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Anthony Kaldellis
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The Roman state lasted from its legendary founding in 753 BC to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD, making it one of the longest-lived political entities in history.
In the Eastern Roman Empire, nearly half of all emperors were removed through violent means, creating a perpetual incentive for rulers to govern well and maintain popular support.
The Eastern Roman Empire experienced approximately 120 civil wars over the millennium Kaldellis studies, yet these were almost always swift power contests rather than ideological conflicts.
In 212 AD, Emperor Caracalla extended full Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire. Within a generation, all the most powerful people in the empire were provincials.
At the time of Constantine's conversion, Christians may have comprised only around 10% of the Roman Empire's population — perhaps even less — making his adoption of Christianity a remarkable, not politically obvious, choice.
Constantinople grew from a small city of around 25,000 people to a metropolis of half a million in just two centuries, driven by mass immigration from Greek-speaking provinces and the grain dole incentive.
Modern laboratory science has confirmed that the Plague of Justinian (541 AD) was caused by Yersinia pestis — the same bacterium as the Black Death — resolving centuries of historical guesswork.
The Roman Empire did not become a solidly Christian society until the early 6th century — roughly five centuries after Jesus — demonstrating how gradual the conversion process was even after imperial endorsement.
Italy was entirely tax-free until Diocletian's reforms in the late 3rd century, as it was considered the land of the conquerors — a remarkable fiscal privilege that ended when Illyrian emperors from the Balkans saw no reason to maintain it.
The Eastern Roman military maintained a paper strength of between 100,000 and 250,000 soldiers depending on the period, making it comparably large to the Caliphate despite the Caliphate controlling far more territory.
Emperor Justinian ordered his armies to slaughter protesters during the Nika Insurrection, resulting in over 30,000 dead — the single instance Kaldellis identifies of an Eastern Roman emperor using the army as a tool of domestic social control.
Kaldellis identifies the early 14th century as the true point of no return for the Eastern Roman Empire, when loss of Asia Minor, civil wars, Serbian expansion, and the Black Death collectively extinguished its sources of resilience.
In over 1,200 years of Eastern Roman history, Bulgaria was the only territory that actively sought and achieved independence, underscoring how remarkably absent separatist or centrifugal forces were throughout the empire's existence.
No modern empire has ever done what Rome did in 212 AD. The Edict of Caracalla extended full citizenship to every free person in the empire — not as a gesture, but with legal teeth. Within a generation, all the most powerful people in the empire were provincials. It is almost impossible to imagine Britain doing this for India, including opening the throne to Indians. Rome did it, and it stuck.
Rome was safe but geographically useless for an empire fighting on all frontiers. Constantinople sat precisely halfway between the Danube frontier and the Euphrates frontier, at the exact point where Europe meets Asia and where the Black Sea meets the Mediterranean. It was a strategic clamp that held the empire together — and once it was built, the empire never broke at that seam again.
Greek fire was a pressurized, flammable compound that burned on water and could not be extinguished, deployed through heated nozzles on Byzantine warships. It was so classified that even today historians debate exactly how it worked. The Eastern Roman Empire used it to defeat two Arab sieges of Constantinople, and later incinerated Viking fleets in the 940s and 1040s. They even had a hand-grenade version.
Rome and Persia fought a catastrophic war from 602 to 628 AD that left both empires depleted of manpower and resources. Then Arab Muslim armies struck from a direction neither empire had ever prepared to defend — Arabia was simply not considered a military threat. The outcome was almost inevitable: the Arabs conquered Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in a single decade, stripping Rome of its richest provinces.
Two factors, and two alone, explain the Eastern Roman Empire's extraordinary resilience: first, authorities made an extraordinary effort to persuade subjects they were ruling on their behalf — and then actually did so. Second, the empire had a tightly unified Roman and Orthodox identity that made every alternative — rule by non-Romans or non-Christians — worse. No separatist movements, no peasant uprisings, no warlords carving out territory. Just subjects who preferred to stay.
Eunuchs were not just palace servants — they were a deliberate tool for preventing the bureaucracy from capturing the emperor. With no family ties, no dynastic ambitions, and no network of aristocratic allies, they were entirely dependent on imperial favor. Emperors could place a palace eunuch in command of an army specifically to shake up established military networks. Sometimes, like Narses who defeated the Goths in Italy as a tiny old man, they were extraordinary at it.
Christianity existed as a minority religion of maybe 10% of the empire when Constantine converted. It did not seize power — power seized it. Unlike Islam, which arose without a preexisting state and built its own, Christianity was absorbed into a highly developed Roman imperial system that shaped its theology, its institutions, and its politics for centuries. The Roman Empire didn't fall to Christianity. It absorbed it.
Constantine had his son executed, his wife murdered, and won his throne through civil war. He is also the single most consequential emperor in world history. Founding Constantinople and converting to Christianity were decisions that reshaped civilization for a millennium. Kaldellis ranks him #1 not because he was a good person, but because the consequences of his choices were simply in a different league from every other ruler.
Justinian started as a Latin-speaking peasant from the Balkans and ended as the emperor whose decisions still govern Western legal systems today. He codified all of Roman law into the Corpus Iuris Civilis, built Hagia Sophia, and reconquered North Africa and Italy — while also ordering the massacre of 30,000 protesters, devastating Syria by stripping its defenses for his western campaigns, and leaving his successors an overextended empire vulnerable to Arab conquest.
In the Eastern Roman Empire, there were no elections — but there was something more powerful: a perpetual referendum. Emperors appeared publicly, crowds cheered or fell silent, and if the grain supply failed or taxes bit too hard, you knew it instantly. 46% of Constantinople's emperors were removed by violence. That number wasn't a bug. It was the mechanism that made good governance rational.
Diocletian's genius was realizing the problem of too many wannabe emperors could be solved by officially having four emperors — the Tetrarchy. He paired this with a universal census, systematic taxation including for the first time taxing Italy itself, and a vastly enlarged bureaucracy. He turned political instability into a constitutional framework and gave the empire a model it would use for the next three centuries.
From the kings of 753 BC through the Republic, the Principate, the Crisis of the Third Century, Constantine, and the Arab conquests, Rome never stopped being Rome. The three main crises — Arab conquests in the 630s, Seljuk Turk conquest of Asia Minor in the 1070s, and the Fourth Crusade of 1204 — were each swift and devastating, but most of the empire's history was slow, steady economic and territorial growth.
The Eastern Roman Empire worked because its armies were genuinely doing what emperors said they were doing: protecting subjects. Most of the world no longer believes what American leaders say their foreign policy goals are. Machiavelli's lesson, applied to empires across 2,200 years: it's not enough to say you're governing for the people. You have to actually do it. The rhetoric only has power when the action backs it up.
The Crisis of the Third Century was a genuine perfect storm: 26 emperors murdered in 50 years, hyperinflation, a devastating pandemic potentially killing 5,000 people a day in Rome alone, and the empire fracturing into three pieces. Yet Emperor Aurelian reconquered all of it in five years. The crisis was severe — but it never produced an alternative political imagination. Every rebel general who broke away still set up a Roman state.
The Eastern Roman Empire called itself Rome, its subjects called themselves Romans, and its laws were Roman law. The term 'Byzantine' was a political invention by Western Europeans who didn't want to include the Greek-speaking East in their cultural genealogy. Calling it Byzantine is cognitive dissonance on a civilizational scale.
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