Aims

The aim of this course on Byzantine history is to familiarize the students with the most significant moments of Byzantine history: as the manifestation of a Medieval Western civilization, inherited from the Roman past and in contact with the West.

Main themes

This course on Byzantine history is a chronological survey of a thousand years of history, one that stops and focuses on the essential events that highlight the characteristics moments particular to the Byzantine world: a Greek speaking Christian world, a Roman society in the East. In particular, we shall examine the central role that the Byzantine Empire played in Christianizing the Middle East (the political, cultural, and religious relations with Eastern Christian communities).

Content and teaching methods

This course analyses the internal and external factors that contributed to the transformation of the Roman Empire into a Hellenised, Christian, Western Empire and the elements thanks to which this Empire survived the upheavals of invasions, Arab and Persian expansion, and the religious and ethnic crises that threatened its cohesion. The course then focuses on the historical circumstances that both forged the Byzantine identity and brought the Empire to its apex, while leading to the break-up of the West and to opposition and rivalry between the two Christian parts of the world to the advantage of the Turkish. Finally, the role played by centrifugal tendencies and foreign interventions in the disappearance of the Empire at the time when the Renaissance was appearing in Europe, partly due to the influence of Byzantium, is examined.

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