Why Did Byzantium Perish

Peter Schreiner*
Universität zu Köln (Germany)

https://doi.org/10.53656/his2023-4-1-why

Abstract. The paper offers a survey of the reasons for the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. The author analyzes the preconditions for this process, dating some of them to as early as the tenth century. He further outlines both the internal and external factors that facilitated it by tracing their development in different times and contexts. Key events from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries as well as the policies of Byzantine emperors and European rulers are discussed in view of their impact on the Empire’s political trajectory during this period. Conversely to popular opinion, the author considers the Fourth Crusade of 1204 to have laid the grounds for the temporary survival and revitalization of Byzantium, but the state’s nature after its restoration in 1261 is described as ill-suited to withstand the Ottoman expansion in the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, the availability or lack of foreign support notwithstanding. Based on the foregoing interpretative approach, the concluding overview provides a three-stage periodization of the era of decline as well as a recapitulation of the positive and negative factors – external and internal alike – that shaped the ultimate demise of the Empire.
Keywords: Byzantium; decline; Ottoman Turks; Byzantine-European relations; Michael VIII Palaeologus; Charles of Anjou; Seljuk Sultanate of Rum

* This article was created based on a lecture by prof. Peter Schreiner which was given on 10 February 2004 in the University of Belgrade. Prof. Peter Schreiner is one of the leading contemporary Byzantinist scholars. He has been a professor of Byzantine studies in the University of Cologne since 1979. In 1986 he was made a member of the Southeast European Commission at the Göttingen Academy. He is a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (1991), a corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy (1993), a member of the Istituto Siciliano di Studi Bizantini e Neoellenici, named after prof. Bruno Lavanini (1994); he was the editor of the Byzantinische Zeitschrift, a speciallised journal of worlwide fame (from March 1992 to 2004). In 2001 at the World Byzantine Studies Congress in Paris he was voted President of the Association Internationale des Études Byzantines. Prof. Schreiner's scientific contributions are highly appreciated in Bulgaria and its neighbouring Balkan countries: in 1988 he was awarded the Medal of Honor from Sofia University; in May 1992 he received a honorary doctorate from the St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo; in 2003 he received a honorary doctorate from the University of Belgrade. This article has been translated from the German to Bulgarian by acad. Vasil Gyuzelev, to whom the Editorial Board of the History journal expresses their thanks.

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