#498 – Anthony Kaldellis: Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, Rise & Fall of Empires

Anthony Kaldellis argues that the Byzantine Empire is a term invented by later historians and never used by the people who lived under it. Every primary source calls the state the Roman Empire, its citizens Romans, and its polity Romania, from the traditional founding in 753 BC through the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD. Western Europeans invented the label for political rather than scholarly reasons, and Kaldellis places the burden of proof on those who claim a meaningful break occurred.

Measured from 753 BC to 1453 AD the Roman state lasted over 2,200 years. Kaldellis uses the Ship of Theseus as his central analytical frame: every component changed over time yet identity persisted through an unbroken story. By 1453 Romans were Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians entirely unlike the Latin-speaking polytheists of the Republic, but both groups belong to the same continuous political community. He notes that Hadrian was already bilingual and Greek-loving, making him more similar to later so-called Byzantine emperors than to Middle Republican Romans, which exposes the inconsistency of scholars who group Hadrian with early Rome but separate him from later Greek-speaking rulers.

Kaldellis identifies three moments of swift catastrophic territorial loss against a background of otherwise slow growth: the Arab conquests stripped major provinces in the 630s, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor in the 1070s, and the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204. Outside these three crises the Roman state was broadly stable and expansionary. He argues these were discrete exogenous shocks rather than products of internal decay, and that after each crisis the Romans consolidated, regrouped, and put their economy on a trajectory of revival and eventual reconquest every single time except the last.

The Roman imperial government projected a consistent persona emphasizing that emperors were responsive and working solely for the benefit of subjects. Because no emperor held a recognized hereditary right to the throne, no ruler could prevent others from attempting to seize power through violence. Kaldellis counts approximately 120 civil wars across the roughly thousand years of Byzantine history he studies, and approximately 46 percent of emperors of Constantinople were overthrown through violence. The Hippodrome in Constantinople, holding between 30,000 and 100,000 spectators, functioned as a perpetual referendum where emperors gauged popularity through crowd acclamations. In the 1190s Emperor Alexius III proposed a German tax in the Hippodrome and immediately reversed course after the crowd erupted in opposition. The most effective strategy for an emperor to avoid violent overthrow was to maintain popular goodwill rather than resort to preemptive arrests and executions.

Diocletian, reigning from 284 to 305 AD, resolved the third-century crisis by creating a tetrarchy of four co-rulers and implementing a universal census covering every taxable asset in the empire, enabling the state to produce a budget. He ended Italy's exemption from taxation and created the administrative and fiscal model that lasted three centuries or more. Kaldellis regards taxation as the single most important factor in the functioning, success, and civil conflicts of the Roman Empire. Constantine fought through roughly six simultaneous claimants before emerging as sole ruler in 324 and founded Constantinople in 330 at a location geographically halfway between the Danube and Euphrates frontiers. Kaldellis estimates Christians represented perhaps 10 percent of the empire's population at the time of Constantine, and most scholars conclude his conversion was a genuine personal religious belief rather than a political calculation, though historians are uncomfortable explaining major historical shifts through personal choice.

Justinian, reigning from 527 to 565, commissioned the Corpus Juris Civilis, which is essentially what Roman law is today, with Roman legal concepts about property and ownership remaining embedded in European legal practice to the present. His western reconquests were a strategic failure overall because stripping eastern armies allowed the Persians to destroy Antioch and left successors more frontiers to defend with fewer concentrated forces. The plague beginning in 541 AD has been confirmed as Yersinia pestis, but Kaldellis is skeptical of the maximalist position that it killed half the population, noting no pause in military operations or taxation is visible in the sources while Justinian was simultaneously waging war on four or five fronts.

Kaldellis explains the empire's extraordinary longevity through two reinforcing mechanisms. Imperial authorities made extraordinary effort to persuade subjects they were ruling on their behalf and actually tended to do so in practice. Subjects shared a tightly unified Roman and Orthodox identity and were aware that alternatives under non-Romans and non-Christians were worse. Bulgaria, conquered in 1018, was the only province that actively sought to break away, eventually succeeding in 1185. No other Roman provincials showed separatist movements, the center never lost its ability to tax its territories, and there were no widespread peasant uprisings of the kind that occurred in every other comparable empire. Kaldellis considers collapse effectively inevitable by the 1340s due to civil wars, Serbian expansion, and the Black Death, with the final fall in 1453 attributable primarily to foreign invasions the empire could no longer absorb rather than internal decomposition.