HIST 327
The Byzantine Empire, 330-1453 CE Fall 2024
Division II

To study the Byzantine empire is to expand and challenge our understanding of Europe’s historical development from late Antiquity to the Early Modern period. The Byzantine state was much more than the surviving Roman empire, but rather fostered a new kind of civilization: Roman and Greek, Christian, yet deeply connected to pagan Antiquity, a multi-ethnic empire that also acted like a nation-state. Its capital was the largest city in Europe for nearly a millennium and it transmitted its unique form of Christianity to much of Eastern Europe and western Asia, yet it was often dismissed, in the minds of western European observers, as an embarrassing, decadent appendix to triumphalist Western history– its archives plundered, its treasures looted, a historical orphan among the nationalist historiographies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, even its true name (“Rome/Romania”) dismissed. In this class, we will examine the life and times of this medieval civilization, as we hear from its emperors, generals, monks, princesses and historians, who carried the ancient Roman empire into the fifteenth century, and whose legacy still inspires politicians, scholars, and artists today.