Byzantine Legacy and Influence

When the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos Dragases, died defending the walls of Constantinople on 29 May 1453, few observers in Western Europe could have predicted that the fallen empire would, in the long run, prove more influential than its destroyers. Yet, in the centuries that followed, the Byzantine legacy emerged as one of the most powerful forces in modern history. The Eastern Orthodox Church preserved the Byzantine liturgical and theological tradition in a vast region from Greece to Russia. The legal tradition of Justinian became the foundation of civil law across continental Europe. The art and architecture of Constantinople, transmitted through refugee scholars, helped spark the Italian Renaissance. And the cultural inheritance of Byzantium, transmitted to the Balkans, Russia, and the Orthodox world, shaped the identity of more than a quarter of modern Christianity.

This pillar explores the long afterlife of the Byzantine Empire, in the West, in the East, in the Slavic North, and in the modern world. It traces the channels by which a thousand-year civilization continued to exert influence long after the empire itself had fallen.

The Byzantine Inheritance in the West

The Italian Renaissance and the Greek Scholars

The most celebrated chapter of the Byzantine legacy in the West is the role played by Byzantine scholars in the Italian Renaissance. Beginning in the late fourteenth century, Greek scholars from the crumbling Byzantine world came to Italy, first as envoys, then as refugees, and finally as teachers. The most famous of these was Manuel Chrysoloras, who was invited to Florence in 1397 to teach Greek. His students included Leonardo Bruni, the great humanist and chancellor of Florence, and many other leading figures of the early Renaissance.

By the middle of the fifteenth century, the great humanist Pope Nicholas V was organizing the translation of Greek texts into Latin on a massive scale. The papacy sent agents throughout the Greek-speaking world to acquire manuscripts. The Florentine Academy of Marsilio Ficino translated Plato and the Neoplatonists. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 accelerated this process, as refugee scholars like John Argyropoulos, Demetrius Chalcondyles, and Theodore Gaza settled in Italy and taught Greek to a generation of Italian humanists.

The new knowledge of Greek gave Western Europeans direct access to the works of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, the Greek tragedians, the orators, and the historians, many of which had been available only in Latin translations or in fragments. It also brought the visual arts of Byzantium to the attention of Italian painters, who studied Byzantine icons and mosaics, like those of the Chiesa d’Oro, and incorporated Byzantine conventions into their own work. The result was the Palaiologan-influenced style of Duccio, Cimabue, and the early Giotto, which became the foundation of the Italian Renaissance.

The Donation of Constantine

The most controversial chapter of the Byzantine legacy in the West was the so-called Donation of Constantine, a document supposedly issued by Emperor Constantine I in the fourth century, granting to the pope and his successors temporal authority over the western part of the Roman Empire, including Rome itself. The Donation was used by the medieval papacy to justify its claims to temporal power, and the Donation was cited for centuries by popes and their supporters.

The Donation was in fact a forgery, almost certainly produced in the papal chancery in the eighth century. The document was first denounced as a forgery by the humanist Lorenzo Valla in 1440, using philological and historical arguments that have become a model of modern historical criticism. The Donation is now generally accepted to be a forgery, but its impact on medieval politics was real, and it remains one of the most consequential forgeries in Western history.

The Byzantine Legacy in Italy

St. Mark’s Basilica and Venice

The most striking monument to Byzantine influence in the West is St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice, the cathedral of the Venetian patriarchate, originally built in the ninth century and rebuilt in its present form in the eleventh. The plan is a Greek cross, the domes are Byzantine, and the interior is covered with the most extensive program of Byzantine mosaic in the West, including cycles of the life of Christ, the life of St. Mark, and the history of the True Cross.

The basilica was the doge’s private chapel and a deliberate statement of Venice’s claim to be the heir of Byzantium. The famous four bronze horses of St. Mark’s, looted from Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, were displayed prominently on the façade as trophies of Venetian imperial ambition. The mosaics were largely executed by Byzantine artists or artists trained in the Byzantine tradition, and the iconographic program follows Byzantine models closely.

The basilica of San Marco was the architectural and artistic ancestor of Venetian Gothic and influenced the design of many churches in the Veneto region. It also served as the model for the great Byzantine revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which was to spread from St. Petersburg to the Balkans.

The Norman Legacy in Sicily

The Norman kings of Sicily, ruling in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, decorated their great churches in Palermo, Monreale, and Cefalù with massive programs of Byzantine-style mosaic, executed by artists from Constantinople. The Capella Palatina in Palermo is the most striking surviving example, a small church whose interior is entirely covered with gold-ground mosaics in the Byzantine manner, including a great Pantokrator in the central dome and a complete cycle of biblical narrative on the walls. The Palatine Chapel is one of the supreme monuments of medieval art and a direct expression of the cultural convergence between Norman Sicily and the Byzantine East.

The Byzantine Legacy in Greece and the Balkans

The Birth of Modern Greece

The Byzantine legacy in modern Greece is the most direct of any successor culture. When the Greek War of Independence began in 1821, the insurgents claimed to be restoring the Byzantine Empire, and the new state adopted the double-headed eagle of the Palaiologan dynasty as its national emblem. The first Greek king, Otto, was Bavarian, but the symbolic continuity with Byzantium was a central element of Greek national identity from the start.

The Greek Orthodox Church, which had continued as an institution under Ottoman rule, became the official church of the Greek state and remains the dominant religious institution in modern Greece. The Greek language, often called katharevousa, drew on classical and Byzantine Greek as a model of literary style. The visual arts of modern Greece, from the great painter Nikolaos Gyzis to the work of contemporary iconographers, draw on the Byzantine tradition.

The Byzantine past of Greece remains visible in the landscape. The medieval churches of Thessaloniki, the monasteries of Meteora, the castles of Mystras, and the great monastery of the Holy Mountain all testify to the Byzantine inheritance. The Greek state maintains the Byzantine heritage as a central element of its national identity, and the Byzantine legacy is invoked in political and cultural discourse on a daily basis.

Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania

The Byzantine legacy in the Balkans is more complex but no less profound. The first Bulgarian Empire, the second Bulgarian Empire, the Serbian Empire, and the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia all received their religion, alphabet, art, and political vocabulary from Byzantium. The Bulgarian khan Boris, the Bulgarian tsar Simeon, the Serbian king Stefan Dušan, and the Romanian voivode Vlad the Impaler all claimed imperial titles derived from the Byzantine model.

The Orthodox Churches of these nations, even where their relationship to Constantinople was sometimes strained, retained the Byzantine liturgical and theological tradition. The great monasteries of Rila, Bachkovo, Hilandar, Studenica, Dečani, and Putna are repositories of Byzantine art, architecture, and learning. The national epics of the Balkans, including the Serbian cycle of Kosovo, the Bulgarian cycle of Krali Marko, and the Romanian chronicle of Radu the Fair, all draw on Byzantine sources.

The fall of Byzantium in 1453 had a profound impact on the Balkans. The successor states, which had looked to Constantinople as their cultural and political center, were left to face the Ottoman expansion on their own. Within a century, the Ottomans had conquered Serbia, Bulgaria, and Wallachia, and the Byzantine legacy in the Balkans was preserved primarily through the Orthodox Church and the monasteries, which became centers of national resistance.

The Byzantine Legacy in Russia

The Third Rome

The most striking political consequence of the fall of Constantinople was the rise of Moscow as the so-called Third Rome. After the marriage of Ivan III to Sophia Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, the Grand Duchy of Moscow began to claim the political and religious inheritance of Byzantium. The Russian Orthodox Church, freed from the authority of the now-Islamized patriarch of Constantinople, was made an autocephalous church in 1589, and the Russian tsars adopted the title of Tsar, derived from Caesar.

The Russian claim to be the heir of Byzantium was articulated most famously by the monk Philotheus of Pskov in the early sixteenth century: “Two Romes have fallen, the third stands, and there shall be no fourth.” The Russian Orthodox Church became the defender of Orthodoxy, especially against the Catholic and Protestant West, and the Russian Empire styled itself as a Christian empire in the Byzantine tradition.

The Byzantine legacy in Russia is visible in every aspect of Russian culture. The Russian alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, was developed in the ninth century by followers of Saints Cyril and Methodius, who were themselves sent on mission by the patriarch of Constantinople. The Russian Orthodox liturgy is Byzantine, in Church Slavonic rather than Greek, but otherwise identical in form. Russian icon painting, beginning with Theophanes the Greek and continuing with Andrei Rublev, Dionysius, and their successors, was a direct continuation of the Palaiologan tradition.

Russian architecture was similarly influenced. The first great stone churches of Kievan Rus, including the Hagia Sophia of Kiev and the Cathedral of St. Sophia in Novgorod, were built by Byzantine architects in the Byzantine manner. The white-stone churches of Vladimir and Suzdal, the wooden churches of northern Russia, and the great baroque and neoclassical cathedrals of St. Petersburg all draw on Byzantine prototypes.

Byzantine Law and the Western Legal Tradition

The Byzantine legal tradition was one of the most durable legacies of the empire. The corpus of civil law compiled under Justinian I, comprising the Codex, the Digest, the Institutes, and the Novellae, was the most sophisticated legal code in the medieval world. It preserved the legal thinking of the Roman jurists and synthesized it with Christian and Hellenistic elements.

After the fall of the empire, the Justinian Code survived in manuscript, especially in the West, where it was rediscovered in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The school of law at Bologna, founded by Irnerius in the late eleventh century, used the rediscovered Digest as its central text, and the tradition of Roman law became the foundation of civil law in continental Europe. The Napoleonic Code, the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, the Swiss Civil Code, and the modern legal systems of Latin America all derive ultimately from the Justinianic tradition.

The Byzantine legal tradition also survived in the Orthodox world, especially in Russia, where the Tsarist legal code was influenced by Byzantine precedent. The modern Greek Civil Code, promulgated in 1946, is essentially a version of the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, which itself derives from the Justinianic tradition. In this sense, Justinian’s legal influence extends into the legal systems of more than a hundred modern states.

The Last Byzantine Stronghold: Trebizond

The fall of Trebizond in 1461 is the final chapter of Byzantine history. The Empire of Trebizond, founded in 1204 by the Comnenian princes who escaped the sack of Constantinople, survived in the remote Pontic Alps of northeastern Anatolia for more than two and a half centuries, a constant reminder that the Byzantine story did not end in 1453.

The Empire of Trebizond, ruled by a branch of the Comnenian dynasty, was a small but prosperous state, benefiting from its position on the Black Sea trade routes. The Trebizond emperors cultivated diplomatic and commercial relations with Genoa, Venice, the Mamluks, Persia, and the Ottoman sultanate. The court preserved the imperial ceremonial of Byzantium, and the churches of Trebizond, decorated with magnificent frescoes that survive to this day, represent the last great flowering of Byzantine art.

The end came in 1461, when the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II demanded that the emperor David submit. David refused, and the Ottomans besieged the city. After a brief resistance, Trebizond surrendered, and the last Greek state on the Black Sea was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. The fall of Trebizond marked the end of Greek political independence for almost four hundred years, until the Greek War of Independence in 1821.

The Long Memory of Byzantium

The Byzantine legacy, in sum, is one of the most powerful cultural inheritances in the modern world. The Eastern Orthodox Church, with some 220 million members worldwide, preserves the Byzantine liturgical and theological tradition. The legal tradition of Justinian forms the basis of civil law in dozens of modern states. The art of Byzantium, in mosaic, fresco, and icon, continues to be venerated, copied, and studied. The Greek and Russian languages carry the vocabulary of the Byzantine world. The political theology of the Christian empire has reemerged in various forms in modern times. The Byzantine sense of imperial mission has been invoked by Russian and Greek nationalists, by ecumenical Orthodox theologians, and even by modern theorists of civilizational dialogue.

The study of the Byzantine legacy is, in this sense, a study of the foundations of the modern world. To understand Byzantium is to understand why the Orthodox world looks and acts as it does, why the Russian Empire styled itself as the Third Rome, why the Italian Renaissance happened when and where it did, and why modern civil law is structured the way it is. The Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, but its legacy continues to shape the world in which we live.

Related Articles

• Byzantine Influence on the Renaissance — the Greek scholars and the rebirth of classical learning
• Byzantine Legacy in Modern Greece — the national identity of modern Greece
• Byzantine Legacy in Russia and Eastern Europe — the Third Rome
• Byzantine Law and its Modern Influence — the Justinianic tradition
• The Cyrillic Alphabet and Byzantine Missionaries — Saints Cyril and Methodius
• Byzantine Architecture in Venice: St. Mark’s Basilica — the cathedral of the Adriatic
• The Donation of Constantine — the great forgery
• Byzantine Law: The Justinian Code — the foundation of civil law
• The Fall of Trebizond: Last Byzantine Stronghold — the end of Greek independence

The Modern Study of Byzantium

The Development of Byzantine Studies

The modern study of Byzantium is a relatively young discipline, which has developed in the last two centuries. The field was established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when scholars such as Karl Krumbacher, the German Byzantinist who wrote the standard history of Byzantine literature, and George Ostrogorsky, the Russian-German historian who wrote the standard one-volume history of the Byzantine state, laid the foundations of the modern discipline.

The field has grown rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, with the establishment of a number of important research centers, including the Center for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., the Institute for Byzantine Studies in Vienna, and the Society for Byzantine Studies in Greece. The field has also been enriched by the contributions of scholars from many countries, including Greece, Russia, the United States, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.

Major Modern Scholars

The most important of the modern scholars of Byzantium include George Ostrogorsky, the author of the standard one-volume history of the Byzantine state; Alexander Vasiliev, the author of another standard one-volume history; John Julius Norwich, the British popular historian whose three-volume A Short History of Byzantium is the most accessible introduction to the subject; Steven Runciman, the British historian of the Crusades whose three-volume History of the Crusades is a major work; and the many specialists in the various periods and aspects of Byzantine history, whose monographs have transformed the field in the last generation.

The contributions of the modern scholars of Byzantium have been immense. They have produced critical editions of the Byzantine texts, they have studied the Byzantine art and architecture, they have analyzed the Byzantine law and administration, and they have explored the Byzantine theology and liturgy. The result is a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the Byzantine civilization, which has replaced the older, often dismissive views of the Byzantines.

The Continuing Importance of Byzantium

A Living Tradition

The Byzantine legacy is not merely a matter of historical interest, but a living tradition that continues to shape the Orthodox world today. The Eastern Orthodox Churches, with some 220 million members worldwide, preserve the Byzantine liturgical and theological tradition. The legal tradition of Justinian forms the basis of civil law in dozens of modern states. The art of Byzantium, in mosaic, fresco, and icon, continues to be venerated, copied, and studied. The Greek and Russian languages carry the vocabulary of the Byzantine world. The political theology of the Christian empire has reemerged in various forms in modern times.

The Byzantine sense of imperial mission has been invoked by Russian and Greek nationalists, by ecumenical Orthodox theologians, and even by modern theorists of civilizational dialogue. The study of the Byzantine legacy is, in this sense, a study of the foundations of the modern world.

The Future of the Byzantine Legacy

The Byzantine legacy is likely to remain an important force in the modern world for many years to come. The Orthodox Christian world, with its more than 200 million members, is one of the largest religious communities in the world, and it is the principal heir of the Byzantine tradition. The Russian Orthodox Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, and the other Orthodox churches are major institutions in their respective countries, and they have played an important role in the post-Soviet world.

The civil law tradition, which derives ultimately from the Justinian Code, is the basis of the legal systems of dozens of countries, and it is one of the most important elements of the modern legal world. The art of Byzantium, in mosaic, fresco, and icon, continues to be studied, copied, and venerated, and it has been the inspiration for the modern iconographic tradition. The political theology of the Christian empire, while not without its problems, has been an important element of the modern political thought, and it has been invoked by both the religious and the secular thinkers.

The study of the Byzantine legacy is, in this sense, the study of one of the most powerful and most enduring elements of the modern world, and it is essential for understanding the foundations of the contemporary world. The Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, but its legacy continues to shape the world in which we live.