Julia Wilkeyson
March 30th, 2015
Mr. McCarthy
AP World 9
1) Hagia Sophia, also known as the Church of Holy Wisdom, was and is the most famous architectural structure in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. It was built by Emperor Justinian I, and is one of the world’s key monuments because of its huge size and daring technological innovations. When it was first built, the Hagia Sophia was a
Christian church, but was converted into a mosque when Byzantium was invaded. It is now a museum.
2) Justinian’s codification of laws came from the law code he had created by reorganizing
Roman laws into a single code. It had taken classes into account for punishments and gave an option of fines or jail time with punishment. It influences today by being the foundation of European Law.
3) Greek orthodoxy was practiced in the Byzantine Empire. While in the unified state of
Kyiv and Novgorod, Kievan Rus, had the Eastern Slavs who were pagans, people who worshipped Earth’s natural forces. In 998, ruler Vladimir I converted to Orthodox
Christianity, then made it the official religion in Kievan Rus. Russian Orthodox services were held in a Slavic language known as old Church Slavonic rather than the Greek language of Byzantium.
4) Slavic peoples were the most numerous of the European peoples, with a population of more than 250 million. They had lived in Eastern and Central Europe, most of the Balkan peninsula, and beyond the Ural Mountains in Asia. Early Slavs were a group of farmers and herders who had lived in the marshes and woodlands of what is now eastern Poland, western Russia, Belarus, and the Ukraine. By the 7th century, the Slavic peoples had traveled as far south as the Adriatic and Aegean seas. In the next two centuries, they settled the Balkan peninsula and most of the Byzantine empire, dislocating natives or influencing newcomers such as Bulgarians.
5) Kyiv, first settled in prehistoric times, became an East Slavic settlement in the sixth and seventh centuries. It soon became an important commercial center on a major trade route.
In 860 the city was taken over by Varangians (Vikings), who made it the center of the first significant East Slavic state, called Kievan Rus. In 988, during the reign of
Volodymyr I (Vladimir I; also known as Saint Vladimir), the inhabitants of Kyiv adopted the Greek Orthodox faith, and the city became the leading religious center in Kievan Rus.
6) Tartars was a collective name that was used for the peoples of Turkish origin whose ancestors invaded parts of Asia and Europe under Mongol leaders in the 13th century.
The original Tartars originated from eastcentral Asia or central Siberia and spoke a language belonging to the Turkic branch of Altaic languages.
Points to Ponder
1) Byzantium officially began when there was the divide between the Roman Empire into the Western Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantine Empire thrived where Rome suffered, becoming a vibrant center for trade in it’s own right. Ships from the Black Sea and trade from Asia Minor, Egypt and the land routes of Asia had all th contributed to the Byzantine Empire’s wealth through trade. When Rome fell in the 5 century, it broke into three parts allowing for the continuation of the Byzantine Empire.
2) Byzantium combined the Greek tradition as it was located on the site of an older Greek city, the laws and newer culture of the Romans, who had built the empire to protect the
Roman culture from the demise of the Western Empire and the newer culture that sprang up in the new capital at Constantinople, the new city, which looked like a combination of
Rome, Greece and the neighboring Muslim world. Emperor Justinian I had taken Roman
Law and made it more useful for the Byzantines, calling it Justinian’s Code of Law.
3) Over hundreds of years, distance, since the Roman Empire had split into two empires, caused a different “style of Christianity to
