The Byzantine Legacy II - Religion - http://maxpages.com/democracy/The_Byzantine_Legacy

The Byzantine Empire was ruled for the first time by a woman, Irene, mother of the Emperor Constantine VI (780-797). Charlemagne did argue that He was the Sole Emperor. The Church and the State were in a difficult period during the time of the Patriarch Photios on the see of Constantinople.

A long period of disagreement between the east and western churches over the matters of ecclesiastical authority and doctrinal assertions ended in an actual schism in 1054, which still in place today.

By the end of the twelve-century, the people of the Western Europe in general disliked and mistrusted the Byzantine emperor and his subjects, but the Venetian had a practical interest in their destruction. They wanted to have the monopoly of the rich trade of Constantinople. Thus the Fourth Crusade took Constantinople and Baldwin of Flandre became emperor. Very few Greeks or Balkan Slavs ever too as legitimate the election of Baldwin of Flandres. Many more of the me were ready to accept universal political monarchy of the Roman pope, which was, in principle, the official ideology of the Latin West. In 1356 a Turkish army crossed to Europe and captured Adrianopole. During the next thirty years, the Turks became masters over the Balkans. The extinction of the Macedonian dynasty marked the end of the Byzantine Empire's era of glory.

By the turn of the twelfth, century Byzantium had become useless to the western Christendom. The overcoming of the Byzantine Empire was the logical outcome of the needs of the West. Pope Innocent III saw the conquest of Constantinople as a miraculous vindication of the papal claims to supremacy over the Byzantine Church. The Byzantines admired the prowess of the western knight and the Latins respected the Byzantine wealth and subtlety.

As the Western Europe came out of the Dark Ages, the Latins took to going on pilgrimage to the Constantinople and Holy Land, and then on crusades. They came and they stayed, carving out principalities for themselves in what has been once a Byzantine territory. Their merchants wanted more of a share of the wealth of Constantinople and Byzantine markets. In 1204, they combined crusading with business by capturing Constantinople and dividing the empire among themselves. After the fourth crusade, the Byzantines never recovered from the shock. Constantinople could no longer fulfil its traditional role of defender of the eastern wall of Christendom against Islam.

The Byzantine Empire played two important functions in the development of the European civilization. It served as a vast storehouse of knowledge accumulated by the ancient civilizations. Thus the Arabs, who swept out of the desert to conquer a great empire, found the Byzantine civilization to supply their avid thirst for knowledge. When the people of Western Europe reached the stage in their development that made them ready to use additional knowledge, the Arabs and the Byzantine empire were there to open to them the civilization of the Hellenistic world. The Byzantine Empire was more than a storehouse. It created a civilization that of its own continued to flourish in Eastern Europe.
Byzantine civilization showed its greatest originality in art. This art found its expression in two ways: the mosaic and the illumination of manuscripts. The Byzantine Church, which is the Orthodox Church, was essentially built to house mosaics. The figures were not intended to look natural. They were essentially symbols that fitted into the design and spirit of the decoration. The impressive dignity of the symbolic figures and the reach beauty of the color achieved a result unequaled by any other art. The same characteristics appeared in the illumination of the manuscripts.

In purely intellectual activity, Byzantine civilization demonstrated originality in two directions: religious controversy and the practical application of learning. The scholars of the Orthodox Church were deeply interested in the theological questions. The outer learning was the foundation of all higher education, but the queen of sciences was theology, in the proper sense of the knowledge of God. Theology came naturally to the Byzantine.
The Byzantine Empire developed a singularly and effective art that was an integral part of its civilization. Music"<,> iconography, architecture, literature , clothing. Knowledge of it spread to Western Europe through articles and through manuscripts. Western artisans used Byzantine models in their work, as did the Western illuminators of the manuscripts. The painters and sculptors, who decorated the Churches of Western Europe, found their inspiration chiefly in the illuminated manuscripts. Thus Byzantine art combined with early Christian art are mold to form the artistic forms of the Western Europe.

The members of the bureaucracy that governed the State were expected to have thorough humanistic education, and both the noble and middle classes were highly educated. While the transmission to the West of the major part of the Greek literature had to await the Renaissance, the twelfth century western scholars were translating works of philosophy and science from Greek into Latin. These manuscripts played a vital part in the earlier development of Western European learning. The scholars fled carrying with them their manuscripts to the University towns of Italy. Italy yielded itself with rapture with the spirit of humanism, and from Italy, the torch of learning was borne in France, from France to England. Paris and Oxford began to rival Bologna, Pisa and Florence, and all Western Europe was bated in the light of the new learning.

The new learning gave to England man like Grocyn (1446-1519), Linacre (1460-1524), John Colet (1446-1519), Erasmus, as a temporary Englishman, Sir Thomas Moore (b. 1478), Sir Walter Raleigh (b. 1552), Sir Philip Sydney (b. 1554), Spenser (b. 1552), Francis Bacon (b. 1651), Marlowe and Shakespeare (both b. 1564). Also there is the great Elizabethan dramatist of France, Ronsard (b. 1524), Montagne (b. 1533) and Rabelais (d. 1553). To Italy Machiavelli (b. 1469), Bandello (b. 1480), Tasso (b. 1544) and Ariosto (b. 1474). Germany during the same period could claim Juhan Reuchlin, and Ulrich von Hutten, Malenchton and Martin Luther. Portugal had Camoens and Spain Calderon and Cervantes.

STEFAN CRISBASAN

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Page Updated Fri Apr 2, 1999 8:59am EST