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ii - Periodisation and the Contents of This Book

from General Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2010

Jonathan Shepard
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

when did byzantium end – or begin?

Byzantium is an elusive phenomenon because so many of its constituent parts altered in place and over time. The overarching façade of the imperial order remained, with certain fixed points: religious doctrine, use of the Greek language, and the City of Constantinople itself. But many other elements were mutable – from court fashions, administrative methods and commercial undertakings, to forms of warfare or territorial possessions. Byzantium’s distinctive qualities lie in this interplay between the fixed and the changeable, the expendable and the non-negotiable, ensuring its endurance across a millennium or so, longevity which only the Chinese and Japanese empires can unequivocally be said to have surpassed.

However, even the chronological limits of the Byzantine empire are contentious. In a material sense, the Constantinopolitan-based emperor could be regarded as powerless, politically dead by the time Sultan Mehmed II’s technicians closed the Bosporus and trained their guns on the City in 1453. Yet alternative or affiliated imperial regimes were still functioning, and to all appearances the empire of Trebizond and the despotate of the Morea could have carried on indefinitely, even flourished, had the Ottomans not determined to put paid to them, too, while reducing other robust polities in the Balkans to tributary status (see below, pp. 831–2, 860–1). And the idea of the central place of the empire and the City in God’s scheme of things persisted among the orthodox well after 1453.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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