The Roman Empire reportedly fell in 476 AD, when a barbarian strongman deposed the last Roman emperor. That marked only the end of the Western Roman Empire. The empire’s other half, more populous and more prosperous, continued on for nearly another thousand years. The Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire, proved astonishingly resilient. It bounced back from many calamities, until it finally went under for good in 1453.
The “Other” Roman Empire
The Eastern Roman Empire continued on as a going concern after the Western Roman Empire fell in 476. It endured from late antiquity, and into the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Over the centuries, the Eastern Romans’ power waxed and waned as they survived and recovered from repeated setbacks. They made it until 1453, when the Ottoman Turks captured their capital and final stronghold. For generations, the Eastern Romans were commonly known as Byzantines, but they never referred to themselves as Byzantines. Instead, they called themselves Romans, and their state the Roman Empire or Romania.
“Byzantine” is derived from the ancient city of Byzantium. It is located on the European side of the Bosporus Strait that separates Balkan Europe from Asia’s Anatolian Peninsula. Emperor Constantine the Great decided in 330 to found a new capital city there, and named it after himself, Constantinople. A century after Constantinople fell, sixteenth century German historian Hieronymus Wolf titled his collection of sources on the vanished empire “Corpus Historiae Byzantinae”. Thus was introduced term into scholarship, and over time, “Byzantine” displaced “Roman”, the word used by the Eastern Romans to describe themselves and their state.
A History of Western Disdain for the Eastern Roman Empire
Generations of Western scholars despised the Eastern Roman Empire. That is, if they even deigned to refer to it as such, instead of the Byzantine Empire. For centuries, the Eastern Romans were treated with disdain, and at times even with hostility, by Western historians. With their Greek culture and “wrong” kind of Christianity, the Orthodox Greek Eastern Romans were not deemed “real” Romans. That disdain peaked into hostility when eighteenth century historian Edward Gibbon penned the influential The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Gibbon saw the Eastern Romans as degenerate travesties of the manlier real Romans. Per Gibbon and those who followed his lead, the Eastern Roman Empire was an unsavory mixture of incompetence and cowardice. Conspiracy, venality, intrigue, assassination, low cultural achievement, and religious superstition, reportedly dominated. In that conception, the Eastern Romans somehow muddled through for centuries longer than they deserved to exist. Then, it was finally put out of its misery by the Turks in 1453. As seen below, that was an undeserved bad rap.
An Undeserved Bad Rap
The Eastern Roman Empire did well in history’s acid test, in which fitter states survive, and the rest go under. Both halves of the Roman Empire eventually vanished. However, the Eastern Romans proved more resilient than the Western Romans revered by Edward Gibbon and those who shared his views. The Western Roman Empire came under ever greater pressure, and collapsed in the fifth century. The Eastern Roman Empire came under ever greater pressure, and withstood it. It proved more resilient and adaptable, and survived nearly another millennium until the fifteenth century.
Religion was a key factor in the West’s hostility towards the Eastern Romans. As the popes in Rome increasingly asserted their independence from the emperors in Constantinople, cracks began to appear between the Western and Eastern churches. They eventually led to a complete breakup, the Great Schism in 1054 between the Roman Catholic Church in the West, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the east. As seen below, despite Western Christianity’s hostility towards it, both the Catholic Church and the West as a whole probably owe their survival to the Eastern Roman Empire.
How the Eastern Roman Empire Saved Europe and the West
The Western Roman Empire’s fall left behind a mishmash of weak and fragmented states in the former empire’s western and central European provinces. The emergence of Islam a few centuries later was followed by a wave of seemingly irresistible Arab conquests. The key factor that kept a divided Europe from getting engulfed by that wave was the Eastern Roman Empire. To be sure, the Eastern Romans had not intended to save Europe out of a sense of benevolence. Nonetheless, their centuries-long struggle for survival against the Islamic onslaught absorbed the bulk of the new faith’s expansionist military energy.
Indeed, Western Europe barely survived a fraction of the Islamic military might available to the Arab Caliphate at its height. That small fraction, unsupported by the central government and sent into Spain at the initiative of a provincial governor, conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula and nearly overran France. Europe would have faced significantly greater Arab resources and armies if those resources and armies had not been kept occupied by the Eastern Roman Empire, which absorbed their blows time after time, endured, and bounced back.
Constantinople’s Powerful Defenses
A key factor that allowed the Eastern Roman Empire to survive so long was the strength of the defensive walls surrounding its capital, Constantinople. That city was strategically situated at a crossroads of land and sea trade routes that linked east and west, north and south, and it prospered as a result. As a seaside city, Constantinople could not be starved out by a land siege, provided the sea supply routes were kept open. So long as the Eastern Roman Empire controlled the sea, the only way to capture Constantinople was to storm its walls. Aware of that, the Eastern Romans erected the pre-gunpowder era’s most powerful defensive walls around their capital.
As a result, other than through treachery from inside the city, Constantinople was impervious to medieval besiegers so long as its walls were well manned. Many attempted to take the Eastern Roman capital. Goths, Huns, Avars, Persians, Arabs, Bulgars, Slavs, Vikings, and Rus – all tried to capture Constantinople, and all failed. The few who succeeded only did so with the aid of traitors inside the city, who helped the besiegers gain entry. It was not until 1453, with the aid of gunpowder, that Constantinople’s walls were finally forcibly breached in the face of determined resistance.
Greek Fire – the Ancient Napalm That Saved Constantinople
Naval power was another key to Constantinople’s survival, and technology played a key role in maintaining control of the seas. In the 670s, the Eastern Romans invent Greek fire, an incendiary for use against enemy ships. A highly flammable liquid, Greek fire was stored in a container and pumped out at high pressure through a nozzle – a medieval flamethrower that sent a stream of fire at enemy ships’ wooden hulls. Like modern napalm, it produced an intense fire that burned on almost any surface, and could not be extinguished with water. It was thus terrifyingly effective in naval warfare.
However, some limitations kept Greek fire from revolutionizing warfare like gunpowder did centuries later. Its effective range was only about thirty feet, so ships had to be very close. Its use also required ideal conditions: rough seas or strong made accurate aiming of the fire stream impossible. When conditions were ideal, however, Greek fire was frightful. That was demonstrated to horrific effect in the 717-718 Arab Siege of Constantinople, when Greek fire annihilated an Arab naval assault in a sea battle fought at close range in calm seas with no strong winds. Control of their territorial waters was key to the Eastern Roman Empire’s survival for centuries, until it finally succumbed in 1453.
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Some Sources & Further Reading
Browning, Robert – The Byzantine Empire (1992)
Davies, Norman – Europe: A History (1996)
Gibbon, Edward – The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1836)
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