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

Why does it matter? Because the civilization you thought ended in 476 AD was still governing millions of people a thousand years later.

The civilization most of us learned to call "Byzantine" never thought of itself that way — and that terminological cover-up hides something profound. Anthony Kaldellis, the preeminent historian of the Eastern Roman Empire, argues that Western historians invented the term to avoid an uncomfortable truth: Rome didn't fall in 476 AD. It kept governing, taxing, and fighting for nearly a thousand years more, in the most contested geography on Earth, and understanding why reveals what actually holds civilizations together.

• The "Byzantine Empire" is a 19th-century political invention; everyone who lived there called themselves Romans until Constantinople fell in 1453 • 46% of the empire's emperors were violently overthrown — and that perpetual threat of murder was the primary mechanism keeping governance accountable • If Kaldellis had to name a single factor for Rome's 1,200-year resilience, it wouldn't be Christianity, culture, or military genius — it would be taxation • Rome didn't convert to Christianity; it absorbed and co-opted it — which explains why Islam and Christianity developed such radically different political histories

The "Byzantine Empire" Never Existed — the People There Called Themselves Romans Until the Very End

The Eastern Roman Empire called itself the Roman Empire. Its subjects were Roman citizens. They used the word Roman until the city fell — and beyond. "It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance," Kaldellis says of how Western historians handle this. "It's like when you know something is the case, but you carry on as if it's not."

The naming wasn't innocent. Western Europeans needed Rome to have died in the fifth century — it was cleaner for their own cultural genealogy. Accepting a second millennium of Roman governance centered in Constantinople, Greek-speaking and Orthodox Christian, disrupted everything. "We kind of know that the eastern half survived, but we don't want to include that in our cultural genealogy. And so we kind of pretend that it became something else."

The term "Byzantine" was coined in the 19th century and has been doing ideological work ever since. The result is that 1,200 years of history gets misread as a Greek medieval backwater rather than the direct continuation of history's most enduring political experiment — built on Roman republican ideology, universal law, and a bureaucratic state of extraordinary sophistication. "It called itself the Roman Empire. Its subjects were Roman citizens. They called themselves Romans all the way down through to the end and beyond."

46% of Constantinople's Emperors Were Violently Overthrown — the Threat of Murder Was the Accountability System

Something like 120 civil wars erupted in the thousand years Kaldellis studies. Every single one was about the same question: who is the best person for the job? "All sides have the same ideology," he notes. The fights were never about governance philosophy — they were a perpetual contest over fitness to govern.

What made this instability functional was its directness. Emperors had no electoral mandate, no fixed term, no dynastic right. "There is no right to the throne." What they had instead was what Kaldellis calls "a perpetual referendum" — the accumulated daily consent of the governed, tested in real time at the Hippodrome, where up to 100,000 people gathered and crowds could go sullen mid-ceremony.

"Something like 46% of the emperors of Constantinople are overthrown through violence. 46%. And that's almost half." Every emperor knew exactly what this meant. "The best way to avoid that fate is to actually do the things that will make people happy so that they don't support a rebel if a rebel decides to appear." Violence at the top created accountability below it — more durably, Kaldellis argues, than formal term limits ever could. When the emperor proposed a new tax he couldn't defend, 100,000 people in the Hippodrome made him walk it back on the spot.

Kaldellis Names One Factor for Rome's 1,200-Year Survival — Not Religion, Not Military Genius, but Taxation

"If you asked me to put my finger on one factor, it would be that." The Diocletianic census — universal, relentless, executed three times a year — integrated every village, every arable field, every person into the Roman matrix. "It's not like you can hide a village." This wasn't taxation as extraction. It was taxation as incorporation.

The census made every taxable asset in the empire legible to the state, which created something no ideology alone could produce: a budget. With a budget came armies. With armies came roads, courts, and coins. And with coins came economic integration so deep that leaving the Roman system became practically unthinkable. "What you're saying is taxation is the thing that brings the empire together. It is, principally, yes."

The unglamorous machinery of assessment and collection — not Constantine's conversion, not Justinian's conquests, not the Hagia Sophia — is what explains why this state outlasted every contemporary. Diocletian even taxed Italy, previously exempt as the land of the conquerors, closing the last loophole. For the first time, all Romans had the same citizenship, the same law, and the same tax code. That triple uniformity was the matrix.

The Roman Empire Gave Full Citizenship to Every Free Inhabitant — and Unlike Every Empire That Followed, They Actually Meant It

In 212 AD, Emperor Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire. Other polities had issued sweeping declarations before. What made Rome different was the implementation. "Not only did they extend citizenship to everybody, but they meant it. This is something that had teeth."

Within a generation, every emperor was a provincial. All the most powerful figures in the empire had been born outside it. Kaldellis reaches for a comparison that makes the scale vivid: "Imagine if the British at the time of the peak of the empire bestowed British citizenship on everyone, including in India — suddenly made positions of power in London available to people from India, including the throne. Like, it's just unthinkable." Rome did it. "They did it, and they meant it."

The edict didn't just broaden legal status — it eliminated the internal pressure of subjugated peoples who had no stake in the system. Universal citizenship with real enforcement "sapped discontent from the relevant populations," which helps explain a striking fact: over 1,200 years of Roman rule, no Roman provincial ever successfully built a movement to leave. The gap between announcing equality and actually implementing it determines whether inclusive policy survives.

Rome Didn't Convert to Christianity — It Captured It, Which Is Why Islam and Christianity Have Such Different Political Histories

"I would lean more toward the second. In other words, that the religion was co-opted by the imperial system." Christianity entered Roman history as a marginal urban cult — Kaldellis estimates maybe 10% of the empire at Constantine's conversion, possibly far less. It didn't conquer Rome. Rome absorbed it.

The contrast with Islam reveals why this distinction matters across centuries. "Islam comes into existence without a preexisting state to receive it and take it on board. It creates its own state." Christianity arrived inside a centuries-old political apparatus that already knew how to govern. The imperial system gave it institutions, endowments, legal standing, civic calendar slots — and in exchange, Christianity prayed for the emperor at every service.

The triumphalist narrative of Christianity defeating paganism is, for Kaldellis, backwards. "We don't know exactly how many Christians existed in the time of Constantine. Well, we speculate maybe 10% of the empire." That's not a conquering religion — that's a marginal movement being strategically absorbed by a state that had outlasted dozens of them. Understanding Rome as the stronger institution reframes not just Late Antiquity but the entire divergence between Christian and Islamic political traditions that has shaped the fourteen centuries since.

Most Histories of the Eastern Roman Empire Skip the Centuries That Actually Explain Why It Lasted

Most Byzantine histories jump catastrophe to catastrophe: the Arab conquests of the 630s, the Seljuk invasion of the 1070s, the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204. Each was devastating, swift, and entirely exogenous — no internal failure caused any of them. Kaldellis's argument is that centering these moments is a methodological mistake.

"Should we define the society by these brief crises of exogenous shocks, or should we define it by the centuries-long, sometimes, periods of regrowth, consolidation, and stabilization which are endogenous?" His answer is unambiguous. "I see this as a society whose internal organization primes it to stabilize and embark on steady growth."

Nobody came from outside to rebuild after each catastrophe. The Romans did it themselves, every time, because the institutions — the tax system, the legal code, the civic identity, the military structure — survived what armies couldn't destroy. "The defeats were swift and kind of, you know, terrible. But most of its history is one of slow growth." The valleys between the crises are where the actual explanation lives. Stop fixating on the peaks, Kaldellis says, and start asking what in the ordinary centuries kept the whole thing running.

The Myth of the Medieval Peasant Disconnected From the State Is Simply False

Tax collectors came three times a year. Every arable field in the empire had been censused for centuries. Churches maintained the civic calendar. Coins — stamped with the emperor's face — circulated everywhere. "These people do not exist, these isolated peasants," Kaldellis says flatly.

The sources' closest approach to a genuinely isolated community describes Christian ascetic hermits retreating so far into the mountains that "not even the tax census people showed up there" — which is itself the tell. It reveals that deep state reach was the baseline, and escaping it required an extraordinary act of religious renunciation.

This matters beyond correcting a historiographical myth. It explains the most striking structural fact about the Eastern Roman Empire: "You never see movements to split away." In 1,200 years, only Bulgaria — conquered from outside and never fully integrated — successfully broke free. Roman provincials, however much they complained about taxes, made no move to leave a system that organized their time, paid for their church, minted their money, and visited their village three times a year. The mesh was too dense, and too useful, to abandon.

The Empire's Irreversible Decline Wasn't Internal Decay — It Began When It Lost the Two-Wing Strategy Around 1300

"I don't see any forces of internal decomposition that would have imperiled it, you know, significantly." Absent external pressure, Kaldellis is convinced the Eastern Roman Empire's internal mechanics were sound enough to continue indefinitely. The familiar collapse narrative — theological exhaustion, administrative decay, moral decline — is, for him, simply wrong.

The actual turning point was geopolitical. Around 1300, Asia Minor fell to the Turks. For a thousand years, Constantinople had governed by drawing on both its European and Asian provinces — shifting defensive weight between two flanks, calling in reinforcements from either side when the other came under pressure. "They lose Asia Minor to the Turks by 1300, roughly, which means that you can now no longer draw upon the two wings, as it were." Confined to a Balkan corridor, battered by civil wars and the Black Death in the 1340s, the empire ran out of room to maneuver.

"Foreign invasions. There's no question. It's just foreign invasions, those which they could not cope with." What ended in 1453 wasn't a civilization in decline. It was a functioning one, finally exhausted by forces it had, in fact, survived before.

The Name "Byzantine" Is Still Doing Work — and the Work Is Hiding That Rome Outlasted Everyone

What Kaldellis's work points toward, quietly, is a principle we keep failing to apply: civilizations collapse because external forces overwhelm institutions that were, in fact, working — not because of moral erosion or loss of values. "Byzantine" was coined precisely to make that lesson disappear, to keep Rome's second millennium off the books. The same habit appears whenever we explain state failure through cultural decay rather than resource exhaustion, or celebrate great leaders while ignoring the census-takers.

The empire that survived longest in the world's most dangerous neighborhood did so because its most unglamorous machinery — taxation, universal law, civic identity, perpetual accountability — worked. That is the idea that lingers.

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Topics: Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, history, governance, political philosophy, taxation, religion, Christianity, Justinian, Constantine, empire building, institutional resilience, civil war, democracy, citizenship