I get the question all the time: Was the Byzantine Empire underrated? Have you ever even heard of the Byzantine Empire? If you’re a regular follower of my blog, possibly not. If you got to this post from an Internet search, perhaps you have. Either way, most people know little about the great empire that lasted for, depending on when you begin your count, a little more or a little less than 1,000 years.

Several weeks ago, I joined Reddit and its history subreddit. The first question I saw asked there: Was the Byzantine Empire underrated? One of the comments on the question was to mention that just last week someone else had asked was the Byzantine Empire underrated. When I was the Concurrent Enrollment Liaison for the college where I used to work, I oversaw a high school class of Western Civilization I. The teacher/professor of the course and I messaged back and forth about setting up the curriculum for the course and he mentioned he’d try to give more attention to the underrated Byzantine Empire.

Let me explain a bit about the Byzantines to clear away some common confusions. You might have learned in school that the Roman Empire came to an end in 476 CE. The Dark Ages and the Middle Ages followed in Europe. Then, the Renaissance happened, and Europe was on the upward path of progress leading to today.

What About the Byzantine Empire?

What you probably didn’t learn in school was that the Roman Empire did not end in 476. The Western Roman Empire ended. The Eastern Empire, however, lived on. These are the people who we call the Byzantines. Their empire lasted until May 29 of 1453, a Tuesday. So, if you think about it, “Roman” civilization lasted for nearly 2,000 years, unbroken.

Two thousand years. Why, then, does the story of the Roman Empire ending in 476 continue? The Byzantines referred to themselves as Romans, after all. So did their contemporaries. When the Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 and conquered much Byzantine territory after the battle, they set up the Sultanate of Rum. In other words, they were the Sultans of Rome.

I suppose one might argue that with Rome no longer in the empire after 476, it couldn’t really be the Roman Empire. But Rome had not been the empire’s capital for nearly 150 years. The emperor Constantine the Great had made Constantinople (literally, the city of Constantine) his capital in 330 CE, and no one disputes that the Roman Empire still existed at that point.

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Consequences of This Omission and the Byzantine Empire Underrated

It is, of course, impossible for me to list all the reasons the Byzantine Empire, underrated or just ignored, gets so little attention. Can you name a single Byzantine emperor? (If you ever have to try, go with Constantine. There were 13 emperors named Constantine, including both the first and the last.)

It would be a little too easy to simply blame Edward Gibbon. He was the British historian who wrote the classic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776. (That year was a monumental year for historically important documents. Besides Gibbon’s great work, it also saw the Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith write The Wealth of Nations.) Gibbon had little positive to write about the Byzantines. It took over a century for the pendulum of scholarship to swing back their way.

Might there also be some political bias at work, however? Political in the sense of using history to justify the present, at least. When the Western Empire fell in 476, Western Europe took a historical course vastly different than that of the Eastern Empire. By the 1700s and especially the 1800s it was clear that Western Europe was militarily and technologically stronger than Eastern Europe. Might one explanation be the influence of the “backward” Byzantine Empire in Eastern Europe?

Why Else is the Byzantine Empire Underrated?

I think culture and familiarity have something to do with it as well. Most Americans are Protestant Christians or Roman Catholics. The Byzantines were Eastern Orthodox. (At least, they were after the Schism of 1054 created the Catholic and Orthodox churches as separate from each other.) The United States has a democratic form of government. The Byzantines, in all their 1,000 years of history, had only one style of government, rule by emperors. Most of the people spoke Greek, rather than Latin.

The Byzantines are not known for their technological innovation, either. (Although their contributions are greater than many realize. Modern banking, chemistry in warfare, and the form of law used in much of Europe to this day, to name three. Culturally speaking, mullets, twerking, and “Swiss” cheese were all known to the Byzantines.) Only in their religious art and architecture do they get much mention. But again, because of their Orthodox faith, even that doesn’t amount to much in the United States.

Perhaps another part of the problem is no one can really agree when the “official” transition from Roman Empire to Byzantine Empire took place. Was it in 330, when Constantine made Constantinople the capital of the empire? Was it in 476 after the fall of the Western Empire? How about in 628 CE, when the emperor Heraclius defeated the Sassanid Persian Empire, something never before done in Roman history? Or how about when Arab armies captured Egypt and Syria from the Byzantines? This confined them to the borders they would maintain for several hundred years afterward? Perhaps we should drop the name altogether and just call them the Eastern Roman Empire instead of the Byzantines.

More to Come

In the upcoming weeks I’ll write more about some of the history of the Byzantine Empire. It is, for me, certainly one of the most enjoyable empires to study. Political intrigue, diplomacy, religion, and sports were all crucial to the Byzantines, just as they are for many people today. I hope you’ll join me.

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