Real Romans

The title​ of Michael Moorcock’s novel Byzantium Endures, published in 1981, captures with one verb the conventional picture of a whole civilisation. Byzantium’s antiquity and grandeur are timeless and static – Yeats’s ‘monuments of unaging intellect’. The future lies elsewhere, in the rise of a West from which Byzantium is excluded. As with most things we all somehow ‘know’, this picture is nearly impervious to change. For decades, English-speaking readers had the choice of superannuated handbooks translated from German or Russian or the works of Steven Runciman – which, though palpably Hellenophile, reinforce the impression that Byzantium matters as and when it pertains to a Latin, Western European history.

Anthony Kaldellis will have none of this. He reprehends the terms ‘Byzantine’ and ‘Byzantium’ as the fraudulent legacy of 19th-century scholars determined to claim the heritage of Roman antiquity for (North-) Western Europe, dispossessing its rightful heirs and smearing them, perversely, with tropes of Oriental despotism invented by the Greeks of the classical age. Save in the book’s subtitle, a commercial concession, Kaldellis restricts the offending word to historiographical contexts. His subject is the Roman Empire, the one founded by Augustus after the Roman republic had conquered much of the known world. His protagonists are Romans – Romani, Rhomaioi – and their polity is Romanía. Other rulers might claim Roman titles or pretend to rule a Roman empire, but the real Romans were subjects of the emperor in Constantinople. It’s a frontal assault on traditional assumptions.

In popular history, size is the key proxy for importance. To compete with the annual collection of doorstoppers on topics readers already recognise as important, a thousand pages of text, plus notes and end matter and a portentously austere dustjacket seem about right: anything smaller would concede the field before battle was joined. Big history books risk being baggy, but Kaldellis is disciplined. This is a narrative of dynastic politics, war and ecclesiastical controversy at the very highest levels. If that seems old-fashioned (and it is), it is in part because, for non-professionals, war and high politics is the stuff of history. We get the odd paragraph on economy, society or culture by way of unavoidable context, but we’re swiftly back to who’s killing whom. The familiar bits of the story are the ones with Western angles: the ‘fall of Rome’, Justinian’s wars and the first four Crusades. Even these take on new valences seen from Constantinople, and much of the rest will be new to most of the potential audience.

For symbolic reasons, the story begins in 324 CE, when the emperor Constantine broke ground for a new city on the Bosphorus, on the site of the ancient polis of Byzantion. Notwithstanding later legend, this was not a Christian capital. It was an imperial residence, a Roman city under the patronage of Apollo, the sun and the emperor himself. By the time Christian monuments began to proliferate, the victorious Constantine and still more his son Constantius II (r. 337-361) had set up the emperor and his government as enforcers, and to some extent arbiters, of disputes among Christian clergy, not least over the correct form of Christian belief. Since believing the right thing was the difference between salvation and damnation, this mattered a great deal and left little room for compromise.

Unfortunately, the paradox of a triune god – a holy trinity and the wrathful deity of Old Testament monotheism – isn’t easily explained. Every solution opened new questions, every neologism was submitted to hostile scrutiny, and no formulation could ever command unanimous assent. Doctrinal positions became badges of individual and group identity (Kaldellis calls them ‘brands’), their intellectual merits irrelevant. A dozen or more phases of theological conflict, beginning in 325 when Constantine called the Council of Nicaea to settle the precise relationship between God the Father and God the Son (the so-called Arian controversy), didn’t exhaust themselves until the seventh century, after Arab conquests had removed swathes of irreconcilable believers from imperial jurisdiction. During the intervening three hundred years, by backing one theological brand over another, enforcing adherence and punishing dissent, emperors created winners and losers and religious subcultures at odds with official doctrine. The sheer expense of all this, whether measured in blood, treasure or wasted energy, is incalculable. But it is an unignorable backdrop to imperial history in late antiquity.

That history took in much of Europe, the Near East and the Mediterranean in the fourth and earlier fifth century, and its narrative centre is usually the western empire, where Rome lay. Constantinople tends to become an onlooker, fuelling the suspicion that real Roman history remained in the west even after Rome’s fall, and making Constantinople and its emperors seem something other than Roman, something Byzantine. Centring the narrative on Constantinople is an effective perspectival shift. Instead of the Rhine frontier, Pictish raids in Britain or dynastic wrangling among Berber princelings, Persia, the Danube and the Caucasus take pride of place in the fourth-century narrative. The impact is even greater in the fifth century, during the proverbial fall of Rome. Rather than asking why the eastern empire didn’t suffer the same systemic breakdown as the western, one can ask why the western empire was so institutionally brittle that it couldn’t weather civil war, usurpation or exogenous shock as the east did.

The answer remains the same: a combination of limited access to fresh gold, an aristocracy less dependent on and so less invested in the imperial bureaucracy, and a greater willingness to use threatening outsiders opportunistically against fellow insiders. Yet the way you pose the question matters, with the second version normalising the strength, continuity and competence of eastern governance. The fall of the western empire becomes a sideshow while Romanía, the Roman polity, persists and develops. In that light, the long reign of Theodosius II (r. 408-50) seems transformative, entrenching a civilian administrative structure, creating a defensive network around Constantinople that functioned as intended for nearly a thousand years and, less happily, enmeshing theological disputes ever more deeply in imperial politics. Zeno’s reign (474-91), from the western angle a tiresome succession of coups, counter-coups and feuds among clans – Zeno was an Isaurian (from the Taurus Mountains, now Turkey’s Konya province), his birthname Tarasikodissa – is shown instead to mark the critical point when the emperor and his court were able to sideline overmighty generals and prevent state capture by warlords.

The first half of the sixth century, and especially the long reign of Justinian (527-65), is familiar thanks to countless books on Rome resurgent and the vast histories of Procopius on which they rely. Kaldellis regards the emperor’s wars in Africa and Italy as reconquests, which is not the way most Italians saw it at the time, but then he parts company with the triumphalists: Africa and especially Italy were drains on imperial coffers, both at the time and later, and diverted attention and resources from new, closer and far more dangerous threats from Slavs, Bulgars and Avars in the Balkans and north of the Black Sea. Along with the ever present threat of a Persian war these ‘costs of overextension’ came due soon after Justinian’s death. His nephew Justin II watched a Lombard invasion nullify most of the Italian conquests, just as an ever more interconnected world, stretching from Central Asia to the Don and Dnipro, began to test the limits of imperial diplomacy. Even competent rulers like Maurice (r. 582-602) struggled to fight wars on multiple fronts.

Maurice’s assassination in 602 begins a chronicle of near ceaseless disaster. The Persian shah Khusrow II, who owed his throne to Maurice, launched an invasion to avenge his murdered ‘father’. The great war with Persia lasted a generation and for the first time Persian armies held on to captured territory in Syria and even Egypt. Tens of thousands of Roman captives were deported to the eastern edges of Iran and, in 615, Khusrow’s generals penetrated Asia Minor as far as the Bosphorus, in full view of Constantinople. More and more of the Balkans slipped into the hands of Slavs and Bulgars, leaving only coastal outposts like Thessalonica and the immediate Thracian hinterland of Constantinople under imperial control. The emperor Heraclius (r. 610-41) considered moving the court to Carthage in North Africa. Instead, in the early 620s, he took vast sums in silver and gold from the churches of the capital, raised a new army and invaded Persia.

He didn’t go through Mesopotamia, as Roman armies had for centuries, but up the Euphrates into eastern Turkey and Armenia, destroying Zoroastrian temples and laying waste to the countryside. Khusrow responded by besieging Constantinople from Asia, while the Avars did the same from Thrace. Heraclius left the capital to fend for itself (it was saved, we are told, by the intervention of the Virgin Mary) and, having allied himself with the khagan of the Western Turks and joined up with a Turkish army, ravaged the Persians’ agricultural heartland of Mesopotamia. It was all too much for the Persian aristocracy: in 628, Khusrow was deposed and the Persians began to withdraw from Roman territory. Both empires were financially ruined and crippled agriculturally. Both had survived, but barely, and neither was in a fit state to handle the sudden appearance of Islam’s armies in the 630s.

Muhammad’s companions and successors Abu Bakr and Umar launched large, co-ordinated invasions of Persian Mesopotamia and Iran and Roman Egypt and Syria, where they took city after city and won a comprehensive victory at the Yarmuk in 636. By the time Umar was murdered in 644, Heraclius was dead, the imperial succession was a tangled mess and a truncated Romanía stopped at the Taurus Mountains on the edge of Syria: more than half the tax-paying population and the vital Egyptian grain supply had been lost. Soon, Crete, Rhodes and the Aegean would also be threatened or captured as the Arab war machine added a navy to its armoury, though for the next hundred years our historical sources are so sparse that we have only intermittent glimpses of events. Constans II (r. 641-68), a grandson of Heraclius, made sporadic efforts at reasserting imperial authority, taking advantage of Muslim civil wars. He was successful in the Caucasus and Armenia, but his travels in Italy and Sicily neither endeared him to his Latin subjects nor made much of an impact on the rapid fragmentation of government there. When news arrived of Constans’s assassination in Syracuse, Constantinople itself was under siege by an Arab army.

Rather against the odds, the teenage Constantine IV (r. 668-85) both fended off the siege and, around the year 673, won a combined land and naval victory in southern Asia Minor that ensured decades of stability. But Greece and the southern Balkans, though still technically part of the empire, were largely submerged in Slavic settlements and threatened by an emerging Bulgar polity. Inside this shrunken state, Constantine managed to broker an end to centuries of ecclesiastical warfare at the Third Council of Constantinople in 680-81. After disputes about divine substances, then natures, then energies, this final round, which dealt with whether Christ had one or two wills, was already two generations old. It was resolved with a bit of fudging by Constantinople and Rome, made easier because their disputes with Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem had been rendered moot by Muslim control of the east.

Another consequence of the Arab conquests was a new homogeneity in what it meant to be Roman. With the empire’s more distant outposts severed, a national, perhaps even ethnic, identity could be discerned among the populace of Romanía’s new core: Constantinople, Thrace, Asia Minor, the Aegean islands and a few mainland enclaves on the Greek coast. They were Greek-speaking, embraced a common theology, and absorbed and Romanised large numbers of Armenians and Slavs thanks to the strong centripetal force exercised by Constantinople. This new imperial core survived an eighth century every bit as disastrous as the seventh. North Africa was finally lost to the Arabs, Sicily was raided and colonised, and Ravenna was seized by the Lombards before the Frankish Carolingians established their hegemony over northern Italy. The period is popularly remembered, if at all, for the ‘iconoclasm’ of Leo III (r. 717-41), which is in fact hardly attested by contemporary evidence, and Constantine V (r. 741-75), who convened a council to inveigh against idolatry but did little of the image-smashing of which he was retrospectively accused. The decision of the empress Irene to rule in her own right from 797 to 802 provided one excuse – the throne was vacant, since a woman could not be emperor – for the proclamation of Charlemagne as emperor of the Romans at Christmas 800.

During the rule of Nicephorus I (r. 802-11), overlapping military and civilian administrations were consolidated under military governors, while a new census more accurately assessed the resources available to the imperial state. A mass resettlement scheme brought Greek-speaking settlers from Asia Minor to mainland Greece, where they mingled with, and over time absorbed, the Slavic population. All these reforms would bear fruit in the tenth century, but their immediate impact was overshadowed by Nicephorus’s death in battle against the Bulgar khan Krum in 811. Krum turned the emperor’s skull into a silver-chased drinking cup and the Bulgarian kingdom remained a powerful force in the region for two centuries. The machinations of khan Boris (r. 852-89), who flirted with both Rome and Constantinople before accepting Christian conversion from the latter, raised the awareness in both east and west of growing theological differences. The middle of the century brought the terrifying advent of the Viking raiders, who would soon found the Rus’ kingdom at Kyiv on the Dnipro.

Under Basil I (r. 867-86), known as the ‘Macedonian’, the empire secured a new presence in the Adriatic and in Apulia, traces of which are still audible in Pugliese dialects. Basil’s focus on Greece and southern Italy was possible because the eastern frontier was now host to squabbling Arab statelets, far from the effective control of the caliph in Baghdad. At this point, and thanks not least to the reforms of Nicephorus, a landed aristocracy began to develop for the first time in the history of Romanía, with the same family names recurring again and again in the annals of the ruling elites. Unlike the fissiparous feudal nobility of the west, this Roman aristocracy remained focused within the framework of the imperial state, and for that reason was a powerfully unifying force. At the same time, what has sometimes been characterised as a Macedonian Renaissance tried to discover, or manufacture, a literary and historical continuity between the Romanía of its own day and that of the distant past: the compilatory efforts directed by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (r. 913-59) had the incidental effect of preserving fragments and excerpts of many late antique histories that we now rely on and would otherwise have been lost.

In the second half of the century, a series of senior generals ruled in consort with descendants of the Macedonian dynasty, and reincorporated Syria into Romanía for the first time since the seventh century. A decade of civil wars during the minority of Basil II (r. 976-1025) were exploited by the Bulgar khan Samuel, but when Basil, the longest-reigning emperor in Roman history, reached his majority, he waged a relentless war in the Balkans that earned him the retrospective nickname of Bulgaroctonus, the Bulgar-Slayer. He was said to have put out the eyes of fifteen thousand Bulgarian warriors and sent them back to their king, guided by the men, just one in a hundred, who had been blinded in only one eye (the atrocity may be authentic, but the numbers are certainly too high). It was also under Basil that the Venetians received favourable trading status in Constantinople in return for helping to supply the imperial headquarters at Bari in Puglia and policing the Adriatic against Arab raiders. Basil also founded the Varangian Guard, Norsemen personally loyal to the emperor, but his decision to remain childless, never explained, led to decades of aristocratic competition, with the purple passing between the Ducas and Comnenus clans before the latter emerged decisively on top in the reign of Alexius I Comnenus (r. 1081-1118).

By then, however, the rise of the Seljuk Turks on the eastern frontier and the arrival of opportunistic Norman warlords in Sicily and southern Italy once again pruned back the frontiers of Romanía, this time for good. Though it is always described as a decisive battle, what actually happened at Manzikert in 1071 is very unclear. All we can be sure of is that the senior reigning emperor, Romanus IV Diogenes (r. 1068-71), was captured and held for eight days by the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan, throwing the Roman leadership into disarray and allowing the Turks to conquer territories in the Caucasus and along the south-eastern shore of the Black Sea that were never recovered. That same year, 1071, the Norman Robert Guiscard took Bari, the empire’s most important Italian possession.

Alexius seized the throne a decade later, wiping out the provincial levies of his rivals with the help of Turkish and Latin mercenary armies. A similar calculus lay behind his request to the pope for assistance against the Turks. That metastasised into the First Crusade, the prism through which his reign is too often viewed. In fact, Alexius was an extraordinary ruler, as we know from his daughter Anna’s Alexiad. While partisan, it can be triangulated with other sources to give a good picture of an emperor who played a weak hand with great skill, making concessions to gain time and immediate support – tax-free trade to the Venetians, for instance – while seizing the assets of churches, monasteries and rival families whenever the opportunity presented itself. With takeovers of this sort, Alexius effectively grafted his clan onto the state, so that the family name came to convey an authority greater than that of actual government officials.

Such a system could work, but only if the ruler was able to control his relations. Under John (r. 1118-43) and Manuel (r. 1143-80), the Comneni multiplied and ramified, with rivalries developing among their different lines. John spent his long reign trying to recover the large parts of Asia Minor that had been lost to the Seljuks and also became entangled in the intrigues of the Crusader principalities. Manuel continued these entanglements, but on a larger scale, building connections with many of the significant players in the Latin, steppe and Islamic worlds. In this multipolar political landscape, as the Second Crusade demonstrated, Latins increasingly saw the inhabitants of Romanía as ‘Greeks’, both different from and inferior to themselves – a disdain fully reciprocated in Constantinopolitan court poetry of the era. On Manuel’s death in 1180, all the familiar predatory neighbours, as well as the rising powers in Hungary and Serbia, began to nibble at imperial territory. The emperor in Constantinople became just one claimant to the imperial title, and not even the most powerful one. In 1204, the Fourth Crusade looted the treasures of a millennium and burned huge tracts of Constantinople to the ground. Latin Greece, in the words of Pope Honorius III, became quasi nova Francia, like a new France.

Up to this point, Kaldellis has succeeded at doing what he set out to do. The reader will not just be convinced of this history’s importance, but surprised that it should have been so widely neglected. His strategy of taking Christian theological disputes seriously but not literally works: one understands why they were central to political developments without having to worry about the minutiae of hypostases or ousia. His determinedly imperial and Constantinopolitan perspective rarely strays into polemic. His baddies are the Normans, towards whom (and anyone else using the ‘old Norman playbook’) he displays an animus almost unseemly in a dispassionate historian. And though it is unfair of Kaldellis to accuse modern historians of recycling anti-Greek calumnies from the ninth-century papal ambassador Anastasius Bibliothecarius, he is quite right that too many accounts of the Fourth Crusade go out of their way to excuse or explain away the cynicism and brutality of the venture. The eight pages he devotes to it are a masterly refutation of such apologetics.

If only the book had ended there. It is almost impossible to make the story of the next two hundred and fifty years – overripe with minor characters fighting over ever decreasing spoils – anything other than a sad coda. His practice of giving roughly the same number of pages to a set number of years, regardless of the density of the source base, is generally very effective at maintaining narrative pace, but becomes a liability after 1204. The Laskarid dynasty at Nicaea is no more plausible a conduit for the continuity of imperial Romanía than other refugee dynasties in Epirus and Trebizond. The ‘return’ of Michael Palaeologus to Constantinople in 1261 marks the start of a last, dispiriting threnody, prolonged until 1453 only because of the Ottomans’ shattering loss to Tamerlane’s Mongols at Ankara in 1402. The last stand of Constantine XI Palaeologus at Constantinople’s outer walls on the morning of 29 May 1453 retains its poignancy.

But these final sections are bound to feel impoverished. They may even revive memories of the Byzantine stereotypes Kaldellis has been at such pains to counter. That would be unjust. It’s hard to write a good book as long as this one. There are 1129 years between his start and end points. That’s an awful lot of history: if you count that far back from 2024, you find yourself in 895, when Alfred the Great was fighting off the Vikings just north of London.