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The Byzantine Empire
Romes Greek-speaking eastern half, ruled from Constantinople for more than a thousand years
For nearly a thousand years after the western Roman Empire fell, a Roman state survived in the East, ruled from Constantinople on the Bosporus. Its people called themselves Romans (Rhomaioi), and the label Byzantine was applied later by Western scholars, after Byzantium, the Greek town Constantine rebuilt as his capital. The empire preserved Greek learning and Roman law, which Justinian codified in the sixth century, and it carried Orthodox Christianity to the Slavic world, along with the Cyrillic alphabet developed by missionaries in its orbit. The domes of Hagia Sophia, finished in 537, still dominate the Istanbul skyline, a reminder of a capital that sat for centuries at the hinge of Europe and Asia.
Its heartland lay on either side of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles: the Balkan Peninsula south of the Danube and the Anatolian plateau, with Constantinople defended by water on three sides and by massive land walls on the fourth. In its early centuries it also held Syria, Palestine, Egypt and the North African coast, and under Justinian in the 550s its armies retook Italy, the Dalmatian coast and southeastern Spain, bringing its extent to roughly 2.7 million square kilometers. Those gains were brief. Arab conquests in the seventh century took Egypt and Syria, and for its middle centuries the empire was a Greek-speaking Balkan and Anatolian state. Its lands lie today mainly in Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, North Macedonia, Cyprus and southern Italy, with earlier holdings across Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Libya and Tunisia.
Historians differ on when Rome ends and Byzantium begins, but many start with the dedication of Constantinople in 330 or the lasting division of the empire in 395. The state outlived wars with Persia, the early Islamic conquests and repeated sieges of its capital, and it revived under the Macedonian dynasty around 1000 CE. Defeat by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert in 1071 opened Anatolia to Turkish settlement, and in 1204 the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople and divided the empire among Latin rulers. A restored Byzantine state retook the city in 1261 but shrank to a few scattered territories. On May 29, 1453, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople, ending the empire. Its legacy survives in the Eastern Orthodox churches, in modern Greek identity, and in the Ottoman state that made the city its own capital.