Empire of God, page 2
The title “Byzantine Empire,” in fact, did not even exist during the entire lifespan of that empire, and the people of that empire never thought of themselves as “Byzantines.” One of the earliest appearances of this usage came in 1481, twenty-eight years after the empire fell. The Italian artist Costanzo da Ferrara fashioned a medallion for Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, on which Mehmed is called Byzantinii imperator, that is, “emperor of the Byzantines,” a title that the actual Byzantine emperors never used.14
Between around 1464 and 1480, the Greek scholar Laonikos Chalkokondyles wrote his Histories, covering the latter period of the empire, from the end of the thirteenth century up to the demise of the empire in 1453. One of his objectives was to dissociate the fallen empire from its Roman identity. Accordingly, Chalkokondyles writes that after the Romans “made the Greek city of Byzantion their capital,” the “Greeks mixed with the Romans in this place, and because many more Greeks ruled there than Romans, their language and customs ultimately prevailed, but they changed their name and no longer called themselves by their hereditary one. They saw fit to call the kings of Byzantion by a title that dignified them, ‘emperors of the Romans,’ but never again ‘kings of the Greeks.’”15
Laonikos Chalkokondyles may have been attempting to demonstrate his loyalty to the new Ottoman overlords, and to dispel any impression that he was still hoping for aid from Western Europe to save his people from Islamic hegemony or had some dual loyalty. However, as he is critical of Mehmed II, it may be that he was writing for a Western European audience; the endeavor to dissociate the Byzantine Empire from its Roman identity dovetailed nicely with the practice of many Western Europeans for centuries.
A Roman Empire without Rome?
Nevertheless, the preference for a word other than “Roman” to denote both this empire and its people is understandable. A Roman Empire that did not include Rome for most of its lifespan and whose citizens did not speak Latin seems strange, and that strangeness struck some of those who dealt with the Byzantines themselves. This line of thought had catastrophic consequences as the Eastern and Western churches went into schism and the West began to regard the Byzantine East as increasingly alien; perhaps if fifteenth-century Western Europeans had regarded the Ottoman siege of Constantinople as a question of the survival of the Roman Empire itself, they would have acted with more dispatch to try to save it. But of course, there were other reasons why sufficient aid to transform the situation didn’t come, and even if it had, it would likely have arrived far too late by that point to make a difference.
It is clear from the unanimous witness of a thousand years of Byzantine writing that the Byzantines considered themselves Romans, and that this was not controversial except when they were dealing with Westerners. The loss of Rome was lamented, but Rome itself was not then the grand city that it had once been or is today, and no people have ever considered their identity to have been fundamentally changed by the loss of a particular territory; why should the Romans of Constantinople have been any different in that regard?
As for their use of Greek rather than Latin, this simply reflected the fact that the eastern regions of the Roman Empire had always spoken Greek. Greek was also the universal language of educated people the world over, as French and then English became later. While Latin was used at the government level, Greek was the common language of everyday usage, and so if imperial officials wished to make themselves understood to the people, they had to communicate in Greek. Consequently Justinian, who died in 565, was the last Roman emperor whose native tongue was Latin. Perhaps Latin would have continued to play a role in the life of the empire if it had managed to hold on to Rome and portions of Italy after Justinian reconquered them, but here again, one’s language does not change one’s ethnicity. Most people in the United States of America speak English, but many do not trace their ancestors back to English-speaking lands. The Romans in Constantinople continued to think of themselves as Romans even after they began speaking Greek universally.
Even in our own day, the tiny remnant of native Greeks in Constantinople, that is, Istanbul, continue to regard themselves as Romans. On May 28, 2022, the spiritual leader of the Greek Orthodox Church, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, visited the Athonite Academy on Mount Athos, a school for boys in the world-famous center of Orthodox monasticism. During his visit, the ecumenical patriarch invited the students to absorb “the open spirit of Romiosini,” that is, of “Romanness.” He explained that in “Constantinople is the womb and generative cause of all Orthodox peoples,” and added: “And as successfully as in your school you coexist from different places and different ethnicities, you are immersed in the open spirit of Romiosini… Romiosini means tolerance, understanding, mutual respect, patience, reconciliation and endless love. That is, education, full of Christ. Love these things, our dear children. Get addicted to these things. Place them in the innermost aspect of your existence.”16
Bartholomew also told the students that the word “Romios” (Roman) is often misunderstood in Greece and gives many people exactly the opposite impression of what it is really meant to convey. “The word ‘Romios,’” he said, “is from the Roman Empire… And we are successors and descendants of the Eastern Roman Empire, of Byzantium. I can say that we are more Greek, not less.”17
So, to contemporary observers they are Byzantines, to their rivals in their own day (and often to themselves, aware of their own heritage) they were Greeks, and in their own view they were Romans. The Byzantines’ Roman identity is a key to unlocking a great deal more of their lingering influence and the greatness of the civilization they created.
Out of respect for the people with whom this book is concerned, as well as concern for historical accuracy on a point that even professional historians have inexcusably slighted, throughout this book I call the empire what it called itself, the Roman Empire. In the latter centuries of its existence, it commonly referred to itself as Romania, that is, “the land of the Romans,” but to avoid further potential confusion with the modern-day country that uses that name, I’ll generally not use that term. The people in the Roman Empire of the Byzantine period referred to people from Western Europe as “Latins,” and to the Church of Rome that became known as the Roman Catholic Church after the split from Constantinople and the East as “the Latin Church.” I’ll do the same. The terms “Eastern Roman Empire” and “Byzantine Empire,” as they weren’t used by the people who lived in that empire, will not be used here.
As this book deals largely with Greek-speaking people, I’ve generally favored the Greek forms of names that have often been Latinized: Nikephoros over Nicephorus, Romanos over Romanus, and so on. I’ve departed from this rule when the person in question was so well known by a non-Greek form of his name that to use the Greek form might cause confusion.
* * *
1 H. W. Crocker III, Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church: A 2,000-Year History (Prima, 2001), Kindle edition, loc. 2368.
2 Ibid., loc. 2620.
3 Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (Princeton University Press, September 28, 2009), 321.
4 E. R. A. Sewter, “Introduction,” in Michael Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, E. R. A. Sewter, trans. (Penguin, 1966), 9.
5 Herrin, Byzantium, op. cit., 322; John Julius Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium (Vintage Books, December 29, 1998), xxxix.
6 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol.1, XLVIII (Fred de Fau and Company, 1776).
7 Ibid.
8 Brian Palmer, “How Complicated Was the Byzantine Empire?,” Slate, October 20, 2011. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2011/10/the-byzantine-tax-code-how-complicated-was-byzantium-anyway.html#:~:text=There%20was%20a%20flat%20tax,were%20notoriously%20difficult%20to%20crunch.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Psellus, Fourteen Byzantine Rulers, op. cit., 28.
13 John Skylitzes, A Synopsis of Byzantine History 811-1057, (Cambridge University Press), 2010, 4.
14 Anthony Kaldellis, “From ‘Empire of the Greeks’ to ‘Byzantium,’” in The Invention of Byzantium In Early Modern Europe, Nathanael Aschenbrenner and Jake Ransohoff, eds. (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2021), 351.
15 Laonikos Chalkokondyles, The Histories, Anthony Kaldellis, trans. (Washington, D.C.: Dunbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, October 6, 2014), I.7.
16 “Οικουμενικος Πατριαρχης στο Αγιον Ορος: Ρωμιοσυνη Σημαινει Ανοχη, Κατανοηση, Υπομονη και Ατελειωτη Αγαπη,” panorthodoxsynod.blogspot.com, May 29, 2022.
17 Ibid.
Chapter One
A New Capital for an Old Empire
Two Names for the Same Empire
If the Byzantines are Romans, why doesn’t everyone just call them Romans in the first place? The answer is that there is a distinction, one that goes back to a time when the Roman Emperor surveyed his vast domains and decided that his empire could be ruled more efficiently if it had two capitals and two emperors.
In the year AD 286, with the Roman Empire beset by rivalries and rebellions, Emperor Diocletian elevated his trusted general Maximian to the status of co-emperor. Maximian ruled in the West and Diocletian in the eastern regions of the empire, with his capital at Nicomedia in what is now Turkey. In 324, Emperor Constantine made the division permanent and founded a grand new city about sixty-five miles west of Nicomedia, on the site of a city called Byzantium. The city would both be a new foundation of imperial Rome and bear its founding emperor’s name, as the fifth-century ecclesiastical historian Socrates Scholasticus recounts:
After the Synod [of Nicaea in 325], the emperor spent some time in recreation, and after the public celebration of his twentieth anniversary of his accession, he immediately devoted himself to the reparation of the churches. This he carried into effect in other cities as well as in the city named after him, which being previously called Byzantium, he enlarged, surrounded with massive walls, and adorned with various edifices; and having rendered it equal to imperial Rome, he named it Constantinople, establishing by law that it should be designated New Rome. This law was engraven on a pillar of stone erected in public view in the Strategium, near the emperor’s equestrian statue.18
Constantine founded a new capital, but he never intended to found a new nation or to establish the two administrative regions of the Roman Empire as two separate and distinct entities. There were two capitals and often two emperors after his death but not two empires: Constantinople was the eastern capital of the Roman Empire, as Rome was its western capital. Romans never thought of there being two Roman Empires; there was one empire with two emperors and two capitals.
Since there is no discontinuity between Rome and Byzantium, and the Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire, without any caveats, those who begin the story of the Byzantine Empire with Constantine the Great’s founding of Constantinople (as we will now do) are actually beginning in medias res. If one wishes to trace the history and discuss the achievements of the Roman Empire in the East, then Constantine is a perfectly reasonable place to start. It should be borne in mind, however, that Constantine’s empire had its origins fully two thousand years before he founded Constantinople. According to the legend elaborated by Cato the Elder, Livy, and others, the defeated Trojan Aeneas, the son of the goddess Aphrodite and the prince Anchises, departed from the ruined Troy, which was a bit over two hundred miles south by land from the place that would become Constantinople, and ultimately settled in Italy.
Several hundred years later, in the eighth century BC, legend has it that Amulius, the younger brother of King Numitor of the city of Alba Longa, south of the future site of Rome in central Italy, drove out his brother, took his throne, and killed his sons. Amulius likewise forced Numitor’s daughter, Rhea Silvia, to become a Vestal Virgin, that is, a priestess of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth. Rhea Silvia, however, gave birth to twin sons, insisting that Mars, the god of war, was their father. Amulius, enraged, had her thrown into prison and ordered her sons to be thrown into the Tiber river. The men charged with this job, however, instead abandoned the babies, Romulus and Remus, who were suckled by a she-wolf, and survived.
Years later, they resolved to found a city at the wild and uninhabited spot by the Tiber where they had been left to die. But as they were building it, Romulus and Remus began to argue with one another; Romulus killed Remus and gave the city he built his own name: Rome. Its founding is traditionally dated to 753 BC.
The Roman state that traced its founding to these stories of savagery and wildness became practically synonymous with civilization itself and had an extraordinarily long lifespan: it began as a kingdom, then became a republic and later an empire, and continued until it was finally conquered and extinguished on May 29, 1453, fully 2,206 years later. At some points during that span, Rome was almost coterminous with the known world, as Romans carried their name and their culture back to the homeland of Aeneas and far beyond that. To be a Roman citizen was not just a legal classification but a mark of distinction, a sign that one was part of the great empire; citizenship was under certain circumstances extended to conquered populations and was widely considered to be a privilege and an honor.
There were many good reasons why that was so.
The Pagan Empire
After he founded his new city, Romulus is said to have established the Senate, a body composed of the most prominent and notable men of Rome. The principal power in the city, however, was invested in kings who were chosen by the Senate upon the death of the reigning monarch. In a very early foreshadowing of government by the consent of the governed, the Senate’s choice was subject to the approval or disapproval of the people, although the king then ruled for life and wielded more or less absolute power.
In 509 BC, Sextus Tarquinius, the son of King Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, raped a noblewoman named Lucretia, who subsequently committed suicide. The ensuing uproar led to the deposition and exile of Lucius Tarquinius, the abolition of the monarchy, and the establishment of the Roman Republic.
The principal leadership in the Roman Republic was invested in two consuls. There were two so as to avoid giving any one person absolute power; each consul had veto power over the other’s decisions. Constantly threatened by its neighbors, the Roman Republic began to expand its territory after a series of victories in war. By 212 BC, it controlled most of the Italian peninsula and most of Sicily, as well as Corsica, Sardinia, and Albania. The Roman Republic, its legions marching under the banner SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus, The Senate and People of Rome) fought several wars to subdue Macedonia and Greece, finally completing the conquest around 146 BC. By 86 BC, it had expanded to the entirety of the Italian peninsula, Sicily, most of the Iberian peninsula, the Balkan coast and Greece, and several areas in North Africa.
A period of instability and a series of civil wars brought the Roman Republic to an end, which came definitively in 27 BC, when Octavian, the adopted son of Julius Caesar, who had ruled as dictator and been assassinated for his ambitions, was granted permanent status as a consul and special powers, including the imperium, which amounted to absolute power. He took the name Augustus, indicating his august status above other citizens, and his adoptive family name of Caesar became an imperial title. The Roman Empire was born.
By the end of the first decade of the new millennium, around AD 9, the Roman Empire encompassed modern-day Spain, France, Italy, much of Germany and the Balkans, Greece, much of present-day Turkey, as well as Egypt and North Africa. A century later, during the reign of Emperor Trajan, the empire reached its furthest extent, stretching from England across virtually all of the western and southern empires and including all of Asia Minor, all the way to modern-day Armenia, and along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers down through Iraq to the Persian Gulf. North Africa and Egypt were part of the imperial domains as well.
By the time Constantine started building his grand new city, the empire had lost some of that territory, and then regained some of what was lost, although the territory of modern-day Iraq was never again to see the forces of imperial Rome. The name of Rome was held in awe and respect even outside the empire, and Romans prided themselves on living in what they considered to be the very center of the civilized world.
Throughout the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic, and the Roman Empire up to the time of Constantine, the Roman gods were at the center of Roman life. Every home had a shrine to its household gods. The gods were an integral part of Roman political life as well; the piety of the Romans was generally considered to be the reason for their military success. That meant that proper obeisance to the gods, in the form of—at very least—an offering of incense, was an essential aspect of being a Roman citizen; to shirk this duty was to endanger the state whose success rested upon the favor of the gods.
Once the empire was established, the emperor underscored the importance of piety to its success by taking the title pontifex maximus, or chief priest. The worship of the gods was nothing less than the unifying principle of the empire itself: these were the days before the advent of constitutions and parliaments; what tended to unify great empires, and the Roman Empire was for its size, power, and prestige by far the greatest of all, was a common religion.
