Anthony Kaldellis: Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, Rise & Fall of Empires | Lex Fridman Podcast #498
Lex Fridman
A Dangerous Neighborhood 0:00
The empire sat in the middle of one of the world's main corridors for empire building and new religions, which made it one of the most dangerous places to live. Over a fifty year stretch, twenty six emperors were murdered, almost all of them generals killed by their own men. Civil war was routine, and it came layered with hyperinflation, economic collapse, and plague, producing tremendous instability. Even so, the empire is not best understood as a military dictatorship, because its rulers almost never used the army as a tool for controlling their own society, even though armies often decided who became emperor through civil war.
Rome Is Not Byzantium 2:32
You should call the so called Byzantine Empire simply the Roman Empire, because its own people always called themselves Romans and never stopped. The label Byzantine was invented by later historians, and the burden of proof lies with anyone who claims this state was something other than Rome continuing. Western historical tradition preferred to say Rome fell in the fifth century, quietly ignoring that the eastern half survived for another thousand years as a direct, unbroken continuation of the same state, with citizens who called themselves Roman all the way to the end. Over time the label used for it shifted, from Empire of the Greeks for a thousand years, to Byzantine Empire for political reasons, and now scholars are moving toward calling it simply the long Roman Empire.
Kings, Republic, Empire 4:00
The full Roman state ran for about twenty two hundred years, from its founding in 753 BC to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD. It moved through three broad phases: a period of kings lasting until around 510 BC, then a republic ruled mainly by an aristocracy working with the people of Rome for roughly five centuries, and finally an imperial monarchy beginning under Augustus around 27 BC that lasted a millennium and a half. That long imperial phase can be split into two parts, one centered on Rome and one centered on Constantinople, though the transition between them happened gradually rather than at any single moment.
Naming the Late Empire 6:03
The term Late Roman Empire applies to both the eastern and western halves, running from around the reign of Diocletian in the third century to the early seventh century. Its defining features are the tax system and the bureaucratic administration built mainly through the reforms of Diocletian, who ruled from 284 to 305 AD, and Constantine.
A Rapid Timeline 7:01
Rome was founded as a small city state in 753 BC, and the kings were overthrown in 509 BC. The Gauls sacked Rome in 390 BC, hardening a lasting security obsession. The Punic Wars from 264 to 146 BC and the survival against Hannibal turned Rome into a Mediterranean superpower. Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon and the ensuing civil war ended the republic and concentrated power in Augustus by 27 BC, opening the Pax Romana that lasted until 180 AD. Diocletian rebuilt the state starting in 284 AD, Constantine founded Constantinople in 330 AD, and the empire split into east and west in 395 AD. Rome was sacked in 410 AD and the western empire fell in 476 AD, while the eastern empire continued through Justinian's sixth century reign, Heraclius's seventh century wars with Persia and the Arabs, the Arab siege of Constantinople, the Macedonian dynasty, the Crusades, and finally the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Three Sudden Catastrophes 10:32
Across this long history, three moments stand out for how quickly huge amounts of territory were lost. The Arab conquests of the 630s stripped away entire provinces within a single decade. The Seljuk Turk conquest of Asia Minor in the 1070s was similarly swift, and only partly reversed afterward. The Fourth Crusade of 1204 saw armies mostly from France sack and dismember Constantinople, though the Romans eventually regrouped and recovered. Aside from these three crisis points, most of the empire's history was one of slow consolidation and steady, if modest, economic and territorial growth.
Events Versus Processes 12:00
As a matter of historical method, some changes really do come from powerful individuals making choices with long term consequences, such as Constantine's conversion to Christianity, which nobody could have predicted. But many dates historians use, like 395 for the division of east and west, or 476 for the fall of the western empire, are convenient markers for what were actually long, gradual processes rather than single dramatic events.
The Ship of Theseus 13:32
Roman history has a through line, unlike Greek or Christian history, because it is specifically the story of a political community, the Roman citizens, rather than a culture that can travel anywhere. Like the ship of Theseus, whose parts are gradually replaced until none of the original remains, Roman history changes so slowly at every point that no one living through it ever felt a rupture or felt they had stopped being part of that story.
Pride Versus Consensus 16:31
Some individuals clearly did feel pride in being Roman, such as a sixth century ambassador who told skeptical Persians that the name Roman should say it all. But this pride should not be treated as the main explanation for why the society held together, since our sources come from a small literate elite and cannot be assumed to represent everyone. For most people, what held things together looked more like a consensus to be ruled, an exchange of taxes and obedience for real benefits, which is why it makes more sense to ask whether people paid their taxes or tried to rebel than to assume they all felt patriotic pride.
How Different Were Romans Over Time 20:01
A Roman from the republic and a Roman from Constantinople in 1453 might seem like different people entirely, and even Romans living at the same time, like a senator in Cicero's era and the slum dwelling son of a slave, might struggle to find much in common. Yet certain threads persisted, such as soldiers across every century swearing basically the same oath to the republic, empire, or emperor, and Roman law shaping daily life in ways other cultures did not share. One striking example is Jewish women in the tenth and eleventh century Eastern Roman Empire who took property disputes to Roman courts rather than rabbinical ones, because Roman law gave them more rights, and Roman courts took precedence over Jewish courts within the empire.
The Emperor's Public Persona 26:31
Despite wide differences between individual rulers, the late Roman state projected a remarkably consistent public persona through laws read aloud in churches, imperial rhetoric, and the answers given to citizen petitions, which anyone could submit and expect to have addressed. That persona presented the emperor as accountable, as exercising power solely for his subjects' benefit rather than his own, as proactive in foreseeing problems before they struck, and as tirelessly hardworking. Justinian was publicly known as the sleepless emperor, a reputation for working through the night on wars, architecture, laws, and theology, a trait conceded even by his enemies, and the persona also promised subjects legal means to hold officials accountable if they broke the law.
Rhetoric Versus Action in Rome 30:03
You raise the idea that what rulers say and what they do can diverge, echoing Machiavelli's lesson that people and states should be judged by their actions rather than their words. Kaldellis explains that his research into the East Roman state suggests the emperors were generally sincere, doing what they said they would, even amid ordinary human corruption and abuse. He argues this consistency mattered because emperors were genuinely vulnerable and needed their subjects to remain content.
Why Emperors Had No Guaranteed Throne 32:33
Kaldellis points to a paradox: the Roman Republic was actually the most imperialistic phase of Roman history, while the "empire" that followed was more defensive. The empire emerged strangely out of the republic, not through a conquering dynasty as with the Ottomans, but through a figure, Augustus, who had to pretend for a long time that he was not what he really was. Augustus needed both to govern effectively and to avoid being overthrown, so he maintained the facade of the republic, deferring to the Senate rather than ruling as an outright dictator, because ending one civil war never guaranteed against another.
Civil War as a Built-In Feature 35:30
Kaldellis agrees that violent overthrow was not a bug but a structural feature of the system, since no one held an automatic right to the throne. Over the thousand years he studies, there were roughly 120 civil wars, almost all quick, non-ideological contests purely over who should hold power rather than disputes over slavery or kingship. About 46 percent of Constantinople's emperors were overthrown through violence, meaning every emperor lived with real insecurity. The safest strategy was not to purge potential rivals but to keep the population genuinely satisfied, since behaving like a tyrant such as Caligula or Nero would likely get you killed.
Crowds as a Check on Power 38:00
Kaldellis describes how a would-be rebel might march down Constantinople's central boulevard, the Mese, gathering a crowd toward Hagia Sophia to demand the emperor's deposition, a bid that sometimes fizzled and sometimes succeeded violently, including mutilations like cutting off an emperor's nose. He compares this to elections, which give modern governments a fixed mandate for several years regardless of popularity, whereas Constantinople operated on what he calls a perpetual referendum. Emperors appeared before crowds of up to 100,000 in the Hippodrome expecting chants of approval, and tepid or hostile reactions signaled a problem, often prompting immediate action such as fixing the grain supply.
The Hippodrome as Popular Politics 41:01
You describe the Hippodrome as a kind of democratic space, and Kaldellis agrees this popular consultation happened not only there but wherever crowds gathered, including army mustering grounds, Hagia Sophia, and the Forum of Constantine. He gives the example of Emperor Alexius III in the 1190s, who proposed a "German tax" to pay off extortion demands from the German emperor, only to reverse the decision instantly after an uproar in the Hippodrome. Even though emperors looked absolute on paper, in practice those who ignored public sentiment did not end well.
What the Hippodrome Actually Was 43:32
Additional detail describes the Hippodrome as a U-shaped racecourse that may have held between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand spectators, with remains, including the curved Sphendone, still visible in Istanbul today, right next to the old imperial palace. Kaldellis notes that when an emperor died without an heir, as in 491, the people gathered there to discuss succession with the court, and on non-race days additional crowds, including military units, could fill the arena floor itself. The Hippodrome also hosted rival circus factions, the Blues, Greens, Reds, and Whites, which became powerful social and sometimes paramilitary forces alongside its role in acclamations and public punishments.
The Edict of Caracalla Explained 48:02
Turning to the Edict of Caracalla in 212 AD, Kaldellis explains that Roman citizenship had long been extended gradually to allies and conquered peoples through various mechanisms, so that by Caracalla's time perhaps only a third of the empire's free population held full Roman citizenship. Caracalla, whose formal name was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, issued the Constitutio Antoniniana, sometimes called the Divine Decree, extending citizenship to nearly everyone, possibly for religious reasons tied to thanking the gods for his survival of a coup, though tax motives and ideas of unified community are also possible explanations. What matters most, Kaldellis stresses, is that the empire meant it: within a generation, all emperors and the most powerful officials came from the provinces, a level of genuine integration he contrasts with something like the British Empire never extending citizenship to India.
Individuals Behind the Edict 54:02
Asked whether specific individuals, akin to Thomas Jefferson figures, drove this change, Kaldellis suspects Roman legal scholars, or jurists, such as Ulpian were likely involved, since 212 falls in an age of significant legal scholarship. However, the historical record is thin, surviving only as a torn, mutilated Greek papyrus fragment preserving the key clause, with no minutes or list of participants. The edict's effects are visible indirectly through an explosion in people adopting the name Aurelius, Caracalla's family name, which citizens took upon gaining citizenship.
The Third Century Crisis Unfolds 57:01
The conversation turns to the Crisis of the Third Century, when 26 emperors were murdered within about 50 years, almost all generals killed by their own men amid nonstop civil war, hyperinflation, and economic collapse. A plague, possibly smallpox or Ebola, struck from 249 to 262 AD, killing up to 5,000 people a day in Rome and devastating the tax base and army recruitment. The empire fractured into three pieces before Emperor Aurelian reunited it within five years. Kaldellis calls it a perfect storm, driven by a crisis of imperial legitimacy as provincial armies proclaimed rival emperors, alongside serious foreign pressures including the rise of the bellicose Sasanian Persian Empire, military defeats, inflation, and plague, though he notes some historians push back against overstating the severity of the crisis.
Life Beyond the Political Crisis 59:31
The instability of the third century, with emperors dying almost every other year and repeated civil wars, describes what was happening at the top of Roman politics rather than the daily experience of ordinary people. Papyrus documents from Egypt, which sit somewhat outside the empire's core troubles, show that most people there were not living through anything they would call a crisis. The point applies even to a figure as violent as Constantine, whose murderousness was largely confined to his own family and inner circle rather than felt by provincial subjects going about their lives.
The Breakaway Empire of the Gauls 1:00:31
During the crisis, the empire briefly split apart, producing what is called the Empire of the Gauls, a separatist state covering roughly modern France and Britain that lasted about a decade and a half. This was not a bid by discontented provincials to escape Roman rule and build something different. It was an attempt by provincial generals to seize the imperial throne itself and rule the whole empire, and when that failed, they simply governed the territory they controlled as a Roman state, because a Roman state was the only political model anyone could imagine. Eventually Aurelian, ruling from the other side, reunited the empire under a single Roman model again.
Diocletian Turns the Problem Into a Solution 1:02:01
Diocletian's fix for a crisis caused by too many rival emperors was to deputize trusted colleagues from the army, creating a shared leadership known as the Tetrarchy, eventually four men working the empire's military zones rather than dividing it into fixed administrative halves. These men were Illyrians, from a region the size of Scotland in what is now the former Yugoslavia, an economically underdeveloped area that pushed young men toward army careers and made it the backbone of the Roman military for centuries. They were tough, career soldiers, a contrast to a more cosmopolitan emperor like Hadrian, and their rise to power through the ranks explains why so many emperors of the era shared this background.
Bigger Government and Bigger Taxes 1:04:30
Running a larger government and possibly a larger army required more systematic taxation, which meant more censuses and more bureaucracy. Asked whether this amounted to a "deep state," the guest resists the label, since he finds no evidence of a hidden faction working to undermine the emperor from within the bureaucracy, only a large administrative apparatus that could leave even Diocletian complaining that nobody told him anything. Diocletian's reforms included a universal census of every taxable asset, allowing the empire to operate with something like a budget, and he abolished Italy's long-standing tax exemption, a privilege it had held as the land of the original conquerors, so that Italy was taxed like everywhere else. Taxation, the guest suggests, sits at the heart of nearly everything that follows in Roman history, including the civil wars and the functioning of government itself.
Mobility Despite Legal Restrictions 1:10:03
Diocletian's reforms placed some legal limits on movement and occupation, such as binding certain farmers to the land and expecting soldiers' sons to serve, but the guest argues these were tax enforcement mechanisms rather than a rigid caste system. Sons following fathers into soldiering or trades like shipping was common and unremarkable, similar to apprenticeship, and there is no record of people complaining about being forced into unwanted roles. The bound farmers were tied to the land fiscally, meaning the state needed a secure revenue source from that land, but they were not physically prevented from leaving; as one description puts it, in this arrangement it is the land that owns the people rather than the reverse. Overall, both social and physical mobility remained considerable across the empire.
Stability Restored Through Force and Confidence 1:13:30
Aurelian had already reunited the empire territorially before Diocletian, and Diocletian's system of four co-rulers with four armies reduced the number of rebellions by putting out fires as they arose. Victories over the Persians, achieved by Galerius, helped push back foreign invasions, and this combination of internal stability and external security created the confidence people needed to invest in land and expand production, since farmers needed assurance that raiders would not come to steal cattle or carry off workers. That renewed sense of security allowed economic and demographic growth to return.
Constantine's Path to Sole Power 1:14:30
Constantine was the son of one of Diocletian's colleagues, born into a system deliberately designed to avoid hereditary succession, where senior emperors retired and junior ones moved up on merit rather than bloodline. Passed over initially, Constantine was nonetheless popular with the army and highly competent, and he emerged from a series of civil wars, sometimes involving as many as six rival claimants, as sole ruler of the entire Roman Empire by 324. His path to power involved defeating relatives by marriage, including fathers-in-law and brothers-in-law, since the era's rulers were bound together by shifting alliances that regularly collapsed into conflict.
Founding Constantinople as New Rome 1:16:03
After defeating his last rival, Licinius, in 324, Constantine found himself in the East, where Licinius had kept headquarters at the town of Byzantium, a site positioned exactly where Europe meets Asia on the Bosporus. Constantine chose this strategically vital spot to found a city named after himself, replacing Byzantium entirely with Constantinople, also called New Rome. This followed an existing pattern, since emperors had become itinerant figures who rarely visited Rome itself, leading various frontier cities to be treated as alternate versions of Rome, though Constantinople became the most successful and lasting of these.
Why Location Made Constantinople Work 1:18:32
Rome sat safely in the middle of Italy and the Mediterranean but far from the frontiers where military emperors now had to live and work, slogging through winter campaigns rather than sitting in a palace. Constantinople, by contrast, sat almost exactly between the Danube and Euphrates frontiers, letting emperors move between the two, and only one emperor, Valentinian, ever chose to remain in the West when given a choice. The city also functioned as a hinge between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean and between Europe and Asia, and because civil wars had repeatedly split the empire along that same line, Constantinople acted as a clamp holding the Balkans, Asia Minor, and Syria together as one functioning unit. A new senate of roughly two to three thousand men, drawn from across the eastern Mediterranean, invested their wealth and loyalty in the new capital, which is part of why the empire's later fracture point shifted to the Adriatic in 395 rather than recurring at the Bosporus.
Ranking Constantine as Top Emperor 1:22:34
Asked why Constantine tops a list of favorite Byzantine emperors, the guest is clear that it has nothing to do with personal admiration, since Constantine was ruthless and murderous, eliminating family members and allies once they stopped being useful. The point is driven home by his execution of his own son Crispus, a popular and competent general, followed by the murder of his wife, both acts left completely unexplained in the sources, a silence read as evidence that no justification existed. Contemporary historians who had praised Crispus while he lived simply stopped mentioning him after his death. Despite this personal brutality, Constantine earns the top spot because his decisions, founding Constantinople and steering the empire toward Christianity, were world-historic in scale, a category few other emperors ever entered, and because the ranking also credits rulers who simply performed the job competently and improved their subjects' lives.
Christianity's Role Before and After Constantine 1:26:33
Before Constantine, Christianity had no formal role within the Roman imperial system and understood itself as having its own separate history, not tied to imperial power. It only began acquiring a role within the empire once emperors, starting with Constantine, took it on board and made it part of the imperial system. This raises the open question of whether Christianity triumphed over Rome or whether Rome instead captured Christianity, a question left hanging as the discussion turns toward exploring it further.
Christianity Absorbed by the Roman State 1:28:00
You hear an argument that reverses the usual story of triumph. Rather than Christianity conquering the Roman imperial system, it was largely co-opted by it, becoming part of the state's machinery for centuries, right down to today. This is framed against Islam, which had no preexisting state to inherit and instead built its own institutions from scratch, since the Quran offers no blueprint for running an empire. Christianity, by contrast, grew up inside an already mature political system. Even by Constantine's time, Christians may have made up only around ten percent of the population, mostly urban, middle class or modest, not politically powerful elites.
Why Constantine Really Converted 1:30:30
Older theories claimed Constantine adopted Christianity for cynical political gain, but no one has produced a convincing account of what that gain would have been, since Christians were few and not especially influential, and bishops offered only modest social leverage. That leaves the less comfortable explanation historians resist: Constantine converted because he personally believed. His decision was still massive in effect, since Romans tended to follow their rulers, much as the whole empire had once accepted Hadrian's command that his dead lover Antinous be worshipped as a god.
The Milvian Bridge Vision Reconsidered 1:33:01
The famous vision before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge comes from writers reporting it decades later, including one who claimed to have heard it over dinner with the emperor himself, which is not a reliable source. Constantine had other religious visions too, including an earlier one of Apollo appearing as light in a Gaul temple, tied to his shifting political branding away from the Jupiter and Hercules model. So it's plausible he believed the Christian God had helped him in battle, without him being a committed convert from that point onward.
A Pragmatist Speaking to Different Audiences 1:35:00
Constantine stayed careful about how explicitly he spoke of Christ depending on his audience, mentioning Christ directly to Christians while referring more vaguely to "good religion" in general laws so as not to alienate other subjects. Even as he institutionalized the church, he erected a colossal, visibly Apollo-styled statue of himself in the Forum of Constantine, naked with rays around the head, showing how he could send different religious signals at once. Romans generally treated emperors as divine in a loose, mushy way, without any hard theology behind the claim.
Five Centuries to a Christian Empire 1:37:33
Christianization was a slow, centuries-long process. A majority Christian society probably didn't exist until the fifth century, and a solidly Christian one, meaning non-Christians dropped to ten or fifteen percent, not until the early sixth century. The church grew through incentives, such as bishops distributing charity and land grants supporting widows and the poor, alongside disincentives like laws banning animal sacrifice, older folk rituals, and eventually barring non-Christians from high office.
What Made Christianity Spread So Well 1:40:02
Christianity succeeded because it developed multiple appealing forms at once: an intellectual, philosophical theology for elites, public processions and festivals replacing older ones, an initiatory ritual of baptism promising a personal afterlife, and integration into imperial power and the army, where soldiers swore oaths to the Trinity. This adaptability let it embed itself in streets, courts, armies, and texts simultaneously.
Unity and Division at Once 1:41:30
Because Christianity makes exclusive truth claims, it is inherently divisive, unlike ancient religions which rarely drove conflict. Yet that same exclusivity forged unusually strong communal identity, so Christianity was both more polarizing and more powerful as a unifying force than what came before. Theological truth itself evolved through these controversies, with many so-called heretics not intending harm but simply stating what they assumed everyone already believed, until someone declared it heresy and a fight began.
Religion's Costs and Benefits for the Empire 1:45:32
Religion and Roman identity are hard to separate historically, and where the society succeeded, religion likely contributed to that success, though at a cost people were willing to pay. At the empire's end, some Byzantines preferred submission to Muslim Turks over union with Catholic Rome, because the Turks would respect their Orthodox identity while Rome demanded doctrinal compromise. Still, not everything traces back to religion: Roman identity and the practical operations of the state functioned as their own distinct threads, intersecting with religion mainly at the level of vocabulary rather than governing everything.
Roman, Christian, and Greek Together 1:48:31
Asked whether a Roman would call themselves Roman or Christian, the answer is both, since the two overlapped without being identical. There were Christians who were not Roman, like the Bulgarians or the Rus, and Romans knew perfectly well there had been non-Christian Romans, since churches commemorated martyrs killed by earlier Roman emperors. The society allowed people to lean more heavily into being Roman, Christian, or Greek, since their language and literature were Greek, making this the only historical society combining all three identities in shifting combinations.
Constantinople's Explosive Growth 1:52:02
Constantinople grew from roughly twenty to twenty-five thousand people to half a million within two centuries, a rate impossible through natural reproduction alone, especially since ancient cities were disease-heavy "death traps" losing one to three percent of population yearly. The growth came from immigration, drawn partly by the roughly 2,500 senators required to reside there, each bringing sizable households of servants and staff, plus a grain dole supporting up to 200,000 people with free bread as an added incentive.
Rome Loses Resources to the East 1:55:32
Constantine diverted Egypt's grain supply to feed Constantinople, effectively pulling food away from Old Rome, though Rome avoided starvation by drawing on North Africa and Sicily instead. This signaled where imperial priorities now lay, encouraging some senators to relocate east and establishing Constantinople as an equal, parallel Roman capital, setting the stage for the discussion of why the Western Roman Empire subsequently declined, with the Visigoths sacking Rome in 410 and the last Western emperor deposed in 476.
The Vicious Cycle of Western Collapse 1:57:03
The fall of the Western Roman Empire followed a clear pattern rather than a mysterious one. Barbarian armies pressed on the empire through the fifth century, and whenever Rome failed to stop one, such as the Vandals seizing North Africa, it lost the tax revenue from that province. Without that money, it could not pay or maintain armies large enough to handle the next wave of invaders, and the barbarians already settled inside the empire could not be dislodged either. This created a self-reinforcing spiral of shrinking resources and shrinking military strength. The pattern began in earnest in 376 when the Goths crossed the Danube, and worsened after the Battle of Adrianople two years later, where a Roman field army was destroyed and Emperor Valens died, leading to an unprecedented truce that let a quasi-independent Gothic army remain inside imperial territory.
Why the East Survived 2:00:01
Geography helped explain why the eastern half held on while the west did not. The Goths in the Balkans had no fleet, so they could not cross into the wealthier provinces of Asia Minor and were instead pushed toward the poorer western Balkans, which eventually made Italy look more attractive to them, drawing the pressure westward. Constantinople itself functioned as an impregnable command center, letting the East shift forces between its European and Asian provinces depending on where trouble arose, since invaders from one side rarely could reach the other. Technological advantages like Greek fire mattered too, but the deeper reason, in this account, was that local communities across the empire kept choosing to remain loyal to the Roman state and reconnected with Constantinople as soon as any crisis passed.
A Shift in Center, Not a Collapse 2:02:32
Rather than picture the empire as dying in the West while a separate Byzantine Empire was born in the East, it makes more sense to see the empire's center of gravity gradually shifting eastward, a process tied to Constantine's founding of the new capital. Weak leadership and structural problems in the West, along with demographic decline tied to this shift, meant the historic western provinces collapsed while the empire itself continued. The evidence is striking: by the 430s Constantinople was already codifying Roman law for the West, and in the sixth century Justinian's forces reconquered part of Italy and recodified Roman law on a much larger scale, meaning the Roman law inherited today actually descends from Constantinople rather than from ancient Rome directly. Thrace, once considered a backward province, became the empire's true heart, while Rome itself became a battered provincial city where wolves reportedly roamed the old Forum.
Military and Civilian Government 2:05:30
The East Roman state's government split broadly into military and civilian branches, with the church arguably functioning as a third arm. The military recruited, organized, equipped, and paid soldiers, and its paper strength ranged from around 100,000 at low points to roughly 250,000 at its height, a large force for a medieval society and comparable to the much bigger Caliphate later on. These were career soldiers whose families were also tied into this military-economic system, and the army was mostly, though not always, defensive. The civilian administration existed mainly to fund this army, the single largest state expense, through census-taking, taxation, and legal bureaus, but it also ran courts, issued laws, handled diplomacy, managed the palace staff, and administered endowments for institutions like Hagia Sophia, which alone had hundreds of paid clergy and staff.
Taxes, Exemptions, and Creeping Complexity 2:09:03
The tax system worked less like a fixed code and more through a constant stream of petitioned exemptions, granted to monasteries, wealthy landowners, well-connected courtiers, or struggling villages hit by bad harvests or barbarian raids. Officials sometimes granted these exemptions on their own authority without imperial approval, forcing emperors to periodically wipe the slate clean and start over. By the eleventh century, when documentation survives, monasteries, villages, and officials all held their own tangle of exemption documents, producing a system that grew steadily more complicated over time even without anyone intending it that way.
The Role of Eunuchs at Court 2:12:03
A significant portion of the bureaucracy consisted of eunuchs, castrated men who staffed the emperor's household, managing the bedchamber, banquets, wardrobe, and daily palace life. Because they were constantly at the emperor's side, they held real informal power and could be bribed to get things done, which also made them objects of resentment that helped absorb public frustration away from the emperor himself. More importantly, emperors deliberately used eunuchs to prevent the bureaucracy or networks of powerful families from overshadowing imperial authority, since eunuchs, often foreign-born or former slaves with no family lineage to protect, depended entirely on the emperor and could be placed in charge of armies or offices to counterbalance entrenched networks. Narses, Justinian's eunuch general who defeated the Goths in Italy, is offered as an example of one who proved highly competent despite his origins. Some eunuchs were forcibly castrated as enslaved children, while others came from families, particularly in Paphlagonia, who pursued this as a deliberate strategy to gain court influence.
No Isolated Communities 2:16:32
There is no evidence for the commonly imagined isolated rural peasant community cut off from the state and unaware of the emperor. Every piece of arable land had been surveyed and taxed for centuries, and even hermits who fled deep into the mountains are described in texts as going beyond where tax collectors could find them, which itself shows how thoroughly the census reached everywhere else. Taxation was not an annual visit but occurred roughly three times a year and included services, recruits, and goods alongside coin, creating a dense institutional web that also included the church, which structured local calendars, sermons, and prayers for the emperor. Taxation, currency, and the church together are described as the forces that bound the empire's population together into one connected system.
Defining a Monarchic Republic 2:20:33
The conventional label Byzantine Empire misleads on both counts, since the people themselves used no equivalent term for empire and instead called their state basileia, meaning monarchy, or politeia, a Greek rendering of the Latin res publica, meaning the common affairs of a political community regardless of its form of government. An empire in modern usage implies one group conquering and ruling others, but Romania was mostly Roman citizens governing themselves, only occasionally ruling genuinely foreign peoples such as Slavs, Bulgarians, or some Syrian Muslims in the eleventh century. Because nearly every state includes groups absorbed through past conquest, the term empire loses much of its usefulness as a strict label, and it becomes especially odd applied to the state's final centuries when it controlled little more than a few regions in the Peloponnese yet is still conventionally called an empire. The more accurate term offered is monarchic republic, capturing a polity governed as a shared public affair, a res publica, but ruled through a monarchical regime with an emperor at its head.
A republic wearing monarchical clothes 2:26:00
The Eastern Roman Empire combined monarchical executive power with a republican baseline ideology, a mixture rarely found in dynastic empires that never emerged from an ancient republic. Emperors were expected to work for the res publica, and this republican expectation sometimes clashed with the realities of one-man rule.
Not a military dictatorship 2:27:33
Even though emperors controlled the armies and soldiers often influenced succession through civil wars, the empire should not be called a military dictatorship, because the army was almost never used as an instrument of social control against the population. Soldiers were typically recruited from local communities and lived among them, so calling up the army meant calling up neighbors, not an occupying force meant to keep people down. This contrasts sharply with modern regimes, where turning the army on civilians is a dangerous gamble, as seen when Mubarak hesitated to use the Egyptian army against Arab Spring protesters, unsure whether soldiers would fire on their own people.
Justinian rises from peasant to emperor 2:30:33
Justinian reigned from 527 to 565 after being positioned as successor by his uncle Justin I, a fellow native of a poor agricultural region in the western Balkans who had risen through the military ranks. Almost nothing is known about Justinian's life before he appears in the historical record around age 38, though he arrived with knowledge of Roman law and Christian theology. He married Theodora, a former sex worker, and chose associates for talent rather than social class, assembling a notably unconventional inner circle that nonetheless produced consequences that shaped world history.
Codifying Roman law 2:33:32
Justinian appointed a committee led by the jurist Tribonian to condense the whole of Roman law into what is now called the Corpus Juris Civilis, a massive act of codification that remains the primary source for Roman law today. Its influence runs through European legal systems and through political and philosophical thought about property and sovereignty, even though common law countries like the United States and Britain rely less directly on it. The code covered marriage rules, inheritance, and property in detail, and Justinian personally viewed homosexuality as morally reprehensible and even blamed it for causing earthquakes, though the state generally left people's private sex lives alone rather than actively policing them.
Conquest without a plan 2:39:31
Justinian believed God had authorized him to reconquer the lost western provinces, and he exploited weaknesses in barbarian kingdoms to retake North Africa, Italy, and southern Spain. But the wars ravaged Italy for decades, overstretched his resources, and left successors with a far more dangerous strategic position, since armies protecting Constantinople and the east were stripped to fund these campaigns, allowing the Persians to march in and destroy Antioch. North Africa likely paid for itself, but Italy and southern Spain probably did not, and conquest alone should not be praised unless it leaves lasting, stable benefit for subjects.
The Nika riots and rebuilding 2:42:30
Justinian's soldiers set fire to much of Constantinople during the Nika insurrection, a roughly ten day uprising that he ended by ordering troops to slaughter more than 30,000 protesters. He then rebuilt the city and constructed the Hagia Sophia, a magnificent and enduring monument, leaving a legacy so evenly split between grand achievement and grave harm that it becomes genuinely difficult to rank him among either the best or worst emperors.
Rethinking the plague of Justinian 2:43:31
The bubonic plague, caused by Yersinia pestis and confirmed through modern laboratory science, broke out in 541 and is sometimes claimed to have killed half the population and devastated the empire. A more moderate view fits the evidence better, since Justinian continued waging war on four or five fronts simultaneously with no visible pause in taxation, courts, or military campaigns, unlike the clear societal halt seen during the Black Death in fourteenth century Europe. Justinian left his successors an overextended empire vulnerable on multiple fronts, though the plague and other factors also share some blame for the difficulties that followed.
Heraclius and the Persian war 2:47:30
Heraclius took power as a rebel against the usurper Phocas, but his own three year civil war from 608 to 610 diverted Roman forces away from the Persian front and let the Persian shah Khosrow II press deep territorial gains, including the loss of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Medieval tradition later cast Heraclius as a proto crusader for eventually retaking Jerusalem and the True Cross, but the full picture is mixed, since he needed roughly fifteen years to organize a response and ultimately relied heavily on Turkish allies from Central Asia. His campaign into the Persian heartland through the Caucasus and Mesopotamia, rather than confronting Persian and Avar forces besieging Constantinople in 626, eventually triggered a coup that killed Khosrow, though this hard won victory left both empires exhausted just before the Arab conquests began.
Different motives, same vulnerability 2:53:34
Persian shahs had traditionally raided for manpower to work Mesopotamian estates, but Khosrow II seemed driven by a revived ambition to restore the Achaemenid empire's reach to the Mediterranean. For the Romans, the war was pure survival, a desperate defense against a conflict that could have ended the Roman state. The early Arab Muslim campaigns aimed first to unify Arabia under Islam, and only afterward turned against Rome and Persia, striking both empires from a direction neither had ever prepared to defend, since Arabia had only ever produced occasional raiders rather than a conquering army.
Losing Egypt, Losing Bread 2:56:31
The loss of the empire's richest provinces, especially Egypt, meant Constantinople could no longer be fed by its grain supply. As a direct result, the population of Constantinople shrank dramatically over the following decades, marking one of the empire's lowest points even as it continued to survive.
Slowly Stopping the Bleeding 2:57:32
Recovery took centuries and began with simply holding the line. The Arabs pummeled the empire for decades in the seventh century until, by the 660s and 670s, Roman forces finally began beating them back on land and holding them off at sea, helped by a new investment in fleets.
Greek Fire, the State Secret 2:58:33
Greek fire, a flamethrower weapon, played a key role in defeating two Arab attempts to take Constantinople. Its exact mechanism remains debated, likely a pressurized heated container with a nozzle spewing a napalm-like compound that kept burning even on water, prepared by a specialized corps of engineers who guarded its formula as a closely kept state secret. It also existed in hand grenade form, a clay container with a compound and fuse, most effective when thrown against wooden siege engines rather than individual people. The Romans later used Greek fire fleets against Viking raiders in the 940s and 1040s.
The Second Arab Siege Fails 3:01:31
In the early eighth century, the second Arab siege of Constantinople failed largely because of the competent leadership of Leo III, a usurper who seized power just as the massive attack was coming. He prepared the city well, secured Bulgar allies who had recently settled south of the Danube, deployed Greek fire strategically, and used his fleet to contain and starve the Arab forces. He went on to rule for over twenty years, founding what is called the Isaurian dynasty, and his son continued the line.
Iconoclasm Was Overblown 3:03:32
The iconoclasm controversy, over whether icons should be venerated or destroyed, is often treated as a defining religious and political crisis, but research shows little popular interest in the matter. Only a small circle, perhaps a hundred or two hundred emperors, bishops, abbots and monks, cared deeply, yet they are the ones who wrote the surviving texts, which is why the conflict looks larger in the record than it was in daily life. When emperors changed policy on images, most people simply fell into line. Eventually the pro-icon position won, which is why Orthodox churches today are filled with icons and iconography.
Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood 3:07:31
This book covers the period from 955 AD to the First Crusade, when Byzantium turned from defensive war to renewed conquest under new tenth century military leadership, expanding into Cilicia, northern Syria, Cyprus, the Caucasus, and Bulgaria. After a generation of stability and prosperity, a triple attack hit the empire at once: Seljuk Turks from the east, Pechenegs crossing the Danube from the north, and Normans in southern Italy. This three-part pressure caused the expansionist state to buckle into another major crisis, comparable to the seventh century collapse, though the empire again survived and rebuilt.
External Shocks, Not Moral Decay 3:10:33
Against the traditional view that this eleventh century crisis stemmed from internal moral decay or civilian emperors neglecting the army, the case is made that it was mainly external: three very different enemies attacking at once, Norman knights practicing a new grinding style of Western warfare, nomadic Pecheneg horsemen, and Seljuk Turks backed by vast Central Asian manpower who were also transforming Asia Minor's farmland into pasture. No medieval or ancient state could realistically withstand three such different, simultaneous attacks. There were internal problems too, including the end of the two-century Macedonian dynasty, insecure new emperors buying political support with cash and titles, and the resulting budget strain from funding armies, but these were secondary to the external pressure.
Defined by Stability, Not Crisis 3:14:32
The pattern of crisis and recovery seen throughout Roman history is not really an oscillation, since the crises themselves are a limited, identifiable set of sudden exogenous shocks that never last long, while the periods of consolidation and regrowth that follow are endogenous, generated from within the society itself with no outside help. The more accurate and interesting way to define this society is by its long stretches of internal stability and steady growth rather than by its brief external crises, which is the focus of an upcoming book on the empire's resilience.
Critiquing the Peak to Peak Histories 3:18:06
Short histories of Byzantium tend to jump from highlight to highlight, from Justinian's extravagant achievements to dramatic crises, without showing the connective tissue in between: the institutions, ideologies, and daily mechanisms that tie people's lives to the broader history. Other revisionist ideas include the notion of a monarchical republic with a broader spectrum of political participation than assumed, and the idea that Roman identity was a genuine, even ethnic, self-identification rather than a label imposed from outside.
Pinpointing the Final Decline 3:21:03
The point of no return for the East Roman Empire is placed between 1300 and 1350. By 1300 the empire lost Asia Minor to the Turks, cutting off one of its two traditional wings of resources, leaving it confined to a narrow corridor of Balkan territory stretching from Constantinople to the Adriatic. Civil wars followed, along with Serbian expansion and the Black Death, and a rebel emperor's deal that surrendered half the remaining territory to the Serbs sealed the outcome. Tamerlane's defeat of the Turks around 1400 accidentally delayed the final conquest by about fifty years, pushing it to 1453.
A Society With No Separatists 3:26:02
Absent foreign invasion, the empire's internal system, its taxation, administration, and politics, could plausibly have lasted far longer, since there were no meaningful separatist movements among Roman provincials apart from Bulgaria, which broke away in 1185 after nearly two centuries under Roman rule. There were no widespread peasant uprisings against taxation, no loss of central taxing power, and no partitioning of territory among warlords, unlike the Franks after Charlemagne. Compared to other long-lived states like Britain, Portugal, or Japan, which sat safely at the edges of the world, this empire endured while sitting in the most dangerous, contested corridor of empire-building and new religions, which makes foreign conquest, rather than internal decay, the real explanation for its eventual fall.
Why the Roman system held together 3:28:00
Lex asks why the Roman Empire had so few internal sources of decay and why it worked so well for so long. Kaldellis answers that people complaining about taxes was actually a sign of a healthy system, since complaining carried no risk and functioned like griping about the weather. He gives a two part explanation for the empire's cohesion. First, the authorities made an extraordinary effort to persuade subjects that rule was being conducted on their behalf, and for the most part actually governed that way. Second, the empire had a tightly unified identity built around being Roman and Orthodox, so people knew they were surrounded by enemies who were neither, and preferred their own system to the alternatives.
Rhetoric backed by real action 3:30:02
Lex points out that both rhetoric and action mattered, since stating repeatedly that rulers acted on behalf of the people functioned as a unifying and pacifying idea even beyond the concrete deeds. Kaldellis illustrates this with his own experience as a department chair, contrasting a dean who bluntly announces cuts with one who frames the same cuts as a shared struggle and promises restoration once funds allow, noting the two approaches produce very different levels of compliance. Both agree the rhetoric must be credible and believed, not just spoken, and Kaldellis cites Aristotle's advice to tyrants in The Politics, that the best way to persuade subjects you are a legitimate benevolent ruler is actually to be one.
Is America an empire 3:33:00
Lex asks what lessons the two thousand two hundred year Roman history offers for the United States, framed as a young empire. Kaldellis notes that calling America an empire, once taboo, became common in casual and academic writing especially after the 2003 Iraq War, used both approvingly and critically, and that most scholarly books use the term simply to analyze rather than to praise or condemn.
Institutions built to last 3:34:32
Kaldellis says the key lesson is that investing in institutions that serve the majority of subjects, even at a cost that must be explained to them, benefits the ruling classes too by favoring long term success over short term gain. He points to Roman roads and the Christian Church as institutions built to last for centuries, and suggests modern societies could use more of that same instinct to explain to people why institutions exist.
The gap between rhetoric and action 3:35:32
Lex raises the idea that Roman rhetoric matched action, while modern American foreign policy sometimes shows a large gap between the two. Kaldellis explains that in the Roman world the army, the single largest expense, generally did what emperors said it did, protecting subjects, with occasional plundering expeditions being the exception rather than the rule, and that pre modern states could not really run hidden foreign policies. He contrasts this with America's history of proclaiming lofty goals that are sometimes implausible, recalling the 2001 framing of the Afghanistan invasion as a feminist war to liberate women from burqas, which he found hard to take seriously. Lex adds that wars in Afghanistan and Iraq became wake up calls exposing that gap, and Kaldellis compares this to Vietnam, whose damage to military credibility forced the shift from a conscript to a professional army, something that never happened in Constantinople because losing a war was tolerated but misusing the army for other ends was not.
Human nature across history 3:40:35
Asked whether anything about human nature stays constant across centuries, Kaldellis recalls resisting a once fashionable postmodern view among grad school colleagues that denied any shared human nature, treating history as incommensurate slices with no continuity. He sides with Thucydides, who held that humans generally love, hate, hold ambitions, and show the same range of types in any group of twenty or thirty people, with culture setting the dials differently rather than creating wholly different species. He also affirms that individuals, from Steve Jobs to figures with a funny hat and a mustache, can occasionally bend the course of history through skill at the right moment, and that cultures do not so fully colonize minds that everyone becomes a clone.
Three phases of human history and what might follow 3:43:35
Asked to imagine a million years of human history, Kaldellis declines to predict specifics but describes three broad phases so far, the long hunter gatherer period, the agricultural revolution that enabled surplus and complex societies, and the current industrial and technological phase. He expects a fourth phase to come, and Lex speculates it might involve genetic engineering, brain computer interfaces, and artificial intelligence reshaping what it means to be human, while wondering whether consciousness, rather than intelligence, is the truly special and hard to engineer trait that would still connect future humans to hunter gatherers, or whether humanity might instead destroy itself with tools it now possesses for the first time.
Closing thoughts on hope 3:47:32
Asked what gives him hope, Kaldellis says other historical periods faced far worse conditions with more reason to despair, and that current problems, including uncertain technology, seem solvable if elites can be reined in. He recalls growing up during the 1980s Cold War under constant threat of nuclear annihilation alongside oddly upbeat popular culture, followed by a more depressed mood in the 1990s despite the Cold War ending, showing that a sense of despair does not always match objective conditions. Lex suggests the late 20th and 21st centuries will be remembered as a flourishing of humanity by most measures, with misery objectively decreasing even as new problems are created, and both agree there is reason for hope while still aiming to do better. The episode closes with Kaldellis thanking Lex for giving his field wider visibility, and Lex signing off with a line from Benjamin Franklin, that a great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.
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