TEXT 3

Byzantium’s Strength

The most obvious strength of the eastern empire was Constantinople’s superb site. Its brilliantly fortified peninsula, coupled with a control of the sea that the Byzantines retained for centuries, made it difficult to be attacked till the invention of the gunpowder. Any enemy coming from the Danube would find his way blocked by its double walls. (The wall which protected the city was built during the reign of Theodosius, 408-450 AD, and was the best military engineering structure of its time. It had three separate battlements and consisted of land and sea walls.) Persian and Arab invaders could not reach European provinces. Its doubled walls protected not only palaces, libraries and churches, but also warehouses and workshops, Constantinople became a great manufacturing and trading city, unlike Rome.

In the early 6^th century, the emperor Anastasius I (491-518 AD), a financial genius, reorganized the army and left a full treasury. Under the rule of Justinian I (527-565 AD) a splendid Byzantine culture emerged, embodied in the cathedral of Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), with its radical new design and gold-crusted two-dimensional art. East Roman power reached westward, reconquering Africa and Italy. By shielding Europe from Arab attack for so long, Byzantium helped the survival of western Christian civilization as well as its own.

All the chronicles refer to the capital of the Empire as a magnificent city, synonymous with imperial power, immensely rich and with a high cultural level of its inhabitants, who were educated in the University while the West was dominated by ignorance.

Thus Constantinople became the centre of a vital and flourishing culture we call Byzantine that lasted until the fifteenth century. The civilization of the Byzantine Empire was a unique combination of classical culture, the Christian religion, Roman law, and Eastern artistic influences. The idea of the inhabitants of the city about the eternal Empire was something like this: Constantinople is an unconquerable city, so the Empire is also unconquerable. While Constantinople is standing, the Empire will exist in spite of all the vicissitudes that may befall it.

Answer the questions:

1. What factors helped Constantinople to become even more prosperous than Rome?

2. How do chronicles describe Constantinople?

3. What are four main components of the Byzantine and prosperity?

4. Comment on “Constantinople is an unconquerable city, so the Empire is also unconquerable.”

5. * What year did Constantinople fall to Turkish invaders?

6. * What is the contemporary name of this city?

7. * How did people of Kiev Rus call this city?

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