Even though the name “Byzantine Empire” is frequently used by historians, it never existed. A German historian invented the name in 1557 for one specific reason: to steal Rome’s legacy for the Holy Roman Empire. For the 1,123 years of its existence, the citizens of Constantinople called themselves Rhomaioi (Romans), and their state the Basileia tōn Rhōmaiōn (Empire of the Romans). They were not the successors to Rome; they were Rome itself.
The premise that the Eastern Romans could not be true Romans because they spoke Greek ignores the multi-ethnic reality of antiquity. The Roman Empire had been culturally divided long before the West collapsed. Ever since Alexander the Great’s conquests, the Eastern Mediterranean was heavily Hellenized.
When Emperor Caracalla issued his edict in 212 AD granting citizenship to all free men in the empire, “Roman” transitioned from an ethnic identity tied to the Italian peninsula to a universal political and legal status. A Greek-speaking citizen in Alexandria or Antioch was legally just as Roman as a Latin-speaking patrician in Rome.
When the Western Roman Empire formally fell in 476 AD, there was no institutional break in the East. The Senate in Rome simply sent the Western imperial regalia to Constantinople, acknowledging the Eastern emperor as the sole ruler. The East maintained continuous Roman law, taxation, and military organization. Emperor Justinian I even dispatched his generals in the sixth century to reconquer Italy and the city of Rome, briefly bringing the old heartland back under imperial control.
The Holy Roman Empire, conversely, was a political invention created centuries later. In 800 AD, Pope Leo III needed a powerful military protector against the Lombards and local Roman factions. He also wanted an emperor beholden to the papacy. Seizing on a technicality—that the throne in Constantinople was occupied by a woman, Empress Irene, which the Pope conveniently declared invalid—Leo crowned the Frankish King Charlemagne as “Emperor of the Romans.”
This coronation was a legal fiction. Charlemagne’s realm was a massive Germanic confederation with no institutional connection to the ancient Roman state. It adopted the title strictly to borrow the prestige of antiquity, relying on the later linguistic rebranding of the continuous Eastern empire to justify the Frankish claim.
Sources
Invention of the term “Byzantine Empire” (Hieronymus Wolf, 1557)
Hieronymus Wolf, Corpus Historiae Byzantinae (Augsburg, 1557).
Self-identification as Romans (Rhomaioi)
Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).
Anthony Kaldellis, Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019).
Caracalla’s Edict and Roman identity (212 AD)
Constitutio Antoniniana. In Ancient Roman Statutes, edited by Allan Chester Johnson, Paul Robinson Coleman-Norton, and Frank Card Bourne, 226–28. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961.
Cassius Dio, Roman History, translated by Earnest Cary. Loeb Classical Library.
476 AD and continuity in the East
Jonathan J. Arnold, Theoderic and the Roman Imperial Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Anonymus Valesianus (excerpts translated in multiple modern editions).
Justinian’s Reconquests
Procopius, History of the Wars, translated by H. B. Dewing. Loeb Classical Library, 1914–40.
J. A. S. Evans, The Age of Justinian: The Circumstances of Imperial Power (London: Routledge, 1996).
Charlemagne’s Coronation (800 AD)
Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne, translated by Samuel Epes Turner (New York: American Book Company, 1880).
Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Anthony Kaldellis, The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).
Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, edited by Alexander P. Kazhdan. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
