The eastern Roman empire at its greatest extent in 555 AD under Justinian the Great – map by Tataryn for Wikipedia “Byzantine Empire” under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

(2) EASTERN ROMAN EMPIRE / BYZANTINE EMPIRE

(330 / 393 – 1453 AD)

We’re still well above the surface of the Roman Empire iceberg here – in the fundamental continuity of the Roman Empire from its classical empire to its eastern empire that endured for over a millennium after the fall of its western half. Historiographical convention has snubbed it as the Byzantine Empire, so as to avoid acknowledging it as the glorious continuation of the Roman Empire – it just stayed more to the east and became more Greek after a certain point. But for familiarity with that convention and for convenience (as it’s shorter), I’ll keep using Byzantine rather than eastern Roman Empire.

There seems to be two recurring arguments among Roman history enthusiasts – whether one ranks the Roman Republic over the Roman Empire, and whether one ranks the Byzantine Empire over the Roman Empire. I’ll have a look at the former in my special mentions but there’s a solid argument to be made for ranking the Byzantine Empire over the classical Roman Empire.

Sure, the Byzantine Empire wasn’t as big as the Roman Empire. After its relatively brief glory days as half the former Roman Empire – or its briefer and even more glorious days when it took a damn good swing at reclaiming the western half under Emperor Justinian – it spent most of its time at about a quarter the Roman Empire. At best, that is – because it spent substantial amounts of time as not much more than its capital in Constantinople.

But for sheer endurance, it has to take the title from the Roman Empire, lasting for a millennium past the fall of the western half, including feats of rebounding from defeats that bordered on resurrection. More like Lazarus Empire, amirite?

And that endurance and those feats were achieved against a more formidable and seemingly eternal encirclement by enemies, from west and east, by land and sea – from which the Byzantines could rarely catch a break, except by soundly defeating one or more of those enemies, and usually not even then.

In the end however, the empire suffered one defeat too many – wounded, fatally as it turned out, from the Fourth Crusade that sacked Constantinople in 1204, although it resurrected itself even from that for two centuries. Alas, it simply lacked the scale of time or resources to see it through, particularly against a rising rival empire in its prime – the Ottoman Empire, which finally conquered Constantinople in 1453.