Byzantine Empire

The Byzantine Empire is the name historians later gave to the Roman Empire's eastern half, which outlived the Western Empire's 476 CE collapse by nearly a thousand years. Its own citizens never called themselves 'Byzantines' — they called themselves Romaioi (Romans) and considered their state the unbroken continuation of Rome itself, right up to its final fall in 1453; 'Byzantine' is a later, originally somewhat dismissive label coined by Western European historians. Centered on Constantinople (modern Istanbul, founded by Constantine the Great in 330 CE on the site of the old Greek colony of Byzantium), the empire fused Roman law and imperial administration with Greek language and culture and Orthodox Christianity, acting for centuries as the wealthiest, most militarily sophisticated state in the Mediterranean world and a crucial buffer and cultural bridge between Western Europe and the Islamic world. This entry sits directly alongside this library's Roman Empire entry — the two are one continuous state split by a modern historical label, not two separate civilizations.