Phantom Byzantium: Europe, Empire, and Identity from Late Antiquity to World War II

How the West appropriated aspects of the eastern Roman empire while portraying it as inferior.

Unveiling the ideological foundations of Byzantine studies, Phantom Byzantium is a pioneering survey of western European perceptions of the eastern Roman empire (also known as Byzantium) spanning late antiquity to World War II. Through ten chronological chapters, Anthony Kaldellis makes the case that western Europe gradually formed its identity by adopting prestigious cultural elements from the eastern empire but simultaneously portraying the east as inferior. The West modeled its Roman imperial style on Constantinople while minimizing the latter as Greek rather than Roman; appropriated a host of Christian traditions from the east while casting the east as schismatic, heretical, or treacherous; and, during the Renaissance, used classical Hellenic philology from Greek scholars before marginalizing them as unworthy bearers of that tradition. This orientalizing impulse worked to buttress western exceptionalism and resulted in the fictitious construction of “Byzantium” as Europe’s evil doppelgänger, embodying the worst versions of traditions fundamental to European identity and casting the region as despotic, superstitious, and degenerate.

Explaining the creation, history, and functions of the ideological construct of Byzantium in the western imagination and European self-fashioning, this book has critical implications for contemporary views of European history.