Romans who never called themselves Byzantines lasted to 1453
The state we nickname the Byzantine Empire was simply the Roman Empire centred on Constantinople, surviving the fifth-century western collapse until Ottoman conquest in 1453. Its citizens called themselves Romans; “Byzantine” is a later scholars’ label that still sparks argument.
Constantine I (324–337) legalised Christianity and planted a new capital on the Bosporus; Theodosius I (379–395) made the faith the state religion as Greek edged out Latin in official life. Justinian I (527–565) pushed the borders widest, briefly reclaiming Italy and western Mediterranean shores before plague around 541 and Persian wars strained the treasury. Arab conquests in the 630s–640s tore away Syria and Egypt; Africa followed by 698. Isaurian stabilisation and a Macedonian renaissance later restored strength until civil wars and Seljuk pressure stripped most of Asia Minor, even as Komnenian recovery kept Constantinople Europe’s richest city into the twelfth century—until Paris overtook it.
The Fourth Crusade’s 1204 sack shattered the realm into Greek rump states and Latin lordships. Greeks retook the capital in 1261, yet the restored empire was only a regional player while Ottomans ate its leftovers through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, finishing the job in 1453. Inhabitants knew themselves as Romaioi; Muslim neighbours spoke of Bilād al-Rūm, the land of the Romans. After 800, Western Europeans preferred “Greeks,” reserving Roman legitimacy for popes and German emperors.
The label itself is revealing. It derives from Byzantion, the Greek town on which Constantinople was built, and once described only the city's residents; after the fall, early modern writers used names such as the Low Empire or the Empire of the Greeks, and the Byzantine tag spread through the work of Hieronymus Wolf. Nobody agrees on a birth date either: scholars linked to Greece or Orthodoxy favour the early 300s, some specialists in late antiquity prefer the seventh or eighth century, and Geoffrey Greatrex thinks exact dating impossible.
Luck and sound choices spared the East the barbarian warlords who finished off the West. Zeno steered the Ostrogoth king Theodoric toward Italy, Anastasius I reformed the finances, and Justinian, after crushing the Nika revolt of 532, recodified Roman law as the Corpus Juris Civilis and rebuilt the Hagia Sophia. Heraclius later beat back a siege of the capital in 626 and defeated Persia at Nineveh, only to watch Arab armies take the Levant and Egypt before he died in 641.
Source: Byzantine Empire
