罗马帝国与拜占庭帝国的兴衰｜Lex Fridman Podcast #498

We're talking about a society that was right in the middle of one of the main corridors of empire-building and new religions in the world. This is the most dangerous neighborhood that you can possibly live in.

Twenty-six emperors were murdered in a period of 50 years.

Yes. It's tremendous instability. Almost all of these emperors were generals, and almost all were murdered by their men. So civil war was the norm: hyperinflation, economic crash, plus a plague. There's just a lot of chaos.

Here's why I don't think the Eastern Roman Empire is a military dictatorship. Even though the emperors controlled the armies, and the armies themselves would often have a say in who became emperor through the civil wars that we mentioned, the reason why I don't think it's a military dictatorship is because they almost never—very, very rarely—used the army as an instrument of social control.

Sometimes these eunuchs were extremely competent, like Narses, Justinian's general, who defeated the Goths in Italy in this massive battle. This guy was a total hardass, and he was this little old man. He was very old, tiny, and a eunuch. The Goths laughed at him, but he had the last laugh.

You've described how the Byzantine Empire is the Roman Empire, that calling it the Byzantine Empire is an invention of historians writing long after the empire had collapsed, that the people of that time considered themselves Romans, and that the so-called Byzantine Empire never actually existed. In every legal and cultural sense, it was the Roman Empire continuing unbroken.

So let's get our terms right in the grand historical context. What is the Byzantine Empire, and why should we just call it the Roman Empire?

The burden of proof is on those who would assert that what we've been calling the Byzantine Empire is something other than the Roman Empire, because all of our sources are very clear about this. We've known about this. We've always known about it. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance, right? It's like when you know something is the case, but you carry on as if it's not.

The Eastern Roman Empire is the direct continuation of the ancient Roman Empire in the East. Everybody knows the Western Empire fell in the fifth century, and for many conceptions of Western history, that was sufficient. That's when we say the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century. We kind of know that the eastern half survived, but we don't want to include that in our cultural genealogy, and so we pretend that it became something else.

But in fact, it called itself the Roman Empire. Its subjects were Roman citizens. They called themselves Romans all the way down through to the end and beyond. So there are a number of reasons why Western Europeans wanted to think that the Eastern Empire was something different, and those reasons created these models. They called it the Empire of the Greeks for 1,000 years, then they switched to the Byzantine Empire for very political reasons.

Now that's collapsing. We're moving into a phase where we have the long Roman Empire. We recognize that the history of the Roman state, the Roman polity, is something that lasts an extraordinarily long time—very uniquely, almost in history—from antiquity, from the archaic period, down to the 15th century.

I think it would be really nice to look, just for a brief moment, at the grand scale of the full Roman state as it lasted for over 2,200 years.

Yeah.

So, from its founding in 753 BC to, let's say, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD, can we try to give a big-picture overview of everything that happened?

Okay. First, we have a period of the kings. This is almost legendary, from around the eighth century BC down to around 510 BC. This is when Rome is ruled by a series of local kings. The kings are expelled, and the republic, or what we call the republic, is instituted.

This is a regime governed mostly by an aristocracy, but with cooperation from the people of Rome. In various ways, the arrangements change over the centuries. That lasts for about five centuries.

Then we have the end of the republic in the era of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar, when the civil wars lead to the creation of an imperial monarchy under Augustus. We date that roughly to 27 BC, something like that.

Thereafter, it is an imperial monarchy for the next millennium and a half. Very broadly, we can divide that into two phases: one where the center of power is in Rome, and one where it's in Constantinople. We can debate the dates of when that transition takes place. These big transitions usually take place over long periods of time; they're not very sudden.

So that's the big picture: kings, republic, imperial monarchy.

The Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire.

Yes.

And then the Western and Eastern Roman Empires.

Yes.

What are the different terms that we could be using for the Byzantine Empire, including Byzantium? Is it also fair to say the Late Roman Empire?

We use “Late Roman Empire” for both east and west, starting around the reign of Diocletian, maybe even a bit earlier, during the third century AD. That goes down to maybe the early seventh century.

The principal characteristics of that period would probably be the tax system and the administration. The bureaucracy of the later Roman Empire comes mostly from Diocletian and Constantine's reforms.

And Diocletian was in the third century.

Yes, 284 to 305 AD. He was a very important reformer.

We'll talk about it, but let's just do this whirlwind. Hopefully there'll be automagical images somewhere overlaid.

Okay.

In 753 BC, Rome, a small city-state, is founded, and in 509 BC, the kings are overthrown and the Roman Republic is born. In 390 BC, the Gauls sack Rome, and this, among other events throughout its history, is a formative trauma that hardens Rome's security obsession.

Throughout its history, people want to attack from different directions, and so you have to defend. There are two kinds of military operations, as we were saying off mic. One is wars of conquest and expansion, and one is more defensive. We'll talk about how the military changes throughout its history to allocate more effort to one versus the other.

From 264 to 146 BC, the Punic Wars and the survival against Hannibal transform Rome into a Mediterranean superpower. Then, like you mentioned, from 49 to 31 BC, Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon, the assassination of Caesar, the Battle of Actium, and the civil war dismantle the Republic and concentrate power in a single ruler, Octavian, also known as Augustus, the first Roman emperor, let's say.

Then, in 27 BC, Augustus founds the Principate, a very low-key monarchy. Officially, that ends the Republic, and from 27 BC to 180 AD begins the Pax Romana, a period of relative peace and stability. A lot of the emperors we know of—the sexy, popular emperors—come from that period. Marcus Aurelius, whom I'm a big fan of, is from that period.

Then that takes us to 284 AD, when Diocletian, the guy we mentioned, rebuilds the state. The emperors drop the first-citizen mask, this perception of the persona presented by the state.

In 312 AD, Constantine defeats Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge to become the sole ruler of the western half of the empire, and then founds Constantinople in 330 AD. East and West are split in 395 AD. The Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD. The West falls in 476 AD, when the last Western emperor is deposed.

Then we focus more on the Eastern Roman Empire, beginning with Justinian's reign in 527, in the sixth century. In the seventh century, Heraclius defeats Persia and then loses against the Arabs. There's the Arab conquest continuing in the seventh century. In the eighth century, the Arab siege of Constantinople fails. Then there's the Macedonian dynasty, about which you have an excellent book.

Then come the Crusades, eventually leading to Constantinople falling in 1453 AD. As a person who understands the full journey of the empire, with a focus on East Roman history, are there obvious, glaring holes or incorrect things in what I just said?

No, nothing incorrect. I would say that if you wanted to produce a very swift timeline of its history, it's obviously important to focus on the moments when lots of territory was lost to foreign invaders. These are actually three main moments.

There's the Arab conquests in the 630s. This is a decade—in a decade, that war was lost. There's the Seljuk Turk conquest of Asia Minor, modern Turkey, in the 1070s. That was very swift and partly reversed afterward, but only partly.

And then there's the Fourth Crusade in 1204, when armies from mostly France sacked and conquered Constantinople and dismembered the empire as much as they could. It didn't last that long. The Romans managed to regroup and recover, but those are the three main crisis points.

They are very swift, but they cause incredible damage. For all the rest of its history, it is a state and society that is generally consolidating, regrouping, and generally engaged in slow but steady economic growth and territorial expansion on a small scale, but steadily.

We can talk about this. I think it's an important thing to keep in mind about the big picture: the defeats were swift and terrible, but most of its history is one of slow growth.

There are some traumatic events that have a big impact, but a lot of the developments we'll talk about might seem or feel as if there's a particular moment when those developments, or changes in the way the government or military is structured, arise. But really, it's a gradual process.

Exactly.

And so that's the tension we have to be constantly dancing with.

Yeah. So, as historians, this is a point of method, and it's very important. There are moments when individuals with a great deal of power make choices that impact everybody else and have long-term consequences downstream. Constantine's conversion to Christianity, for example, right? Not something that anybody could have predicted or did predict.

Otherwise, most of the developments that we identify by specific dates—like you mentioned 395, the division of the eastern and western empires—are conventional dates that we use to capture what is, in fact, a much longer process. There was no split between the two halves. It was one among many allocations of jurisdiction to one son and another son in the east and the west.

The two halves were subsequently reunited, then they divided again among different emperors. It's just a process, and so we sometimes use fixed dates for what is, in fact, a process. Or, for 476, the fall of the Western Empire, that's just the last date. It's actually a very long process that took decades.

So that's just something to keep in mind: Sometimes we're talking about processes, and sometimes we're talking about very discrete events with long-term consequences.

Maybe an impossible question for a Roman state that lasted over 2,200 years, but is there a kind of through line, a thread, a soul that runs through the entire history of the Roman Empire? As you said, it's a slow transformation and evolution. But if we dare call the whole thing Roman—Rome, the Roman state—is there some aspect, some characteristic that runs through the whole thing?

Yes.

By the way, do you know the metaphor of the Ship of Theseus? In case the audience doesn't know it, this is when there's a ship at sea, and over time every component of that ship is replaced with some other component, so that by the end of the story it has none of the original parts. But it's, in a certain sense, still that ship because of the story, right?

Roman history is different from, let's say, Greek history or Christian history, right? Christian history is the story of a religion. It can be in any country, among any ethnic group. It's here, there—it's everywhere. But you still have histories of Christianity.

It's the same with, say, Greek culture or Greek literature, right? It's not a function of a particular state. Ancient Greeks were famously never united in a state. But it's people who culturally accept that tradition as their elite prestige culture and engage with Homer and Plato and so forth. And they can be anywhere.

Roman history is not like that. Roman history is very specifically the history of a state or a political community. This is the community of the Roman people, the Roman citizens. It is in gradual evolution, but at no point is there a rupture in that history such that its members would ever think that something dramatic had changed and that they're no longer part of that story.

In the same way as the ship I just mentioned, it's the narrative that you tell about it where the changes that take place make sense only when you see them within the context of that story. It's the same with Roman history. Yes, there are changes. Eventually, everything changes. But it happens so gradually that it doesn't seem that way to anyone living in it.

The narrative of the history of the Roman people is what holds all of this together.

How important is it that—you mentioned Greek culture—a lot of my friends who are Greek are extremely proud of being Greek. There are certain cultures that are proud.

Sure.

And it's not a momentary, ephemeral thing. It feels like a thing that has lasted for many generations.

Oh, yeah.

And so that is an engine that propagates through time, that carries that culture forward. Does a similar thing apply for the Roman Empire in a different way? Maybe because you say it's a political kind of community, that means a set of ideals.

And we'll talk about this, because those ideals become even more concretized and explicit, I think, through the East Roman Empire. One of the things you talk about is that the citizens of the empire are all connected, that they're engaged in this whole sort of machinery.

Anyway, that's a complicated way of asking: Are there some elements that Greek pride—dare I speak—is there some kind of Roman pride that propagates the thing?

Oh, there totally is. You can find authors and historical agents who definitely display this or talk about it. But we don't want to make that the center of the story or the basis for any analysis, because what you're observing in your Greek friends is also the result of modern nation-building. It's the result of modern systems of education and national identities, and these are fostered and created through all kinds of media and institutions. It's just a different situation altogether.

What you find in ancient republics or medieval states is more something like a consensus to rule and to be ruled in this particular political community. Some members of it may definitely—and, in fact, did—have this kind of pride.

I'll give you an example. There's an ambassador in the sixth century, and he's concluding a deal with the Persians. The Persians are skeptical because Romans can't always be trusted. But this guy says to them, "Let me just tell you: You're making a deal here with the Romans. The Romans. The name should say it all."

You get a sense that he's expressing a certain pride in being a bearer of the Roman tradition and speaking for the emperors and the Roman Empire. For him, this was something very, very momentous. You find these kinds of examples, so these people exist.

But I wouldn't want to make that the basis for an analysis of how the society works as a whole. For the most part, it was something like a consensus where subjects or citizens, however you want to call them, agree to be taxed and be ruled by political authorities because of what they get in return. There's this kind of understanding of a mutual set of responsibilities.

My concern, among other things, is to try to explain how this society held together for so long. Pride, yes, among some people, definitely. You find it in the sources. But texts are written by literate, usually elite people, so this is a small part of the population. We can't automatically extend their attitudes to everybody else.

In dealing with everyone else, we have to work with different kinds of materials and different kinds of assumptions. We can't just posit that they're proud of being Roman. They could have been. We don't know that, though. We can see other sorts of things about them. For example, did they pay their taxes? Did they try to rebel and leave the empire? Those are the kinds of things that I look for.

Pride is one component, but there could be other explanations and factors that explain what motivates a soldier to defend the capital, for example, or what motivates a particular person to pay taxes. This is something that we'll definitely talk about.

But just to linger at the big picture, if the Romans from the different periods met, how different would they be from each other? If I brought you a Roman from the kingdom period, the republic period, and the early imperial period—this is one of those blind taste tests you can do with food.

Yes, yes.

Blind taste tests you can do with food.

Yes. Pepsi and Coke.

Pepsi and Coke.

Yes. I mean, I get asked this in a much more radical form, which is: If you take someone from around 1453 who's a Roman and a subject of the Roman Empire, and compare him—or have him meet, in your imagination—with someone from the ancient republic, how—

Yeah—

—could they find any kind of agreement on what it means to be Roman and recognize each other as belonging to that polity? This is a very difficult thing to—

Like, now, I can point to a number of things that they would eventually find. If you told them, "You're both Romans. You're both from this long history. Now you have to find what you have in common," I think they could find things.

But before we talk about those, if you want to get into it, let's just say that the question can even be posed about Romans who live at the same time. If you take a senator from the age of Cicero and someone from the slums of Rome, who's maybe the son of a slave who was brought from the East by some general a generation ago, and put them in a room and say, "Now, you discuss. You're both Romans. What do you have in common?" they might have trouble coming up with something.

So let's not minimize the sheer diversity of the experiences and life experiences of Romans who were living at the same time. The important thing is that change is always happening, and from my standpoint this change is cumulative. It results in Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian Romans in Constantinople who, at first sight, might have little to do with Latin-speaking, non-Christian Romans—or Romans worshiping the ancient gods—from the republic in Rome.

Those are very, very different situations, and no doubt they would look and seem foreign to each other, right? The question is, why do we assume that someone like Hadrian, an emperor from the second century, a very cosmopolitan figure who travels around the empire with his Greek lover, writes poems, has a Greek beard, loves Greek culture, and has much to do with someone from the Middle Republic who is some warrior chasing down cattle from the Samnites?

I mean, and yet the way we understand history is, “Oh no, those belong together”: Hadrian and this ancient Roman from the 4th century BC. But not Hadrian and someone, an emperor a few centuries later who’s just like him, bilingual in Greek and Latin, cosmopolitan, who reads the same stuff, because we posit this rupture between Roman and Byzantine.

One of the ways we can try to analyze this is, for example, by looking at a very specific role in society across time. We can look at soldiers and how they dealt with violence, for example.

That’s one way. You’re making me realize that we can just take 1,000 different professions and positions in society and really specifically look at what the experience of the world was like. One of them is the view on violence across time, and the other is the view on the role of the government across time.

That’s an excellent way of putting it. Take soldiers, for example. They swear an oath. We don’t have the oath for every given period. We have some approximations of it, some hints of what it contained, but we know that Roman soldiers swore an oath throughout all of the centuries of the empire.

Sometimes they might add a Christian formula to it. Sometime before that, they did not. But they swore basically to protect the republic, depending on what term they used, or the empire or the emperor. This is something that they would have recognized very quickly. If they met each other over time and said, “Hey, what was your oath like?” and recited it, this would have made much sense to them, right?

Or take, for example, a woman who runs a business from any century of the empire. Especially the later you go, the more this woman is enabled to do this by virtue of Roman law: certain Roman laws of property, inheritance, and marriage, but also regulations regarding who can do what and what kinds of property women can handle and under what circumstances.

This is something that Roman women had in common that many other cultures did not. I’ll give you an example. In the 10th and 11th centuries, there are Jewish women who live in the Eastern Roman Empire who realize that they have more rights in Roman courts than in rabbinical ones, and they take their disputes to the Roman courts.

The thing is that for the Romans, these are property matters, not religious matters. But for the rabbis, these are religious matters. The Roman courts trump the Jewish courts in the empire, right? And so you end up with a situation where Jewish women have more rights than Jewish women do elsewhere, because Roman law is not operative there.

And there you go. These things matter, right? That’s a function of imperial law.

This would be an interesting interplay between the law and religious institutions throughout the East Roman Empire. You argue that even though the personalities of the various emperors varied, as we’ll talk about, and as they’re often venerated, celebrated, criticized, and talked about, the East Roman Empire was projecting a persona to its citizens that was consistent throughout its history.

Can you describe what you mean by this and the different detailed characteristics of this persona?

Yes. This persona is what the governments—or the emperor, the court, and the spokesman, the bureaucracy—want their subjects to think. This whole thing is about how power is being used, why, and for whom, right? They do so in laws that they promulgate throughout the empire. Sometimes they have these laws read in church, for example, or posted publicly. They’re definitely eager to have them communicated to as many people as possible.

But they’re also a function of imperial rhetoric: the way you praise an emperor, the way you talk about an emperor. You find this language in petitions. This is a hugely important glue for this society: anyone could basically petition the authorities for just about anything. That’s not technically true, but there’s a lot of petitioning going on.

If you think something’s wrong or you’ve been treated unjustly, you can petition local officials, even imperial officials. You can petition the emperor, right? The expectation is that that petition will be read, addressed, and answered. It might not be answered in the way that you want, but it will be answered. Those responses contain this language also.

These are the different media through which the emperors are broadcasting this persona. And that persona is what? Basically, that the authorities are responsive to the needs of their subjects, that they are often accountable. In other words, they understand that they are exercising public power and that their mandate is to exercise it solely for the benefit of their subjects.

They keep saying this: “We’re not doing this for our benefit. We’re doing this for your benefit,” say the authorities. They’re also proactive. The emperors are constantly saying, “We’re planning ahead. We’re trying to foresee what problems you might have, and we are solving them before you experience them.”

They’re also working very hard. They’re hardworking. In fact, one of the clichés that they keep using is “sleepless.” The emperors keep saying, “I’m losing sleep over this. I’m not sleeping at night because I’m just worrying so much about your problems and how to solve them.”

Justinian, for example, was publicly known as the sleepless emperor—not because he was a demon whose head floated around in the palace on its own, which some people—

That’s the thing?

It was a thing, yes.

Okay.

That’s a whole thing.

But sleepless in terms of working so hard—

Yes.

There’s no time to sleep.

He was a workaholic. That is conceded by even his enemies. All night he was up, just hauling officials in at any old hour to talk about whatever: wars, architecture, laws, religion, theology, and whatever else.

The emperors are projecting this image, right? That’s what I call the persona: tireless effort to work on behalf of subjects, to do so responsibly, to be responsive and accountable. In other words, if some of my officials break the law or oppress you, I’m giving you instruments, like legal instruments, by which to hold them to account.

So that’s the persona. It’s very consistent, and I think it’s part of the mechanism of tying the society together. In other words, if subjects think that their emperors are like this, they’re more likely to agree to the consensus of essentially paying taxes.

You draw this distinction between rhetoric and action—what the authorities say and what they actually do. When you say “persona” in modern times, some of that could be reframed as propaganda, for example. Propaganda implies that there’s a big gap between the rhetoric and the action.

One of the things you said you took away from reading Machiavelli is that we should judge people not by what they say, but by what they do. So how much of the Roman Empire’s government—what they espoused—was merely rhetoric, and how much was true in how they acted?

Yes. This is a key lesson I took from reading Machiavelli, and I found this a very insightful way of thinking about politics. I would recommend that anybody practice this way of looking at the world, right? People and states and powerful people can say anything they want to. At the end of the day, what matters is what they actually do.

This doesn’t mean that what they say is irrelevant, even if it’s discordant with what they do. Nevertheless, in the case of the East Roman state, my research suggests that the emperors and the authorities were generally sincere in what they said. In other words, I have found that they generally did what they said they were going to do overall.

Not perfectly, obviously. Of course, these are human beings we’re talking about. In human societies, there was a lot of corruption and abuse, of course there was. But overall, I think that there was a sufficient level of understanding that the emperors were in fact doing this, and they were actually incentivized to do this. We can talk about how. They were also in a pretty vulnerable situation, so they needed their subjects to be relatively content on this front.

Isn’t this surprising to you? From the outsider point of view, Roman emperors, even in the East Roman Empire, technically have a lot of power. You can even say, in some cases, absolute power, and yet they seem to be awfully worried to make everybody in the empire happy. What explains that? What explains the small gap between rhetoric and action in the East Roman Empire?

A number of things, but ultimately it is that there is no right to the throne. This is a function of the Roman matrix of politics here.

Here’s a bit of a paradox. What we call the Roman Republic was the most imperialistic phase of Roman history. This is when the Romans did most of their conquering. What we call the empire is much less imperialistic in this way. It’s much more defensive in its approach, right? And yet our terms are a little mismatched in that way.

The empire is more a function of the fact that it has an emperor rather than that it is engaged in imperialism. That emperor emerged out of the republic, but emerged out of the republic in a very strange way. In other words, not as a dynasty that created the state.

For example, if you think of the Ottoman Empire and many other empires, the whole thing existed because this dynasty engaged in conquest and was successful in creating the state. The dynasty was at the heart of the state.

But that's not at all the case in the Roman Empire. The emperor is a figure who emerged within a republic, and in order to create peace after the civil wars, those emperors had to, for a long time, pretend that they were not what they really were. Basically, they continued to flatter the idea of a republic that had a first citizen, maybe. “Oh, no, no, I'm not a king. I'm just—I have this office and that office and that office. Whatever the Senate has given me.”

Now, we understand that's a façade, but the fact that they had to create this façade at all is very important.

Can we actually just linger on that? How much of this—because you said they had to create this façade. Did Augustus, who started the whole thing, the first emperor of Rome, have to act that way? He kept acting like he wasn't an absolute—

Yes.

—monarch, and he could have gone hardcore: destroy the Senate, full hardcore rule, dictatorship.

Well, then how does he govern?

He wants to be an effective governor.

Oh, yeah.

He also wants to not be overthrown.

Exactly. Just because you ended one civil war doesn't mean that there isn't going to be another. You have to create a consensus such that people don't want to have another civil war.

If he did what you said, which he could have done in theory, that would have just led to more wars, right? The problem is that the emperors, even those who come to power through violence, can't prevent other people from trying to come to power through violence because, as I said, no one has a right to the throne.

We should also say one more thing—dare I carefully say this—but it seems like riots and civil wars are a feature, not a bug, of the system.

Yes.

This is different from the modern day, because the threat of a civil war—a violent civil war where you overthrow the government and there's a lot of death and struggle for power—is always present. That's another incentive—I guess the stick, not the carrot, but the stick—for the emperor to behave.

Yes. It's the main one. Just take the thousand years that I study. There's something like 120 civil wars.

These are usually very swift. They're over quickly, and they're never about ideology. So they're not like modern civil wars. They're not about slavery or the rights of kings or whatever. They're solely about who has the power.

All sides have the same ideology. They talk about the responsibility of government in the same way, right? They're just competing over who is the best man to do the job. Once you have that situation, it might not be a civil war. It could be a palace coup or fighting in the capital, something like that.

Once everyone's taken their side and you have a winner, that's the emperor, and you often overthrow the previous regime.

I'll give you some statistics. Something like 46% of the emperors of Constantinople were overthrown through violence. Forty-six percent. That's almost half, right? That's a huge number, which means that every emperor is vulnerable and insecure, and they know it.

What they have to do is make sure that doesn't happen to them. The way to do that is not by arresting and executing everybody you think might be a threat, or just generally behaving like a Caligula or a Nero. That will just get you killed. They know this.

The best way to avoid that fate is to do the things that will make people happy, so that they don't support a rebel if a rebel decides to appear. Sometimes rebels would appear.

There's a kind of convention in Constantinople: sometimes you think, “That emperor's pretty unpopular, and I think I can overthrow him.” What you would do is march down the center boulevard, and you'd have your people call the populace of Constantinople out to rally, maybe go to Hagia Sophia, the church, and create a big crowd calling for the deposition of the emperor.

Sometimes that happened, and sometimes it didn't. The rebel or wannabe rebel would proceed down the Mese, the boulevard, and people would gradually disappear. Then he'd be left alone and go up to Hagia Sophia seeking asylum.

That's a bid. That's someone making a bid for the throne, and it goes disastrously wrong. Other times, the people come out because they hate the emperor, and they drag the emperor out and cut his nose off or whatever.

So emperors are constantly trying to prevent that from happening, and the best way to do that is through goodwill.

I'm trying to load in that kind of world because it's a different world from the one we live in today.

Yes.

There's a constant inner working of policy development inside government.

Yes.

But the check on power is literal: “We will murder you.”

Yes. It depends on the period. Sometimes they would murder you, sometimes blind you, sometimes cut your nose off. But there were periods—

Thank you for the nuance.

No, there were periods that were more civilized. You'd basically get retired to a monastery.

Right.

Okay, you're right. Here's what elections do. Elections give a government a mandate for, I don't know, 4 or 5 years, and during that period, you may be unpopular, but you're legitimate because of the institutions.

Whereas in Constantinople, we don't have those kinds of institutions. We have, instead, an ongoing referendum. We just call it a perpetual referendum, right?

In fact, the emperors are conducting opinion polls, in a sense, because they appear in public. When they appear in public, everyone is expected to cheer and chant acclamations—slogans, right? So you have 100,000 people in the Hippodrome all chanting, “Worthy,” or “Many years for you, Augustus,” or something like this.

If that happens, it's great. But if you appear in the Hippodrome and people are sullen, or if the chanting is a bit tepid, or if they're booing, then you know something's wrong, right? You have to find out what's wrong. It could be something like the grain supply isn't working or whatever. Emperors are desperate to fix those problems.

The Hippodrome is this big gathering place in Constantinople, where a lot of people gathered and did this kind of cheering—or not cheering—based on policy and whether the emperor was popular or not.

This was democracy. I apologize for using that term, but in our conception of what that means, what do we mean by democracy in the modern day? The people somehow have a connection to who leads and how they lead, and the Hippodrome was that connection between the people and the leaders.

We can talk about modern democracy if you want. I have my own views about modern democracy, how it works and how it doesn't, and whether it is democracy, in fact, because there are other models of democracy, like ancient Athenian democracy, which is a whole other thing.

But you're right. It's not just in the Hippodrome. It's wherever people assemble in large numbers. This could be military mustering grounds, right? The army is also the Roman people, in a way, and in some cases the most decisive part of it, right?

So if an army gathers together and decides it wants a different emperor, that's serious, and that can happen out in the provinces, too. It doesn't necessarily have to happen in Constantinople.

There's also Hagia Sophia, so people gather in the church, or they gather in public spaces like the Forum of Constantine. This can happen anywhere where a large number of people can gather.

I don't know if you want to call it a democracy as such, but it is definitely a form of popular—let's say—consultation and a testing of consensus.

I'll give you another example. In the 1190s, the emperor, Alexios III, is being threatened by the German emperor. The German emperor is basically saying, “You pay me a bunch of money or I'll invade.” Straight-up extortion.

Yeah.

Alexios decides, “Okay, I'm going to gather this money. I'm going to impose these taxes.” He gathers the people in the Hippodrome and says, “We're going to have the German tax.” He called it the German tax.

There was such an uproar in the Hippodrome against this that he said, “That wasn't my idea. I don't know where that came from. Never mind. We're not going to have the German tax.”

Fortunately, the German emperor died and nothing ever happened, but it gives you a sense of how emperors can literally backtrack when they see that the people are against something in a matter of policy, like tax policy.

So, yeah, there was this give-and-take. Institutionally, the emperor might look absolute, as you called him earlier. In practice, no. The ones who did that didn't end well.

We should say, going to Perplexity here, the Hippodrome of Constantinople was the main stadium and social center of the Byzantine capital, used primarily for chariot racing and imperial ceremony, and today survives in Istanbul's Sultanahmet district.

The reason I looked this up is that I wanted to see how many people it held. Shaped as a long, U-shaped racecourse with a central barrier and tiered seating, it may have held from roughly 30,000 up to 100,000 spectators, though exact capacity is debated because archaeological remains are limited.

That's a lot of people.

Thirty thousand is definitely a pretty underestimated number. The Hippodrome is still there. You can see it from satellite photos. Actually, some parts of the building—the Sphendone, the sling around the southern side—are still there.

You can walk around it. And it's right next to the palace. In other words, emperors didn't have to go far.

Sometimes there are events for replacing an emperor. Say the emperor dies in his sleep and there's no heir. This happens in 491, for example, and so the people gather in the Hippodrome in order to have a discussion with the court about whom to appoint. In those kinds of contexts, it's entirely possible that there are people also in the arena, not just in the stands. I think some military units might have been arrayed there rather than in the stands. So you can get more people than what we project might fit in the stands because they're not having the races on that day.

We should say that what was emphasized in the first paragraph was the athletic and entertainment events, right? Like the imperial ceremony. But there was also a sort of political gathering that was popular. The Hippodrome was not just for sport. It was where emperors appeared before the people, where acclamations, public punishments, and political demonstrations took place, and where the rival circus factions—the Blues, Greens, Reds, and Whites—became powerful social and sometimes paramilitary forces. And this goes on and on and on. So this was a place—

Oh, it's a very important place. Yeah.

—for people to speak to the leader.

Yeah. Vent sometimes. Even insult them.

Yeah. This is fascinating. It's human civilization. It's converged toward a mechanism that has clearly worked, because the empire in the East stood for a thousand years. It's fascinating. We, as humans, throughout our history, try to figure out: How do we govern large collections of humans in a way that they're represented, in a way that they don't riot or rebel, and in a way that we flourish together as a people? All this stuff. The East Roman Empire is a real study of something that seemed to have worked. There are lessons there even for modern times, I think. Modern times, again, are very early in human civilization.

From a certain standpoint, yes, we are still early in trying to figure it out.

Trying to figure it out.

Yes. Now, mind you, I'm not advocating for this type of social organization and government. What I'm trying to do as a historian is understand how and why it survived and also to find the ways that it worked, because it did work. We know that much. We have to start from that. It survived. It was resilient. There was a lot of give and take in the exercise of power, and I want to understand the mechanisms of that.

So if we can, before we go to Emperor Constantine I and the founding of Constantinople, can we look at some perhaps seminal events that led up to some of the topics we'll be talking about? One of them—tell me if this is not as interesting as I think it is—is the Edict of Caracalla in 212 AD.

You described that, starting with Augustus in the early imperial period, the government saw itself as a protector of Roman citizens, which was a minority of the people living in the Roman Empire. It didn't consider the provincials. And then you described how the Edict of Caracalla extended full Roman citizenship to basically all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire. What is it? Why was it done? Why is it important? And how did it change the Roman Empire?

Right. I agree with you that this is, in fact, very important. It's a real turning point in a sense, but it also is part of a process. For various reasons, the Roman polity tended to bestow its metropolitan citizenship—that is, Roman citizenship—on its allies and eventually, in time, on many people that it had conquered. And it had various mechanisms for doing so.

It could bestow block grants. Sometimes it allowed its generals to bestow citizenship on people they thought would be necessary players for controlling local societies. Sometimes it even allowed foreign cities—non-Roman cities—to decide who would get Roman citizenship by basically electing them to certain kinds of offices. They outsourced a lot of this. And so, over time, you have the steady growth of a Roman community of citizens who are not all in Rome and who are not all of Roman origin, whatever that means. They were not descended from people who were from Rome.

By Caracalla's time, in the early third century AD, we can estimate that maybe, at most, a third of the free citizens of the empire were Roman citizens. Everyone else had local citizenship. You were Alexandrian or Athenian or whatever, and with that, you were subject to those laws. This emperor, Caracalla—that's his nickname—had the reigning name Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. So, just like Marcus Aurelius, it's the same name two generations later.

Some badass names for emperors, by the way. I don't know if it's the chicken or the egg, but some epic names.

They've been remembered that way, and so we read that back into the name—

Yes, that's true.

—and absolutely, yes.

But anyway, Caracalla. Yeah.

Yeah, so he issues this edict in 212 called the Constitutio Antoniniana, named after him. Some people at the time called it the Divine Decree, which basically extended citizenship to everybody.

Now, we don't know exactly why he did so. We can guess the reasons that he said he did so, and this was for religious reasons. In other words, he wanted people to go to the temples and pray and give thanks to the gods for him and for his survival from a coup. Which is whatever. It's possible that there was some kind of religious motivation here, and he wanted everybody to do so as Roman citizens, to honor the Roman gods and something like that.

Other historians at the time said he did it for tax reasons. We don't know exactly. There might even have been a kind of ideology of a unified community across the empire playing, if not in his mind, then in the minds of the jurists—that is, the legal advisers he had. So that's possible. But less interesting than his motivations are the consequences of this and what it tells us about the Roman community.

Imagine a situation where no modern empire has ever really done this, right? What's significant about the Roman case is that not only did they extend citizenship to everybody, but they meant it. This is something that had teeth. In other words, it meant that the rights and opportunities that were available to Roman citizens, say, in the Roman Senate at Rome, are now available to everybody. And within a generation, you have a situation where all of the emperors are provincials. All the most powerful people in the empire are from the provinces.

This is mind-blowing. The fact that the Roman Empire was able to do this and that it stuck. This is incredible.

They did it, and they meant it.

And they meant it. They implemented it. It was real. That's an important thing that tells you a lot about the populace of the Roman Empire: the fact that it stuck, that the government meant it, that the system encouraged and incentivized the government to mean it. It's incredible.

Yeah, and there's a law of citizenship, and it basically says something like, “Anyone born within the Roman Empire is a Roman citizen.” The Roman jurists and policymakers who were behind this had some very interesting ideas about creating this kind of community.

Imagine if the British, at the time of the peak of the empire, had bestowed British citizenship on everyone, including in India, and suddenly made positions of power in London available to people from India, including the throne. It's just unthinkable. And that has to do with race and colonialism and all kinds of things, right? But not in the Roman Empire.

We have a situation where the emperors are all from the provinces. The most powerful officials are all from the provinces. And so, a century later, when Constantinople is created, it's created in the Bosporus, where modern Istanbul is, in the Eastern Roman Empire. It's created within the preexisting Roman context. It doesn't bring Romanness to the East. It's already there. And so it's not such a leap to create a center of Roman power in the East because of that.

And you've helped put together a book on the history of intellectual thought in the East Roman Empire. But this is the interesting thing here, and I can ask that many times, but let me ask it here also: the great-man, great-woman view of history. Were there Thomas Jefferson–type characters in the meetings as they were executing on the edict or developing the edict? Is that important, or is it more about the system and the culture? How important was it?

It seems like a revolutionary idea. When we think about the American Revolution and the founding documents, it seems like a few individuals were really critical about the wording of things. And then words matter because those words create the reality, and then it propagates through time.

Yeah. For the edict, I suspect that, yes, there were a few people who were behind it, quite possibly jurists—that is, Roman legal scholars. And 212 is an age of very important Roman legal scholars: Ulpian, for example, and others. But we just don't have those records. We have the minutes of the meetings for the American Revolution. Not only do we not know who was in the room, we don't even have the whole edict. We have a papyrus fragment, a piece of ancient paper, that's mostly torn and mutilated, and we have a bit of a paragraph from it.

In Greek, not even the Latin original. It's kind of torn, but it actually preserves the key clause. And that's all we have of the original. We have contemporary sources that mention it and legal documents, but nothing like a complete narrative. We can talk about the people involved in it or even how it was immediately implemented.

Suddenly, we see this explosion in the number of people called Aurelius, because that was his Roman family name. When you acquired citizenship from that edict, you became an Aurelius. There are lots of Aurelii suddenly all over the place. We can see it immediately, but we can't actually see the implementation.

But your instinct says that individuals were very important in the development of that idea and execution of it.

Probably, yeah. Even though it's part of a long-term process of expanding Roman citizenship, this was an explosion, not just an expansion.

And then you said that one of the important aspects about this edict is that giving equal rights to provincials was one of the things that helped deal with the crisis of the third century, and was the thing that, I think you said, quote, “sapped discontent from the relevant populations,” which then minimized the probability of uprisings.

Well, now that's a very long-term process. The third century is chaos. There's a crisis; it's a mess, right? So what follows the edict is quite a few decades of unrest.

Okay, let's put it mildly. Let's talk about the crisis of the third century, where 26 emperors were murdered in a period of 50 years. There's civil wars nonstop. Almost all of these emperors were generals, and almost all were murdered by their men, so civil war was the norm. There was hyperinflation, an economic crash, plus a plague from 249 to 262 AD, which was a pandemic, possibly smallpox or Ebola. It killed up to 5,000 people a day in Rome alone, devastating the tax base and army recruitment pool. The empire fractured into 3 pieces, but then Emperor Aurelian miraculously reconquered them in a period of 5 years. It deserves the name “the Crisis of the Third Century.”

Yeah, it's a perfect storm. You have a crisis of imperial legitimacy. Basically, the army's proclaiming emperors left and right. In an odd sense, ironically, this is in part because there are now a lot more stakeholders in the Roman tradition, right? There are all of these provincial armies, and they're appointing their generals as rival emperors.

But you also have a serious uptick in foreign invasions. In the north, you have foreign invasions; in the east, you have the creation of the Sasanian Empire, the Persian or Iranian Empire, and this was very, very bellicose. So, lots of foreign defeats. Armies are defeated by, quote, “barbarian enemies.” You have eventual inflation and plague.

Under the pressure of all of those forces, it almost fell apart. Now, it didn't actually. Inevitably, there are also historians who downplay the crisis, and legitimately so. We must push back against every one of these characterizations.

26 emperors died, bro. What do you—

That's just the emperors.

I'm sorry. In 50 years. Every other year, an emperor dead. Civil war—

Yeah, that's political instability at the top, right? But what—

Right, that's not—

But what are the lives of most people?

Sure.

So if you go to Egypt, for example, what's going on there? How are people living there? And we can see how people are living in Egypt because we have all these papyrus documents from Egypt.

That's true.

And for the most part, they don't seem to be experiencing a crisis.

Constantine, as we'll get to him, is one of the most murderous leaders in all of human history, if you consider his own family. But if you're living in the provinces, you know, he's not—

Oh, yeah.

He's not that murderous.

No, he's perfectly fine.

So it's very important to remember what the actual experience of the average citizen of the empire is like. Fair. Okay, but how—maybe there's more we could say about the crisis. And then, of course, the crisis is in part resolved by Diocletian, as he does a hard reset on the structure of the Roman system of government. So maybe you could speak a little bit more to the crisis that's important for us to understand, and how Diocletian solves the crisis in 284 AD.

Right. So again, these are processes rather than specific events.

Sure.

For example, you mentioned that the empire kind of breaks into pieces.

Yes.

And we have what's sometimes called the Gallic Empire. The provinces of Gaul—modern France and, sort of, Britain—for a decade and a half or so are kind of like this little separatist empire.

What's interesting about that is that this was not an attempt to break away from the empire. In other words, it's not some discontented provincials who are just tired of Roman rule and want to break away and do their own thing. No. This is actually just an attempt by provincial generals to take the throne and do so to rule the entire empire.

It doesn't work. They get only as far as the provinces that they take. The only way that they know to set up a state is to make it a Roman state, right? Their total political imaginary is, “Well, we're just going to do a Roman thing here.” Maybe we'll reunite the empire ourselves, or, as happened, Aurelian—that is, someone from the other side—will reunite the empire. But it's always a Roman model. It's almost like there are no alternatives by this point.

So that's interesting. The way I characterize what Diocletian does sometimes is that he turns the problem into its own solution. In other words, the problem is too many emperors or wannabe emperors. There's just more going on. One emperor can't deal with all these problems along the frontiers or with all the political problems.

So what he does is deputize some of his colleagues, people he was on very good terms with from the army. These are all Illyrians. By the way, for a few centuries, the emperors are all from this region of the former Yugoslavia that's the size of Scotland. That's where they all come from.

What explains that?

The army.

Ah.

These are military men, sometimes hard-drinking military men, very good at their job, like Aurelian, whom you mentioned. There's a series of Illyrian emperors who restore stability. The reason why there are so many Illyrian emperors is because they worked their way up through the ranks of the army.

The regions of Yugoslavia at that time are sufficiently economically underdeveloped that there's a strong incentive for young men to join the army because it's a living. Illyrians become the backbone of the Roman army, and they're described as these tough Roman conservative types. These are tough military guys.

I say that to draw a contrast between, say, Hadrian, whom I mentioned earlier, who was a much more sophisticated, artsy, poetic, cosmopolitan emperor.

Sure.

Also a hard-ass. You did not want to mess with Hadrian. But these guys from the third century are military men through and through. Their whole careers are in the army. They have the military stubble. They've got these thick necks. They look angry. They've got their hands on their swords. They're not projecting an image of calm and sophistication.

So, military men.

Yeah.

Military men from Aurelian.

Yep. So Diocletian gets a gang of them together. Eventually, there are 4. We call this the Tetrarchy. He basically allocates them to various areas. This wasn't any kind of hard division of the empire. Basically, it was a collaborative project. They each went wherever they were needed.

Was it fair to say that there were 4 administrative zones? He allocated each one to a zone?

Broadly. I'd say more military zones.

Okay.

The administration tends to operate, humming along in the background, wherever these emperors happen to be, right? This is a period of big government now. Diocletian creates a larger government, possibly a larger army, and in order to pay for that, you need more systematic and effective taxation, which means you need more censuses, more bureaucracy, more collection. So it is an era of bigger government.

So just to linger on that point, is it fair to say that Diocletian created the “deep state”? Quote, “deep state.” The tax collectors, the logistics, the thing that you've hinted at, which is the separation of the civil and the military layer of society.

So, the concept of a deep state—I've had discussions about that with experts who work on the idea of the deep state—and I'm not sure that I would characterize the Roman Empire that way. In part, because while you do have big government and bureaucracy, you have bureaucrats who are buried in various echelons, and nobody knows exactly what they're doing and things like that, I have not come across the idea of some sort of sinister elements working within the administrative apparatus to undermine the emperor.

From a distance, occasionally, you might get glimpses of this kind of thing. Diocletian, for example, once complained, “Nobody ever tells me anything.” In other words, he's so removed—

In part, from the realities of what was going on on the ground, he felt sometimes that he'd lost touch. But I don't find this kind of idea of undermining imperial power from within the bureaucracy.

Yeah, I think one of the ways to explain that is because, in the modern day, “democracy”—in quotes—has a kind of temporary nature to the leader at the top. So it's incentivized the deep state to form. The deep state thinks of itself as a thing that propagates over long periods of time, and then the leader is a very ephemeral, short-term thing.

Yeah.

With an emperor, technically, you can go for a long time, so it's best to be integrated deeply. The bureaucracy should be integrated with the leader. It makes sense.

Mary Beard

Yeah.

But also, in modern social thought, or fear, is that the deep state might be undermining, say—

Undermining, yeah.

—the democracy itself, rather than—right, rather than—

It can cut both ways.

But there is a bureaucracy. There is a big government.

Absolutely. Yeah.

There's a big machinery.

Yeah, compared to before.

Before.

Yes. So Diocletian creates these larger bureaucratic structures, and these are the ones that define the society that I study. As a specialist, I focus mostly on the period after him. But he implemented those to solve a lot of these problems. He was mostly successful.

In terms of generating revenue from a much more troubled and precarious situation, sustaining large armies, and putting down these rebellions and usurpations, he was generally successful at doing that. So he created the model that they kept for the next 3 centuries or more.

But a lot of the elements of that model lasted even beyond that, right?

Mary Beard

Yeah, like universal taxation. I'll give you an example. Up until then, Italy was exempt from taxes. Italy was the land of the conquerors. The conquerors don't pay taxes to themselves. The conquerors live off the taxes that others pay, right?

So Italy was this big tax haven, right? Diocletian, Galerius—these guys are from Illyria. They're from the Balkans. Why is Italy tax-free exactly? That doesn't make any sense. It's a very, very wealthy, prosperous part of the world, and so, no, they tax Italy.

So now, not only do all Romans have the same citizenship and the same law, they all have the same tax system. The Diocletianic tax code, as it were—it's not a code—sounds like a flat tax, which for us sounds regressive. But by the standards of that time, it's actually kind of progressive in a way.

Right.

It means that even elites paid the same, right? Yeah.

So how much of all of this—everything we'll talk about in the coming centuries—is all about taxation?

I think it's huge. Taxation is the heart of it.

So the functioning, the success, the flourishing of a society, the way the government works, the way the people are represented—all of it has to do with taxation. All the civil wars and everything, it feels like taxation is at the core.

Yes. Yeah. If you asked me to put my finger on 1 factor, it would be that.

So the taxation system feels like the early framework for the East Roman Empire.

It did create a more homogeneous framework, for sure. By the end of the 3rd century, it's pretty much in place. What Diocletian does is a universal census, and this is continued by his successors. So every taxable asset in the empire is censused. And so you can now start to have a budget.

Now, there is some element—and then you push back against that—of Diocletian where he legally limited social and class mobility, in part for the taxation system, and made it, in many cases, illegal to move and illegal to quit your job.

For example, as I read, to guarantee the food supply and land tax, farmers were legally forbidden from moving away from the land they worked, so the state always knew who to tax. And for soldiers, sons of veterans were legally obligated to serve in the army to maintain troop numbers. You argue that these were tax-enforcement mechanisms, not a rigid caste system, and so in practice, the empire remained a society of high mobility.

This is a complicated matter. Let's talk, for example, about soldiers. It's probably the case that most soldiers' sons were expected to succeed them. Like most professions where you have an apprenticeship, the son will usually succeed, right?

There are a number of other professions that were kind of guild-like in nature, like shipping, where there were considerable assets involved in order to secure contracts for insurance purposes for the ships and so forth. It made sense for those assets to be passed from father to son. In other words, with them comes the obligation to continue in that line of work.

Some of these things are inherently hereditary, and I don't think most people would have objected to it. Farmers are probably the only case where it might have actually involved some coercion. There was a category of farmers, and we don't know how many of them, who were, for fiscal purposes, bound to the land.

This doesn't mean they couldn't leave the land physically. No one's preventing them from leaving. But they were fiscally responsible for providing the taxes or rents or whatever, because the state wanted to have a secure revenue stream from, say, those lands. It's one of these complicated situations. This did create some limitations on those people.

It's a topic of current research: these bound farmers, as it were, who are tied to the land. Someone put it that most of the time it's people who own the land, and in this arrangement, it's the land that owns the people.

But you're saying the bigger-picture thing is that there was mobility.

Oh, there's considerable mobility.

So class mobility and physical mobility—meaning people moved. And we'll see this from the West into the East and Constantinople and all this kind of stuff.

Oh, yeah. There's tons of mobility. No, this is not a society where people are really bound. We don't find anybody who's like, “I really don't want to be a soldier, but my father was a soldier, and I'm obligated to be one.” We just don't hear those kinds of complaints from people who don't want to be soldiers. Why wouldn't you want to be a soldier in the Roman Empire? It's got tremendous perks.

So can we just linger on why Diocletian was able to stabilize the empire? The crisis of the 3rd century really threatened to tear apart everything. So why did some of these things that we talked about stabilize?

Aurelian had already united the empire territorially. So this is right before Diocletian. What Diocletian did was put in place a system that reduced the number of rebellions. Simply by having 4 big guys with 4 armies, they managed to put out all of those fires, or most of them.

And once you have stability—and he also beat the Persians, I mean, Galerius did so, starting to beat back foreign invasions—that creates a framework for economic stability. People need to, if they're going to invest in land reclamation or expand production, know that foreigners aren't going to come rampaging through, marauding through, stealing their cattle, enslaving them, and taking them off to work on agricultural farms in Mesopotamia.

They need to know this. And if you provide that context of stability, the economic growth and the demographic growth will return. Diocletian created that kind of context.

Let's talk about Constantine and Constantinople. Let's go to the rise of the East Roman Empire. Who was Constantine? Tell me about his rise to power and the founding of Constantinople in 330 AD.

Sure. Constantine was the son of one of Diocletian's colleagues, so he comes from within the system. The system was actually designed to be non-hereditary. In other words, the senior emperors would retire, the junior ones would move up to the senior position, and then they would recruit 2 new ones. They tried to skip the dynastic element.

So it would be, let's just say, kind of meritocratic, not based on whose son you were. Constantine was passed over, but the armies liked him. He was actually quite competent. And so there's a series of civil wars among all of these successors of Diocletian, and Constantine emerges as the winner.

There are periods when there are quite a few of them—like 6 at a time—but they gradually dwindle down to 1. It's as if you have the quarterfinals, semifinals, and then the final war, and Constantine emerges in 324 as the sole ruler of the entire Roman Empire. So that's who he is.

He's definitely an insider, a very, very competent general at civil war. He gradually moves eastward. As he's conquering his rivals, who are often his fathers-in-law or his brothers-in-law, these people are all intermarried, and they have alliances and they fall out. It's one of those kinds of situations.

He moves eastward, and by the time he defeats his last rival, an emperor called Licinius, in 324, he's in the East. Licinius had his headquarters, or one of his headquarters, at this town called Byzantium. Byzantium is a city right where Constantinople was founded. It is at exactly the point where Europe meets Asia, on the Bosporus.

And it's a very strategic location. It always had been, right? Whoever controls the straits of the Bosporus—we don't need to explain how important that is. Constantine decides to create a city named after himself, Constantinople, on that spot, Byzantium. So Byzantium essentially ceases to exist as a city and is replaced by Constantinople, a.k.a. New Rome.

It's pretty clear that right from the beginning, Constantine intended this to be a kind of branch office of Rome in the East, a kind of copy and paste of Rome in the East. It's a plan that his successors continued, right? Now, there are a number of other cities in a generation or 2 before this that were also treated as quasi-Romes.

Basically, there was a historian in the third century who said, “Wherever the emperor is, that's Rome,” right? Emperors are now itinerant. They're no longer staying at Rome. They're mostly on the frontier, and Constantine is one of these frontier emperors. They will sometimes visit Rome, maybe once or twice, maybe once a decade, something like this.

So Rome becomes something that can be sort of copied and pasted in other parts of the empire, and a bunch of other cities get called a New Rome, an Other Rome, an Alternative Rome, My Rome. Constantinople is the last and most successful of those.

So maybe can you speak geographically about the importance of Constantinople? It's an interesting place because when you're talking about a land as large as the West and the East, with enemies and threats from all kinds of different directions, the location where the emperor sits is important.

Very. So look at Rome. It's right in the middle of Italy, right in the middle of the Mediterranean. It's a very safe location in a way, but it's very far from the frontiers. This is a period when emperors need to be with the armies, right? They're not senatorial emperors sitting in Rome having meetings with senators. They are military emperors marching along the frontiers, mostly with generals rather than civilian administration.

They're doing their job. This is the hard work. They're slogging through the mud of winter campaigns. They're not just sitting in a palace enjoying themselves when they could. Rome just becomes inconvenient because of that.

If you look at Constantinople, it is kind of halfway between the Danube frontier and the Euphrates frontier. If you want to prioritize the East or treat it as an equal part of the Roman Empire, as these emperors all did—in fact, almost all emperors who had a choice about whether they would stay in the East or stay in the West chose the East.

There's only 1 who chooses the West, and that's Valentinian later in the fourth century. All the others understand that the East is where it's at. Constantinople is right between the Danube and the Euphrates. These are 2 major frontiers, and so it allows emperors to move between the 2.

Also, look at its location north, south, east, west. North-south, it is the node between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, right? East-west, it's precisely where Europe meets Asia. Because there's a break there—there's a Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, the Hellespont—the Roman Empire during the civil wars would tend to break there. You would have 1 emperor on 1 side in Asia, and you would have another emperor on the other side. This just kept happening.

Constantinople ultimately functions as a kind of clamp that unifies this whole area, basically the Balkans, Asia Minor, and Syria as a kind of unit, right? What is a New Rome? A New Rome is, among other things, a new senate. Constantine and his successors recruit this new senate for the new Rome.

We're talking about maybe 2,500 or 3,000 men at its peak, and these are all recruited from all of these areas. Some come from Rome, but others come from the Aegean region, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. These are the wealthiest people, usually the most well-connected elites from the whole Eastern Mediterranean, and they come together and form a new common purpose in Constantinople.

The empire never breaks there again. It holds together this part of the world. The breaking point now, interestingly, moves to the Adriatic. So when, in 395, we talked about East and West kind of splitting, it breaks at the Adriatic because Constantinople is now holding that whole Eastern world together.

All of these elites are now invested in it. They're literally investing in it. They have to invest in it in order to be senators in Constantinople. That's one of the functions that it performs, a strategic function. There's a political function. There's also a cultural one, but we can talk about that, too. That's what you see there on that map: the north, west, east, and south.

So just to linger on it, you do a podcast, Byzantium and Friends, but you're also a guest on podcasts. I should mention you being a guest multiple times on the excellent The History of Byzantium podcast, hosted by Robin Pierson. I highly recommend people listen to it, to all of your appearances. You have a lot of really fascinating ones.

The reason I bring all that up is that in one of the episodes, you do the fun thing of selecting the top 10 emperors of Byzantium. Spoiler alert: everybody should go listen to the full list because you justify all the different options. Constantine ends up in the number one spot. Can you just add a little bit more depth to why he would be in your number one spot, now that we're talking about him?

Yes. It's not because I sort of like him as a person. As you said, he was pretty murderous. All those wars, so clearly ambitious, murderous, ruthless, basically.

Can you actually speak to the murderous aspect? He seemed to have murdered a lot of people in his family.

Yes. That's because what we call his family were also alliances of convenience that he made on the way to the top. When those alliances—or those wives or those fathers-in-law—were no longer convenient or turned against him, he had no hesitation in removing them.

But he gets a little extra bonus because he also murdered his own son, Crispus, who was apparently a very competent and popular kind of general, and we don't know why. He executes Crispus soon after defeating Licinius, and then follows it up with the murder of his wife—not Crispus's mother—and we don't know why.

The funny thing is that when emperors do this sort of thing, if there's any kind of remotely good reason, they'll blast it through all of the media, right? “Crispus was rebelling against me,” or whatever. There's nothing. He doesn't even try to justify it, which means it must have been something unjustifiable.

I don't know. I can't process it.

And also, I read that the historians of the time would just ignore that that happened.

Yes. Well, sort of. When Crispus is alive, it's all praising Crispus: “Oh, Constantine, you great emperor, and your wonderful son who will...” whatever. Then Crispus is executed, and he just disappears from the record. They never talk about him.

Actually, as another side to a side, I think you mentioned, whether it's on your podcast or elsewhere, that if you had to have a beer with any of the emperors, you probably wouldn't. So it's not like some of the most impactful, some of the most influential, and great emperors that we talk about—they might not be very pleasant people.

Let's set aside whether you'd like to have a beer with these people. The reason I put Constantine at the top of the list is because the decisions that he made were so consequential, just important, and for the most part, not bad decisions. I couldn't not put him at the top of the list.

Creating Constantinople, converting to Christianity, and setting the empire on a path to conversion—these are major, world-history-level decisions. Not many emperors do that. In fact, Constantine is in his own league when it comes to those kinds of decisions.

My other criteria for top emperors were basically those who did the job well. Not making these kinds of earth-shattering decisions or world-history-changing decisions, but just who performed the role competently, with results that impacted the lives of their subjects for the better. Those are the other criteria that I used.

It's difficult to juggle these different criteria in order to create a systematic list, right? By the way, we historians generally don't do these kinds of things. But you said it's fun. It is fun.

It was fun. It was fun.

It allows you to talk about certain things that you might not otherwise do. So, yeah, that's why Constantine was at the top.

So you mentioned Christianity. That was one other big component of his rule. What was the role of Christianity in Constantine's life, in the lives of the citizens of the new Roman Empire?

At this stage, Christianity doesn't have a role. It took the emperors taking it on board—that is, making it a part of the imperial system—for it to begin to acquire a role within the system. Previously, it had imagined itself as having its own history, not necessarily part of the empire or affiliated with imperial power. But after Constantine, it does acquire a role.

One way to ask that question, which is fascinating, is that you said there's Rome, and then there are cultures or traditions like Christianity, or being Greek, that kind of thing. One way to ask this question is: Does Christianity triumph over Rome, or did Rome capture Christianity?

Right.

Yes.

Which is the mechanism?

I would lean more toward the second. In other words, that the religion was co-opted by the imperial system. Now, there are many areas in which that's not the case and where the opposite happens, so I'm not going to be absolute about it. But I think it's very important to recognize that because Christianity generates this narrative of triumph, which modern historians perpetuate. It's framed in very particular ways.

In other words, Christianity triumphs over the ancient religions, displacing Zeus and Apollo and all of that. Animal sacrifice is gone, and that's because Christianity triumphs. That's a very narrow way of looking at it. In other words, you pick your enemy, and then you can defeat that enemy, right? But if you look in the other direction, there's the Roman imperial state, and you cannot say that Christianity either triumphed over it or even tamed it or anything. It actually became part of it in many ways that determined its history for centuries and, in fact, down to today.

So this is very different, for example, from the history of Islam. Islam comes into existence without a preexisting state to receive it and take it on board. It creates its own state, right? So the Muslim armies conquer this empire, and then they have to govern it, they think, according to whatever Islamic principles. The Quran doesn't say anything about running an empire. So that creates a completely different society, where Islam is really a primary kind of identity and drives a lot of developments.

But Christianity comes into existence within a very well-developed society and political system. Now, here's the thing: we don't know exactly how many Christians existed in the time of Constantine. We speculate maybe 10% of the empire. That might be very high, right? But even if it's 10%, it's not a lot, and these are not elites for the most part.

Maybe middle class—what we loosely call middle class—with a few elites, a few slaves, this kind of thing. Mostly urban, and keeping in mind that most of the population is rural. So we're talking about pockets of concentrated Christian groups in cities. That's what we're talking about. They were not terribly politically powerful.

So Constantine's conversion to Christianity and moving the empire toward Christianity is not something where there's a gigantic majority of the people, or it's a political convenience because they're the elites. It's something else. I mean, it's a pretty revolutionary decision, I would say.

Exactly. Now, there used to be theories that Constantine did this for pragmatic, cynical reasons—that he wasn't a true Christian or anything, but there was some kind of political gain to be had here. But I've never read a convincing account of what exactly that political gain is. We now know that there were fewer Christians. They were not that influential.

You can make an argument that bishops are a kind of convenient social influencers, you might say. You can use them. They're not a threat to your position, right? A bishop isn't going to try to take the throne, so they're not dangerous political operatives in that way. But they do have some influence over sectors of society, and so that might be a factor. Okay, I see that, but I don't quite see the argument for going full Christian just to get the support of some bishops, who actually pretty quickly turn out to be, some of them, more trouble than they're worth.

Anyway, I have not yet seen a convincing political argument for Constantine's decision, which means that you then fall back on a personal explanation: that he did this because he was a believing Christian, right? He came out in support of the religion that he held, and that's where most scholars are today. Though, I have to tell you, historians are very uncomfortable about personal choice, like explaining history in terms of these kinds of personal choices.

Because Constantine's conversion is massive. It opens the door. It incentivizes so many people to also convert, because Romans will generally do what their rulers tell them. If we've mentioned Hadrian a few times, Hadrian had this lover, Antinous, a Greek boy from Bithynia, who died in an accident in Egypt. Hadrian said, basically, that Antinous should be regarded as a god throughout the empire. And he was.

We have more statues and busts of Antinous from all of these temples all over the empire than I think of anyone else except Hadrian. So, if the emperor says, "This is a person who's a god now. Put statues of him everywhere," they will. And when Constantine comes out in favor of Christianity, suddenly people discover that this is an interesting rite. It has the support of the emperor.

So one of the things here, going to Perplexity, Constantine's conversion to Christianity is usually dated to 312 AD, linked to a visionary experience before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Do you believe that vision, that he had this religious experience before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge? Here it says, "But historians debate both its nature and its sincerity."

Before we even get to the sincerity, there's the problem of the sources. This is reported by authors writing later, in the aftermath of a victory. One of them had a dinner conversation with the emperor a few decades later, and he said, "Well, let me tell you about the Milvian Bridge." I'm not going to believe that. I'm not going to take that at face value, rather. It's much more complicated: this is how the emperor wants things to be remembered. That's different.

Also, Constantine tended to have a lot of religious visions. He'd had religious visions of Apollo before Christ, and we have sources that talk about that, too. He went to this temple in Gaul, and Apollo appeared to him in the form of light. Constantine has a religious vision every time he wants to shift policies and his profile. When he wanted to break away from the other emperors who went for this Jupiter-Hercules model, he shifted to an Apollo model. This is branding. This is emperors doing branding.

So we should say that, as you've described, Constantine is a pragmatist. He's very pragmatic.

Mary Beard

Yeah.

But you're saying it's fair to believe, based on the evidence, that he actually converged toward being a Christian believer.

Yeah. It's very possible, in fact plausible, that he thought the Christian God had helped him in battle. And, for someone like him, that's as good a reason as any to support that god.

But he was not a hardcore Christian all the way through. He was a kind of spiritual, religious person. He thought about religions more generally and just converged toward Christianity as a good religion. He also had ideas about what a good religion is and what a bad religion is, that kind of stuff. So he's thinking in this space.

He's tending not to be too explicit, depending on the audience. So Constantine remains a pragmatist in the sense that he doesn't want to alienate too many of his subjects, right?

Mm-hmm. Fair. Mm-hmm.

Mary Beard

And so he's sometimes a bit coy or elusive about what he's getting at. When he's talking to Christians, he will talk about Christ. He will mention Christ. When he's talking to everybody else in a general law, he'll just refer to good religion. And it's like, maybe you know what I mean, right? But he's not going to come to Jesus.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah.

So even at the time when he's supporting the church, basically institutionalizing the church as part of the imperial system, he's also putting up statues of himself that look like Apollo in Constantinople, right? The focal point of Constantine's Constantinople is the Forum of Constantine. In the middle is this very tall column, and it has a colossal statue of Constantine on top—a gilded, enormous thing. I don't know, 8 meters tall or whatever.

But it's a repurposed Apollo. It's even visibly so. It's naked and has the rays coming out of its head, right? And everybody knew it was an Apollo. So that's Constantine in the guise of his old patron god, Apollo. Still, he's Christian Constantine, so he's sending all of these different messages.

I mean, he likes being the godlike figure. That whole statue is just like, "I am the god."

Mary Beard

Yeah. It's assimilating yourself to—

And I mean, a lot of the Romans, is it fair to say, kind of saw the emperor a little bit in that light?

Yeah. They called him divine. There's not a hard theology there, right? If you pressed them on the actual theology, they wouldn't say the emperor is a god. No. This is mushy. This gets very, very mushy.

But a lot of Christians have a kind of humility before God. I think when you have an emperor who's godlike, it gets a little weird—

Yes. Yes.

—in the way you talk about God.

Mary Beard

It depends on the context. There are contexts in which you are an emperor and you're proclaiming your majesty, and then there are more personal contexts where you might be more humble because, I don't know, you're being baptized or something. Those are different contexts.

So can you speak to the whole process of the conversion to Christianity, the propagation of Christianity throughout the empire, and Constantine's role in that?

Constantine, and his successors as well, because this was a gradual process and it takes a very long time. So let's put it into perspective. We probably can't talk about a majority-Christian society until maybe the 5th century, or the early 5th century.

Mid-5th century. We don't have data, obviously. We can't talk about a solidly Christian society until the early 6th century. By solidly, I mean maybe where the non-Christians are 10 or 15 percent, right? So that's a long time. That's like 5 centuries after Jesus. That's half a millennium. So we're talking about a half-millennium process here. It's very long.

But it's only a couple of centuries after Constantine.

Yes. So it takes about 2 centuries to really make the Roman Empire Christian. It's a very slow conversion, maybe up to 10 percent at most under Constantine. Then, obviously, larger and larger groups join the church, even if only nominally, right? Until you get to the 6th century, when you're clearly talking about a mostly or overwhelmingly Christian society.

A lot of this is just done through incentives and disincentives, right? Bishops are given funds with which to distribute charity and help to communities in distress. They have lists of widows and whatever they support. Land is given to the church by the emperors or in wills so that they can engage in this kind of social policy.

And then there are disincentives. Emperors pass laws that increasingly restrict the exercise of traditional religion. You can't perform animal sacrifices, then you can't start doing things like tying ribbons to make wishes, or going out to sacred trees and doing this or that, because they say, "Oh, this is kind of nefarious business," or magic, or whatever it is. Then they just gradually start outlawing it more and more, putting restrictions on things like, if you're not a Christian, you can't hold these high offices, or there are problems with your wills. So they gradually do it like that. This is how you—yeah, this is how you do it. And it works.

What explains the success of Christianity after Constantine? Why was it, as a technology, so successful at spreading throughout the empire?

Christianity developed in a number of ways. It acquired a certain number of forms that were capable of appealing to different constituencies. In other words, there was an intellectual side to it: the sort of theology, the almost quasi-philosophical engagement with philosophical schools that could draw in, let's say, intellectuals.

There was a public ceremony and ritual aspect, where you can organize communities and cities to have processions or all these festivals that take the place of the ancient ones. You have a kind of—not secretive, but initiatory—aspect, where there's baptism and you learn a sort of creed, and you're initiated into the religion with the prospect of a personal afterlife, right? That appeals to other kinds of people.

There are also ways in which it integrated itself into the court and the language of power, and also into the army, right? Soldiers now swear an oath to the Trinity, right? So it takes all of these different forms that enable it to position itself here and there: in the streets, in the court, in the armies, in the churches, in texts, and in books. It has this manifold diversity that makes it very adaptable.

One of the things you mentioned is that Constantine did not anticipate or realize that Christianity creates divisions between various groups.

In part, this happens when you have religions that make exclusive claims, right? My beliefs are true, and yours are by definition false. Not just wrong, but false and even kind of evil. Maybe Satan put them in your mind to lead you astray, right? This is inherently divisive.

There's this paradox where Christianity, in contrast to, say, the ancient religions, is both far more polarizing and far more powerful as a unifying force at the same time, right? Ancient religions tended not to produce this kind of conflict, identity, or war. They could under certain circumstances, but for the most part, they were not drivers of history in this kind of way.

But when you have exclusive claims, then suddenly you have these communities that are sort of consolidated and have this very strong identity. But you also alienate other groups that you then are in conflict with. This is why I, for one, can't come down on whether Christianity is more of a unifying force or a divisive force in the history of the Eastern Empire, because it's both.

And also trying to figure out whether the unifying or the divisive aspects are a feature or a bug. Maybe some of the divisive elements are a way for society internally, much like the civil wars, to try to figure itself out.

Yes.

Sometimes tension and conflict are a good mechanism for figuring out what the people want.

Or what's the truth, right?

Or what's the truth.

Yeah. So the story that it likes to tell itself is that there's this one original truth, and the hard core of true believers is defending that truth at every moment against all of these evil heretics who are coming in and trying to corrupt it.

In reality, what happens is that this truth is something that's evolving in the course of the controversies. Often they don't know that they believed that until in retrospect, once they've had the fight and the winner has this position: "Oh, now that turns out to have been the position we always held," right? This happens again and again and again.

A lot of the time, these Christian theologians who get into so much trouble and get branded as heretics and sometimes get sent into exile didn't mean any harm. They often were just stating what they thought everybody believed. Then they blurt it out, and someone off in Alexandria is like, "What? That's heresy." Now you're in trouble. Now you're getting into this fight, and you might win or you might lose. But a lot of them were well-intentioned in that way, or they had no intention of starting a fight. There's always someone who wants to start a fight.

Yeah. Sometimes the fights are extremely intense over things that I could see on the surface as being about iconography. It seems like a very subtle debate, almost academic, and then a large number of people don't see it as academic. They see it as if the devil put ideas in your head that are completely wrong, and it's fascinating how that kind of division can emerge.

The impossible question, and I apologize for asking it, but maybe it's worthwhile to try to think about it: On the grand scale of centuries of the Eastern Roman Empire, is religion a constructive or a destructive force for the empire? Did it help it flourish, or did it hold it back?

This society identified itself increasingly with what it saw as orthodoxy. Orthodoxy just means correct belief. Every religion ultimately thinks it's orthodox, right? But that's the conventional name. Orthodoxy today might be called Greek Orthodoxy. It's such an essential part of the culture. It really is.

I can't think of the two of them independently. I mean, I try to, because as a historian I have to test the models and try to see these things as independent of each other. But ultimately, it's very difficult to disentangle them. I would say that, to the degree that this is a successful society historically, its religion definitely contributed to that and played a role in it.

Not without cost, right? It mattered to them. They valued it, but things that matter to you have a cost, and they paid that price. They were willing to pay that price for it. For example, at the very end, they had to choose between Catholicism and Western rule, where they essentially had to compromise on their faith, or rule by the Muslims, the Turks, where they would not have to compromise their faith.

Some of them were explicit that they preferred option B, because the Turks would at least respect their identity. That's a cost.

Yeah. But there are other layers, like taxation and the functions of government, that are connected to religion to the degree that it interacts with the tax system. But it feels like that's the engine of the society, and religion is more like the cultural layer.

Yeah. This is why I said that, in thinking of the models that we use to understand the society, I try not to assume that religion is everywhere and for everything. I have colleagues who do that, and I would disagree with them about this, but you're exactly right.

There are elements of this society that I like to see as their own thing, like the Roman identity, for example. It's not the same as Orthodoxy. There are also the operations of the state. Those are very pragmatic things, and you see them intersect with religion largely in areas of terminology or the vocabulary that they use, or at the top, but not in their actual functioning.

In my field, I'm a historian who's tried to promote other aspects of the culture as having a kind of integrity of their own, and not to subsume them all within Orthodoxy.

Again, an impossible way of asking the same question: If you asked a Roman—a million Romans across 1,000 years—"Are you a Roman or a Christian?" what would the answer be?

Oh, both. Oh, absolutely.

No, you don't get to say both. You're not allowed to do that.

Why not? It's the true answer.

Okay. So you're saying they're really tied together.

Well, they overlap. This might be a somewhat more subtle conversation than most of them would want to have, but if you were to say, "Are Roman and Christian the same thing to you?" if they thought about it for a little while, they'd quickly be able to say no. Because there were, just logically, Christians who were not Romans.

The Bulgarians or the Rus or whoever. There were lots of Christians who were not Roman, and they did not regard them as Roman just because they were Christian. Conversely, they knew perfectly well that there had been Romans who were not Christians. How did they know this? Because in the churches, almost every week, they celebrated martyrs who had been killed by the Roman emperors in the past.

The performance of violence by Roman emperors against Christians was something they remembered. They knew perfectly well that those two things did not overlap perfectly. There were some contexts in which you would be more Roman, and there were some contexts in which you would be more Christian.

You find characters who, as some sources say, did not pay too much attention to Christian things. They were just politicians. They were just doing their work. And then you find characters who devote themselves completely to Orthodoxy and monasticism, and they just do not care about the Roman stuff at all.

That is, in fact, part of the reason why I like this society: it has these kinds of options for people to choose. There is another one. There is the Greek stuff, too, because their language is Greek and their literature is Greek, so there are people in the society who go all in on the Greek stuff.

I see this society as a kind of laboratory of these 3 elements coexisting in fascinating combinations. Usually, it is combinations, right? But sometimes you will find people who try to be purists in one way or another. It is the only society in history in which you can do this, because it is the only society that is Roman, Christian, and Greek—but in different ways.

Yeah, unfortunately, I think it is tempting, but it is probably impossible to say: If we remove the taxation system, would the Roman Empire be more or less successful? If we removed religion, would it be more or less successful? If we removed Greek and kept it Latin all the way through, would it be more or less successful?

It is probably impossible to do this kind of analysis because they are all so deeply integrated.

Right.

But there is a big temptation, and this is at the core of your work, to understand why the East Roman Empire lasted as long as it did, and why the broader Roman Empire lasted as long as it did.

Yeah.

Because it is one of, if not the most, successful empires in terms of duration and stability in a very dense part of the world.

That is actually my next project. I am starting to write a book trying to explain, from an analytical standpoint, why.

How did it last so long?

Yeah.

A lot of your work hints at it.

Yeah.

It is here and there, but you are trying to do something more systematic. We will keep hinting at it.

Yes.

But to put a bow on Constantinople, it went from a very low population of maybe 25,000 people to 500,000 people in just 2 centuries. Can you explain how that happened?

It did not happen through just demographic growth and reproduction in the city itself. That rate of growth is impossible for an ancient city. When I say 20,000 to 25,000, that is possibly what the ancient city of Byzantium had when Constantine decided to found Constantinople, and it grew to a city of half a million in 2 centuries.

That can only have been done in 1 way: immigration from the provinces. People must have been moving there in large numbers. It is a movement that we cannot see very clearly in the sources, but we have to infer it and then try to explain it.

There is another factor. Ancient cities, we now know or suspect, are what some historians call death traps. In other words, the density of disease is such that ancient cities probably lose something like 1%, 2%, possibly 3% of their population per year. In order to stay at a stable population, they have to import people.

They were not like 17th-century London. They were not that bad.

Do diseases and plagues seem to be prevalent?

Oh, yeah. Roman cities have some protections against these sorts of things, such as the way they distribute water through the city. Anyway, they were not as bad as they could have been, but there is that.

Not only does keeping the population steady require people to come in from the provinces, but expanding it so dramatically means that a lot of people were coming in, mostly from the Greek-speaking provinces. Greece, Asia Minor, and some of the major cities in the East were Greek-speaking.

I started to wonder: Who are these people, for one thing? Then I did some simple calculations. I mentioned earlier that we have something like 2,500 senators who were initially required to reside in Constantinople.

Senators do not live in bachelor pads. Senators have mansions. They have household staff. In Rome at the time, there is a calculation that a senatorial household was something like 100 people—servants, slaves, dancing girls, cooks, barbers, whatever.

Let us assume conservatively that in Constantinople it was only 30 people, which might be low. If you do the math, you are starting to get something closer to 100,000 people. That is just by bringing in senators. They come with people.

Constantine also makes provision for possibly up to 200,000 people to receive the grain dole—the bread. That would have incentivized even more people to travel there.

So you get free bread.

Yes. You cannot live on that alone, but it is something.

An incentive. Is it true that he diverted resources from Rome to Constantinople?

Absolutely. That grain is coming from Egypt. New Rome is literally stealing food from the mouth of Old Rome. Old Rome does not starve because they divert other resources. From North Africa and Sicily, you can feed Rome.

But it sends a strong signal to the people living in Old Rome that, long-term, we should probably move.

Some people do move. We know of some senators who moved from Rome. It sends a signal about the priorities of the state: They are investing much more in the East, and the East would be regarded as an equal, parallel Roman world.

As we talk about diverting resources, slowly the West declines and collapses in 476 AD. The Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD, and in 476 AD, the last Western emperor is deposed, marking the end of the Western Roman Empire.

At a high level, what is the reason for the decline and collapse of the Western Roman Empire? There were nonstop civil wars, as we have talked about, and weak emperors. There was an economic and monetary crisis, with a shrinking tax base and rising army costs. There was a loss of key provinces, especially in North Africa.

There was reliance on contracted barbarian troops as they immigrated more and more into the Western Roman Empire. There were cascading invasions and migrations amplified by Hunnic pressure, and then the East-West split. The richer East survives; the West cannot stabilize under that split.

The crux of the matter is that barbarian armies—that is, armies from outside the empire—put increasing pressure on it during the 5th century. For whatever reason, when the Roman state failed to suppress one of them and, say, settled them there, allowed them to remain there, or could not stop them when they took over a province, as the Vandals did in North Africa, this created a vicious cycle.

The Roman state lost access to the resources from those provinces—that is, the taxes—and without those resources, it could not maintain, mobilize, or pay for its armies. Then it had fewer armies to handle the next wave of barbarians that came in. The previous barbarians who settled there declared their independence. They also could not be put down, and so this created a vicious cycle that just continued.

It is not rocket science, actually. You can see it playing out. Who these groups were, where they came from, and why they crossed are different questions. But from the Roman standpoint, this is how it was experienced.

These were armies that could defeat a Roman field army in battle, and sometimes they did. They then settled and took over territories, and the Romans lost the revenues, so they could not recruit their own armies. That is the cycle.

The East tried to help. Occasionally, they would send forces, but they were also subject to some of the same pressures. Remember, the Goths crossed the Danube for the first time in a major way in 376. Then you have the Battle of Adrianople a couple of years later, where 1.5 field armies were annihilated, the emperor Valens died, and the Goths were loose in the Balkans.

There was then a 4-year war with them. It resulted in a kind of truce in which neither side won, and the Romans, for the first time, accepted the presence of this quasi-independent Gothic army in the territory of the empire. This was unprecedented, as I said, and it created a lot of tension and dysfunction.

Why does the East survive and the West does not? There are lots of reasons that we can give here, but one of them is the geography that we were talking about earlier. Without a fleet, which they did not have, the Goths could not cross over from Thrace or the western Balkans to Asia Minor and plunder some of the more prosperous provinces.

They were stuck in the Balkans. They were gradually pushed toward the western Balkans, which was the worst part to be in at the time.

And eventually, they just decide, “Well, it’s kind of nicer in Naples.” And so they go to Italy, right? There are a lot more resources there for them. And that’s one way that the East manages to do this. It doesn’t do this deliberately, but the geography kind of pushes these invaders to the West.

So that’s one. Geography—some of it is sort of the luck of geography, both of the invaders and of the empire.

Yeah.

But, you know, the East had a lot of invaders and was able to, still barely at times, survive them. Some of that could be luck. Some of it could be about the nature of the invaders and the effectiveness of their military, all that kind of stuff.

By the way, it worked in the other direction, too. So if you have Persians or Arabs coming into Asia Minor from the East, they usually can’t cross over into your Balkan provinces.

Mm-hmm. Right.

So you can fall back on one side or the other. If you fortify Constantinople so that it’s an impregnable bunker—which it was—you hold your command center in Constantinople. You can alternate between your European or your Asian provinces, depending on where the trouble is. You can call in reinforcements from either side.

So the East does have that kind of advantage. This is not the reason why it survives for as long as it does, though it is a reason. They also acquire flamethrowers at some point, which help, too, right?

Ultimately, I think it’s the decision made by local communities to stick with the Roman state. They’re not going to actively side with invaders. When the trouble passes, they restore ties with Constantinople immediately. This is their natural political home. And that’s the question that I’m really trying to answer: Why does that happen?

You know, we should say, just like we’ve articulated multiple times, that the Roman Empire survives. So it’s not like the Roman Empire collapsed and another Byzantine Empire was born. Really, there is a shift that happens, and part of that shift is because of Constantine, right? It’s not just about where the capital is, but I’m sure that there’s a general move in that direction, from the West to the East.

Yeah, yeah.

And in many ways, weak emperors in the West, weak leaders, the structure of government, all these kinds of elements put together—maybe demographic shifts and declines that have to do with the fact that the center of the empire has moved.

That’s right. It’s quite striking. For example, already by the 430s, Constantinople is basically codifying Roman law for the West. Roman law in Latin is codified in Constantinople and then sent to the West as, “Oh, here’s your law code.” This is in the 430s, so after the alleged division between the two, which, like I said, is kind of loose. It’s not hard and fast.

In the 6th century, it is the East that reconquers part of the West under Justinian. Not only that, he also recodifies Roman law on a much bigger scale, and then that law becomes Western law. So, in a certain sense, Roman law as we know it comes from Constantinople. It doesn’t come from ancient Rome. Ultimately, it comes from ancient Rome, but we don’t have those versions of it. We have the East Roman versions of it.

It is East Rome that reconquers Rome. This is a funny inversion, because Constantinople is situated in a province, Thrace, which always was sort of considered backward, right? In the time of the early Caesars, if you were in Rome and you thought about Thrace, it was like, “Ugh.” It was some sort of armpit of the Roman Empire or something.

But by Justinian’s time, it’s a complete inversion. The capital of the Roman world, the heart of it, is there, and Rome is this kind of backwater provincial city in Italy that you’ve just liberated from the Goths, and it’s kind of in ruins. There are wolves roaming the streets of the Forum. So this is a complete overhaul of the centers of power. It’s turned inside out almost.

Mm-hmm. And I think it’s fair to say that part of the reason the East lasted as long as it did is the topic that we’ve mentioned, which is the structure of government. So can we just zoom out once again and explain the key ways the government functioned in the East Roman Empire and how it evolved over the lifetime of the empire?

Very broadly speaking, there’s civilian and military, right? And you might actually add the church. It’s entirely plausible to treat the church as a kind of government institution at this time. But let’s just stick with military and civilian.

The military is pretty straightforward and would be recognizable to any student of military history. This is how you recruit, organize, equip, pay, and lead soldiers. The East Roman state tends to have a larger military, at least on paper. Active is a different matter. How many soldiers you take on a campaign is a different matter, but how many soldiers you maintain in the provinces generally tends to be on the large side for a medieval society. So it compares favorably to, say, the Caliphate later on, which is a much more massive territorial entity.

It can have anywhere between 100,000 at a minimum, at a low point, up to maybe about 250,000 at a high point, depending on the period. It’s a lot of people. It’s a lot of men. Factor in their families, right? These are also part of the whole military-economic complex, if you will.

And they’re career military, so this is their job.

Yep, yes.

And is the military, for most of the history of the East Roman Empire, a defensive military?

Mostly, but not always.

Yeah. And we’ll talk about Justinian.

Sure. And so then you have the civilian administration. Civilian administration does a number of things. Principally, it is to find the funds to pay for this army, which is the single largest expense on the state budget, right? And so, in order to find those funds, it has to have a census of the assets, and it has to be able to tax them, and there are lots of different ways of doing that.

So the civilian administration has a number of tax bureaus, record-keeping, this sort of thing, and also a legal branch for resolving disputes with the imperial fisc.

But the civilian administration does a number of other things, too. For example, the whole legal regulation of the empire: the courts, judges, courts of appeal, also issuing laws, keeping records—all of this. And those are the main bureaus that have to do with the subjects of the empire.

The emperors obviously maintain bureaus for things like diplomacy or running the palace staff, because the palace is a huge institution. And then there are a number of endowments that major churches require. Hagia Sophia, for example, has hundreds of staff, from clergy to readers and whatever, and so they need to be paid. You need endowments.

The imperial household has expenses, so it needs endowments, right? There’s a lot of land earmarked for these kinds of expenses, and that requires administration. So this multiplies. I mean, you can go on and on and on.

And I’m sure the tax code is not a simple flat tax. It’s probably incredibly complicated. So it’s just like in the United States: It feels like the majority of the United States is basically lawyers and the IRS. That’s maybe 98%, I think, is lawyers.

Lawyers. I thought they shrunk the IRS down now to a size that it can’t actually do anything.

They shrunk it down…

I thought it was just…

…to just 90% now.

90, just 90.

No. I think there’s something—this is another conversation about human nature and about the nature of governments—but there’s something about it. I think it’s impossible to have an IRS-type organization that doesn’t grow. I think maybe with good intentions, because everybody always comes to you: “Well, here’s my special case. I want my tax to be lower.” And they kind of add another line: “All right, if you have purple hair, the tax decreases.”

And so you keep adding, and then, of course, the more you add, the more opaque the thing becomes. Therefore, corruption seeps in—or, maybe not official corruption, but corruption light—and then that tax code grows. All of a sudden, you have these big institutions that then encourage corruption, and then there’s a bureaucracy, and there’s a momentum. This is just how humans are.

Yes. So this happens in East Roman society, too. I’ll give you some examples. There’s not a tax code as such, but the way it operates is basically through exemptions. So you petition for an exemption.

You might be a monastery. You might be someone well-connected to the court. You might be a struggling provincial village, and you petition the emperor or some official, and you say, “Hey, we know we had a bad season,” or, “The barbarians came through. We can’t pay the taxes. Could we have an exemption?”

Emperors often grant these exemptions for very specific things, like maybe for this year or for that tax or whatever. The problem is that the emperors discover, every once in a while, that their officials are granting these exemptions sort of on their own. So every once in a while, the emperors have to clean house: They have to cancel all of these exemptions and start the whole process again.

But later on, once we start to have documentation, maybe in the 11th century, we see that all these monasteries, little villages, and high officials have documents that give them exemption from this, that, or the other thing. It gets so complicated, and that's how it works.

But it is the engine of society that makes the whole thing work, because you have to fund—I mean, there are infrastructure projects, but you also have to fund the army, and the army is necessary to defend against all the military incursions. A good fraction of the bureaucracy seemed to have been eunuchs, which are castrated men. Can you explain why this was a prominent thing?

The eunuchs are part of the household staff of the emperor. That would be like the West Wing of the White House or something like this. They are the people who handle the imperial person, the bedchamber, the organization of palace life, things like banquets, the wardrobe, and so forth.

Why are they important? For starters, if you're physically with the emperor all day, handling the meetings, people can come to you and say, "Hey, I need you to put in a good word for me," right? They can get things done. You bribe them, and they get things done. So they're very useful in this way.

They're also kind of hated for that reason, but they're also there to be hated. In other words, they soak up a lot of the frustration that people sometimes feel when they're not getting what they want from the court. That's one thing.

Here's the other thing that's more interesting: How do you, as an emperor, make sure that your bureaucracy doesn't displace you? If the bureaucracy is handling all the matters of running the empire, what do we need you for? The bureaucracy can develop rules of its own for solving all the problems, dealing with petitions and exemptions and whatever. They can do it. So where's your power exactly?

What the emperors did not want was to be displaced or overshadowed by these more impersonal institutions. And so—this could be a bit confusing—eunuchs were perfect for this reason, because often their origin was from outside the empire, or they were former slaves. They weren't connected to networks of powerful families. So you knew that they would generally be loyal to you, because they depended entirely on you, the emperor, for their position and their power.

What you would sometimes do is say, "Okay, I'm putting you in charge of this army." Literally, putting you in charge of an army, just so that you can counterbalance the kinds of networks of established generals. And you'll have a eunuch from my wardrobe. I'm putting him in charge.

This kind of shook things up a little bit, so that people who were part of a system or a network could never fully count on that getting them all the power that they wanted. They now had to answer to this eunuch from the wardrobe who was outside of their system.

Sometimes these eunuchs were extremely competent, like Narses, Justinian's general, who defeated the Goths in Italy in this massive battle. This guy was a total hard-ass. He was a little old man. He was very old, and he was tiny, and he was a eunuch. The Goths laughed at him, but he had the last laugh.

Is there some component to their being eunuchs, so they can't propagate the bloodline?

Yes. They can't have their own family, so they can't be looking out for their own offspring. They're isolated individuals who depend entirely on your favor.

Is it known whether the castration is almost always by force?

There are eunuchs in society generally. They're often bishops, and they're sometimes appointed Patriarch of Constantinople. They're in all kinds of positions.

Many of them are children who are enslaved and castrated against their will. Sometimes, however, they are castrated very much according to the will of their families. In some parts of Caucasia, there were regions that were famous for producing eunuchs, as well as in Persia and elsewhere.

But we're pretty sure that this happened within the empire, because there were some families that really wanted to place a eunuch at the court. From Paphlagonia, in northern Asia Minor, there were a number of eunuchs. It was almost like a family strategy.

It's fascinating that they had so much representation in the inner circles of the emperor and therefore had real influence.

Oh, yeah. But this was always the case, even in Rome, like under the Julio-Claudians, under the first Caesars. There were all these powerful eunuchs, and the senatorial class always hated them. It's the same dynamic.

One of the interesting things you've said as an aside in one of the many podcasts of yours that I listened to is that there were no isolated people—people who are disconnected from the empire, who maybe don't know about the taxes or just don't feel integrated into the system. That's really interesting to me: that there's so much connectivity, so much cohesion as an entire people.

These people, these isolated peasants, do not exist. This is a myth that one day I'm going to write a chapter about, because it's an idea that you occasionally encounter—actually, quite often—in the scholarship: that there are rural communities out there somewhere that don't know what's going on in Constantinople. They might not even know who the emperor is. They're cut off. Maybe a tax official will show up every once in a while, maybe not, and they just live their lives on their own, unaffected by, say, the state, because the medieval state, we suspect, is always powerless and can't affect people's lives.

There's no proof for these communities at all. At most, you might try to find actual hermits—actual Christian ascetic hermits who try to go out and find this situation. Sometimes they're described in the texts as, "So-and-so went so far out into the mountains that not even the tax census people showed up there," which tells you how they think about what it means to be isolated.

This is a state in which every piece of arable land has been censused for centuries. It's not like you can hide a village. The taxation process is not like they visit once a year, give us some coin, and leave. It's actually more like three times a year.

The taxes are not just coin and maybe a payment in kind or something; they're a whole bunch of things, like services and recruits and all.

You're right.

Once you start adding all of these things up, it creates a very dense institutional matrix in which all communities are enmeshed. They can't get out of it.

Also, they have a church, don't they? If they have a church, they have the calendar. Of course they have the calendar, because how do they organize time and space and boundaries and all of these things? No, these are all state institutions.

How do they pay for anything? They have coins. Coins are everywhere. So I think that these institutions structured how everyone—even in village communities, even in the most supposedly isolated ones—thought about things like time and space and value and relations and power and kinship and so forth.

So what you're saying is taxation is the thing that brings the empire together.

It is, principally, yes.

I mean, it's true, right? This is how you know.

Yes. But on top of that is layered things like the economy, coins, and the church.

Yeah, and the church is important, just like you said. There are churches throughout the empire.

Yes, and they have sermons, and they pray for the emperor after the service. No, there are no isolated communities.

One of the things I briefly mentioned that would be nice to elaborate on is this term "monarchic republic." We've been throwing around words like kingdom, republic, empire, and monarchy. What's a good applicable term for what this thing is—the East Roman Empire?

That's an excellent question, and I'm glad you flagged that, because we conventionally call it the Byzantine Empire, and it's neither of those things, really.

We talked about "Byzantine." "Empire" is a bit of a problem, because, first of all, there's no term in Greek that they use at this period that corresponds to our notion of empire. It's not part of the official terms. They didn't even have a term for it.

There are some terms that might mean something like state: archē or kratos. But for the most part, it's either basileia, which we might translate as monarchy, or politeia, which is polity.

Politeia in Greek—polity—is a Greek translation of the Latin res publica. Res publica doesn't mean "republic" the way we mean it for the Romans, as a non-monarchical regime. That's how we mean it, like the American Republic. That's a usage that came in later, during the Enlightenment.

In Latin, a res publica is the common affairs, the common interest, of a people who are constituted as a political community, regardless of the type of regime that they have. Even Cicero could imagine the Roman res publica governed by a king, by a senate, or by a democracy.

They continued to use that term. We don't use it according to Roman norms; we use it according to modern norms, the term "republic." So they continued to call it a res publica, or a polity, under the emperors as well.

It was understood that the role of the emperor—whether he's Caesar, basileus, or whatever, in whatever language—was to serve the polity.

They keep saying this. The terms that occur in the sources most commonly are basileia of the Romans, polity of the Romans, or Romania, which is the proper name of this state. Not empire.

Now, empire, in modern English, commonly refers to a state that's created when one group conquers a bunch of others and rules them. It could be an ethnic group, an ethnoreligious group, a political group, whatever. But there's an act of conquest, and it results in a state where one group is ruling over others. That's not how Romania is actually constituted.

We've talked about this. For the most part, it's all Roman citizens—Roman subjects—ruling themselves through their own government. So it's not an empire, strictly speaking. Now, occasionally, they will conquer other people. We talked about the warfare. Sometimes it's not just defensive; sometimes it's offensive.

In that case, you do establish an imperial relationship: We, the Romans, are ruling over this other group. It could be Slavs, it could be Bulgarians for a while, it could be whatever. Or even some Muslims in northern Syria for a while in the 11th century: You are not Romans. And that's an imperial relationship.

The question is, how many of these imperial relationships do you need to decide that we've reached a tipping point, and now we're just going to call the whole thing an empire? Personally, I don't think we ever reach that point. All states, even today, have minorities. Some of them are part of that state because they were conquered once upon a time, but we don't necessarily call those states empires.

Look at the United Kingdom. Wales was conquered, and the Welsh have their own identity and their own language. I don't know that you would call that an imperial relationship now. Maybe. I don't know.

I think there's also a synonymous use of the word empire that refers to the power that the state has in the global context, geopolitically. Sometimes empire is used synonymously with superpower, meaning it's one of the primary nations in the world, and it doesn't necessarily have to do with the imperial nature of its history.

That's true.

Hence the sort of American empire, or U.S. empire.

Yes. Though you would never characterize the American political regime as an imperial one insofar as it does not have an emperor, for example. But anyway, yes.

The problem is that in my field, we use the term empire conventionally, even when what you just described is clearly not happening—even toward the end. It's not a major world power. It has a few islands in the Peloponnese, and yet we call it an empire and call its ruler the emperor. It's completely ridiculous. There's not even a term in their language for that sort of thing.

We can call things whatever we want, as long as we understand what the reality is and what we are using those terms to mean. I think that's the important thing.

So then let's look at two words which are both fascinating: monarchic republic.

Right.

Why is that a good term for the East Roman Empire?

Because they understood it very much to be a polity in the Roman sense of a res publica that was governed by a regime that was monarchical.

So those two elements: there's an emperor dude at the top, and it functioned politically like a republic.

Also, the emperor was expected to be working for the republic. They keep saying this. This was their conception. You don't find it, for example, in other kinds of dynastic empires, the ones that don't emerge from within the context of an ancient republic.

So this is another reason why I find this civilization so fascinating. We mentioned the Greek, Roman, and Christian elements that are kind of jostling together. This is fascinating to me in part because it's this weird combination of monarchical power—in terms of executive institutions—and a republican kind of baseline ideology on which it operates.

Yeah, and they sometimes come to a head. Is there at all a degree to which it's a military dictatorship? Because especially when it's the general in the emperor's seat, yes, there's a republic, and yes, there's political discussion, but the army has a lot of power. So to what degree is it a military dictatorship, as is sometimes talked about when you talk about the Roman Empire?

Augustus's position, for example, and that of his successors, is talked about as a military dictatorship. In other words, when push comes to shove and the basis of political power is the army, then I suppose it's legitimate for historians to talk about a military dictatorship.

But here's why I don't think the Eastern Roman Empire is a military dictatorship. Even though the emperors control the armies, and the armies themselves will often have a say in who becomes emperor, like through the civil wars that we mentioned, the reason why I don't think it's a military dictatorship is because they almost never—very, very rarely—use the army as an instrument of social control.

Isn't that strange to you? Because you see that being done through so much of human history. And the fact that they don't resort to that—for 1,000 years, that's just not a thing.

As a way of keeping down the population, you just don't see it. Part of the reason for that is I don't think the population needs to be kept down. This gets back to the consensus that we were talking about. The understanding is that the army is there to protect the Roman people and is often recruited among them. For most of the period that I study, it lives among them.

So when the emperors have to call up the army, they're literally calling up soldiers from local villages.

It's just incredible that this worked. I guess the civil war thing, as a mechanism, is effective. Throughout human history, you look at even recent history, and it's just a very common thing for an authoritarian figure to use the army to suppress people.

Yeah, but isn't that dangerous, though? Look at how many modern regimes tried to use their own armies against their people when they were in a moment of rising up.

It doesn't last.

Well, it's a risk. Take the Arab Spring, especially in Egypt. You could tell for those 3 weeks that Mubarak was trying to decide whether he could actually count on the army to suppress the protesters or not, because you never know what they're going to do if you ask them to fire on a civilian population. It can backfire on you badly.

So I think that is a very dangerous force to use, and even in the context of modern regimes, it can result in a regime change.

Absolutely, and there's huge wisdom behind that. But leaders are not always wise, and often they're not wise. Maybe they start out wise, but power corrupts them over time. So the fact that this does not happen just over and over and over again in the East Roman Empire is a signal that's fascinating.

This goes to the book that you want to be working on about why the thing lasts.

There's one emperor who does do that, and that's Justinian.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, he gets wild.

Right. Yeah.

So let's talk about Justinian. We have to. We have to talk about Justinian.

Yes.

One of the most impactful Roman emperors in history, he started as a peasant and rose in power to become emperor. He fought wars of conquest and was very consequential and impactful.

Yes.

So who was he?

All right. Justinian was the emperor from 527 to 565, so quite a long reign. He was the nephew of the previous emperor, Justin I, who was an older man and ruled for just under a decade before Justinian. Both of them came from small, poor agricultural communities in the western Balkans.

We should say that Justin I ended up in your worst 10 emperors list.

Yeah, for one decision. He's not the worst of the worst, but he made a very, very bad call when it came to church policy and tore the church apart. He shouldn't have done that, in my view.

By the way, Justinian's an immensely complicated figure. I found it impossible to decide, first of all, whether to put him on the best emperors or the worst emperors.

Yeah, you're being spicy. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. You have to be provocative about these things. I thought omitting those two would be provocative, and it was. So here we are talking about it.

Yeah, exactly. The controversy.

And through all the systems of social mobility that we've been talking about, Justin ended up emperor. Because of his military background, he just rose through the ranks. He was in the right place at the right time, became emperor, and then he gradually positioned his nephew, Justinian, whose background we do not know, to become his successor eventually.

Literally, we do not know anything that Justinian did before the age of something like 38, when he appears on the historical record. We know where he came from, but we don't know what he was doing. Was he an active soldier for decades? We don't know. Probably not.

He comes equipped with a knowledge of something like Roman law and some Christian theology. That seems to be what he knew. Then Justin positions him to become his successor, kind of reluctantly, but he does.

Justinian also marries Theodora, who's a former sex worker, which is a controversial choice. By this point, he's a senator and is holding all of these top generalships, and then he becomes emperor.

She was also very influential, yes?

Very powerful.

Very powerful.

During his reign. The interesting thing about Justinian's choice of associates, and that includes his wife, is that he seems to have gone for people he thought were talented or who would be good for him as a ruler, rather than their social class or prestige. So he accumulates around him quite a motley group of odd, sometimes disreputable people.

But they did what he wanted them to, and they did so with lasting consequences for world history. He had an eye for talent, and he didn’t hesitate to pick people that others might look down on if he thought they could get the job done. These are some of the attributes that enabled him to be as successful as he was. That’s his background. He’s primarily a Latin speaker, but he knows Greek, too.

So here he is. He had, as I mentioned, the wars of conquest. He also overhauled Roman law.

He appoints a committee, as one does, to take the whole of Roman law and condense it into what today we call the Corpus Juris Civilis, which is the body of Roman civil law. This was a massive work of codification, and it is our main source for Roman law. Overwhelmingly, what we call Roman law is what Justinian’s committee—and specifically this character called Tribonian, who was a very accomplished jurist—said it was.

Did that persist through time? Did that last?

Yes, still to this day. When you study Roman law, you’re studying Tribonian’s committee.

In terms of our modern society, how much of an impact did that have—this codification, this stable law that ran the East Roman Empire?

Roman legal concepts pervade everything from philosophy to political thought to actual Roman legal practice. It depends on what country you’re in. So, in many of the countries of Europe, it is the current law, to some degree. I’m exaggerating, but legal scholars have to study Roman law. Even law students have to do that.

Not so much in countries like the United States or Britain, which have the so-called common law system. But ideas in Roman law about, for example, property, ownership, and things like this were hugely important in formulating ideas about sovereignty in political thought. It’s one of the most important and influential acts of committee work ever done in Constantinople.

Going to Perplexity here and looking at some aspects of Justinian’s laws, they include a systematic structure of private law—persons, things, and actions; strong protection of property and contracts; detailed family and inheritance rules; and a hierarchical, status-based view of persons. These elements became the template for later civil law systems.

Some overall structures: a tripartite schema, with law organized around personae, legal subjects, things, and procedural actions—essentially the who, what, and how of private law. And it goes on. A lot of the things I’m reading here really sound like what we think of as law. Marriage.

Look, most of it’s about property.

Marriage is a legal status. Lawful matrimony required conformity to rules about age, citizenship, and cognatum, or prohibited degrees—incest rules, adoption relations, and so on.

Oh, yes. Who you can marry, who you can’t.

What was their view of homosexuality?

Well, I mean, Justinian thought it caused earthquakes.

Oh, did it?

Yes.

Did it?

Yes.

Wow. That’s fascinating.

No, for him, no. For Christian emperors or Christian authorities, this is a reprehensible, immoral act. It could be punished. Justinian did try to punish it pretty brutally—ultimately, lethally.

However, this gets really tricky because what counts as a homosexual act is not clear to everybody, right? In addition, this is a society that generally will not go after scandals or deviance, or however you want to call it, systematically. There’s no Inquisition. There’s no social police.

If there’s some sort of scandal and it comes out, then it’s a problem. But they’re not actively going to track down, hunt down, monitor, surveil, or interrogate people about their sex lives. In a way, despite having views that we may not agree with about sexuality, it was generally humane in leaving people alone.

I mean, that said, I just looked up on Perplexity Justinian’s Roman law view of sexuality. They’re pretty harsh on adultery and just getting freaky with it.

No, Justinian was more zealous in this matter, definitely.

Even though he married a sex worker.

Sex work wasn’t illegal.

Right, but it’s a bit spicy.

Yes. And in fact, it was illegal for a senator to marry someone from such a disreputable profession. He got his uncle to pass a law changing that rule so that he could.

Well, love knows no bounds.

Actually, Justinian kind of says that in one of his laws.

Oh, wow.

No, he clearly loved her. There’s no question.

This is actual love. I mean, you have to like this guy. He starts as a peasant, surrounds himself with all kinds of weirdos just because they were good at what they did, and it doesn’t really matter, class or not.

Yes, but there’s a lot to be said against him, too. I like so much.

Let’s get into it. He did launch wars of conquest. What was his view of war and conquest, and what are the things we should mention in terms of expansionary wars?

He thought he was authorized by God to reconquer the lost provinces of the Western Roman Empire, and when he did so, that was proof that God favored him. He was generally opportunistic about it and, for the most part, successful in that he intervened at the most critical moments in the histories of these barbarian kingdoms in the West, exploited their weaknesses, and took them over.

In the process, many of these provinces were ravaged by war—Italy for decades. He overstretched his resources, leaving his successors with a much more dangerous situation to defend. He disbanded certain armies that were meant to protect Constantinople and sent them to Italy, for example. This weakened the home front.

He left a very difficult legacy for his successors in that way. Plus, some of the provinces that he conquered—like Italy, I don’t think they could even pay for themselves after a certain point. I’m not sure that some of those decisions were the best ones. North Africa, yes, probably that paid off. Italy and southern Spain, not so sure.

So that’s one of the big criticisms: even though there was conquest, it was overextended, and those lands were not economically stable.

Yeah, and—

Broke. AKA.

Conquest is not just good in itself. I know that some rulers in history are called “the Great” simply because they conquered something. But that’s not enough. I know that rulers do this, but if we’re to compare them to each other, we should at least expect that they have a plan or that it works out well in the end, let’s say. I don’t think that many of these did.

I should say that, as far as historians go, I think you don’t give too many points on the conquest front.

Personally? No, I don’t.

So your value comes from a leader implementing lasting change.

Was he good for his subjects? Were they living better because of him than otherwise?

And also the long-term nature of it, not just a temporary thing.

Right. Are you strengthening institutions that benefit your subjects? That’s it. Some he did, some he did not.

In order to send those armies west to make the conquests, he stripped the East of armies, so the Persians could just march in and destroy Antioch. That’s a major strategic failure, and I don’t think you get a pass for conquering North Africa by surrendering Syria.

He did rebuild Constantinople and reconstruct the Hagia Sophia.

Yes, after he and his soldiers set fire to it—in the Nika insurrection. This is when the people of the capital rise up against him, and there are about 10 days of street fighting. He brings in some armies, and eventually he orders his armies to slaughter the protesters, leaving more than 30,000 dead. That’s an enormous number.

A lot of Constantinople burned in the process, and, yes, he rebuilt it. His building is considered one of his great points. He built Hagia Sophia, for example, which is a magnificent church, hands down. It’s also a fascinating monument to study.

I’m trying to give you a sense here that the good and the bad are mixed in such equal measure that, like Buridan’s ass, I can’t decide which bale of hay to put him on.

But there’s a grand scale to the good and the bad.

Yes.

For many people, that’s what makes for a top 10 emperor list. What about the plague?

Well, he wasn’t responsible for that, at least.

All right.

Okay.

The Plague of Justinian, also known as the plague of 541 AD. Some historians claim that it killed half the population and ruined the empire. You’re skeptical of this view.

Yes. This is a bubonic plague, which lasts more or less for 2 centuries. It comes and goes, and it’s endemic to large parts of the world. 541 is when it starts to break out in the empire, in Constantinople and other cities, and it spreads.

There’s been a lot of debate about this recently because now we’ve actually isolated the pathogen. It’s Yersinia pestis. We know this. Just as of a generation ago, this was just guesswork. But now all of this new laboratory science has come in to fill in some of the gaps in history.

That’s so cool.

It is. There are lots of discussions about that, and the study of diseases and virology have just become much more important lately. It still doesn’t tell you, however, mortality rates and historical impact. For that, you still need standard, old-fashioned, non-laboratory historical work.

There’s a debate about the impact of this plague. It’s ongoing, I should say. Some scholars argue for a kind of maximalist position of 50%.

I think that would have brought this society to a halt, just logistically speaking. And so I believe in a much more moderate impact.

And the real impact is what? The tax base shrinks?

Oh, yeah. The tax base would shrink instantly. You wouldn't be able to recruit armies. There would be massive social dislocation, like what happens in the Black Death in Europe in the 14th century. We have very good records for what happened to those societies, and basically everything that they were doing stopped for a few years until they tried to put things back together again.

This does not happen in the 6th century. In fact, Justinian is at that time waging war on something like 4 or 5 different fronts. If you read the narratives of those wars, there's no pause. There's no impact from the plague on the conduct of those wars. They just continue on. Taxation continues. The courts continue. You just don't see it in the narrative, and so I think that there's a much lesser impact than 50%, certainly.

So this sets the stage for a tumultuous 7th century.

Yeah, you could call it that. Yes.

So what is the legacy of Justinian, in terms of how he left the empire leading into the 7th century?

Well, he left it overextended, so his successors had to deal with many more problems along many more fronts, with fewer military forces concentrated in what we might call the homeland of the Eastern Roman Empire. And so that made the center vulnerable too, and you start to get raids into the Balkans. It enters a kind of vicious cycle again.

Now, not all of this was Justinian's fault. The plague definitely had some impact. But I wouldn't blame everything on his successors, as is sometimes done, as if they mishandled the situation. He left them a very difficult situation to deal with.

So, speaking of which, let's talk about Heraclius. He didn't make your list either, which is a shocker for a lot of people. Perhaps you can describe the nuance of that, but he took over the Roman Empire on the verge of extinction: Persians at the gates, treasury empty. So maybe first tell the full saga of the Roman-Persian War that threatened the empire's existence.

Sure. Well, he wasn't entirely free of blame for the situation that he inherited. He was in part responsible for it, so he doesn't get a pass on that.

Heraclius is basically a rebel and a usurper. For various reasons, Rome and Persia are at war starting around 602. The Persian shah at this time, Khosrow II, has basically decided on a policy of conquest, not just raiding. He isn't just going in to take your people, some cattle, and some statues and bring them to Mesopotamia. He starts what—I think there's some evolution in his thinking and his planning about this—but pretty soon during the 600s, he realizes that there's potential for actual permanent territorial gain here, and his armies start moving in.

The Roman emperor is this guy called Phocas, who is himself a usurper with a military background. He now faces a rebellion by Heraclius, whose base is in North Africa at this time, around Carthage. They have a civil war for 3 years, from 608 to 610. That civil war that Heraclius initiates causes a diversion of Roman armies to the civil war, away from the Persian front. So it's a massive gift to the Persians.

Plus, a lot of the fighting takes place in Egypt, and Egypt was a province that had, up until that point, not really been harmed by war. Now it is. Heraclius's forces—he's not in Egypt, but his backers are—are fighting a civil war in Egypt, so that province is now ravaged in part. The Persians make tremendous gains in the east. Heraclius heads straight for Constantinople during all of this, and, to make a long story short, he manages to take Constantinople, execute Phocas, and become emperor.

But now he's facing a problem that's much worse than it was before he started the rebellion. The reason why Heraclius is lionized in some circles—actually, there's a very long tradition of doing this, which goes back to the Middle Ages—is that, in the Western Middle Ages, Heraclius was sometimes considered the first crusader.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. There's all this medieval literature about Heraclius as a proto-crusader type, reconquering Jerusalem from the Persians and restoring the True Cross and all that. So he had this kind of aura, and I think his modern admirers are basically just continuing—I mean, they might not know it, but they're kind of continuing this very, very long tradition of treating Heraclius as this heroic holy warrior.

Anyway, from my standpoint, it's a complete wash. In other words, yes, he does beat the Persians, and he gets full credit for that, though he did it with, I think, the help of some Turkish allies from Central Asia. These were, I think, the major component of his success at the very end.

But no, he held the Persians off and ultimately defeated them, yes. And then he loses everything to the Arabs.

So the Arab conquests are in the 630s and 640s, but the Persian War is from 602 to 628.

Yes.

So what can be said about this seemingly costly war?

The war was costly initially only for the Romans. The eastern provinces were conquered by Persia. That means Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. So that's a loss. You lose all that revenue, and then they start raiding into Asia Minor.

Yes.

By the way, this is exactly what the Arabs would do just a couple of decades later. They would conquer Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, and they would start raiding into Asia Minor. So almost like this phase of East Roman history begins already during the Persian invasion. It's just a kind of prelude. It was, in fact, the Arabs that would do that for the next few centuries.

It takes Heraclius a very long time to get organized—in fact, something like 15 years—and it's not entirely clear what he's doing all this time. But he ultimately manages to defeat the Persians by waging these really spectacular, weird campaigns in the east. He decides to strike into the Persian heartland, as it were: first in the Caucasus region, and then he goes into Mesopotamia.

He doesn't try to defeat their armies that are rampaging around Asia Minor or even besieging his capital in 626. The Persians and the Avars—this nomadic warrior group that settled in roughly modern Hungary—are besieging Constantinople. Heraclius doesn't even go. He's just preparing his armies in the east, and he strikes the Persians right where it hurts.

This begins to degrade the Persian heartland and its infrastructure because, remember, both of these empires are going to be in shambles by the time the Arabs come along. This is what enables the Arabs to conquer them so quickly. They've destroyed each other in these wars.

Eventually, Heraclius calls in his Turkish allies, and they go on a field trip through Mesopotamia. This causes a coup in Persia, and Khosrow is killed.

Is there something to be said—a little bit of texture to the motivations of the different empires and the different groups involved? So, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Islamic caliphates: were they after conquering? Were they after expansion? Were they after more like raiding for financial benefits? What was the motivation?

In the past, the Persian shahs basically were interested in raiding, and they also had an interest in manpower. All of those Mesopotamian agricultural estates won't till themselves. So they were insatiable for agricultural workforces, specialized craftsmen, and people like that. They would go into the empire and get them.

But in this phase, it seems that Khosrow II is really taking to heart the idea that the Persian Empire should extend to the Mediterranean, as it did in Achaemenid times—in ancient history, the empire that Alexander conquered. The Sasanians, this Iranian dynasty that's ruling the Persian Empire, were aware of the Achaemenids, but sometimes they would have these claims to reviving the former greatness of the Iranian Empire.

Bathing in the Mediterranean Sea is something that many Near Eastern monarchs did as a sign of success. Anyway, for the Romans, it was sheer survival, just desperate survival, because they knew that this was a war that could end the Roman state.

I mean, they're already on the verge of being ended. These are defensive wars of survival.

Yeah. So it's pretty clear that initially the goal of Arab Muslim warfare is to unify Arabia. That is, all Arabs should be Muslim and should be unified into this religious kind of state that the Prophet and his successors had created.

Then they start striking out into Rome and into Iran. It's not entirely clear why. Now, there are obvious reasons. It's not a huge historical mystery why a recently formed, successful army will decide to take on two very weak opponents.

Who are on their doorstep.

This is not complicated.

Yeah, they're pretty effective at military conquest.

Yeah. But they're striking both empires from a direction that those empires had never prepared to defend from. Arabia was just not a place from which they expected an army to come out that could potentially conquer them. You might get some occasional raiders, but you're never going to get an army like that.

So the defensive orientations are all wrong. And these two empires have gone through this massive war that has destabilized them. They're low on manpower and low on resources. The outcome is almost inevitable. I don't think there's a great mystery.

And the effect of that is they stripped away the richest provinces of the Roman Empire.

Yes, Egypt in particular. That means now you can't feed Constantinople. As we talked about, the grain from Egypt came to Constantinople, right? You don't have that now. And so that means that the population of Constantinople will decline dramatically over the next few decades.

So how does the empire rebuild itself and restabilize? Because it doesn't collapse there, right? It stays; it survives. There are interesting low points for the empire where it still survives.

This is one of them.

And that is as interesting as the survival at the top. The flourishing survival at the bottom is also super interesting. So how does it stabilize? What happens?

Very slowly. This is a painful process, and it takes them centuries, you could say. First, you have to stop the bleeding, just try to hold the line. It takes them decades just to hold a line.

They get pummeled by the Arabs for decades in the 7th century until finally, by the 660s and 670s, they begin to beat them—beat them on land and hold the line on the sea. And so now we have an investment in fleets. Eventually, you get Greek fire, which is the flamethrowers. And when the Arabs try to take Constantinople, these attempts are defeated twice, and that ensures the survival of the Roman state in some form.

How were the flamethrowers used?

Ah, yes. This is an interesting question. We're still debating that.

Oh, it's not fully understood.

Well, it's a state secret. They didn't want this getting out, so they kept it pretty well. The fact that we're debating it will tell you that they were pretty good at keeping secrets. So possibly through a pressure valve, right? You have this flammable compound whose preparation and components are also a state secret.

There is a specialized corps of engineers that prepares this and deploys it. It's possibly through a heated, pressurized container with a spigot, let's say, that unleashes this thing through a nozzle. It's lit and basically spews flaming napalm on other ships, and it will continue to burn even when it's on the water, right? On the top. So you can't swim away or anything. It's a very, very destructive weapon. Terrifying.

They used it against Vikings too. This is much later.

When they would raid and attack Constantinople in the 940s, then again in the 1040s—

Yeah, the Romans used Greek fire from their fleets to just incinerate them.

And that'll teach Vikings.

Yes. If you're in that situation, you'd rather serve under the emperors than attack them.

And so this is a nuclear-weapon-level state secret.

They even had it in hand-grenade form.

This is a real thing?

Oh, yes.

Hand-grenade form?

Yes. It's like a clay container with the compound, and it has some sort of fuse that you light on the outside and throw. Now, you can throw it against people, but it's not going to be that effective. Maybe you burn a person, whatever. You just wasted a hand grenade for one person.

It's most effective against things like siege engines. You throw that on a wooden frame and, yeah.

This is incredible. So this is one of the things that's finally stabilized, stopped the bleeding from a military perspective.

Yeah, eventually. Now remember, they've pulled the armies back into Asia Minor, so they're beginning to defend and fortify Asia Minor. Now you have to find ways to pay, support, and feed all of these soldiers, and this is a wrenching administrative readjustment. But they go through it. It takes them a long time. Eventually, they emerge with a different kind of strategic logistical system.

Just a smaller, harder core of the empire.

That's right. Very militarized.

Very militarized. And then in the 8th century, the second Arab siege of Constantinople somehow fails.

In the early 8th century, yes, that was the second siege.

Yeah, the early 8th century. So why did it fail? Can you tell the story of that siege? That was really the empire hanging by a thread.

Yes, but it happened to have a very competent man in charge. This is Leo III. He's a usurper who has just seized power. They knew that this massive Arab attack was coming, and so it's quite possible that the Roman elites preferred to put someone capable in power at that moment.

The city was very well prepared. I encourage people in the audience to go and read the sources that we have for that. You can find many accounts of it online. It was just very, very well done. He also had Bulgar allies. These were the Bulgars who had just crossed the Danube a few years earlier and settled south of the Danube, where eventually Bulgaria emerged.

He had Bulgar allies, and he used the Greek fire very strategically. He used his own fleet. He contained the Arabs to certain places where they starved and wore them down. It was just very well done.

From a military perspective, was it the walls, the navy, the weather, the diplomacy, or just good luck that helped Constantinople hold?

I don't see much role for good luck there. I think he had it all pretty planned out. It was all of the elements that you mentioned. He just deployed them very, very astutely and went on to rule after that for another 20-some years, and his son continued. They formed a dynasty. We call it the Isaurian dynasty, though they were not from Isauria.

And then, from that, the fascinating thing that we mentioned about religion: there was a whole stretch of time marked by intense internal religious conflicts over iconoclasm. Maybe you can clarify this, but iconoclasm, of course, is whether sacred images, icons, should be venerated or destroyed. This had major political and theological stakes. The seemingly smallest things can have the biggest conflicts.

Yeah. You've been in an Orthodox church. Have you seen all the icons and the paintings everywhere? Every space that you can imagine is covered in either icons, images, or iconography of saints. That's a result of this.

No, that's not what Christian churches used to be like, at least not in Constantinople. But his dynasty basically tried to limit or remove images from churches, and ultimately that policy failed. The other side that wanted images—or, let me put it differently, thought that images were not only appropriate but helpful in the context of Christian worship—prevailed.

And so gradually, the churches began to fill up with icons, lots of icons. They're almost like a catchword for Orthodox devotion. I have icons at home. You have a little corner in the house with little iconography. Anyway, as a secular Orthodox person, even I can't get away from them.

But that has serious consequences. I mean, that was serious. It was an extremely serious internal religious conflict.

Well, okay, so one asterisk on that. In my research, I did not find a popular interest in this matter.

Oh, interesting.

So this is an overblown—

Yes. Yes, socially completely overblown.

Oh, this is one of those things where religious folks will write the story of history.

That's it. Got it.

Ah.

You got it. I could not find—there were a few emperors, and there were some bishops, abbots, and monks. Maybe 100 or 200 people were seriously invested in this, and they were going at it. But these are the people who write the texts.

They never mention, for example, that the people of Constantinople rose up and demanded icons or no icons or anything like that. Never. So in my view, this is one of those controversies that only a few people really, really cared about, and unfortunately, they're the ones who wrote the sources.

So you always have to be very careful to consider the sources when you're reading about anything involving religious events.

Or any kind of events.

But certain things are more intense. People are more intensely passionate about them, and therefore that bias is going to bleed into the way you report the history.

Yeah. And not only that, when emperors changed their policy, almost everyone fell into line. They switched positions. It's like, "No, yeah, whatever. Put the images, take the images," whatever. They did not see this as central. Some people did, and they got very worked up about it.

Anyway, in the end, the pro-icon position won, and their view just began to fill up the space. It literally was filling up the churches, and it still does.

The thing is, we somehow took on the impossible task of talking about 1,000 years.

It'll defeat you, man. It'll defeat you every time.

I mean, there's a reason why you really want to do a 1,000-hour podcast on this, right? There are so many incredible conversations about every single emperor, every single nuanced detail of the emperors. It really is a thriving civilization. It's a thriving empire, which contains so many lessons even for modern times.

But anyway, you have written one of the books, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 A.D. to the First Crusade. This period has some low points, as we talked about, but it's also a period where, once again, there's some flourishing. So by the 10th century, in the Macedonian era, the empire is back. It's wealthy, it's culturally confident, and under emperors like Basil II, who I think is in your top 10 list, it is expanding again. This is a period that you describe in part in your book, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood.

So how did Byzantium go from surviving to expanding again?

I wrote that book in part to test myself and see if I could write narrative. I hadn't written a narrative history book up until that point. Everything I wrote was analytical, right? And it was successful enough that a few years later, my editor asked me to write the big history, The New Roman Empire—

Yeah.

—the thousand-page—

Of the whole thing.

—of the whole thing. And so I set for myself the task of explaining, in this book, Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood, a very particular period that was marked by a sudden turn to conquest again after a long period of more or less defensive war.

In 955, a new military leadership is appointed, and the Romans go conquering again, especially in Cilicia, northern Syria, Cyprus, and the Caucasus, and then eventually also Bulgaria. Right afterward, they have this generation-plus period of stability and prosperity, and then they're hit by a triple whammy. These are 3 new attackers: primarily the Seljuk Turks coming in from the east, some Pechenegs coming down from the north over the Danube, and the Normans in southern Italy.

Under the pressure of this three-part attack, this expansionist state, which had become more imperial, buckles and enters another one of these crises, just like the one we described for the seventh century. It survives by the skin of its teeth and goes on again to rebuild and become prosperous, wealthy, and powerful, as it does throughout its history. It's these cycles. I just wanted to describe that iteration of the process, and that's what I do in that book.

I think the traditional view of this perfect storm of the 11th century is that it had more to do with internal moral decay and civilian emperors neglecting the army—this internal stuff. You make the case that it's the external stuff, the three-pronged attack, as you said: the Normans in the west, the Turkic steppe people in the north, and, in Central Asia, the Turks in the east. Can you describe those 3 forces and make the case that this was the main reason why it hit a low?

This is also a methodological problem, right? In other words, when you're looking at a society that suddenly faces a bunch of problems, and you could reasonably make the case for a kind of decline or crisis, is your instinct—your first instinct—to suppose that there must be something wrong in the internal mechanisms of that society that led it to fail? That's what my field has done traditionally, in part because of the decline-and-fall model. We're primed to think that there was something wrong with it. It's a long story.

Or is it reasonable to say that a society that does not seem to have any particularly serious structural flaws is hit by external challenges that it couldn't realistically have foreseen or prepared for, such that it couldn't cope with them and, as I said, buckled? I think that's what happened. I think that's the main narrative. Not that there weren't problems—there were—but no medieval or ancient state can realistically survive the simultaneous attack of 3 very different kinds of enemies.

The Normans—these knights—represent a new type of Western warfare that is all about grinding the enemy to bits. But they are also terrorists. They're straight-up terrorists.

The Normans are fascinating because there's a Viking component, too—

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

—with the Normans.

Yeah, yeah. So they have 3 different kinds of enemies.

The Pechenegs, which are a totally different type of probably mostly nomadic horsemen, and then the Seljuk Turks, who are also mostly nomadic horsemen but are coming in from Central Asia with vast reserves of manpower behind them. In fact, whether they intended to or not, they effected a change that was not just demographic but ecological, too, because when they moved into Asia Minor, they transformed agricultural land into pasturage.

They're backed by reserves of manpower that no other enemy of the empire had yet. So how do you cope with these situations? It's very, very difficult, and it's a wonder that they survived it at all.

They also have internal problems, and I'm not going to try to sweep these under the rug. In particular, we're seeing the end of the Macedonian dynasty. This is a dynasty that had lasted for about 2 centuries, and its end has a politically destabilizing effect.

New emperors—and there are a lot of childless old men in this period—are relatively insecure. They don't have this sort of dynastic legitimacy behind them, and so they're tending to buy a lot of political support: handing out exemptions, giving cash and titles to anyone who will support them. This, of course, causes a budget problem. They don't have enough money after a while.

Then they have to start raising all of these armies to deal with all of these problems, and that just increases the pressure on the budget. So there is an internal problem as well, yeah.

You mentioned this loop of thriving and then having to survive—surviving. That happens a few times throughout the history of the Roman Empire. It seems that societies in general oscillate in that way. Is there something particular you could say about the oscillations, the loops that the Roman Empire goes through?

Yes. I don't think this is an oscillation. At least that's not how I think of it in my own mind.

As I explained, the crises that this polity, this state, this society undergoes—there are a discrete number of them, and we've talked about most of them so far. They don't last very long, and they're all sudden challenges that appear from outside. In other words, they're exogenous shocks that the Romans can't really have prepared for.

These shocks cause massive territorial loss, which requires adjustment, but they don't last that long. In other words, the Romans almost always, at some point, figure out how to hold a line, consolidate their position, regroup, and put their economy and society back on a trajectory of revival, regrowth, and eventual reconquest.

Always. Every single time, except the last time.

For me, this poses the following kind of dilemma, which I can answer. Should we define the society by these brief crises of exogenous shocks, or should we define it by the sometimes centuries-long periods of regrowth, consolidation, and stabilization, which are endogenous? Nobody came from the outside to help them rebuild.

My answer is unequivocally the latter. I see this as a society whose internal organization primes it to stabilize and embark on steady growth—slow and gradual, but steady. That's what I would like my field to explain more, and I'm going to try to do so in the book I mentioned, which I'm writing on the longevity or resilience of this society.

I'm going to try not to center the crises, which I see as being from the outside. Of course, they're part of its story, but they're not coming from it. What's coming from it is the stability, and I think that's the more interesting part of this society.

These peak-to-peak histories, as you can think of them, miss the machinery in the valleys: institutions, incentives, daily life, all of these things—the politics, the religion. You have a bunch of revisionist history ideas in your work. You're challenging the field, in the best possible way.

Just to linger on it, what are some of the things that historians miss? This is a big one that you're speaking to, which is focusing too much on specific moments versus the broad structural underpinnings of an empire, of a society.

Right. What you alluded to there is a critique of what we might call short histories of Byzantium, which is a genre of book. This isn't necessarily what my other revisionist ideas are about.

The more important ones are things like the monarchical republic that we talked about: that there's actually a broader spectrum of political participation, that emperors are having to look over their shoulders all the time, and that there is a deeper matrix of Roman Republican thought there. That's one revisionist idea.

Another one is about Roman identity. Who are these people? No, they are Romans, and in fact, it's kind of an ethnic identity after a certain point. Those are the kinds of ideas.

The criticism of the peak-to-peak kinds of books is that if you're trying to condense 1,200 years into 120 pages or even 200 pages, there's no way to do so realistically and give a sense of the whole terrain. What these books do is jump from highlight to highlight, and these highlights are sometimes things like everything Justinian did because it's so extravagant, or the crises.

The crises are, of course, dramatic moments that you can't skip. But you can't get a sense from these books of how all of this is interconnected in the valleys, right? In the crags, down there. What are the mechanisms that are connecting these peaks together?

That's how I tried to write the big history, The New Roman Empire: to tell the story by casting light in those darker places. That is, to show how especially institutions and ideologies tie people's lives together—tie people to institutions and to the broader history that surrounds them.

The reader can get a sense, when I'm recounting specific events, whether of greatness, success, or failure, of roughly why these things are happening, right? Look, there's no perfect answer.

A short book will just not tell you these things. A long book, well, is a long book.

Well, in some sense, even in this very conversation, I think we did a pretty good job of looking at the valleys, the structure, and the institutions. That gives you a sense of the whole underpinnings. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful way to see history, especially for societies that have lasted as long as the East Roman Empire has.

But it did take us a few hours.

Yes.

Yes, you're right. But it requires that you actually spend some time to look in there.

What's a few hours among friends?

No, no, no, I agree.

Zooming out and asking once again the old question—we're getting a little close to last call at a bar—I'm going to ask you the big question. We asked it before about the collapse of the West Roman Empire. When did the decline of the East Roman Empire begin for you? At what point, if you were to predict, would you be able to say where this is going to be over? And what led to that decline and the collapse? Of course, the collapse finally came in 1453 AD.

Right. That's actually a very good question. In other words, not looking at all of the previous crises that caused the loss of territory—you lose Egypt, you lose Syria, you lose Palestine, you lose eastern Asia Minor—but at what point could you say there's no coming back from this?

I would say the early 14th century, somewhere between 1300 and 1350. The sources of resilience begin to dry up, and you have a number of setbacks. They lose Asia Minor to the Turks by 1300, roughly, which means that they can no longer draw upon the 2 wings, as it were—the European side and the Asian side—which they could always do. They're confined to Europe.

Then you have a series of civil wars, you have the Serbian expansion, and you have the Black Death. They never recover from that. In 1300, you look at this and think, “That's a tiny little Balkan state.” It goes from Constantinople to the Adriatic in this ribbon, this corridor that stretches across the Balkans. And yet, it's not that much smaller than England and has about as much, if not more, revenue because they're still able to raise cash through taxes. The emperor is still able to pull in a lot of gold, and his territory is not completely insignificant. It's not what the Roman Empire used to be, but I don't think that it's completely lost.

Then they have some civil wars. Then 1 emperor—a rebel—makes a deal with the Serbs and surrenders half that territory. After that, game over. What's surprising is that it takes the Turks that long. 1453 is another century. It didn't need to be. It looks like they might have had it wrapped up 50 years after that, by 1400. But then accidental events happened. Timur, Tamerlane, comes from Central Asia, trounces the Turks, and breaks up their empire. So they go into a cycle of rebuilding, and that's why it takes another 50 years. Anyway, I'd say by the 1340s, game over.

And so why did it collapse? What are the things on the ground that, when you zoom out, ate away at the—I like this term—sources of resilience?

Foreign invasions. There's no question. It's just—

It's just invasions.

It's foreign invasions, those with which they could not cope. They coped with lots of them. But all it takes is to lose to 1, and you lose some part of your territory. If you keep losing enough, you won't have anything to fall back on, and that's what happens.

So really, if there are no significant external invasions, the East Roman Empire—the fundamentals, the taxation system, the way the policies were developed, the way politics was done, the way representation was done—all of that, this empire could have lasted for another 1,000 years.

Absolutely. I'm absolutely convinced of this because you never see movements to split away. That is, there are no separatist movements, at least not on the part of any Roman provincials. There's 1 separatist movement, which is Bulgaria. We mentioned that Bulgaria was conquered in 1018. There are a couple of independentist rebellions. Eventually, 1 succeeds in 1185, so just under 2 centuries. So Bulgaria is the only part of this empire that actively seeks to break away and does so.

But for the rest of the 1,200 years, you don't find provincials wanting to leave this system. However much they complain about the taxes, they don't want to leave, and they make no move to do so. You also never have a moment when the center loses its ability to tax its territories. You don't have widespread peasant uprisings, provincial rebellions, or agricultural rebellions—these kinds of things happen in every other one of these empires.

They also never decide to partition it. The Franks partition theirs after Charlemagne. No. There are no Roman warlords who try to carve out a piece of the territory for themselves and rule it independently. That doesn't happen either. So if you're looking at the kinds of factors that cause states to fail, fragment, and become ungovernable, these never happen.

This is so incredible. This is truly incredible. In the history of human civilization, it's just an incredible study of what human societies can form. So what are the whys? Why was it so stable?

Well, look, there are other stable states. For example, the British monarchy has been around for quite a while.

Yeah, that's true.

States like Portugal and Japan have 1 thing in common: they're all tucked away at the edges. They're little islands or whatever. They're not in the middle of 1 of the main corridors of empire-building and new religions in the world. This is the most dangerous neighborhood that you can possibly live in. So no wonder it didn't survive. It would have been extraordinary if it had.

But absent those forces, I don't see any forces of internal decomposition that would have imperiled it significantly.

So what—I mean, we've talked about a lot of it, but just to return to it—why were there no internal sources of decomposition? Why did it work so well? Why did the people feel represented? By the way, you talked about how they complain about the taxes, which is 1 of the signs of a healthy society. It's like complaining about the weather. The fact that you complain about the taxes actually means that you're happy with the taxes, kind of counterintuitively, or that it's not too bad. You're just complaining as part of the system.

Anyway, why did it work so well? Why did everybody feel represented? I don't mean get along in a silly way. I mean, sufficiently so that warlords wouldn't rise and break apart the system, or, if there were those kinds of forces, they would come back together. Why is this such a great self-healing system?

So you're exactly right. Sufficient is the key word. We don't want to idealize this. They're not just dancing in the streets, holding hands. Even when it comes to the tax system, they are complaining all the time. Of course, they're doing so because they know that complaining gets you things. There's no disincentive to complaining. You might not get what you want, or you might get it, but no harm will come to you. So they're complaining all the time. They have all of these civil wars.

I think I would give you a 2-part answer, really quickly, as to why this held together so well. First is that an extraordinary effort was made by the authorities to persuade their subjects that they were ruling on their behalf, and I think, for the most part, they actually tended to do so.

The second is that it had a very tightly unified identity as Roman and as Orthodox. For most of the time, they knew that they were surrounded by enemies who were not those things. They did not want to live under the power of non-Romans and non-Christian people. Those 2 factors combined, I think, gave everybody reason to hold it together. The alternatives were worse.

Yeah. I mean, that's a really brilliant summary, and I think we should mention that both the rhetoric and the action are important. I think you've articulated that rhetoric is really powerful: stating over and over and over that you represent the people, that you're acting on behalf of the people, and doing the action.

But it's not enough to actually do the action. You would think that's all—Machiavelli says that's the only thing that matters. But no, rhetoric actually has a lot of power because it is a uniting idea, an ideal that propagates through time, and it pacifies you. It makes you—it puts you at peace. Rhetoric is important.

I'll give you an example. As an academic administrator, I was chair of a department for years and years. There's a difference between a dean who says, “Sorry, bad budget situation. We're just going to have to cut your programs,” on the 1 hand, and a dean who says, “I am fully on board with what you're trying to accomplish with these programs. I am a defender of the humanities. Unfortunately, we have this budget situation, and we're going to have to cut some of the programs. But I assure you, the moment I'm in this with you, together—the moment we find the funds, we will restore them.”

Those 2 rhetorical strategies, though they're aiming at the same practical outcome, will produce very different levels of compliance and consensus.

And I should say that there's subtlety there. The best rhetoric in that context, and maybe in the Eastern Roman Empire, is that you also have to believe it.

Yes. It has to be credible. You can't just say it and then not do it.

But one of the things I've learned about humans, just doing this little podcast, is that the best way to say a powerful thing is to really believe it. This is clearly one of the things that made the Roman Empire work: doing the action is the best way to make the rhetoric powerful and effective.

Yeah. This is sort of what Aristotle says about tyrants. In The Politics, Aristotle is essentially giving advice to tyrants on how to protect themselves because tyrants are usually hated and are killed in coups, right? And he says, "Well, how—essentially, how do you manage to secure yourself when you're a tyrant?"

Well, you can start by maybe obeying the laws or making sure that your subjects obey the laws and maybe work for the interests of your subjects. Essentially, he's telling them to become benevolent kings. And the best way to persuade your subjects that you're legitimate, benevolent kings is to be that.

So, from all of this—from this 2,200-year history of the Roman Empire—what lessons can we draw for modern times? Now we're sitting in America, this young empire. I know we're not calling it an empire, but, you know.

Lots of people are calling it an empire. I thought it was sort of taboo. In the 20th century, it was like, "Is America an empire now?" But since the Iraq War, since 2003, I've seen at least very casual uses of "America" and "empire" in the same sentence without any kind of hand-wringing.

Is it ever called that in an academic setting?

Yes.

I mean, it's technically, I guess you could say, an empire, given the expanse of the military bases, the military might, and the way that represents itself in the geopolitical context.

Oh, yeah. There are books published all the time that unironically discuss America as an empire in various ways. Yeah, no.

By the way, both positively and negatively. When you're saying something positive about America, you call it an empire, and when you're saying it to criticize America, you call it an empire. Yeah, you're right.

Most academic books aren't trying to do either. They're just trying to analyze a situation.

What lessons about representing the people, about flourishing, about stability, can we draw?

I will say that, just drawing on what we were talking about a moment ago, investing in institutions that work for the majority of your subjects—even if indirectly, like they have to pay a cost for them, but you have to explain to them why they're paying that cost—is to the benefit of the ruling classes as well. Ideally, you're thinking about long-term success and not just your own short-term gain.

And I think that's what this society tends to do well. You know how the Romans built roads for the centuries and the millennia? They built institutions, too. One of the institutions they built was the Christian Church. They built things to last.

And I think that's a good lesson beyond even the roads. I think institutions that explain to people why they exist—yeah, I think we could use some of that.

And also the first point you made about the Eastern Roman Empire. I think you've said that U.S. foreign policy sometimes has quite a large gap between the rhetoric and the action.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And so that's to Machiavelli's point: We want to maybe narrow that gap. For a successful empire, for a successful nation, the rhetoric has to match the action.

Yes.

And it doesn't quite for some of the foreign-policy engagements in the world.

So, in the context of the society I study, let's say the army—the single largest expense—is doing pretty much what the emperors say that it's doing, which is protecting its subjects. That's actually what it's doing most of the time. Not all the time.

For example, emperors will sometimes take the armies out on a raid or an expedition, crack some skulls, gather some plunder, come back, and this is done to glorify the emperor. Yeah, this does happen. But for the most part, they're doing that, not much else.

And actually, in a premodern context, it's very difficult to operate shadow foreign policies and things like this. It's just not part of the—it's not in the cards. But America in particular has such a history of proclaiming the loftiest goals, sometimes just breathtakingly implausible.

Plus the incredible engineering behind the military-industrial complex. America is very good at creating the technologies of war, all the way to the flamethrowers.

Yes.

The technologies of war. So the lofty goals combined with just a lot of profit that could be made on the technologies of war create a very difficult situation to navigate, where the gap naturally widens.

I don't think most of the world even believes what American leaders say their goals are, especially when it comes to war. Spreading democracy? No, really? I remember when they were trying to convince us that the invasion of Afghanistan was a feminist war.

Oh, that was a thing, huh?

Oh, yes. They were going to liberate the women from the burqas or whatever, and the news was just flooded with how terrible women have it in Afghanistan. It's like, you're really trying to persuade me that that's why you're sending armed forces? Anyway.

I think there were a lot of wake-up calls about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where people realized that there is that gap between the rhetoric and the action. And because a lot of people woke up to that, they created pressure on the government to close that gap. That's how we navigate this complicated world, but it's a costly one. These were extremely costly wars—on every front, by every measure.

Yep, but the same lesson was learned in the Vietnam War, and that was such a disaster that essentially they had to switch from a conscript army to a professional army. It took them so long to be able to wage these empire wars again because of the sheer damage that the Vietnam War did to the credibility of the military leadership in the country, right?

This never happens in Constantinople. I can lose a war—you can be criticized for losing a war. That's one thing, right? But using the army to do that? No.

Some of this does have to do with how democracy functions: the temporary nature of the leadership, and the fact that they're very short-sighted because of the nature of the elected position or the executive. I mean, that's what we're trying to figure out as a human civilization: how to do this—in this particular case, the democracy thing.

There's no right answer, and by the way, I don't want to be ruled by kings or monarchs or emperors either. So I wouldn't necessarily support that. I'm not advocating anything here. I'm just trying to explain.

But you're exactly right. We want democracy. We want leaders whom we can eject every 4 or 5 years, which sometimes includes their teams of experts and policy designers and whatever, and that comes at a cost too.

So you said that the Roman Empire, maybe ancient Greece, maybe the societies before that, and the societies after that—the society we live in—are very different. And so, applying the lessons of history, you have to be careful doing so. But are there things that are the same with us humans? Of everything you've studied across hundreds of years and centuries, are there aspects of human nature that persist?

Intellectually, I've gone through periods when—when I was a grad student, for example—what we might loosely call postmodernism was alive and well and had not yet been kicked in the pants. It was very common to find colleagues who did not believe that there was such a thing as, let's say, human nature.

In other words, the parameters of human psychology are—yes, there's considerable variation, but they're within a certain set of norms. We're not going to behave like different species. And they did not believe that there was such a thing. In other words, all of human history is essentially a series of incommensurate slices of difference, right? That you just couldn't go from one to the next.

And I think it's a very problematic view for all kinds of reasons. How small do you slice these slices? No, I'm with Thucydides on this one, who says that, more or less, human beings are going to be acting, right? They love, and they hate, and they have ambitions, and they're incompetent, and you find the whole gamut of diversity pretty much in every group of about 20 or 30 people. You're going to find the same kinds of types.

Culture then comes in and tweaks things in all kinds of weird ways, and that's, as a historian, what I like to study. I like how culture will modify things, will set the dials, right? But the dials go from 1 to 10 for most people. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think so.

But every once in a while, there'll be a few folks who come along, whether it's Steve Jobs with a turtleneck or some guy with a weird mustache or a funny hat, and those can turn the tide of history.

I think so. Occasionally, yes.

But they're just ultra-skilled at the right time.

At the right moment.

Oh, I believe that too. Oh, yeah. In other words, I also don't think that cultural systems or ideologies are so effectively totalitarian that they colonize the mind of every person. So everyone in a culture is just like a clone.

No, you encounter this sometimes in historical scholarship. I think people can sometimes just think for themselves, or they can think outside the box, and they can do all kinds of things. I always want to keep my mind open to that possibility when I'm encountering historical agents.

So just because you've seen this grand history—and I apologize for the ridiculous question—but if we look at the entirety of Earth and fast-forward a million years from now—

Oof.

—and when the history of life on Earth is written, do you think we're at the very beginning of human history? Or are we in the middle, or are we close to the end?

A million years from now. I can't project or predict anything even a year from now, and I've become increasingly skeptical that I can do so, at least. However, I don't know about beginning, middle, and end.

It's easier to think in terms of numbered phases—significantly different phases of human history. I would say we're probably in the third. I think there have only been 3 phases. The first one was the hunter-gatherer period, which lasted for the majority of human history so far.

Then there's the agricultural revolution, basically. This is when you start to produce surpluses that create more complex societies. And we're now living through a technological phase—first industrial, now all kinds of technology—

Yeah, you can throw it all in the same bucket.

All kinds of technology—

Industrial, technological.

Yeah, industrial, technological, which is modifying the parameters of what it is that human beings can do and possibly be. Who knows where this will go?

But I see these as very distinct in many ways. It's all human beings—

Yeah, it's all humans—

—but in very different contexts.

But they're almost modifying themselves. So the question is, is there a fourth? Is there going to be a—

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there will be.

And what does that look like? And is it—when they look back at the third, would they still see us as the same as them, or would it be something completely different?

Oh, no. I mean, we look back at the Romans or the Greeks or any period in history, and we're like, "Yeah, no, I see what you're doing there. You're doing it with the technological capabilities that you had at that time. You're doing it with the materials that you had. But I see what you're doing. Yeah. You've got families, and you've got armies, and you've got—you bury your dead, and you—"

Mm-hmm. But now we're increasingly having the tools and technology to deeply modify what it means to be human: genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces. As we understand the brain more, we can modify things, expand them completely. Plus, artificial intelligence can expand the knowledge base and the intelligence of the human mind.

Unless we figure out that the human mind is actually incredibly special, to the degree where, at least with the tools we have this century, we cannot accomplish—we cannot achieve—the level of general intelligence that humans have. Or one of the things we might figure out in stage 4 of this long history is that the thing that makes humans special is not intelligence.

It's not any of the things we value each other by. It's actually consciousness, and consciousness is the thing that is very difficult to engineer. And so the common thing, from the hunter-gatherers through the period before the Industrial Revolution and after, is that we're still the same.

We still feel what it's like to be alive, and that's maybe an important component of what makes us fall in love with each other or fear each other or suffer—all the full range of the human condition, the human experience. Maybe even technology cannot replicate that or modify that. Maybe that's what we learn.

Or very possibly, we destroy this whole thing, because now, for the first time in human history, we have the tools—

Yeah, yeah, we have—

—unfortunately, to destroy everything.

This is all very eloquent. I mean, after so many hours of my rambling about the medieval Roman Empire, I'm impressed.

Okay. What gives you hope about this whole thing, about the future of human civilization?

Look, there are a lot of challenges that we face, and we talk about them a lot. As a historian, I see other periods that were far, far more difficult, when people could have far more easily given up hope, and sometimes did.

But I don't think we're in one of those. There are some major issues, like the uncertain future of technologies and what they might do—exactly what you were talking about. I think they're solvable problems to a certain degree. If we can rein in some elites, a lot of these problems can be fixed, and that's not super difficult. I mean, it's difficult, but it's not impossible.

Look, I grew up during the Cold War. Let's just take the '80s, for example. In the '80s, there was a pervasive sense that nuclear war could happen at any time and just annihilate everything, and we lived under that.

If you look at the popular culture of the '80s, it's all upbeat and cheerful and naive. There was just no correlation. And then you move into the '90s, and the Cold War is over, and everyone's all depressed. The music gets all whiny, and it's like, "What happened?" There's just no correlation.

Anyway, I just think that a pervasive sense of hopelessness or despair doesn't always match the situation if you look at it objectively. I mean, yeah, it can be pretty bad. But there's so much that's happening that's good all the time.

I think this period of human history—the late 20th century and the 21st century—will be seen as the flourishing of humans. So if we actually just wake up to everything around us, by most measures of human flourishing, we're doing pretty good.

The amount of sheer misery is probably objectively decreasing every year. Now, we're also creating problems that will cause misery down the road, yes. But overall, I don't see a reason to despair and not have hope.

Yeah. We're doing okay.

We can do better. Let's do better. But yeah.

Let's do better. Well, Anthony, this was an incredible conversation. Thank you for all the amazing work you do and for the whirlwind journey through such a fascinating part of human history. This was fun. Thank you for talking today.

It was a pleasure to be here, and thank you—not just for inviting me. I mean, this is probably the largest audience I've ever spoken to, but also for giving my field and this civilization that I study the opportunity to be seen and heard by more people.

I think that's very important. You've done a real service here, so I want to thank you for that.

Thank you.