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Episode 338 - Get Rid of Byzantium with Leonora Neville

January 27, 2026·40 min·3 clips

Leonora Neville explains why Edward Gibbon was wrong about Christianity causing the Roman Empire's fall.

1. The History of Byzantium episode 338 features an interview with Professor Leonora Neville of the University of Wisconsin-Madison arguing that the term 'Byzantium' should be replaced with 'East Roman.' 2. Neville holds the John W. and Jean M. Rowe Chair of Byzantine History at Wisconsin and has written books on Byzantine gender, provincial authority, historical memory, and Anna Komnene that Robin identifies as vital sources for the podcast. 3. The episode's thesis is that terminology is not just pedantry — changing from 'Byzantium' to 'East Roman' shifts the underlying conceptual framework in ways that affect how historians, students, and political actors use the history. 4. Neville opens by noting that 'Byzantine' has negative connotations across multiple European languages: intricate and rigid in English, hair-splitting in Dutch, ceremonial and slavish in German, endless purposeless debate in French, and hypocrisy in Polish. 5. She argues that the primary function of the term 'Byzantium' is to signal that the Eastern Roman Empire — which called itself Roman for over a thousand years — was not the real Roman Empire, enabling a narrative in which the Roman Empire properly fell in 476 AD. 6. Neville identifies Edward Gibbon as a key architect of this framework: his Decline and Fall argued that Rome collapsed under barbarism and Christianity, which required the Eastern empire to be cast as a zombie state, perpetually falling but never fully dead, for his argument to hold. 7. She notes that Gibbon's claim that pre-Christian Rome was not religious is demonstrably false — the ancient world was full of temples and genuine religious belief — making his framing of Christianity as a destabilizing force historically unfounded. 8. Neville argues the 'Western civilization' narrative taught in undergraduate survey courses requires Byzantium to be separate: the story runs from Greece to Rome to medieval France to the Renaissance to America, and this arc only works if Rome falls when it is supposed to. 9. She contends that acknowledging the long Roman Empire would dethrone Christianity as the pivot point of Western civilization, because the Eastern Romans had both a vigorous pre-Christian and a vigorous Christian phase within a single continuous polity. 10. A further argument involves race: 19th- and 20th-century scholars fought over whether the people in the Byzantine Empire were 'really' Greeks, Slavs, or Albanians, all accepting the premise that racial identity was a scientific truth that trumped self-identification. 11. Neville discusses the 1830s controversy in which German scholar Joachim Fallmeier argued that no true Greeks remained in Greece, having been replaced by Slavs and Albanians — a claim that Greek nationalists contested while accepting the underlying racial logic. 12. She frames taking the Eastern Romans seriously as Romans as a profoundly anti-racist position: it affirms that communities are constituted by who they say they are, not by ethnicity, paralleling how Americans of diverse ancestry identify as American. 13. Neville traces how Soviet historians used Byzantine history to argue Slavic peoples had natural communist tendencies, with a 'beautiful period' of strong emperors ruling peasant communes ended by German feudalizing influence — a framework that allowed Russian serfdom to be blamed on Germans. 14. She then describes how Putin uses the same severed 'Byzantium' as a model of orthodox autocracy that resisted Western moral influence, noting this political use of the past is strong in Russia at the time of recording. 15. Neville argues that reconceptualizing the history as a long Roman Empire makes this political fantasy structurally harder, because without Christianity as the pivot point, the 'orthodox autocratic dominion' becomes just one phase of a longer story. 16. She notes that 'global Middle Ages' scholarship frequently skips Byzantium entirely, jumping from Europe to Islamic caliphates to China, because the artificial conceptual walls around 'Byzantium' make it hard to integrate — a problem that 'East Roman' would help dissolve. 17. Her recommended terminology depends on context: 'East Roman' for political history, 'Orthodox icon' for religious artifacts, 'Greek language manuscript' for textual scholarship — more precise terms that don't carry the ideological baggage of Byzantium. 18. She credits her colleague Anthony Kaldellis with laying out the full case for 'East Roman' in a book called 'The Case for East Roman History,' and endorses his recommendation. 19. Robin notes that he personally never uses the word 'Byzantium' except when people ask the name of the podcast, always describing the subject as Roman history. 20. The interview is conversational and accessible, aimed at listeners who have followed the full History of Byzantium narrative and are ready to question the framing of what they have been learning.

As heard by us

A sharp case for why the name you use changes the history you think you know.

Leonora Neville makes a focused case for replacing Byzantium with a different way of naming the eastern Roman past, and the episode keeps circling back to what that label has obscured. The strength here is that the discussion never stays at the level of terminology alone.

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Want a brisk argument for rethinking one of history's most familiar labels?

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