catholic West and Orthodox East that led to the Byzantine Greeks being labeled as heretics in the West. Throughout the later centuries of the Byzantine Empire and particularly following the imperial coronation of the King of the Franks, Charlemagne ( r. 768–814 ), in Rome in 800,
31155-499: The religious hierarchy mirrored the Empire's administrative divisions, the clergy were more ubiquitous than the emperor's servants. The issue of caesaropapism , while usually associated with the Byzantine Empire, is now understood to be an oversimplification of actual conditions in the Empire. By the fifth century, the Patriarch of Constantinople was recognized as first among equals of the four eastern Patriarchs and as of equal status with
31356-435: The rest from practicing their faith. Conversions [to islam], Turkish migration, and Greek outmigration increasingly endangered the Greek minority in central Asia Minor. When the Turks overran Western Anatolia, they occupied the countryside first, driving the Greeks into the cities, or away to Europe, or the islands. By the time the Anatolian cities fell, the land around them was already largely Turkish [and Islamic]. In contrast,
31557-652: The reverse was not unknown, as in Theodore Prodromos's description of a battered husband in the Ptochoprodromos poems. Although female life expectancy in Byzantium was lower than that of men, due to death in childbirth, wars and the fact that men married younger, female widowhood was still fairly common. Still, some women were able to circumvent societal strictures and work as traders, artisans, abbots, entertainers, and scholars. The traditional image of Byzantine Greek merchants as unenterprising benefactors of state aid
31758-453: The rise of the vernacular. From this era many beautiful works in the vernacular, often written by people deeply steeped in classical education, are attested. A famous example is the four Ptochoprodromic poems attributed to Theodoros Prodromos. From the 13th to the 15th centuries, the last centuries of the Empire, there arose several works, including laments, fables, romances, and chronicles, written outside Constantinople, which until then had been
31959-516: The rural peasants and trained on an annual basis. As the Byzantine Empire entered the 11th century, more of the soldiers within the army were either professional men-at-arms or mercenaries . Until the thirteenth century, education within the Byzantine Greek population was more advanced than in the West, particularly at primary school level, resulting in comparatively high literacy rates. Success came easily to Byzantine Greek merchants, who enjoyed
32160-579: The same class, adopted a new set of endings modelled on the passive of regular verbs, as in the following examples: In most cases, the numerous stem variants that appeared in the Ancient Greek system of aspect inflection were reduced to only two basic stem forms, sometimes only one. Thus, in Ancient Greek the stem of the verb λαμβάνειν [lambáneːn] ('to take') appears in the variants λαμβ- [lamb-] , λαβ- [lab-] , ληψ- [lɛːps-] , ληφ- [lɛːpʰ-] and λημ- [lɛːm-] . In Medieval Greek, it
32361-641: The same original phoneme had merged with /i/ in mainstream varieties at roughly the same time (the same documents also transcribe υ/οι with ი /i/ very sporadically). In the original closing diphthongs αυ , ευ and ηυ , the offglide [u] had developed into a consonantal [v] or [f] early on (possibly through an intermediate stage of [β] and [ɸ] ). Before [n] , υ turned to [m] ( εὔνοστος ['evnostos] → ἔμνοστος ['emnostos] , χαύνος ['xavnos] → χάμνος ['xamnos] , ἐλαύνω [e'lavno] → λάμνω ['lamno] ), and before [m] it
32562-505: The seat of most literature, in an idiom termed by scholars as "Byzantine Koine". However, the diglossia of the Greek-speaking world, which had already started in ancient Greece, continued under Ottoman rule and persisted in the modern Greek state until 1976, although Koine Greek remains the official language of the Greek Orthodox Church . As shown in the poems of Ptochoprodromos, an early stage of modern Greek had already been shaped by
32763-435: The soldiers. As with the peasantry, many soldiers performed ancillary activities, like medics and technicians . Selection for military duty was annual with yearly call-ups and great stock was placed on military exercises, during the winter months, which formed a large part of a soldier's life. Until the 11th century, the majority of the conscripts were from rural areas, while the conscription of craftsmen and merchants
32964-416: The souls of the inhabitants, forcing them to deny God and giving to them their own defiled mysteries. They abused their [Christians’] souls, alas, with wanton outrage! Denuding them of all property and their freedom, they left the [Christians as] weak images of slaves, exploiting the remaining strength of the wretched ones for their own prosperity. According to Speros Vryonis : The conquest, or should I say
33165-516: The southeastern part of Asia Minor fell into similar decay. Quoting contemporary authorities, J. Laurent writes: “It is difficult even to imagine the complete ruin the Turks left behind them. Whatever they could reach, men or crops, nothing remained alive; and a week was sufficient under dread of famine to force them to abandon the most prosperous areas. On their departure all that was left were devastated fields, trees cut down, mutilated corpses and towns driven mad by fear or in flames.’”’ At Armorium, it
33366-413: The state did allocate to soldiers, however, from the 12th century onwards, were the tax revenues from some estates called pronoiai ( πρόνοιαι ). As in antiquity, the basic food of the soldier remained the dried biscuit bread, though its name had changed from boukelaton ( βουκελάτον ) to paximadion . Byzantine education was the product of an ancient Greek educational tradition that stretched back to
33567-458: The state from the different towns and villages chorio , komai mostly made up of peasants, who were the main income. There are no reliable figures as to the numbers of the peasantry, yet it is widely assumed that the vast majority of Byzantine Greeks lived in rural and agrarian areas. In the Taktika of Emperor Leo VI the Wise (r. 886–912), the two professions defined as the backbone of the state are
33768-473: The term "Romaic" ("Roman") to refer to their Modern Greek language. During most of the Middle Ages, the Byzantine Greeks self-identified as Rhōmaîoi ( Ῥωμαῖοι , "Romans", meaning citizens of the Roman Empire ), a term which in the Greek language had become synonymous with Christian Greeks. The Latinizing term Graikoí (Γραικοί, "Greeks") was also used, though its use was less common, and nonexistent in official Byzantine political correspondence, prior to
33969-421: The throne of Byzantium, leading to the sack of Constantinople, and the creation of the successor states. Economic concessions to the Italian Republics of Venice and Genoa weakened the empire's control over its finances, especially from the ascension of Michael VIII Palaiologos in the 13th century onward. At this time it was common for emperors to seek sponsorship from Venice , Genoa , and the Turks. This led to
34170-426: The throne of their relation to Basil II, leading several marriages, and increasing power for the courtly faction. This culminated after the failed Battle of Manzikert. As civil wars broke out, and tensions between courtly and military factions reached a zenith, the demand for soldiers led to the hiring of Turkish mercenaries. These mercenaries aided in the Byzantine loss of Anatolia by drawing more Turkish soldiers into
34371-488: The time and sometimes in villages. Nikolaos Oikonomides , focusing on 13th-century Byzantine literacy in Western Asia Minor, states that Byzantine society had "a completely literate church, an almost completely literate aristocracy, some literate horsemen, rare literate peasants and almost completely illiterate women." Ioannis Stouraitis estimates that the percentage of the Empire's population with some degree of literacy
34572-485: The time the danger of the Seljuk raids, mounting in frequency, extent and success during his reign.” The most they did was make treaties with Sultan Tughril ; and when roaming bands of Turks broke the treaty by raiding and pillaging Byzantine territory, and Constantinople objected, Sultan Tughril feigned innocence by claiming he was unable to control these “lone wolves,” even as they continued raiding deeper and deeper into western Anatolia. During this time, recruitment of
34773-450: The turn of the first millennium AD. Written literature reflecting this Demotic Greek begins to appear around 1100. Among the preserved literature in the Attic literary language, various forms of historiography take a prominent place. They comprise chronicles as well as classicist, contemporary works of historiography , theological documents, and saints' lives . Poetry can be found in the form of hymns and ecclesiastical poetry. Many of
34974-419: The verb stem, which was a feature of the old perfect forms, was gradually abandoned and only retained in antiquated forms. The small ancient Greek class of irregular verbs in -μι [-mi] disappeared in favour of regular forms ending in -ω [-oː] ; χώννυμι [kʰóːnnymi] → χώνω ['xono] ('push'). The auxiliary εἰμί [eːmí] ('be'), originally part of
35175-494: The vowel system was gradually reduced to five phonemes without any differentiation in vowel length, a process also well begun during the Hellenistic period. Furthermore, Ancient Greek diphthongs became monophthongs . The Suda , an encyclopedia from the late 10th century, gives some indication of the vowel inventory. Following the antistoichic system, it lists terms alphabetically but arranges similarly pronounced letters side by side. In this way, for indicating homophony , αι
35376-532: The way history was written in Byzantium, which was often under the patronage of their competitors, the court, and land aristocracy. The fact that they were eventually surpassed by their Italian rivals is attributable to the privileges sought and acquired by the Crusader States within the Levant and the dominant maritime violence of the Italians. Unlike in Western Europe where priests were clearly demarcated from
35577-467: The west. The result was a weakening of the Byzantine defenses in the region, which, when combined with insufficient resources and incompetent leadership, led to the complete loss of all the empire's Asian territory to the Turks by 1338. The disintegration of the Seljuk Turks led to the rise of the Ottoman Turks . Their first important leader was Osman I Bey, who attracted Ghazi warriors and carved out
35778-436: The whole of their body except their hands. While women among the poor sometimes wore sleeveless tunics , most women were obliged to cover even their hair with the long maphorion ( μαφόριον ) veil. Women of means, however, spared no expense in adorning their clothes with exquisite jewelry and fine silk fabrics. Divorces were hard to obtain even though there were laws permitting them. Husbands would often beat their wives, though
35979-495: The works of Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (mid-10th century). These are influenced by the vernacular language of their time in choice of words and idiom , but largely follow the models of written Koine in their morphology and syntax . The spoken form of Greek was called γλῶσσα δημώδης ( glōssa dēmōdēs 'vernacular language'), ἁπλοελληνική ( haploellēnikē 'basic Greek'), καθωμιλημένη ( kathōmilēmenē 'spoken') or Ῥωμαιϊκή ( Rhōmaiïkē 'Roman language'). Before
36180-479: The written Koine of the Bible and early Christian literature, to a highly artificial learned style, employed by authors with higher literary ambitions and closely imitating the model of classical Attic, in continuation of the movement of Atticism in late antiquity. At the same time, the spoken vernacular language developed on the basis of earlier spoken Koine, and reached a stage that in many ways resembles present-day Modern Greek in terms of grammar and phonology by
36381-476: The year 1030, Michael the Grammarian could still make fun of the bishop of Philomelion for confusing ι for υ . In the 10th century, Georgian transliterations begin using the letter representing /u/ ( უ ) for υ/οι , in line with the alternative development in certain dialects like Tsakonian , Megaran and South Italian Greek where /y/ reverted to /u/ . This phenomenon perhaps indirectly indicates that
36582-399: Was a profoundly literate one. Based on information from an extensive array of Byzantine documents from different periods (i.e. homilies, Ecloga , etc.), Robert Browning concluded that, while books were luxury items and functional literacy (reading and writing) was widespread, but largely confined to cities and monasteries, access to elementary education was provided in most cities for much of
36783-401: Was after the battle of Manzikert (to flee the brutal Turkic raids). After severe persecutions of the Armenian and Syrian Monophysite non-Calcedonian communities, several Armenian royal families, which included Adom and Abucahl of Vaspuracan and Gagik of Ani, used the opportunity provided by the invasion of the Seljuk Turks to seek vengeance upon the local Greek Orthodox population. This included
36984-557: Was also used by the Byzantines' later Ottoman rivals, and its Turkish equivalent Rûm , "Roman", continues to be used officially by the government of Turkey to denote the Greek Orthodox natives ( Rumlar ) of Istanbul , as well as the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople ( Turkish : Rum Ortodoks Patrikhanesi , "Roman Orthodox Patriarchate"). Among Slavic populations of southeast Europe, such as Bulgarians and Serbs
37185-585: Was at most 15–20% based primarily on the mention of illiterate Byzantine tourmarchai in the Tactica of Emperor Leo VI the Wise (r. 886–912). In Byzantium, the elementary school teacher occupied a low social position and taught mainly from simple fairy tale books ( Aesop's Fables were often used). However, the grammarian and rhetorician , teachers responsible for the following two phases of education, were more respected. These used classical Greek texts like Homer's Iliad or Odyssey and much of their time
37386-485: Was being ravaged by the Seljuks, Byzantine rulers showed little interest in what was happening along its eastern borders. The indifferent and “squanderous” lifestyle of Empress Zoe Porphyrogenita was the beginning of the "utter decline in our national affairs and the cause of our subsequent humiliation,” says Michael Psellus . Her successors were not much better. Alfred Friendly reports that "Neither Constantine IX nor his advisers gave any evidence that they appreciated at
37587-506: Was borrowed from the Latin -arium , became 'fish' ( ὀψάριον [oˈpsarion] ), which after apheresis, synizesis and the loss of final ν [n] became the new Greek ψάρι [ˈpsari] and eliminated the Old Greek ἰχθύς [ikʰtʰýs] , which became an acrostic for Jesus Christ and a symbol for Christianity. Especially at the beginning of the Byzantine Empire , Medieval Greek borrowed numerous words from Latin , among them mainly titles and other terms of
37788-409: Was developed in the 17th century by a printer from the Antwerp printing dynasty, Wetstein, eventually became the norm in modern Greek printing. Decline of the Byzantine Empire In the 11th century the empire experienced a major catastrophe in which most of its distant territories in Anatolia were lost to the Seljuks following the Battle of Manzikert and ensuing civil war. At the same time,
37989-456: Was dropped ( θαῦμα ['θavma] → θάμα ['θama] ). Before [s] , it occasionally turned to [p] ( ἀνάπαυση [a'napafsi] → ἀνάπαψη [a'napapsi] ). Words with initial vowels were often affected by apheresis : ἡ ἡμέρα [i i'mera] → ἡ μέρα [i 'mera] ('the day'), ἐρωτῶ [ero'to] → ρωτῶ [ro'to] ('(I) ask'). A regular phenomenon in most dialects
38190-540: Was followed by a period of secure dynastic rule by the Komnenos dynasty, under Alexios I (1081–1118), John II Komnenos (1118–43) and Manuel I Komnenos (1143–1180). Cumulatively, these three emperors were able to partially restore the empire's fortunes , but they never were able to fully undo the damage caused by the instability at the end of the 11th century, nor return the empire's frontiers to those of 1071. The second period of civil war and collapse took place after Manuel's death in 1180. Manuel's son Alexios II Komnenos
38391-414: Was kept by both Ottoman Greeks and their Ottoman overlords throughout the years of the Ottoman rule, increasingly transforming into an ethnic identity, marked by Greek language and adherence to Orthodox Christianity , a precursor that shaped the modern Greek ethnic identity . The self-identity as Roman among the Greeks only began to lose ground by the time of the Greek Revolution , when multiple factors saw
38592-418: Was known as "Tsardom of the Greeks". Both rulers of the Despotate of Epirus and the Empire of Nicaea were also "Greek tsars ruling over Greek people". Equally, among Nordic people such as Icelanders , Varangians ( Vikings ) and other Scandinavian people, "Rhomaioi" were called "Grikkr" (Greeks). There are various runic inscriptions left in Norway, Sweden and even in Athens by travellers and members of
38793-450: Was left isolated as the Islamic empire gained a foothold in the Balkans under the leadership of Orhan Gazi and his son Murad I . They rapidly conquered the Byzantine heartland over the course of the 14th century leading to the Fall of Trebizond and the Fall of Constantinople by the army of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror in the 15th century. While internal struggles continued between the Ottomans and other Turkish rulers in Anatolia, with
38994-400: Was limited to literacy and the Bible ; a famous exception is the princess Anna Komnene (1083–1153), whose Alexiad displays a great depth of erudition, and the renowned 9th century Byzantine poet and composer Kassiani . The majority of a young girl's daily life would be spent in household and agrarian chores, preparing herself for marriage. For most girls, childhood came to an end with
39195-405: Was lost to the Seljuk Turks. In 1203, the imprisoned former emperor Alexios IV Angelos escaped jail and fled to the west, where he promised the leaders of the Fourth Crusade generous payment if they would help him regain the throne. These promises later proved to be impossible to keep; in the event, the dynastic squabbling between the weak and ineffectual members of the Angelid dynasty brought about
39396-418: Was overthrown in 1183 by Andronikos I Komnenos , whose reign of terror destabilised the empire internally and led to his overthrow and death in Constantinople in 1185. The Angelos dynasty which ruled Byzantium from 1185 to 1204 has been considered one of the most unsuccessful and ineffectual administrations in the empire's history. During this period, Bulgaria and Serbia broke away from the empire, further land
39597-401: Was performed, However with Pope Gregory's death (January 1276), the hoped-for gains did not materialize. While the union was opposed at all levels of society, it was especially opposed by the greater populace, led by the monks and the adherents of the deposed Patriarch Arsenios, known as the Arsenites. One of the chief anti-unionist leaders was Michael's sister Eulogia (aka Irene), who fled to
39798-451: Was returned to Greek rule under the Palaiologoi in 1261, the Empire exerted much of its efforts into defeating its Latin neighbours, contributing to the eventual failure of the Crusades by 1291. No emperor after the Komnenian period was in a position to expel the Turks from Asia Minor, while the preoccupation of the Nicaean emperors with the attempt to recover Constantinople meant that resources were diverted away from Asia Minor and towards
39999-419: Was taken with detailed word-for-word explication. Books were rare and very expensive and likely only possessed by teachers who dictated passages to students. Women have tended to be overlooked in Byzantine studies as Byzantine society left few records about them. Women were disadvantaged in some aspects of their legal status and in their access to education, and limited in their freedom of movement. The life of
40200-474: Was the predominant language amongst the populace and also replaced Latin in administration. At first, the Byzantine Empire had a multi-ethnic character, but following the loss of the non-Greek speaking provinces with the 7th century Muslim conquests it came to be dominated by the Byzantine Greeks, who inhabited the heartland of the later empire: modern Cyprus , Greece , Turkey , and Sicily , and portions of southern Bulgaria , Crimea , and Albania . Over time,
40401-496: Was to persist until well into the 20th century, when the Greek language question was decided in favor of the vernacular in 1976. The persistence until the Middle Ages of a single Greek speaking state, the Byzantine Empire, meant that, unlike Vulgar Latin , Greek did not split into separate languages. However, with the fracturing of the Byzantine state after the turn of the first millennium, newly isolated dialects such as Mariupol Greek , spoken in Crimea, Pontic Greek , spoken along
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