When the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great founded his city, Constantinople, as a new Rome in 330 CE, he could hardly have dreamed that his great empire would endure for yet another millennium. During this long millennium, the Roman Empire, also known to historians as the Byzantine Empire, underwent profound cultural, religious, political, and legal transformation. This course will examine that history from the foundation of Constantinople in 330 to the Ottoman conquest in 1453. It will focus on the changing meaning of ‘Rome,’ both within the empire and without, the dynamic cultural production of the Roman people, and how the political and legal history of the Empire was intertwined with both Western Europe and the Islamic world. The emphasis of the course will be on learning to read and analyze primary sources—histories, hagiographies (the lives of saints), poetry, and legal texts—and how to deploy these sources as evidence in historical writing.