Why Did Byzantium Perish

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.