CHRISTIAN CULTURE IN BYZANTIUM

Themes "Christian society" art and culture: otherworldly values

Background

• Late Roman Empire: division and conversion
  • Diocletian r. 284-305
    
    
  • Constantine r. 317-337
    
    
  • Theodosius r. 379-395
    
    
  • East and West*: Constantinople and Rome
    
    
  • the "three heirs of Rome *:"
    
    
• Byzantine Empire 4th-7th cen. C.E.
  • Constantinople
  • Justinian and Theodora 527-565
  • Iconoclastic controversy 726-843



• Macedonian dynasty 867-1056
  
  
• decline, retrenchment, cultural flowering 12th-15th centuries
  
  

Byzantine Society

• synthesis:
• economic and social:
  • rural: Farmer's Law
  • urban: Thessalonica fair
  • The Blues and the Greens: Procopius; Theopanes; in Egypt
    
    
• political: emperors and patriarchs
  • Justinian and Theodora
    • Procopius: The Reconquest of Africa, 534; On the Nika Revolt, 539; Secret History on Justinian
      
      
    • Corpus Juris Civilis
      
      
    • Hagia Sophia; Paul the Silentiary; Procopius
    
    
    
  • caesaropapism: Theodore of Balsamon late 12th cen.; Patriarch Antony 1395
  
  
  
• Byzantine commonwealth
  
  
  • 988 conversion of Rus
  
  
  
  • Slavs
    
    
• cross cultural interactions
  • Persian conquest of Jerusalem, 614: Antiochus Strategos
  • Liutprand of Cremona (Ottonian German) visits Constantinople
  • an Arab ambassador in Constantinople
  • Muslim expansion
  • 4th Crusade, 1204
  • Ottoman Turks, 1453

Worldviews: Eastern Orthodoxy

• otherwordliness: monasticism and mysticism
  • Daniel the Stylite
  • Hesychasm
  • Mary the Younger
  • poetry: Theodore of Studium
  
  
  
• religion and the arts
  • architecture: Hagia Sophia; mosaics
    
    
  • music
    
    
  • icons
    
    
• the iconoclastic controversy
  • Emperor Leo III, c. 726
  • Council of Constantinople, 754
  • John of Damascus

Conclusions

• politics, religion, and cultural identity
  
  
• comparisons: