How Barbarians Renamed the Roman Empire

We call it Byzantium. They called it Rome.

That alone should make us pause.

For over a thousand years after the so-called "fall of Rome," the Eastern Roman Empire continued to function, legislate, philosophize, and pray — in Greek, yes, but under Roman law, in Roman institutions, led by emperors who saw themselves as nothing less than Caesars and Augusti. And yet, modern history books don't call them Romans. They call them Byzantines — as if they were something else entirely.

They weren't.

The term "Byzantine Empire" is not a historical name. It's a retrospective insult. Coined centuries after the empire's fall, it serves a single narrative function: to strip away the Roman identity from the East so that the West — the Frankish kings, the Holy Roman Emperors, the Catholic Church, the Enlightenment republicans — could claim Rome for themselves. The word "Byzantine" is a kind of damnatio memoriae, a political erasure dressed up as a neutral label.

And the absurdity of the name becomes even more obvious when you remember this: there was no city called Byzantium during the entire existence of what we now call the Byzantine Empire. The city had been renamed Constantinople in the 4th century. Calling them Byzantines is like calling Italians "Romans" and saying Rome is still ruled by consuls.

But let's be clear: the so-called Byzantines never called themselves that. They were Romans (Rhomaioi). Their empire was the Basileia ton Rhomaion — the Roman Empire. Not a shadow. Not a successor. The same.

The Real Greeks

If anything, this was the most Greek empire in history. Greek was the language of the court, the liturgy, the street. Its emperors traced cultural and educational lineages back to Plato and Aristotle. Its capital, Constantinople, housed libraries, universities, and aqueducts while the Roman Forum was literally being grazed by cattle.

It wasn't the West that preserved Plato. It was the monasteries of Cappadocia. It wasn't Renaissance Italians who saved Aristotle — it was Syriac, Arabic, and Greek scribes under Eastern Roman and Islamic patronage. So when Renaissance thinkers clung to a long-dead image of pagan Greece, they ignored the living, breathing continuation of it — because it was too Christian, too Eastern, too alive.

In truth, the Eastern Roman Empire was a civilization that fused three worlds: Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian theology. It wasn't a rebirth. It was continuity.

They even brought Christianity to Central Europe. Saints Cyril and Methodius, missionaries of the Eastern Roman Empire, created the Glagolitic script and spread Christian teachings across Slavic lands — the cultural bedrock of modern-day Slovakia, Czechia, Poland, and beyond.

And for nearly a millennium, they stood as the front line of defense between Islamic conquest and Western Europe. From Arab sieges in the 7th century to the rise of the Ottomans, the Eastern Romans — not the Franks, not the Germans — bore the brunt of the conflict. That sacrifice is barely acknowledged in Western narratives.

And when Constantinople finally did fall to the Ottomans in 1453, the West was shocked — horrified that the jewel of Christian civilization had fallen to Islam. Yet just a few centuries earlier, it was Western Christian crusaders who sacked Constantinople in 1204, looting its treasures, desecrating its churches, and permanently weakening the empire they were supposed to be aiding. That betrayal, conveniently glossed over, says more about Western priorities than any speech about unity.

The Renaissance and Its Convenient Amnesia

Western Europe likes to pretend the light of antiquity blinked out, only to be reignited by a sudden spark in Florence. But the reality is that the flame had been burning steadily — just not where they wanted it.

Renaissance humanists needed antiquity to be silent. Dead. Distant. Easier to admire a ruined statue than to acknowledge a living tradition. So they resurrected Plato and Cicero from dusty tombs, while ignoring the Greek-speaking Christian scholars who had never stopped reading them.

The absurdity of this rewriting becomes even clearer when you realize that while Constantinople still had functioning baths and scholars debating theology, the Roman Forum was a pasture. The Campo Vaccino — the cow field. Literally.

If you asked Cicero which city looked more Roman in 1300, it wouldn't have been Rome.

He would've booked a ship to the Bosphorus and quoted Plato the whole way there.

And while we're speaking of Roman continuity, let's mention the one institution every Roman schoolchild was taught to revere: the Senate. The Western Roman Senate officially disappeared sometime in the late 6th century, around 603 AD. In Constantinople? The Eastern Roman Senate lingered on — symbolically — until the 14th century.

That's right: even as a shadow of its former self, the East still maintained the illusion of senatorial dignity. Because some fictions, even bureaucratic ones, are worth more than forgetting.

The Fall That Started the Future

Modern historians often date the end of the Middle Ages to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The irony should be unbearable: history “moves forward” only once the last Roman emperor is dead. The empire that preserved law, reason, and scripture longer than anyone else was finally gone — and so the West declared it medieval and obsolete.

That's not periodization. That's narrative control.

And by turning a living, Greek-speaking Roman empire into something called "Byzantium," they left a dangerous vacuum — one that Russia was all too eager to fill. With no one else claiming the mantle, Moscow declared itself the "Third Rome," despite having no historical or cultural connection to ancient Rome or Constantinople. In the 20th century, Russia would even attempt to claim Constantinople for itself — a narrative made possible only because the West abandoned the rightful heirs.

A Civilization, Not a Fantasy

This isn't to romanticize the empire. It was still imperial. Still capable of cruelty, of decadence, of political backstabbing. It was, after all, Rome. The kind of place where a peasant could rise to the title of emperor through service, only to be manipulated into surrendering it back to the dynasty he tried to serve.

But that's precisely what makes it real. It wasn't a myth. It was a civilization — proud, contradictory, fragile, brilliant. The tragedy is not that it ended. The tragedy is that it was renamed.

What the West Owes to Eastern Rome

We like to think the Renaissance invented the West. But without Eastern Rome, there wouldn't have been much to rediscover.

• Preservation of classical knowledge: Manuscripts of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, and others were preserved in Constantinople's scriptoria.
• Transmission of Stoicism: Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, written in Greek, were preserved by Eastern Roman monastics. Without them, we wouldn't have the Stoic revival we see today.
• Continuity of Roman law: The Corpus Juris Civilis of Justinian laid the foundations of many modern European legal systems.
• Christian tradition: Eastern theology shaped the councils, creeds, and debates that defined Christianity for centuries.
• Diplomacy and cultural transmission: From missionary work in Central and Eastern Europe to cultural exchanges with Islam and the Slavs, Eastern Rome connected worlds.

And it gave us voices that are rarely heard in the Western canon:

"I was not born to be loved, but to love." — Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Meditations survived thanks to Greek preservation.

"We are not philosophers because we write in Greek, but because we live wisely." — Michael Psellos, philosopher and statesman of Constantinople.

"Do not be afraid of enemies who threaten you with death. Be afraid of the emptiness in your own soul." — Gregory Palamas, theologian and mystic of the Eastern Church.

These are not relics of some distant empire. These are echoes of the Western tradition — preserved not in Rome or Paris, but in Constantinople.

Reclaiming the Name

We don't call the Western Roman Empire the "Milanese Empire" because it had a temporary capital there. We don't call Charlemagne's realm the "Aachenian Empire." And yet we let the Eastern Roman Empire — the longest-lasting empire in European history — be defined not by what it was, but by what it used to be called a thousand years earlier: Byzantium.

How absurd is it that we constantly call Ancient Greece the foundation of Western civilization… and Ancient Rome the source of law and order… and then strip later Greece of its place in that continuity? As if the moment Greeks became Christian and imperial, they stopped being worthy of admiration. As if Plato and Pericles belong to us, but Basil and Anna Komnene do not.

If we had called it the Greek Empire, or better yet the Greco-Roman Christian Empire, our understanding of history would be radically different. But instead, we renamed it to erase it. And now, in a final twist of historical irony, modern Greece is once again considered part of the West — an EU and NATO member, held to the same standards of democracy and Enlightenment as those who once pretended it didn't exist.

The West forced modern Greece to forget its thousand-year empire just to fit a cleaner story of progress — from Rome, to darkness, to Renaissance. But history doesn't work that way. It's messy. It overlaps. And sometimes, it survives in places we choose not to look.

The Narrative of the Victors

History is written by the winners — and in this case, it was rewritten by those who needed to own Rome. They renamed it Byzantium. They called it medieval. They made it vanish so they could rise.

And yet, I say all this not because I hate the West — but because I love it. I love the Renaissance. I love the Roman Empire. I love the philosophical, cultural, and spiritual tradition we now call the Western world.

And that's exactly why I criticize its artificial narratives. Because truth should be part of what we preserve — not just marble columns and flattering myths.

This matters because the Eastern Roman Empire was part of the Western world. It preserved the very things that make the West great — literacy, law, critical thought, and philosophical depth.

Without the Eastern Romans, we might not even have access to Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. His deeply personal, Stoic reflections — written in Greek — were preserved and copied in Eastern Roman monasteries, handed down through their tradition. Without them, the modern Stoic revival might not exist. Without them, one of the West's most admired moral voices might have been lost.

It's time to give the Eastern Roman Empire its name back. It's time to remember that Byzantium was never real — but Rome in the East was.