The Empire That Never Existed (Remake)

Podcast Transcript

This is a remake of the very first episode of Everything Everywhere Daily, released on July 1, 2020.

The script has been updated and expanded with greatly improved audio.

You may have heard of many of the largest empires in world history. The Romans, the Mongols, the British, the Persians, the Ottomans, the Incas, and the Byzantines.

That last empire, however, the Byzantines, never actually existed.

How can one of the world’s greatest empires not have existed?

Learn more about the Byzantine Empire and why no one ever called it that during its existence on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The Byzantine Empire had its capital in Constantinople, now modern-day Istanbul. History books will tell you the empire lasted over 1,000 years.

Under Emperor Justinian in 555, the empire reached its greatest extent, encompassing territory around the Mediterranean, Egypt, North Africa, the Balkans, and the Levant. Over its millennium of existence, it had 94 different emperors, and it was the center of Orthodox Christianity.

Over time, the empire shrank. By the time of its final defeat at the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to the Ottoman Turks, the empire had dwindled to what is today parts of eastern Turkey, Greece, and some of the Balkans.

With all of that history, how is it possible to say that the Byzantine Empire didn’t exist?

It’s actually pretty easy.

At no point in their one-thousand-some-year history did they or anyone else ever call themselves Byzantines or refer to their empire as Byzantium.

They considered themselves Roman.

The Byzantine Empire was really nothing more than the continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire after the Empire in the West fell. In every real sense of the word, the Byzantine Empire WAS the Roman Empire. You can draw a direct line from the Byzantine emperors to the Emperor Augustus, Julius Caesar, and the Roman Republic.

Why don’t we just call it the Roman Empire?

To understand how the Roman Empire kept going until the Renaissance, we need to go back to the Roman Emperor Diocletian.

By the time Diocletian became emperor in the late third century, the Roman Empire had become very large and difficult to administer centrally. Sending orders and getting updates from distant corners of the empire could take months.

In the year 293, Diocletian devised a new system for the Roman Empire, dividing it into two parts: east and west. Each part of the empire would be led by a senior Emperor called the Augustus, and a junior emperor with the title of “Caesar”. The system was known as the Tetrarchy.

Diocletian established himself as the Augustus in the east, and his top general, Maximian, was the Augustus in the west.

This system lasted only twenty years, as rivals and claimants fought for power after the death of Diocletian. In 312, the two parts of the empire were unified once again under Emperor Constantine I, aka Constantine the Great, who established a new capital city for the empire.

A city he called “Nova Roma” or New Rome, but eventually became “Constantinople”.

After the death of Constantine the Great, the empire once again split into two parts.

This is the first of the possible starting points for the Byzantine Empire.

Constantine is considered by some to be the first Byzantine Emperor because he founded the city of Constantinople and legalized Christianity in the empire. Still, he was, in every sense of the word, a Roman Emperor.

After Constantine, there were attempts to reunify the two halves of the empire. Emperor Theodosius successfully reconquered the Italian peninsula and was the last person to claim to be emperor of a united Roman Empire.

Upon his death in 395, he split the empire between his sons, Arcadius in the East and Honorius in the West, and the empire was never unified again.

The year 395, and the final split of east and west, is also sometimes used as the starting date of the Byzantine Empire.

In the year 476, the last emperor of the Western Empire, Romulus Augustulus, was killed and was replaced by the “King” of Italy, a barbarian by the name of Flavius Odoacer.

476 is the date usually given in most history books for the fall of the Roman Empire. In reality, it was anything but. If they had newspapers back there, there never would have been a headline saying “Roman Empire Falls!” To the average person living in Italy, it was just one ruler replacing another, a pattern that had been going on for centuries.

As you can guess with a name like Flavius, Odoacer was very Romanized, even though he was considered a barbarian. While he styled himself as “king”, he considered himself subservient to the Roman emperor back in Constantinople, the Emperor Zeno.

He sent the robes of Romulus Augustulus to Zeno, and Zeno even had coins minted showing Odoacer ruling Italy under the name of Zeno.

I mention this because even after historians say the Western Roman Empire ended, the people who took over still considered it an ongoing concern.

476 is also sometimes used as the starting date of the Byzantine Empire, as it coincides with the empire’s end in the west.

The reason it is so hard to pin down a starting date for the Byzantine Empire is that there was never a single event you could point to as the starting point. It could be considered the founding of Constantinople, the death of Theodosius, or the fall of the Western Empire. Either way, it was just the Roman Empire chugging along like it always had, just a bit different.

While we can’t put a date on when it started, we can certainly put a hard date on when it ended. That happened on May 29, 1453, when the legendary Theodisian Walls of Constantinople were breached for the first and only time. The last emperor, Constantine XI was killed, and the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II conquered the city.

So, if this empire was really just the Roman Empire, why do we call it the Byzantine Empire?

The name originates from Byzantium, the ancient Greek colony on the Bosporus that Constantine the Great enlarged and refounded in 330 as Constantinople.

Humanist scholars in western Europe first began using words derived from Byzantium in the sixteenth century, primarily in Latin, to distinguish the medieval Roman Empire of the east from the ancient Roman Empire of antiquity.

The most cited moment for the formalization of the term is the 1557 publication of Corpus Historiae Byzantinae by the German historian Hieronymus Wolf, who used Byzantine as a categorical label for the history and literature of the eastern empire.

The term gained traction in European scholarship over the course of two centuries, becoming standard in academic writing by the Enlightenment.

Its use was strengthened by negative Western perceptions, particularly in French and English histories, which depicted the eastern Romans as either decadent or excessively complex. This historical portrayal subsequently attached lasting connotations of intrigue and excessive bureaucracy to the modern adjective “byzantine.”

However, those who lived in the Byzantine Empire called themselves Romans.

Greek was the dominant language from the seventh century onward, but this linguistic shift did not change their political identity.

Their preferred self-designation was Rhomaioi, meaning Romans, and their state was called Basileia ton Rhomaion, meaning Empire of the Romans. In everyday speech, the term Roman simply referred to their national identity, regardless of whether they were ethnically Greek, Armenian, Slavic, or of any other background.

The emperor’s title was Basileus ton Rhomaion, meaning “Emperor of the Romans.” Orthodox Christian religious identity fused with Roman political legitimacy rather than replacing it.

Even in the empire’s final centuries, when Constantinople ruled only a fragment of its former territory, its population still viewed itself as Roman rather than Greek in the modern national sense.

Foreign powers reflected this Roman identity in most of their terminology.

The Islamic caliphates referred to the empire as the land of the R?m, meaning Romans, and this term continued in Ottoman usage long after they conquered Constantinople in 1453.

Ottoman tax records referred to local Orthodox Christians as the Rum millet, meaning the Roman religious community.

In the Slavic world, the empire was often remembered as Tsargrad, literally Caesar city, a reference to Constantinople’s imperial stature, and the Russians adopted the concept of Moscow as the Third Rome on the grounds that they inherited legitimacy from the Roman emperors through Orthodox Christianity.

The medieval kingdoms of western Europe were inconsistent.

Early Latin documents frequently called the rulers of Constantinople Imperator Romanorum, Emperor of the Romans, but the Holy Roman Empire disputed this title after 800, when Charlemagne was crowned in Rome, and western writers began drawing distinctions between the Romans of antiquity and the eastern Greeks to justify their own claims.

After the crowning of Charlemange, you’ll often find it called Imperium Constantinopolitanum, Empire of Constantinople, or Imperium Graecorum, or Empire of the Greeks. This was especially true after the Great Schism of 1054 and particularly after the Fourth Crusade in 1204.

By the nineteenth century, as Greek nationalism grew during and after the Greek War of Independence, many educated Greeks began emphasizing their Hellenic identity rather than their Roman one, although the older term Romioi persisted in popular culture.

In the early twentieth century, many Greek-speaking people, especially in places like Crete, the Aegean islands, the Dodecanese, and even rural parts of the Greek mainland, still called themselves Romans (Romioi) because that identity had been the dominant one throughout the centuries of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ottoman period.

This wasn’t a confusion about nationality so much as a continuation of the medieval Roman identity of the Byzantine world, where Orthodox Christians were the “Roman people” regardless of ethnic background.

Modern Greek will still sometimes use Romiosyni in poetic contexts to describe Greekness, showing how deeply rooted the Roman identity once was.

Today, the name “Byzantine Empire” is universally accepted in scholarship as a convenient label, but it is understood as an external construct. Specialists stress that it was a medieval Roman state, that was Greek in culture and language, Orthodox in religion, and heir to imperial institutions that stretched back to Augustus.

This Roman heritage can still be seen today in the name of the country, which uses the exact name the Byzantines used to describe their land: România or Romania.

The term Byzantine is helpful because it distinguishes the earlier Roman Empire, which was based in Italy, though not always in Rome, from the later empire, which was based in Constantinople.

However, when you hear the terms Byzantium or Byzantine, you should always be thinking Rome 2.0 or Rome II: Electric Bugaloo. Because it wasn’t an independent empire, it was just the continuation of what started in Rome.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

Today’s review comes from listener farriernoire on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They Write:

My new favorite podcast!

Absolutely incredible. The amount of research they do for each episode is astounding. Host Gary Arndt is the perfect person to deliver such profound facts. I check Apple Podcasts every day in excitement to hear the new episode.

HIGHLY recommended!!

Thanks, farriernoire! I’m glad that you are excited to get a new episode every day. I don’t know if I’m the perfect person to deliver profound fact, but I am probably good enough.

Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you, too, can have it read on the show.