Byzantine Rome

The Roman Empire had been administratively divided long before it fell. In 285 CE, the emperor Diocletian split governance between east and west to make the vast territory more manageable. After the death of Theodosius I in 395 CE, the division became permanent. The western half collapsed under military pressure and fiscal strain; in 476 CE, a Germanic chieftain named Odoacer deposed the last western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople. The eastern empire, governed from Constantinople, continued to function: its tax system intact, its army paid, its emperor unchallenged.

Modern historians call this surviving eastern state Byzantine, after Byzantium, the ancient Greek city on whose site Constantinople was built. The Byzantines themselves used no such word. They called themselves Romans, their state Romania, and their emperor the emperor of the Romans. The eastern emperors governed as Romans, legislated as Romans, and considered the western provinces — including Italy — rightfully theirs.

Italy passed first to Odoacer, then in 493 CE to Theodoric and his Ostrogoths, who ruled it with considerable sophistication and largely preserved Roman institutions. To Constantinople, this was a temporary and illegitimate arrangement. When Justinian I became emperor in 527 CE, he resolved to correct it. His general Belisarius entered Rome on 9 December 536 CE, the Ostrogothic garrison withdrawing without a fight. For the first time in sixty years, the city was formally back inside the Roman Empire.

The Gothic War lasted until 554 CE, with Rome changing hands multiple times and suffering siege, famine, and depopulation severe enough to reduce what had once been a city of hundreds of thousands to something closer to a large town. The administrative order that emerged placed Rome inside the Exarchate of Ravenna — a new Byzantine province for Italy — governed locally by a duke, the dux Romae, answerable to the Exarch in Ravenna and ultimately to Constantinople. Byzantine governors established their administrative headquarters inside the former imperial palaces on the Palatine Hill, physically anchoring Eastern rule to the house of Augustus. The legal and civic architecture of Roman government — titles, courts, bureaucratic structures — continued under new management.

The cultural imprint was equally direct. In 609 CE, Pope Boniface IV obtained permission from the emperor Phocas to convert the Pantheon into a Christian church, consecrating it as Santa Maria ad Martyres — the first pagan temple in Rome transformed into a place of Christian worship. At the foot of the Palatine, Santa Maria Antiqua, built into an imperial monumental complex during the reign of Justin II, was decorated over three centuries with layered Byzantine frescoes that now constitute one of the largest collections of pre-iconoclastic art in the world. Greek monks and eastern administrators arriving in Rome kept Greek classical literacy alive alongside the Latin tradition.

Lombard invasions from 568 CE onward severed road connections between Rome and Ravenna, making imperial authority increasingly nominal. Into that vacuum stepped the papacy, organizing the grain supply, negotiating with Lombard dukes, and effectively governing a city the empire could no longer reach. In 751 CE the Lombards took Ravenna, dissolving the Exarchate and ending what remained of Byzantine administrative authority in central Italy. Pope Stephen II, facing continued Lombard pressure, appealed not to Constantinople but to the Frankish king Pepin III, father of Charlemagne. The emperor in Constantinople was too distant and too preoccupied with Arab and Bulgarian threats to respond. Byzantine Rome was over.

FURTHER READING

1. Brown, T. S. Gentlemen and Officers: Imperial Administration and Aristocratic Power in Byzantine Italy, A.D. 554–800. British School at Rome, 1984.
2. Sarris, Peter. Economy and Society in the Age of Justinian. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
3. Heather, Peter. Rome resurgent: war and empire in the age of Justinian. Oxford University Press, 2018.
4. Mordechai, Lee, et al. “The Justinianic Plague: An Inconsequential Pandemic?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 116, no. 51, 2019, pp. 25546–54. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26863897. Accessed 20 July 2026.
5. Herrin, Judith. “Constantinople, Rome, and the Franks in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries.” Margins and Metropolis: Authority across the Byzantine Empire, Princeton University Press, 2013, pp. 220–38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1r2dsx.15. Accessed 20 July 2026.