Is the Byzantine Empire the same as the Roman Empire?

One empire, two halves

The Roman Empire was split for good in 395, when Emperor Theodosius died and his two young sons divided it. One ruled the West. The other ruled the East from Constantinople, the city Constantine had dedicated in 330 on the site of Byzantium, an old Greek town on the Bosporus. When the last emperor in Italy was retired in 476, the eastern half did not begin anything new. It simply carried on.

The general who retired him, Odoacer, sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople, with the message that one emperor was enough for both halves. A historian writing in Constantinople around 551 summed it up:

Thus the Western Empire of the Roman race … perished with this Augustulus … and from this time onward kings of the Goths held Rome and Italy.

For Jordanes, the Western empire had ended. The empire he lived in had not.

Who invented “Byzantine”?

Not the empire’s own people, at least not for their empire. To them Byzantion was the old, classical name of their capital, and the few learned writers who said “Byzantines” meant the people of the city. Their country was Rhomanía, “Romanland,” and their ruler was the emperor of the Romans. Their neighbors agreed. Arab writers called the empire bilad al-Rum, “the land of the Romans,” and the thirtieth chapter of the Qur’an, al-Rum, is named for them. After the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453, he styled himself Kayser-i Rum, Caesar of Rome.

The label came a century later. In 1557 the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf published a collection of the empire’s Greek historians as the Corpus Historiae Byzantinae. A much larger edition made in France under Louis XIV spread the word, and during the 1800s “Byzantine Empire” became the standard term.

Why the West stopped saying Roman

Western Europe had its own reasons. In 800 Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans in Rome. From then on, with the popes and the western emperors claiming Rome’s inheritance, Latin writers usually called the eastern emperors “Greeks.” The eastern Romans never accepted it. Names carry politics: once the East was Greek, or Byzantine, the West could keep the Roman title for itself. In English “byzantine” still means needlessly complicated, a trace of that old suspicion.

Why historians still use the word

Because the empire changed. After Justinian, in the 500s, Latin faded and Greek became the language of government and law. The empire was Christian, centered on Constantinople, and after the Arab conquests of the 600s much smaller than in Trajan’s day. The word marks that new world. Many historians now prefer “Eastern Roman Empire,” or simply call its people what they called themselves.

The continuity is real, though. Justinian, a Latin speaker from the Balkans, won back North Africa in 533–534 and much of Italy after that, and gathered Roman law into the code that still underlies the civil law of Europe and Latin America. Its emperors saw themselves as heirs of Augustus, in a line that ran, through rebellions and a crusader occupation from 1204 to 1261, to Constantine XI, who died defending Constantinople on 29 May 1453.