A period in the history of the Byzantine Empire, during the 7th and 8th centuries
The term
Byzantine Dark Ages
is a
historiographical
term for the period in the
history of
the
Eastern Roman
(Byzantine) Empire, during the 7th and 8th centuries, which marks the transition between the
late antique
early Byzantine period and the "medieval" middle Byzantine era. The "Dark Ages" are characterized by widespread upheavals and transformation of the Byzantine state and society, resulting in a paucity of historical sources.
Collapse
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The 7th century was a watershed in the history of the Byzantine Empire. At its beginning, the
Eastern Roman Empire
still controlled most of the
Mediterranean
Basin's shores and faced the
Sassanian
Empire as its main eastern rival. The
Fall of the Western Roman Empire
had eroded this traditional order, and despite Emperor
Justinian I
's wars of reconquest in the 6th century, many of his gains in Italy and Spain were quickly undone. But it was still recognizably the
late antique
world dominated by the
Roman Empire
, with the Mediterranean
mare nostrum
as its center of gravity and cities as the main social and economic unit.
The
final Byzantine-Sassanid War
weakened this world, but the
Muslim conquests
of the 7th century shattered it for good. The emergent
caliphate
was not only far more powerful and threatening than Persia had ever been, but it also shattered the political unity of the Mediterranean world and moved the center of power east, first to
Damascus
and then to
Baghdad
. Byzantium was left territorially crippled, reduced to the status of a peripheral power, and on a permanent defensive against invaders from all sides.
Transformation
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This crisis led to a profound transformation in the nature and culture of the Byzantine state, that was not completed until the 9th century, when the Muslim pressure on the Empire slackened.
The Byzantine state that emerged "was an empire and culture focused on emperor and capital."
It was also much more militarized: The civilian late-antiquity administrative structure, put in place by
Diocletian
and his successors, was replaced by the
themes
, each governed by a military commander (
strategos
, "general"). The rigid distinction between civilian and military hierarchies, which was a hallmark of the late antique system, was thus abolished.
With the territorial losses reducing the Empire to its core territories in
Anatolia
and parts of the Balkans, the administration was streamlined, with the central government essentially absorbing the old provincial administration of the
praetorian prefectures
into a centralized, court-centered hierarchy. In the process, the handful of great departments of late antiquity were replaced by a series of smaller, more narrowly focused fiscal bureaus, all of roughly equal status.
Another change was that Greek also finally replaced Latin as the language of administration during this period.
The Muslim conquests, coupled with the
Slavic migrations to Southeastern Europe
around the same time, resulted in the breakdown of the late-antiquity social order. In some instances, cities were reduced to small fortified settlements, notable mainly as defensive bastions and market centers; the Byzantine capital,
Constantinople
, remained highly populated.
The provincial aristocracy declined; offices such as the
decurions
of the cities disappeared and with them the political functions of the landed aristocracy. The great landholders of late antiquity were ruined by the constant invasions, and those who survived appear to have left the cities to fortified country estates.
Many of the provincial aristocracy during this period managed to retain ? or gain ? their positions through holding offices in the themes, and gradually, they too became militarized.
Education suffered a severe blow during this period. Some form of higher education was still available in the capital; albeit, there too few figures of prominence are known, and private education was still available for the wealthy, but acquiring it was much more difficult. In particular, education in
Roman law
, which had been the basis for a public career, suffered an abrupt decline, aided by the fact that legal teaching had traditionally been in the hands of a small group of mostly pagan professors.
The numerical and qualitative decline of the educated classes had, as a result, the decline in the number of philological works produced, as the remaining audience for such works was small and diminishing with every passing year.
Art and architecture followed suit, with many quarries being abandoned. Apart from fortifications ?often quite hastily executed ? almost all building activity ceased during this period.
Historical sources
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Examining this crucial period in Byzantine history has posed many difficulties to modern scholars, as the Byzantine historical sources about it are few and mostly originated later than the period itself.
No Byzantine historical source is known from the end of the
last great Byzantine?Sassanid war
around 630 until the late 8th century, when
Patriarch Nikephoros I of Constantinople
wrote his
Brief History
, followed a few decades later by the
Chronicle
of
Theophanes the Confessor
.
Administrative and legal sources are also scarce, with the "
Farmer's Law
" and the "
Rhodian Sea Law
" the only exceptions.
Much of the information for this period is thus derived from non-Byzantine sources, such as the
Arab historians
, as well as
Armenian
and
Syriac
sources from the Empire's periphery, although many of them are of a later date as well.
Theological
works are an exception to this scarcity of sources, but again, due to the decline of the educated classes in Byzantium itself, most of these were written in the Empire's periphery or indeed in lands controlled by the caliphate, while works from Constantinople are almost entirely absent.
See also
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References
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Sources
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Bibliography
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- Brubaker, Leslie; Haldon, John (2011).
Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680?850: A History
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN
978-0-5214-3093-7
.
- Curta, Florin
; Szmoniewski, Bartłomiej Szymon (2019).
The Velestino Hoard: Casting Light on the Byzantine 'Dark Ages'
. Palgrave Macmillan.
ISBN
978-3-0300-4845-7
.
- Decker, Michael J. (2016).
The Byzantine Dark Ages
. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
ISBN
978-1-4725-3606-8
.
- Haldon, John
(2016).
The Empire That Would Not Die: The Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival, 640?740
. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
ISBN
978-0-674-08877-1
.
- Ivison, Eric A. (2007).
"Amorium in the Byzantine Dark Ages (seventh to ninth centuries)"
. In Henning, Joachim (ed.).
Post-Roman Towns, Trade and Settlement in Europe and Byzantium, Vol. 2: Byzantium, Pliska, and the Balkans
. de Gruyter. pp. 25?59.
ISBN
978-3-11-018358-0
.
- Niewohner, Philipp (2007).
"Archaologie und die ?Dunklen Jahrhunderte" im byzantinischen Anatolien"
[Archaeology and the 'Dark Centuries' in Byzantine Anatolia]. In Henning, Joachim (ed.).
Post-Roman Towns, Trade and Settlement in Europe and Byzantium, Vol. 2: Byzantium, Pliska, and the Balkans
. de Gruyter. pp. 119?157.
ISBN
978-3-11-018358-0
.
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Preceding
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Early
(330–717)
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Middle
(717–1204)
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Late
(1204–1453)
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By modern region
or territory
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