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.
26 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 there's 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, again, 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, very rarely use 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. Like, this guy was a total hardass. And he's this little old man. He was very old, and he was tiny, and he was a eunuch, and the Goths laughed at him, but he had the last laugh.
The following is a conversation with Anthony Kaldellis, a historian of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire. This is a Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description, where you can also find links to contact me, ask questions, give feedback, and so on. And now, dear friends, here's Anthony Kaldellis. You've described that the Byzantine Empire is the Roman Empire, that calling it the Byzantine Empire is an invention of historians writing long after the empire has collapsed, that the people of that time considered themselves Romans, and that the so-called Byzantine Empire never actually existed, that it was, in every legal and cultural sense, 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?
So Lex, 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. And 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. So the Eastern Roman Empire, this is the direct continuation of the ancient Roman Empire in the East, right? Everybody knows the Western Empire fell in the fifth century. And for many conceptions of Western history, that was sufficient. Like, that's when we just called it. The Roman Empire fell in the fifth century. And we kinda, yeah, we kinda know that the eastern half survived, but we don't wanna include that in our cultural genealogy. And so we kinda 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 is something different, and those reasons have created these models where they called it Empire of the Greeks for 1,000 years, then they switched to Byzantine Empire for very political reasons. Now that's collapsing. So we're now 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 unique almost in history, from antiquity, like the archaic period, down to the 15th century.
I think it would be really nice to actually look just for a brief moment at the grand scale of the full Roman state as it lasted for over 2,200 years.
So its founding, 753 BC, to let's say the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD. So can we try to give a big picture overview of everything that happened?
Okay, so first we have a period of the kings. This is almost legendary, from like the eighth century BC down to around 510 BC. So 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, and this is a regime that's governed by mostly an aristocracy, but with cooperation from the people of Rome. In various ways, the arrangements change over the centuries. So that lasts for about five centuries. And 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, right, under Augustus. So that's, we date that roughly either, yeah, 27 BC, something like that. And 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. And, you know, 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, like, very sudden. So that's the big picture. Kings, republic, imperial monarchy.
The Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire.
And then the West and East Roman Empire.
And then maybe 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?
So Late Roman Empire we use for both east and west, starting around the reign of Diocletian maybe, even a bit earlier, so during the third century AD. And that goes down to maybe the early seventh century. So that period we call Late Roman Empire. And if you ask me to define its principal characteristics, it would probably be the tax system and the administration, the bureaucracy of the later Roman Empire is that that comes from mostly Diocletian and Constantine's reforms.
And Diocletian was in the 3rd century.
Yes, 284 to 305 AD. Yes. A very important reformer.
And we'll talk about it, but let's just do this whirlwind, and hopefully there'll be automagical images somewhere overlaid, but-
So in 753 BC, Rome, a small city state, is founded, and in 509 BC, the kings are overthrown, and the Roman Republic is born. 390 BC, the Gauls sack Rome, and this, I believe, among other events throughout its history, is a formative trauma that hardens Rome's security obsession. It turns out, throughout its history, people want to attack from different directions, and so you have to defend. So there's two wars, as we're actually saying off mic. There's two kinds of military operations. One is wars of conquest and expansion, and one is more defensive. And we'll talk about how the military changes throughout its history to allocate more effort to one versus the other. In 264 to 146 BC, the Punic Wars and the survival against Hannibal transform Rome into a Mediterranean superpower. Then like you mentioned, Caesar in 49 to 31 BC, Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon to assassination of Caesar to the Battle of Actium, and then the Civil War dismantles the Republic and concentrates power in a single ruler, Octavian, AKA Augustus, the first Roman emperor, let's say. Then 27 BC, Augustus founds the Principate, really low-key monarchy. And so officially, that ends the Republic, and then that begins, 27 BC to 180 AD, the Pax Romana, which is a period of relative peace and stability. And a lot of the emperors we know of, the sexy, popular emperors all come from that period. Marcus Aurelius, who I'm a big fan of, from that period. Then that takes us to 284 AD, the guy we mentioned, Diocletian, who rebuilds the state. Emperors drop the first citizen mask, this perception of the way, and we'll talk about this, the persona that's presented by the state. 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. Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD. The West falls at 476 AD as the last Western emperor is deposed. And then we sort of focus more on the East Roman Empire with 527. In the 6th century, Justinian's reign. In the 7th century, Heraclius defeats Persia and then loses against the Arabs. There's the Arab conquest continuing in the 7th century. In the 8th the Arab siege of Constantinople fails. There's the Macedonian dynasty in that you have an excellent book about. And then the Crusades, and then eventually leading to Constantinople falling in 1453 AD. As a person who understands the full journey of it with a focus on East Roman history, is there obvious glaring holes or incorrect things in what I just said?
No, nothing incorrect. I would say if you wanted to produce a sort of very swift timeline of its history, it's obviously important to focus on the moments when lots of territory was lost to foreign invaders, and 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. It is the Seljuk Turk conquest of Asia Minor, modern Turkey, in the 1070s, and that was very swift and partly reversed afterwards, but only partly. And then there's the Fourth Crusade, 1204, when the armies from mostly France sack, conquer Constantinople, and dismember 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 sort of consolidating, you know, regrouping, and generally engaged in slow but steady economic growth, territorial expansion on a small scale, but steady. So we can talk about this. It's... I think it's an important thing to keep in mind about the big picture, that the defeats were swift and kind of, you know, terrible. But most of its history is one of slow growth.
There's some traumatic events that have a big impact, but a lot of the developments we'll talk about it might seem or feel like there's a particular moment when those developments or changes in the way the government or the military is structured arise, but really it's a gradual process.
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, like, individuals with a great deal of power make choices that impact everybody else and have, you know, long-term consequences downstream. Constantine's conversion to Christianity, for example, right? Not something that anybody could have or did predict. Okay. Otherwise, most of the developments that we identify by specific dates, like you mentioned 395, the division of the eastern and the western empires, those are conventional dates that we use to actually 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, like, one son and another son in the east and the west. The two halves were subsequently reunited, then they kind of 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 76, the fall of the Western Empire, that's just the last date. It's actually a very long process that took decades. Right? So that's just something to keep in mind, that sometimes we're talking about processes, sometimes we're talking about very discrete events with long-term consequences. Yeah.
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 characteristics that run through the whole thing?
I think so, yes. By the way, you know the metaphor of the Ship of Theseus? Okay. So in case the audience doesn't know it, this is when there's a ship, and it's, you know, at sea, and over time, like, 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, like, in a certain sense still that ship because of the story, right? The... Okay. So 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, right? It's everywhere. But you still have histories of Christianity. It's the same with, like say, Greek culture or your 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 kind of 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. And so this is the community of the Roman people, the Roman citizens. And 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. So in the same way as the ship I just mentioned, in other words, it's the narrative that you tell about it where the changes that take place to it make sense only when you see them within the context of that story. It's the same with Roman history. Yes, there are changes. Like, eventually everything changes. But it happens so gradually that it doesn't seem that way to anyone living in it. And so the narrative of the history of the Roman people is what holds all of this together.
How important is it that, so you mentioned Greek culture. So a lot of my friends who are Greek are extremely proud of being Greek. There's certain cultures that are proud.
And it's not a momentary ephemeral thing. It feels like a thing that has lasted for many generations.
And so that is an engine that propagates through time that carries that culture forward. And so 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, because those ideals become even more concretized and explicit, I think, through the East Roman Empire, because one of the things you talk about is that the citizens of the empire are kind of all connected, that they are engaged in this whole sort of machinery. Anyway, that's a complicated way of asking, is 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... So what you're observing in your Greek friends is also the result of modern nation building, is it's the result of modern systems of education, and sort of 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 be ruled, to be, to rule and to be ruled in this particular political community. Now, some members of it may definitely, and in fact did have this kind of pride. I'll give you an example. So there's an ambassador in the sixth century, and he's concluding a deal with the Persians. And you know, the Persians are skeptical cause, you know, Romans can't always be trusted. But this guy says to them, he says, and let me just tell you, you're making a deal here with the Romans. The Romans. The name should say it all. Like, you, okay, and you get a sense that this is, he's expressing a certain pride in, like, being a bearer of the Roman tradition and speaking for the emperors and the Roman Empire. I mean, that's, 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 like an analysis of how the society works as a whole. For the most part, it was something like a consensus where, you know, subjects or citizens, however you want to call them, they agree to let's say be taxed and be ruled by political authorities because of what they get in return, and there's this kind of understanding of a mutual set of responsibilities. And 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 sources are, texts are written by literate, you know, usually elites. So this is a small part of the population. We can't automatically extend their attitudes to everybody else. So in dealing with everyone else, we have to work with different kinds of materials, different kinds of assumptions. We can't just posit that they're just proud of being Roman. They could have been. We don't know that, though. We can see other sorts of things about them. Like, for example, did they pay their taxes? Did they try to rebel and leave the empire? So 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. Like, what motivates a particular person to pay the taxes. And then 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? Like, if I brought to you... This is one of those, you know, there's like-
... blind taste tests you can do with food.
If I brought you a Roman from the kingdom period, the republic period, the early imperial period-
I mean, I get asked this in a much more radical form, which is like if you take someone from, like, around 1453 who's a Roman and a subject of this Roman, and compare, and, and, you know, compare him or have him meet, you know, in your imagination with someone from the ancient republic. Like, how-
... could they find any kind of agreement on what it means to be Roman and recognize each other as belonging to that polity? This, this is a very difficult thing to... Like, now, I can point to a number of things that they would find eventually. And, you know, if you told them, "Yo, you're both Romans, you're both from this long history, now you have to find, you know, what you have in common," I think they could find things. But before we talk about those, if you wanna get into it, let's just say that the question can even be posed about Romans who live at the same time. I mean, 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 in coming up with something. Right? So let's not minimize the sheer diversity of experiences and sort of life experiences of Romans who are living at the same time. The important thing is that a change is always happening, and from my standpoint this change is sort of cumulative, so it results in Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian Romans in Constantinople who at first sight might have little to do with Latin-speaking, you know, non-Christians or worshiping the ancient gods, Romans from a republic in Rome. And 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, right, an emperor from the second century sort of a very cosmopolitan figure who travels around the empire with his Greek lover and, you know, writes poems and has a Greek beard and, you know, loves Greek culture and has much to do with someone from the Middle Republic who's, you know some warrior who's chasing down cattle from the Samnites. I mean, and yet the way we understand history is that, oh no, those belong together. Hadrian and this ancient Roman from the fourth century BC. But not Hadrian and someone, you know, an emperor a few centuries later who's just like him, bilingual in Greek and Latin, who's kinda cosmopolitan, who, you know, 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, looking at a very specific role in society across time. So we can look at soldiers, how they solve violence, for example. That's one way. So 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. And so one of them is the view on violence, across time. And, and then the other is the view on the role of the, the government across time.
That's an excellent way of putting it. So take soldiers, for example. They swear an oath. Right? Now, 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 like, throughout all of the centuries of the empire. Sometimes they might add, like, a Christian formula to it. Sometime before that, not. But they swore basically to protect the republic or depending on what term they used or the empire or the emperor. And this is something that they would have recognized very quickly. Like, if, if they met each other over time and said, "Hey, what was your oath like?" And they recited it this would have made much sense to them, right? Or take, for example, a woman who runs a business, right? From any century of the empire. It, it would have been, especially the later you go, the, the more so, that this woman is enabled to do this by virtue of Roman law. Of certain, you know, Roman law of property and inheritance and, and marriage, but also regulations regarding who can do what and what kinds of properties women can handle and under what circumstances. This is something that Roman women had in common that many other cultures did not. So I'll give you an example. So for example, in the 10th, 11th century, 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. Now, the thing is that for the Romans, these are property matters, not religious matters. But for the rabbis, these are religious matters. But 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 where Roman law is not operative. And there you go. Right? Like, these things matter, right? And that's a function of imperial law.
And this, this would be an interesting actually interplay between the law and religious institutions throughout the East Roman Empire. So you argue that even though the personality of the various emperors varied, as we'll talk about, and as they're often venerated, celebrated, criticized, talked about, the late Roman Empire was projecting a persona to its citizens that was consistent throughout its history. Can you describe what you mean by this and describe the different detailed characteristics of this persona?
Yes. So this persona, it's what the governments or the emperor, the court, and the spokesman, the bureaucracy want their subjects to think, this whole thing is about. Like, how is power being used, why, and for whom, right? And 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 so the way you praise an emperor, the way you talk about an emperor. You find this language in petitions, so this is a hugely important glue for this society, is that anyone could basically petition the authorities for let's just say just about anything. That's not technically true, but there's a lot of petitioning going on. So, you know, 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, you can... Right? And 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. And those responses contain this language also, right? So 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. So renouncing any kind of private interest. In other words, "We're not doing this for our benefit," say the authorities. "We're doing this for your benefit." Also that they're proactive. So the emperors are constantly saying that, "We're planning ahead. We're trying to foresee what problems you might have, and we are solving them at, before you experience them." And that they are also working very hard. So hardworking. In fact, the one of the cliches that they keep using is sleepless. The emperors keep saying that, "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, and not because he was a demon whose head floated around in the palace on its own, which some people-
But sleepless in terms of worked so hard-
... 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, you know, wars and architecture and laws and the religion and theology and whatever. So the emperors are projecting this image, right? So 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 breaks the law or oppresses 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, right, they're more likely to agree to the consensus of essentially paying taxes.
And you draw this distinction between rhetoric and action, what the authorities say and what they actually do. So when you say persona in the modern times, some of that could be reframed as propaganda-
... for example. And propaganda implies that the rhetoric, that there's a big gap between the rhetoric and the action. And 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 of 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, and I would recommend that anybody kind of practice this way of looking at the world, right? People and states and, you know, powerful people can say anything they want to. At the end of the day, what matters is what they actually do. And this doesn't mean that what they say is irrelevant, even if it's discordant with what they do. But nevertheless, in the case of the East Roman state, so 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. And of course, these are human beings we're talking about. The, right, the human societies, there was a lot of, you know, corruption, and you name it. Abuse, of course. Of course there is. But overall, I think that there was a sufficient level of understanding that the emperors are in fact doing this, and they were actually incentivized to do this. We can talk about how. Because they were also in a pretty vulnerable situation too, so they needed their subjects to be relatively content on this front.
Isn't this surprising to you? So, you know, 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? Like what, 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. And this is a function of the Roman matrix of politics here. In other words, so here's a bit of a paradox. What we call the Roman Republic was the most imperialistic phase of Roman history. Like this is when the Romans did most of their conquering. What we call the empire is much less imperialistic in this way. That'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, that it has an emperor rather than it is engaged in imperialism. And 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. So for example, if you think of the Ottoman Empire, many other empires, they... The whole thing existed because this dynasty engaged in conquest and was successful in creating the state, and so the dynasty was like 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, kind of pretend that they were not what they really were. Basically, you know, continuing to flatter the idea of a republic that is, you know, that has 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 facade, but the fact that they had to create this facade at all is very important.
Can we actually just linger on that? I mean, how much of this... 'Cause you said they had to create this facade.
Did Augustus, who started the whole thing, the first emperor of Rome, did he have to act that way? 'Cause he kept acting like he's not an absolute-
... monarch, and he could have gone hardcore, destroy the Senate, just full hardcore rule, dictatorship.
Well, then how does he govern then?
Uh, so he wants to be an effective governor.
And he also wants to not be overthrown.
Exactly. Because, you know, just because you ended one civil war doesn't mean that there's not 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 in theory could have done, but that would've just led to more wars, right? So the problem is that the emperors, even those who come to power through violence, they can't prevent other people from trying to come to power through violence because like I said, no one has a right to the throne.
We should also say one more thing where, dare I carefully say this, but it seems like riots and civil wars is a feature, not a bug of the system.
This is a different thing that we have to the modern day, is because the threat of a civil war, a violent civil war where you overthrow the government and there's just a lot of death and struggle for power is always a threat. That's another incentive that, I guess the stick, not the carrot, but the stick for the emperor to behave.
Yes. It's the main one. In other words, just take the, the thousand years that I study. There's something like 120 civil wars. Now, these are usually very swift. They're over quickly, and they're never about ideology. So they're not like modern civil wars. Right? It's about slavery or the rights of kings or whatever. No, no, no. They're solely about who has the power. All sides have the same ideology. They talk about, you know, the responsibility of government in the same way, right? They're just competing over who's the best man to do the job. Right? And so once you have that situation... And it might not be a civil war, it could be a palace coup, it could be a kind of 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 are overthrown through violence. 46%. And that's almost half. Right? So that's a huge, that's a huge number, which means that every emperor is vulnerable and insecure, and they know it, right? So what they have to do is make sure that that doesn't happen to them, and the way to do that is not by arresting and executing everybody you think might be a threat or just generally behaving like a, you know, a Caligula or a Nero. That will just get you killed. Like, they know this. So the best way to avoid that fate is to actually do the things that will make people happy so that they don't support a rebel if a rebel decides to appear. And sometimes rebels would appear. There's a kind of convention in Constantinople, like if you... Sometimes you you think, "Hmm, that emperor's pretty unpopular and I think I can overthrow him." What you would do is you would march down the center boulevard, and, you know, you'd have your people just call the populace of Constantinople out to rally, to you know, maybe go to Hagia Sophia, the, the church, and just create a big crowd and call for the deposition of the emperor and, you know, maybe that would hap- And sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn't, and the rebel or wannabe rebel would sort of proceed down the Mese, the boulevard, and people would just gradually just disappear, and then he'd be left alone and go up to Hagia Sophia as seeking asylum. Right? So that's a bid. That's someone making a bid for the throne, and it just goes disastrously bad. Other times, the people come out 'cause 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 'cause it's a different world than we live in today.
There's a constant inner workings of policy development inside government.
But the check on power is, like, literal, like, we will murder you.
Yes, it depends on the period. Sometimes 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. We'll just basically, you'll get retired to a monastery.
Okay. You're right. So here's what elections do. Elections give a government a mandate for, I don't know, four or five years, and during that period, you may be unpopular, but you're legitimate, right, 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? And in fact, the emperors are, they're conducting opinion polls in a sense because they appear in public. When they appear in public, everyone is expected to cheer and chant acclamations, right, like, slogans. Right? So you have 100,000 people in the Hippodrome all chanting, you know, "Worthy" or "Many years for you, Augustus" or something like this. And if that happens, it's great. But if you appear in the Hippodrome and people are, like, sullen or if the chanting is a bit tepid or if they're booing, then you know something's wrong, right? So you gotta find out what's wrong. It could be something like the grain supply is, you know, not working or whatever. And so emperors are desperate to fix those problems.
And the Hippodrome is this big gathering place in Constantinople, which I guess a lot of people gathered at and did this kind of cheering or not cheering based on policy and whether the emperor is popular or not. This was democracy. I apologize to use that term, but in our conception of what that means, because what do we mean by democracy in the modern day is that the people somehow have a connection to who leads and how they lead, and this is, the Hippodrome was that connection between the people and the leaders.
Yes. Now, we can talk about modern democracy if you, if you want. That's a, that's a, I have, I have my own views about modern democracy, and, and, you know, how it works and how it doesn't and, anyway, whether it is democracy, in fact, 'cause there are other models of democracy, like ancient Athenian democracy, which is a whole other thing. But you're right. So it's not just in the Hippodrome. It's wherever people assemble in large numbers. So this could be military mustering grounds, right? So the army. The army is also the Roman people in a way, and the in some cases, the most decisive part of it, right? So if an army gathers together and they decide they want a different emperor, that's serious, and that can happen out in the provinces too. That doesn't necessarily have to happen in Constantinople. There's also Hagia Sophia, so the people gather in the church, or they gather in public spaces like the Forum of Constantine. So this can happen anywhere where a large number of people can gather, and it's, I don't know if you wanna call it a democracy as such but it is definitely a form of popular, mm, let's say consultation and a testing of consensus. I'll give you another example. So in the 1190s, the emperor, and it's Alexius III, he's being threatened by the German emperor. German emperor's basically, "You, you, you pay me a bunch of money or I'll invade." Just straight up extortion.
And Alexius decides, "Okay, I'm gonna gather this money. I'm gonna impose these taxes." And he gathers the people in the Hippodrome, and he says, "You know, we're gonna have the German tax." He called it the German tax. And there's such an uproar in the Hippodrome against this that he was like, "Uh, that wasn't my idea. I don't know where that came from. No, never mind. We're not gonna have the German tax." Fortunately, the German emperor died and, and nothing ever happened, but it gives you a sense of how emperors, like, literally can backtrack when they see that the people are against something in a matter of policy, right, like tax policy. So yeah, there was this give and take. So institutionally, the emperor might look absolute, as you called him earlier. In practice, no. No. The ones that did that didn't end well.
And 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. And the reason I looked this up, I wanted to see how many people. Shaped as a long U-shaped race course with a central barrier and tiered seating, it may have held from roughly thirty thousand up to a hundred thousand spectators, though exact capacity is debated because archaeological remains are limited. That's a lot of people.
Thirty thousand is definitely a pretty underestimate. The Hippodrome is still there. I mean, you can see it from, it's like satellite photos. The shape of it is still there. And actually some parts of the built, the, the Sphendone, the, the sling around the southern side is 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. Now, sometimes there are events for replacing an emperor. So 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. Now, in those kinds of contexts, it's entirely possible that there are people also in the, the arena, like not just in the stands. I think some military units might have just 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, so like, I think the thing that was emphasized in the first paragraph is the, the athletic events and the entertainment events, right? Like the imperial ceremony. But there is a sort of a political gathering was also 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, blues, greens, reds, 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. I mean, it's human civilization. It's converged towards a mechanism that has clearly worked, because for the empire in the East, stood for a thousand years. So it's, it's fascinating. We as humans, throughout our history, we try to figure out, okay, how do we, figure out how to govern large collections of humans in a way that they're represented, in the way that they don't riot, they don't rebel. In the way that we flourish together as a people, all this, all this kind of stuff. So this is a real... The East Roman Empire is a real study of something that seemed to have worked. There are lessons there even for the modern times, I think. And modern times, again, is very early human civilization.
From a certain standpoint, yes, we are still early in-
... 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, you know, 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 the First and the founding of Constantinople, can we look at some maybe seminal events that led up to some of the topics we'll be talking about? So one of them maybe tell me if this is not as interesting as I think it is, but the Edict of Caracalla, in 212 AD. So this is where, you described that starting with Augustus in the early imperial period, government saw itself as a protector of the Roman citizens, which is a minority of the people living in the, in the Roman Empire. It doesn't consider the, the provincials. And then you described that the Edict of Caracalla, that extended full Roman citizenships to basically all free inhabitants of the Roman Empire. So 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, a very important... It's a, it's a real turning point in a sense, but it also is part of a process. So 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, you know, would be necessary players for controlling local societies. Sometimes they even allowed foreign cities to, like non-Roman cities, to decide who would get Roman citizenship by basically electing them to certain kinds of offices. Like they, they outsourced a lot of this. And so you have over time 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, but they, they were not descended from people who were from Rome. And this proceeds, you know, it expands, it expands, it expands. By Caracalla's time, so early third century AD, we can estimate that maybe at, at most, a third of the free citizens of the empire are Roman citizens. Everyone else has local citizenship, like you're Alexandrian or Athenian or, or whatever. And with... You're subject to those laws. This emperor, Caracalla, now that's his nickname. His reigning name is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. So just like Marcus Aurelius, it's 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 just... some epic names.
They've been remembered that way, and so we read that back into the name-
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, for his survival out of a coup. Which is whatever. And 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 in his, if not in his mind, in that of the jurists, that is the legal advisors that he had. So that's possible. But less interesting than his motivations, more interesting are the consequences of this and what it tells us about the Roman community. So imagine a situation where, like, no modern empire has ever done this really, right? When 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, like, all of the emperors are provincials, right? All the most powerful people in the empire are from the provinces.
This is, like, mind-breaking, mind-blowing. This is incredible. The fact that the Roman Empire was able to do this, and it stuck.
They did it, and they meant it.
And they meant it. They implemented it. It was real. That's, that tells you, that's an important thing that tells you a lot of information about the populace of the Roman Empire. That the, the fact that it stuck, that the government meant it, that the system encouraged, incentivized the government to mean it. It's incredible.
Yeah, and there's a law of citizenship, and it, basically it says something like, "Anyone born within the Roman Empire is a Roman citizen." And the Roman jurists and policymakers who were behind this had some very interesting ideas about, you know, creating this kind of community. Look, like, imagine if, I mean, it's almost impossible to, to imagine, but the, the British at the time of the peak of the empire bestowed British citizenship on everyone, including in India, and, like, suddenly made positions of power in London available to people from India, like, including the throne. Like, it's just unthinkable. And that has to do, you know, with race and colonialism and all kinds of things, right? But not in the Roman Empire. So 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, this is, it's created, right, like, in, in the Bosporus, so, like, where modern Istanbul is, in the Eastern Roman Empire. It's created within the preexisting Roman context, right? 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, is the great man, the great woman view of history. Were there, like, Thomas Jefferson or those types of characters in the meetings as they're executing on the edict or developing the edict? Is that important, or is it more about the system and the culture and just, uh, is it, how important was it? 'Cause this seems like a revolutionary idea, and when we think about the American Revolution and the, 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, and quite possibly jurists, that is Roman legal scholars. And, and 212 is in an age of very important Roman legal scholars Ulpian, for example, and others. But we just don't have those... We, we have minutes of the meetings for the American Revolution. Not only do we not know who was in the room, we don't actually even have the whole edict. We have a papyrus fragment, this is a piece of ancient paper that's mostly torn and mutilated, and we have, like, a bit of a paragraph from it. In Greek, not even the Latin original. And it's kind of torn, but it actually preserves the key clause. Right? And that's, that's all we have of the original. We have contemporary sources that mention it, we have legal documents, but nothing like a, like we can talk about the people involved in it. Or even how it was immediately implemented. Like, suddenly we know everyone in the provinces, like, there's this explosion in the number of people called Aurelius, because that was his Roman family name. And so when you acquired citizenship from that edict, you became an Aurelius. Right? And there are lots of Aurelii suddenly all over the place. Like, 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. Yeah. Even though it's part of a long-term process of expanding Roman citizenship, this was a, 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. Now, 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 in mildly. Let's talk about the crisis of the third century, where 26 emperors were murdered in a period of 50 years.
Yes. It's tremendous instability.
So there's civil wars nonstop. Almost all were, of these emperors were generals, and almost all were murdered by their men. So civil war was the norm, hyperinflation, economic crash, plus there's a plague from 249 to 262 AD, which is 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. And the empire fractured into three pieces, but then Emperor, Aurelian miraculously reconquered them in a period of five years. So just a lot of chaos. It deserves the name, the Crisis of the Third Century.
Yeah, it's a perfect storm. Yeah, I mean, 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's 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 the creation of the Sasanian Persian or Iranian Empire in the east, and this was very, very bellicose. So lots of foreign defeats. Armies are defeated by, you know, like, quote, 'barbarian enemies.' You have eventually inflation, and you have plague. And so under the pressure, right, of all of those forces, it almost fell apart. Now, it didn't actually. Inevitably, there are also historians who downplay the crisis. Of course, right, like, and legitimately so, right? We must push back against every one of these characterizations.
26 emperors died, bro. What do you—
That's just the emperors. That's just the emperors. We should be—
Every other year, emperor dead.
That's political instability at the top, right? But what—
What are the lives of most people?
So if you go to Egypt, for example, which is kind of out of the... Right? 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.
And for the most part, they don't seem to be experiencing a crisis.
I mean, this is something you talk about. 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, there's... He's not—
No, no, no, he's perfectly fine. Yeah, yeah.
So it's very important to actually remember about what the actual experience of the average citizen of the empire is like. Fair. Okay, so 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 on 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.
So for example, you mentioned that the empire kind of breaks into pieces.
And we have what's called sometime the Empire of the Gauls. Gaul are modern France and sort of Britain, for a while are, for a decade and a half or so, are kind of like this little separatist empire. So 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 discontent provincials who are just tired of Roman rule and wanna 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. And the only way that they know to set up a state is to make it a Roman state. Right? Like, that's the total of their political imaginary is like, 'Well, we're just gonna do a Roman thing here.' And maybe we'll get, you know, 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. Like, there's, it's almost like there's no alternatives by this point. So that's interesting.
What Diocletian does essentially is, the way I characterize it sometimes is that he turns the problem into its own solution. In other words, the problem is too many emperors or wanna-be emperors. Because there's just more going on. Like, one emperor can't deal with all these problems along the frontiers, with all the political problems. So what he does is he deputizes some of his colleagues, people he was on very good terms with from the army. These are all Illyrians. They're from... By the way, for a few centuries, the emperors are all from this region of the former Yugoslavia that's the size of Scotland. Like, that's where they all come from.
Well, what explains that?
These are military men. Sometimes hard-drinking military men. Very good at their job like Aurelian, you mentioned, right? So there's a series of Illyrian emperors who restore stability. And the reason why there's so many Illyrian emperors is because they worked their way up through the ranks of the army. And, you know, the regions of Yugoslavia in, at that time are sufficiently, you know, economically underdeveloped that there's a strong incentive for young men to go join the army because, you know, it's a living. Um, and so Illyrians become, like, kind of the backbone of the Roman army, and they're described as these, you know, tough Roman conservative types. I mean, these are, you know, these are tough military guys. I say that to draw a contrast between, say, Hadrian, whom I mentioned earlier, you know, who was a much more sophisticated, artsy, poetic, cosmopolitan emperor.
Also a hard-ass. You did not wanna mess with Hadrian. But these guys from the third century are military men through and through. Like, their whole careers are in the army. And they have, like, the military stubble. They've got these thick necks. They look angry. They've got their hands on their swords. Like, they're not projecting an image of sort of—
Calm and sophisticated, you know, bum-bum, you know.
Military men from Aurelian.
Yep. So Diocletian gets a gang of them together. They, eventually there are four. We call this the Tetrarchy. Um, and he basically allocates them to various... This wasn't any kind of hard division of the empire. Basically, it was a collaborative project. They each went wherever they were needed.
Uh, was it, is it fair to say that there was four administrative zones? He allocated each one to a zone?
Broadly. I'd say more military zones.
Um, so the administration tends to operate, it kind of humming along in the background wherever these emperors happen to be, right? This is a, we're talking about a period of big government now. So 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 census, you need more bureaucracy, you need more collectors. You know? 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.' So the tax collectors, the logistics, the thing that you've kinda 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, you do have bureaucracy, you have bureaucrats who are buried in various echelons, and you know, nobody knows exactly what they're doing and things like that, you know, I have not come across the idea of some sort of sinister elements, you know, who are working within the administrative apparatus to undermine the emperor. Like, from a distance occasionally, you might get glimpses of this kind of thing. Diocletian, for example, once complained that, 'Nobody ever tells me anything.' In other words, like, he's so removed in part from the realities of what's going on on the ground that he felt sometimes 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, so, you know, in the modern day, democracy in quotes, there's a kind of temporary nature to the leader at the top. So it's incentivized the deep state to form. That, so the deep state thinks of themselves as a thing that propagates long-term periods of time, and then the leader is a very ephemeral short-term thing.
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.
Also in modern social thought or fear is that the deep state might be undermining, say—
The democracy itself rather than, right, rather than... It can cut both ways.
But there is a bureaucracy. There is a big government.
Yeah, compared to before.
Yes. So Diocletian creates these larger bureaucratic structures, and these are the ones that define the society that I study. So as a specialist, I focus on the period after him mostly. But he implemented those to solve a lot of these problems. He was mostly successful. So in terms of generating revenue from a much more troubled and kind of precarious situation in sustaining large armies and putting down these rebellions and usurpations. And he was generally successful at doing that. So he created the model that they kept for the next, well, three centuries or more.
But a lot of the elements of that model lasted even beyond that, right?
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, you know, his guys, these guys are from Illyria. They're from the Balkans. Like why is Italy tax-free exactly, you know? 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, like, not only do all Romans have the same citizenship and the same law, they all have the same tax system, and the Diocletianic tax code, as it were, it's not a code, it 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.
It means that, like, even—
Elites paid, like, 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 I mean, 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, 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 one factor, it would be that.
So the taxation system, that feels like the early framework for the East Roman Empire.
It did create a more sort of homogeneous framework, for sure. By the end of the third 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, some element 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 then 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. So 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 for example, shipping. Uh, where there were considerable assets involved in order to secure contracts for insurance purposes for the ships and so forth, and it made sense for those assets to be, you know, passed from father to son. In other words, and with them comes the obligation to continue in that line of work. Some of these things are inherently, sort of hereditary, and I don't think most people would have objected to it. The farmers is 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, like 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. And if... Anyway, it's one of these complicated situations. This did create some limitations on those people. And it's a topic of current research, these bound farmers, as it were, who are tied to the land. It's more of a... You know, someone put it that, you know, 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, so class mobility and physical mobility, meaning people moved a... And we'll see this as from the West into the East and Constantinople and all this kind of stuff.
Oh, yeah. There's tons of mobility. No, no, this is not a society where people are bound really to... We, like, we don't find anybody who's, who's like, 'Ah, I really don't want to be a soldier. But my father was a soldier, and I'm obligated to be one.' Like, we just don't hear those kinds of complaints of people who don't want to be a soldier. Why wouldn't you want to be a soldier in the Roman Empire? I mean, it's got tremendous perks.
Right. Right. So can we just linger on the why is it that Diocletian was able to stabilize the empire? It's like, you know, the crisis of the third century really threatened to tear apart everything. So why did some of these things that we talked about stabilize?
Well, Aurelian had already united the empire territorially. So this is right before Diocletian. And what Diocletian did was put in place a system that reduced the number of rebellions. Simply by having four big guys with four 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, you know, if they're going to invest in, like, land reclamation or expand production, they need to know that, you know, foreigners aren't gonna come rampaging through, marauding through the, you know, stealing their cattle and, you know, enslaving them and taking them off to work on agricultural farms in Mesopotamia. Like, they need to know this. And if you provide that context of stability, the economic growth, the demographic growth will return. And Diocletian created that kind of, that context.
So that takes us to Constantine but first a quick bathroom break, if I can.
Quick ten-second thank you to our sponsors. Check them out in the description. It really is the best way to support this podcast. Go to lexfridman.com/sponsors. And now, dear friends, back to our conversation about the Eastern Roman Empire. All right, we're back, and 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. So Constantine was the son of one of Diocletian's colleagues, so he comes from within the system. And 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 two new ones. And they tried to skip the dynastic element. So it would be kind of, let's just say, kinda meritocratic, not whose son, you know, you were. Constantine was a son. He 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. There are, like, six at a time, but they gradually dwindle down to one. So yeah, it's as long as 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, very, very competent general at civil war. And he gradually moves eastward. So as he's conquering his rivals, who are often his father-in-laws or his brother-in-laws, because 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, this, an emperor called Licinius, in 324 he's in the East. And Licinius had his headquarters or one of his headquarters at this town called Byzantium. Byzantium is a city right where Constantinople was founded. And it is at exactly the point where Europe meets Asia, so on the Bosporus. And it's a very strategic location. It always had been, right? So whoever controls the straits of the Bosporus, yeah, we don't need to explain how important that is. And 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, AKA New Rome. So 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, and it's a plan that his successors continued, right? Now, there are a number of other cities in this, let's say in the generation or two before this, that were also treated as sort of quasi-Romes. Basically, there was this historian in the third century who said, 'Well, wherever the emperor is, that's Rome,' right? 'Cause 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, you know, 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, you know, a New Rome, an Other Rome, an Alternative Rome, My Rome. And Constantinople is the last and most successful of those.
So maybe can you speak geographically the importance of Constantinople? It's an interesting place 'cause it, when you're talking about a land so large as the West and the East, with enemies, with threats from all kinds of different directions, the location where the emperor sits is important.
Very. So look at Rome, right? So it's right in the middle of Italy, right in the middle of the Mediterranean. Very safe location in a way, but it's very far from the frontiers. And this is a period when emperors need to be with the armies, right? They're not senatorial emperors who are sitting in Rome having meetings with senators. They are military emperors who are marching along the frontiers, mostly with generals rather than civilian administration. So they're doing their job. Like, this is the hard work. They're slogging through the mud of winter campaigns, right? Uh, they're not just sitting in a palace enjoying themselves when they could. But Rome just becomes inconvenient because of that. And if you look at Constantinople, it is kind of halfway between the Danube frontier and the Euphrates frontier. So 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 one 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. And Constantinople is right between the Danube and the Euphrates. These are two major frontiers. And so it allows emperors to move between the two. And also look at its location north, south, east, west, right? So north, south, it is the node between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, right? And east, west, it's precisely where Europe meets Asia, right? And because there's a break there, so there's a Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara, the Hellespont, the Roman Empire during the civil wars, it would tend to break there. And you would have one emperor on one side in Asia, and you would have another emperor on the other side. And this just kept happening. And Constantinople ultimately functions as a kind of clamp that unifies this whole area, so basically the Balkans and Asia Minor and Syria as a kind of unit, right? And, you know, what is a new Rome? A new Rome is, among other things, a new senate, right? And Constantine and his successors recruit this new senate for the new Rome. So we're talking about maybe two and a half thousand, 3,000 men, you know, at its peak, and these are all recruited from all of these areas. You know, some come from Rome, but others come from the Aegean region, from Asia Minor, Eastern Mediterranean. So these are the wealthiest people, usually most well-connected elites from the whole Eastern Mediterranean, and they come together and form a new purpose, common purpose in Constantinople. And the empire never breaks there again. Right? So it holds together this part of the world. The breaking point now, interestingly, moves to the Adriatic, right? So when, in 395, we talked about East and West kind of splitting. It breaks at the Adriatic 'cause Constantinople is now holding that whole Eastern world together. 'Cause all of these elites, they now, they're invested in it. They're literally investing in it. They have to invest in it in order to be senators in Constantinople. So that's kind of one of the functions that it performs, a strategic function. There's a political function. There's also a cultural one, but you know, we can talk about that, too. But that's what you see there on that map, the northwest, east, south.
So just to linger on it, so you do a podcast, Byzantium and Friends, but you're also a guest on podcasts, and 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. But the reason I bring all that up is one of the episodes, you do the fun thing of selecting the top 10 emperors of Byzantium, and spoiler alert, everybody should go listen to the full list 'cause you justify all the different options. But Constantine ends up in the number one spot. And so can you just add a little bit more depth 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, right? I mean, as you said, he was pretty murderous. Right? 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. And when those alliances or, you know, those wives or those fathers-in-law were no longer convenient or turned against him, he had no hesitation in removing them. But he's also, you know, 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' 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, like, a good reason, they'll blast it through all of the media, right? Like, '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. Like, 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. So when Crispus is alive, it's all, like, praising Crispus as, 'Oh, Constantine, you great emperor, and your wonderful son who will...' whatever. And then Crispus is executed, and he just disappears from the, like, they never talk about him.
Yeah. 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, that 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.
So 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. So I couldn't not put him at the top of the list. The, you know, the creating Constantinople and converting to Christianity and setting the empire on a path to conversion, these are major, like, world history level decisions. Right? Now, not many emperors do that. In fact, Constantine is in, like, 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, right? Not making, you know, these kinds of earth-shattering decisions or, you know, world history changing decisions, but just who performed the role competently with results that impacted the lives of their subjects for the better. So those are the other criteria that I used. It's difficult to juggle these different criteria, right, in order to create a systematic list. And by the way, we historians generally don't do these kinds of things. But you said it's fun. It is fun.
And 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 actually took the emperors... When the emperors took it on board, that is, they made it a part of the imperial system, then it began to acquire a role within the system. Previously, it had imagined itself as having its own history, like not necessarily part of the empire or affiliated with imperial power. But after Constantine, it does acquire a role.
And so actually, one way to ask that question, which is fascinating, 'cause you said that there's like, there's Rome, and then there's like cultures like, or traditions like Christianity, or being Greek, that kind of thing. So, one of the ways to ask this question is does Christianity triumph over Rome, or did Rome capture Christianity?
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, right, which modern historians perpetuate, and it's framed in very particular ways. In other words, that Christianity triumphs over the ancient religions. Right? So displacing Zeus and Apollo and all of that, and animal sacrifice is gone, and like, that's because Christianity triumphs, and 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, like, 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, you know, determined its history for centuries and, in fact, down to today. So this is very different, for example, from the history of Islam. So 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, they conquer this empire, and then they have to sort of 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, right, where, like, Islam is really a primary kind of identity and, like, 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. Well, 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, like, elites for the most part. Maybe middle, you know, what we loosely call middle class, a few elites, a few slaves, like this kind of thing. Mostly urban, and keeping in mind, most of the population is rural. Right? So pockets of concentrated, you know, Christian groups in cities. That's what we're talking about. Not terribly politically powerful.
So Constantine's conversion to Christianity and moving the empire towards Christianity is not something where it's a gigantic majority of the people, or it's a political convenience because it's the elites. It's something else. I mean, it's, I mean, a pretty revolutionary decision, I would say.
Exactly. Now, there used to be theories that Constantine did this for, like, pragmatic, cynical reasons, that he, like, wasn't a true Christian or anything, but there was some kind of political gain to be had here. But I have never read a convincing account of what exactly that political gain is. We now know that there are fewer Christians. They were not that influential. You can make an argument that bishops are a kind of convenient social influencers, you might say. Like, you can use those. They're not a threat to your position. Right? So a bishop is not gonna 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... Okay, I see that, but I don't quite see the argument for, like, 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, so I have not yet seen a convincing, like, 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? And he came out, you know, in support of the religion that he held, and that's kind of where most scholars are today. Though, I gotta 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 like, it's massive. It opens the door. It incentivizes so many people to also convert. 'Cause Romans will generally do what their, you know, rulers will tell them. If we've mentioned Hadrian a few times, Hadrian's, he had this lover, Antinous, Greek boy from Bithynia, who died in an accident in Egypt, whatever, and Hadrian said basically that Antinous should be regarded as a god throughout the empire. And he was. We have, like, more statues and busts of Antinous from all of these temples all over the empire than I think of anyone else except Hadrian. So yeah, if the emperor says, like, 'This is a person who's a god now, you know, put statues of him everywhere,' they will. And when Constantine comes out in favor of Christianity, you know, suddenly people discover that, oh, this is an interesting rite. It's got the support of the emperor.
So one of the things here, going to the 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.'
Do you believe the sincerity of that experience?
Before we even get to the sincerity, is the problem of the sources. This is reported by authors writing later in the aftermath of a victory when the emperor... Like, 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.' And it's like, okay, I'm not gonna believe that. I'm not gonna take that at face value, rather. It's a much more complicated... You know, this is how the emperor wants things to be remembered. That's different. Also, Constantine tended to have a lot of religious visions. He had had religious visions of Apollo before Christ, and we have sources that talk about that, too, that he went to this temple in Gaul, and Apollo appeared to him in the form of light. Okay, Constantine has a religious vision every time he kind of wants to shift policies. And his, like, profile. Like, when he wanted to break away from his other emperors who used to go for the, like, they went for this kind of Jupiter/Hercules model. And he shifted to an Apollo model. This is a branding. This is emperors doing branding.
So we should say that, as you've described, Constantine is a pragmatist. He's very pragmatic.
But you're saying it's fair to believe, based on the evidence, that he actually converged towards being a Christian believer.
Yeah. It's very possible, in fact plausible, that he thought the Christian God had helped him in battle. And, you know, for someone like him, that's as good a reason as any to support that god.
But he was not, like, a hardcore Christian all the way through. He was a kind of a spiritual, religious kind of person. He thought about religions more generally and just converged towards 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?
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, like, 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 gonna, like, you know, come to Jesus.
So even at the time when he's, like, supporting the church, like, basically institutionalizing the church as part of the imperial system, but he's also putting up statues of himself that look like Apollo in Constantinople, right? So the focal point of Constantine's Constantinople is the Forum of Constantine. And in the middle is this very tall column, and it has a colossal statue of Constantine on top, gilded, enormous thing. I don't know, like, eight meters tall or whatever. But it's a repurposed Apollo. It's even, it, like, visibly so. It's naked. It has the rays coming out of the head, right? Right. And everybody knew it was an Apollo. So that's Constantine in the guise of his old patron god, Apollo. Still, but he's still Christian Constantine, so he's sending all of these different messages.
I mean, he likes being the god-like figure. I mean, that whole statue just is like, 'I am the god.'
Yeah. It's assimilating yourself to... Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I mean, a lot of the Romans, is it fair to say, kinda saw the emperor a little bit in that light?
No, yeah. Oh, yeah. They called him divine and, yeah. There's not a hard theology there, right? Like, if you pressed them on the actual theology, they wouldn't, they wouldn't say the emperor is a god. No. This is mushy. This gets very, very mushy.
But I mean, a lot of the Christians have a kinda humility before God. I think when you have an emperor that's god-like, it gets a little weird—
In the way you talk about God.
It depends on the context. Like, 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. Like, those are different contexts.
So can you speak to the whole process of the conversion to Christianity, of the propagation of Christianity throughout the empire and Constantine's role in that?
Constantine, or 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 early 5th, mid-5th. We don't have data, obviously. And we can't talk about, like, a solidly Christian society until early 6th century. And by solidly, I mean maybe where the non-Christians are 10, 15%, right? So that's a long time. That's, like, five centuries after Jesus. That's half a millennium. So we're talking about a half a millennial process here. It's very long.
But it's only a couple of centuries after Constantine. So it takes about two centuries to really make the Roman Empire Christian.
Yes. So very slow conversion, maybe up to 10% tops under Constantine. Then obviously larger and larger groups join the church, even if only nominally, right? Until you get to the sixth century when you're clearly talking about a, you know, mostly or overwhelmingly Christian society. A lot of this is just done through incentives and disincentives, right? So bishops are given funds with which to distribute, like, 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. So emperors pass laws that increasingly restrict the exercise of traditional religion. Like, you can't perform animal sacrifices, then you can't start doing these like tying ribbons to make wishes or, like, all of these things, like going out to sacred trees and doing this or that, because they say, 'Oh, this is kind of nefarious business,' or, like, magic or whatever it is. And then they just gradually start outlawing it more and more, putting restrictions on, like, if you're not a Christian, you can't hold these high offices or you can't... Your... There's problems with your wills. So they gradually do it like that. And this is how you... Yeah, this is... And it works. 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. So 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 or engagement with philosophical schools that could draw in, let's say, intellectuals. There is a public ceremony and ritual aspect where you can organize communities and cities to have processions or, like, have all these festivals that take the place of the ancient ones. You have a kind of not, it's not secretive, but it's kind of this initiatory aspect where there's this baptism and you learn a sort of creed, and you're initiated into the religion with the prospect of a personal afterlife, right? And that appeals to other kinds of people. There's also ways in which it integrated itself into the court and the language of power. Also in 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, you know, here and there and, you know, in the streets, in the court, in the armies, in the churches, in texts, in books. And so it has this kind of manifold diversity, right, that makes it very adaptable.
So one of the things you mentioned that Constantine did not anticipate, did not realize that Christianity creates divisions between various groups.
So in part, this happens when you have religions that make exclusive claims, right? Like, my beliefs are true, and yours are by definition false. Not just wrong, but false and even kinda evil. Like maybe Satan put them in your mind to lead you astray, right? And this is inherently divisive. Like, it is. So there's this paradox where Christianity, in contrast to, say, the ancient religions, is both far more polarizing but also far more powerful as a unifying force at the same time, right? So ancient religions tended not to produce this kind of conflict or identities, right, or wars or these kinds of things. And 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 these very 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. So this is why I for one can't come down on whether, you know, 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 is a way for society internally to try to, much like the civil wars, to try to figure itself out.
So sometimes tension and conflict is a good mechanism for figuring out what do the people want.
Or what's the truth, right?
Yeah. So the story that it likes to tell itself is that there's this, like, this one original truth, and the hardcore 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. And, like, 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? And this happens again and again and again. You know, 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, they didn't mean any harm. They often just were stating what they thought everybody believed. And then when they blurt it out, someone is like, off in Alexandria, is like, 'What? That's heresy.' And then now you're in trouble. Now you're getting into this fight, and you might win, you might lose. But, like, a lot of them were kind of sort of well-intentioned in that way, or they had no intention of starting a fight. But there's always someone who wants to start a fight.
Yeah, I mean, sometimes the fights are extremely intense over things that I could see on the surface or, like, iconography. It's like, it seems like a very subtle debate, like almost academic. And then a large number of people don't see it as academic. They do see it like the devil put ideas in your head that are completely wrong, and it's fascinating how that kind of division can emerge. Uh, I mean, I— The impossible question, and I apologize for asking it, but maybe just worthwhile to try to think about it is, on the grand scale of centuries of the East 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. I mean, like every religion ultimately thinks it's orthodox, right? That's— But that's the conventional name, right? Orthodoxy today might be called Greek Orthodoxy. Um, and I mean, 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, you know, and try to see these things as independent of each other. But ultimately, it's very difficult to disentangle them, and I would say that to the degree that this is a successful society historically, that its religion definitely contributed to that and played a role in it. Not without cost, right? There are, 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, Western rule, where they essentially have to compromise on their faith, or rule by Muslims, the Turks, where they would not have to compromise their faith. And some of them were explicit that they were preferring option B, because the Turks will at least respect our identity. Like, that's a cost.
Yeah. But there's other layers, like taxation and the functions of government that are connected to religion to the degree 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. So this is why I said that I try in thinking of the models that we use to understand the society, not to assume that religion is everywhere and for everything. Now, 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. But also the operations of the state. Those are very pragmatic things, and you see them intersect with religion in, largely in areas of terminology or the vocabulary that they use or, you know, like at the top, but not at their actual functioning. So 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.
So, I mean, again, an impossible way of asking the same question. If you asked a Roman, a million Romans across a thousand years, 'Are you a Roman or a Christian?' What would be the answer for that?
Oh, both. Oh, absolutely.
No, you don't get to say both. You're not allowed to do that.
Okay. So you're saying they're really tied together.
Well, they overlap. But if you were to... And this might be a somewhat more subtle conversation than most of them would want to have, but if you were to say, 'Is 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, I mean, just logically, there were Christians who were not Romans. The Bulgarians or the Rus or, you know, 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, and they knew this how? Because in the churches like almost every week, they celebrated martyrs who had been killed by the Roman emperors in the past. And so it was, like, the performance of violence by Roman emperors against Christians was something they remember. They knew perfectly well. So those two things did not overlap perfectly. And there were some contexts in which you would be more Roman, and there were some contexts in which you would be more Christian. And you find characters who, and I love to do this. I find characters who, as some sources say, we didn't pay too much attention to Christian things. Like, they were just politicians. They were just doing their work. And then you find characters who, like, devote themselves. They go all in on Orthodoxy and, like, monasticism and they just don't care about the Roman stuff at all. And that is, in fact, part of the reason why I like this society, is because it has these kinds of options for people to choose. And there's another one. There's the Greek stuff, too, because their language is Greek, their literature is Greek, and so there are people in the society who go all in on the Greek stuff. Right? And I see this society as this kind of laboratory of these three elements coexisting in these fascinating combinations. Usually it's combinations, right? But sometimes you'll find people who are like, kinda try to be purists in one way or another. And it's the only society in history in which you can do this, 'cause it's the only society that's Roman and Christian and Greek. But in different ways, right?
Yeah, unfortunately, I think it's tempting, but it's 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's probably impossible to do this kind of analysis 'cause they're all so deeply integrated.
And fundamentally, it also wouldn't be what it was. It would be something different.
But there is a big temptation, and this is at the core of your work, and to understand why did the East Roman Empire last as long as it did. And why did the broader Roman Empire last as long as it did?
'Cause 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's actually like my next project. I'm starting to write a book trying to explain just kind of from an analytical standpoint why.
A lot of your work kinda hints at it.
It's here and there. But you're trying to do more, more systematic. So, and we'll keep hinting at it.
But to put a bow tie on Constantinople, it went from a very low population of maybe 25,000 people to 500,000 people in just two centuries. So can you explain how that happened?
Well, it didn't happen through just demographic growth and reproduction in the city itself. That rate of growth is impossible for an ancient city. So when I say 20,000, 25,000, that's possibly what the ancient city of Byzantium had when Constantine decided to found Constantinople, and it grew to a city of a half a million in two centuries. That can only have been done in one way, and that is immigration from the provinces. So people must have been moving there in large numbers, which is a movement that we can't see very clearly in the sources, but—
We have to infer it and then try to explain it. So, also there's another factor, which is that 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 are losing something like 1, 2, possibly 3% of their population per year. So just in order to stay with a stable population, they have to import people. Right? Now, they're not like 17th century London. They're not that bad.
