Byzantium: The Rome That Refused to Fall
The Byzantine Empire called itself Rome. Its citizens called themselves Romans. Its emperor held the title that Augustus had held. Its laws were Roman laws. Its language of government was Latin until the seventh century, when Greek — which had always been the spoken language of the eastern provinces — became official. The entity that modern historians call Byzantium would not have recognized the name: it was Byzantium only in retrospect, named by scholars for the ancient Greek city on whose site Constantine had built his new capital. To everyone who lived in it, from Constantine’s founding of Constantinople in 330 AD to the Ottoman conquest in 1453, it was simply Rome. That it had relocated, that the western half had collapsed, that Germanic kings sat in Ravenna and eventually in the city of Rome itself — none of this changed the self-conception of an empire that understood itself as continuous with Augustus.
This continuity was not purely rhetorical. The Eastern Empire’s survival while the West collapsed is one of the more significant facts in ancient history, and its explanation lies partly in genuine structural advantages. The eastern provinces were richer than the western ones — the cities of Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt had larger populations, more developed commercial economies, and higher tax revenues than the frontier provinces that dominated the West. Alexandria and Antioch were among the largest cities in the Mediterranean world. Constantinople, built on a peninsula with water on three sides and a massive land wall completed by Theodosius II in the early fifth century, was among the most defensible positions in the ancient world. The eastern frontier against Persia, though perennially dangerous, was manageable in a way that the Rhine-Danube frontier was not, because it was a defined point of contact rather than a vast open perimeter.
The fifth century, which destroyed the Western Empire, was difficult for the East but survivable. The Huns who devastated the Balkans under Attila were bought off with tribute — a humiliation, but a solvent one. The Gothic peoples who settled permanently in the western provinces were redirected, subsidized, or defeated in ways that preserved eastern territorial integrity. When the last Western emperor was deposed in 476, the Eastern emperor Zeno continued to reign in Constantinople without apparent constitutional crisis. The Roman world had not ended; it had contracted.
Justinian, who ruled from 527 to 565 AD, attempted to undo the contraction. His general Belisarius reconquered North Africa from the Vandals in 533 and most of Italy from the Ostrogoths in a campaign that lasted nearly twenty years. Justinian reclaimed Southeastern Spain as well. At his death, the empire controlled more territory than at any point since the early fifth century, and his legal codification — the Corpus Juris Civilis — had organized the entire inheritance of Roman law into a form that would shape European legal development for the next millennium. The reconquests proved too expensive to hold; the Byzantine presence in Italy collapsed within a generation under Lombard pressure, and the reconquered territories required resources the empire could not sustain. But the legal achievement was permanent.
The seventh century was catastrophic in a way the fifth century had not been. The Islamic expansion that followed Muhammad’s death in 632 AD was unlike anything the empire had previously faced: a military force animated by religious conviction, operating across the vast territory of the Arabian Peninsula, and expanding with a speed that outpaced Byzantine response capacity. Syria, Palestine, and Egypt — the three richest provinces of the eastern empire, the fiscal and demographic foundation of its survival — fell within fifteen years. Persia, which had been the empire’s eastern rival for centuries and had recently fought to exhaustion in a war that ended in Byzantine victory, was eliminated entirely by the Arab armies. The empire that emerged from the seventh century was territorially a fraction of its former self, essentially confined to Anatolia, the Balkans, and portions of Italy, and structurally transformed in ways that make the term Byzantine — meaning distinct from the earlier Roman Empire — more appropriate than it had been.
What survived was still formidable. The empire defended Constantinople against Arab siege in 674–678 and 717–718 AD, on both occasions breaking the attacking fleets with Greek fire — an incendiary compound whose precise formula has been lost but whose effects are extensively documented. The Macedonian dynasty of the ninth through eleventh centuries presided over a military and cultural renaissance. Byzantine missionaries converted Bulgaria and Russia, transmitting Orthodox Christianity, the Cyrillic alphabet, and Byzantine legal and artistic culture into the Slavic world. Constantinople was, by most measures, the largest and most sophisticated city in the Christian world for most of the medieval period, a status that the Crusaders recognized when they sacked it in 1204.
The end came gradually and then suddenly, which is how most ends come. The Seljuk Turks won the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 and broke Byzantine control of Anatolia, the imperial heartland. The Fourth Crusade’s sack of Constantinople in 1204 established a Latin empire in the city for fifty years and permanently weakened the state’s capacity even after the Byzantines recaptured their capital. The Ottoman expansion of the fourteenth century reduced the empire progressively to the city and its immediate environs. When Mehmed II brought his army and his cannon to the walls of Constantinople in 1453, he was besieging what had been for some decades a city-state rather than an empire. The walls that Theodosius had built held for over a thousand years. They did not hold in 1453.
The fall of Constantinople was recognized at the time as significant — Renaissance humanists in Italy were among the first to understand what had ended — but it was not simply the fall of a city. It was the end of the Roman Empire, which had now finally and definitively ceased to exist eleven hundred and twenty-three years after the date historians conventionally assign to the fall of the West. That is a long time to refuse to fall. The Byzantines earned their thousand years, and the history that treats them as a footnote to Rome’s real story has misread the text.