# Byzantium: the Empire That Kept the Name

History II · Medieval History · https://tryals.app/learn/history-ii/byzantium-the-empire-that-kept-the-name

## Rhomaioi

The people of the eastern empire called themselves **Rhomaioi**, meaning Romans. The West often used other terms, but the empire saw no break with its Roman past. The German scholar **Hieronymus Wolf** coined the term Byzantine in 1557. An unbroken line of emperors governed the East until **Constantine XI** died in 1453.

**Justinian** best illustrates this Roman continuity. He codified Roman law into four core texts:
* The Code
* The Digest
* The Institutes
* The Novels

He also rebuilt **Hagia Sophia** after the Nika riots in 532. However, his reconquests drained the treasury. The **plague of 541–542** followed, devastating the population. Most of his territorial gains vanished within a century.

In the seventh century, Emperor **Heraclius** defeated Persia. Soon after, he lost Syria and Egypt to Arab forces. Yarmuk fell in 636, followed by Egypt in 642.

The crisis forced the empire to reorganise:

| | Sixth century | Eighth century |
|---|---|---|
| Language | Latin | Greek |
| Provinces | Civil and military separated | **Themes**: army and administration fused |
| Economy | Monetised and urban | Rural, soldiers paid in land |
| Frontier | Danube and Euphrates | Taurus mountains |

Under each **theme**, soldiers defended their own plots. This system kept defence affordable. It helped the empire survive the siege of Constantinople in **717–718** (spanning 717 to 718).

**Iconoclasm** divided society over the use of religious images. The **Macedonian** dynasty restored stability. Power peaked under **Basil II**.

Two later shocks proved fatal:
* **Manzikert** in 1071 lost Anatolia to the Turks.
* In **1204**, the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople.

> **Common pitfall:** Viewing the empire as constantly declining. It survived for centuries because it repeatedly reformed its military and tax structures.

## Practice questions

10 of this lesson's 14 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. The transformation between the sixth and eighth centuries saw the empire abandon Latin and monetised provincial armies in favour of Greek and rural theme settlements. What does this profound structural shift reveal about the nature of imperial survival after the Arab conquests?

A. Preserving Roman identity required freezing antique methods
B. Survival required complete cultural isolation from the West
C. Institutional survival was secured solely by religious unity
D. Continuity depended on radical administrative adaptation

**Answer:** D. Continuity depended on radical administrative adaptation

**Why:** Equating survival with inertia overlooks how institutional durability demanded drastic reorganisation. The transition to themes and local agrarian upkeep was a pragmatic retrenchment, not an ideological rejection of Rome or a retreat into sectarian harmony.

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### 2. The term "Byzantine" was used by the empire’s own inhabitants to distinguish themselves from the Romans of the West.

**Answer:** False

**Why:** **False.** They called themselves *Rhomaioi*, Romans, and their state the Roman empire. Hieronymus Wolf introduced "Byzantine" in 1557, and the label caught on partly because it let western Europe treat the Holy Roman Empire as Rome’s real successor.

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### 3. Arrange these episodes in the eastern empire’s history, earliest first.

**Answer:**

1. Justinian rebuilds Hagia Sophia after the Nika riots
2. Plague reaches Constantinople from Egypt
3. Arab armies take Syria after the battle of Yarmuk
4. A second Arab siege of Constantinople is repelled
5. The restoration of icons ends iconoclasm
6. Seljuk forces destroy the imperial army at Manzikert
7. A crusading army sacks Constantinople

**Why:** Read as a sequence, the pattern is loss followed by reconstruction until 1204, which is the first blow the empire never recovers from. Manzikert is often called the fatal wound, but the state survived it for a further century and a third; the Fourth Crusade destroyed the capital, the fleet and the fiscal system at once.

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### 4. Why did the theme system, soldiers settled on land in the districts they defended, reshape the empire’s politics as well as its finances? Select every consequence that followed.

A. Provincial commanders acquired the resources to mount rebellions
B. Defence became locally rooted, since soldiers were defending their own land
C. Armies became far cheaper to maintain in a period of collapsed cash revenue
D. The empire no longer needed to tax its provinces at all

**Answer:** A. Provincial commanders acquired the resources to mount rebellions; B. Defence became locally rooted, since soldiers were defending their own land; C. Armies became far cheaper to maintain in a period of collapsed cash revenue

**Why:** A land-based army solves the cash problem and creates a political one: the strategos of a theme commanded troops and revenues together, and Byzantine history is punctuated by their revolts. Taxation continued throughout, the themes reduced the army’s cost, they did not abolish the fiscal state.

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### 5. Complete the account of Justinian’s legal work and its afterlife.

**Answer:** Justinian ordered the compilation of the **Corpus Iuris Civilis**, whose four parts include the Code, the **Digest** of juristic opinion, the Institutes and the later Novels. Because it was preserved in the East, it became the channel through which Roman **law** reached the medieval West, where it was taught from the eleventh century at **Bologna**.

**Why:** The transmission is the point. Justinian’s commission preserved a body of classical jurisprudence that would otherwise have been lost entirely, and its rediscovery in eleventh-century Italy gave medieval Europe a technical vocabulary for sovereignty, contract and property that canon and royal lawyers both took over.

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### 6. In which year did Constantinople fall to the Ottoman forces of Mehmed II, ending the line of Roman emperors?

**Answer:** 1453

**Why:** **1453.** Constantine XI died in the fighting and no successor was proclaimed, which makes this, rather than 476, the year an unbroken line of Roman emperors actually stops. The city had already been reduced to a fraction of its population by the sack of 1204 and the wars that followed.

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### 7. Arrange these stages of the empire’s seventh-century transformation in the order they occurred.

**Answer:**

1. Heraclius defeats Persia and recovers the eastern provinces
2. Arab armies take Syria, Palestine and Egypt
3. Cash revenue collapses with the loss of Egyptian grain and taxes
4. Provinces are reorganised into themes under military governors
5. Greek replaces Latin as the language of administration

**Why:** The bitter joke of the century is the first two steps: Heraclius won the last Roman–Persian war and lost the provinces he had just recovered within ten years. The themes and the switch to Greek are consequences, not causes, the empire redesigned itself around what it still had.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-ii/byzantium-the-empire-that-kept-the-name/arrange-these-stages-of-the-empires-seventh-century-transformation

### 8. The Fourth Crusade of 1204 did more lasting damage to the eastern empire than the defeat at Manzikert in 1071.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** **True**, on most readings. Manzikert cost Anatolia and the manpower base, but the empire recovered enough under the Komnenoi to campaign offensively for a century. The 1204 sack removed the capital, the fleet and the fiscal apparatus simultaneously, and the state restored in 1261 never again ruled more than a regional territory.

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### 9. A Roman emperor reigned in Constantinople from the deposition of the last western emperor in 476 until the city fell. Estimate how many years that is.

**Answer:** 977 (within ±30)

**Why:** **977 years.** The figure is worth holding because of what it does to the phrase "the fall of Rome": on the eastern reckoning the Roman empire outlasted its supposed end by almost a millennium, and ended in a year most western surveys treat as the start of the modern period.

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### 10. Sort each item by whether it is a genuine feature of the eastern empire or a WESTERN misconception about it.

**Answer:**

- Genuine feature: The state rebuilt its army and tax base more than once, Roman law was preserved and transmitted westward from it, Its provincial system fused military and civil authority
- Western misconception: It spent a thousand years in uninterrupted decline, It was a wholly different state from the Roman empire

**Why:** The three misconceptions are versions of one move: treating a change of capital and language as a change of state. Once the empire is renamed, its survival looks like an anomaly needing explanation, and the reforms that produced that survival get read as symptoms of decline instead.

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