Less than a century after Constantine, Alaric the Goth marched into Rome and burned a great deal of the city. Forty-five years later another tribe, the Vandals, destroyed the rest. We get the word “vandalism” from the Vandals. It means the willful destruction of something beautiful, which is what the Vandals did. After the Vandals other Germanic tribes, with their horned helmets and their long yellow hair, came streaming in, bringing their women and children with them. They were followed by the Mongolian Huns and Avars.
In 476 A.D., one of the barbarian chiefs decided it was foolish to pretend any longer. He deposed the then Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus (a Latin name meaning “Romulus, the little Augustus”), and proclaimed himself king of Italy. Thus ended the Roman Empire in the West.
If it had not been for Diocletian and Constantine, it would also have ended the Roman Empire everywhere. It might have ended Western civilization, too.
But the emperor of the Roman Empire in the East stood safe behind his mighty walls, and he announced as quickly as possible that he was now emperor of the whole Roman Empire. He ordered this barbarian king of Italy and all the other barbarian kings to acknowledge him as emperor and overlord.
Many of them did.
That is probably the most important thing to remember about the Byzantines. They considered themselves Romans. Most people in the West called them Greeks, and indeed they spoke Greek and were Greek in many other ways. They were also Orientals in their splendor. But for at least the first 900 years of their history they thought of themselves as Romans and were proud of it. Their emperor was still the Augustus, and his other title autokrator was a Greek translation of the Latin imperator, or commander in chief. Even when he later took the proud title of basileus, a Greek equivalent for the Persian “king of kings,” he was basileus tou Romaion, king of the Romans. To call him “Greek emperor,” as did some Westerners, was to use a fighting word.
The second most important thing to remember about the Byzantines was that Constantinople never fell into the hands of the enemy. This means that the empire never fell into the hands of the barbarians, for in those days the capital was even more important than it is today, and so in spite of all the lands it governed, Constantinople was the empire. As long as it stood, the empire stood. The Byzantines had plenty of troubles, and more than once saw the turbans and scimitars of the Arabs, and the felt hats and yellow faces of the followers of some steppe-riding khagan, right beneath their walls. But except when he was invited, no foreign invader had ever set foot in the streets of Constantinople until Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert of Clari came with their fellow crusaders.
It is a fact that for century after century, when almost every other important city in the world was sacked and looted over and over again, the Byzantines were able to make and keep Constantinople safe. It was a place of refuge for men and for ideas and for the civilization the Greeks and Romans had given them and for the ideals of Christianity in the midst of a stormy world.
