THE WORLD ATLAS

Empire · 395–1453 · Europe

Byzantine Empire

Also known as Eastern Roman Empire

The Byzantine Empire is the name historians give to the eastern half of the Roman Empire, which survived for nearly a thousand years after the West fell; its people always called themselves Romans. Ruled from Constantinople by emperors seen as God's representatives on earth, it was Greek-speaking and Orthodox Christian.

Justinian I reconquered Italy and North Africa and codified Roman law, but in the 7th century the Arab conquests took Syria, Egypt and Africa. The empire recovered under the Macedonian dynasty, reaching a new height under Basil II, but after defeat by the Seljuks at Manzikert in 1071 it lost most of Anatolia. Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1204. Restored in 1261 but much reduced, it fell to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II in 1453.

Follow its story on the map

Mosaic of Emperor Justinian I and his court in San Vitale, Ravenna, consecrated in 547
Mosaic of Emperor Justinian I and his court in San Vitale, Ravenna, consecrated in 547 Steven Zucker · CC BY 2.0
Years
395–1453
Capital
Constantinople
Greatest extent
555, about 2.70 million km²
Region
Europe

Under Justinian I, after reconquering Italy, North Africa and southern Spain; c. 2.7M km² c. 555 (Turchin, Adams & Hall 2006); Taagepera (1979) gives c. 2.8M km² c. 450

Legacy

Byzantium preserved Greek and Roman learning, shaped Orthodox Christianity and the Slavic world, and built masterpieces such as Hagia Sophia.

Timeline of Byzantine Empire

  1. Theodosius I dies; Arcadius rules the East from Constantinople

    For decades the Roman Empire had often been ruled by more than one emperor, each with his own court. Theodosius I was the last man to rule both halves, and when he died at Milan on 17 January 395, his two young sons, already co-emperors, divided the empire between them. Arcadius took the East, ruling from Constantinople, and Honorius the West. The split was meant to be administrative, but it proved permanent. This is where the map begins: the Eastern Roman Empire, later called Byzantine, covering the Balkans, Anatolia, Syria and Egypt.

  2. Last western emperor deposed; Constantinople is the sole Roman capital

    By the 470s the Western Roman Empire had shrunk to little more than Italy, run by Germanic generals who set up puppet emperors. In 476 the barbarian commander Odoacer deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus at Ravenna and did not name a successor. Instead, the Senate sent the imperial regalia to the eastern emperor Zeno, and Odoacer ruled Italy as king while nominally accepting Zeno as his superior. From now on the emperor in Constantinople was the only Roman emperor, and the East carried on Rome's traditions alone.

  3. Belisarius defeats the Vandals and retakes North Africa (533–534)

    Justinian I, emperor from 527, wanted to win back the western provinces lost to Germanic kingdoms. In 530 the pro-Roman Vandal king Hilderic was overthrown by his cousin Gelimer, giving Justinian his excuse. A fleet under the general Belisarius landed in North Africa in September 533, routed the Vandals at Ad Decimum, near Carthage, and took the city. After a second victory at Tricamarum in December, Gelimer surrendered in spring 534. Africa, roughly modern Tunisia and coastal Algeria and Libya, was restored to the empire, the first big step in Justinian's reconquest.

  4. Gothic War ends; Italy is back under Roman rule

    Next Justinian turned to Italy, ruled by the Ostrogoths. Belisarius invaded in 535 and took the Gothic capital Ravenna in 540, but a Gothic revival under King Totila dragged the war on for years. The eunuch general Narses finally crushed the Goths in the early 550s and drove back a Frankish invasion in 554, the year Justinian issued a decree setting up Italy's new government. Italy was back under Roman rule, but the long war had left it devastated. Only 14 years later the Lombards invaded and seized much of the peninsula.

  5. Justinian I dies with the empire at its greatest extent

    Justinian died on 14 November 565, childless, after a 38-year reign. Besides Africa and Italy, his forces had also taken a strip of southern Spain, so the empire now ringed much of the Mediterranean again. He left lasting monuments too: the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and the Corpus Juris Civilis, a code of Roman law that is still the basis of civil law in many countries. But the wars, and the plague of the 540s, which Justinian himself caught and survived, had drained the treasury. The map shows the empire at its widest here, and it soon began to shrink.

  6. Heraclius defeats the Persians at Nineveh

    After the Persian king Khosrow II went to war against the empire in 602, over twenty years the Persians took Syria, Jerusalem and, for the first time, Egypt. The emperor Heraclius fought back from 622, and in late 627 he invaded Mesopotamia in a risky winter campaign. On 12 December 627 near the ruins of Nineveh he defeated a Persian army whose general, Rhahzadh, was killed. The Persians overthrew Khosrow, and the peace that followed returned all the lost provinces and the True Cross. Both empires, though, were now exhausted.

  7. Arab victory at the Yarmuk ends Byzantine rule in Syria

    Only a few years after defeating Persia, the empire faced a new enemy: Arab armies united under Islam. They invaded Syria in the 630s, and in May 636 Heraclius sent a huge army to drive them out. The Arabs pulled back and gathered on the plains by the Yarmuk river, near today's borders of Syria, Jordan and Israel. In six days of fighting in August 636 they defeated the larger Byzantine force, in what became the greatest victory of their commander Khalid ibn al-Walid. Byzantine rule in Syria effectively ended, and the empire's frontier fell back to the Taurus Mountains of Anatolia.

  8. Alexandria surrenders to the Arabs; Egypt lost

    In December 639 the Arab general Amr ibn al-As invaded Egypt, the empire's richest province and a main source of grain for Constantinople. He beat a Byzantine army at Heliopolis in 640 and took the Babylon Fortress, near modern Cairo, in 641. Alexandria, Egypt's capital, agreed to surrender by a treaty of November 641, and Arab troops entered the city the following September. The loss of Egypt cut off a huge share of the empire's revenue. The empire on the map was now reduced mainly to Anatolia, the Balkan coasts, parts of Italy and North Africa.

  9. Leo III repels the Arab siege of Constantinople (717–718)

    In 716 a huge Umayyad army under Maslama, the caliph's brother, invaded Anatolia, hoping to exploit a Byzantine civil war. The general Leo III seized the throne in 717, just before the Arabs began a land and sea blockade of Constantinople behind its massive Theodosian Walls. The Byzantine navy used Greek fire, an incendiary liquid, to destroy much of the Arab fleet, so the city could be supplied by sea. A harsh winter, famine and disease, plus Bulgar attacks, wrecked the besiegers, who withdrew on 15 August 718. The capital, and Anatolia behind it, survived.

  10. Basil II completes the conquest of Bulgaria

    Under its Tsar Samuel, the Bulgarian state had grown to stretch from the Adriatic to the Black Sea, and Emperor Basil II spent decades at war with it. On 29 July 1014 he trapped the Bulgarian army at Kleidion. According to chroniclers he blinded some 15,000 prisoners, leaving one man in every hundred with one eye to lead the rest home, and Samuel died of a stroke soon after. Bulgaria fought on until 1018, when it submitted. The empire's border reached the Danube again, and Basil earned the name 'Bulgar-Slayer'.

  11. Seljuks capture Romanos IV at Manzikert; Normans take Bari

    In 1071 the empire suffered two blows at opposite ends. In the west, Norman adventurers captured Bari, the last Byzantine stronghold in southern Italy, ending centuries of rule there. In the east, Emperor Romanos IV Diogenes marched against the Seljuk Turks and met Sultan Alp Arslan near Manzikert, in eastern Anatolia, on 26 August 1071. Many of his troops fled, and Romanos became the only Byzantine emperor captured by a Muslim commander. Civil war followed his release, and Turkish groups poured into Anatolia, the empire's heartland.

  12. Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople; empire splits into rump states

    The Fourth Crusade set out in 1202 to attack Egypt but could not pay Venice for its fleet. In exchange, the crusaders first sacked the Christian city of Zara, then sailed to Constantinople to put a Byzantine claimant, Alexios IV, on the throne in return for huge payments he could not make. In April 1204 they stormed the city and plundered its enormous wealth. A Latin Empire was set up there, while Greek rulers held on in three rump states centred on Nicaea, Epirus and Trebizond. On the map the empire breaks apart, with the exiled court at Nicaea standing in for it.

  13. Michael VIII of Nicaea recaptures Constantinople

    The Empire of Nicaea, in western Anatolia, became the strongest Greek successor state, and its ruler Michael VIII Palaiologos aimed to retake Constantinople. In July 1261 the general Alexios Strategopoulos was sent near the city with about 800 soldiers, mostly Cumans. On the night of 24–25 July they slipped in through the walls, and the Latin emperor Baldwin II fled by ship. Michael entered the city on 15 August and was crowned in Hagia Sophia. The Byzantine Empire was restored, but it was poorer and smaller than before 1204.

  14. Ottomans take Adrianople as they push into the Balkans

    The Ottoman Turks, from north-west Anatolia, crossed into Europe after seizing Gallipoli in 1354, helped by Byzantine civil wars. Sultan Murad I's forces then conquered much of Thrace, and Adrianople (Edirne), the main city between Constantinople and the Balkans, fell in the 1360s. The date is disputed (some historians say 1361 or 1362, others about 1369), and the city became the Ottoman capital. Constantinople was now surrounded by Ottoman land, and by the 1370s the shrunken empire had become an Ottoman vassal.

  15. Mehmed II takes Constantinople; Constantine XI dies

    By 1453 the empire was little more than Constantinople and a few lands in Greece. The young Sultan Mehmed II besieged the city from 6 April with an army far larger than its defenders. Huge cannons battered the ancient walls, and on 29 May 1453, after a 53-day siege, the Ottomans broke in, and the last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died in the fighting. Mehmed made Constantinople his new capital in place of Adrianople. The Byzantine Empire, the last direct heir of Rome, disappears from the map.

Periods and reigns

Rulers

Realms on the map

Wars

Chapters

Sources