Question

What factor united the various groups of people in the Byzantine Empire?
What role did the Christian Church have over Western Europe during the Middle Ages?
What were the Byzantine’s cultural contributions to the world?
Why was the location of the Byzantine Empire significant?
Describe the city of Constantinople.

Answer 1

1 well, they were the Greeks, the Romans, and the Latins.......so what do you think??

Answer 2

2. (not my work)
The Church in medieval times was Catholic and it took control to give salvation to the people. The Church also started many crusades to gain back the Holy Land. Most failed but one a success. Today, Christians are able to enter due to these crusades. The Church is a valuable prized religion and still is today. The Church also was supreme. Answer The greatest reason the Church was important during the Middle Ages, was because the Middle Ages were a time in which people believed their souls were the most important things they had, and the true Religion was the only way to save them. In terms of the day to day lives of ordinary people, the Church guided them through their lives with baptism, confession and absolution, confirmation, Eucharist, unction, and, when they died, it buried them and conducted prayers for their souls.
The Church provided services beyond those that were purely spiritual. This was partly because it was important for Christians to be charitable. The result was that Church organizations provided hospital care, medicines, care for orphans, education, safe lodgings for travelers, and safe places where people who wanted to live out their lives in contemplation and prayer could do so, the monasteries and convents. (please see link below on Christian monasticism)
The Church had organizations such as the Knights Templar, who accompanied travellers as they made their ways through the lands. The travelers included pilgrims, but they also included merchants, and really anyone on the road. (please see link below on Knights Templar)
From a historic perspective, the crusades represent a great exercise of power of the Church, and possibly one of its greatest failures. They took over the Holy Land and held it briefly, but at a cost that in retrospect was extraordinarily high. The crusaders also contributed greatly to the destruction of the Byzantine Empire and the eventual fall of Constantinople to the Muslim Turks.
Monasteries, convents, and ordinary churches also provided places of refuge to those who sought it. A woman who was running away from an abusive husband or a predatory admirer could seek protection in such a place. So could a felon. And while felons often had only a limited amount of time to be protected, during which they could confess and possibly make a better deal for justice (usually no more than six weeks), others often stayed as long as they needed to. And no one, not even agents of a king, could remove them. (please see link below on Right of Asylum)
The Church was a counter to kings who wanted absolute power, because the Church had one power the kings could not take away: it could excommunicate a king. Today this does not sound like much, but at the time, excommunication was a disaster. The Middle Ages were a time in which everything was controlled by oaths, from oaths of allegiance to treaties. When a pope excommunicated a king, everyone, from the king's subjects to his enemies, could be freed from those oaths, and all treaties could be cancelled. Enemies could rise up in revolt or invade, without fear of condemnation by the Church. Subjects of the king who did not like him, could switch sides with a clear conscience. There are king and emperors who were examples of this, such as King John of England, who found the difficulties he encountered from excommunication so onerous that he was willing to swear fealty to the pope to get out of them. (please see link below on King John)
The idea that the Catholic Church was politically supreme is not correct. For one thing, Christianity was not the only religion in Europe. There were pagans and Jews in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, and in such places as Spain, there were large numbers of Muslims, many in Muslim countries. Jewish and Muslim contributions to European civilization profoundly altered the nature of the later parts of the Middle Ages. (please see link below on Islamic contributions to medieval Europe)
But also, the Roman Catholic Church was not the only brand of Christianity. Apart from a number of very powerful heresies, whose followers controlled whole areas of the continent from time to time, there were other Church Organizations, such as the Celtic Church, which the Catholic Church absorbed in time, and the Oriental Orthodox and the Coptic Orthodox Churches, which have existed from the beginning and to this day. More importantly, the Catholic Church was never well unified, with various schisms always either threatening or under way. The greatest of these, the East-West Schism, divided the main body of the Church into the Roman Catholic, in the West, and the Eastern Orthodox, in the East, in 1054. But there were others that were patched up, both before and after that event. One was the Great Schism of the West, which produced a time when there were two popes in Europe, one in Rome, and one in France. (please see links below on heresy, Orthodox Christianity, East-West Schism, and the Western Schism)
Nor is it correct that the Church was somehow responsible for the suppression of science or witch hunts. Such meddling in affairs came after the Middle Ages were over. There was a set of condemnations issued by the Church, in 1210, 1270, and 1277, and these had a profound influence on science, but the influence was positive, freeing students and scientists from restraints imposed by university teachers who insisted that Aristotle was always right about science. The effect of these condemnations was so profound that some historians have referred to them is a beginning point of modern science. The witch hunts were a thing of the Renaissance and Reformation, as was the meddling in science. (Please see the links on witch hunts and the condemnations of 1210 to 1277)

Answer 3

3. The Empire, a bastion of Christianity and one of the prime trade centers in the world, helped to shield Western Europe from early Muslim expansion, provided a stable gold currency for the Mediterranean region, influenced the laws, political systems, and customs of much of Europe and the Middle East, and preserved much of the literary works and scientific knowledge of ancient Greece, Rome, and many other cultures.
The finest Byzantine literary works were Hymns and devotionals. The other area where the Byzantines excelled was in practical writing. While rarely works of genius, a series of competent, diligent writers, both male and female, produced many works of practical value in the fields of public administration, military affairs, and the practical sciences. The early theological work of the Byzantines was important in the development of western thought. Historiography influenced later Russian chroniclers.

Answer 4

4. The Byzantines stopped the advance of Islam into Europe from the east, for a long time. The French stopped the Islamic armies at the Battle of Tours, but the Byzantines held back far more powerful forces; at the very heart of Islam. The Battle of Yarmuk in 636ad cost the empire much of its land, but by establishing the border with the Abbasid caliphate, it held back Islam.

The Byzantines were also authors of the Justinian Code, which served as the basis of most Western nations' legal systems until at least the 19th century.
It was the Eastern part of The Roman Empire that survived after the Western Roman Empire declined and collapsed.

Byzantium was rich, highly populated, and contained a large Greek-speaking population. It preserved a lot of ancient knowledge as Western Europe collapsed into The Dark Ages after the fall of Rome.
The Byzantine empire spread Roman culture and western ways to eastern Europe and the Middle east. They were also the only real centralized Medieval Government that was consistently powerful. The BE was able to conquer much of the former Roman empire for a short time, and they were the first since the Western Roman Empire to spread law, order, safety, and government across a massive amount of land.

Answer 5

5. FREAKING IMPENETRABLE! THE GREAT WALLED CITY. THE IMPREGNABLE CITY.
Constaninople is the city that is now called Istanbul. Was under the control, and the seat of power for the Eastern Roman Empire or the Byzantine Empire from 395 to 1453, and then the Ottoman Empire from 1453 to 1922, after which it ceased to be the capital of anything as Ankara became the capital of Turkey. In 1930 it was officially renamed Istanbul - a name the Turks had been using ever since they conquered the city. The only change in this chronology is when the so-called Latin Kingdom ruled over Constantinople for the period of 1204 to 1261. This happened under the auspices of the Fourth Crusade when on the way to the Holy Land the crusaders decided instead to sack & conquer the city of their fellow Christians. They were closely linked to the Latin Kingdoms in the Holy land, installing rulers that managed to hold the city for nearly 60 years, until Michael VIII Palaeologus re-took the city for the Byzantines.

When the Muslim Turkish Ottoman captured the city in 1453 from the Greek Orthodox Chritian Byzantium's they did set about turning the city from a centre of Christianity to the centre of a grand Muslim Empire. They "cleanised" all the churches/holy places with Rose Water, and then turned the most of the churches into mosques, whilst protecting the places of Christian pilgramage (ie saints burail places). They did not kill all the Christians in the city as the Christian's often did to the Muslims when taking their cities.