The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire | Lex Fridman Podcast #498

0:00 We're talking about a society that was right in the middle of one

0:04 of the main corridors of empire building and new religions in the world.

0:09 This is the most dangerous neighborhood that you can possibly live in.

0:14 26 emperors were murdered in a period of 50 years.

0:19 Yes.

0:19 It's tremendous instability.

0:21 Almost all were of these emperors were generals,

0:23 and almost all were murdered by their men.

0:26 So civil war was the norm,

0:29 hyperinflation, economic crash, plus there's a plague.

0:32 There's just a lot of chaos.

0:35 Here's why I don't think the Eastern Roman Empire is a military dictatorship.

0:38 Even though, again, the emperors control the armies,

0:43 and the armies themselves will often have a say in, Who becomes emperor,

0:49 like through the civil wars that we mentioned.

0:51 The reason why I don't think it's

0:54 a military dictatorship is because they almost never,

0:57 very, very, very rarely use the army as an instrument of social control.

1:04 Sometimes these eunuchs were extremely competent like Narses,

1:07 Justinian's general, who defeated the Goths in Italy in this massive battle.

1:11 Like, this guy was a total hardass.

1:13 And he's this little old man.

1:15 He was- he was very old, and he was tiny, and he was a eunuch,

1:18 and the Goths laughed at him, but he had the last laugh.

1:25 The following is a conversation with Anthony Kaldellis,

1:28 a historian of the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire.

1:35 This is a Lex Fridman podcast.

1:37 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description,

1:39 where you can also find links to contact me,

1:43 ask questions, give feedback, and so on.

1:46 And now, dear friends, here's Anthony Kaldellis.

1:52 You've described that the Byzantine Empire is the Roman Empire,

1:56 that calling it the Byzantine Empire is an invention

1:59 of historians writing long after the empire has collapsed,

2:04 that the people of that time considered themselves Romans,

2:07 and that the so-called Byzantine Empire never actually existed,

2:10 that it was, in every legal and cultural sense,

2:14 the Roman Empire continuing unbroken.

2:17 So let's get our terms right in the grand historical context.

2:24 What is the Byzantine Empire, and why should we just call it the Roman Empire?

2:28 So Lex, the burden of proof is on those who would

2:31 assert that what we've been calling the Byzantine Empire is something other-...

2:35 than the Roman Empire, because all of our sources are very clear about this.

2:38 And we've known about this.

2:39 We've always known about it.

2:40 It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance, right?

2:42 It's like when you know something is the case, but you carry on as if it's not.

2:47 So the Eastern Roman Empire,

2:49 this is the direct continuation of the ancient Roman Empire in the East, right?

2:53 Everybody knows the Western Empire fell in the fifth century.

2:57 And for many conceptions of Western history, that was sufficient.

3:00 Like, that's when we just called it.

3:02 The Roman Empire fell in the fifth century.

3:05 And we kinda, yeah, we kinda know that the eastern half survived,

3:07 but we don't wanna include that in our cultural genealogy.

3:10 And so we kinda pretend that it became something else.

3:13 But in fact, it called itself the Roman Empire.

3:16 Its subjects were Roman citizens.

3:17 They called themselves Romans all the way down through to the end and beyond.

3:21 So there are a number of reasons why Western Europeans

3:25 wanted to think that the Eastern Empire is something different,

3:28 and those reasons have created these models where They were,

3:33 they called it Empire of the Greeks for 1,000 years,

3:35 then they switched to Byzantine Empire for very political reasons.

3:38 Now that's collapsing.

3:40 So we're now moving into a phase where we have the long Roman Empire.

3:44 We, we recognize that the history of the Roman state,

3:46 the Roman polity, is something that lasts an extraordinarily long time.

3:51 Very unique almost in history, from antiquity,

3:55 like the archaic period, down to the 15th century.

3:59 I think it would be really nice to actually look just for a brief moment

4:03 at the grand scale of the, the full

4:06 Roman state as it lasted for over 2,200 years.

4:11 Yeah.

4:12 So its founding, 753 BC, to let's say the fall of Constantinople in 1453 AD.

4:21 So can we try to give a big picture overview of everything that happened?

4:26 Okay, so first we have a period of the kings.

4:28 This is almost legendary, from like the eighth century BC down to around 510 BC.

4:34 So this is when Rome is ruled by a series of local kings.

4:37 The kings are expelled, and the republic,

4:39 or what we call the republic, is instituted,

4:42 and this is a regime that's governed by mostly an aristocracy,

4:46 but with cooperation from the people of Rome.

4:50 In various ways, the arrangements change over the centuries.

4:53 So that lasts for about five centuries.

4:56 And then we have the end of the republic

4:58 in the era of Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar,

5:01 when the civil wars lead to the creation of an imperial monarchy...

5:05 ...right, under Augustus.

5:07 So that's, we date that roughly either, yeah, 27 BC, something like that.

5:12 And thereafter, it is an imperial monarchy for the next millennium and a half.

5:17 Very broadly, we can divide that into two phases,

5:20 one where the center of power is in Rome, and one where it's in Constantinople.

5:26 And, you know, we can debate the dates of when that transition takes place.

5:30 These big transitions usually take place over long periods of time.

5:33 They're not, like, very sudden.

5:35 So that's the big picture.

5:39 Kings, republic, imperial monarchy.

5:42 The Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire.

5:46 Yes.

5:46 And then the West and East Roman Empire.

5:49 Yes.

5:50 Uh, and then maybe what are the different terms

5:52 that we could be using for the Byzantine Empire, including Byzantium?

5:59 Is it also fair to say the Late Roman Empire?

6:03 So Late Roman Empire we use for both east and west,

6:06 starting around the reign of Diocletian maybe,

6:08 even a bit earlier, so during the third century AD.

6:11 And that goes down to maybe the early seventh century.

6:16 So that period we call Late Roman Empire.

6:18 And if you ask me to define its principal characteristics,

6:22 it would probably be the tax system and the administration, the bureaucracy...

6:27 ...of the later Roman Empire is

6:28 that that comes from mostly Diocletian and Constantine's reforms.

6:33 And Diocletian was in the 3rd century.

6:35 Yes, 284 to 305 AD.

6:37 Yes.

6:37 A very important reformer.

6:40 And we'll talk about it, but let's just do this whirlwind,

6:42 and hopefully there'll be automagical images somewhere overlaid, but-- Okay.

6:47 So in 753 BC, Rome, a small city state, is founded,

6:51 and in 509 BC, the kings are overthrown, and the Roman Republic is born.

6:58 390 BC, the Gauls sack Rome, and this, I believe,

7:02 among other events throughout its history,

7:05 is a formative trauma that hardens Rome's security obsession.

7:10 It turns out, throughout its history,

7:13 people want to attack from different directions, and so you have to defend.

7:18 So there's two wars, as we're actually saying off mic.

7:21 There's two kinds of military operations.

7:24 One is wars of conquest and expansion, and one is more defensive.

7:31 And we'll talk about how the military changes throughout its

7:36 history to allocate more effort to one versus the other.

7:40 In 264 to 146 BC, the Punic Wars and the survival against Hannibal

7:46 transform Rome into a Mediterranean superpower.

7:49 Then like you mentioned, Caesar in 49 to 31 BC,

7:55 Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon to assassination

7:58 of Caesar to the Battle of Actium,

8:01 and then the Civil War dismantles the Republic

8:04 and concentrates power in a single ruler,

8:08 Octavian, AKA Augustus, the first Roman emperor, let's say.

8:13 Then 27 BC, Augustus founds the Principate, really low-key monarchy.

8:19 And so officially, that ends the Republic,

8:21 and then that begins, 27 BC to 180 AD,

8:25 the Pax Romana, which is a period of relative peace and stability.

8:29 And a lot of the emperors we know of, the sexy,

8:33 popular emperors all come from that period.

8:36 Marcus Aurelius, who I'm a big fan of, from that period.

8:39 Then that takes us to 284 AD,

8:41 the guy we mentioned, Diocletian, who rebuilds the state.

8:45 Emperors drop the first citizen mask, this perception of the way,

8:50 and we'll talk about this, the persona that's presented by the state.

8:55 312 AD, Constantine defeats Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge to become

9:01 the sole ruler of the western half of the empire,

9:04 and then founds Constantinople in 330 AD.

9:07 East and West are split in 395 AD.

9:11 Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD.

9:15 The West falls at 476 AD as the last Western emperor is deposed.

9:21 And then we sort of focus more on the East Roman Empire with 527.

9:28 In the 6th century, Justinian's reign.

9:31 In the 7th century, Heraclius defeats Persia and then loses against the Arabs.

9:36 There's the Arab conquest continuing in the 7th century.

9:40 In the 8th the Arab siege of Constantinople fails.

9:46 There's the Macedonian dynasty in that you have an excellent book about.

9:52 And then the Crusades,

9:54 and then eventually leading to Constantinople falling in 1453 AD.

10:02 As a person who understands the full journey

10:05 of it with a focus on East Roman history,

10:09 is there obvious glaring holes or incorrect things in what I just said?

10:15 No, nothing incorrect.

10:16 I would say if you wanted to produce

10:18 a sort of very swift timeline of its history,

10:24 it's obviously important to focus on the moments

10:29 when lots of territory was lost to foreign invaders,

10:33 and these are actually three main moments.

10:36 There's the Arab conquests in the 630s.

10:40 This is a decade.

10:42 In a decade, that war was lost.

10:44 It is the Seljuk Turk conquest of Asia Minor, modern Turkey, in the 1070s,

10:53 and that was very swift and partly reversed afterwards, but only partly.

10:59 And then there's the Fourth Crusade, 1204,

11:02 when the armies from mostly France sack,

11:04 conquer Constantinople, and dismember the empire as much as they could.

11:08 It didn't last that long.

11:10 The Romans managed to regroup and recover

11:12 but those are the three main crisis points.

11:16 They are very swift, but they cause incredible damage.

11:22 For all the rest of its history,

11:24 it is a state and society that is generally sort of consolidating,

11:30 you know, regrouping, and generally engaged in slow but steady economic growth,

11:38 territorial expansion on a small scale, but steady.

11:43 Uh, so we can talk about this.

11:45 It's...

11:45 I think it's an important thing to keep in mind about the big picture,

11:50 that the defeats were swift and kind of, you know, terrible.

11:55 But most of its history is one of slow growth.

12:00 There's some traumatic events that have a big impact,

12:03 but a lot of the developments we'll talk about

12:07 it might seem or feel like there's a particular

12:10 moment when those developments or changes in the way

12:14 the government or the military is structured arise,

12:16 but really it's a gradual process.

12:19 Exactly.

12:19 And so that's the tension we have to be constantly dancing with.

12:22 Yeah, so as historians, this is a point of method, and it's very important.

12:25 There are moments when, like, individuals with a great deal of power

12:30 make choices that impact everybody else and have,

12:32 you know, long-term consequences downstream.

12:36 Constantine's conversion to Christianity, for example, right?

12:39 Not something that anybody could have or did predict.

12:43 Okay.

12:44 Otherwise, most of the developments that we identify by specific dates,

12:48 like you mentioned 395, the division of the eastern and the western empires,

12:52 those are conventional dates that we use to actually

12:56 capture what is in fact a much longer process.

12:59 There was no split between the two halves.

13:01 It was one among many allocations of jurisdiction to, like,

13:06 one son and another son in the east and the west.

13:09 The two halves were subsequently reunited,

13:11 then they kind of divided again among different emperors.

13:15 It's just a process,

13:17 and so we sometimes use fixed dates for what is in fact a process.

13:21 Or for 76, the fall of the Western Empire, that's just the last date.

13:25 It's actually a very long process that took decades.

13:29 Right?

13:29 So that's just something to keep in mind,

13:31 that sometimes we're talking about processes,

13:32 sometimes we're talking about very discrete events with long-term consequences.

13:36 Yeah.

13:37 Maybe an impossible question for a Roman state that lasted over 2,200 years,

13:42 but is there a kind of through line,

13:45 a thread, a soul that runs through the entire history of the Roman Empire?

13:49 As you said, it's a slow transformation and evolution.

13:53 But if we dare call the whole thing Roman, Rome, the Roman state-- Yes-...

14:01 is there some aspect, some characteristics that run through the whole thing?

14:06 I think so, yes.

14:07 By the way, you know the metaphor of the Ship of Theseus?

14:10 Okay.

14:10 So in case the audience doesn't know it, this is when there's a ship,

14:13 and it's, you know, at sea, and over time, like,

14:16 every component of that ship is replaced with some other component,

14:20 so that by the end of the story, it has none of the original parts.

14:24 But it's, like, in a certain sense still that ship because of the story, right?

14:29 The...

14:29 Okay.

14:30 So Roman history is different from, let's say,

14:33 Greek history or Christian history, right?

14:35 Christian history is the story of a religion.

14:37 It can be in any country, among any ethnic group.

14:40 It's here, there, right?

14:41 It's everywhere.

14:43 But you still have histories of Christianity.

14:45 It's the same with, like say, Greek culture-...

14:49 or your Greek literature, right?

14:50 It's not a function of a particular state.

14:53 Ancient Greeks were famously never united in a state.

14:56 But it's people who culturally accept that tradition as their kind

15:02 of elite prestige culture and engage with Homer and Plato and so forth.

15:06 And they can be anywhere.

15:08 Roman history is not like that.

15:10 Roman history is very specifically the history

15:12 of a state or a political community.

15:15 And so this is the community of the Roman people, the Roman citizens.

15:20 And it is in gradual evolution,

15:22 but at no point is there a rupture in that history

15:25 such that its members would ever think that something dramatic had changed,

15:29 and that they're no longer part of that story.

15:32 So in the same way as the ship I just mentioned, in other words,

15:37 it's the narrative that you tell about it where the changes that take place

15:41 to it make sense only when you see them within the context of that story.

15:45 It's the same with Roman history.

15:47 Yes, there are changes.

15:48 Like, eventually everything changes.

15:50 But it happens so gradually that it doesn't

15:53 seem that way to anyone living in it.

15:56 And so the narrative of the history of the Roman

15:59 people is what holds all of this together.

16:02 How important is it that, so you mentioned Greek culture.

16:05 So a lot of my friends who are Greek are extremely proud of being Greek.

16:10 There's certain cultures that are proud.

16:12 Sure.

16:13 And it's not a momentary ephemeral thing.

16:16 It feels like a thing that has lasted for many generations.

16:20 Oh, yeah.

16:20 And so that is an engine that propagates

16:23 through time that carries that culture forward.

16:26 And so does a similar thing apply for the Roman Empire in a different way?

16:31 Maybe because you say it's a political kind of community,

16:34 that means a set of ideals.

16:36 And we'll talk about,

16:38 because those ideals become even more concretized and explicit,

16:41 I think, through the East Roman Empire,

16:44 because one of the things you talk about is that the citizens

16:48 of the empire are kind of all connected, that they are—...

16:54 engaged in this whole sort of machinery.

16:56 Anyway, that's a complicated way of asking,

16:58 is there some elements that Greek pride,

17:01 dare I speak, is there some kind of Roman pride that propagates the thing?

17:06 Oh, there totally is.

17:09 You can find authors and historical agents

17:12 who definitely display this or talk about it.

17:15 But we don't want to make that the center

17:18 of the story or the basis for any analysis because...

17:20 So what you're observing in your Greek friends

17:22 is also the result of modern nation building,

17:25 is it's the result of modern systems of education,

17:27 and sort of national identities,

17:29 and these are fostered and created through all kinds of media and institutions.

17:33 It's just a different situation altogether.

17:35 What you find in ancient republics or medieval states

17:40 is more something like a consensus to be ruled,

17:45 to be, to rule and to be ruled in this particular political community.

17:50 Now, some members of it may definitely, and in fact did have this kind of pride.

17:54 I'll give you an example.

17:55 So there's an ambassador in the sixth century,

17:57 and he's concluding a deal with the Persians.

18:00 And you know, the Persians are skeptical cause,

18:02 you know, Romans can't always be trusted.

18:04 But this guy says to them, he says,

18:06 and let me just tell you, you're making a deal here with the Romans.

18:10 The Romans.

18:11 The name should say it all." Like, you, okay, and you get a sense that this is,

18:15 he's expressing a certain pride in, like, being a bearer of the Roman tradition

18:19 and speaking for the emperors and the Roman Empire.

18:21 I mean, that's, for him, this was something very, very momentous.

18:24 You find these kinds of examples, so these people exist.

18:26 But I wouldn't want to make that the basis for like

18:29 an analysis of how the society works as a whole.

18:34 For the most part, it was something like a consensus where,

18:38 you know, subjects or citizens, however you want to call them,

18:42 they agree to— let's say be taxed and be ruled

18:46 by political authorities because of what they get in return,

18:49 and there's this kind of understanding of a mutual set of responsibilities.

18:54 And my concern, among other things,

18:57 is to try to explain how this society held together for so long.

19:02 Pride, yes, among some people, definitely.

19:05 You find it in the sources.

19:07 But sources are, texts are written by literate, you know, usually elites.

19:11 So this is a small part of the population.

19:15 We can't automatically extend their attitudes to everybody else.

19:18 So in dealing with everyone else,

19:20 we have to work with different kinds of materials,

19:22 different kinds of assumptions.

19:23 We can't just posit that they're just proud of being Roman.

19:26 They could have been.

19:27 We don't know that, though.

19:28 We can see other sorts of things about them.

19:31 Like, for example, did they pay their taxes?

19:32 Did they try to rebel and leave the empire?

19:35 So those are the kinds of things that I look for.

19:38 Pride is one component,

19:39 but there could be other explanations and factors that explain

19:44 what motivates a soldier to defend the capital, for example.

19:49 Like, what motivates a particular person to pay the taxes.

19:54 And then this is something that we'll definitely talk about.

19:57 But just to linger at the big picture,

20:01 if the Romans from the different periods met,

20:06 how different would they be from each other?

20:09 Like, if I brought to you...

20:10 This is one of those, you know, there's like-- Yes, yes,-...

20:12 blind taste tests you can do with food.

20:15 Yes.

20:15 Pepsi and Coke.

20:16 Pepsi and Coke.

20:17 Yes.

20:18 If I brought you a Roman from the kingdom period,

20:22 the republic period, the early imperial period-- I mean,

20:27 I get asked this in a much more radical form,

20:29 which is like if you take someone from, like,

20:31 around 1453 who's a Roman and a subject of this Roman,

20:35 and compare, and, and, you know, compare him or have him meet, you know,

20:39 in your imagination with someone from the ancient republic.

20:41 Like, how-- Yeah,-...

20:43 could they find any kind of agreement on what it means

20:46 to be Roman and recognize each other as belonging to that polity?

20:49 This, this is a very difficult thing to...

20:52 Like, now, I can point to a number of things that they would find eventually.

20:57 And, you know, if you told them, "Yo,

20:59 you're both Romans, you're both from this long history,

21:01 now you have to find, you know,

21:03 what you have in common," I think they could find things.

21:05 But before we talk about those, if you wanna get into it,

21:09 let's just say that the question can even be

21:12 posed about Romans who live at the same time.

21:15 I mean, if you take a senator from the age

21:19 of Cicero and someone from the slums of Rome,

21:22 who's maybe the son of a slave who was

21:26 brought from the East by some general a generation ago,

21:30 and put them in a room and say, "Now, you discuss.

21:33 You're both Romans.

21:34 What do you have in common?" They

21:36 might have trouble in coming up with something.

21:38 Right?

21:38 So let's not minimize the sheer diversity of experiences and sort

21:44 of life experiences of Romans who are living at the same time.

21:49 The important thing is that a change is always happening,

21:52 and from my standpoint this change is sort of cumulative,

21:57 so it results in Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian Romans in Constantinople

22:03 who at first sight might have little to do with Latin-speaking,

22:08 you know, non-Christians or worshiping the ancient gods,

22:11 Romans from a republic in Rome.

22:13 And those are very, very different situations,

22:15 and no doubt they would look and seem foreign to each other, right?

22:19 The question is, why do we assume that someone like Hadrian, right,

22:23 an emperor from the second century sort of a very cosmopolitan figure

22:29 who travels around the empire with his Greek lover and, you know,

22:34 writes poems and has a Greek beard and, you know,

22:37 loves Greek culture and has much to do

22:42 with someone from the Middle Republic who's,

22:44 you know some warrior who's chasing down cattle from the Samnites.

22:47 I mean, and yet the way we understand history is that, oh no,

22:52 those belong together.

22:53 Hadrian and this ancient Roman from the fourth century BC.

22:58 But not Hadrian and someone, you know,

23:00 an emperor a few centuries later who's just like him,

23:04 bilingual in Greek and Latin, who's...

23:06 kinda cosmopolitan, who, you know, reads the same stuff,

23:10 because we posit this rupture between Roman and Byzantine.

23:15 One of the ways we can try to analyze this is,

23:17 for example, looking at a very specific role in society across time.

23:22 So we can look at soldiers, how they solve violence, for example.

23:28 That's one way.

23:29 So you're making me realize that we

23:32 can just take 1,000 different professions and positions

23:35 in society and really specifically look at what

23:38 the experience of the world was like.

23:41 And so one of them is the view on violence, Across time.

23:48 And, and then the other is the view on the role of the, the government-...

23:56 across time.

23:57 That's an excellent way of putting it.

23:59 So take soldiers, for example.

24:00 They swear an oath.

24:01 Right?

24:02 Now, we don't have the oath for every given period.

24:05 We have some approximations of it, some hints of what it contained,

24:08 but we know that Roman soldiers swore an oath like,

24:11 throughout all of the centuries of the empire.

24:14 Sometimes they might add, like, a Christian formula to it.

24:18 Sometime before that, not.

24:21 But they swore basically to protect the republic or depending

24:26 on what term they used or the empire or the emperor.

24:30 And this is something that they would have recognized very quickly.

24:33 Like, if, if they met each other over time and said, "Hey,

24:37 what was your oath like?" And they recited it

24:39 this would have made much sense to them, right?

24:41 Or take, for example, a woman who runs a business, right?

24:45 From any century of the empire.

24:47 It, it would have been, especially the later you go, the, the more so,

24:53 that this woman is enabled to do this by virtue of Roman law.

24:57 Of certain, you know, Roman law of property and inheritance and, and marriage,

25:03 but also regulations regarding who can do what and what

25:07 kinds of properties women can handle and under what circumstances.

25:11 This is something that Roman women had

25:13 in common that many other cultures did not.

25:16 So I'll give you an example.

25:18 So for example, in the 10th, 11th century,

25:21 there are Jewish women who live in the Eastern Roman Empire-...

25:26 who realize that they have more rights in Roman courts than in rabbinical ones,

25:32 and they take their disputes to the Roman courts.

25:37 Now, the thing is that for the Romans, these are property matters-...

25:41 not religious matters.

25:41 But for the rabbis, these are religious matters.

25:43 But the Roman courts trump the Jewish courts-...

25:47 in the empire, right?

25:48 And so you end up with a situation where Jewish women have more rights-...

25:52 than Jewish women do elsewhere, because where Roman law is not operative.

25:56 And there you go.

25:58 Right?

25:58 Like, these things matter, right?

25:59 And that's a function of imperial law.

26:02 And this, this would be an interesting

26:04 actually interplay between the law and religious institutions-...

26:09 Throughout the East-...

26:11 uh, Roman Empire.

26:13 So you argue that even though the personality of the various emperors varied,

26:17 as we'll talk about, and as they're often venerated,

26:21 celebrated, criticized, talked about,

26:24 the late Roman Empire was projecting a persona

26:26 to its citizens that was consistent throughout its history.

26:31 Can you describe what you mean by this and describe

26:34 the different detailed characteristics of this persona?

26:37 Yes.

26:37 So this persona, it's what the governments or the emperor, the court,

26:43 and the spokesman, the bureaucracy want their subjects to think,

26:49 This whole thing is about.

26:51 Like, how is power being used, why, and for whom, right?

26:56 And they do so in laws that they promulgate throughout the empire.

27:01 Sometimes they have these laws read in church, for example, or posted publicly.

27:06 They're definitely eager to have them

27:08 communicated to as many people as possible.

27:11 But they're also a function of imperial

27:13 rhetoric so the way you praise an emperor, the way you talk about an emperor.

27:18 You find this language in petitions,

27:20 so this is a hugely important glue for this society,

27:24 is that anyone could basically petition the authorities

27:27 for let's just say just about anything.

27:30 That's not technically true, but there's a lot of petitioning going on.

27:33 So, you know, if you think something's wrong or you've been treated unjustly,

27:38 you can petition local officials, even imperial officials.

27:42 You can petition the emperor, you can...

27:44 Right?

27:44 And the expectation is that that petition will be read, addressed, and answered.

27:48 It might not be answered in the way that you want, but it will be answered.

27:52 And those responses contain this language also, right?

27:55 So these are the different media through

27:58 which the emperors are broadcasting this persona, and that persona is what?

28:02 Basically, that the authorities are responsive to the needs of their subjects,

28:08 that they are often accountable.

28:10 In other words, they understand that they are exercising public power,

28:16 and that their mandate is to exercise

28:18 it solely for the benefit of their subjects.

28:21 They keep saying this.

28:22 Um, so renouncing any kind of private interest.

28:25 In other words, "We're not doing this for our benefit," say the authorities.

28:30 "We're doing this for your benefit." Also that they're proactive.

28:34 So the emperors are constantly saying that, "We're planning ahead.

28:40 We're trying to foresee what problems you might have,

28:43 and we are solving them at, before you experience

28:46 them." And that they are also working very hard.

28:49 So hardworking.

28:50 In fact, the one of the cliches that they keep using is sleepless.

28:54 The emperors keep saying that, "I'm losing sleep over this.

28:57 I'm not sleeping at night because I'm just worrying so

29:00 much about your problems and how to solve them." Justinian,

29:02 for example, was publicly known as the sleepless emperor,

29:06 and not because he was a demon whose

29:08 head floated around in the palace on its own,

29:10 which some people- That's the thing?

29:13 It was a thing, yes.

29:14 Okay.

29:14 That's a whole thing.

29:15 But sleepless in terms of worked so hard-- Yes.

29:17 there's no time to sleep.

29:19 He was a workaholic.

29:21 That is conceded by even his enemies.

29:24 All night he was up just hauling officials

29:26 in at any old hour to talk about whatever,

29:28 you know, wars and architecture and laws

29:31 and the religion and theology and whatever.

29:33 So the emperors are projecting this image, right?

29:36 So that's what I call the persona.

29:38 Tireless effort to work on behalf of subjects,

29:42 to do so responsibly, to be responsive and accountable.

29:47 In other words, if some of my officials breaks the law or oppresses you,

29:53 I'm giving you instruments, like legal instruments,

29:57 by which to hold them to account.

29:59 So that's the persona.

30:01 It's very consistent,

30:03 And I think it's part of the mechanism of tying the society together.

30:07 In other words, if subjects think that their emperors are like this, right,

30:12 they're more likely to agree to the consensus of essentially paying taxes.

30:17 And you draw this distinction between rhetoric and action,

30:21 what the authorities say and what they actually do.

30:23 So when you say persona in the modern times,

30:27 some of that could be reframed as propaganda-- Yeah.

30:31 for example.

30:32 And propaganda implies that the rhetoric,

30:36 that there's a big gap between the rhetoric and the action.

30:40 And one of the things you said you took away from reading

30:43 Machiavelli is that we should judge people not by what they say,

30:46 but by what they do.

30:48 So how much of the Roman Empire's

30:50 government of what they espoused was merely rhetoric,

30:53 and how much was true in how they acted?

30:56 Yes.

30:57 This is a key lesson I took from reading Machiavelli,

31:00 and I found this a very insightful way of thinking about politics,

31:04 and I would recommend that anybody kind of practice

31:07 this way of looking at the world, right?

31:09 People and states and, you know, powerful people can say anything they want to.

31:14 At the end of the day, what matters is what they actually do.

31:18 And this doesn't mean that what they say is irrelevant,

31:21 even if it's discordant with what they do.

31:25 But nevertheless, In the case of the East Roman state,

31:31 so my research suggests that the emperors

31:34 and the authorities were generally sincere in what they said.

31:38 In other words, I have found that they generally

31:41 did what they said they were going to do overall.

31:46 Not perfectly, obviously.

31:47 And of course, these are human beings we're talking about.

31:50 The, right, the human societies,

31:52 there was a lot of, you know, corruption, and you name it.

31:55 Abuse-...

31:56 of course.

31:57 Of course there is.

31:58 But overall, I think that there was

32:00 a sufficient level of understanding that the emperors

32:04 are in fact doing this, and they were actually incentivized to do this.

32:08 We can talk about how.

32:09 Because they were also in a pretty vulnerable situation too,

32:13 so they needed their subjects to be relatively content on this front.

32:19 Isn't this surprising to you?

32:20 So, you know, from the outsider point of view, Roman emperors,

32:25 even in the East Roman Empire, technically have a lot of power.

32:33 You can even say in some cases absolute power,

32:36 and yet they seem to be awfully worried...

32:40 to make everybody in the empire happy.

32:44 What explains that?

32:45 Like what, what explains the small gap between

32:49 rhetoric and action in the East Roman Empire?

32:52 A number of things, but ultimately it is that there is no right to the throne.

32:57 And this is a function of the Roman matrix of politics here.

33:01 In other words, So here's a bit of a paradox.

33:06 What we call the Roman Republic was

33:09 the most imperialistic phase of Roman history.

33:11 Like this is when the Romans did most of their conquering.

33:15 What we call the empire is much less imperialistic in this way.

33:19 That's much more defensive in its approach, right?

33:21 And yet our terms are a little mismatched in that way.

33:26 The empire is more a function of the, That it

33:31 has an emperor rather than it is engaged in imperialism.

33:36 And that emperor emerged out of the republic.

33:40 But emerged out of the republic in a very strange way.

33:42 In other words, not as a dynasty that created the state.

33:48 So for example, if you think of the Ottoman Empire, many other empires, they...

33:53 The whole thing existed because this dynasty engaged in conquest and-...

33:57 was successful in creating the state,

33:59 and so the dynasty was like at the heart of the state.

34:01 But that's not at all the case in the Roman Empire.

34:05 The emperor is a figure who emerged within a republic,

34:09 and in order to create peace after the civil wars,

34:13 those emperors had to, for a long time,

34:16 kind of pretend that they were not what they really were.

34:21 Um, basically, you know, continuing to flatter the idea of a republic that is,

34:25 you know, that has a first citizen maybe.

34:28 "Oh, no, no, I'm not a king.

34:30 I'm just, I have this office and that office

34:32 and that office." "Whatever the Senate has given me." Now,

34:35 we understand that's a facade,

34:36 but the fact that they had to create this facade at all is very important.

34:40 Can we actually just linger on that?

34:41 I mean, how much of this...

34:43 'Cause you said they had to create this facade.

34:45 Yeah.

34:47 Did Augustus, who started the whole thing,

34:50 the first emperor of Rome, did he have to act that way?

34:55 'Cause he kept acting like he's not an absolute-- Yes-...

35:00 monarch, and he could have gone hardcore,

35:04 destroy the Senate, just full hardcore rule, dictatorship.

35:09 Well, then how does he govern then?

35:11 Uh, so he wants to be an effective governor.

35:13 Oh, yeah.

35:13 And he also wants to not be overthrown.

35:16 Exactly.

35:16 Because, you know, just because you ended one civil

35:19 war doesn't mean that there's not going to be another.

35:22 You have to create a consensus such

35:23 that people don't want to have another civil war.

35:26 If he did what you said, which he in theory could have done,

35:30 but that would've just led to more wars, right?

35:33 So the problem is that the emperors,

35:35 even those who come to power through violence,

35:37 they can't prevent other people from trying to come

35:40 to power through violence because like I said, no one has a right to the throne.

35:45 We should also say one more thing where,

35:49 dare I carefully say this, but it seems like riots and civil wars is a feature,

35:57 not a bug of the system.

35:59 Yes.

35:59 This is a different thing that we have to the modern day,

36:03 is because the threat of a civil war, a violent civil war where you overthrow

36:07 the government and there's just a lot of-...

36:11 death and struggle for power is always a threat.

36:15 That's another incentive that, I guess the stick,

36:18 not the carrot, but the stick for the emperor to behave.

36:22 Yes.

36:22 It's the main one.

36:24 In other words, just take the, the thousand years that I study.

36:28 There's something like 120 civil wars.

36:31 Now, these are usually very swift.

36:33 They're over quickly, and they're never about ideology.

36:37 So they're not like modern civil wars.

36:40 Right?

36:40 It's about slavery or the rights of kings or whatever.

36:43 No, no, no.

36:44 They're solely about who has the power.

36:47 All sides have the same ideology.

36:49 They talk about, you know,

36:50 the responsibility of government in the same way, right?

36:53 They're just competing over who's the best man to do the job.

36:57 Right?

36:57 And so once you have that situation...

36:59 And it might not be a civil war, it could be a palace coup,

37:03 it could be a kind of fighting in the capital-...

37:06 something like that.

37:07 Once everyone's taken their side and you have a winner,

37:10 that's the emperor, And you often overthrow the previous regime.

37:14 I'll give you some statistics.

37:16 Something like 46% of the emperors

37:19 of Constantinople are overthrown through violence.

37:22 46%.

37:23 And that's almost half.

37:25 Right?

37:26 So that's a huge, that's a huge number,

37:28 which means that every emperor is vulnerable and insecure,

37:30 and they know it, right?

37:32 So what they have to do is make sure that that doesn't happen to them,

37:36 and the way to do that is not by arresting and executing everybody

37:41 you think might be a threat or just generally behaving like a, you know,

37:45 a Caligula or a Nero.

37:46 That will just get you killed.

37:48 Like, they know this.

37:49 So the best way to avoid that fate is to actually do the things that will

37:55 make people happy so that they don't support

37:58 a rebel if a rebel decides to appear.

38:00 And sometimes rebels would appear.

38:03 There's a kind of convention in Constantinople, like if you...

38:06 Sometimes you you think, "Hmm,

38:07 that emperor's pretty unpopular and I think I can overthrow him."

38:10 What you would do is you would march down the center boulevard-...

38:16 And, you know, you'd have your people just

38:19 call the populace of Constantinople out to rally,

38:21 to you know, maybe go to Hagia Sophia,

38:24 the, the church, and just create a big crowd

38:26 and call for the deposition of the emperor and, you know,

38:29 maybe that would hap- And sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn't,

38:32 and the rebel or wannabe rebel would sort of proceed down the Mese,

38:37 the boulevard, and people would just gradually just disappear,

38:40 and then he'd be left alone-...

38:43 and go up to Hagia Sophia as seeking asylum.

38:47 Right?

38:47 So that's a bid.

38:49 That's someone making a bid for the throne, and it just goes disastrously bad.

38:53 Other times, the people come out 'cause they hate the emperor,

38:55 and they drag the emperor out and cut his nose off or whatever.

38:58 So emperors are constantly trying to prevent that from happening,

39:03 and the best way to do that is through goodwill.

39:07 I'm trying to load in that kind of world

39:10 'cause it's a different world than we live in today.

39:13 Yes.

39:14 There's a constant inner workings of policy development inside government.

39:20 Yes.

39:22 But the check on power is, like, literal, like, we will murder you.

39:27 Yes, it depends on the period.

39:29 Sometimes murder you, sometimes blind you, sometimes cut your nose off,

39:32 but there were periods-- Thank you for the nuance-...

39:35 No, there were periods that were more civilized.

39:37 We'll just basically, you'll get retired to a monastery.

39:39 Right.

39:40 Okay.

39:40 You're right.

39:41 So here's what elections do.

39:43 Elections give a government a mandate for, I don't know, four or five years,

39:48 and during that period, you may be unpopular,

39:51 but you're legitimate, right, because of the institutions.

39:55 Whereas in Constantinople, we don't have those kinds of institutions.

40:00 We have instead an ongoing referendum.

40:04 We just call it a perpetual referendum, right?

40:07 And in fact, the emperors are,

40:09 they're conducting opinion polls in a sense because they appear in public.

40:12 When they appear in public,

40:14 everyone is expected to cheer and chant acclamations, right, like, Slogans.

40:20 Right?

40:20 So you have 100,000 people in the Hippodrome all chanting, you know,

40:24 "Worthy" or "Many years for you, Augustus" or something like this.

40:28 And if that happens, it's great.

40:29 But if you appear in the Hippodrome and people are, like,

40:32 sullen or if the chanting is a bit tepid or if they're booing,

40:37 then you know something's wrong, right?

40:39 So you gotta find out what's wrong.

40:40 It could be something like the grain supply is,

40:43 you know, not working or whatever.

40:46 And so emperors are desperate to fix those problems.

40:50 And the Hippodrome is this big gathering place in Constantinople,

40:53 which I guess a lot of people gathered at and did

40:58 this kind of cheering or not cheering based on policy and-...

41:02 and whether the emperor is popular or not.

41:05 This was democracy.

41:07 Uh, I apologize to use that term, but-...

41:09 in our conception of what that means,

41:11 because what do we mean by democracy in the modern day is

41:14 that the people somehow have a connection to who leads and how they lead,

41:20 and this is, the Hippodrome was

41:23 that connection between the people and the leaders.

41:27 Yes.

41:27 Now, we can talk about modern democracy if you, if you want.

41:29 That's a, that's a, I have, I have my own views about-...

41:33 modern democracy, and, and, you know,

41:34 how it works and how it doesn't and, anyway, whether it is democracy, in fact,

41:39 'cause there are other models of democracy, like-...

41:41 ancient Athenian democracy, which is a whole other thing.

41:44 But you're right.

41:45 So it's not just in the Hippodrome.

41:47 It's wherever people assemble in large numbers.

41:49 So this could be military mustering grounds, right?

41:53 So the army.

41:54 The army is also the Roman people in a way,

41:56 and the- in some cases, the most decisive part of it, right?

42:00 So if an army gathers together and they decide they want a different emperor,

42:04 that's serious, and that can happen out in the provinces too.

42:08 That doesn't necessarily have to happen in Constantinople.

42:11 There's also Hagia Sophia, so the people gather in the church,

42:15 or they gather in public spaces like the Forum of Constantine.

42:19 So this can happen anywhere where a large number of people can gather, and it's,

42:24 I don't know if you wanna call it a democracy

42:27 as such but it is definitely a form of popular,

42:31 mm, let's say consultation and a testing of consensus.

42:36 I'll give you another example.

42:38 So in the 1190s, the emperor, and it's Alexius III,

42:42 he's being threatened by the German emperor.

42:44 German emperor's basically, "You, you,

42:45 you pay me a bunch of money or I'll invade." Just straight up extortion.

42:50 Yeah.

42:50 Um, and Alexius decides, "Okay, I'm gonna gather this money.

42:53 I'm gonna impose these taxes." And he gathers

42:56 the people in the Hippodrome, and he says,

42:58 "You know, we're gonna have the German tax." He called it the German tax.

43:02 And there's such an uproar in the Hippodrome against this that he was like,

43:08 "Uh, that wasn't my idea.

43:09 I don't know where that came from.

43:10 No, never mind.

43:11 We're not gonna have the German tax." Fortunately,

43:13 the German emperor died and, and nothing ever happened,

43:17 but it gives you a sense of how emperors,

43:18 like, literally can backtrack when they see that the people

43:21 are against something in a matter of policy, right-...

43:23 like tax policy.

43:24 So yeah, there was this give and take.

43:28 So institutionally, the emperor might look absolute, as you called him earlier.

43:34 In practice, no.

43:35 No.

43:35 The ones that did that didn't end well.

43:40 And we should say, going to Perplexity here,

43:43 the Hippodrome of Constantinople was the main

43:45 stadium and social center of the Byzantine capital,

43:49 used primarily for chariot racing and imperial ceremony,

43:53 and today survives in Istanbul's Sultanahmet district.

43:57 And the reason I looked this up, I wanted to see how many people.

44:00 Shaped as a long U-shaped race course with a central barrier and tiered seating,

44:06 it may have held from roughly thirty

44:09 thousand up to a hundred thousand spectators,

44:13 though exact capacity is debated because archaeological remains are limited.

44:18 That's a lot of people.

44:19 Thirty thousand is definitely a pretty un- underestimate.

44:22 The Hippodrome is still there.

44:23 I mean, you can see it from, it's like satellite photos.

44:26 The shape of it is still there.

44:28 And actually some parts of the built, the, the Sphendone,

44:31 the, the sling around the southern side is still there.

44:33 You can walk around it.

44:35 And it's right next to the palace.

44:37 In other words, emperors didn't have to go far.

44:40 Now, sometimes there are events for replacing an emperor.

44:43 So say the emperor dies in his sleep, and there's no heir.

44:47 This happens in 491, for example.

44:51 And so the people gather in the Hippodrome in order

44:53 to have a discussion with the court about whom to appoint.

44:56 Now, in those kinds of contexts,

44:58 it's entirely possible that there are people also in the, the arena,

45:03 like not just in the stands.

45:05 I think some military units might have just

45:08 been arrayed there rather than in the stands.

45:10 So you can get more people than what we project might fit in the stands,

45:13 because they're not having the races on that day.

45:16 We should say, so like, I think the thing that was emphasized in the first

45:19 paragraph is the, the athletic events and the entertainment events, right?

45:23 Like the imperial ceremony.

45:25 But there is a sort of a political gathering was also popular.

45:29 The Hippodrome was not just for sport.

45:32 It was where emperors appeared before the people,

45:35 where acclamations, public punishments, and political demonstrations took place,

45:39 and where the rival circus factions, blues, greens,

45:43 reds, whites, became powerful social and sometimes paramilitary forces.

45:48 And this goes on and on and on.

45:50 So this was a place-- Oh, it's a very important place.

45:52 Yeah,-...

45:53 for people to speak to the leader.

45:55 Yeah.

45:56 Vent sometimes.

45:57 Even insult them.

45:59 Yeah.

45:59 This is fascinating.

46:00 I mean, it's human civilization.

46:02 It's converged towards a mechanism that has clearly worked,

46:06 because for the empire in the East, stood for a thousand years.

46:12 So it's, it's fascinating.

46:14 We as humans, throughout our history, we try to figure out, okay, how do we,

46:22 figure out how to govern large collections

46:26 of humans in a way that they're represented,

46:29 in the way that they don't riot, they don't rebel.

46:33 Um, in the way that we flourish together as a people,

46:37 all this, all this kind of stuff.

46:39 So this is a real...

46:40 The East Roman Empire is a real study of something that seemed to have worked.

46:45 There are lessons there even for the modern times, I think.

46:49 And modern times, again, is very early human civilization.

46:55 From a certain standpoint, yes,

46:56 we are still early in-- Trying to figure it out-...

46:58 trying to figure it out.

46:59 Yes.

46:59 Now, mind you, I'm not advocating

47:01 for this type of social organization and government.

47:03 What I'm trying to do as a historian is understand how

47:08 and why it survived and also to find the ways that it worked,

47:14 because it did work.

47:15 We know that much.

47:16 We have to start from that.

47:18 It survived.

47:18 It was resilient.

47:19 There was a lot of, you know, give and take in the exercise of power,

47:24 and I want to understand the mechanisms of that.

47:27 So if we can, before we go to Emperor

47:30 Constantine the First and the founding of Constantinople,

47:33 can we look at some maybe seminal events that led

47:38 up to some of the topics we'll be talking about?

47:41 So one of them maybe tell me if this is not as interesting as I think it is,

47:47 but the Edict of Caracalla, in 212 AD.

47:51 So this is where, You described that starting

47:55 with Augustus in the early imperial period,

47:58 government saw itself as a protector of the Roman citizens,

48:02 which is a minority of the people living in the, in the Roman Empire.

48:06 It doesn't consider the, the provincials.

48:11 And then you described that the Edict of Caracalla,

48:14 that extended full Roman citizenships to basically all,

48:20 free inhabitants of the Roman Empire.

48:23 So what is it?

48:25 Why was it done?

48:26 Why is it important?

48:28 And how did it change the Roman Empire?

48:31 Right.

48:31 I agree with you that this is, in fact, a very important...

48:34 It's a, it's a real turning point in a sense, but it also is part of a process.

48:40 So for various reasons,

48:43 the Roman polity tended to bestow its metropolitan citizenship, that is,

48:50 Roman citizenship, on its allies, and eventually in time,

48:56 on many people that it had conquered.

48:59 And it had various mechanisms for doing so.

49:01 It could bestow block grants.

49:03 Sometimes it allowed its generals to bestow

49:06 citizenship on people they thought would,

49:08 you know, would be necessary players for controlling local societies.

49:13 Sometimes they even allowed foreign cities to, like non-Roman cities,

49:17 to decide who would get Roman citizenship

49:21 by basically electing them to certain kinds of offices.

49:23 Like they, they outsourced a lot of this.

49:26 And so you have over time the steady growth

49:29 of a Roman community of citizens who are not all in Rome,

49:34 and who are not all of Roman origin, whatever that means,

49:36 but they, they were not descended from people who were from Rome.

49:40 And this proceeds, you know, it expands, it expands, it expands.

49:44 By Caracalla's time, so early third century AD,

49:48 we can estimate that maybe at, at most,

49:51 a third of the free citizens of the empire are Roman citizens.

49:56 Everyone else has local citizenship,

49:59 like you're Alexandrian or Athenian or, or whatever.

50:02 And with...

50:03 You're subject to those laws.

50:05 This emperor, Caracalla, now that's his nickname.

50:08 His reigning name is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.

50:12 So just like Marcus Aurelius, it's sa- same name two generations later.

50:15 Some badass names for emperors, by the way.

50:17 I don't know if it's the chicken or the egg, but just...

50:21 some epic names.

50:22 They've been remembered that way,

50:23 and so we read that back into the name—- Yes, that's true.

50:26 and absolutely, yes.

50:27 But anyway, Caracalla.

50:27 Yeah.

50:28 Yeah, so he issues this edict in 212

50:31 called the Constitutio Antoniniana, named after him.

50:33 Some people at the time called it the Divine Decree,

50:37 which basically extended citizenship to everybody.

50:39 Now, we don't know exactly why he did so.

50:42 We can guess the reasons that he said he did so,

50:47 and this was for religious reasons.

50:49 In other words, he wanted people to go to the temples

50:53 and pray and give thanks to the gods for him, for his survival out of a coup.

51:01 Which is whatever.

51:03 And it's possible that there was some kind of religious motivation here,

51:08 and he wanted everybody to do so as Roman

51:10 citizens to honor the Roman gods and something like that.

51:13 Other historians at the time said he did it for tax reasons.

51:17 We don't know exactly.

51:19 There might even have been a kind of ideology of a unified

51:24 community across the empire playing in his, if not in his mind,

51:28 in that of the jurists, that is the legal advisors that he had.

51:33 So that's possible.

51:34 But less interesting than his motivations,

51:39 more interesting are the consequences of this—...

51:43 and what it tells us about the Roman community.

51:46 So imagine a situation where, like,

51:49 no modern empire has ever done this really, right?

51:55 When what's significant about the Roman case is that not

51:57 only did they extend citizenship to everybody, but they meant it.

52:00 This is something that had teeth.

52:02 In other words, it meant that the rights

52:04 and opportunities that were available to Roman citizens,

52:07 say, in the Roman Senate at Rome—...

52:11 are now available to everybody.

52:13 And within a generation, you have a situation where,

52:17 like, all of the emperors are provincials, right?

52:21 All the most powerful people in the empire are from the provinces.

52:25 This is, like, mind-breaking, mind-blowing.

52:27 This is incredible.

52:29 The fact that the Roman Empire was able to do this, and it stuck.

52:33 They did it, and they meant it.

52:35 And they meant it.

52:36 They implemented it.

52:36 It was real.

52:37 That's, that tells you, that's an important thing that tells you a lot

52:42 of information about the populace of the Roman Empire.

52:45 That the, the fact that it stuck, that the government meant it,

52:49 that the system encouraged, incentivized the government to mean it.

52:54 It's incredible.

52:55 Yeah, and there's a law of citizenship,

52:56 and it, basically it says something like,

52:58 "Anyone born within the Roman Empire is a Roman

53:01 citizen." And the Roman jurists and policymakers who were behind,

53:06 This had some very interesting ideas about,

53:07 you know, creating this kind of community.

53:10 Look, like, imagine if, I mean, it's almost impossible to, to imagine,

53:15 but the, the British at the time of the peak

53:19 of the empire bestowed British citizenship on everyone,

53:22 including in India, and, like,

53:25 suddenly made positions of power in London available to people from India,

53:30 like, including the throne.

53:31 Like, it's just unthinkable.

53:34 And that has to do, you know,

53:35 with race and colonialism and all kinds of things, right?

53:38 But not in the Roman Empire.

53:40 So we have a situation where the emperors are all from the provinces.

53:44 The most powerful officials are all from the provinces.

53:47 And so a century later, when Constantinople is created,

53:52 this is, it's created, right, like, in, in the Bosporus, so, like,

53:56 where modern Istanbul is, in the Eastern Roman Empire.

54:00 It's created within the preexisting Roman context, right?

54:03 It doesn't bring Romanness to the East.

54:05 It's already there.

54:07 And so it's not such a leap to create

54:10 a center of Roman power in the East because of that.

54:14 And you've helped put together a book on the history

54:16 of intellectual thought in the East Roman Empire.

54:17 But this is the interesting thing here, and I can ask that many times,

54:21 but let me ask it here also, is the great man, the great woman view of history.

54:28 Were there, like, Thomas Jefferson or those types of characters

54:32 in the meetings as they're executing on the edict or developing the edict?

54:39 Is that important, or is it more about

54:40 the system and the culture and just, uh—...

54:44 is it, how important was it?

54:45 'Cause this seems like a revolutionary idea,

54:47 and when we think about the American Revolution and the, the founding documents,

54:51 it seems like a few individuals—...

54:55 were really critical about the wording of things,

54:57 and then words matter because those words create the reality,

55:01 and then it propagates through time.

55:03 Yeah.

55:03 For the edict, I suspect that yes, there were a few people who were behind it,

55:07 and quite possibly jurists, that is Roman legal scholars.

55:11 And, and 212 is in an age of very important Roman legal scholars Ulpian,

55:17 for example, and others.

55:20 But we just don't have those...

55:21 We, we have-...

55:22 minutes of the meetings for the-...

55:24 American Revolution.

55:25 Not only do we not know who was in the room,

55:28 we don't actually even have the whole edict.

55:30 We have a papyrus fragment, this is a piece of ancient paper—...

55:34 that's mostly torn and mutilated, and we have,

55:36 like, a bit of a paragraph from it.

55:39 Um, in Greek, not even the Latin original.

55:41 And it's kind of torn, but it actually preserves the key clause.

55:46 Right?

55:46 And that's, that's all we have of the original.

55:50 We have contemporary sources that mention it, we have legal documents,

55:54 but nothing like a, Like we can talk about the people involved in it.

55:59 Or even how it was immediately implemented.

56:02 Like, suddenly we know everyone in the provinces, like,

56:05 there's this explosion in the number of people called Aurelius,

56:08 because that was his Roman family name.

56:13 Um, and so when you acquired citizenship from that edict,

56:16 you became an Aurelius.

56:18 Right?

56:18 And there are lots of Aurelii suddenly all over the place.

56:20 Like, we can see it immediately.

56:22 Uh, but we can't actually see the implementation.

56:26 But your instinct says that individuals were very important

56:31 in the development of that idea and execution of it.

56:34 Probably, yeah.

56:34 Yeah.

56:35 Even though it's part of a long-term process of expanding Roman citizenship,

56:39 this was a, an explosion, not just an expansion.

56:43 And then you said that one of the important

56:45 aspects about this edict is that giving equal

56:49 rights to provincials was one of the things

56:52 that helped deal with the crisis of the third century,

56:55 and was the thing that, I think you said, quote,

56:59 "sapped discontent from the relevant populations,"

57:02 which then minimized the probability of uprisings.

57:07 Well, now that's a very long-term process.

57:09 Now, the third century is chaos, there's a crisis, it's a mess, right?

57:13 So what follows the edict is quite a few decades of unrest.

57:20 Okay, let's put it in mildly.

57:21 Let's talk about the crisis of the third century,

57:25 where 26 emperors were murdered in a period of 50 years.

57:31 Yes.

57:31 It's tremendous instability.

57:33 So there's civil wars nonstop.

57:35 Almost all were, of these emperors were generals,

57:38 and almost all were murdered by their men.

57:42 So civil war was the norm,

57:45 hyperinflation, economic crash, plus there's a plague-...

57:49 from 249 to 262 AD, which is a pandemic, possibly smallpox or Ebola.

57:56 It killed up to 5,000 people a day in Rome alone,

58:00 devastating the tax base and army recruitment pool.

58:04 And the empire fractured into three pieces, but then Emperor,

58:10 Aurelian miraculously reconquered them in a period of five years.

58:16 So just a lot of chaos.

58:18 It deserves the name, the Crisis of the Third Century.

58:21 Yeah, it's a perfect storm.

58:22 Yeah, I mean, you have a crisis of imperial legitimacy.

58:24 Basically, the army's proclaiming emperors left and right.

58:27 In an odd sense, ironically, this is in part because there are now

58:32 a lot more stakeholders in the Roman tradition, right?

58:35 There's all of these provincial armies,

58:37 and they're appointing their generals as rival emperors.

58:41 But you also have a serious uptick in foreign invasions.

58:47 In the north, you have the creation

58:49 of the Sasanian Persian or Iranian Empire in the east,

58:52 and this was very, very bellicose.

58:55 So lots of foreign defeats.

58:57 Armies are defeated by you know, like, quote,

59:01 "barbarian enemies." You have eventually inflation, and you have plague.

59:05 And so under the pressure, right, of all of those forces, it almost fell apart.

59:12 Now, it didn't actually.

59:14 Inevitably, there are also historians who downplay the crisis.

59:17 Of course, right, like, and legitimately so, right?

59:20 We must push back against every of these characterizations.

59:23 26 emperors died, bro.

59:24 What do you-- That's just the emperors.

59:27 That's just the emperors.

59:28 We should be- I'm sorry.

59:30 In 50 years.

59:31 Yeah.

59:32 Every other year, emperor dead.

59:33 Yeah, that's-- Civil war-...

59:35 that's political instability at the top, right?

59:37 But what-- Right, that's not--...

59:39 what are the l- the lives of most people?

59:40 Sure.

59:41 So if you go to Egypt, for example, which is kind of out of the...

59:44 Right?

59:45 What's going on there?

59:46 How are people living there?

59:46 And we can see how people are living in Egypt

59:49 because we have all these papyrus documents from Egypt.

59:52 That's true.

59:53 And for the most part, they don't seem to be experiencing a crisis.

59:56 I mean, this is something you talk about.

59:57 Constantine, as we'll get to him,

59:59 is one of the most murderous leaders in all of human history,

1:00:04 if you consider his own family.

1:00:07 But if you're living in the provinces, you know, there's...

1:00:12 He's not-- Oh, yeah, yeah.

1:00:14 he's not that murderous.

1:00:15 No, no, no, he's perfectly fine.

1:00:16 Yeah, yeah.

1:00:17 So it's very important to actually remember about what the actual

1:00:20 experience of the average citizen of the empire is like.

1:00:24 Fair.

1:00:24 Okay, so but how...

1:00:26 Maybe there's more we could say about the crisis.

1:00:29 And then of course, the, the crisis is in part resolved by Diocletian

1:00:35 as he does a hard reset on the structure on the Roman system of government.

1:00:39 So maybe you could speak a little bit more

1:00:41 to the crisis that's important for us to understand,

1:00:44 and how Diocletian solves the crisis in 284 AD.

1:00:49 Right.

1:00:49 So again, these are processes rather than specific events.

1:00:52 Sure.

1:00:53 So for example, you mentioned that the empire kind of breaks into pieces.

1:00:57 Yes.

1:00:58 And we have what's called sometime the Empire of the Gauls.

1:01:02 Gaul are modern France and sort of Britain, for a while are,

1:01:05 for a decade and a half or so, are kind of like this little separatist- empire.

1:01:10 So what's interesting about that is that this was

1:01:13 not an attempt to break away from the empire.

1:01:16 In other words, it's not some discontent provincials who are just tired

1:01:20 of Roman rule and wanna break away and do their own thing.

1:01:25 No.

1:01:26 This is actually just a, it's an attempt

1:01:29 by, provincial generals to take the throne, and do so to rule the entire empire.

1:01:34 It doesn't work.

1:01:35 They get only as far as the provinces that they take.

1:01:38 And the only way that they know to set up a state is to make it a Roman state.

1:01:43 Right?

1:01:43 Like, that's the total of their political imaginary is like, "Well,

1:01:47 we're just gonna do a Roman thing here." And maybe we'll get,

1:01:51 you know, we'll reunite the empire ourselves, or as happened, Aurelian,

1:01:55 that is someone from the other side, will reunite the empire.

1:01:59 But it's always a Roman model.

1:02:01 Like, there's, it's almost like there's no alternatives by this point.

1:02:05 So that's interesting.

1:02:07 What Diocletian does essentially is, The, the way I characterize it sometimes is

1:02:14 that he turns the problem into its own solution.

1:02:18 In other words, the problem is too many emperors or wanna-be emperors.

1:02:21 Because there's just more going on.

1:02:23 Like, one emperor can't deal with all these problems along the frontiers,

1:02:26 with all the political problems.

1:02:29 So what he does is he deputizes some of his colleagues,

1:02:32 people he was on very good terms with from the army.

1:02:35 These are all Illyrians.

1:02:36 They're from...

1:02:36 By the way, for a few centuries, the emperors are all from this region

1:02:40 of the former Yugoslavia that's the size of Scotland.

1:02:42 Like, that's where they all come from.

1:02:45 Well, what explains that?

1:02:46 Uh, the army.

1:02:47 Ah.

1:02:47 These are military men.

1:02:49 Sometimes hard-drinking military men.

1:02:51 Very good at their job like Aurelian, you mentioned, right?

1:02:53 So there's a series of Illyrian emperors who restore stability.

1:02:59 And the reason why there's so many Illyrian emperors is because

1:03:03 they worked their way up through the ranks of the army.

1:03:06 And, you know, the regions of Yugoslavia

1:03:08 in, at that time are sufficiently, you know,

1:03:12 economically underdeveloped that there's a strong incentive

1:03:15 for, for young men to go join the army because, you know, it's a living.

1:03:21 Um, and so Illyrians become, like, kind of the backbone of the Roman army,

1:03:25 and they're described as these, you know, tough Roman conservative types.

1:03:29 I mean, these are, you know, these are, these are tough military guys.

1:03:33 I say that to draw a contrast between,

1:03:36 say, Hadrian, whom I mentioned earlier-...

1:03:39 you know, who was a much more sophisticated,

1:03:42 artsy, poetic, cosmopolitan emperor.

1:03:44 Sure.

1:03:45 Also a hard-ass.

1:03:46 You did not wanna mess with Hadrian.

1:03:48 But, These guys from the third century are military men through and through.

1:03:52 Like, their whole careers are in the army.

1:03:54 And they have, like, the military stubble.

1:03:57 They've got these thick necks.

1:03:59 They look angry.

1:04:00 They've got their hands on their swords.

1:04:02 Like, they're not projecting an image of sort of-- Yeah.

1:04:05 calm and sophisticated, you know, bum-bum, you know.

1:04:08 So, military men.

1:04:10 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:04:10 military men from Aurelian.

1:04:11 Yep.

1:04:11 So Diocletian gets a gang of them together.

1:04:13 They, eventually there are four.

1:04:15 We call this the Tetrarchy.

1:04:18 Um, and he basically allocates them to various, um...

1:04:22 This wasn't any kind of hard division of the empire.

1:04:26 Basically, it was a collaborative project.

1:04:29 They each went wherever they were needed.

1:04:32 Uh, was it, is it fair to say that there was four administrative zones?

1:04:36 He allocated each one to a zone?

1:04:38 Broadly.

1:04:38 I'd say more military zones.

1:04:40 Okay.

1:04:41 Um, so the administration tends to operate,

1:04:43 it kind of humming along in the background

1:04:45 wherever these emperors happen to be, right?

1:04:47 This is a, We're talking about a period of big government now.

1:04:51 So Diocletian creates a larger government, possibly a larger army,

1:04:54 and in order to pay for that, you

1:04:56 need more systematic and effective taxation-- Mm-hmm.

1:04:59 which means you need more census,

1:05:00 you need more bureaucracy, you need more collect...

1:05:02 You know?

1:05:03 So it is an era of bigger government.

1:05:05 So just to linger on that point-- Yeah.

1:05:07 is it fair to say that Diocletian created the deep state?

1:05:10 Quote, "deep state." So the tax collectors, the, the logistics,

1:05:15 the thing that you've kinda hinted at, which is

1:05:17 the separation of the civil and the military layer of society.

1:05:22 So the concept of a deep state, I've had discussions about that with experts who

1:05:26 work on the idea of the deep state,

1:05:29 and I'm not sure that I would characterize the Roman Empire that way,

1:05:34 in part because while you do have big government,

1:05:36 you do have bureaucracy, you have,

1:05:38 you have bureaucrats who are buried in various echelons, and you know,

1:05:41 nobody knows exactly what they're doing and things like that, you know,

1:05:45 I have not come across the idea of some sort of sinister elements,

1:05:49 you know, who are working within

1:05:52 the administrative apparatus to undermine the emperor.

1:05:58 Like, from a distance occasionally,

1:05:59 you might get glimpses of this kind of thing.

1:06:02 Diocletian, for example,

1:06:03 once complained that, "Nobody ever tells me anything." In other words,

1:06:05 like, he's so removed-...

1:06:07 in part from the realities of what's going on on the ground that he,

1:06:11 felt sometimes he'd lost touch.

1:06:13 But I don't find this kind of idea

1:06:16 of of undermining imperial power from within the bureaucracy.

1:06:21 Yeah, I think the, one of the ways to explain that is because, so, you know,

1:06:25 in the modern day, democracy in quotes,

1:06:28 there's a kind of temporary nature to the leader at the top.

1:06:32 So it's incentivized the deep state to form.

1:06:35 That, so the deep state thinks of themselves

1:06:37 as a thing that propagates long-term periods of time,

1:06:40 and then the leader is a very ephemeral short, short-term thing.

1:06:45 Yeah.

1:06:45 With a, with an emperor, technically-...

1:06:47 you can go for a long time, so it's best to be integrated deeply.

1:06:51 With, the bureaucracy should be integrated with the leader.

1:06:54 It makes sense.

1:06:56 Yeah.

1:06:56 But also,- Fair enough-...

1:06:57 also in, in, in modern social thought or, or fear

1:07:01 is that the deep state might be undermining, say...

1:07:05 Undermining, yeah-...

1:07:06 the democracy itself rather than, right, rather than...

1:07:08 It can cut both ways.

1:07:10 But there is a bureaucracy.

1:07:11 There is a big government.

1:07:13 Absolutely.

1:07:14 Yeah.

1:07:14 There's a big machinery.

1:07:15 Yeah, compared to before.

1:07:17 Before.

1:07:17 Yes.

1:07:18 So Diocletian creates these larger bureaucratic structures,

1:07:20 and these are the ones that define the society that I study.

1:07:24 So as a specialist, I focus on the period after him mostly.

1:07:29 But he implemented those to solve a lot of these problems.

1:07:33 He was mostly successful.

1:07:34 So in terms of generating revenue from a much more troubled and kind

1:07:40 of precarious situation in sustaining large armies

1:07:44 and putting down these rebellions and usurpations.

1:07:48 And he was generally successful at doing that.

1:07:53 So he created the model that they kept for the next,

1:07:57 Well, three centuries or more.

1:08:00 But a lot of the elements of that model lasted even beyond that, right?

1:08:05 Yeah, like universal taxation.

1:08:06 I'll give you an example.

1:08:07 Up until then, Italy was exempt from taxes.

1:08:10 Italy was the land of the conquerors.

1:08:12 The conquerors don't pay taxes to themselves.

1:08:14 The conquerors live off the taxes that others pay, right?

1:08:17 So Italy was this big tax haven, right?

1:08:22 Diocletian, Galerius, you know, his guys, these guys are from Illyria.

1:08:26 They're from the Balkans.

1:08:27 Like why is Italy tax-free exactly, you know?

1:08:29 That doesn't make any sense.

1:08:31 It's a very, very wealthy, prosperous part of the world,

1:08:34 and so, no, they tax Italy.

1:08:36 So now, like, not only do all Romans have the same citizenship and the same law,

1:08:40 they all have the same tax system,

1:08:43 and the Diocletianic tax code, as it were, it's not a code,

1:08:46 it sounds like a flat tax, which for us sounds regressive.

1:08:51 But by those stand- by the standards of that time,

1:08:53 it's actually kind of progressive in a way.

1:08:56 Right.

1:08:57 It means that, like, even-- Right.

1:08:58 elites paid, like, the same, right?

1:09:00 Yeah.

1:09:02 So how much of all of this, everything we'll talk

1:09:04 about in the, in the coming centuries is all about taxation?

1:09:08 I think it's huge.

1:09:09 Taxation is the heart of it.

1:09:12 So I mean, the functioning, the success, the flourishing of a society,

1:09:17 the way the government works, the way the people are represented,

1:09:20 all of it has to do, all the civil wars and everything,

1:09:23 it feels like taxation is at the core.

1:09:25 Yes.

1:09:25 Yeah.

1:09:26 If you asked me to put my finger on one factor, it would be that.

1:09:30 So the taxation system,

1:09:32 that feels like the early framework for the East Roman Empire.

1:09:37 It did create a more sort of homogeneous framework, for sure.

1:09:40 By the end of the third century, it's pretty much in place.

1:09:44 What Diocletian does is a universal census,

1:09:48 and this is continued by his successors.

1:09:50 So every taxable asset in the empire is censused.

1:09:54 And so you can now start to have a budget.

1:09:59 Now, there is some element,

1:10:00 and then you push back against that, some element of Diocletian where

1:10:05 he legally limited social and class mobility in part for the taxation system,

1:10:12 and made it, in many cases, illegal to move and illegal to quit your job.

1:10:17 For example, as I read to guarantee the food supply and land tax,

1:10:23 farmers were legally forbidden from moving away from the land they worked,

1:10:27 so the state always knew who to tax.

1:10:29 And then for soldiers, sons of veterans were legally obligated to serve

1:10:34 in the army to maintain troop numbers.

1:10:38 You argue that these were tax enforcement mechanisms, not a rigid caste system,

1:10:44 and so in practice, the empire remained a society of high mobility.

1:10:50 This is a complicated matter.

1:10:51 So let's talk, for example, about soldiers.

1:10:54 It's probably the case that most soldiers' sons were expected to succeed them.

1:11:01 Like most professions where you have an apprenticeship,

1:11:05 the son will usually succeed, right?

1:11:07 There are a number of other professions that were

1:11:11 kind of guild-like in nature like for example, shipping.

1:11:15 Uh, where there were considerable assets involved in order to secure

1:11:21 contracts for insurance purposes for the ships and so forth,

1:11:25 and it made sense for those assets to be, you know, passed from father to son.

1:11:28 In other words, and with them comes

1:11:31 the obligation to continue in that line of work.

1:11:35 Some of these things are inherently, sort of hereditary,

1:11:40 and I don't think most people would have objected to it.

1:11:44 The farmers is probably the only case

1:11:48 where it might have actually involved some coercion.

1:11:51 There was a category of farmers, and we don't know how many of them,

1:11:55 who were, for fiscal purposes, bound to the land.

1:12:00 This doesn't mean they couldn't leave the land, like physically.

1:12:02 No one's preventing them from leaving.

1:12:03 But they were fiscally responsible for providing the taxes or rents or whatever

1:12:07 because the state wanted to have a secure revenue stream from, say, those lands.

1:12:12 And if...

1:12:13 Anyway, it's, it's one of these complicated situations.

1:12:16 This did create some limitations on, on those people.

1:12:20 And it's a topic of current research, these bound farmers,

1:12:24 as it were, who are tied to the land.

1:12:27 It's more of a...

1:12:28 You know, someone put it that, you know,

1:12:29 most of the time it's people who own the land,

1:12:32 and in this arrangement, it's the land that owns the people.

1:12:36 But you're saying the bigger picture thing is that there was mobility.

1:12:39 Oh, there's considerable mobility.

1:12:40 So, so class mobility-...

1:12:41 and physical mobility-...

1:12:42 meaning people moved a...

1:12:43 And we'll see this as from the West

1:12:45 into the East and Constantinople and all this kind of stuff.

1:12:48 Oh, yeah.

1:12:49 There's tons of mobility.

1:12:50 No, no, this is not a society where people are bound really, to...

1:12:54 We, like, we don't find anybody who's, who's like,

1:12:57 "Ah, I I really don't want to be a soldier.

1:13:01 But my father was a soldier, and I'm obligated to be one." Like-...

1:13:03 like, we just don't hear those kinds of complaints- of people who don't want

1:13:07 to be a so- Why wouldn't you want to be a soldier in the Roman Empire?

1:13:09 I mean, it's got tremendous perks.

1:13:11 Right.

1:13:12 Right.

1:13:12 So can we just linger on the why is

1:13:15 it that Diocletian was able to stabilize the empire?

1:13:19 It's like, you know,

1:13:21 the crisis of the third century really threatened to tear apart everything.

1:13:25 So why did some of these things that we talked about stabilize?

1:13:30 Well, Aurelian had already united the empire territorially.

1:13:33 So this is right before Diocletian.

1:13:36 And what Diocletian did was put in place

1:13:38 a system that reduced the number of rebellions.

1:13:41 Simply by having four big guys with four armies,

1:13:44 they managed to put out all of those fires, or most of them.

1:13:48 And once you have stability, and he also beat the Persians, I mean,

1:13:52 Galerius did so starting to beat back foreign invasions,

1:13:56 that creates a framework for economic stability.

1:14:00 People need To, you know, if they're going to invest in, like,

1:14:05 land reclamation or expand production, they need to know that, you know,

1:14:10 foreigners aren't gonna come rampaging through,

1:14:12 marauding through the, you know, stealing their cattle and, you know,

1:14:15 enslaving them and taking them off to work on agricultural farms in Mesopotamia.

1:14:18 Like, they need to know this.

1:14:20 And if you provide that context of stability,

1:14:23 the economic growth, the demographic growth will return.

1:14:26 And Diocletian created that kind of, that context.

1:14:30 So that takes us to Constantine but first a quick bathroom break, if I can.

1:14:35 Sure.

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1:14:43 And now, dear friends, back to our conversation about the Eastern Roman Empire.

1:14:52 All right, we're back, and let's talk about Constantine and Constantinople.

1:14:56 Let's go to the rise of the East Roman Empire.

1:15:00 Who was Constantine?

1:15:01 Tell me about his rise to power and the founding of Constantinople in 330 AD.

1:15:09 Sure.

1:15:09 So Constantine was the son of one of Diocletian's colleagues,

1:15:12 so he comes from within the system.

1:15:15 And the system was actually designed to be non-hereditary.

1:15:18 In other words, the senior emperors would retire,

1:15:21 the junior ones would move up to the senior position,

1:15:24 and then they would recruit two new ones.

1:15:27 And they tried to skip the dynastic element.

1:15:30 So, so it would be kind of, let's just say,

1:15:34 kinda meritocratic, not whose son, you know, you were.

1:15:37 Constantine was a son.

1:15:38 He was passed over, but the armies liked him.

1:15:41 He was actually quite competent.

1:15:43 And so there's a series of civil

1:15:45 wars among all of these successors of Diocletian,

1:15:48 and Constantine emerges as the winner.

1:15:51 There are periods when there are quite a few of them.

1:15:53 There are, like, six at a time,

1:15:54 but they gra- they gradually dwindle down to one.

1:15:58 So yeah, it's as long as you have the quarterfinals,

1:16:01 semifinals, and then the final war,

1:16:03 and Constantine emerges in 324 as the sole ruler of the entire Roman Empire.

1:16:09 So that's who he is.

1:16:10 He's definitely an insider, very, very competent general at civil war.

1:16:16 And he gradually moves eastward.

1:16:20 So as he's conquering his rivals,

1:16:22 who are often his father-in-laws or his brother-in-laws,

1:16:25 because these people are all intermarried,

1:16:27 and they have alliances, and they fall out.

1:16:29 It's one of those kinds of situations.

1:16:30 He moves eastward, and by the time he defeats his last rival,

1:16:35 this uh, an emperor called Licinius, in 324 he's in the East.

1:16:41 And Licinius had his headquarters or one

1:16:44 of his headquarters at this town called Byzantium.

1:16:47 Byzantium is a city right where Constantinople was founded.

1:16:53 And it is at exactly the point where Europe meets Asia, so on the Bosporus.

1:16:59 And it's a very strategic location.

1:17:00 It always had been, right?

1:17:01 So whoever controls the straits of the Bosporus, yeah,

1:17:03 we don't need to explain how important that is.

1:17:07 And Constantine decides to create a city named after himself,

1:17:11 Constantinople, on that spot, Byzantium.

1:17:13 So Byzantium essentially ceases to exist as a city

1:17:17 and is replaced by Constantinople, AKA New Rome.

1:17:21 So it's pretty clear that right from the beginning,

1:17:24 Constantine intended this to be a kind of branch office of Rome in the East,

1:17:29 a kind of copy and paste of Rome in the East,

1:17:34 and it's a plan that his successors continued, right?

1:17:37 Now, there are a number of other cities in this, Let's say

1:17:44 in the generation or two before

1:17:46 this, that were also treated as sort of quasi-Romes.

1:17:50 Basically, there was this historian in the third century who said,

1:17:53 "Well, wherever the emperor is, that's Rome," right?

1:17:56 'Cause emperors are now itinerant.

1:17:58 They're no longer staying at Rome.

1:18:00 They're mostly on the frontier,

1:18:02 and Constantine is one of these frontier emperors.

1:18:04 They will sometimes visit Rome, maybe once or twice,

1:18:06 maybe once a decade, you know, something like this.

1:18:10 So Rome becomes something that can be sort

1:18:13 of copied and pasted in other parts of the empire,

1:18:15 and a bunch of other cities get called, you know,

1:18:18 a New Rome, an Other Rome, an Alternative Rome, My Rome.

1:18:23 And Constantinople is the last and most successful of those.

1:18:29 So maybe can you speak geographically the importance of Constantinople?

1:18:31 It's an interesting place 'cause it-...

1:18:35 when you're talking about a land so large

1:18:37 as the West and the East, with enemies,

1:18:39 with threats from all kinds of different directions,

1:18:43 the location where the emperor sits is important.

1:18:47 Very.

1:18:47 So look at Rome, right?

1:18:49 So it's right in the middle of Italy, right in the middle of the Mediterranean.

1:18:53 Very safe location in a way, but it's very far from the frontiers.

1:18:57 And this is a period when emperors need to be with the armies, right?

1:19:01 They're not senatorial emperors who are

1:19:03 sitting in Rome having meetings with senators.

1:19:05 They are military emperors who are marching along the frontiers,

1:19:11 mostly with generals rather than civilian administration.

1:19:15 So they're doing their job.

1:19:17 Like, this is the hard work.

1:19:19 They're slogging through the mud of winter campaigns, right?

1:19:24 Uh, they're not just sitting in a palace enjoying themselves when they could.

1:19:28 But Rome just becomes inconvenient because of that.

1:19:31 And if you look at Constantinople,

1:19:34 it is kind of halfway between the Danube frontier and the Euphrates frontier.

1:19:42 So if you want to prioritize the East or treat

1:19:45 it as an equal part of the Roman Empire, as these emperors all did.

1:19:48 In fact, almost all emperors who had a choice about whether they

1:19:52 would stay in the East or stay in the West chose the East.

1:19:56 There's only one who chooses the West,

1:19:59 and that's Valentinian later in the fourth century.

1:20:01 All the others understand that the East is where it's at.

1:20:04 And Constantinople is right between the Danube and the Euphrates.

1:20:07 These are two major frontiers.

1:20:09 And so it allows emperors to move between the two.

1:20:13 And also look at its location north, south, east, west, right?

1:20:16 So north, south, it is the node

1:20:19 between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, right?

1:20:22 And east, west, it's precisely where Europe meets Asia, right?

1:20:27 And because there's a break there, so there's a Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara,

1:20:31 the Hellespont, the Roman Empire during the civil wars,

1:20:35 it would tend to break there.

1:20:38 And you would have one emperor on one side in Asia,

1:20:40 and you would have another emperor on the other side.

1:20:42 And this just kept happening.

1:20:45 And Constantinople ultimately functions as a kind

1:20:48 of clamp that unifies this whole area,

1:20:53 so basically the Balkans and Asia Minor and Syria as a kind of unit, right?

1:21:01 And, you know, what is a new Rome?

1:21:04 A new Rome is, among other things, a new senate, right?

1:21:09 And Constantine and his successors recruit this new senate for the new Rome.

1:21:15 So we're talking about maybe two and a half thousand, 3,000 men, you know,

1:21:19 at, at, at its peak, and these are all recruited from all of these areas.

1:21:24 You know, some come from Rome,

1:21:26 but others come from the Aegean region, from Asia Minor, Eastern Mediterranean.

1:21:31 So these are the wealthiest people,

1:21:34 usually most well-connected elites from the whole Eastern Mediterranean,

1:21:38 and they come together and form a new purpose, common purpose in Constantinople.

1:21:43 And the empire never breaks there again.

1:21:46 Right?

1:21:46 So it, it holds together this part of the world.

1:21:49 The breaking point now, interestingly, moves to the Adriatic, right?

1:21:53 So when, in 395, we talked about East and West kind of splitting.

1:21:57 It breaks at the Adriatic 'cause Constantinople

1:21:59 is now holding that whole Eastern world together.

1:22:02 'Cause all of these elites, they now, they're invested in it.

1:22:05 They're literally investing in it.

1:22:07 They have to invest in it in order to be senators in Constantinople.

1:22:11 So that's kind of one of the functions that it,

1:22:13 that it performs, a strategic function.

1:22:15 There's a political function.

1:22:16 There's also a cultural one, but you know, we can talk about that, too.

1:22:20 But that's what you see there on that map, the northwest, east, south.

1:22:24 So just to linger on it, so you do a podcast,

1:22:28 Byzantium and Friends, but you're also a guest on podcasts,

1:22:32 and I should mention you being a guest multiple times

1:22:36 on the excellent The History of Byzantium podcast hosted by Robin Pierson.

1:22:41 I highly recommend people listen to it, to all of your appearances.

1:22:44 You have a lot of really fascinating ones.

1:22:46 But the reason I bring all that up is one of the episodes,

1:22:50 you do the fun thing of selecting the top 10 emperors of Byzantium,

1:22:57 and spoiler alert, everybody should go listen to the full

1:23:01 list 'cause you justify all the different options.

1:23:04 But Constantine ends up in the number one spot.

1:23:09 And so can you just add a little bit more

1:23:12 depth why he would be in your number one spot-- Yes-...

1:23:16 now that we're talking about him?

1:23:17 Yes.

1:23:17 It's not because I sort of like him as a person, right?

1:23:20 I mean-...

1:23:21 as you said, he was pretty murderous.

1:23:23 Right?

1:23:24 All those wars, so clearly ambitious, murderous, ruthless, basically.

1:23:30 Can you actually speak to the murderous aspect?

1:23:32 He seemed to have murdered a lot of people in his family.

1:23:36 Yes, that's because what we call his family were also alliances

1:23:40 of convenience that he made on the way to the top.

1:23:44 And when those alliances or, you know, those, you know,

1:23:48 those wives or those fathers-in-law were no

1:23:51 longer convenient or, or turned against him,

1:23:54 he had no hesitation in removing them.

1:23:57 But he's also, you know,

1:24:00 he gets a little extra bonus because he also murdered his own son,

1:24:04 Crispus, who was-...

1:24:05 apparently a very competent and popular kind of general, and we don't know why.

1:24:11 He executes Crispus soon after defeating Licinius,

1:24:15 and then follows it up with the murder of his wife-...

1:24:18 not Crispus' mother, and we don't know why.

1:24:21 The funny thing is that when emperors do this sort of thing,

1:24:24 if there's any kind of remotely,

1:24:25 like, a good reason, they'll blast it through all of the media, right?

1:24:29 Like, "Crispus was rebelling against me," or whatever.

1:24:33 There's nothing.

1:24:34 He doesn't even try to justify it,

1:24:36 which means it must have been something unjustifiable- Like, I don't know.

1:24:40 I can't process it.

1:24:41 And also, I read that the historians

1:24:44 of the time would just ignore that that happened.

1:24:48 Yes.

1:24:48 Well, sort of.

1:24:50 So when Crispus is alive, it's all, like, praising Crispus as, "Oh,

1:24:55 Constantine, you great emperor, and your wonderful son who will..." whatever.

1:24:58 And then Crispus is executed, and he just disappears from the, like-...

1:25:01 they never talk about him.

1:25:02 Yeah.

1:25:03 Actually, as another side to a side,

1:25:06 I think you mentioned, Whether it's on your podcast or elsewhere,

1:25:11 that if, if you had to have a beer with any of the emperors,

1:25:15 that you probably wouldn't.

1:25:17 So it's not like some of the most impactful,

1:25:20 some of the most influential and great emperors that we talk about,

1:25:25 they might not be very pleasant people.

1:25:28 So let's set aside whether you'd like to have a beer with these people.

1:25:31 The reason I put Constantine at the top of the list

1:25:34 is because the decisions that he made were so consequential,

1:25:36 just important, and for the most part, not bad decisions.

1:25:44 So I couldn't not put him at the top of the list.

1:25:50 The, you know, the creating Constantinople and converting to Christianity

1:25:54 and setting the empire on a path to conversion,

1:25:57 these are major, like, world history level decisions.

1:26:02 Right?

1:26:02 Now, not many emperors do that.

1:26:04 In fact, Constantine is in, like,

1:26:06 his own league when it comes to those kinds of decisions.

1:26:09 My other criteria for top emperors were

1:26:12 basically those who did the job well, right?

1:26:16 Not making, you know, these kinds of earth, you know,

1:26:19 shattering decisions or, you know, world history changing decisions,

1:26:22 but just who performed the role competently with results

1:26:28 that impacted the lives of their subjects for the better.

1:26:33 So those are the other criteria that I used.

1:26:35 It's difficult to juggle these different criteria,

1:26:37 right, in order to create a systematic list.

1:26:39 And by the way, we, historians generally don't do these kinds of things.

1:26:43 But you said it's fun.

1:26:44 It is fun.

1:26:45 It was fun.

1:26:45 It was fun.

1:26:46 And it allows you to talk about certain things that you might not otherwise do.

1:26:50 So yeah, that's why Constantine was at the top.

1:26:53 So you mentioned Christianity.

1:26:55 That was one other big component of his rule.

1:26:57 What was the role of Christianity in, in Constantine's life,

1:27:02 in the lives of the citizens of the new Roman Empire?

1:27:08 At this stage, Christianity doesn't have a role.

1:27:11 It actually took the emperors...

1:27:13 When the emperors took it on board, that is,

1:27:16 they made it a part of the imperial system,

1:27:18 then it began to acquire a role within the system.

1:27:22 Previously, it had imagined itself as having its own history,

1:27:26 like not necessarily part of the empire or affiliated with imperial power.

1:27:31 But after Constantine, it does acquire a role.

1:27:35 And so actually, one way to ask that question,

1:27:37 which is fascinating, 'cause you said that there's like,

1:27:39 there's Rome, and then there's like cultures like,

1:27:43 or traditions like Christianity, or being Greek, that kind of thing.

1:27:51 So, one of the ways to ask this question is does Christianity triumph over Rome,

1:27:56 or did Rome capture Christianity?

1:27:59 Right.

1:27:59 Yes.

1:27:59 That's a—- Which is the mechanism?

1:28:04 I would lean more toward the second.

1:28:05 In other words, that the religion was co-opted by the imperial system.

1:28:09 Now, there are many areas in which that's

1:28:11 not the case and where the opposite happens,

1:28:13 so I'm not going to be absolute about it,

1:28:15 but I think it's very important to recognize

1:28:17 that because Christianity generates this narrative of triumph- ...right,

1:28:23 which modern historians perpetuate, and it's framed in very particular ways.

1:28:28 In other words, that Christianity triumphs over the ancient religions.

1:28:31 Right?

1:28:31 So displacing Zeus and Apollo and all of that, and animal sacrifice is gone,

1:28:37 and like, that's because Christianity triumphs,

1:28:39 and that's a very narrow way of looking at it.

1:28:41 In other words, you pick your enemy, and then you can defeat that enemy, right?

1:28:46 But if you look in the other direction, there's, like, the Roman imperial state,

1:28:49 and you cannot say that Christianity either triumphed

1:28:52 over it or even tamed it or anything.

1:28:55 It actually became part of it.

1:28:56 in many ways that, you know,

1:28:59 determined its history for centuries and, in fact, down to today.

1:29:03 So this is very different, for example, from the history of Islam.

1:29:07 So Islam comes into existence without a preexisting

1:29:11 state to receive it and take it on board.

1:29:15 It creates its own state, right?

1:29:17 So the Muslim armies, they conquer this empire,

1:29:20 and then they have to sort of govern it.

1:29:23 They think according to whatever Islamic principles.

1:29:25 The Quran doesn't say anything about running an empire.

1:29:29 So that creates a completely different society, right, where, like,

1:29:32 Islam is a, is really a primary kind of identity and, like,

1:29:37 drives a lot of developments.

1:29:38 But Christianity comes into existence within

1:29:41 a very well-developed society and, and political system.

1:29:44 Now, here's the thing.

1:29:46 We don't know exactly how many Christians existed in the time of Constantine.

1:29:50 Well, we speculate maybe 10% of the empire.

1:29:52 That might be very high, right?

1:29:55 But even if it's 10%, it's not a lot,

1:29:58 and these are not, like, elites for the most part.

1:30:01 Maybe middle, you know, what we loosely call middle class,

1:30:06 a few elites, a few slaves, like this kind of thing.

1:30:10 Mostly urban, and keeping in mind, most of the population is rural.

1:30:14 Right?

1:30:14 So pockets of concentrated, you know, Christian groups in cities.

1:30:19 That's what we're talking about.

1:30:21 Not terribly politically powerful.

1:30:23 So Constantine's conversion to Christianity

1:30:24 and moving the empire towards Christianity

1:30:26 is not something where it's a gigantic majority of the people-...

1:30:30 or it's a political convenience because it's the elites.

1:30:33 It's something else.

1:30:34 I mean, it's, I mean, a pretty revolutionary decision, I would say.

1:30:38 Exactly.

1:30:39 Now, there used to be theories that Constantine did this for, like,

1:30:42 pragmatic, cynical reasons, that he, like, wasn't a true Christian or anything,

1:30:45 but there was some kind of political gain to be had here.

1:30:48 But I have never read a convincing

1:30:51 account of what exactly that political gain is.

1:30:54 We now know that there are fewer Christians.

1:30:57 They were not that influential.

1:30:59 You can make an argument that bishops are

1:31:01 a kind of convenient social influencers, you might say.

1:31:04 Like, you can use those.

1:31:06 They're not a threat to your position.

1:31:08 Right?

1:31:08 So a bishop is not gonna try to take the throne.

1:31:11 So they're not dangerous political operatives in that way.

1:31:14 But they do have some influence over sectors of society,

1:31:17 and so that might be a...

1:31:18 Okay, I see that, but I don't quite see the argument for, like,

1:31:23 going full Christian, Just to get the support of some bishops,

1:31:27 who actually pretty quickly turn out to be,

1:31:29 some of them, more trouble than they're worth.

1:31:31 Anyway, so I have not yet seen a convincing like,

1:31:36 political argument for Constantine's decision,

1:31:37 which means that you then fall back on a personal explanation

1:31:41 that he did this because he was a believing Christian, right?

1:31:45 And he came out, You know, in support of the religion that he held,

1:31:50 and that's kind of where most scholars are today.

1:31:52 Though, I gotta tell you,

1:31:55 historians are very uncomfortable about personal choice,

1:31:58 like explaining history in terms of these kinds of personal choices.

1:32:02 Because Constantine's conversion is like, it's massive.

1:32:05 It opens the door.

1:32:07 It incentivizes so many people to also convert.

1:32:11 'Cause Romans will generally do what their, you know, rulers will tell them.

1:32:16 If we've mentioned Hadrian a few times Hadrian's,

1:32:19 he had this lover, Antinous, Greek boy from Bithynia,

1:32:23 who died in an accident in Egypt, whatever,

1:32:25 and Hadrian said Basically that Antinous should

1:32:28 be regarded as a god throughout the empire.

1:32:31 And he was.

1:32:32 We have, like, more statues and busts of Antinous from all of these temples

1:32:36 all over the empire than I think of anyone else except Hadrian.

1:32:39 So yeah, if, if the emperor says, like, "This is a person who's a god now,

1:32:43 you know, put statues of him everywhere," they will.

1:32:45 And when Constantine comes out in favor of Christianity, you know,

1:32:48 suddenly people discover that, oh, this is an interesting rite.

1:32:51 It's got the support of the emperor.

1:32:53 So one of the things here, going to the Perplexity,

1:32:56 Constantine's conversion to Christianity is usually dated to 312 AD,

1:33:01 Linked to a visionary experience before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge.

1:33:05 Do you believe that vision,

1:33:07 that he had this religious experience before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge?

1:33:13 Here it says, "But historians debate both its nature and its

1:33:17 sincerity."- Well-- Do you believe the sincerity of that experience?

1:33:20 Before we even get to the sincerity-...

1:33:22 is the problem of the sources.

1:33:23 This is reported by authors writing later

1:33:25 in the aftermath of a victory when the emperor...

1:33:28 Like, one of them had a dinner conversation

1:33:30 with the emperor a few decades later, and he said,

1:33:33 "Well, let me tell you about the Milvian Bridge." And it's like,

1:33:35 okay, I'm not gonna believe that.

1:33:36 I'm not gonna take that at face value, rather.

1:33:38 It's a much more complicated...

1:33:40 You know, this is how the emperor wants things to be remembered.

1:33:43 That's different.

1:33:44 Also, Constantine tended to have a lot of religious visions.

1:33:47 He had had religious visions of Apollo before Christ,

1:33:50 and we have sources that talk about that, too,

1:33:52 that he went to this temple in Gaul,

1:33:54 and Apollo appeared to him in the form of light.

1:33:57 Okay, Constantine has a religious vision every

1:33:59 time he kind of wants to shift policies.

1:34:02 And his, like, profile.

1:34:03 Like, when he wanted to break away from his other

1:34:06 emperors who used to go for the, like,

1:34:09 they went for this kind of Jupiter/Hercules model.

1:34:11 And he shifted to an Apollo model.

1:34:12 This is a branding.

1:34:13 This is emperors doing branding.

1:34:16 So we should say that, as you've described, Constantine is a pragmatist.

1:34:20 He's very pragmatic.

1:34:22 Yeah.

1:34:23 But you're saying it's fair to believe, based on the evidence,

1:34:27 that he actually converged towards being a Christian believer.

1:34:32 Yeah.

1:34:32 It's very possible, in fact plausible,

1:34:34 that he thought the Christian God had helped him in battle.

1:34:38 And, you know, for someone like him,

1:34:41 that's as good a reason as any to support that god.

1:34:44 But he was not, like, a hardcore Christian all the way through.

1:34:48 He was a kind of a spiritual, religious kind of person.

1:34:52 He thought about religions more generally and just

1:34:57 converged towards Christianity as a good religion.

1:35:01 He also had ideas about what a good religion is-...

1:35:04 and what a bad religion is, that kind of stuff.

1:35:07 So he's thinking in this space.

1:35:09 He's tending not to be too explicit.

1:35:11 Depending on the audience.

1:35:13 So Constantine remains a pragmatist in the sense that he

1:35:17 doesn't want to alienate too many of his subjects, right?

1:35:20 Mm-hmm.

1:35:20 Fair.

1:35:20 Mm-hmm.

1:35:21 And so he's sometimes a bit coy or elusive about what he's getting at.

1:35:26 When he's talking to Christians, he will talk about Christ.

1:35:29 He will mention Christ.

1:35:30 When he's talking to everybody else in, like,

1:35:32 a general law, he'll just refer to good religion.

1:35:36 And it's like, maybe you know what I mean, right?

1:35:40 But he's not gonna, like, you know, come to Jesus.

1:35:43 Yeah.

1:35:43 Right?

1:35:43 Yeah.

1:35:44 So even at the time when he's, like, supporting the church,

1:35:49 like, basically institutionalizing the church as part of the imperial system,

1:35:54 but he's also putting up statues of himself

1:35:57 that look like Apollo in Constantinople, right?

1:35:59 So the focal point of Constantine's Constantinople is the Forum of Constantine.

1:36:04 And in the middle is this very tall column,

1:36:07 and it has a colossal statue of Constantine on top, gilded, enormous thing.

1:36:12 I don't know, like, eight meters tall or whatever.

1:36:15 But it's a repurposed Apollo.

1:36:17 It's even, it, like, visibly so.

1:36:19 It's naked.

1:36:20 It has the rays coming out of the-...

1:36:22 head, right?

1:36:23 Right.

1:36:23 And everybody knew it was an Apollo.

1:36:25 So that's Constantine in the guise of his old patron god, Apollo.

1:36:30 Still, but he's still Christian Constantine,

1:36:31 so he's sending all of these different messages.

1:36:35 I mean, he likes being the god-like figure.

1:36:37 I mean, that whole statue just is like, "I am the god."- Yeah.

1:36:41 It's assimilating yourself to...

1:36:42 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:36:44 And I mean, a lot of the Romans, is it fair to say,

1:36:46 kinda saw the emperor a little bit in that light?

1:36:48 No, yeah.

1:36:48 Oh, yeah.

1:36:49 They called him divine and-...

1:36:50 yeah.

1:36:51 There's not a hard theology there, right?

1:36:52 Like, if you pressed them on the actual theology, they wouldn't-...

1:36:56 they wouldn't say the emperor is a god.

1:36:58 No.

1:36:59 This is mushy.

1:37:00 This gets very, very mushy.

1:37:02 But I mean, a lot of the Christians have a kinda humility before God.

1:37:07 I think when you have an emperor that's god-like, it gets a little weird-- Yes.

1:37:12 Yes-...

1:37:13 in the way you talk about God.

1:37:15 It depends on the context.

1:37:16 Like, there are contexts in which you

1:37:18 are an emperor and you're proclaiming your majesty,

1:37:20 and then there are more personal contexts

1:37:22 where you might be more humble because,

1:37:25 I don't know, you're being baptized or something.

1:37:27 Like, those are different contexts.

1:37:30 So can you speak to the whole

1:37:31 process of the conversion to Christianity, of the-...

1:37:34 propagation of Christianity throughout the empire

1:37:35 and, and Constantine's role in that?

1:37:38 Constantine, or his successors as well, because this was a gradual process,

1:37:42 and it takes a very long time.

1:37:45 So let's, Let's put it into perspective.

1:37:49 We probably can't talk about a majority Christian

1:37:52 society until maybe the 5th century, or early 5th-...

1:37:57 mid-5th.

1:37:58 We don't have data, obviously.

1:38:01 And we can't talk about, like,

1:38:03 a solidly Christian society until early 6th century.

1:38:06 And by solidly, I mean maybe where the non-Christians are 10, 15%, right?

1:38:12 So that's a long time.

1:38:15 That's, like, five centuries after Jesus.

1:38:17 That's half a millennium.

1:38:19 So we're talking about a half a millennial process here.

1:38:23 It's, it's very long.

1:38:25 But it's only a couple of centuries after Constantine.

1:38:28 So it takes-...

1:38:30 about two centuries to really make the Roman Empire Christian- Yes.

1:38:35 So very slow conversion, maybe, maybe up to 10% tops under Constantine.

1:38:40 Then obviously larger and larger groups join the church,

1:38:44 even if only nominally, right?

1:38:46 Until you get to the sixth century

1:38:48 when you're clearly talking about a, you know,

1:38:51 mostly or overwhelmingly Christian society.

1:38:54 A lot of this is just done through incentives and disincentives, right?

1:38:59 So bishops are given funds with which to distribute,

1:39:03 like, charity and help to communities in distress.

1:39:07 They have lists of widows and whatever they support.

1:39:11 Land is given to the church by the emperors or in wills

1:39:15 so that they can engage in this kind of social policy.

1:39:18 And then there are disincentives.

1:39:20 So emperors pass laws that increasingly

1:39:22 restrict the exercise of traditional religion.

1:39:25 Like, you can't perform animal sacrifices,

1:39:27 then you can't start doing these like tying ribbons to make wishes or, like,

1:39:31 all of these things,

1:39:33 like going out to sacred trees and doing this or that, because they say,

1:39:36 "Oh, this is kind of nefarious business," or, like, magic or whatever it is.

1:39:41 And then they just gradually start outlawing it more and more,

1:39:44 putting restrictions on, like,

1:39:45 if you're not a Christian, you can't hold these high offices or you can't...

1:39:49 Your...

1:39:50 There's problems with your wills.

1:39:52 So they gradually do it like that.

1:39:54 And this is how you...

1:39:56 Yeah, this is...

1:39:56 And it works.

1:39:57 It works.

1:39:59 What explains the success of Christianity after Constantine?

1:40:02 Why was it, as a technology, so successful at spreading throughout the empire?

1:40:09 Christianity developed in a number of ways.

1:40:13 So it acquired a certain number of forms

1:40:15 that were capable of appealing to different constituencies.

1:40:20 In other words, there was an intellectual side to it, The sort of theology,

1:40:28 the almost quasi-philosophical or engagement with philosophical

1:40:31 schools that could draw in, let's say, intellectuals.

1:40:35 There is a, a public ceremony and ritual aspect where

1:40:40 you can organize communities and cities to have processions or, like,

1:40:46 have ho- all these festivals that take the place of the ancient ones.

1:40:50 You have a kind of not, it's not secretive,

1:40:56 but it's kind of this initiatory aspect where there's

1:40:59 this baptism and you learn a sort of creed,

1:41:03 and you're initiated into the religion

1:41:05 with the prospect of a personal afterlife, right?

1:41:08 And that appeals to other kinds of people.

1:41:11 There's also ways in which it it integrated

1:41:15 itself into the court and the language of power.

1:41:19 Also in the army, right?

1:41:20 Soldiers now swear an oath to the Trinity, right?

1:41:23 So it takes all of these different forms

1:41:26 that enable it to position itself, you know,

1:41:30 here and there and, you know, in the streets, in the court,

1:41:33 in the armies, in the churches, in texts, in books.

1:41:37 And so it has this kind of manifold diversity,

1:41:41 right, that makes it very adaptable.

1:41:44 So one of the things you mentioned that Constantine did not anticipate,

1:41:49 did not realize that Christianity creates divisions between various groups.

1:41:53 So in part, this happens when you have,

1:41:57 Religions that make exclusive claims, right?

1:42:00 Like, my beliefs are true-...

1:42:02 and yours are by definition false.

1:42:04 Not, not just wrong, but false and even kinda evil.

1:42:08 Like maybe-...

1:42:09 Satan put them in your mind to-...

1:42:11 lead you astray, right?

1:42:12 And this is inherently divisive.

1:42:14 Like, it is.

1:42:15 So there's this paradox where Christianity,

1:42:19 in contrast to, say, the ancient religions,

1:42:22 is both far more polarizing but also far more

1:42:27 powerful as a unifying force at the same time, right?

1:42:32 So ancient religions tended not to produce this kind of conflict or identities,

1:42:37 right, or, or wars or these kinds of things.

1:42:40 And they could under certain circumstances, but for the most part,

1:42:43 they were not drivers of history in this kind of way.

1:42:47 But when you have exclusive claims,

1:42:49 then suddenly these very communities of, that are

1:42:52 sort of consolidated and have this very strong identity,

1:42:57 But you also alienate other groups-...

1:43:00 that you then are in conflict with.

1:43:03 So this is why I for one can't come down on whether, you know,

1:43:07 Christianity is more of a unifying force or a divisive

1:43:10 force in the history of the Eastern Empire, because it's, it's both.

1:43:14 And also trying to figure out whether the unifying

1:43:17 or the divisive aspects are a feature or a bug.

1:43:21 Maybe some of the divisive elements is a way

1:43:24 for society internally to try to, much like the civil wars,

1:43:28 to try to figure itself out.

1:43:31 Yes.

1:43:31 So sometimes tension and conflict is a good

1:43:34 mechanism for figuring out what do the people want.

1:43:37 Or what's the truth, right?

1:43:38 Or what's the truth.

1:43:39 Yeah.

1:43:40 So the story that it likes to tell itself is that there's this, like,

1:43:44 this one original truth,

1:43:46 and the hardcore of true believers is defending that truth at every

1:43:50 moment against all of these evil heretics who are coming in-...

1:43:53 and trying to corrupt it.

1:43:54 In reality, what happens is that this truth is

1:43:56 something that's evolving in the course of the controversies.

1:44:01 And, like, often they don't know that they believed that until in retrospect,

1:44:06 once they've had the fight and the winner has this position,

1:44:10 oh, now that turns out to have been the position we always held, right?

1:44:14 And this happens again and again and again.

1:44:16 You know, a lot of the time,

1:44:18 these Christian theologians who get into so much trouble

1:44:21 and get branded as heretics and sometimes get sent into exile,

1:44:24 they didn't mean any harm.

1:44:27 They often just were stating what they thought everybody believed.

1:44:31 And then when they blurt it out,

1:44:32 someone is like, off in Alexandria, is like, "What?

1:44:34 That's heresy." And then now you're, now you're in trouble.

1:44:37 Now you're getting into this fight, and you might win, you might lose.

1:44:39 But, like, a lot of them were kind of sort of well-intentioned in that way,

1:44:43 or they had no intention of starting a fight.

1:44:46 But there's always someone who wants to start a fight.

1:44:50 Yeah, I mean, sometimes the fights are extremely intense over

1:44:53 things that I could see on the surface or, like, iconography.

1:44:57 It's like, it seems like a very subtle- ...debate, like almost academic.

1:45:03 And then a large number of people don't see it as academic.

1:45:08 They, they do see it like the devil

1:45:10 put ideas in your head that are- ...completely wrong,

1:45:12 and it's, it's fascinating how that kind of division can emerge.

1:45:17 Uh, I mean, I— The impossible question, and I apologize for asking it,

1:45:21 but maybe just worthwhile to try to think about it is,

1:45:25 on the grand scale of centuries of the East Roman Empire,

1:45:30 is religion a constructive or a destructive force for the empire?

1:45:37 Did it help it flourish, or did it hold it back?

1:45:41 This society identified itself increasingly with what it saw as orthodoxy.

1:45:47 Orthodoxy just means correct belief.

1:45:48 I mean— ...like every religion ultimately thinks it's orthodox, right?

1:45:52 That's— But that's the conventional name, right?

1:45:55 Orthodoxy today might be called Greek Orthodoxy.

1:45:57 Um, and I mean, it's such an essential part of the culture.

1:46:03 It really is.

1:46:04 I can't think of the two of them inde...

1:46:07 I mean, I try to because, as a historian, I have to test the models,

1:46:11 you know, and try to see these things as independent of each other.

1:46:15 But ultimately, it's very difficult to disentangle them,

1:46:19 and I would say that to the degree

1:46:22 that this is a successful society historically,

1:46:26 that its religion definitely contributed to that and played a role in it.

1:46:29 Not without cost, right?

1:46:31 There are, it mattered to them.

1:46:34 They valued it, but things that matter to you have a cost.

1:46:38 And they paid that price.

1:46:40 They were willing to pay that price for it.

1:46:43 For example, at the very end, they had to choose between Catholicism,

1:46:48 Western rule, where they essentially have to compromise on their faith,

1:46:53 or rule by Muslims, the Turks,

1:46:55 where they would not have to compromise their faith.

1:46:59 And some of them were explicit that they were preferring option B,

1:47:03 because the Turks will at least respect our identity.

1:47:07 Like, that's a cost.

1:47:10 Yeah.

1:47:10 But there's other layers,

1:47:11 like taxation and- ...the, the functions of government—...

1:47:15 that are connected to religion to the degree it interacts with the tax system.

1:47:20 But it feels like that's the engine of the society

1:47:24 and religion is more like the cultural layer.

1:47:27 Yeah.

1:47:27 So this is why I said that I try in thinking

1:47:32 of the models that we use to understand the society,

1:47:35 not to assume that religion is everywhere and for everything.

1:47:40 Now, I have colleagues who do that, and I

1:47:43 would disagree with them about this, but you're exactly right.

1:47:45 There are elements of this society that I like to see as their own thing.

1:47:50 Like the Roman identity, for example.

1:47:52 It's not the same as Orthodoxy.

1:47:56 But also the operations of the state.

1:47:59 Those are very pragmatic things,

1:48:01 and you see them intersect with religion in, largely in areas

1:48:06 of terminology or the vocabulary that they use or, you know,

1:48:09 like at the top, but not at their actual functioning.

1:48:14 So in my field, I'm a historian who's

1:48:17 tried to promote other aspects of the culture

1:48:21 as having a kind of integrity of their own

1:48:24 and not to subsume them all within Orthodoxy.

1:48:28 So, I mean, again, an impossible way of asking the same question.

1:48:32 If you asked a Roman, a million Romans across a thousand years,

1:48:39 "Are you a Roman or a Christian?" What would be the answer for that?

1:48:46 Oh, both.

1:48:46 Oh, absolutely.

1:48:47 No, you don't get to say both.

1:48:48 You're not allowed to do that.

1:48:49 Why not?

1:48:50 It's the-- Well, you're-- It's the true answer.

1:48:52 Okay.

1:48:52 So you're saying they're really tied together.

1:48:56 Well, they overlap.

1:48:57 But if you were to...

1:48:59 And this might be a somewhat more subtle

1:49:02 conversation than most of them would want to have, but if you were to say,

1:49:06 "Is Roman and Christian the same thing to you?"

1:49:08 If they thought about it for a little while, they'd quickly be able to say no.

1:49:14 Because there were, I mean, just logically,

1:49:17 there were Christians who were not Romans.

1:49:20 The Bulgarians or the Rus or, you know, whoever.

1:49:24 There were lots of Christians who were not Roman,

1:49:26 and they did not regard them as Roman just because they were Christian.

1:49:30 Conversely, they knew perfectly well that there

1:49:33 had been Romans who were not Christians, and they knew this how?

1:49:35 Because in the churches like almost every week,

1:49:38 they celebrated martyrs who had been killed by the Roman emperors in the past.

1:49:43 And so it was, like, the performance of violence by Roman

1:49:47 emperors against Christians was something they remember.

1:49:50 They knew perfectly well.

1:49:51 So those two things did not overlap perfectly.

1:49:55 And there were some contexts in which you would be more Roman,

1:49:58 and there were some contexts in which you would be more Christian.

1:50:02 And you find characters who, and I love to do this.

1:50:05 I find characters who,

1:50:07 As some sources say we didn't pay too much attention to Christian things.

1:50:11 Like, they were just politicians.

1:50:12 They were just doing their work.

1:50:14 And then you find characters who, like, devote themselves.

1:50:17 They go all in on Orthodoxy and, like,

1:50:20 monasticism and they just don't care about the Roman stuff at all.

1:50:25 And that is, in fact, part of the reason why I like this society,

1:50:28 is because it has these kinds of options for people to choose.

1:50:31 And there's another one.

1:50:32 There's the Greek stuff, too,

1:50:33 because their language is Greek, their literature is Greek,

1:50:35 and so there are people in the society who go all in on the Greek stuff.

1:50:39 Right?

1:50:40 And I see this society as this kind of laboratory

1:50:44 of these three elements coexisting in these fascinating combinations.

1:50:48 Usually it's combinations, right?

1:50:51 But sometimes you'll find people who are like,

1:50:53 kinda try to be purists in one way or another.

1:50:56 And it's the only society in history in which you can do

1:51:00 this, 'cause it's the only society that's Roman and Christian and Greek.

1:51:04 But in different ways, right?

1:51:06 Yeah, unfortunately, I think it's tempting,

1:51:08 but it's probably impossible to say if we remove the taxation system,

1:51:12 would the, would Roman Empire be more or less successful?

1:51:15 If we removed religion, would it be more or less successful?

1:51:18 Right.

1:51:19 If we removed, uh, Greek and kept it Latin all the way through,

1:51:26 would it be more or less successful?

1:51:28 It's probably impossible to do this kind

1:51:30 of analysis 'cause they're all so deeply integrated.

1:51:34 And fundamentally, it also wouldn't be what it was.

1:51:37 It would be something different.

1:51:39 But there is a big temptation, and this is at the core of your work,

1:51:42 and to understand why did the East Roman Empire last as long as it did.

1:51:48 And why did the broader Roman Empire last as long as it did?

1:51:51 Yeah.

1:51:51 'Cause it's, it is one of, if not the most successful empires

1:51:56 in terms of duration and stability in a very dense part of the world.

1:52:02 That's actually like my next project.

1:52:04 I'm starting to write a book trying to explain

1:52:07 just kind of from an analytical standpoint why.

1:52:11 How did it last so long?

1:52:13 Yeah.

1:52:13 A lot of your work kinda hints at it.

1:52:15 Yeah.

1:52:15 It's here and there.

1:52:16 But you're trying to do more, more systematic.

1:52:19 So, and we'll keep hinting at it.

1:52:21 Yes.

1:52:22 But to put a bow tie on Constantinople,

1:52:24 it went from a very low population of maybe

1:52:28 25,000 people to 500,000 people in just two centuries.

1:52:33 So can you explain how that happened?

1:52:38 Well, it didn't happen through just demographic

1:52:41 growth and reproduction in the city itself.

1:52:43 That rate of growth is impossible for an ancient city.

1:52:47 So when I say 20,000, 25,000,

1:52:49 that's possibly what the ancient city of Byzantium had-...

1:52:54 when Constantine decided to found Constantinople,

1:52:55 and it grew to a city of a half a million in two centuries.

1:52:58 That can only have been done in one way,

1:53:02 and that is immigration from the provinces.

1:53:05 So people must have been moving there, In large numbers,

1:53:12 Which is a movement that we can't see very clearly in the sources,

1:53:16 but we have to infer it and then try to explain it.

1:53:20 So, Also there's another factor, which is that ancient cities we now know

1:53:26 or suspect are what some historians call death traps.

1:53:30 In other words, the density of disease is such

1:53:34 that ancient cities probably are losing something like 1,

1:53:39 2, possibly 3% of their population per year.

1:53:43 So just in order to stay with a stable population, they have to import people.

1:53:49 Right?

1:53:49 Now, they're not like 17th century London.

1:53:52 They're not that bad.

1:53:54 Do diseases and plagues seem to be prevalent?

1:53:57 Oh, yeah.

1:53:57 Now, you know, Roman cities have some corrections for these sorts of things,

1:54:01 like the way they distribute the water through the city.

1:54:04 Anyway, they, they weren't as bad as they could've been, but there's that.

1:54:09 So not only to keep the population steady,

1:54:12 but to expand it so dramatically means that a lot

1:54:15 of people are coming in from the provinces, mostly the Greek-speaking provinces.

1:54:20 So you know, Greece, Asia Minor,

1:54:22 and some of the major cities in the East that are Greek speaking.

1:54:26 And I start to wonder like, well, how did this happen?

1:54:30 Like, who are these people, for one thing?

1:54:33 And then I did some simple calculations.

1:54:35 So I mentioned earlier that we have

1:54:37 something like two and a half thousand senators-...

1:54:40 Who are required initially to reside in Constantinople.

1:54:44 Well, senators don't live in bachelor pads.

1:54:47 Senators have manners.

1:54:48 They have household staff, right?

1:54:50 In Rome at the time, there's a calculation that a senatorial

1:54:55 household was something like 100 people, right?

1:54:58 Just servants, slaves, dancing girls, cooks, barbers, whatever, right?

1:55:05 So let's assume sort of conservatively

1:55:07 that in Constantinople it's only 30 people, which it might be low, right?

1:55:11 So if you do the math, you're starting to get something like,

1:55:15 I mean, closer to 100,000 people, right?

1:55:19 And that's just by bringing in senators.

1:55:22 Right?

1:55:22 They come with people.

1:55:24 So I think this was the nucleus of the population.

1:55:30 Now then Constantine also makes provision for possibly up

1:55:34 to like 200,000 people to receive the grain dole, the bread.

1:55:40 So that would've incentivized even more people to travel

1:55:45 there because there are-- So you get free bread.

1:55:48 Yes.

1:55:48 And you can't live on that alone, but it is, it's something.

1:55:51 Incentive.

1:55:51 Is it true that he diverted resources from Rome to Constantinople?

1:55:56 Absolutely.

1:55:56 Oh, yeah.

1:55:57 That grain, that's coming from Egypt.

1:55:59 So New Rome is literally stealing food from the mouth of Old Rome.

1:56:05 Now, Old Rome doesn't starve because they, they divert other,

1:56:08 like from North Africa and Sicily, you can feed Rome, right?

1:56:11 But it sends a strong signal to the people living in Old Rome that, long term,

1:56:16 we should probably move.

1:56:18 Some people do move.

1:56:19 So we know of some senators who move from Rome.

1:56:22 It sends a signal about the priorities of the state,

1:56:25 like they're investing much more in the East.

1:56:27 And that the East would be regarded as an equal parallel Roman, you know, world.

1:56:33 Yeah.

1:56:34 As we talk about diverting resources,

1:56:37 slowly the West declines and collapses in 476 AD.

1:56:44 So the Visigoths sack Rome in 410 AD, and in 476 AD,

1:56:52 the last Western emperor is deposed,

1:56:55 marking the end of the Western Roman Empire.

1:56:59 High-level question: What is the reason for that decline

1:57:03 and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire?

1:57:06 So, nonstop civil wars, as we've talked about, weak emperors.

1:57:11 There's an economic money crisis, so shrinking tax base, rising army costs.

1:57:18 There was a loss of key provinces, especially in North Africa.

1:57:23 Reliance on contracted barbarian troops as they immigrated

1:57:28 more and more into— ...the Western Roman Empire.

1:57:32 Cascading invasions, migrations amplified by Hun pressure,

1:57:37 and then the East-West split.

1:57:40 The richer East survives, the West can't stabilize under— ...that split.

1:57:48 Yeah.

1:57:48 The crux of the matter is that barbarian armies,

1:57:51 so armies from outside the empire,

1:57:53 put increasing pressure on it during the fifth century.

1:57:57 And for whatever reason,

1:57:59 when the Roman state failed to sort of suppress one of them and, say,

1:58:04 settled them here or allowed them to have here

1:58:07 or couldn't stop them and they took over a province,

1:58:10 like the Vandals did in North Africa— ...this created this kind of vicious

1:58:14 cycle because then the Roman state lost

1:58:17 access to the resources from those provinces,

1:58:20 that is the taxes, and without those resources,

1:58:23 they couldn't, you know, maintain, mobilize, pay for their armies.

1:58:28 Then they had fewer armies to handle the next wave of barbarians that came in.

1:58:33 The previous barbarians who settled kind of declared their kind of independence.

1:58:36 They also could not be put down,

1:58:38 and so this created a vicious, cycle that just continued in that way.

1:58:43 It's not rocket science, actually.

1:58:44 I mean, you can see it playing out.

1:58:47 Yeah.

1:58:47 Now, who these groups are, where they came from, why did they cross,

1:58:51 that, those are different questions, right?

1:58:54 But from the Roman standpoint, that's how it was experienced.

1:58:58 These are armies that can defeat a Roman field army- right, in battle.

1:59:04 And sometimes they do.

1:59:07 And they then settle and take over territories,

1:59:09 and then you lose the revenues, and so you can't recruit your own armies.

1:59:13 And so, anyway, that's the kind of cycle.

1:59:15 The East tried to help.

1:59:18 Occasionally, they would send forces,

1:59:19 but they were also subject to some of the same pressures.

1:59:23 Because remember, the Goths cross the Danube

1:59:25 for the first time in a major way in 376.

1:59:28 Then you have the Battle of Adrianople a couple years later,

1:59:32 where, like, one and a half field armies is just annihilated,

1:59:35 and the Emperor Valens dies, and the Goths are just,

1:59:37 like, kind of loose in the Balkans.

1:59:39 And there was then a long war with them, four years.

1:59:44 It results in a kind of truce where neither side wins, and the Romans,

1:59:49 for the first time, accept the presence of this quasi-independent

1:59:53 Gothic army in the territory of the empire.

1:59:57 This is unprecedented, as I said,

1:59:59 and it creates a lot of tensions and dysfunctions.

2:00:02 Okay, so why does the East survive and the West does not, right?

2:00:08 There's...

2:00:08 And so the— Lots of reasons that we can give here,

2:00:10 but one of them is the geography that we were talking about earlier.

2:00:14 In other words, the, without a fleet, which they don't have,

2:00:19 the Goths can't cross over from Thrace or the western Balkans

2:00:23 to Asia Minor and go plunder some of the more prosperous provinces.

2:00:28 So they're stuck in the Balkans.

2:00:31 They're gradually pushed kind of in toward the western Balkans, which is, like,

2:00:34 the worst part you, you know, at the time, like, you wanna be in.

2:00:38 And eventually, they just decide, "Well, you know,

2:00:41 it's kinda nicer in Naples." And so they go to Italy, right?

2:00:46 Just because there's just a lot more resources there for them.

2:00:50 And that's one way that the East just kind of manages to...

2:00:54 It doesn't do this deliberately, but it,

2:00:56 the geography kind of pushes these invaders to the West.

2:01:01 So that's one.

2:01:02 So geography is, some of it's sort of the luck of geography and-...

2:01:06 both of the invaders and the geography of the empire.

2:01:09 Yeah.

2:01:10 But, you know, the East had a lot of invaders since-...

2:01:16 and was able to still barely at times-...

2:01:20 survive the invaders, so...

2:01:21 And some of that could be luck.

2:01:23 Some of it could be about the nature

2:01:25 of the invaders and the, the effectiveness of their military,

2:01:28 all that kind of stuff.

2:01:31 By the way, it worked in the other direction, too.

2:01:32 So if you have, like, Persians or Arabs coming into Asia Minor from the East,

2:01:37 they usually can't cross over into your Balkan provinces.

2:01:40 Mm-hmm.

2:01:40 Right.

2:01:40 So you can fall back on one side or the other side.

2:01:44 They...

2:01:44 If you fortified Constantinople so that it's an impregnable bunker,

2:01:48 which it was, right?

2:01:50 So you're holding your command center in Constantinople.

2:01:52 You can alternate between your European or your Asian provinces,

2:01:56 depending on where the trouble is.

2:01:58 You can call in reinforcements from either side.

2:02:00 So the East does have that kind of advantage.

2:02:02 This is not the reason why it survives for as long as it does,

2:02:06 though it is a reason.

2:02:07 You know, also, they acquire flamethrowers at some point, which-...

2:02:11 those help, too.

2:02:12 Um, right?

2:02:12 Ultimately, I think it's the decision made by local

2:02:15 communities to stick with the Roman state, like, ultimately.

2:02:19 Like, they're not going to actively side with invaders.

2:02:25 And when the trouble passes, they restore ties with Constantinople immediately.

2:02:29 Like, this is their natural political home.

2:02:32 And, and that's the question that I'm really trying to answer,

2:02:35 like, why does that happen?

2:02:37 You know, we should say, just like we've articulated multiple times, that it,

2:02:40 the Roman Empire survives- So it's not like

2:02:45 the Roman Empire collapsed and another Byzantine Empire was born.

2:02:49 Really, there is a shift that happens,

2:02:51 and part of that shift is because of Constantine, right?

2:02:56 It's not just about where the capital is,

2:02:58 but I'm sure that there's just a general move

2:03:01 towards that direction from the West to the East.

2:03:05 Yeah, yeah.

2:03:05 And, and that in many ways, you know, weak emperors and the West,

2:03:10 the weak leaders, The structure of government,

2:03:14 all these kinds of elements put together-...

2:03:17 maybe demographic shifts and declines that have to do

2:03:20 with the fact that the center of the empire has moved.

2:03:24 That's right.

2:03:25 And so ultimately-...

2:03:27 it's not that the West Roman Empire collapsed,

2:03:30 it is that the center of the Roman Empire shifted.

2:03:34 And because of that, the historic West collapsed.

2:03:38 It's quite striking.

2:03:40 So for example, already by, like in the 430s,

2:03:45 Constantinople is basically codifying Roman law for the West.

2:03:49 So Roman law in Latin is codified in Constantinople,

2:03:53 and then sent to the West as, "Oh,

2:03:55 here's your law code." And this is in the 430s,

2:03:58 so after the alleged division between the two,

2:04:00 which like I said, is kind of loose.

2:04:02 It's not hard and fast.

2:04:04 In the 6th century, it is the East

2:04:07 that reconquers part of the West under Justinian.

2:04:10 Mm-hmm.

2:04:11 And not only that, he also recodifies Roman law on a much bigger scale,

2:04:15 and then that law becomes Western law.

2:04:18 So in a certain sense, Roman law as we know it comes from Constantinople.

2:04:23 It doesn't come from ancient Rome.

2:04:25 I mean, ultimately it comes from ancient Rome,

2:04:27 but we don't have those versions of it.

2:04:29 We have the East Roman versions of it.

2:04:32 It is East Rome that reconquers Rome.

2:04:35 This is a funny inversion, you know,

2:04:37 because Constantinople is situated in a province,

2:04:40 Thrace, which always was sort of considered backwards, right?

2:04:44 In the time of, like, the early Caesars,

2:04:45 if you were in Rome and you thought, you know, Thrace,

2:04:48 it was like, "Ugh." It's like, you know, some sort of, yeah,

2:04:51 armpit of the Roman Empire or something, you know?

2:04:54 But by Justinian's time, it's complete inversion.

2:04:56 Like, the capital of the Roman world, the heart of it is there,

2:05:00 and Rome is this kind of backwater provincial city in Italy,

2:05:05 you know, that you've just liberated from the Goths, and it's kind of in ruins.

2:05:08 There are wolves roaming the streets of the Forum.

2:05:11 So this is a complete, you know, overhaul of the centers of power.

2:05:15 It's turned inside out almost.

2:05:18 And I think it's fair to say that the reason the East...

2:05:22 Part of the reason the East lasted as long

2:05:24 as it did is the topic that we've mentioned,

2:05:26 which is the structure of government.

2:05:28 So can we just zoom out once again and explain

2:05:30 the key ways the government functioned in the East Roman Empire,

2:05:35 and how it evolved over the lifetime of the empire?

2:05:39 Very broadly speaking, there's civilian and military, right?

2:05:43 And you might actually add the church.

2:05:45 It's entirely plausible to treat the church

2:05:47 as a kind of government institution at this time.

2:05:51 But let's just stick with military and civilian.

2:05:55 the military is pretty straightforward,

2:05:56 would be recognizable to any student of military history.

2:06:00 This is how you recruit, organize, equip, pay, and lead soldiers.

2:06:06 And the East Roman state tends to have a larger military,

2:06:13 at least paper strength.

2:06:15 Active is a different matter.

2:06:16 Like, how many soldiers you take on a campaign is a different matter,

2:06:19 but how many soldiers you maintain, like,

2:06:21 in the provinces generally, right, is a...

2:06:24 It tends to be on the large side for a medieval society, right?

2:06:30 So it compares favorably to, say,

2:06:33 the Caliphate later on, which is a much more massive territorial entity.

2:06:38 So the military is that.

2:06:41 It can have anywhere between 100,000 at a minimum, at a low point,

2:06:48 up to maybe about 250,000 at a high point, depending on the period.

2:06:53 It's a lot of people.

2:06:55 It's a lot of men.

2:06:57 Factor in their families, right?

2:06:58 These are also, like, part of the whole,

2:07:01 you know, military economic complex, if you will.

2:07:05 And they're career military, so, like, this is their job.

2:07:08 Yep, yes.

2:07:09 And is the military for most of the history

2:07:11 of the East Roman Empire defensive military?

2:07:16 Mostly, but not always.

2:07:18 Yeah.

2:07:18 And we'll talk about Justinian.

2:07:20 Sure.

2:07:21 Um, and so then you have the civilian administration.

2:07:23 Civilian administration does a number of things.

2:07:25 Principally, it is to find the funds to pay for this army,

2:07:30 which is the single largest expense on the state budget, right?

2:07:35 And so in order to find those funds, it has to have census of the assets,

2:07:40 and it has to be able to tax them,

2:07:43 and there are lots of different ways of doing that.

2:07:45 So the civilian administration has a number of tax bureaus,

2:07:51 records keeping this sort of thing,

2:07:53 also a legal branch for resolving disputes with the imperial fisc.

2:07:57 Okay.

2:07:57 But the civilian administration does a number of other things, too.

2:08:01 For example, the whole legal regulation of the, of the empire, the courts,

2:08:06 judges, courts of appeal, Or also issuing laws,

2:08:11 keeping records, all, all of this.

2:08:14 And those are the main bureaus that have to do with the subjects of the empire.

2:08:21 The emperors obviously maintain bureaus

2:08:23 that are for things like diplomacy, right, or running the palace staff,

2:08:29 Because the palace is a huge institution, right, with...

2:08:33 And then there are a number of endowments that, you know,

2:08:36 major churches, Hagia Sophia, for example, has hundreds of staff,

2:08:40 clergy to, you know, readers to whatever,

2:08:42 and so they need to be paid, and so you need endowments.

2:08:44 The imperial household, it has expenses, so it needs endowments, right?

2:08:48 So there's a lot of land that's earmarked For these kinds of expenses,

2:08:54 that requires administration.

2:08:55 So, this multiplies, right?

2:08:56 I mean, go on and on and on and on.

2:08:59 And I'm sure the tax code is not a simple flat tax.

2:09:03 It's...

2:09:04 probably incredibly complicated.

2:09:05 So it's just like in the United States, it feels like the majority of the United

2:09:11 States is basically lawyers and the IRS.

2:09:14 That's maybe 98%, I think, is lawyers.

2:09:18 Lawyers.

2:09:19 I'm not sure it's scientifically-- I thought they shrunk

2:09:21 the IRS down now to a size that it can't, like, actually do anything.

2:09:24 They shrunk it down...

2:09:25 I thought it was just...

2:09:26 to just 90% now.

2:09:27 90, just 90.

2:09:30 No.

2:09:30 I think there is something—this is another,

2:09:34 Conversation about human nature and about the, the nature of governments,

2:09:38 but there's something about,

2:09:40 like I think it's impossible to have an IRS-type organization that doesn't grow.

2:09:47 I think maybe with good intentions because you can't— You have to, like...

2:09:53 everybody always comes to you, "Well, I don't...

2:09:56 Here's my special case.

2:09:57 I want my tax to be lower." And they kind of add another line.

2:10:03 "All right, if you have...

2:10:05 purple hair, you..."...

2:10:07 the tax decrease.

2:10:07 And so you keep adding, and then of course,

2:10:10 the more you add, the more opaque the thing becomes,

2:10:14 therefore corruption seeps in or co- you know,

2:10:17 maybe not like official corruption, but...

2:10:20 corruption light, and then that tax code grows,

2:10:23 and then all of a sudden you have these big institutions that then-...

2:10:26 encourage corruption, and then there's a bureaucracy,

2:10:29 and there's a momentum, and this is just how humans are.

2:10:33 Yes.

2:10:33 So this happens in East Roman society too.

2:10:35 I'll give you some examples.

2:10:37 So, there's not a tax code as such,

2:10:41 but what you— The way it operates is through basically exemptions.

2:10:46 So you petition for an exemption.

2:10:48 You might be a monastery,

2:10:50 you might be a wealthy la- You might be someone well-connected to the court.

2:10:54 You might be a struggling provincial village,

2:10:56 and you petition the emperor or some official, and you say,

2:10:59 "Hey, we know we had a bad season,"

2:11:01 or, "The barbarians came through and they took all of our...

2:11:03 We can't pay the taxes.

2:11:04 Could we have an exemption?" And emperors often

2:11:08 are granting these exemptions for very specific things,

2:11:11 like maybe for this year or for that tax or whatever.

2:11:15 The problem is that the emperors are discovering

2:11:16 every once in a while that their officials are,

2:11:18 are granting these exemptions sort of on their own.

2:11:20 So every once in a while, the emperors have to, like,

2:11:23 clear house when they have to, like,

2:11:26 cancel all of these exemptions and start the whole process again.

2:11:30 But, later on, when— once we start to have documentation,

2:11:32 like maybe in the 11th century, we see that every little, well, not every,

2:11:38 but we have all these monasteries, these little villages, these high officials,

2:11:41 and they all have these documents that give them

2:11:43 exemption from this or that or the other thing,

2:11:45 and it gets so complicated and that's how it works.

2:11:50 Uh, but it is the engine of society that makes

2:11:52 the whole thing work 'cause you have to fund— I mean,

2:11:55 there's infrastructure projects, but you have to also fund the army,

2:11:58 and the army's necessary to defend against all the military incursions.

2:12:03 A good fraction of the bureaucracy seemed to have been eunuchs,

2:12:07 which are castrated men.

2:12:08 Can you explain why this was a prominent thing?

2:12:12 The eunuchs are part of the household staff of the emperor.

2:12:16 So that would be like, what would it be?

2:12:18 The West Wing of the White House or something like this.

2:12:21 So they are the people who handle the imperial person, the bedchamber,

2:12:26 the organization of palace life, things like banquets,

2:12:30 you know, these kinds of things, the wardrobe.

2:12:34 And why are they important?

2:12:36 So for starters, if you're, like, physically with the emperor all day, right?

2:12:42 Like, you're handling the meetings, you're...

2:12:44 Right?

2:12:44 People can come to you and say, "Hey,

2:12:46 I need you to put in a good word for whatever," right?

2:12:49 So they can get things done.

2:12:51 So you bribe them, they get things done.

2:12:53 So they're very useful in this way.

2:12:55 They're also kind of hated for that reason.

2:12:57 Right?

2:12:58 But they're also kind of there to be hated.

2:13:00 In other words, they soak up a lot

2:13:03 of the frustration that people sometimes feel when they're not getting,

2:13:07 you know, what they want from the court.

2:13:10 Okay.

2:13:10 That's one thing.

2:13:11 Here's the other thing that's more interesting.

2:13:15 How do you as an emperor make sure that your bureaucracy doesn't displace you?

2:13:20 Like, if the bureaucracy is handling all the matters of running the empire,

2:13:23 what do we need you for?

2:13:26 Right?

2:13:26 Like, the bureaucracy can develop rules of its own-...

2:13:30 for solving all the problems for dealing

2:13:33 with petitions and exemptions and whatever.

2:13:34 Like, they can do it.

2:13:36 So where's your power exactly?

2:13:38 So what the emperors did not want is to be

2:13:41 displaced or overshadowed by these kinds of more impersonal institutions.

2:13:45 And so they would often set up, like, So this could be a bit confusing.

2:13:52 So eunuchs were perfect for this reason because

2:13:56 often their origin was from outside the empire, or they were former slaves.

2:14:00 They weren't connected to, like, networks of powerful families.

2:14:04 So you knew that they would generally be

2:14:06 loyal to you because they depended entirely on you,

2:14:09 the emperor, for their position and their power.

2:14:12 And what you would sometimes do is you'd say,

2:14:14 "Okay, I'm putting you in charge of, like,

2:14:16 this army." Literally, like putting you in charge of an army,

2:14:20 just so that you can counterbalance

2:14:22 the kind of networks of established generals,

2:14:25 and you'll have, like, a eunuch from my wardrobe.

2:14:28 You know, I'm putting him in charge.

2:14:31 And so this kind of shook things up a little

2:14:33 bit so that people who were part of a system

2:14:36 or a network could never fully count that that could

2:14:39 get them all the power that they wanted.

2:14:41 They now have to answer to this eunuch from the wardrobe who's,

2:14:43 like, outside of their system.

2:14:45 And sometimes these eunuchs were extremely competent like Narses,

2:14:49 Justinian's general, who defeated the Goths in Italy in this massive battle.

2:14:53 Like, this guy was a total hardass.

2:14:54 And he was this little old man.

2:14:56 He was very old, and he was tiny, and he was a eunuch,

2:14:59 and the Goths laughed at him, but he had the last laugh, right?

2:15:04 Is there some component to them being eunuchs,

2:15:07 so they can't propagate the bloodline?

2:15:10 Yeah.

2:15:10 They can't have their own family, so they can't be,

2:15:12 like, looking out for their own offspring.

2:15:14 They're kind of isolated individuals who depend entirely on your favor.

2:15:21 Is it known whether the castration is almost always by force?

2:15:26 There are eunuchs in society generally.

2:15:28 They're often bishops.

2:15:29 They're appointed Patriarch of Constantinople sometimes.

2:15:32 They're-...

2:15:33 they're in all kinds of positions.

2:15:35 Many of them are children who are enslaved and castrated against their will.

2:15:41 Sometimes, however, they are castrated very much

2:15:44 according to the will of their families.

2:15:46 Um, in some parts of, like in Caucasia,

2:15:50 there were some regions that were famous for producing eunuchs,

2:15:54 also in, in Persia and so forth.

2:15:56 But also, we are pretty sure that this happened within the empire,

2:16:00 because there were some families that, like,

2:16:02 really wanted to place a eunuch at the court.

2:16:04 Um, so from Paphlagonia, there were a number of...

2:16:07 This is in northern Asia Minor.

2:16:09 And so they would...

2:16:11 It was almost like a family strategy.

2:16:15 I mean, it's fascinating.

2:16:16 It's fascinating that they had so,

2:16:19 So much representation in the inner circles-...