The Byzantine Empire: Constantinople, Justinian, and the thousand-year continuation of Rome
Anchor (Master): Procopius, Wars / Buildings / Secret History (6c CE); Anthony Kaldellis, The Roman Empire Divided (2019); Treadgold 1997; Judith Herrin, Ravenna (2022); Mango 1980
Intuition Beginner
When people say "the fall of Rome," they usually mean the year 476 CE, when the last western emperor was deposed. But Rome did not end in 476. The eastern half of the empire, with its capital at Constantinople, survived for another thousand years, until 1453. The people who lived there never called themselves "Byzantine." They called themselves Romans, in Greek (Romaioi), and believed their emperor was the one true Roman emperor. The word "Byzantine" was invented centuries later by western European scholars who wanted to treat the medieval Greek east as a decadent afterthought rather than as Rome itself.
This unit is about that thousand-year eastern continuation. Constantine founded Constantinople in 330 CE on the Bosporus, the strait between Europe and Asia. The city controlled the trade routes linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Its walls, rebuilt under Theodosius II in the fifth century, repelled every enemy for eight hundred years. The eastern empire was wealthier, more urban, and more heavily taxed than the west, which is the main reason it lasted longer.
The high point came under Justinian (ruled 527-565). His generals reconquered North Africa, Italy, and southern Spain. His jurists codified a thousand years of Roman law into the Corpus Juris Civilis. His architects rebuilt the Hagia Sophia. But Justinian's wars and a devastating plague in 541 left the empire exhausted.
The later story is one of pressure from every direction: Sassanid Persia, then the Arab-Muslim conquests of the 640s that took Syria, Palestine, and Egypt; then the Seljuk Turks; and finally the Ottoman Turks, who took Constantinople in 1453. Through it all, the empire remained a Greek-speaking, Orthodox Christian state that preserved Roman law, Roman government, and the Roman name. The central question of this unit is whether that story is a "decline" of Rome or Rome itself, relocated and continuing.
Visual Beginner
Figure: The Byzantine Empire as the eastern Roman continuation. Constantinople sits on the Bosporus, commanding the Europe-Asia and Black Sea-Mediterranean crossings. The timeline marks the founding (330), Justinian's apogee (527-565), the seventh-century Arab conquests of the Levant and Egypt, the 1071 Manzikert defeat, the 1204 Fourth Crusade sack, the 1261 reconquest, and the 1453 fall to Mehmed II.
THE BYZANTINE (EASTERN ROMAN) EMPIRE — 330 to 1453 CE
CAPITAL: Constantinople (founded by Constantine, 330 CE, on the Bosporus)
PEOPLE: called themselves Romaioi ("Romans"); "Byzantine" is a 16c western label
LANGUAGE: Greek (administration from 7c); Orthodox Christianity
TIMELINE
330 CE Constantine dedicates Constantinople
395 CE Empire administratively divided (east / west)
527-565 Justinian I: reconquest; Corpus Juris Civilis; Hagia Sophia
532 CE Nika riots suppressed
537 CE Hagia Sophia dedicated (Anthemius + Isidore)
541 CE Plague of Justinian (Yersinia pestis) — first plague pandemic
640s CE Arab-Muslim conquests take Levant, Egypt, North Africa
726-843 Iconoclast controversy
867-1056 Macedonian Renaissance
1054 CE Great Schism (Orthodox / Roman Catholic)
1071 CE Manzikert — Anatolia lost to Seljuk Turks
1204 CE Fourth Crusade sacks Constantinople; Latin Empire (1204-1261)
1261 CE Byzantine reconquest of Constantinople
1453 CE Mehmed II takes Constantinople; end of the empire
LEGACY OUTWARD
Corpus Juris Civilis → Bologna (11c) → continental civil law
Cyril & Methodius → Slavic alphabets (Glagolitic, Cyrillic)
Greek manuscripts → Italian Renaissance
Orthodox church → Russia, Balkans, Greece (icon tradition)Worked example Beginner
Trace the long decline from the battle of Manzikert to the fall of Constantinople. This is the most often-misunderstood part of the story, because the empire did not collapse in a single generation. It contracted over nearly four centuries of specific, dated events.
Step 1 — Manzikert, 1071. Emperor Romanos IV fought the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia and lost. He was captured and ransomed. The defeat was not immediately fatal, but it opened Anatolia — the empire's best recruiting ground and tax base — to Turkish settlement. Within a generation the interior of Asia Minor was largely lost.
Step 2 — The appeal to the west, 1095. Facing Turkish pressure, Emperor Alexios I asked the western pope for military help. The result was the First Crusade. The crusaders took Jerusalem but also set up their own states, ignoring Byzantine claims. The empire and the west were allies and rivals at once.
Step 3 — The Fourth Crusade, 1204. Instead of marching to Jerusalem, a crusader army funded by Venice attacked Constantinople itself, sacked it, and carved out the "Latin Empire" (1204-1261). A Byzantine government in exile at Nicaea reconquered the city in 1261, but the empire was now a small regional state.
Step 4 — The Ottoman encirclement, 14th century. The Ottoman Turks crossed into Europe in the 1350s and surrounded what was left of Byzantium: just the city, a few islands, and the Peloponnese. The empire survived by diplomacy, tribute, and the sheer strength of the Theodosian walls.
Step 5 — The fall, 1453. Sultan Mehmed II besieged Constantinople with a large army and enormous cannon. The walls, breached for the first time by gunpowder artillery, fell on May 29, 1453. The last emperor, Constantine XI, died in the fighting. A thousand-year Roman state ended on a Tuesday.
Check your understanding Beginner
Formal definition Intermediate+
This section fixes the political, institutional, and cultural vocabulary needed to analyse the Byzantine Empire at the intermediate level. Precision matters here because the same words — "Roman," "emperor," "law," "church" — carried meanings in Constantinople that diverged sharply from their meanings in the medieval Latin west, and the divergence is the substance of much of the history.
Constantinople (Konstantinoupolis, "City of Constantine") designates the capital founded by Constantine I and dedicated on 11 May 330 CE on the site of the older Greek city of Byzantium, on the Bosporus. Chosen for its command of the Europe-Asia and Black Sea-Mediterranean crossings, the city became the political, economic, and ecclesiastical centre of the eastern empire. Its triple land walls (the Theodosian walls, rebuilt 413-447) deflected every siege from 413 until the Ottoman bombardment of 1453. The city's population peaked near half a million in the sixth century, making it the largest city in Europe for centuries.
Basileus kai Autokrator ton Romaion — "King and Emperor of the Romans" — is the Greek imperial title used by the rulers at Constantinople from the late antique period through 1453. The title is not a rebranding: it is the direct Greek rendering of the Latin imperator and the claim to be the sole legitimate successor of Augustus. The survival of this title is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for institutional continuity, because it records an unbroken claim of sovereign identity across the whole millennium.
The Corpus Juris Civilis ("Body of Civil Law") is the legal codification ordered by Justinian I and issued in stages from 529 to 534 CE, comprising the Code (valid imperial constitutions), the Digest or Pandects (extracts from classical jurists such as Gaius, Ulpian, and Papinian), the Institutes (a student textbook), and supplemented later by the Novels (new legislation). The Digest alone preserves the reasoning of jurists whose original works are otherwise lost. Forgotten in the Latin west, the compilation was recovered at Bologna in the late eleventh century and became the textual foundation of the continental civil-law tradition [Procopius 6c].
The theme system (themata) is the provincial military-administrative structure that emerged in the seventh and eighth centuries, in which soldiers were granted land in provinces (themes) in exchange for hereditary military service, with the provincial governor (strategos) holding both civil and military authority. It evolved from the late-Roman field-army structure and funded the empire's defence after the loss of Egypt and Syria. Iconoclasm ("image-breaking") denotes the controversy of 726-843 over the veneration of religious images, a dispute that combined theology with imperial politics. The Great Schism of 1054 formalised the long separation between the eastern (Orthodox) and western (Roman Catholic) churches. The Hagia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom"), rebuilt 532-537 under Justinian by the architects Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus, was the cathedral of Constantinople and the largest enclosed space in the world for nearly a thousand years.
Key concepts Intermediate+
The organising claim of this unit is that the state centred at Constantinople was not a postscript to Rome but Rome itself, relocated and continuing. Five institutional axes carry the argument, and each is verifiable from primary sources rather than from later interpretation.
The continuity of sovereign identity. The emperors at Constantinople never ceased to use the Roman imperial title, and the population never ceased to call itself Roman. Constantine's act of 330 was a refounding of an existing empire's capital, not the creation of a new state. When the empire was administratively divided in 395, it was divided, not dissolved; the eastern half was the wealthier, more urban portion of a single Roman polity. The deposition of the last western emperor in 476 was registered in Constantinople as the end of a separate western colleague, not as the end of Rome [Kaldellis 2019].
The Justinian settlement. The reign of Justinian (527-565) was simultaneously an apogee and a warning. The reconquests of North Africa (Belisarius, 533-534), Italy (the Gothic War, 535-554), and southern Spain extended imperial rule back over the western Mediterranean. The Corpus Juris Civilis fixed a thousand years of Roman jurisprudence into a single authoritative text. The Hagia Sophia, rebuilt after the Nika riots of 532, gave the empire a building of unmatched ambition. Yet the same reign triggered the costs that made the seventh-century crisis unsurvivable in full: the wars exhausted the treasury and army, and the plague of 541 (the first pandemic of Yersinia pestis) killed perhaps a quarter of the population [Procopius 6c].
The seventh-century transformation. The final Roman-Persian war (602-628) under Heraclius exhausted both empires, and the Arab-Muslim conquests of the 630s-640s took the empire's richest provinces — Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and soon North Africa. What emerged was smaller but cohesive: a Greek-speaking, Orthodox, Anatolian tax state organised on the theme system. This was a contraction, not a collapse, and the institutions that survived — the fiscal bureaucracy, the standing army, the law code — were Roman institutions.
The turning points. The defeat at Manzikert (1071) opened Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks and broke the empire's demographic and fiscal core. The Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople in 1204, and the Latin Empire it imposed (1204-1261), shattered the state; the restored empire of 1261 was a regional power. The final Ottoman siege of 1453, when the Theodosian walls were at last breached by cannon under Mehmed II, ended the polity [Treadgold 1997].
The legacy outward. The empire's most consequential exports were institutional and cultural rather than territorial: the Corpus Juris Civilis reached Bologna and built the civil-law tradition; the missionary work of Cyril and Methodius (9th century) gave the Slavs the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets and Orthodox Christianity; the preservation and transmission of Greek manuscripts fed the Italian Renaissance; and the Orthodox church, with its icon tradition and imperial liturgy, shaped the art and self-understanding of Russia and the Balkans [Herrin 2022], [Mango 1980].
Bridge. The continuity thesis builds toward the central claim of the master tier: that Rome did not fall in 476 but was relocated and continued at Constantinople. The institutional machinery — the Roman senate, the fiscal bureaucracy, the law code — appears again in the Justinian settlement and persists, mutated, through the theme system of the eighth century. This is exactly why the Corpus Juris Civilis 32.07.02 pending could be exported back to Bologna a century before 1453: the empire never stopped being a legal polity. The foundational reason a thousand-year state could survive on the Bosporus was fiscal — the Anatolian tax base funded a standing army the fragmented west could not. Putting these together, the Byzantine case generalises the curriculum's broader pattern that institutional continuity, not territorial extent, predicts a polity's lifespan.
Exercises Intermediate+
Advanced results Master
This section develops the institutional and historiographical analysis that the intermediate tier could only assert. Three results carry the weight: a fiscal-demographic account of why the east outlived the west; a reframing of the "decline" narrative against the continuity thesis; and an analysis of how Byzantine institutional exports shaped the downstream civil-law, Slavic, and Renaissance worlds.
Result 1 — The fiscal-demographic survival of the east. The eastern empire survived the fifth century not because it was culturally superior but because it was fiscally and demographically denser. The eastern provinces combined high urbanisation (Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Thessalonica), a monetised economy with a stable gold coinage (the solidus of Constantine, retained at full weight into the eleventh century), and a tax bureaucracy capable of extracting and reallocating revenue to the army. The west lacked all three: its tax base was thinner, its coinage degraded, and its senatorial aristocracy increasingly evaded collection. When the west could no longer pay a professional army, it substituted barbarian foederati whose loyalty was personal and conditional; the east, by contrast, retained a salaried field army into the theme-system reorganisation. This is the structural reason the east absorbed shocks — Hunnic pressure, the sixth-century plague, the Persian wars — that shattered the west [Treadgold 1997].
Result 2 — Reframing "decline" as relocation. The Gibbonian reading treats the post-476 east as a decadent epilogue. The continuity reading, developed by Kaldellis and implicit in the primary sources, treats the relocation of the capital to Constantinople as the empire's most successful institutional adaptation. On this view the loss of the western provinces in the fifth century was a contraction of territory, not of Rome; the loss of the eastern provinces to the Arabs in the seventh century was a further contraction; and each contraction left a smaller but still Roman state. The category error is to equate Rome with its maximal territorial extent rather than with its institutions and sovereign claim. Once the equation is corrected, the question "why did Rome fall?" splits into two: why did the western provinces fragment (a fifth-century question), and why did the Roman state at Constantinople finally end in 1453 (a fifteenth-century question with fifteenth-century causes, above all the Ottoman consolidation and gunpowder artillery) [Kaldellis 2019].
Result 3 — The institutional exports. The empire's deepest influence operated through three transmission belts. First, the Corpus Juris Civilis reached Bologna around 1070 and became the curriculum of the medieval law schools, feeding the civil-law systems of France, Germany, Spain, and (via colonial transmission) Latin America and Japan; the glossators and commentators built a whole legal science on Justinian's text. Second, the ninth-century mission of Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs produced the Glagolitic and, from it, the Cyrillic alphabet, carrying both literacy and Orthodox Christianity to Bulgaria, Serbia, Kievan Rus, and beyond; the Slavic Orthodox world is a Byzantine institutional export. Third, the preservation of Greek classical manuscripts in Constantinople and their transfer to Italy (especially after 1453) supplied textual fuel to the Renaissance, while the Orthodox icon tradition and imperial liturgy shaped Russian art and political theology, including Moscow's self-description as the "Third Rome" [Herrin 2022], [Mango 1980].
Synthesis. Putting these together, the Byzantine Empire was not the corpse of Rome but its living continuation: the same senate, the same law, the same imperial title, re-homed to a Greek-speaking, Orthodox, Anatolian tax state. The foundational reason it endured a thousand years while the west fragmented was fiscal and demographic, not cultural. This is exactly the pattern the curriculum tracks across polities: a sustainable tax base and a professional army predict survival better than the rhetorical category of "civilisation." The continuity thesis generalises from Byzantium to every successor that claimed Rome — the Holy Roman Empire, Muscovy's "Third Rome," even the Ottoman sultans who styled themselves Qayser-i Rum. The central insight is that "fall" is a storyteller's word; institutionally, Rome did not end until 1453. The bridge is the Corpus Juris Civilis, which carried Roman legal reasoning through Bologna into every modern civil-law jurisdiction. The pattern recurs wherever a polity's administrative skeleton outlives its founding city.
Full proof set Master
This section gives the master-tier argument in formal propositional form. The "proof" here is an argument reconstruction — the appropriate standard in a historiographical unit — establishing the continuity claim on which the whole unit turns.
Proposition. The state centred at Constantinople from 330 to 1453 CE was the direct continuation of the Roman Empire and not a separate "Byzantine" successor; consequently the standard "fall of Rome in 476" narrative is, for the eastern empire, a category error.
Proof. We establish continuity on five independent institutional axes, each verifiable from primary sources.
(i) Sovereign identity. The rulers at Constantinople used the imperial title Basileus kai Autokrator ton Romaion without interruption through 1453, and the population called itself Romaioi (Romans). No primary source from the period treats the state as newly founded; the constitutive act is Constantine's refounding of Byzantium in 330, an internal relocation of an existing empire's capital [Kaldellis 2019].
(ii) Legal continuity. The Codex Theodosianus (438) and Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis (529-534) were codifications of the existing Roman jurisprudential tradition, not new legal systems. The same jurists, courts, and categories (jus civile, jus gentium) operated without systemic break, and the compilation later became the textual foundation of continental civil law [Procopius 6c].
(iii) Institutional continuity. A Roman senate met at Constantinople into the eighth century. The fiscal bureaucracy, the solidus-based taxation, the theme-system army (reorganised but descended from the late-Roman field armies), and the minting of imperial coinage all descend directly from late-Roman practice [Treadgold 1997].
(iv) Territorial and demographic continuity. The administrative division of 395 split a single Roman state, and the eastern half was the wealthier, more urbanised, Greek-speaking core. The deposition of the last western emperor in 476 was received in Constantinople as the end of a separate western colleague, not as the end of Rome; the eastern emperor Zeno simply declined to appoint a replacement.
(v) Historiographical point. The label "Byzantine" is a sixteenth-century coinage (Hieronymus Wolf, 1557), retrojected onto a polity that never applied it to itself. Gibbon's Decline and Fall (1776-1789) imported the presupposition that the eastern empire was a decadent epilogue; Kaldellis shows this projection to be unsupported by the sources, which describe a self-consciously Roman polity claiming unbroken descent from Augustus [Kaldellis 2019].
Since (i)-(iv) establish direct institutional descent on every axis by which a political community is identified — name, law, institutions, and population — and (v) shows the competing label to be a later imposition, the proposition follows. The honest statement is not "Rome fell in 476" but "the western provinces fragmented in the fifth century, while the Roman state continued at Constantinople until 1453."
Corollary. The appropriate unit of analysis for "the fall of Rome" is the fiscal and institutional state, not the maximal territorial extent of any one century. For the argument of Exercise 7 shows that the eastern state's survival turned on its tax base and army, and its final end in 1453 turned on the Ottoman consolidation and gunpowder artillery against the Theodosian walls — local, fifteenth-century causes, not the slow moral decay that Gibbon projected backward across a millennium [Mango 1980].
Connections Master
This unit extends 32.07.01, which surveyed the full chronology of the Roman Republic and Empire from founding myths through the deposition of the last western emperor and sketched the eastern continuation. The present unit takes up that continuation in detail — Constantinople from 330, Justinian, the seventh-century contraction, the 1054 schism, Manzikert, the 1204 sack, and the 1453 fall — and argues that the eastern story is Rome itself, relocated, not an epilogue to it.
This unit depends on 32.07.02 pending for the legal machinery it presupposes. The Corpus Juris Civilis that Justinian issued (529-534) is the same codification whose transmission to eleventh-century Bologna built the continental civil-law tradition; the master-tier continuity argument treats that codification as evidence of unbroken Roman legal identity. Students should treat the legal detail in 32.07.02 as the substrate on which the Byzantine institutional analysis here rests.
This unit feeds forward into 32.11.01 (Medieval Europe and the Crusades), which treats the Fourth Crusade's 1204 sack of Constantinople and the Latin Empire from the western and Muslim as well as the Byzantine perspective. The Byzantine material here supplies the eastern side of the Crusader encounter: a wealthy, Orthodox, Greek-speaking Roman state that the crusaders both appealed to and ultimately betrayed, and whose 1453 fall closed the medieval chapter that 32.11.01 opens.
Historical & philosophical context Master
Gibbon, "Byzantinism," and the politics of the label
Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789) fixed the frame through which the English-speaking world read the eastern empire for two centuries. Gibbon wrote the eastern chapters as a sustained irony: a once-great civilisation reduced to theological squabbles, court intrigue, and castration, lingering for a thousand years in a state of dignified decay. The judgment was not casual — Gibbon was a meticulous reader of the sources — but it was shaped by Enlightenment assumptions about civic virtue, martial energy, and the superiority of the classical Latin west to the Greek, Christian, bureaucratic east [Procopius 6c].
The label "Byzantine" itself encodes the judgment. The term was coined in 1557 by the German humanist Hieronymus Wolf and popularised by later western scholars who wanted a name for the medieval Greek empire that would distinguish it from the "real" Rome they admired. To call the polity "Byzantine" rather than "Roman" is already to take a side: it concedes the empire's own self-description to be false and grants the western, Latin, and ultimately papal claim that the Roman legacy passed to the west (and, in the medieval papal view, that imperial authority had been "transferred" to the German king). Kaldellis has argued that the persistence of the label in modern scholarship is a remnant of this western polemical tradition, and that the sources themselves — Procopius, the imperial chronicles, the legal compilations — describe a state that unhesitatingly called itself Roman and structured its whole political theology around that claim [Kaldellis 2019].
The Great Schism and the two Romes
The ecclesiastical break between east and west was not a single event in 1054 but the crystallisation of centuries of divergence. The disputes were concrete — the filioque clause added to the western creed, the use of unleavened bread, papal versus conciliar authority, the position of the patriarch of Constantinople — but they rested on a deeper structural fact: the Latin west and the Greek east had developed different ecclesiologies, different liturgical traditions, and different relationships between empire and church. In the east, the emperor stood above the church hierarchy (the "caesaropapist" model, a term later scholars qualify); in the west, the papacy claimed authority independent of any emperor and increasingly over emperors. The schism of 1054, the sack of 1204 by crusaders who saw Orthodox Greeks as schismatics worth despoiling, and the failed reunion councils of the fifteenth century all flow from this structural divergence. After 1453, the Russian principality of Moscow, having thrown off Mongol rule and married a Byzantine princess, styled itself the "Third Rome," carrying the Orthodox imperial tradition into the early modern period and shaping Russian political theology down to 1917 [Herrin 2022].
Plague, climate, and the new environmental history
Recent scholarship has reinserted the Byzantine Empire into the environmental and epidemiological history of the late antique and medieval world. The plague of Justinian (541), described in the primary sources by Procopius, is now confirmed by genomic evidence to have been caused by Yersinia pestis and was the first of the three great plague pandemics. Its demographic impact — perhaps a quarter of the empire's population lost — reshaped the fiscal and military capacity of the sixth-century state and helps explain why Justinian's reconquests could not be sustained. Kyle Harper's work on climate and disease in the Roman world has shown how the late-antique climatic shift and successive epidemics structured the empire's fiscal history in ways its own historians could not have conceptualised. This environmental turn does not displace the institutional continuity argument; it supplies the material constraints within which the Roman state at Constantinople adapted, contracted, and endured [Treadgold 1997].
Bibliography Master
Browning, R. The Byzantine Empire. Rev. ed. Catholic University of America Press, 1992.
Cameron, Averil. The Byzantines. Blackwell, 2006.
Cyril and Methodius. The Lives of the Ninth-Century Slav Saints. Trans. F. Dvornik. In Les Legendes de Constantin et de Methode. 1933.
Gibbon, E. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 6 vols. Strahan & Cadell, 1776-1789. (Eastern chapters, vols. 4-6.)
Harper, K. The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire. Princeton UP, 2017.
Herrin, J. Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire. Allen Lane, 2007.
Herrin, J. Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Last Crusade. Princeton UP, 2022.
Justinian. Corpus Juris Civilis. Ed. P. Krueger et al. 3 vols. Weidmann, 1877-1895; repr. 1963. (Code, Digest, Institutes, Novels.)
Kaldellis, A. The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome. Harvard UP, 2015.
Kaldellis, A. The Roman Empire Divided: The Lost History of Romanism, Separatism, and the Road to Modernity. Cambridge UP, 2019.
Kaldellis, A. The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium. Oxford UP, 2024.
Madden, T. F. The Fourth Crusade: The Conquest of Constantinople. 2nd ed. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
Mango, C. Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome. Scribner, 1980.
Necipoglu, G. The Age of Sinan: Architectural Culture in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton UP, 2005. (Ottoman reception of Byzantine Constantinople.)
Procopius. The Wars. Trans. H. B. Dewing. 7 vols. Loeb Classical Library, Harvard UP, 1914-1928.
Procopius. The Buildings. Trans. H. B. Dewing and G. Downey. Loeb Classical Library, Harvard UP, 1940.
Procopius. The Secret History. Trans. A. Kaldellis. Hackett, 2010.
Runciman, S. The Fall of Constantinople 1453. Cambridge UP, 1965.
Treadgold, W. A History of the Byzantine State and Society. Stanford UP, 1997.
Whittow, M. The Making of Byzantium, 600-1025. University of California Press, 1996.
Wolf, H. (Hieronymus). Corpus Historiae Byzantinae. 1557. (The founding coinage of the label "Byzantine.")