Kaldellis, Anthony
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Kaldellis's central thesis is that "Byzantium" is a modern historiographical invention: the so-called Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire, unbroken, with citizens who called themselves Romans down to 1453. The term "Byzantine" arose from a Western European reluctance to include a Greek-speaking, Orthodox, non-Latin polity in its own cultural genealogy. He frames all 2,200+ years — kingdom, republic, imperial monarchy split into West and East — as one continuous political community, using the Ship of Theseus as his central metaphor: every component changes, but the narrative holds it together, and no generation of Romans ever experienced their own moment as a rupture from the story.
He builds the case methodically through recurring machinery rather than great-man drama, though he doesn't dismiss individual agency (Constantine's conversion, he argues, changed world history and wasn't inevitable). Key structural arguments: (1) the Edict of Caracalla (212 AD), extending citizenship to nearly all free inhabitants, was "real" in a way no other pre-modern empire matched — within a generation all emperors and elites were provincials, which is why Constantinople could later function as a true "New Rome" rather than a colonial imposition; (2) the empire was best described as a "monarchic republic" — a res publica (common affairs of a self-governing citizen body) run by a monarch who had no hereditary right to rule, which is why 46% of emperors were violently overthrown and why emperors were obsessively responsive to public opinion, expressed through mass gatherings like the Hippodrome (a "perpetual referendum" via public acclamation, booing, and occasional forced policy reversals — he cites Alexius III withdrawing a "German tax" under Hippodrome pressure in the 1190s); (3) taxation, not religion or ethnicity, was the deepest glue holding the society together — a dense, inescapable administrative matrix (frequent tax collection, censuses, courts) meant there were no truly "isolated" peasant communities; (4) civil wars (~120 over a millennium) were frequent but never ideological — purely contests over who holds power — and functioned as a systemic check that incentivized emperors toward genuinely responsive governance, since the army was almost never used as an instrument of internal social control (a rarity he finds remarkable across world history).
On decline and resilience, he argues historians over-focus on three swift, catastrophic territorial ruptures (the Arab conquests of the 630s, the Seljuk conquest of Asia Minor in the 1070s, the Fourth Crusade sack of 1204) at the expense of the far longer stretches of steady internal consolidation and regrowth that followed each crisis — and insists the empire's true story is that stability, not the crises, which were essentially exogenous shocks from living in "the most dangerous neighborhood" imaginable. He is emphatic that no internal decomposition (separatism, tax-base collapse, elite partition schemes) ever seriously threatened the state — the sole exception being Bulgaria's secession — and that the empire's actual terminal decline only began in the 1300s-1340s after losing Asia Minor to the Turks and fracturing through civil war, not from any earlier "moral decay." He also discusses Christianity's institutional co-optation by (rather than triumph over) the Roman state, Justinian's deeply mixed legacy (legal codification and Hagia Sophia vs. ruinously overextended wars of conquest and the brutal suppression of the Nika riots), and closes by drawing a Machiavellian lesson for modern states: legitimacy requires that rhetoric about serving the people actually be backed by action, a gap he argues the East Roman state managed unusually well and that he sees as wider in modern American foreign policy.
Excerpts
On why "Byzantine Empire" is a misnomer, opening the entire conversation's frame:
“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... 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.”
On why the empire wasn't a military dictatorship despite emperors ruling through armies and frequent civil war:
“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... the understanding is that the army is there to protect the Roman people. And is often recruited among them... When the emperors have to call up the army, they're literally calling up soldiers from local villages.”
On why the empire's true story is resilience rather than collapse, his key revisionist claim:
“Should we define the society by these brief crises of exogenous shocks, or should we define it by the centuries-long... 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... I don't see any forces of internal decomposition that would have imperiled it significantly" — attributing its eventual fall instead to its uniquely exposed geographic position at "one of the main corridors of empire building and new religions in the world.”