The Byzantine Empire was a continuation of the Roman Empire and even of the Roman Republic.
Its political ideology was fundamentally secular and grounded in the ancient Roman republican belief that government exists to serve the common good.
Its people no longer had a legal role in the election of leaders or legislators, but they often played an extralegal role in the making and unmaking of emperors, whose legitimacy depended on popularity and not on a claim of divine right or constitutional correctness.
Emperors therefore ruled pragmatically and not fanatically, often disappointing the Church to please the people…
Kaldellis’, The Byzantine Republic […] is a frankly revisionist attack on the field of Byzantine studies, which has perpetuated age-old Western prejudices at odds with the historical record.
Kaldellis takes aim mostly at academics of the 1930s and their imitators, but the roots of prejudice go back much further to the anti-Orthodox propaganda of the Middle Ages.
The Orthodox Byzantines refused to recognize the supremacy of the Pope of Rome over all things sacred and secular, and they allowed their emperor far more authority over the Church than papal partisans could countenance.
Later, during the Enlightenment, as the West moved to exclude religion from politics, the Byzantines were held up as the prime example of “caesaropapism” under the mistaken belief that the Byzantine emperor ruled as both king and pope, with no separation of church and state.
As Western political thought evolved, more faults were found in the Byzantine model.
The empire lacked a written constitution with enumerated rights, separation of powers, democratic procedures, or any other explicit limits on the authority of the emperor, who seemed to rule by divine right as an absolute monarch.