The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium

Summary

The New Roman Empire is a one-volume narrative history of the eastern Roman Empire, the state modern writers call Byzantium, from the reforms of Diocletian in the late third century to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Its author, Anthony Kaldellis, is a historian at the University of Chicago, and the book was published by Oxford University Press at the end of 2023 (many catalogues date it 2024) in more than a thousand pages with maps, color plates and glossaries. It is protected by copyright; the library offers this summary and a study guide, not the text. The book's starting point is a question of names. The people of this empire called themselves Romans and their state Romanía; 'Byzantine' is a label coined by later Western scholars. Kaldellis writes their history as the continuation of the Roman Empire, governed from New Rome on the Bosporus, and he presents it as a political society whose emperors depended on the consent of the people, the army and the senate, and could be removed when they lost it. The narrative is chronological. It begins with Diocletian's division and reorganization of the empire and Constantine's adoption of Christianity and founding of Constantinople. It treats the fifth century not as an age of decline but as one of recovery in the East while the western provinces were lost, then the age of Justinian, with its law code, reconquests in Italy and Africa, and Hagia Sophia, and the plague and wars that followed. The seventh-century crises, the long war with Persia and the Arab conquests that took Syria, Palestine and Egypt, leave a smaller state that survives in Anatolia and the Balkans, the period of the iconoclast controversy. Kaldellis then traces the expansion of the Macedonian dynasty in the ninth and tenth centuries, culminating under Basil II; the losses after Manzikert in 1071 and the Komnenian restoration under Alexios I and his successors; the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 and the successor states; and the restored Palaiologan empire, shrinking under pressure from Serbs, Italians and Ottomans until Constantine XI died defending the city in 1453. Along the way Kaldellis argues that the state lasted so long because of competent administration, a professional army, a tax system that funded both, and a population that identified with the Roman polity. He also gives sustained attention to Sicily and southern Italy, to the empire's neighbors, and to ecclesiastical politics, including the Christological and hesychast disputes.

Top Lessons

• Names shape understanding

  Kaldellis begins by asking what the people of this empire called themselves. They were Romans, and the term 'Byzantine' was applied to them much later. Calling a people by their own name changes how we read their history: not as a strange offshoot but as the continuation of Rome.

• Why a state endures

  The eastern Roman state lasted more than a thousand years after Constantine. Kaldellis attributes its endurance to working institutions: a tax system, a salaried army, a trained administration, and a people who regarded the state as theirs. Students can test this account against the episodes of collapse and recovery in the book.

• Emperors and the consent of the people

  Many emperors were overthrown by popular uprisings, military revolts or palace coups. Kaldellis reads these as signs that imperial power rested on the support of the people of Constantinople and the army, not on divine right alone. The book invites reflection on authority, legitimacy and accountability.

• A Christian empire

  The New Roman Empire was the setting of the ecumenical councils, the Nicene Creed, Hagia Sophia, the icons and the monastic tradition of Mount Athos. Kaldellis narrates its church politics, from Christological controversies to hesychasm, as part of public life, and readers can see how theology and government were intertwined.

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Medical Lens

The book is a political narrative, but it includes the great epidemics that struck the empire: the plague of Justinian from 541 and its recurrences, and the Black Death of 1347, which reached Constantinople early in its spread to Europe. It also touches on the empire's charitable foundations, which included hospitals with salaried physicians, and on emperors' illnesses and deaths as political events. Readers interested in Byzantine medicine will find more in specialized studies.

• Chapters on Justinian and the sixth century

  The arrival of plague in 541–542 and its demographic and political effects.

• Chapters on the Palaiologan period

  The Black Death of 1347 at Constantinople amid civil war.