Conribution of Byzantine Empire

The Byzantine Empire (or Byzantium) was the predominantly Greek-speaking eastern Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, centered around its capital of Constantinople, and ruled by emperors in direct succession to theAncient Roman emperor. It was called the Roman Empire and also Romania by its inhabitants and neighbours. As the distinction between “Roman Empire” and “Byzantine Empire” is largely a modern convention, it is not possible to assign a date of separation, but an important point is Emperor Constantine I’s transfer in 324 of the capital from Nicomedia (in Anatolia) to Byzantium on theBosphorus, which became Constantinople (alternatively “New Rome“). During its existence of more than a thousand years, the Empire remained one of the most powerful economic, cultural, and military forces in Europe, despite setbacks and territorial losses, especially during the Roman–Persian and Byzantine–Arab Wars. The Empire recovered during the Macedonian dynasty, rising again to become a pre-eminent power in the Eastern Mediterranean by the late tenth century, rivaling the Fatimid Caliphate. After 1071, however, much of Asia Minor, the Empire’s heartland, was lost to the Seljuk Turks. The Komnenian restoration regained some ground and briefly re-established dominance in the twelfth century, but following the death of Andronikos I Komnenos and the end of the Komnenos dynasty in the late twelfth century the Empire declined again. The Empire received a mortal blow in 1204 by the Fourth Crusade, when it was dissolved and divided into competing Byzantine Greek and Latin realms. Despite the eventual recovery of Constantinople and re-establishment of the Empire in 1261, under the Palaiologan emperors, successive civil wars in the fourteenth century further sapped the Empire’s strength. Most of its remaining territory was lost in the Byzantine–Ottoman Wars, culminating in the Fall of Constantinople and its remaining territories to the Muslim Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. Nomenclature For more details on this topic, see Names of the Greeks. The designation of the Empire as “Byzantine” began in Western Europe in 1557, when German historian Hieronymus Wolf published his work Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ, a collection of Byzantine sources. “Byzantine” itself comes from “Byzantium” (a Greek city, founded by colonists from Megara in 667 BC), the name of the city of Constantinople before it became the capital of Constantine. This older name of the city would rarely be used from this point onward except in historical or poetic contexts. The publication in 1648 of the Byzantine du Louvre (Corpus Scriptorum Historiæ Byzantinæ), and in 1680 of Du Cange‘s Historia Byzantinafurther popularized the use of Byzantine among French authors, such asMontesquieu. The term then disappears until the nineteenth century when it came into general use in the Western world. Before this time, Greek had been used for the Empire and its descendants within the Ottoman Empire. The Empire was known to its inhabitants as the Roman Empire, the Empire of the Romans Imperium Romanum, Imperium Romanorum, , Basileia ton Rhomaion, Romanian, the Roman Republic(Latin: Res Publica Romana, Graikia, and also as Rhomais Although the empire had a multi-ethnic character during most of its history and preserved Greco-Roman traditions, it was usually known to most of its western and northern contemporaries as the Empire of the Greeks due to the increasing predominance of the Greek element.The use of the term Empire of the Greeks in the West to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire also implied a rejection of the empire’s claim to be the Roman Empire. The claims of the Eastern Roman Empire to Roman inheritance had been actively contested in the West at the time of the Roman Empress Irene of Athens, due to the coronation ofCharlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor in the year 800, by Pope Leo III, who, needing help against enemies in Rome, saw the throne of the Roman Empire as vacant . Whenever the Popes or the rulers of the West made use of the name Roman to refer to the eastern Roman Emperors, they preferred the term Imperator Romania instead of Imperator Romanorum, a title that Westerners maintained applied only to Charlemagne and his successors. By contrast, in the Persian, Islamic, and Slavic worlds, the Empire’s Roman identity was generally accepted. In the Islamic world it was known primarily as Rome. In modern historical atlases, the Empire is usually called the Eastern Roman Empire in maps depicting the empire during the period 395 to 610, after the new emperor Heraclius changed the official language from Latin to Greek in maps depicting the Empire after 610, the term Byzantine Empire usually appears.