#498 – Anthony Kaldellis: Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, Rise & Fall of Empires

Anthony Kaldellis: I would say if you wanted to produce a sort of very swift timeline of its history, it's obviously important to focus on the moments when lots of territory was lost to foreign invaders. And these are actually 3 main moments. There's the Arab conquests in the 630s. This is a decade. In a decade, that war was lost. It is the Seljuk Turk conquest of Asia Minor, modern Turkey, in the 1070s. And that was very swift and partly reversed afterwards, but only partly. And then there's the Fourth Crusade, 1204, when the armies from mostly France sack, conquer Constantinople, and dismember the empire as much as they could. It didn't last that long. The Romans managed to regroup and recover. But those are the three main crisis points. They are very swift, but they cause incredible damage. For all the rest of its history, it is a state and society that is generally consolidating, regrouping, and generally engaged in slow but steady economic growth, territorial expansion, a small scale but steady.

Anthony Kaldellis: This persona, it's what the governments or the emperor, the court, and the spokesman, the bureaucracy want their subjects to think this whole thing is about. Like how is power being used, why and for whom, right? And they do so in laws that they promulgate throughout the empire. Sometimes they have these laws read in church, for example, or posted publicly. They're definitely eager to have them communicated to as many people as possible. But they're also a function of imperial rhetoric... Basically, that the authorities are responsive to the needs of their subjects, that they are often accountable. In other words, they understand that they are exercising public power and that their mandate is to exercise it solely for the benefit of their subjects. They keep saying this. So renouncing any kind of private interest. In other words, we're not doing this for our benefit, say the authorities. We're doing this for your benefit. Also that they're proactive. So the emperors are constantly saying that we're planning ahead. We're trying to foresee what problems you might have, and we are solving them before you experience them. And that they are also working very hard. So hardworking, in fact, one of the cliches that they keep using is sleepless. The emperors keep saying that I'm losing sleep over this. I'm not sleeping at night because I'm just worrying so much about your problems and how to solve them. Justinian, for example, was publicly known as the sleepless emperor.

Anthony Kaldellis: A number of things, but ultimately it is that there is no right to the throne. And this is a function of the Roman matrix of politics here, in other words. So here's a bit of a paradox. What we call the Roman Republic was the most imperialistic phase of Roman history. This is when the Romans did most of their conquering. What we call the empire is much less imperialistic in this way. That's much more defensive in its approach, right? And yet our terms are a little mismatched in that way. The empire is more a function of the that it has an emperor rather than it is engaged in imperialism. And that emperor emerged out of the republic, but emerged out of the republic in a very strange way. In other words, not as a dynasty that created the state. So for example, if you think of the Ottoman Empire, many other empires, the whole thing existed because this dynasty engaged in conquest and was successful in creating the state. And so the dynasty was like at the heart of the state. But it's not at all the case in the Roman Empire. The emperor is a figure who emerged within a republic... Something like 46% of the emperors of Constantinople are overthrown through violence. 46%. That's almost half. So that's a huge number, which means that every emperor is vulnerable and insecure, and they know it. So what they have to do is make sure that doesn't happen to them. And the way to do that is not by arresting and executing everybody you think might be a threat or just generally behaving like a Caligula or Nero. That will just get you killed. Like they know this. So the best way to avoid that fate is to actually do the things that will make people happy so that they don't support a rebel if a rebel decides to appear.

Anthony Kaldellis: In the 1190s, the emperor, Alexius III, he's being threatened by the German emperor. German emperor is basically, you pay me a bunch of money or I'll invade. Just straight up extortion. And Alexios decides, okay, I'm going to gather this money. I'm going to impose these taxes. And he gathers the people in the Hippodrome. And he says, you know, we're going to have the German tax. He called it the German tax. And there's such an uproar in the Hippodrome against this that he was like, that wasn't my idea. I don't know where that came from. No, never mind. We're not going to have the German tax. Unfortunately, the German emperor died and nothing ever happened. But it gives you a sense of how emperors like literally can backtrack when they see that the people are against something in a matter of policy, right? Like tax policy. So yeah, there was this give and take. So institutionally, the emperor might look absolute as you called him earlier. In practice, no.