Byzantine Civilization
The Greek-Orthodox successor civilization to the eastern Roman Empire (c. 4th century – 1453) — for Quigley, a new civilization rather than a continuation of Classical, and possibly the early phase of Russian (Orthodox) civilization
Also known as: Byzantine, Byzantium, Eastern Roman civilization, Greek-Christian civilization
Byzantine Civilization is Quigley's analytical unit for the civilization that grew out of the eastern half of the Roman Empire — Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian, centred on Constantinople — from late antiquity to the Ottoman conquest of 1453. Quigley raises the analytic question explicitly: "Was Byzantine culture a new society or was it merely a revived Classical culture? Or is it possible that Byzantine culture is an earlier phase of Orthodox (Russian) civilization?" (EoC 330–331). His answer is decisive: because Byzantine culture had a different religion, ideology, social organisation, military and economic technology, and almost certainly a different organisation of expansion from Classical civilization, it is difficult to regard it as simply a revived Classical culture (EoC 331). It is, in Quigley's reading, either a separate civilization or the early phase of Russian (Orthodox) civilization.
Origin: New Civilization or Continuation?
Byzantine civilization presents Quigley with one of his most explicit cases of the analytic question "is this a civilization?" Writing in chapter 9 of Evolution of Civilizations, he concludes the Classical chapter with the puzzle directly: "This gives rise to one of the greatest puzzles of analytic history: Was Byzantine culture a new society or was it merely a revived Classical culture? Or is it possible that Byzantine culture is an earlier phase of Orthodox (Russian) civilization?" (EoC 330–331). His answer turns on the diagnostic criteria of his own theory: religion, ideology, social organisation, military and economic technology, and the organisation of surplus accumulation. "In view of the fact that Byzantine culture had a different religion, ideology, social organization, military and economic technology, and almost certainly a different organization of expansion, it seems difficult to regard it as simply a revived [Classical civilization]" (EoC 331). The mixture, then, is genuinely new: an inheritance of Greek-Hellenistic culture and Roman administrative form, transformed by Christianisation, and developed under sustained pressure first from Islamic civilization and then from the Slavic and Turkic worlds.
Instrument of Expansion: Bureaucratic-Tributary State Fused With Orthodox Church
Although Quigley does not give Byzantine civilization a chapter-length treatment in Evolution of Civilizations, his analysis of the case in chapter 9 and his sustained treatment in Weapons Systems and Political Stability (where Byzantine military and political institutions occupy roughly 200 pages) makes the instrument of expansion clear in outline: it was the bureaucratic-tributary imperial state, intimately fused with the Orthodox Church. The theme system — large administrative-military districts in which soldier-peasants held land in exchange for hereditary military service — accumulated surplus in a relatively broad class of smallholders during the seventh through eleventh centuries; this was the productive social organisation of the Byzantine Age of Expansion. The structure was unusual in Quigley's typology because it distributed surplus accumulation among many small holders rather than concentrating it in a priestly or commercial class, which gave Byzantine civilization an unusual military resilience: the theme-soldier was a free peasant defending his own land, not a mercenary or a serf-conscript. The imperial centre at Constantinople taxed this productive base, maintained the standing core forces (the tagmata), conducted the elaborate ceremonial that legitimated the imperial-religious order, and patronised the Orthodox Church which in turn legitimated the entire structure. As the great landed magnates of Anatolia grew at the expense of the soldier-peasants from the eleventh century onward — concentrating land in their own hands, reducing the free peasant to dependent status, and substituting mercenary forces for theme-soldiers — the instrument institutionalised, the theme system collapsed, and the long Age of Conflict began. Quigley reads the parallel rise of mounted heavy cavalry (the kataphraktoi, the late mailed riders), and the gradual displacement of the free soldier-peasant by mercenary forces (notably the Varangian Guard and various foreign contingents), as the diagnostic military-technological mark of this institutionalisation. The Manzikert defeat of 1071 was the moment at which the new arrangement proved unable to defend the eastern frontier.
The Seven Stages Applied
Quigley reads the Byzantine case through the seven-stage model approximately as follows. Mixture: c. 300–550 CE — Christianisation of the eastern Roman Empire, the Justinianic synthesis, and the loss of the western half. Gestation: c. 550–700 — survival of the Arab and Slavic onslaughts and the recasting of the state on a thematic-Anatolian basis. Expansion: c. 700–1050 — the great age of recovery, the reconquest of Anatolia, the Christianisation of the Slavs, the cultural projection into Bulgaria and Kievan Rus'. Age of Conflict: c. 1050–1204 — the Manzikert disaster of 1071, the Crusades, the rise of magnate landlordism, civil war. Universal Empire: arguably never fully attained, or arguably the briefer post-Manzikert restoration. Decay: c. 1204–1453 — the Latin sack of Constantinople, the Palaiologan restoration in a much-reduced territory, slow contraction. Invasion: the Ottoman conquest of 1453 closing the political form of the civilization. The cycle is unusual in Quigley's typology in that the invading civilization (Islamic) ultimately absorbed the Byzantine territory and population rather than producing a clean break.
Relation to Classical, Islamic, and Russian Civilizations
Byzantine civilization sits at a unique intersection in Quigley's typology. It inherits the Classical substrate — Greek language, Roman law, Hellenistic philosophy and science — but, as Quigley insists, transforms it sufficiently that it cannot be analysed simply as Late Classical (EoC 331). It coexists in mutual hostility and mutual borrowing with Islamic civilization for eight centuries; the long Byzantine-Arab and later Byzantine-Turkish frontier is one of Quigley's principal cases of inter-civilizational dynamics. And it is, in Quigley's reading, possibly the early phase of Russian (Orthodox) civilization: the conversion of Vladimir of Kiev in 988, the long projection of Byzantine ecclesiastical, liturgical, and political models into the Slavic Orthodox world, and the continuity of the doctrine of "Third Rome" in Muscovy together make the analytic question genuinely open. If Byzantine and Russian civilizations are one continuous civilization, that civilization is one of three peripheral successors to the Classical world (alongside Western and Islamic) and is, in Quigley's framing, currently in late Age of Conflict / Universal Empire (the Soviet phase) (EoC 88).
The Crisis That Ended Each Stage
The Manzikert disaster of 1071, when the Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantine field army and opened Anatolia to settlement, marks the end of the Byzantine Age of Expansion in Quigley's reading. The 1204 sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade — Quigley's case of one civilization (Western, in Expansion) physically attacking another (Byzantine, in Conflict) — is the catastrophic event that ends the Conflict stage and inaugurates a long Decay. The 1453 fall of Constantinople to Mehmed II concludes the cycle: an Invasion stage executed by a Universal Empire phase of the neighbouring Islamic civilization (Ottoman). Quigley emphasises that this is one of the cleaner cases in his sample of a civilization brought down by inter-civilizational rather than purely internal causes.
Significance: The Hardest Analytic Case
Byzantine civilization is, in Quigley's own admission, the hardest analytic case in his typology: "one of the greatest puzzles of analytic history" (EoC 330). It is the case that most strongly tests the boundaries of what counts as a separate civilization versus a continuation or sub-phase of another. Quigley's methodological lesson is that the diagnostic criteria of religion, ideology, social organisation, military and economic technology, and organisation of surplus must all be applied, and that where they all diverge from the apparent predecessor, a new civilization must be analytically posited even where political continuities exist (EoC 331). The case is also methodologically important because it raises the open question of whether Russian civilization should be analysed as an autonomous civilization or as a late Byzantine phase — a question with very large implications for Quigley's twentieth-century geopolitics in Tragedy and Hope.
Cited in
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 330 Quigley
This gives rise to one of the greatest puzzles of analytic history: Was Byzantine culture a new society or was it merely a revived Classical culture? Or is it possible that Byzantine culture is an earlier phase of Orthodox (Russian) civilization?
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 331 Quigley
In view of the fact that Byzantine culture had a different religion, ideology, social organization, military and economic technology, and almost certainly a different organization of expansion, it seems difficult to regard it as simply a revived [Classical] civilization.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 88 Quigley
From its wreckage emerged three civilizations: (a) Western civilization… (b) Orthodox civilization, which seems to be culminating in the Soviet empire; and (c) Islamic civilization, which did culminate in the Ottoman Empire.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 276 Quigley
The beginnings of the split between the Latin world and the Greek world… later appeared as a split between the Western Roman Empire (which disappeared in the fifth century) and the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire (which disappeared only in the fifteenth century), as well as the schism of the Christian church into Roman and Orthodox branches.
- weapons-systems-political-stability Quigley
Byzantine military organisation — the theme system of soldier-peasants, the development of heavy mailed cavalry, and the gradual displacement of these by mercenary forces — is the central case in any analysis of weapons systems and political stability.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 223 Quigley
[The arch] became the chief feature of ecclesiastical architecture in the medieval period both in Western cathedrals and in Byzantine churches.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 94 Quigley
The Byzantine Empire, surviving as a distinct civilization from the fourth century to 1453, provided the cultural and religious matrix for the Russian (Orthodox) successor civilization.