The Empire of the East --- The Western Roman empire fell in the fifth century. The other half lasted a thousand more years

"The New Roman Empire

By Anthony Kaldellis

Oxford, 1,160 pages, $45

Julian

By Philip Freeman

Yale, 168 pages, $26

Justinian

By Peter Sarris

Basic, 544 pages, $35

The eastern Roman empire was founded by Constantine the Great on May 11, A.D. 330. The empire fell on May 29, 1453, when the army of the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II breached the walls of Constantinople. Pagan then Christian, Roman then Greek, the eastern empire endured for 1,123 years, bridging the centuries between the ancient and modern ages. The life of Constantine XI Palaiologos (1405-1453), the emperor last seen taking arms against a sea of Turks at Constantinople, overlapped with those of Christopher Columbus (b. 1451) and Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452).

The 19th-century historian Jacob Burckhardt called ancient history a "base-chord heard again and again" through the medieval and the modern eras. 

The eastern empire created the doctrines and institutions of early Christianity and preserved and developed the Roman law. 

Yet for centuries, Western Europeans remained selectively deaf to these resonances. Medieval European warlords pretended to the confected title of Holy Roman Emperor, despite the endurance of a real holy Roman empire to the east. They were abetted by the Latin churchmen who forged the Donation of Constantine as the pope's license to appoint a king of the Romans. The Greek and Latin churches split over doctrine in the Great Schism of 1054, and in 1204 a western alliance fatally wounded the eastern empire by diverting the Fourth Crusade from Jerusalem and sacking Constantinople.

Modern historians repeated the insult in the name of the Enlightenment. Edward Gibbon, in the 18th century, called the eastern empire a "new Rome," but saw its history as a fall that followed the decline of the old Rome. In the 19th century, French historians used "Byzantine" to mean the opposite of progress: procrastination, irrationality, mystification. Naturally, this image appealed to artists. Their ideal resembled the jeweled tortoise in J.K. Huysmans's "Against Nature" or the gilded perfection in W.B. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium": gorgeous but immobile, timeless but useless.

Recent scholars see Byzantium differently. As Christianity grew from Judaism, so the inheritances of the modern West grew from the new Rome as well as the old. In "The New Roman Empire," Anthony Kaldellis, a professor of classics at the University of Chicago, argues that the eastern empire "directly inherited Roman political traditions, Greek literature, and Biblical monotheism."

 The new Rome, not the old, passed this heritage to the West as "curated versions of the corpus of Roman law, Greek literature and thought, and the Church Fathers and decisions of the Church Councils." 

We might add to the Byzantine legacy two unprecedented templates, the sensuous austerities of Byzantine art and the accidental invention of what we now call identity politics.

By the third century, the idea of Rome, Mr. Kaldellis writes, was "less a physical city than an ideal of political community." The symbolic capital on the Tiber ruled a multiethnic empire from the Danube to the Euphrates. Provincials became citizens, then senators and generals, and eventually emperors. As barbarians invaded from the north and Persians from the east, the emperors, who were often from military families, lived on perpetual campaign in the provinces. Rome, a general from Antioch said, was now "wherever the emperor was." Wherever the Thracian-born emperor Maximinus might have been, it wasn't Rome; he never saw it.

The city of Byzantion, astride the frontier between Greece and Asia Minor and equidistant from the Danube and Euphrates, was the traditional fault line whenever the empire divided in civil war. The east, Mr. Kaldellis writes, needed "a Rome of its own" to repel the Persians. Constantine, having won his own civil war in 324, needed the support of the elites in the eastern provinces. He rebalanced strategically by making Byzantion "a clamp that fastened the two halves of the empire together," then secured himself politically by rebuilding Byzantion as Constantinople, the old-new image of Rome.

The empire made Romans, but it also made Christians. Before Constantine's conversion to Christianity, there were roughly two million Christians in the eastern empire (about one-tenth of the population). Once the empire switched from persecuting Christians to placing restrictions on pagans, the number of Christians rose sharply.

The new faith was called a lex (law), the same term the Romans used for their pagan cults and for the temple cult of the Jews. Rather than Christianity conquering the empire, Mr. Kaldellis suggests, the empire domesticated a rebellious spirit into a "pan-Roman" ideal, a unifying "religion of the Romans."

The problem was that the Christians were never unified. Pagans had beliefs and practices, but Christians, like Jews and Mithras worshipers, preferred what Mr. Kaldellis calls their own "brand-name identity" and "crisp group definition." Right-thinking ("ortho-doxy") was essential to personal salvation, but Christian bishops could not agree on the theological relationships between God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and this led to disputations and riots. The bitterness of the identitarian rivalry between Christians was matched only by that between followers of the Blue and Green racing teams at the hippodrome. When everyone was a Roman taxpayer and local ethnic and religious identities were "merely variations on a universal norm," theology, like sports, offered a personal politics of identity. The conflict of identities became an unlikely Byzantine legacy.

In 325, Constantine tried to referee this "chaotic free-for-all" by inviting his bishops to a Council at Nikaia (Nicaea), travel expenses included. This was, Mr. Kaldellis writes, "the most important event of the fourth century after the foundation of Constantinople," but no one recorded its deliberations. Its declarations of doctrinal orthodoxy, some of them suggested by a baffled Constantine, failed to settle the disputes on the nature of Jesus, but they did fold Christianity into the empire.

Constantine's Christian empire almost never was. In 361, Constantine's nephew Julian ascended to the throne and attempted a pagan restoration. Philip Freeman of Pepperdine University has written a fresh and engaging biography, "Julian: Rome's Last Pagan Emperor," for Yale's Ancient Lives series. When Constantine died, his sons fought over his empire. The winner, Constantius, murdered his rivals, among them Julian's father and brother. Julian's mother died soon after. Raised by his maternal grandmother, Julian was tutored in the Greek classics by an elderly Scythian eunuch named Mardonius, then toured the Aegean as a young man, studying with pagan scholars. Before Constantius and Julian could dispute the succession on the battlefield, Constantius died suddenly, leaving Julian the last prince standing.

An ascetic who slept on a straw mattress, Julian might, Mr. Freeman writes, have "become a traditional Christian intellectual with a tendency toward Neoplatonic spiritualism." The "brutal hypocrisy" of his family and his attraction to magic made him a genuine but secret pagan. The sole survivor of the imperial family and a veteran of fighting on the German frontier, Julian "sincerely believed the gods were on his side" and was determined to "degrade Christianity however possible."

With Constantius dead, the new emperor started sacrificing animals, gathering pagan philosophers at his court and restoring the Roman gods. As the Christians claimed that the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem confirmed one of Jesus' prophecies, Julian told the Jews to rebuild it. The rabbis at Tiberias considered this both heretical and politically risky. Construction began, then stalled as Julian turned to fight the Persians. He was fatally wounded in 363 by a spear to the liver. His last words, according to one historian, were "a calm and careful discussion concerning the immortality of the soul." The Christians damned him, though Gibbon and Gore Vidal, who wrote a novel about him, differed. Just under three decades later, in 391, the emperor Theodosius closed the last pagan shrines.

The fall of the western empire in the fifth century nagged at the sixth-century emperor Justinian like the ghost of an amputation. "Justinian," by Peter Sarris of the University of Cambridge, is a vivid and fluent study of the paradoxes of the pious Christian who built the Hagia Sophia; married an actress, Theodora, and made her his empress; and refounded Constantine's empire. Justinian bequeathed the enduring image of Byzantium as Greek Orthodox and established, Mr. Sarris writes, the "ideological and psychological foundations for medieval Christendom as a whole."

Campaigning against the Persians in Syria, the Vandals in north Africa and the German tribes in Italy, Justinian recovered the littoral of the entire Mediterranean basin. At home, he persecuted Jews and heretics and overhauled the Roman law. But the plague and the Persians stopped him.

The image of Justinian's legacy is one of immobile beauty, like the mosaics of Justinian and Theodora in the Church of San Vitale at Ravenna. This belies the dynamic reality. Constantinople's court history may be, as the Victorian historian W.E.H. Lecky complained, "a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides." But, as Mr. Kaldellis shows, the empire institutions worked and kept working.

The new Rome achieved a degree of social homogeneity "greater than any empire before or since," Mr. Kaldellis writes.

 It offered and honored a social contract, extracting taxes and service and supplying law and order. 

It was flexible enough to renew itself even as its territory contracted beneath constant external shocks (four centuries of war with the Fatimid and Abbasid caliphates, the disruptions of the Crusades, three centuries of war with the Seljuk Turks). In the ninth century, a Macedonian dynasty led Byzantium to a cultural and political revival, and by the 11th century the emperors were "pulling in more revenue than at any time since the age of Justinian."

"We can never cut ourselves off from antiquity unless we intend to revert to barbarism," Jacob Burckhardt insisted. "The barbarian and the creature of exclusively modern civilization both live without history." For centuries, chauvinism and cultivated ignorance cut us off from the full story of the new Rome. The aesthetic nectar of Yeats's "hammered gold and gold enamelling" cannot do justice to the political realities of running the real "artifice of eternity," a thousand-year empire. The complexities of this great culture's history are, frankly, byzantine at times, so newcomers might begin with John Julius Norwich's "Byzantium" trilogy and dip into Gibbon before reading Mr. Kaldellis's epic revision and these biographies of Julian and Justinian. A strange, yet strangely familiar, world awaits.

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Mr. Green is a Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: The Empire of the East --- The Western Roman empire fell in the fifth century. The other half lasted a thousand more years. Green, Dominic.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 23 Dec 2023: C.7.