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Constantine was emperor of the Byzantine empire from 306-337 AD. He founded the city of Constantinople which became the capital of the Byzantines.
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Justinian became emperor from 527 to 565. While he was emperor he tried to revive the empire's greatness and reconquer the lost western half of the historical Roman Empire.
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The Hagia Sophia was completed in 537. It served as an Eastern Orthodox Cathederal and seat of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. until 1204. The church was dedicated to the Wisdom of God. It is said to have "changed the history of architecture."
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He was the leading military figure in the age of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. He led imperial armies against the Persian empire, the Vandal kingdom of North Africa, the Ostrogothic regime of Italy, and the barbarian tribes intruding upon Constantinople. He was one of the last important figures in the Roman military tradition.
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The Islamic conquests began with the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. (700 AD) They grew well beyond the Arabian Peninsula in the form of a Muslim Empire with an area of influece that stretched from the borders of China and India, across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula, to the Pyrenees. The Muslim conquests brought the collapse of the Sassanid Empire and a great territorial loss for the Byzantine Empire.
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Basil sought to restore territories the Empire had lost long before. He extended imperial rule in the Balkans (notably Bulgaria), Mesopotamia, Georgia, and Armenia and increased his domestic authority by attacking the powerful landed interests of the military aristocracy and of the church.
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The East-West Schism is the medieval division of Chalcedonian Christianity into Eastern (Greek) and Western (Latin) branches, which later became known as the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. The East–West Schism is the larger and more lasting of the two schisms to which the term "Great Schism" is applied (the other being the Western Schism).
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Emperor Alexios I was the Byzantine emperor from 1081 to 1118. Alexios was able to halt the Byzantine decline and begin the military, financial, and territorial recovery known as the Komnenian restoration. In the first week of March 1095, a delegation from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus presented Urban with a request for help against the Turks. Pope Urban II's response was to preach the First Crusade, starting on November 27, 1095
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The Fourth Crusade was originally intended to conquer Muslim-controlled Jerusalem by means of an invasion through Egypt. Instead, in April 1204, the Crusaders of Western Europe invaded and sacked the Orthodox Christian city of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. This is seen as one of the final acts in the Great Schism between the Eastern Orthodox Church and Roman Catholic Church, and a key turning point in the decline of the Byzantine empire and of Christianity in the Near East.
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Historians generally agree that after the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the empire was only a shadow of its former self. The death of Michael VIII in 1282 marks the last period of Byzantine success on anything more than a minor scale. From this date onwards, the empire entered its final decline.
