Byzantine Empire

Byzantium and Christianity grow up together, age together, and—crucially—outlive one another in different ways.

The beginning of the Byzantine Empire is not a clean birth but a philosophical rebranding of Rome. In 330 CE, Emperor Constantine I refounded the old Greek city of Byzantium as Constantinople, “New Rome.” Politically, this was still the Roman Empire. Culturally and spiritually, something radical had happened. Constantine had legalized Christianity in 313 (the Edict of Milan), ending centuries of persecution, and he openly favored it. The emperor now saw himself as God’s chosen steward of earthly order. Power, theology, and imperial administration fused into a new alloy.

Christianity at this point was still defining itself. Doctrines were debated with the intensity of civil wars—because sometimes they were civil wars. The Council of Nicaea in 325, convened by Constantine himself, tried to answer a deceptively simple question: who exactly is Christ? The answer shaped not only theology but politics, because unity of belief was thought necessary for unity of empire. From the start, Byzantine Christianity assumed that truth mattered enough to argue over fiercely—and that the state had a role in enforcing it.

As the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century under economic strain and invasions, the Eastern half endured. Greek replaced Latin. Christian theology replaced old Roman civic religion. The emperor in Constantinople was no longer just a ruler; he was a protector of orthodoxy. This was the Byzantine synthesis: Roman law, Greek philosophy, and Christian theology braided into a single civilization.

Fast forward a thousand years to the ending, and the symmetry is brutal. By 1453, Constantinople was a ghost of its former self—still spiritually radiant, politically exhausted, surrounded by the rising Ottoman Empire. When Mehmed II breached the city’s walls, the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, reportedly died fighting in the streets. The empire ended not with decadence but with defiance.

Christianity, however, did not end. It fractured.

The fall of Constantinople marked the effective end of Byzantine political power, but Eastern Orthodox Christianity survived—and still survives—without an empire. In fact, the schism between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Catholicism had already hardened in 1054, long before the city fell. Byzantium’s end merely sealed the divorce. Orthodoxy became a church shaped by memory rather than imperial authority, rooted in liturgy, mysticism, and continuity rather than expansion.

Western Christianity went in a different direction. The Roman Catholic Church had already learned to exist without emperors and soon would face the Protestant Reformation. Christianity, once married to empire in Byzantium, learned how to live as a stateless faith.

So here’s the strange irony worth savoring:
The Byzantine Empire ended because it was too tightly bound to a city and a political order. Christianity endured because it could shed that order and keep the story, the symbols, and the practices alive.

Empires die when their walls fall. Religions die only when people stop believing they tell the truth about reality. Byzantium fell in 1453. Byzantine Christianity never really did.