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 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 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.

This reframes a foundational assumption in how Western civilization understands its own history, revealing that the label 'Byzantine' is a politically motivated fiction rather than a historical reality.

By the way, you know the metaphor of the Ship of Theseus? 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? 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.

By invoking the Ship of Theseus and then complicating it, Kaldellis offers a precise philosophical framework for understanding how political identity can persist across radical cultural transformation.

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.

Kaldellis applies a Machiavellian lens to imperial governance and arrives at a counterintuitive conclusion: that the East Roman emperors' rhetoric largely matched their actions, challenging the assumption that political power inevitably corrupts into pure self-interest.

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.

The observation that 'no right to the throne' was a structural constraint that made emperors accountable is a profound insight into how the absence of dynastic legitimacy can function as a check on power.

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. And so 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.

The contrast between Rome's Edict of Caracalla and British colonial practice illuminates how genuinely radical Roman universalism was, and raises deep questions about what it means for a state to truly mean its own stated values.

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.

This reframe — that Diocletian weaponized the very instability that threatened Rome into a structural solution — is a powerful model for thinking about crisis management in complex systems.

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.

A leading Byzantine historian's single-factor distillation of what drives imperial rise and fall cuts through cultural and military narratives to the fiscal skeleton underneath.

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... 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.

The insight that Constantinople's genius was not just geographic but socio-political — a deliberate coalescence of Eastern elites into a shared investment — explains the East's durability versus the West's fragmentation.

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... 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.

Inverting the standard 'Christianity conquered Rome' narrative to 'Rome captured Christianity' reorients how we understand the relationship between religious movements and state power throughout history.

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?... 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.

This observation that theological 'orthodoxy' is constructed retrospectively through conflict rather than transmitted intact from an origin reveals a general mechanism by which institutions manufacture their own foundational myths.

Ultimately, I think it's the decision made by local communities to stick with the Roman state, like, ultimately. Like, they're not going to actively side with invaders. And when the trouble passes, they restore ties with Constantinople immediately. Like, this is their natural political home.

This reframes the survival of the Eastern Roman Empire as a bottom-up phenomenon driven by popular legitimacy rather than top-down military or administrative power.

Already by, like in the 430s, Constantinople is basically codifying Roman law for the West. So Roman law in Latin is codified in Constantinople, and then sent to the West as, 'Oh, here's your law code.' ... In the 6th century, it is the East that reconquers part of the West under Justinian. And not only that, he also recodifies Roman law on a much bigger scale, and then that law becomes Western law. So in a certain sense, Roman law as we know it comes from Constantinople. It doesn't come from ancient Rome.

This inverts the popular narrative about the fall of Rome, showing the Eastern Empire as the true custodian and exporter of Roman civilization to the West.

Eunuchs were perfect for this reason because often their origin was from outside the empire, or they were former slaves. They weren't connected to, like, networks of powerful families. So you knew that they would generally be loyal to you because they depended entirely on you, the emperor, for their position and their power. And what you would sometimes do is you'd say, 'Okay, I'm putting you in charge of, like, this army.' Literally, like putting you in charge of an army, just so that you can counterbalance the kind of networks of established generals.

This reveals a sophisticated imperial strategy for preventing institutional capture — using socially isolated individuals to disrupt entrenched power networks, a technique with echoes in modern organizational design.

These people do not exist, these isolated peasants. This is a myth... There's no proof for these communities at all... This is a state in which every arable, you know, piece of arable land has been censused for centuries. It's not like you can hide a village, right? And the taxation process is not like, what, they visit once a year, give us some coin, and we'll leave. It's actually more like three times a year... Once you start adding all of these things up, it creates a very dense institutional matrix in which all communities are enmeshed.

Kaldellis demolishes the persistent scholarly myth of isolated medieval peasants, revealing instead a highly integrated state that reached into every village through taxation, coinage, church, and law.

They almost never, very, very, very rarely use the army as an instrument of social control... part of the reason for that is I don't think the population needs to be kept down. Like, this gets back to the consensus that we were talking about. The understanding is that the army is there to protect the Roman people. And is often recruited among them. And for most of the period that I study, is like lives among them. So when the emperors have to call up the army, they're literally calling up soldiers from local villages.

The Eastern Roman Empire's millennium-long avoidance of using military force against its own population stands as a historically remarkable case study in the relationship between state legitimacy and internal stability.

In my research, I did not find a popular interest in this matter. I could not find... There were, like, a few emperors, and there's some bishops and abbots and monks. Like, I don't know, maybe 100, 200 people are, like, seriously invested in this, and they're going at it. But these are the people who write the texts. But they never mention, for example, that, oh, you know, the people of Constantinople, they rose up, and they demanded icons or not icons or anything like that. Nah, never. So in my view, this is one of those controversies that's only a few people really, really cared about it, and unfortunately, they're the ones who wrote the sources.

This is a striking reminder that the historical record is shaped by who holds the pen, and that seemingly world-historical religious conflicts may have been elite obsessions invisible to ordinary people.

This is also a methodological problem, right? In other words, when you're looking at a society that suddenly faces a bunch of problems, and you could, you know, reasonably make the case for a kind of decline or a crisis, is your instinct, it's your first instinct to suppose that there must be something wrong in the internal mechanisms of that society that, you know, led it to fail, which is what my field has done traditionally. Or is it reasonable to say that a society that does not seem to have any, like, particularly serious structural flaws is hit by external, you know, challenges that it couldn't realistically have foreseen or prepared for such that, you know, it couldn't cope with them and, as I said, buckled.

Kaldellis exposes a deep methodological bias in how historians—and perhaps analysts generally—default to internal decay narratives when external shocks may be the more parsimonious explanation.

They don't last very long, and they are all sudden challenges that appear from the outside. In other words, they're exogenous shocks, that they can't really have prepared for. These shocks cause massive territorial loss, which requires adjustment, right? But they don't last that long. In other words, the Romans almost always, at some point, figure out how to hold a line, how to consolidate their position, regroup and put their economy and their society back on a trajectory of revival, regrowth, and eventual reconquest. Always. Every single time, except the last time, right? And for me, this poses the following kind of dilemma, which I can answer. And the dilemma is, should we define the society by these brief crises of exogenous shocks, or should we define it by the centuries-long, sometimes, periods of regrowth, consolidation, and stabilization, which are endogenous. Nobody came from the outside to help them rebuild. And my answer is unequivocally the latter. So I see this as a society whose internal organization primes it to stabilize and embark on steady growth. Slow and gradual, but steady.

Kaldellis reframes the entire thousand-year Byzantine story: the defining feature is not dramatic collapse but remarkable self-generated resilience, a lens with profound implications for how we study any long-lived institution.

Absolutely. I'm absolutely convinced of this because you never see movements to split away. That is, there's no separatist movements, at least not on the part of any Roman provincials. For the rest of the 1,200 years, you don't find provincials wanting to leave this system. However much they complain about the taxes, they don't want to leave, and they make no move to do so. You also never have a moment when the center loses its ability to tax its territories, right? You don't have, like, widespread peasant uprisings or provinc- or, right, agricultural rebellions or these kinds of things, which happens in every other one of these empires. They also never decide to partition it. The Franks partition theirs, right, like after Charlemagne. No. There are no, like, Roman warlords that try to carve out a piece of the territory for themselves and rule it independent. Nope, that doesn't happen either. So if you're looking at the kinds of factors that cause states to fail, fragment, you know, become ungovernable, these never happen.

Listing the standard failure modes of empires—separatism, tax revolt, warlordism, partition—and showing none applied to Byzantium makes a powerful empirical case for its exceptional internal cohesion.

First is that an extraordinary effort was made by the authorities to persuade their subjects that they were ruling on their behalf, and I think, for the most part, actually tended to do so. And the second is that it had a very tightly unified identity as Roman and as Orthodox. In other words, for the most, most time, they knew that they were surrounded by enemies who were not those things. And they did not want to live under the power of non-Romans and non-Christian people. And so those two factors combined, I think, gave everybody reason to hold it together. The alternatives were worse.

Kaldellis distills 1,200 years of Byzantine cohesion into two factors—legitimate governance aligned with subjects' interests, and a strong shared identity defined partly against external 'others'—a framework applicable to any durable polity.