Concept

Long Roman Empire

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Long Roman Empire

The long Roman Empire is historian Anthony Kaldellis‘s name for a single, unbroken Roman polity running from the founding of Rome in 753 BC to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD — replacing the conventional split between ‘the Roman Empire’ (which supposedly ended in the West in 476 AD) and a separate ‘Byzantine Empire’ picking up the story afterwards in the Greek-speaking East.

On this account, ‘Byzantine Empire’ is not a neutral scholarly label but a name invented centuries after the fact, mostly by Western European historians who wanted to treat the medieval, Greek-speaking, Christian state centred on Constantinople as something other than Rome — first ‘the Empire of the Greeks’, later ‘the Byzantine Empire’. The people who actually lived under that state never adopted either label. They called their polity Romania and called themselves Romans continuously, in law and self-identity, from the ancient republic through to the city’s fall. Kaldellis’s preferred image is the Ship of Theseus: every component of Roman society was eventually replaced — the language shifted from Latin to Greek, the religion from the old gods to Christianity, the capital from Rome to Constantinople — but the narrative thread, a continuously recognised political community of Roman citizens, was never broken from the perspective of the people living inside it.

What continuity actually tracks

Kaldellis is careful that the claim is not that all Romans, across 2,200 years, would have recognised each other as similar people. A senator from Cicero’s Rome and an Orthodox Christian subject of eleventh-century Constantinople would look thoroughly foreign to one another — but, he points out, so might a Roman senator and the enslaved son of a war captive living in the same city at the same moment. Continuity in this sense is a property of the story a political community tells about itself, and of a handful of institutions that persisted regardless of who held power: a soldier’s oath (sworn ‘to the republic’ or ‘to the emperor’ across every century of the empire), a citizen’s legal standing under Roman property and inheritance law, and, above all, a functioning tax system that bound every parcel of land into a single fiscal structure.

Roman, Greek, and Christian as separable strands

Part of Kaldellis’s case for genuine continuity, rather than a convenient historian’s fiction, is that he treats ‘Roman’, ‘Greek’, and ‘Christian’ as three distinguishable identities that overlapped in most people but not all — unlike, say, Christian history, which is the story of a faith untethered from any one state, or Greek culture, which travelled wherever people adopted it as an elite prestige tradition regardless of political allegiance. Romanness, by contrast, was specifically the history of a political community: the polity of Roman citizens, its own res publica, evolving gradually but never rupturing in its members’ own understanding of who they were.

Where mainstream views differ

The traditional field, especially in its popular and Western-inherited form, still tends to treat 476 AD (the deposition of the last Western emperor) as the effective end of ‘the Roman Empire’ and to describe everything east of that date and east of the Adriatic as ‘Byzantine’ — a separate, exotic, largely Greek-Orthodox civilisation loosely descended from Rome. Kaldellis’s ‘long Roman Empire’ framing has become increasingly mainstream within Byzantine studies itself over the past generation, but the older Roman/Byzantine split remains the default outside the specialist field, in general histories, museum labelling, and popular usage — which is precisely the gap Kaldellis’s public-facing work, including this conversation, is aimed at closing.

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