BYZANTINE ERA. 1

BYZANTINE ERA. 1) The period of the Byzantine Empire extending from Constantine’s founding of the New Rome, Constantinople (qq.v.), in 330 to Sultan Mohammed II’s conquest of the latter on 29 May 1453. Quite the longest and most influential period in the history of the Orthodox Church, it left its impress on the latter’s worship, theology, spirituality, and liturgy (qq.v.). The Byzantine era, moreover, enjoyed a kind of half-life-“Byzance apres Byzance”-in the centuries of the Ottoman Empire when the Ecumenical Patriarch (qq.v.) acted similar to a surrogate emperor for the Ottomans’ Christian population. In a sense, the Byzantine era in the Balkans and Middle East (qq.v.) does not truly end until the rise of nationalism and the emergence of the state churches in the 19th c.

2) A second, more technical sense of this phrase is that of a system of calendrical computation worked out in the 630s by the monk George, which became the standard method of dating by the 10th c. Papers, including the decrees of emperors and patriarchs, were dated from the creation of the world, reckoned to have occurred in the year 5508 B.C. In Russia this system of dating, inherited from the Byzantines, was changed under Peter the Great in 1700. The system can still be seen in use among those Orthodox with archaizing tendencies.