The Byzantine Empire, Rome in the east

When the western Roman Empire fell in 476 AD, its eastern half carried on for almost another thousand years from its capital at Constantinople. Its people never stopped calling themselves Romans; historians later named this Greek-speaking, Christian continuation the Byzantine Empire.

Under Justinian I in the 6th century it briefly reconquered Italy, North Africa and southern Spain, shown here around 555 AD at its widest reach. Scrub the ChronoAtlas timeline to watch it contract under Arab, Turkic and Latin pressure until Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans in 1453.

Key facts

• Constantinople was the largest and richest city in Christendom for much of the Middle Ages.
• Justinian's legal code, the Corpus Juris Civilis, is the foundation of much of modern European law.
• The Hagia Sophia, completed in 537 AD, was the largest cathedral in the world for nearly a thousand years.
• The empire's fall in 1453 sent Greek scholars west and helped spark the Renaissance.