The Illusion of Greatness: Byzantium and the Collective West

One of the stranger features of international politics is how long a state can go on behaving as if it were still a great power long after the foundations of that status have crumbled. It continues to issue proclamations. It expects deference. It talks about its special role in the world. Its embassies behave with peculiar stiffness. Its ruling class confuses politeness from others with respect, and then turns to outrage when reality bites through the self-deception. That was Byzantium in the 14th and 15th centuries. And there is a growing sense that this is now the condition of the collective West.

I have just read a most instructive article: Donald M. Nicol, “The Byzantine View of Western Europe,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 8.4 (1967), pp. 315–339. It is a penetrating case study in how a once-great power behaves when it has ceased to be great. Nicol shows how Byzantium, in its final centuries, clung ever more tightly to its imagined centrality in the world, even as its political and military reality disintegrated. The comparison with the modern West feels uncomfortably close.

Byzantium was the eastern continuation of the Roman Empire. It preserved much of the Roman administrative structure, military organisation, and sense of imperial mission, and from the 8th to the 11th centuries it achieved real greatness—both as a military power and as the centre of a distinct and sophisticated civilisation. Under emperors like Leo III, Basil I, and Basil II, it beat back Arab invasions, recovered lost territories, and maintained a complex court culture that influenced its neighbours. But this greatness began to ebb after the death of Basil II in 1025, and suffered an irrecoverable shock in 1071, when the Seljuk Turks defeated the imperial army at Manzikert and overran most of Asia Minor. What followed was not collapse, but a slow contraction of power and knowledge. Byzantines still called themselves Romans (Romaioi) and still believed they were the centre of a universal Christian order. But increasingly, this belief was detached from political or military reality. As Nicol shows, this was more than arrogance: it became, over time, a theology of self-deception.

Even in the late 14th century, with Ottoman forces closing in, and with a capital city reduced to a few streets of crumbling stone, Byzantine writers and administrators insisted that their emperor was still the one true emperor, crowned by God and ruling in the earthly reflection of heaven. Patriarch Antony of Constantinople could still write to the Grand Prince of Moscow in 1395 that “if the nations [i.e. the Turks] now encircle the residence of the Emperor, it does not follow that Christians should despise him… for the universal king is one” (Philotheos Kokkinos, ed. Triantafillis, 10-11).

Byzantium’s pride was reinforced by its ignorance. Its scholars continued to call Western Europeans by archaic names. Franks were Celts, Catalans were Italians, Hungarians were Paeonians, and Mongols were Scythians. The more the West changed—economically, militarily, intellectually—the less the Byzantines understood. As Nicol puts it, “Byzantine ignorance of the West seems rather to have increased with the passage of the centuries.”

Yet this ignorance was matched by hauteur. In the 10th century, Liutprand of Cremona was rebuffed when seeking a Byzantine bride for the German emperor’s son. The Greeks refused to consider a marriage alliance with a “barbarian.” Even when the Westerners were obviously superior—better armed, richer, more numerous—the Byzantines would not let go of their illusions. In the 14th century, the Emperor John VI Cantacuzenus referred to his Turkish son-in-law Orchan as “the barbarian,” despite relying on his military aid. John V, his son, was willing to make concessions to Rome, as if he were granting some great boon to the Pope, yet was arrested in Venice as an insolvent debtor. Reality had little impact on how the empire viewed itself.

Now look at the West today.

The United States, Britain, the European Union—these are states and blocs that inherited enormous power from the 19th and 20th centuries. They dominated trade. They ruled colonies. They developed the most sophisticated science and literature. But what happens when that material base is eroded by their own ruling classes? When the industries move abroad? When debt piles up? When currencies inflate? When education becomes a joke, and universities turn into therapy centres? When wars are lost that should never have been started?

What happens, in short, when a great power becomes a poor imitation of itself?

It continues to act the part.

Like the Byzantines, the West remains convinced of its civilisational superiority. It sees its democracy as universal, its language as neutral, its cultural exports as the measure of modernity. It responds with bafflement or rage when others ignore its rules. It demands respect, and labels any refusal as aggression. The language used by Western politicians about Russia or China in 2025 could be mapped almost word-for-word onto the proclamations of late Byzantine emperors about the Latins or the Turks.

But the deeper problem is the fading grip on reality. Like the Byzantines who failed to realise that the Crusaders were no longer deferential, or that the Sultan was not a passing nuisance, the modern West struggles to grasp the scale of the shift taking place in the world. The manufacturing base has gone. The debt is unpayable. The dollar and pound and euro are propped up by momentum. China grows stronger each year. So does India. So do other regional powers.

And the reaction? More slogans. More sanctions. More summits. More myth.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. In the case of Byzantium, the illusion held until the very end. The final emperors still imagined they could call councils and negotiate with popes and be treated as equals by kings. In 1439, Emperor John VIII went to Florence and agreed to a union of the Churches, hoping it would bring Western aid. It brought nothing. The city fell in 1453.

If there is a lesson here, it is not just that decline happens. It is that decline becomes fatal when combined with delusion. A great power that adapts may survive. A great power that lies to itself will collapse.

And if Britain in particular does not wish to repeat the Byzantine fate—reduced to pomp and ruin while others rise—it must recover its sense. That means ending the myth of global leadership. It means accepting the loss of empire. It means making peace with reality. Above all, it means rebuilding the foundations of power: family, economy, education, and national independence. Byzantium never lost all of these. The modern West is losing them all. That is what we must not forget.

Reading List

Donald M. Nicol, “The Byzantine View of Western Europe,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 8.4 (1967), pp. 315–339.
Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Cambridge University Press, 1965.
Dimitri Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.
Edward N. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire, Harvard University Press, 2009.
Anthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome, Harvard University Press, 2015.
Walter Emil Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, Bloomsbury, 2015.
Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, Image Books, 1958.