ABSTRACT

One of the best syntheses in the field of Byzantine history, Charles Diehl's famous Byzantium: Greatness and Decline, is devoted partially to an analysis of Byzantine strength. The development of Constantinopolitan and imperial rhetoric is closely associated with the circumstances surrounding Constantinople's foundation. The concept of Rome and the Empire's eternity, however, could not simply be transferred to Constantine's city. The Byzantines, then, found the bases of Byzantine greatness in a religio-political ideology inherited from late Antiquity and adapted in the mid-Byzantine period to the Christian environment by a strong emphasis on divine protection; in a theory of kingship which considered emperor and empire the images of the Logos of God and the kingdom of God, respectively, and assigned to the Byzantine emperor the task of periodically restoring man to the faith in which God had created him; and finally in a sense of Byzantine mission consisting in the preaching of the Gospel 'to the ends of the world'.