Читать книгу The World's Christians - Douglas Jacobsen - Страница 29

The late Byzantine period began on an upswing. The world of Orthodoxy was expanding northward as a result of the conversion of Russia, and the Orthodox Byzantine Empire seemed poised to reconquer much of the territory that had been lost to Islam. Under Basil II, who ruled from 976 to 1025, the Byzantine Empire made impressive gains in the East, in what is now Syria and northern Iraq, but then the tide changed. The Byzantine army suffered a huge defeat at the hands of the Seljuk Turks in the famous Battle of Manzikert (1071) in what is now eastern Turkey. That defeat marked the beginning of a long, slow decline in both the Byzantine Empire and its Orthodox Church.