Who Were the Byzantines?

Imagine, for a moment, that you could travel back in time—not just a few years, but all the way back to over a thousand years ago. You close your eyes, spin around three times (that's the secret time-travel technique), and when you open them, you're standing in the middle of a city unlike anything you've ever seen.

The streets are wider than any highway you've ever walked on—wide enough for six horses to race side by side without bumping into each other! The buildings around you reach toward the sky, their domes glinting in the sunlight like giant soap bubbles made of gold and marble. People are dressed in long, colorful robes, speaking in a language that sounds a little bit like English but also a little bit like Greek. Merchants are selling silks from China, spices from India, and jewels from Africa. In the center of the city, on a hill overlooking everything, sits a palace so magnificent that it makes the biggest castle you've ever seen look like a humble cottage.

This city is called Constantinople, and the empire it belongs to is what we'll be exploring together in this book. Welcome to the Byzantine Empire—the Purple Empire, as we're going to call it from now on.

But before we can understand the Byzantines, we need to travel back even further in time, to a place and period that you might have heard of already: the Roman Empire. The Romans were the people who built roads all across Europe, who invented concrete (yes, the same stuff sidewalks are made of today!), and who created some of the most amazing buildings, from giant arenas to towering columns. For hundreds of years, the Roman Empire was the biggest and most powerful empire in the world. It stretched from the shores of Britain in the west all the way to the deserts of Iraq in the east, and from the cold forests of Germany in the north to the hot sands of Africa in the south. That is absolutely enormous—bigger than many countries today!

The Roman Empire had its capital in a city called Rome, which is still a famous city today (you've probably heard of it!). Rome was the heart of the empire, the place where the emperors lived, where the biggest temples stood, and where all the important decisions were made. For centuries, this system worked beautifully. The Romans built roads connecting every corner of their empire, built walls to protect their borders, and built aqueducts to carry fresh water to their cities. They created laws that we still use today and told stories that we still read in school. The Roman Empire was truly one of the greatest civilizations in all of human history.

But here's something interesting: the Roman Empire wasn't always one big happy family. Even though it started as a single empire with Rome as its capital, over time it grew so large that managing it became incredibly difficult. Think about trying to organize a group project at school when half your classmates live in one neighborhood and the other half live all the way across town. Communication becomes hard, decisions take forever to reach everyone, and before you know it, the group starts to feel less like one team and more like two separate groups that happen to be working on the same project.

This is more or less what happened to the Roman Empire.

The Great Split: When One Empire Became Two

Around the year 285 AD—nearly eighteen hundred years ago—something very important happened. The Roman Emperor at the time, a man named Diocletian (try saying that name five times fast!), made a decision that would change the course of history. He decided that the empire was simply too big for one person to manage. So he did something that nobody had ever done before: he split the Roman Empire in half.

The western half kept the old capital of Rome, but the eastern half got a new capital—a city called Byzantium. Now, Byzantium wasn't an entirely new city. It was actually quite an old city already, founded nearly a thousand years earlier by Greek settlers from the city of Athens. But Diocletian saw its potential. Located on a narrow strip of land between two continents—Europe and Asia—it controlled the most important trade routes of the ancient world. Ships coming from the Mediterranean Sea into the Black Sea had to pass right by Byzantium. It was like the empire's most valuable crossroads.

Diocletian appointed a co-emperor to rule the eastern half from this strategic location. This way, he reasoned, the empire could be governed more efficiently. The eastern half could focus on trade, diplomacy, and protecting the borders that faced powerful empires to the east, while the western half could focus on defending against fierce tribes that threatened from the north and west.

For a while, this system worked reasonably well. But Diocletian's idea of splitting the empire would have consequences that nobody could have predicted at the time. The western half of the Roman Empire would eventually fall, conquered by tribes from the north who overwhelmed the Roman armies. Cities that had been Roman for centuries were abandoned. The great Colosseum in Rome, where gladiators had fought for entertainment, fell into ruin. The western empire slowly crumbled and disappeared.

But the eastern half? The eastern half didn't just survive—it thrived.

Born in the East: The Rise of Byzantium

In the year 330 AD, exactly forty-five years after Diocletian's great split, another Roman emperor made another historic decision. His name was Constantine, and he is one of the most important figures in all of Byzantine history. In fact, he's so important that we're going to spend a lot of time getting to know him in the next few pages.

Constantine looked at the empire's split and realized something crucial: the eastern half, with its rich cities, busy ports, and fertile farmland, was where all the wealth and power had gathered. While the western half struggled with invasions and poverty, the eastern half grew richer and more powerful every year. Constantinople, the city that Diocletian had used as his eastern capital, sat at the perfect spot. It was surrounded by water on three sides, making it easy to defend. It controlled the trade routes between Europe and Asia. And it was far from the chaos and invasions that plagued the west.

So Constantine made a bold decision: he would make Constantinople the official capital of the entire Roman Empire. Not just the eastern half, but the whole thing. He moved his throne, his court, and thousands of his best soldiers and officials to this magnificent city. He built palaces, churches, and monuments that made Rome itself seem old-fashioned. He filled the streets with people from every corner of the known world—merchants, scholars, artists, and pilgrims all drawn to this new center of power.

When Constantine died in 337 AD, he left behind an empire that was effectively divided in practice, even if not in name. The west continued to weaken, while the east continued to grow stronger. And when the western half finally collapsed in 476 AD—over a hundred years after Constantine's death—the eastern half simply kept going. Without the burden of the failing west to support, the eastern empire grew more powerful than ever.

And that's when the eastern half of the Roman Empire truly became something new. No longer just the "eastern half of Rome," it became a civilization unto itself, with Constantinople as its gleaming heart. Historians began to call this new empire "Byzantium," after the old Greek city of Byzantium that had stood on the same spot before Constantine built his magnificent capital.

But here's the most important thing to understand about the Byzantines: they never thought of themselves as anything other than Romans.

The Last Romans: Why the Name Matters

If you asked a Byzantine emperor who he was, he would have told you, without hesitation, that he was a Roman. If you asked a Byzantine soldier what army he served in, he would have said "the Roman army." If you asked a Byzantine farmer what emp