eugyppius

Here we will primarily introduce topic. Why we care about Byzantium in 7th century? For many reasons, but among them: It's in the course of this century that a recognisably post-Roman 'Byzantine' empire emerged, distinct from the Late Antique eastern empire.

Also, we care about it to the extent that anybody still cares about idle discourse around the FaLL of tHe RoMAn EmPIre. The western Roman empire evaporated in the later fifth century, overrun by barbarians.

The Eastern Roman Empire had its own directly equivalent crisis in the 7th century, so keeping an eye on developments in both regions helps us think about how the political & economic forms that bound the Mediterranean together in Antiquity were changing/decaying.

After AD 476 the last western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, is depose. We never hear about him again except possibly in 507, when the tedious Cassiodorus writes him to confirm details of his pension.

Political and administrative structures in the West have been coopted by a patchwork of barbarian successor states. You have the Vandals in North Africa, you have Goths in Italy, you have the Franks in Gaul.

This lamentable state of affairs (no empire in West, yes empire in East) persists for 2 generations, until we get to the reign of Justinian. Justinian is acclaimed emperor in AD 527. His great idea, is the restoration of the (western) empire.

By AD 534, his armies have retaken North Africa from the Vandals. You never hear of the Vandals ever again after this, really, so, score Justinian.

In 533 the long campaign to retake Italy from Ostrogoths begins. It is a cliché to say that the Italy of classical ruins we know today is a legacy of Justinian's destructive wars I think this is a thing profs mainly tell bored students, but the Ostrogoth wars were destructive.

Justinian can't fight wars on too many fronts at once. The have ancient enemies to the east, namely the Persians; and they have problems in the Balkans, where the Avars have set up shop.

To restore the West, Justinian has to buy the Persians off, a semi-traditional way of dealing with the Persian Problem. Things in the Balkans remain tense. It is delicate balancing act, projecting power far away, while you are threatened at home. Keep this in mind.

Italy campaign drags on until the 550s, and is enormously expensive. At the end of it, Justinian's empire is – heaven forgive me for repeating another cliché – overextended.

The Vandals are gone but before long the Berbers are revolting in North Africa instead; the Ostrogoths are out of Italy but before long the Lombards (another, less organised, barbarian tribe) are invading instead, etc. And nearer home there are still Persians, still the Avars.

So this is one important precondition for the what we will call the Disaster of the Seventh Century: The pendulum swinging back with ferocity, after Justinian has kicked it entirely too hard in the other direction.

Now another precondition, which I don't to spoil too much in this introductory throat clearing, because there's a lot to say about it. I mean the whole problem of the Monophysites vs. the Chalcedonians.

This is a huge religious divide that splits the Eastern Roman Empire in half. In the east, the ancient patriarchal sees at Antioch and Alexandria believe that Christ had *one nature*, namely a divine one.

The patriarch at Constantinople, however, is further West, and he believes that Christ had *two natures*, a divine and a human one. This was also what the monumentally crucial Council of Chalcedon had decreed in AD 451.

The emperors generally fall under the sway of the patriarch of Constantinople and profess Chalcedonian orthodoxy, but sometimes – as under Justinian – they seem less than totally convinced.

(Theodora, Justinian's whoar wife, has Monophysite sympathies.)

It sounds perhaps like an arcane theological dispute to you, but it mattered graetly to many ordinary people on the ground. As big, or bigger, than the Roman Catholic vs. Protestant divide in 15th/16th centuries. Of huge political significance.

Again, we will talk more this in the course of the coming week, but you need to keep in mind that the territories that the eastern empire loses, in the Disaster of the 7th Century, are predominantly Monophysite.

This is also a cornerstone of important conspiracy theories we will come to entertain.

Finally, just a broader cultural note about the steady transition from classical antiquity to a more mediaeval world. This is an era in which there is a general movement, away from civic political structure, to more overt apolitical religious expression.

A big part of what lends a 'mediaeval' or post-Roman feel to the era we are discussing, is the vanishing of civil society (no roles beyond clerical & military positions), the movement of artistic production into exclusively religious spheres, etc.

OK. Now to sources. This is the tweet, way down here, where I give away all my secrets and remove all your reasons for my thread, and indeed for reading any other histories of seventh century Byzantium.

Because the major narrative sources for this period exist in excellent English translations and you can read them yourself and develop your own ideas. In my fantasy of how this thread develops, some of you even go to library, look things up, pick a fight with me. Maybe we do that

Historians, a strange dusty breed of scholar, mainly depend on narrative sources to develop a basic political/chronological frame, upon which they then hang the evidence of other non-narrative sources, be they numismatic, documentary, archaeological.

For 7th century Byzantium, we have (only) two major narrative sources, that is, things that actually try to relate the history of political events as they occurred.

Both date to the 9th century. That is, they are substantially *later* than the events they describe. What is moar, the manuscripts that transmit them are even later.

Also keep this in mind going forward, when we begin to probe the boundaries of what might possibly be true about 7th century history (as opposed to the boring stuff we are fed in Wikipaedia-adjacent pseudo-oracles).

The first and most important is the Chronographia, or Chronicle, of Theophanes the Confessor. Available to everybody in excellent English translation: Mango & Scott, Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor, Oxford 1997.