ABSTRACT
Books and articles by the dozen refer to the Byzantine empire, and since Byzantium was in all periods 'a significant other' for the west, it is appropriate to ask what kind of state it actually was. Byzantium's reach extended beyond its borders: cultures and practices outside the Byzantine empire, for instance in the Islamic east, can also reasonably be seen as Byzantine. Since Byzantium evolved out of the Roman empire, some historians prefer to call it the eastern or east Roman empire, and indeed this evolutionary heritage and the multiple ways in which the Byzantines responded to it complicate all attempts to characterise the Byzantine state. Byzantium belongs within the wider developments across Eurasia over many centuries, which included the rise of empires. Empires, including ancient empires, have been characterized in a number of different ways, including 'patrimonial', 'tributary', 'bureaucratic' and 'agrarian', and all these terms can be applied to Byzantium, if in different degrees at different periods.
