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

Anthony Kaldellis argues that the Byzantine Empire is not a separate historical entity but the direct, unbroken legal and cultural continuation of the ancient Roman Empire. The term Byzantine Empire was invented by historians writing long after the empire collapsed, and the people living within it called themselves Romans and considered themselves Roman citizens all the way to 1453 and beyond. Western Europeans had political reasons to portray the Eastern Empire as something distinct, calling it the Empire of the Greeks for roughly a thousand years before adopting the term Byzantine Empire. Kaldellis places the burden of proof on those who claim it was something other than Rome, and frames the Roman state as lasting over 2,200 years from its founding in 753 BC through the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD.

Outside three major crisis points, Kaldellis characterizes Roman history as one of slow but steady economic growth and territorial expansion rather than continuous decline. The three crises were the Arab conquests of the 630s, the Seljuk Turk conquest of Asia Minor in the 1070s, and the Fourth Crusade of 1204, when armies mostly from France sacked and dismembered the empire. After each crisis the Romans regrouped and put their economy on a trajectory of revival and eventual reconquest, every single time except the last, and did so without outside assistance.

Kaldellis identifies taxation as the single most important factor explaining the functioning, success, and civil conflicts of the Roman Empire. Diocletian conducted a universal census of every taxable asset in the empire, enabling the government to produce a budget, and ended Italy's longstanding tax exemption. The civilian administration's principal function was identifying funds to pay the army through census and taxation. Church services throughout the empire included prayers for the emperor, reinforcing imperial integration at the local level, and the ability to petition local officials or the emperor directly was a major source of social cohesion.

The Byzantine political system contained no formal hereditary right to the throne, meaning any emperor who seized power through violence could not logically prevent others from attempting the same. Kaldellis counts approximately 120 civil wars across the thousand years of Byzantine history he studies, and roughly 46 percent of emperors of Constantinople were overthrown through violence. He argues this made civil wars a recurring mechanism of accountability rather than a sign of systemic failure, and that the most effective defense against violent removal was competent governance and popular goodwill. The hippodrome in Constantinople, with a capacity estimated between 30,000 and 100,000 spectators, functioned as a perpetual referendum on imperial legitimacy, with crowd reactions carrying real political weight.

The Edict of Caracalla in 212 AD extended Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire, and within a generation all emperors and most powerful officials came from the provinces. Roman law on property, inheritance, and marriage enabled women to run businesses across many centuries, and Jewish women in the Eastern Roman Empire in the tenth and eleventh centuries took disputes to Roman courts because Roman law granted them more rights than rabbinical courts did. Kaldellis argues Rome was unique among empires in not only extending citizenship universally but implementing it with genuine legal force.

Constantine's conversion to Christianity is described as a revolutionary decision with no obvious political payoff, since Christians were perhaps ten percent of the empire at the time and held few elite positions. Kaldellis argues the scale of the decision almost requires an explanation rooted in personal belief rather than cynical pragmatism. He also argues that Rome captured Christianity rather than Christianity triumphing over Rome, meaning the religion was co-opted by the imperial system, making its trajectory fundamentally different from Islam, which came into existence without a pre-existing state and had to create its own.

The irreversible decline of the East Roman Empire began between 1300 and 1350, when the loss of Asia Minor eliminated the empire's ability to draw on both its European and Asian territorial wings. Around 1400 Timur of Tamerlane defeated the Ottomans and broke up their empire, delaying the final conquest by approximately 50 years. Kaldellis identifies foreign invasion, not internal decomposition, as the primary cause of collapse, arguing the empire could have lasted another thousand years given its internal fundamentals absent external pressure. He describes Byzantine society as unique in history as the only society simultaneously Roman, Christian, and Greek, and frames its roughly 1,200-year survival in one of the most geographically dangerous corridors in the world as historically remarkable.