# Map of the Byzantine Empire

Source page: https://geographichistory.app/empire/byzantine-empire/

On the Geographic History map, the Byzantine Empire appears from AD 396 to 1453. It reaches its largest mapped extent in AD 555: about 3 million km² across 160 provinces.

The Byzantine Empire was the eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, and it outlived the western half by almost a thousand years; its people called themselves Romans. Under Justinian I in the 6th century it reconquered Italy and North Africa and built the Hagia Sophia, and it remained a Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian power for centuries. It ended when the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453.

## Mapped area by year (km²)

- AD 396: 1,986,000
- AD 451: 2,015,000
- AD 506: 1,997,000
- AD 561: 2,934,000
- AD 616: 2,793,000
- AD 671: 1,303,000
- AD 726: 941,000
- AD 781: 873,000
- AD 836: 800,000
- AD 891: 789,000
- AD 946: 709,000
- 1001: 940,000
- 1056: 1,136,000
- 1111: 644,000
- 1166: 737,000
- 1221: 0
- 1276: 236,000
- 1331: 120,000
- 1386: 65,000
- 1441: 30,000

## About this map

Territory comes from the Chronas historical dataset used by the Geographic History app. Areas are approximate, computed from about 2,400 province shapes, and describe this map rather than official historical figures - border data for the ancient and medieval world is necessarily a reconstruction.