“Rome NEVER Fell!” - The Hidden Roman Empire, The Vatican & Crusades | Anthony Kaldellis

Summary

Central argument: Rome continued in the East

Anthony Kaldellis argues that what is commonly called the Byzantine Empire was not a separate state that replaced Rome. Its people called themselves Romans, and their state continued Roman institutions, laws, citizenship, and identity for centuries after the Western Roman Empire ceased to have an emperor of its own.

Kaldellis sees the label “Byzantine” as a later, politically loaded term. In his account, Western powers began denying the Eastern Empire’s claim to be Roman around the year 800, calling its people “Greeks” and claiming Rome’s imperial inheritance for the West. The name “Byzantine” was adopted much later, especially in Western writing after the Crimean War in the 19th century. It obscures how the people being described understood themselves.

Roman identity was civic and adaptable

The conversation presents Roman identity as more civic than racial or narrowly ethnic:

• The empire absorbed people from many regions and backgrounds.
• In 212, Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to nearly all free inhabitants of the empire.
• Roman identity was tied to belonging to the Roman polity and its laws, rather than descent from the original city of Rome alone.
• Greek language and culture were deeply embedded in Roman life. Many Roman elites knew Greek, and the Eastern Roman state eventually became predominantly Greek-speaking without ceasing, in its own view, to be Roman.

Kaldellis compares this long process of changing who counted as Roman to later societies gradually expanding their ideas of national belonging.

The Eastern Empire’s resilience

Kaldellis frames the Eastern Roman Empire’s longevity as a historical puzzle worth explaining. It faced repeated invasions and territorial losses, yet usually recovered and remained institutionally coherent.

He suggests that several features helped sustain it:

• A centralized state: The empire had common laws, currency, administration, and a system for taxing its territories.
• A standing army: Soldiers could be deployed across the empire rather than being controlled solely by local lords.
• Local ties between taxation and military service: In some periods, local communities’ taxes supported nearby soldiers, connecting the population to the army and the state.
• Public responsibilities: Tax revenue supported defense and other state functions. Kaldellis argues that people could see the practical value of contributing, particularly in a region repeatedly threatened by invasion and enslavement.
• Petitions and relief: Subjects could appeal to officials or the emperor for tax relief after disasters or unusual hardship. Kaldellis argues that this opportunity for redress helped bind people to the state.
• Recruitment beyond the capital: Leaders and officials often came from provincial backgrounds, rather than from a permanently insulated capital aristocracy.

He contrasts this with much of medieval Western Europe, where rulers often lacked the authority to tax all their subjects and depended heavily on borrowing, local privileges, or negotiations with powerful nobles.

The Western Empire’s end was gradual

The year 476 was not, in Kaldellis’s account, a sudden sack of Rome that ended the whole Roman Empire. It marked the end of the Western imperial office after a long unraveling:

1. Groups such as the Goths and Vandals entered or crossed into Roman territory.
2. Some were incorporated as Roman allies or soldiers, while others established independent power.
3. The loss of regions such as North Africa reduced tax revenue.
4. Reduced revenue weakened the ability to pay and maintain armies.
5. The loss of military capacity made it harder to defend remaining territory, worsening the cycle.
6. In 476, the military leader Odoacer deposed the young Western emperor Romulus Augustulus, sent the imperial insignia to Constantinople, and ruled Italy in the Eastern emperor’s name.

Kaldellis describes this as a process, not a planned outcome. The Eastern Empire continued, while conditions differed sharply from region to region: Britain suffered an early and severe economic collapse after Roman forces withdrew, whereas Italy’s major disruption came later.

The empire’s division was practical, not formal

The Roman Empire was often governed by multiple emperors because it was too large for one ruler to manage every frontier. Diocletian’s tetrarchy—rule by four—was one attempt to address this. Later, emperors governed eastern and western territories in parallel, but Kaldellis emphasizes that the empire was not formally divided into two separate states.

The conventional date for the lasting eastern-western administrative arrangement is 395, when Theodosius I left the eastern and western portions to different sons. Even after that, the two halves could still intervene in one another’s affairs.

Kaldellis also explains that Rome had already ceased to be the emperors’ regular political base before Constantine. Emperors often traveled with their armies and administrative staffs, while frontier cities served as temporary centers of power. Constantine’s founding of Constantinople in 330 fixed a new imperial center at a strategically important location between Europe and Asia.

Constantinople as “New Rome”

Constantinople was deliberately equipped with Roman institutions and monuments: a palace, senate houses, forums, and a hippodrome. Its public art included works brought from across the empire, turning the city into a display of Roman history and power.

The empire also had a name of its own: Romania, meaning roughly “Roman land.” Kaldellis notes that the Greek language itself was called Romeic for many centuries. These names, he argues, show how central Roman identity remained in the East.

Constantine, Christianity, and the changing Roman state

Kaldellis describes Constantine as a consequential and capable ruler, while stressing that he was also violent, including toward members of his own family. The reasons for his conversion to Christianity are uncertain. One possible explanation offered in the discussion is that Constantine believed the Christian God had helped him win a decisive battle.

Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 helped make it possible for Christians and traditional religious communities to coexist as Roman subjects. Over time, however, Christian emperors increasingly treated Christianity as the official Roman religion; by 380, an emperor declared Christianity the religion of the empire.

This transition, like many changes discussed in the interview, took place over generations rather than all at once.

Justinian: consequential, but a mixed legacy

Justinian is described as a major figure because he pursued ambitious projects with lasting effects:

• His administration compiled and codified Roman law, shaping what later generations would know as Roman law.
• His armies reconquered North Africa from the Vandals, much of Italy from the Goths, and a small part of Spain.
• He built Hagia Sophia and sponsored other major church-building projects.
• His government made extensive legal and administrative reforms.

Kaldellis also emphasizes the costs and failures of Justinian’s reign: the wars damaged Italy, the government violently crushed the Nika revolt, attempts to unify Christian churches instead deepened divisions, and the empire faced the Justinianic plague and multiple wars. The result, in Kaldellis’s view, is a complex legacy rather than a simple story of success or failure.

The Crusades and worsening East–West relations

The Crusades were Western European movements that combined religious pilgrimage and warfare. The Eastern Romans were not drawn to the same form of religious violence, but their empire lay directly along the route to the Crusaders’ targets.

• The First Crusade brought some benefit to the Eastern Empire: Emperor Alexios I used it to help recover parts of western Asia Minor from the Seljuk Turks.
• Later Crusades caused repeated conflict and resentment as armed forces passed through Roman territory.
• Western accusations that the Eastern Romans were secretly aiding Muslims added to existing religious and political hostility.
• The Fourth Crusade, originally aimed at Egypt, was redirected to Constantinople and resulted in the city’s capture in 1204.

Kaldellis presents the Crusades as a major source of damage to the Eastern Empire’s image in Western Europe and as a deepening of the divide between Eastern and Western Christians.

The later Roman states and the end of Constantinople

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 ended the empire centered there, but Kaldellis notes that a related Roman state survived briefly in Trebizond, on the Black Sea coast. It was conquered in 1461.

Cultural legacy and historical change

The Eastern Roman world’s most visible continuing influence, according to Kaldellis, is Eastern Orthodox Christianity, including its liturgy, churches, icons, and artistic traditions. He says that the Orthodox tradition familiar today took shape gradually; earlier centuries had a different religious and cultural character.

The Renaissance, in his account, began largely in Italy in response to Italian interests in recovering classical Latin writing and political thought. Greek scholars and texts became increasingly important around 1400, as Italian humanists sought to understand Greek authors such as Plato and the Greek background to Roman literature and Christianity.

Kaldellis’s broader lesson is that a society can change substantially while retaining a continuous identity. He compares the Roman Empire to the Ship of Theseus: its people, language, religion, political center, and institutions changed over time, but the changes were gradual enough that people continued to understand themselves as part of the same Roman story.

Other topics discussed

• Sappho and the word “lesbian”: Sappho, a lyric poet from Lesbos in the 6th century BC, wrote some poetry addressed to women that has been interpreted as homoerotic. Kaldellis says the earliest known use of “lesbian” as a term for female homosexual activity appears in a manuscript from around 900 AD. The transcript identifies the manuscript’s annotator as Arethas of Caesarea.
• Greece and Turkey: Kaldellis notes that ordinary Greeks and Turks share substantial cultural history, including food and vocabulary, even when relations between their governments are tense.
• Athens: He describes modern Athens as having grown rapidly after World War II as Greece shifted toward an urban, industrial, and professional economy. The city combines an ancient core with extensive modern development, with comparatively little medieval or early-modern architecture.
• Education and historical inquiry: Kaldellis says he initially pursued physics and biology, then moved through philosophy into history. He became interested in examining national narratives and interpreting historical texts in their social and political contexts, rather than treating history as a fixed doctrine or reading texts only for isolated arguments.

Speakers and sources featured

Main speakers

• Julian Dorey — host and interviewer.
• Anthony Kaldellis — historian and guest.

Incidental voices

• Joey Dee/Def and Steve — appear briefly in sponsor advertisements; the auto-generated subtitles render some names inconsistently.
• Amanda and “Deep” — mentioned or briefly heard in production-related exchanges; their roles and names are unclear in the subtitles.

Named scholarly works and references

• Robin Fleming — cited for archaeological work on the end of Roman Britain.
• Procopius, Secret History — discussed as a hostile account of Justinian’s regime.
• Edward Gibbon — mentioned as an influence on Kaldellis’s use of “New Roman Empire.”
• John Fine — named as a supportive professor who helped introduce Kaldellis to Byzantine history.
• Plato, Thucydides, Sappho, and Plutarch — discussed as ancient authors and texts relevant to Greek and Roman history.
• Sponsor advertisements — Ultra Pouches, Quince, and Underdog Hemp.