Byzantium! A name that glitters. A synonym for formality, unbending etiquette, luxury, exoticism. A word that stands for unyielding resistance to change, for codified, inflexible forms, for intrigue and bloodthirsty scheming. Say “Byzantium” and you stand before processions of saints and martyrs trapped in shimmering fields of gold and glass tesserae. You conjure up rigid figures who glare fiercely from the confines of icons and manuscripts, their gorgeously colored robes heavy with embroidery and punctuated by overscaled jewels, their gestures ritualized, exaggerated, theatrical. You see Yeats’s “sages standing in God’s holy fire/ as in the gold mosaic of a wall,” their solemn progress and otherworldly setting alike echoed by the thudding reiterations of “gold” and “golden” in the stunning last stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium.”
The Byzantine Empire lasted for more than a thousand years.
The reality of what that magic name evokes was, of course, far more complicated. The Byzantine Empire lasted for more than a thousand years. Begun in 324, when the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great, moved his capital to the Greek city of Byzantium, renaming it Constantinople—present day Istanbul—in his own honor, it ended only in 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks. There were considerable stretches during this extraordinary span when Byzantine influence encompassed much of the known world of the time, reaching westward from Constantinople across the entire Mediterranean and eastward toward Central Asia. But throughout the long and convoluted history of Byzantium, internal strife, theological hairsplitting, and competition
