What difficulties did the Byzantine Empire have to deal with internally in the twelfth century? How did it recover from these difficulties? Was it enough to maintain the strength of the empire in the region?
What will be an ideal response?
A. Internal difficulties
1. agriculture was stagnant
a. emperors tried to revive rural revenues by giving peasant lands
to great lords and encouraging monastic colonization of new lands
2. attempt to exploit new resources
a. limited usefulness in a state whose territory was much
diminished
3. diminished wealth
a. squalor and inequalities of wealth in Constantinople
B. Efforts of recovery
1. empire was obliged to look to trade and industry for its wealth
a. Constantinople benefited from its uniquely favorable position
for trade, where Mediterranean and trans-Asian routes met
b. revenues of 200,000 gold pieces a year from rents, market
dues, and the tolls on passing trade
2. relationship with Venice
a. Venice began to build up enough capital to become major traders, channeling toward Europe a share of the valuable trade in silks and spices that was concentrated at Byzantium
b. Venice was close to Byzantium culturally and economically
c. Byzantine models saturated their taste in art and buildings
C. Recovery could not be sustained
1. Byzantium's wealth was a magnet and its weakness a motive
2. popular enthusiasm revived for a new effort to launch a Crusade to
recapture Jerusalem
3. crusaders were convinced by Alexius IV, pretender to the Byzantine
throne, to divert from their original alliance with Venetian army and
attack Constantinople
4. Crusade ended in 1204 by shedding Christian blood, capturing and
sacking Constantinople and dividing most of what was left of the
Byzantine Empire in Europe among the victors
5. Venice achieved a virtual monopoly in the rights to Byzantine trade and suddenly becoming an imperial power in the eastern Mediterranean
6. remnants of the Byzantine Empire in western and coastal Anatolia
LO 1
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