History has painted a gloomy picture of the Byzantine empire. A new exhibition suggests otherwise, writes Robin Cormack
The Roman Emperor Constantine the Great made two extraordinary decisions which changed the world.
 | |
The first, in 313, was to end the persecution of Christians and to declare Christianity a legal religion in the Roman empire. The second, in 324, was to found a new city on the site of Byzantium, which he dedicated in 330 and called Constantinople. Today it is the vast city of Istanbul.
Constantinople flourished and by the reign of Emperor Justinian the Great (527-65) it was the Christian capital of a reduced Roman empire. Its rulers aspired to preside over a unified Mediterranean state with a common faith and a humane law code. We call this the Byzantine empire - though they still called it the Roman empire. It survived until 1453 when the city fell to the Ottoman Turks.
Byzantium 330-1453, a new exhibition at the Royal Academy, assesses the effects of Constantine's decisions. It brings back together many of the widely scattered objects which are the visual legacy of this empire. But it also poses two important questions. What is the real legacy of Byzantium? And is the picture of doom and gloom painted by the Enlightenment historian Edward Gibbon more rhetoric than fact?
No comments:
Post a Comment