There is an empire that lasted for over a thousand years. An empire that preserved the knowledge of the ancient world, produced some of the most breathtaking art and architecture in human history, held the line between Europe and invasion for centuries, and shaped the foundations of modern law, religion, and culture across three continents.

You have probably never spent much time thinking about it.

The Byzantine Empire is one of the most overlooked, under appreciated, and misunderstood civilizations in all of medieval history. It does not get the Hollywood treatment. It barely gets a chapter in most school textbooks. And yet without it, the world you are living in right now would look fundamentally different.

It is time to change that.

So What Exactly Was the Byzantine Empire?

Here is where it gets interesting right from the start.

The Byzantine Empire was the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and it survived over a thousand years after the western half dissolved. When most people think of Rome falling, they picture the end of the entire Roman story. But that is not what happened. When the western Roman Empire collapsed in 476 AD, the eastern half kept right on going. For another thousand years.

The origins of the Byzantine Empire trace back to 330 AD when the Roman emperor Constantine I dedicated a new capital on the site of an ancient Greek colony called Byzantium. He renamed it Constantinople, though he preferred to call it New Rome. The city sat on a narrow strait called the Bosphorus, straddling the border between Europe and Asia, giving it extraordinary control over trade routes connecting the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. It was one of the most strategically perfect locations for a capital city in human history.

Here is the twist though. The people who lived in the Byzantine Empire did not call themselves Byzantines. They called themselves Romans. The term Byzantine Empire was actually coined by historians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, long after the empire itself had fallen. To the people living inside it, they were simply continuing the Roman Empire that had always existed. Their emperor held the title Emperor of the Romans. Their legal system was Roman law. Their identity was Roman through and through, even as their language shifted to Greek and their culture evolved into something distinctly their own.

A City Like No Other

To understand the Byzantine Empire you have to understand Constantinople, because the two are inseparable.

The new capital had an excellent natural harbor and, straddled on the border between Europe and Asia, could control the passage of ships through the Bosphorus from the Aegean to the Black Sea, linking lucrative trade between west and east. The construction of the massive Theodosian Walls between 410 and 413 meant that the city was able to withstand time and again concerted attacks from both sea and land.

And withstand them it did. For nearly a thousand years Constantinople was the most heavily fortified city in the world, repelling sieges that would have crushed any other civilization. It was not just a political capital. Over the centuries it became the richest, most lavish, and most important Christian city in the world. A place where emperors lived in magnificent palaces, where scholars copied and preserved ancient texts that would have otherwise been lost forever, and where artists created mosaics so breathtaking they still draw visitors from around the globe today.

The Emperor Who Almost Changed Everything

If there is one Byzantine ruler who deserves more attention than almost any other, it is Justinian I.

Justinian I, who became sole emperor on August 1, 527 and ruled until his death on November 14, 565, is widely regarded as one of the greatest rulers of the Byzantine Empire. His origins were about as humble as they come. Born to peasant parents in the village of Tauresium in Dardania, near what is now Skopje in North Macedonia, he was taken under the wing of his uncle Justin I, a former swineherd who had risen through military service to become emperor himself. Justinian succeeded Justin in 527 and proved to be a ruler of extraordinary ambition and ability.

During nearly forty years on the throne he launched a sweeping military campaign to recapture lost Roman territories in the west, temporarily bringing North Africa, Italy, and parts of Spain back under Roman control. He rebuilt Constantinople after a catastrophic riot in 532 known as the Nika Riots nearly destroyed the city. And he commissioned the construction of the Hagia Sophia, the spectacular domed Church of Holy Wisdom that is still standing in Istanbul today and is still considered one of the greatest architectural achievements in human history.

Perhaps most importantly of all, Justinian oversaw the compilation of Roman law into a single unified legal code known as the Corpus Juris Civilis. This compendium of jurisprudence became the bedrock of many modern legal systems and its influence can still be felt in the laws of countries across Europe and beyond. Every time a modern court invokes principles of civil law, it is drawing on foundations that Justinian helped lay fifteen hundred years ago.

At the time of Justinian's death the Byzantine Empire reigned supreme as the largest and most powerful state in Europe. It would not stay that way, but the foundations he laid would carry the empire for centuries more.

The Keepers of Ancient Knowledge

Here is perhaps the most important thing the Byzantine Empire ever did, and it is the thing that gets talked about the least.

When the western Roman Empire collapsed, libraries burned, schools closed, and centuries of accumulated knowledge came terrifyingly close to disappearing forever. The Byzantine Empire stepped into that void and became the great preserver of the ancient world's intellectual heritage.

Byzantine scholars spent centuries carefully copying ancient Greek manuscripts, philosophical texts, scientific treatises, and literary works that would otherwise have been lost. Scholars have noted that Byzantine scribes played a primary role in preserving ancient Greek manuscripts, transmitting classical knowledge to both the Islamic world and Renaissance Italy. Think about what that means. Without Byzantine scribes patiently copying text after text in their monasteries and libraries, we would have lost the majority of ancient Greek literature, philosophy, and science.

The scholars of the empire played a principal role in transmitting classical knowledge to the Islamic world and Renaissance Italy. When Byzantine scholars fled westward following the fall of Constantinople in 1453, they brought their manuscripts with them. Those manuscripts helped ignite the Renaissance, the great flowering of art, literature, and ideas that transformed medieval Europe into the modern world. The Renaissance, in many ways, was built on a Byzantine foundation.

The Schism That Split Christianity Forever

The Byzantine Empire was not just a political and military power. It sat at the center of one of the most consequential religious events in human history.

For centuries the Christian church had been one institution, at least nominally. But tensions had been building for years between the church in Rome, which spoke Latin and was led by the pope, and the church in Constantinople, which spoke Greek and operated under the authority of the Byzantine emperor. Theological differences, political rivalries, and cultural distance had slowly been pulling the two apart.

In 1054 everything came to a head. A falling out between the patriarch of Constantinople and a papal delegate led the Eastern and Western churches to issue decrees excommunicating one another. This Great Schism created two separate branches of Christianity: the Roman Catholic Church in the West, and the Eastern Orthodox Church in the Byzantine East.

Those two branches of Christianity remain separate to this day. The Eastern Orthodox Church, with its hundreds of millions of followers across Greece, Russia, Eastern Europe, and beyond, traces its direct lineage to the Byzantine Empire. Every time an Orthodox Christian attends a service, lights a candle, or venerates an icon, they are participating in a tradition that the Byzantine Empire shaped and preserved across more than a thousand years.

Greek Fire: The Byzantine Secret Weapon

It would not be a proper introduction to the Byzantine Empire without mentioning one of the most extraordinary military innovations of the medieval world.

Greek Fire was a liquid incendiary weapon deployed by the Byzantine navy that could not be extinguished with water and could even burn on the surface of the sea. Once ignited it kept burning regardless of what was thrown at it. It was most famously used to devastating effect against Arab and Russian naval invaders during sieges of Constantinople in the seventh, eighth, and tenth centuries. Entire enemy fleets were set ablaze by Byzantine ships equipped with siphons that projected streams of liquid fire across the water.

The exact chemical formula for Greek Fire remains one of history's great unsolved mysteries. The Byzantines guarded the secret so carefully that it died with them. We know it existed. We know it worked. We know it terrified enemies across centuries. But we still do not know exactly what it was made of.

If that is not the most compelling history mystery you have heard this week, keep reading this blog.

Why Does Nobody Talk About It

So why does the Byzantine Empire get so little attention compared to Rome, Greece, or even the Vikings?

Part of the answer is that the empire suffered from a serious image problem almost immediately after it fell. Western European historians of the sixteenth century, who coined the term Byzantine in the first place, were not being complimentary. They used the word to suggest something complicated, devious, and unnecessarily elaborate. The phrase Byzantine politics is still used today as a synonym for overly complicated scheming. It was a dismissive label that stuck.

Part of the answer is also the sheer complexity of the empire's history. Over eleven hundred years, dozens of emperors, shifting borders, religious controversies, and relationships with dozens of neighboring civilizations is a lot to squeeze into a school curriculum. It is easier to draw a line at the fall of Rome in 476 AD and move on.

But that leaves an enormous gap in the story. A gap filled by an empire that preserved ancient knowledge, shaped the laws and religion of half the modern world, held back invasion after invasion, and produced art and architecture that still takes your breath away.

The Byzantine Empire lasted from 330 to 1453 AD. It survived eleven hundred years. For context, the United States of America is around 250 years old. The Byzantine Empire outlasted that lifespan more than four times over.

It is time this empire got the attention it deserves.

The Fall and the Legacy

The end came on Tuesday, May 29, 1453. Most historians agree on that date at least. After a prolonged siege Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II conquered Constantinople, bringing the Byzantine Empire to its final close.

It was the end of an era in the most literal sense. The last direct political successor to the Roman Empire was gone. The medieval world was over. The modern world was beginning.

But the Byzantine legacy did not disappear with the empire. The Eastern Orthodox Church carried on. The legal principles embedded in Justinian's code survived and spread. The ancient manuscripts preserved by Byzantine scholars fueled the Renaissance. The art, the architecture, the theological traditions, the very shape of Eastern European and Russian civilization all carry the fingerprints of a thousand years of Byzantine influence.

The word Byzantine may have become a synonym for unnecessarily complicated. But the empire itself was something far more remarkable than that. It was the bridge between the ancient world and the modern one. And it is long past time we started talking about it.

Sources

• Britannica: Byzantine Empire

• World History Encyclopedia: Byzantine Empire

• History.com: Byzantine Empire

• History.com: 10 Things You May Not Know About the Byzantine Empire

• Live Science: Byzantine Empire: Map, History and Facts

• School History: Byzantine Empire Facts, Worksheets, Origins, and History

• Library of Congress: Byzantine Empire Research Guide

• High Speed History: A Brief History of the Byzantine Empire

• Wikimedia

  • Byzantine Empire Map

  • Emperor Justinian I Mosaic

  • The Fall of Constantinople

• The Met

  • Byzantine St. John Excerpt

  • Four Icons