The Middle Ages: The Byzantine Empire ; Sixth grade social studies ; Homeschool

 The Middle Ages: The Byzantine Empire and The Early Civilizations of America ; Sixth grade social studies ; Homeschool 

Its hard to believe February is already over. 2021 is seeming to fly. This week, I’ve been learning about the middle ages. I've got most of my information from "Everything you need to know to ace world history in one big fat notebook". Here, we will be only focusing on European and American civilizations. 

The Byzantine Empire:

The Byzantine Empire started around 330 CE. The Byzantine, or Eastern Roman Empire was located in parts of Italy, Greece, Turkey, Libya, Israel, Egypt, Cyprus, Syria, Morocco and Bulgaria. Back then, the capital, Constantinople, was a powerful trade center until its fall in the 1400's. 

Justinian was one of the greatest Byzantine emperor, whose term began in 527 CE. Even though Romans had made the source of democracy- Roman laws were still a mess. Documents with rules and laws were mixed and weren’t organized. This made everything hard to keep track of. Justinian made a group to sift through the ancient laws and make sense of them. The Justinian code, is an organized collection of Roman rules. Believe it or not, most modern European countries use the code to this day.

However, Justinian’s accomplishment caused trouble in some countries like North Africa, Palestine and Syria. As the Byzantine became bigger, it was soon too large to protect. As the rise of Islam happened around the 600’s, unified Arab groups grew throughout the empire. This caused the Arabs to take iver Syria and Palestine. 

By the 700’s, the Byzantine Empire became much smaller than it’s original state. However, it started to expand again during the twelfth century. They charged taxes on goods and quickly became rich. 

It was a short session, but I think the Byzantines were fascinating.