For 25 years I’ve read about the Byzantine Empire. Now that I’m writing this journal, I realize that very few people have ever asked me why, and how I became so passionately intrigued by the Byzantines. Only a few of my closest friends and family members know about my unusual side passion. Even they don’t ask “why” anymore. Reading about Byzantium was just something I did on my own, in private, while leaving little trace evidence in my regular life. It’s a niche fascination that rarely found its way into regular conversations. Whenever I do end up mentioning something about the Byzantine Empire, or that the capital was Constantinople, the most common response I get (and I’m not kidding) is a pause and then a cheery rendition of Istanbul Not Constantinople. So now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople, and we all get that.

But how did this particular time and place in the world come to capture my imagination so entirely? Like many things for me, the culprit was a book.

I can actually tell you the exact day my fascination with the Byzantine Empire began. It was on March 10^th, 1993. I know this because the library card is still inside the book cover to this day. The book was a non-fiction work called, Constantinople: Birth of an Empire by Harold Lamb, and it was published way back in 1957. During my 1993 study hall, though, I just needed a book to kill time because I sure as hell wasn’t going to do my Algebra homework. So, I flipped through the pages, and the musty scent of old paper really set the tone. There were some black & white pictures on a few pages depicting a mosque-like building of some kind, various mosaics, and stone reliefs. I turned back to the first page and started reading:

The author opens with:

This is the story of a city built by survivors. As often happens in a great disaster, these survivors were not one people ethnically, but a fusion of many peoples. They gathered together to defend not so much their lives and property as their way of life. In so doing they displayed a certain perversity; they refused to surrender their city. They kept on refusing for nearly a thousand years. History has named them the Byzantines…

So, wait a minute, I thought. This sounds nothing like the Roman Empire I learned about in any schoolroom. The Romans were of one people ethnically, you know, the Romans, so this account baffled me. The Roman Empire was a civilization built not by survivors, but by conquerors.

The author goes on:

They were alone in their survival. In the West, a long twilight fell on the Roman Empire during the centuries between A.D. 200 and 450. It ended in the darkness of the first Middle Age. In the East, however, the inhabitants of this city learned the hard lessons of disaster, and they managed to hold back the night.

Images of invincible Roman legionnaires, of architectural splendor, and ancient decadence all seemed at odds with the rather morbid tone the book struck. What the hell was this guy talking about? I flipped to a map in the index and got a better idea. The Roman Empire had been split in two at some point, a west and an east empire. I remembered hearing something about the split, but then also realized that I never heard about what happened to that eastern portion of the empire. It was like the weird old uncle you meet at a family reunion and never hear from again.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

So, apparently, the Roman Empire we all study in school is the orange part, the western part, the European part with its iconic boot of Italy kicking Sicily, and with the familiar shapes of France and Spain leaning into the Atlantic Ocean. But there’s that whole purple side, the less European side, which clearly includes Greece, the Balkans, all of Turkey, parts of Asia, the entire Middle-East, Egypt, and Libya. Even today, that purple side includes a rare fusion of diverse cultures that actually encompasses three continents—Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The author then launches into a spellbinding account of the late Roman Empire—not in its glory—but in the spasms of a violent death throe. He painted a picture of an absolute catastrophe. I still get goosebumps remembering the tale. Civilization had failed in totality. Rome was sacked. Pillaging went on uncontested and tiny villages were left to fend for themselves. Barbarians migrated freely through the once secure interior of the empire. Imperial highways fell into disrepair. Stray cows milled about in the ruins of monuments, where nature crept back to reclaim the space. Roman soldiers deserted and joined the enemy. Noble families sailed out to escape their doom, only to be captured and sold into slavery. Like the final hour of the movie Titanic, I beheld a disaster on a scale so great that my imagination was paralyzed. And the story kept getting worse. Various people made radical attempts at survival in remote pockets…and failed. Desperate Roman emperors passed equally desperate policies in hopes of saving the empire…and failed. Finally, the black shadow of the Dark Ages truly descended upon a world that had actually lost the ability to function or even exist. I was amazed at such a thorough regression of a flagship human civilization.

But in the East, on the side of the world we rarely talked about in class, I suddenly discovered that half of the Roman Empire survived. That purple section had a history of its own, and it deviated quite a bit from the Roman Empire I understood. A man named Constantine won a civil war and became a Roman Emperor. He saw the writing on the wall that the Roman Empire was in dire straits.  He built a city from scrap in the year 324 C.E. and turned the small fishing village of Byzantium into the City of Constantine, a sister capital of a Roman Empire. The eastern empire was a second, bizarre Roman Empire that was divorced from Europe and didn’t even include the ancestral capital of Rome. The citizens spoke mostly Greek, not Latin. They were Christian, not pagan. They were the former conquered provinces, not the founding homeland. And from the ashes of the fallen Western Empire, I discovered that this eastern Frankenstein remnant of the Roman Empire would come to be known as the Byzantine Empire. These people and their empire would come to dominate the Medieval Era as the superpower of the world, exploding in culture, influence, and art. They had little in common with the Dark Age and barbarism occurring in Europe. Moreover, the Byzantine Empire would go on ‘surviving’ for over a thousand years, making it one of the longest-lived civilizations ever. It lasted until the year 1453.

In one quick stroke, my study hall that day shattered everything I thought I knew about the Roman Empire, of Western civilization, and my belief that all of history represented steady upward progress. I never considered that we could lose it all and even regress.

I was so enchanted by the world I found in those pages that my 17-year old self, in all his wisdom, pretended to lose the library book rather than return it. I paid the $18 lost fee and proceeded to horde this book my whole life.

In these pages, I met a beautiful cast of real-life people I’d otherwise never heard of, heroes and heroines who called themselves Roman but wore eastern, almost Asian-looking gowns and gaudy bejeweled crowns. In my 20’s I was mostly captivated by a young Byzantine general, named Belisarius. He was Justinian’s prime general and is considered a military savant. In his early 30’s, he goes on to accomplish some military feats that are so amazing that he’s still considered one of the top generals in all human history. Google ‘top 100 generals of all time.’ Click on the first link, and you’ll find him under the Medieval Era. Click on the second link, and you’ll find him ranked #9 all time, etc. Again, to my shock, I learned something that I never heard about in school. Remember that colorful map I included above? The one with the half orange, half purple Roman empire? Well, Belisarius manages to reconquer the entire orange section, including the old capital of Rome, herself. And for a generation, the entire Roman Empire was united once again, a truly impossible thing to believe. The battles he fought made him a poster child of a civilized world that fought back now against the hordes of barbarian armies, outnumbered, yet winning in the most ingenious ways. Civilization made a comeback under the command of General Belisarius.

Can you imagine…sixty years after the tragic fall of Rome…the sight of a Roman army marching through the Tuscan hills, returning after all these years to liberate the mother city of Rome from barbarian rule? For the Roman villagers who came out to see for themselves, Belisarius and his troops must have looked like apparitions from a time long forgotten. The image captivated me. How come I never heard about any of this before?

I also read about a peasant named Petrus, who left his pig-farming village in modern Macedonia to go on to become arguably the greatest Byzantine Emperor in history. He takes on the name of his adopted father and becomes Justinian. And then there’s his wife, Empress Theodora, whom history has never been more uncomfortable acknowledging. She had been a lowly prostitute, well known for her infamy in the seedy entertainment districts of Constantinople. She was essentially a medieval stripper and sex performer, who goes on to become a powerful intellectual contributor to Byzantine law and culture. Theodora’s undeniable influence on a sweeping legal overhaul may indeed represent the first official laws designed specifically for the betterment of women, and directed by a woman. The only reason why Theodora isn’t a household name is probably because we don’t know much about the Byzantines. I’ve never been able to forget this generation of historical people and I’ve always dreamt of writing about them.

So, that one book opened me up to all of these aspects. This wasn’t the Dark Ages of Europe. This was something entirely new. The Byzantine Empire should not have existed. It shouldn’t have gone on as long as it did. Belisarius, Justinian, and Theodora should never have accomplished what they did, given their lowly origins. To me, they were historical superheroes and I, alone, seemed to know their feats.

My library is now filled with 45 books on the Byzantine Empire. Some of my books are out of print and are considered quite rare. Sometimes, learning about Byzantine history feels like I’m unearthing a deep historical secret ala The Da Vinci Code or even the lost city of Atlantis. And this is made all the more maddening that nearly no one knows much about it.

Here’s a fun little test. Name a movie, television show, or novel that has the Byzantine Empire as a setting. No, really, name one.

I mean, we have movies set in ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt, Rome, Medieval Japan, Medieval China, South America, the Mayan Empire, Antarctica, Middle-Earth, Mars, and Tatooine. And yet, I bet you cannot come up with a single relevant story set in the Byzantine Empire. Seriously. Why?

History is incomplete without the Byzantines. For example, I was always told that Western Europe just kind of ‘woke up’ out of the Dark Ages. But that’s simply not true. Western Europe awoke only once the “brain drain” of Byzantine intellectuals migrated to Europe when Constantinople was captured by the Turks. This bizarre eastern culture was the very catalyst that set modern history into motion.

Constantinople finally fell in the year 1453. If you Google ‘The Italian Renaissance’ you’ll see that it began in roughly 1420, at the exact time that the last generation of Byzantines made their way into Europe to escape subjugation. They brought with them their Greek culture, their literacy, legalism, and ideas. It’s well documented that the Renaissance has an unmistakable flair for Greek revivalism and that’s because of the Greek-speaking Byzantines. Within the next few decades, the Protestant Reformation would begin against the Catholic Church, to whom the Orthodox Byzantines had always been a rival.

Secondly, the closure of the trade routes to India, which went through Constantinople, is the exact event that sent desperate European explorers across the Atlantic to find a new trade route. This obviously led to the Western discovery of America in 1492, a mere 39 years since the Byzantine Empire disappeared. Talk about shock waves. These are rapid geopolitical developments that literally set the stage for the modern world in which we now live.

Thirdly, if I asked anyone today, “where is the capital of Christendom?” They’d say, “the Vatican.” And if I asked, “what is the name of the great church at the heart of the Vatican?” Most people would answer, “Saint Peter’s Basilica.” But did you know that Saint Peter’s Basilica, as we know it, didn’t even exist during the entire medieval era? The modern Vatican that tourists visit year-round is merely a modern adaption of its medieval predecessor. The Byzantine Empire had been the face of Christendom on earth in the medieval world and a great church, known as the Hagia Sophia (look it up if you get a chance), had been the great monumental church for all of Christianity. The great church still exists today but has since been converted into a mosque in modern day Istanbul. I’ve been there. I’ve seen it, and wow. It’s pretty spectacular for a building built in 536 C.E. So, when Constantinople fell to the Turks, Christianity no longer had a great church. Only when Constantinople faced certain doom to the rival religion of Islam, did the need arise for a new ‘big’ church. The construction of Saint Peter’s Basilica went into rapid motion and was completed in 1506. The timing makes perfect sense if you understand the role the Byzantine Empire played in the drama.

Did you know that the Corpus Juris Civilis (which was a Byzantine contribution under Theodora and Justinian) is a cornerstone of modern Western law, including the legal system of the United States? Wikipedia even says: “The Corpus continues to have a major influence on public international law. Its four parts thus constitute the foundation documents of the Western legal tradition.” What? That’s huge! An incredible amount of Western civilization is in debt to the never-mentioned, barely-heard-of Byzantines.

Finally, Google ‘The medieval era’ or better yet, ‘History by period.’ Both searches will show the same thing. You’ll see that history is divided up into three main categories. There’s the Ancient Period or Antiquity. There’s the Postclassical or Medieval Era, and there’s Modern History, which is essentially the last 500 years. All of human history is under the umbrella of these three categories, and these are pretty standard date ranges among scholars. The Medieval Era spanned the one-thousand years between 500-1,500 C.E. The Byzantines emerged as a truly independent civilization when Rome fell in 476 C.E., and it ended when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453. I mean, the Byzantine lifespan is the Middle Ages. Therefore, this culture’s very existence on earth represents a singularly unique epoch in human history. The Byzantine Empire literally bridges a misunderstood gap in time between you and me today, and our world’s most ancient societies.

Geographically, the Byzantine Empire essentially merged into the Islamic Ottoman Empire, while culturally, it migrated into the Eastern Orthodox Russian Empire, and geopolitically, it became the Hapsburg Empire (which still used the Roman ‘double-eagle’ on its flag). The Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires vanished in 1918, after World War 1. The Russian Empire, however, had a revolution at that time and became the Soviet Union. The U.S.S.R. came to occupy what we call ‘Eastern Europe,’ which clearly matches up with many of the former Byzantine states. Therefore, the mysterious lands of the Byzantines didn’t truly open up to the West again until 1991, when the Soviet Union finally collapsed. Amazingly, this is right around the time I checked out that library book.

Most of our perception of the Byzantines is found indirectly with our fascination with the eastern European mystique. We see it in stories like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which takes place in Romanian Transylvania and has an occultic Byzantine feel, or Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. We see the Hagia Sophia in movies like From Russia with Love, The International¸ or Tom Hank’s Inferno. And most recently, Millennials walked on the streets of 16^th Century Constantinople in the critically acclaimed video game, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. But none of these things quite explain the forgotten super culture that once tied them all together.

So, why don’t we know more about the Byzantine Empire? I’ve never gotten a good answer to this question. I’m a 42-year old man still caught up in the thrill of a book I found when I was 17. I feel like an explorer who discovered a bizarro world, a kind of doppelganger to Western civilization as exotic and fantastic as Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. And now, I’d love to share this world with anyone who’s willing to listen.

Carl Jung

“What does the example of the Roman Empire teach us? After the conquest of Asia Minor, Rome became Asiatic, even Europe was impacted by Asia and remains so today. Out of Selecia came the Mithraic cult, the religion of the Roman Army and its spread from Egypt to fog bound Britain. Need I point to the Asiatic origin of Christianity? We have not yet clearly grasped the fact that Western theosophy is an amateurish imitation of the East.”