Happy Birthday, Constantinople

Today, the 8 th of November, marks the date when Roman history took a new direction. For over a millennium, Rome, founded before 700 BCE, had been expanding. Her success over most of that time was owed to battling her neighbours. But in recent centuries, more and more of Rome’s battles had pitted Romans against each other rather than against neighbours. On 8 th November in 324, the Emperor Constantine ordained a policy reset: to uproot the capital of the empire and to replant it in the East in the city of Byzantium, where Europe and Asia meet. Six years later, in 330, Constantine relocated to Constantinople, as the city was renamed. He is known as Constantine the Great.

The Dark Ages, a catch-all description of the cultural and social murk besetting Europe during the time separating Antiquity and the Middle Ages, told a tale of two empires: of one in the West wasting away, of one in the East growing stronger.  Western Rome left a patrimony of monuments that we still can see and visit. Eastern Rome gifted us another patrimony, intangible but nonetheless real, in new approaches to laws and economics.            

One of Byzantium’s policy resets, monetary reform, had an almost instant impact. Constantine minted a coin, the solidus , in gold. This gold standard became the currency of choice for trade within the empire and beyond. Byzantium’s diplomats knew that a stable currency redounded on the standing of its issuer, and their treaties with foreign powers invariably stipulated that gold coinage was a Byzantine monopoly. Minting a gold coin, in other words, was as much as throwing down a gauntlet to Byzantium’s emperor. Consequently, nobody dared challenge Byzantium’s gold standard, until a rival came forward in the realm of the new religion of Islam, where a caliph, Abd al Malik, issued an Islamic gold coin in 696. Coining gold henceforth was a duopoly, but Byzantium’s gold standard was not undermined until 1204. More of that later. 

To reform the legal system was a more challenging task than upgrading the monetary system. In 527 the Emperor Justinian commissioned a wholesale review of Roman law, stock-taking, updating and editing its entire corpus. This task was huge.  Romans had begun codifying law in writing from the fourth century BCE. Justinian’s task force had to go through some 900 years of legal literature. It completed the first sift by 529. And the job was not done yet. It still had to critique jurisprudential traditions. Further edits followed, to make Justinian’s Code a workable manual. The task was completed by 533.  

The Dark Ages were a tale of two cities in other ways. Byzantium surpassed Rome, not only in advances in law and economics, but also in engagements with new cultural currents. The most important of these, pulsing from cities such as Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, was Christianity.  

When it came to promoting new cultural trends, Constantinople had two key advantages over Rome. The first was language. Constantinople was a turntable for all the new ideas pulsing out from early Christianity – from Cappadocia, the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, regions all belonging to the Byzantian realm. Whereas in Rome, Greek was the preserve of the educated class, in Constantinople Greek was spoken by everyone. Since the Gospels and other foundational Christian writings were in Greek, knowing Greek as a native rather than as a foreign language gave readers in Constantinople an edge over their peers in Rome. 

Another key advantage of Constantinople was its siting. Rome was located inland, Constantinople on the shores of the Bosphorus. Rome routed tracks across land, Constantinople across water. In the Roman empire all roads led to Rome, its head, its capital. Byzantium was a maritime empire and her imperial network linked nodes that faced outward, to the sea. In Byzantium, sea lanes crisscrossing the Mediterranean connected heterogeneous regions whose cultures were homegrown. 

The fate of the distribution of Justinian’s Code illustrates how the melting pot of ideas in the Mediterranean East differed from the cultural backwater of Italy. Justinian’s Code was distributed throughout the empire, including to Byzantium’s subject cities in Italy. There, however, rulers and readers seemed not to know what to do with it. Copies of Justinian’s Code for the most part went missing. Only centuries later, when a rare copy stashed away on an overlooked shelf in an Italian library was discovered, did scholars in Italy take a fresh look. The study of Roman law then took off in universities in Italy, and the study of Justinian’s Code sparked the fusion of law and theology that became Scholasticism.

Another tale of the two cities was told by the progress of Christianity in East and West. 

Christian doctrine in the West was enforced from Rome. Roman Christianity was in many ways the Roman empire at prayer. Its hierarchy was graded and centralist, its theology rigorous and logical, its doctrine brooked no dissent. Constantinople dominated Christianity in the East. Pagan temples were defunded and the Academy in Athens was closed down. However, if Orthodoxy frowned on sectarian offshoots, they were not extinguished. Christendom in the West was monocultural, multicultural in the East.   

Byzantine maritime trade prospered. Nowhere were the relative gains greater than in Italy, where trade picked up in new cities such as Venice and Genoa. These maritime cities established trade outposts in the Levant and in Egypt that enjoyed the protection of their overlords in Constantinople, but were left alone to go about their business as they saw fit. 

Over time Constantinople and its premier subject, Venice, traded places. Venice had become Byzantium’s paymaster by the time of the crusades and in 1204 a Venetian-led crusader force made a detour to Constantinople to collect on monies owed. In all but name, this trade mission was a raid. After centuries of facing off the challenge of conquest by Islam and other enemies, Constantinople was overrun by her subjects. This reverse takeover of the empire sapped her strength. 

In 1453 Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks and the name of the city changed to Istanbul — although the old name persisted among Christian subjects and in the West. Byzantium’s multiculturalism, however, lived on. Her successor, the Ottoman empire, recruited many members of the elite from ethnic minorities. It was not unusual for Armenians, Greeks, Jews to be promoted to elite office. For example, in the 19 th century, Egypt was ruled by Muhammad Ali (1769-1849), whose birthplace was in Greece and whose family was Albanian. Some elite officials were not even born anywhere in the Ottoman realm. The reorganisation of the Ottoman army was placed in the hands of Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891), who on completion of his contract returned to his native Prussia. 

Byzantian/Ottoman multiculturalism endured until the early twentieth century. By the end of World War I, Istanbul was home to Greek, Armenian and Jewish minorities that made up some 40% of the population. The following population exchanges between Turkey and Greece, imposed in the 1920s, opened a Pandora’s Box of strife and mayhem, a template of what has come to be called ethnic cleansings that ever since have been occurring throughout Europe and the Middle East.         

In the history of Rome a new chapter opened in the year 324. The transition from a monocultural to a multicultural millennium merits all the more attention in our own times that have become increasingly nativist and isolationist. The legacy of Byzantium is to show that multiculturalism works.

Thank you, Constantinople.

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