Byzantium: The Orthodox Empire
In brief
"Byzantium" is the name modern historians give to the eastern half of the Roman Empire, centered on Constantinople, which endured for more than a thousand years after the West fell — from roughly 330 to 1453. Its people did not call themselves Byzantines; they called themselves Romans (in Greek, Rhomaioi), and their state the Roman Empire. For a millennium this Christian empire was the earthly home of the Orthodox Church, and it shaped Orthodox worship, art, and theology into forms still lived today.
The empire that called itself Roman
When people speak of "the fall of Rome" in 476, they mean the Latin-speaking West. The eastern half of the empire did not fall. It continued without a break from its capital at Constantinople, Greek in language, Christian in faith, and Roman in law and self-understanding. Its citizens knew themselves as Rhomaioi — Romans — and their emperor as the Roman emperor.
The word "Byzantine" would have puzzled them. It was coined by Western scholars long after the empire was gone (the name traces to a 1557 work by the German humanist Hieronymus Wolf), from Byzantion, the old Greek town on whose site Constantinople was built. It is a useful label for historians, but it is worth remembering that it is our word, not theirs.
A Christian civilization
Byzantium was the world in which Orthodoxy took its enduring shape. The great Ecumenical Councils were held on its soil and summoned by its emperors. In its churches — above all the Great Church of Hagia Sophia — the Divine Liturgy grew into its full splendor, and its hymnographers, iconographers, and theologians gave the Church treasures it still uses every day. The relationship of Church and emperor was governed by the ideal of symphonia, the harmony of priesthood and kingship.
This was not a static or untroubled Christian society; it weathered the long crises of Arianism and of iconoclasm, and its emperors sometimes forced the Church rather than serving it. But its confidence in the beauty of Orthodox worship carried the faith outward — most consequentially in the ninth-century mission to the Slavs, which gave the Scriptures and services to whole new nations in their own tongue.
The long endurance — and the fall
For centuries Byzantium held the eastern frontier of Christendom against Persians, Arabs, and Turks, shrinking and recovering again and again. The deepest wound came from the West: in 1204 the Fourth Crusade sacked the Christian capital itself. The empire was restored but never fully recovered, and in 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, ending the Roman Empire after more than a thousand years.
The Orthodox do not grieve for Byzantium as a lost golden age to be idolized — the Church confesses that here we "have no continuing city." Yet its legacy is everywhere in Orthodox life, from the shape of the Liturgy to the icons on the walls. After 1453, Russia would even speak of Moscow as a "Third Rome," heir to the Christian empire that had passed away.