Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

The fall of Constantinople may have extinguished the last vestige of the Roman Empire, but the immense light of its learning wasn’t snuffed out. Refugees streamed into western Europe, bringing with them the lost jewels of Greek and Roman civilization. The first blush of humanism was just stirring the West’s collective soul, and it received Byzantium’s precious gift with enthusiasm. Partial copies of Aristotle’s works had been well known for centuries, but now Europe was introduced to Plato and Demosthenes, electrified by the Iliad, and captivated by Xenophon and Aeschylus. Byzantine émigrés tutored luminaries as diverse as Petrarch and Boccaccio and the wealthy Cosimo de’ Medici was so impressed by a Byzantine lecturer that he founded the Platonic Academy of Florence. The result was a “rebirth” or “Renaissance,” as it was soon called, during which western Europe was reintroduced to its own roots.

Other exiles fled to Russia, the last great free Orthodox state, and tried to re-create the Byzantine dream. The kings of those vast northern lands already had a Byzantine alphabet and an eastern soul, and they welcomed the newcomers, taking the title of tsar—their version of Caesar—and adopting the double-headed eagle as their symbol. Byzantine art combined with local styles and continued to flourish throughout the Balkans and the north. The Russians could never forget the dazzling vision of Constantinople that was passed on to them, and the yearning for it became the long unfulfilled dream of the Russian Empire. They drank so deeply of Byzantium that even Stalin, flushed with the victory of Communism, embraced its memory, passing along both the lessons of its history and the dark mistrust of the West that still haunts the Kremlin.

The greatest heir of Byzantium, however, is undoubtedly the Orthodox Church. Pressed into service by the forces of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the church provided a cultural repository linking the peoples of the former empire with the glorious epochs of their past. Today the Byzantine eagle flutters proudly from the flags of nations from Albania to Montenegro, and though each state has its local version of the church, the heritage they all bear is Byzantine.^*

Only in the West was the story largely forgotten, though without Byzantium the history of the Middle East and Europe is at best incomplete and at worst incomprehensible. When the smoke cleared from the Turkish cannons that awful Tuesday, it revealed a world that had profoundly changed. The Middle Ages had ended, and western Europe was on the brink of an extraordinary cultural explosion. Only thirty-five years after the fall of Constantinople, Bartholomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, opening up a sea route to India, and just four years after that, a little-known Italian explorer named Christopher Columbus—using a translated Byzantine text of Ptolemy’s Geographia—discovered America.

In the heady Age of Discovery that was dawning, there was little room for the tangled memories of Byzantium. The great bastion that had sheltered Europe for a millennium sank into obscurity, and the word “Byzantine” became a caricature of its people, conjuring up images of unnecessary complexity and vaguely sinister designs. Such accusations were as undeserved as they were untrue, and successfully denied the West the lessons afforded by the empire’s history and example. Though it sprang from the same cultural fountainhead that birthed western Europe, Byzantium found its own unique balance to the familiar tensions of church and state, faith and reason. Its empire stretched over lands long considered inherently unstable, and though it frequently stumbled, it left behind a legacy of stability and even unity for more than a thousand years.

The greatest tragedy in its vast and glorious tapestry is not the way in which it fell, but that it has been consigned to irrelevance, its voices unheeded and its lessons unlearned. For those who have eyes to see, however, the lonely Theodosian walls still stand, battered and abused, marching the long miles from the Sea of Marmara to the waters of the Golden Horn. There they serve as a fitting testament to that epic struggle five centuries ago, an unwavering reminder that the Roman Empire didn’t expire in the humiliation of a little Augustus, but in the heroism of a Constantine.