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Constantine rebuilt the Greek city of Byzantium and then he renamed it after himself. He renamed it Constantinople, which became the new capital of the empire.
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The Byzantine empire reached their peak under the emperor Justinian. He wanted to revive ancient Rome by recovering lands that had been overrun by inhvadors.
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Hagia Sophia means "Holy Wisdom." It is located where Europe meets Asia and where Islam meets Christianity. Justinian ordered the construction of this church after the other church was destroied by riots. Since 1935, it has been a museum . The interior reflects Christian and Muslim heritage.
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General Belisarius led Byzantine armies to reconquer North Africa, Italy and the southern Iberian penisula. The fighting tired Justinian's treasury and weakened his defenses in the east. Therefore the victories were only temporary.
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Arab armies slowly gained control of much of the Mediterranean world. Constantinople withstood their attack, and the Byzantines held onto their heartland.
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In the earlier years of his long reign, everything was dominated by civil war against powerful generals from the Anatolian aristocracy. Basil oversaw the expansion of the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire, and the final and complete subjugation of Bulgaria. When Basil died, the Empire stretched from Southern Italy to the Caucasus and from the Danube to Palestine.
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A split between eastern and western Christianity is known as the Great Schism. The Byzantine church became the Eastern, or Greek, Orthodox Church and the western branch became the roman Catholic Church. The pope and the patriarch stopped talking to each other, so then the contacts between the churches became distant. They treated each other as rivals versus branches of the same faith.
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The First Crusade started as a widespread pilgrimage and ended as a military expedition by Roman Catholic Europe. It started on 27 November 1095 by Pope Urban II with at first having the goal of responding to an appeal from Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who wanted and needed western volunteers to come to his aid and help to repel the invadingTurks. The First Crusade was part of the Christian response to the Muslim conquests, and later there was the Second to the Ninth Crusades.
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Venetian merchants persuaded knights on the Fourth Crusade to attack Constantiople. For 3 days, crusaders burned and wrecked the city, sending a lot of treasure westward. Western Christians ruled Constantinople for 57 years.
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As the empire came to an end, many Greek scholars left Constantinople to teach at Italian universities. They took Greek manuscripts, their knowledge and Byzantine culture with them to the west.
