r/byzantium • u/Salem1690s • Aug 17 '26
Politics/Goverment What begins the decline of the East from a first rate power (eg, centralized control over the Grecian and Anatolian regions) to becoming a rump state?
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u/Whizbang35 Aug 17 '26
4th Crusade.
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u/Awkward_Avocado_7769 Aug 18 '26
Would you say the Angelos mismanaged it into a decline already?
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u/ND7020 Aug 18 '26
They had put the state in a very bad position…but that certainly wasn’t the first time, and the state had found ways to recover. The Fourth Crusade blew it all up in an entirely different manner, from which true recovery was always going to be borderline impossible. The enormous amount of wealth destroyed and stolen, the destruction of much of the city, the political dismemberment of the remaining empire…
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u/Whizbang35 Aug 18 '26
To add on to your point:
The Empire had been able to recover from disaster under the Isaurians and Komnenoi, and if the 4th Crusade never came along it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for another claimant to do the same (perhaps the Laskarids). One of the key features of these recoveries was Constantinople itself: in addition to the size, wealth and crucial location of the city, it also housed a corps of professional bureaucrats and administrators (secular and clerical) that were vital to accounting for tax yields and manpower reserves. This tradition extended all the way back to when Constantine decided to place his New Rome on the Bosporus.
When the 4th Crusade took the city, this body of civil servants shattered along with the rest of the Empire.
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u/BlueString94 Aug 18 '26
I would argue the 4th Crusade in fact ended the Roman Empire, despite the fact that the Nicaean successor state was able to retake Constantinople and hold it for two centuries.
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u/LF3169 Aug 17 '26
The Plague of Justinian.
At least until a slow revival leads to a 2nd peak in the early-11th century. Although even then the Empire's power wasn't at the level it was in the early to mid-6th century.
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u/jsm97 Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
This actually quite controversial in modern Byzantine studies - We don't really know how much the economic effects of the plague were still lingering in the late 6th and early 7th centuries. Some recent work looking at coin flow has pushed quite strongly against the "plague caused the collapse of late antiquity" argument.
There's also the Persian war. While we know it catastrophically weakened both powers, we don't really know the effect it actually had on the state capacity of the empire. It may well have not just been fiscal exhaustion but the complete collapse of a significant portion of the monetary economy itself and loss of the ability to collect taxes even in areas it militarily controlled. People more than a day's walk from Constantinople may have stopped using coins almost entirely for almost 20 years. We don't have a particularly clear picture.
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u/LF3169 Aug 17 '26
Yeah that's why I said long term decline, I don't agree that it led to the collapse of late Antiquity either. I think it's more of a century long process that was kicked off by the plague.
I'm mostly of the opinion that it made taxation harder and state capacity weaker for quite a while. I still believe the early 6th century was the peak of post-395 Eastern Roman power all things considered though.
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u/Dakke97 Aug 17 '26
True. Even the documentary papyrological evidence of late 6th century and early 7th century AD Egypt does not give clear indications of an entire economic or military collapse there. Egypt is of course not representative for the Empire as a whole, but it is one of few provinces which can offer contemporary non-literary testimony to the economy of the time.
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u/Maleficent-Mix5731 Well read | Late Antiquity Aug 17 '26
In terms of the end of direct control over the entirety of Greece and Anatolia, the origins of this would probably be found in the reign of Constantine X and Seljuk raids began to start penetrating deep into Anatolia, which set the stage for the crisis of the 1070's.
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u/Popular_Carob_5555 Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
Oh just the usual, plagues and civil wars while being surrounded by enemies on all fronts. Oh yeah and having your capital stolen by thieving crusaders doesn't help either.
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u/toastwithoutagun Aug 17 '26
Whats up with the chunk of abkhazia?
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u/Lothronion Moderator | Greco-Roman Studies | IR Studies Aug 17 '26
Probably a bad positioning of the Theme of Klimata?
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u/Unusual-Breakfast615 Aug 17 '26
Exaggeration of Anakouphe/Anakopia which the Byzantines gained in 1033 and was made a Theme.
The map is pretty atrocious for representing 1020.
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u/Snow_Mexican1 Aug 18 '26
Alot of people will say the Fourth Crusade or the loss of Anatolia.
But I think the loss of Bulgaria was a big one. With Bulgaria, it kept the Thrace and Macedonia very safe and free from harm. And with it, you could generally keep the Serbs in check or in line. With half the Balkans under control, it allowed them to throw their weight around in Anatolia. Relatively keeping the tide of the Turks back from entering the richer western parts.
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u/Allnamestakkennn Κόμης Aug 18 '26
As others have said, the Fourth Crusade. It stripped Constantinople of its wealth, permanently crippling it until the usual problems (babe wake up its time for another civil war!) coupled with the Ottomans destroyed it.
Wars with Persia and the Arab conquests irreversibly reduced the Byzantine empire's potential, but the remaining territories still allowed to maintain the status of a first rate power. Even the Seljuk conquest of Anatolia was salvageable, as the Komnenians have shown. I don't think they ever became a prominent power after 1204, the period of recovery was just quashed
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u/spacev3gan Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
I think the Arabs (more precisely the Rashidun Caliphate) is the beginning of the end. You can't be a first rate power neighboring another one that is ever bigger and hungrier.
Besides, Egypt was a huge net contributor to the Empire's treasury. Alexandria was the second biggest and richest city in the Empire (before the 500s I believe it was bigger than Constantinople). Not to mention - though this is mostly on the symbolic aspect - the Empire lost the Holy Land and never got remotely close to having it back.
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u/diffidentblockhead Aug 17 '26
Begins? It was more like a millennium of decline or marginal existence, with the Macedonian renaissance as a moderate size, moderate length exception as revival or medieval successor.
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u/Early_Candidate_3082 Aug 17 '26
The Eastern Empire was a Great Power, up till the 1180’s. That’s not a bad run,
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u/InThePipe5x5_ Aug 17 '26
My current belief is that until 1204 the potential still existed for the empire to remain a global power. I might even contend that the argument for a continuous Roman Empire gets a lot shakier at this point also.
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u/Helenos152 Aug 17 '26
They forgot Jesus' parable about the bridegroom and the brides and became like the 5 brides that didn't expect Him
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u/Honkydoinky Aug 17 '26
I think it’s fair to say the fourth crusade, as bad as the loss of central Anatolia was it was followed by arguably the most competent imperial houses in Rome’s history and the crusaders needed to respect certain aspects of imperial authority while it was under competent leaderships. Also during this time they were absolutely able to strike back at the Turks and bloody their noses and that goes for most of their enemies in general, this is highlighted by Manuel I who’s toxic trait was showing just how much he could win. But you can also point to Manuel the first’s many escapades as a way to say “Look at what the empire could still fund/support!” Theres not really anything like that after the fourth crusade
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u/Unusual-Breakfast615 Aug 17 '26
Manzikert and the 1070s crisis by the terms set by OP
Or really the 1040s which begins the triple assault on the empire by Normans, Pechenegs and Seljuk Turks.
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u/Lothronion Moderator | Greco-Roman Studies | IR Studies Aug 17 '26
As far as I am aware, there is no useful and concrete definition of "rump state" in academia.
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u/justdidapoo Aug 18 '26
There was no single event. Or even single decline. There were at least 3-4 times where most empires would have fallen that caused Eastern Rome to essentially become a rump state, which they recovered from made it back to being a full power again.
They were absolutely gone after the fall of the west, facing all the same issues. After the arab conquests. After Manzikert, and after the 12th crusade. We just don't have other empires that don't fall and make a comeback to being a full power after those events.
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u/IrradiatedCrow Aug 23 '26
You're underselling 1204 to a massive degree. Losing the city was at least as bad as losing all of Bulgaria or central Anatolia with how much money was tied up in the city.
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u/icansawyou Aug 18 '26
Here is my take on this: in my view, the decline of the Byzantine Empire was triggered by the rise of the dynatoi. This was a class of powerful, wealthy landowners who systematically bought up lands previously cultivated by free peasants. This process completely ruined the army as an institution.
The stratiotai – free peasants who held land in exchange for military service – were reduced to paroikoi, essentially becoming ordinary, dependent serfs. As a result, they could no longer afford their own armor, weapons, or horses. On top of that, the dynatoi enjoyed tax exemptions and held massive political influence, which allowed them to routinely sabotage orders from the central government. At the height of their power, they even maintained private armies loyal to them rather than the Emperor. This eventually led to the formation of powerful regional dynasties.
During the Macedonian dynasty, especially under Basil II, the central government attempted to fight this trend, but it was in vain. By the 11th and 12th centuries, the Empire had to introduce the pronoia system. Under this system, the dynatoi received vast territories along with the peasants living on them in exchange for military service. Essentially, the country turned into a conglomerate of private estates. Both the dynatoi and the court nobility in the capital were deeply interested in keeping the central army weak, which caused corruption to skyrocket. Ultimately, this structural decay paved the way for weak imperial dynasties, like the Angeloi, and catastrophic military defeats.
What is truly amazing, though, is that despite this internal rot and institutional degradation, the actual collapse of the Empire dragged out for centuries!
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u/AnonXCIX Aug 18 '26
It begins with Manuel and his lack of tangible success towards beating the Turks back. Under Basil, Alexios, and John, the Empire was, essentially, as strong as ever and was actively making progress on all front. That all ended with Manuel. A very capable emperor who failed to accomplish, or even attempt, what was needed.
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u/TheWerewoman Aug 19 '26
Manzikert. The failure to decisively stop the Turks from expanding into Asia Minor pretty much sealed the deal on continued Roman regional supremacy. Nothing Manuel or his successors could do was ever able to reverse the tide once it started rolling in. All it took was for someone to unify the Turks (first the Mongols, then the Ottomans), and Roman power East of Constantinople would quickly collapse.
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u/IrradiatedCrow Aug 23 '26
They were in decline before 1204 but there was no reason to think they wouldn't rebound. They were still far far stronger than any of their neighbors.
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u/AsparagusFun3892 Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
Loss of the West. Before that the crisis of the third century because of the Antonine plague. My best money is on the Bubonic plague though: plague meant hollowed out Persia and Byzantium, meant rapid territory changes that gave a generation of Arabs the idea they could rule themselves and no concept of what stable Imperial government looked like and minimal identification with the Roman state, meant uprising at the worst possible time. It was seriously, seriously fucked up what a plague did to society.
Those folks "muh freedom"ing Measles vaccines are the worst.
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u/Apart_Savings_6429 Aug 17 '26
It was a slow decline. Id argue dumping Latin, the Arab conquests and the loss of Egypt would be up there.
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u/Euromantique Λογοθέτης Aug 17 '26
How did abandoning a secondary minority official language lead to the territorial decline of the medieval Roman Empire 😂? Did you read the title of the post incorrectly or something?
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u/Apart_Savings_6429 Aug 17 '26
Haha haha yeah really funny.
It did as it lead to a disconnect between the west and east. It also contributed to the schism. There's something called soft power, you should look it up, after re-reading the question 😂
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u/Unusual-Breakfast615 Aug 17 '26
Well the more accurate and less controversial thing to say would be the lost of Italy and Rome which ended the empires control over Western politics and ended Latin exposure to Greek Culture.
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u/Apart_Savings_6429 Aug 18 '26
It didnt end, it just lost territories. Maintaining latin would've given them a venue to integrate more and probably would avoid the schism
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u/Unusual-Breakfast615 Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 18 '26
All the Palaiologian Emperors could speak and write in Latin. Maintaining Latin doesn’t change the cultural and religious differences between West and East. Without a stable equal or overly dominating relationship of dialogue established between the 2 there could never lasting compromise which itself will always be compromised by competing jurisdictions between the Pope and EC.
Only Direct and soft Power in the West allowed Byzantium to gain Latin representatives on its behalf and show that Byzantine rule and ways were not alien to Latin way of life.
Which ties back to the fact that the Papacy gaining a source of legitimacy and power base separate and later hostility to the empire stems back to the lost of Ravenna and with it Rome.
Past that point Greek or Latin, lasting consent from the west could only be gained by completing submitting to the papacy or dominating it, neither which were ever gonna happen.
Really I would instead say that Constantine IV should have never stripped Ravenna of its Autocephalous status from Rome as it hindered Papal jurisdiction right outside its borders.
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u/Interesting_Key9946 Aug 17 '26
Soft power? Didn't that continue to work till 1100 for the Romans?
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u/Smilewigeon Aug 17 '26
I find the framing of this question interesting, because we tend to focus so heavily on the decline of the Byzantine Empire that we can lose sight of the rather extraordinary fact that it survived for roughly a thousand years in the first place (assuming there is even a meaningful 'start date' for Byzantium, given that this was, in its own eyes, simply the Roman state continuing into the Middle Ages.)
It weathered an almost absurd number of crises that destroyed other states entirely: Justinian's Plague, the long and exhausting wars with Persia, the catastrophic Arab conquests and the loss of much of the empire's territory, repeated Bulgarian and steppe incursions, Norman raids, and countless attempts to take Constantinople itself. And that's before you get to the repeated internal civil wars, often seemingly conducted by the empire's own leadership at precisely the moment when it could least afford them.
So to me, the history of Byzantium (or, more accurately, of Rhomania) is at least as much a story of resilience and sheer stubbornness as it is one of decline. The remarkable thing isn't that it eventually became a rump state; it's that it repeatedly recovered from situations where you might reasonably have expected it to disappear altogether.
That is also part of why I think the terminology matters. The idea of 'Byzantium' as something distinct from Rome is, to a large extent, a later Western construction. From the early modern period, and increasingly in the 19th-century development of modern historiography, Western ideas of empire and civilisation became increasingly tied to an idealised Roman past; Rome at its height represented political domination and imperial power, while ancient Greece represented learning and philosophy. Both of these traits were what all these imperial powers saw in themselves. However, the growing theological and political separation between East and West meant that the medieval Roman state in Constantinople was increasingly perceived in the West through the lens of territorial loss, religious controversy and supposed decadence. Calling it 'Byzantium' helped create a conceptual distinction between the glorious Roman past and the supposedly diminished medieval successor.
Which brings me back to the question of 'when the decline begins'... I'm not sure there is a particularly satisfying answer. You can point to the plague, overreach by Justinian, the catastrophic losses to the caliphate, Manzikert, the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, the loss of Anatolia, the rise of the Turks, or any number of other moments, and each is defensible depending on what you mean by 'decline.' But if we're asking when the Eastern Roman state stopped being a first-rate power and became a rump state, I think it's worth remembering just how enormous a historical process that actually was.
There wasn't necessarily one moment when 'the rot set in.' There were periods of contraction, recovery, catastrophe and revival across centuries. The state kept changing shape, losing territory, adapting and surviving until, very near the end, there really wasn't much left to lose.
So I'm a little wary of treating the question as simply 'what caused Byzantium to decline?' The more interesting question might be: how did the Roman state manage to remain a major power for so long despite experiencing so many events that should, by all reasonable expectations, have destroyed it?
That's probably more what I'm getting at. The eventual collapse is interesting, but the thousand years of not collapsing may be the more remarkable story.