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Yet the empire, ringed with enemies, endured more than 1,100 years. Behind the silken glove of its diplomacy lay the mailed fist of its navy, sophisticated defenses, and small but highly trained army, based on a battering wedge of armored cavalry and mounted archers.

Proudly continuing Rome’s iron discipline, the Byzantines now defended the empire as “champions and saviors of Christendom.” On campaign they rose and slept to a round of prayers. Parading a most sacred relic—the Virgin’s robe—around Constantinople’s walls was credited with saving the “city guarded by God” from Rus attack in the ninth century. The Emperor Heraclius’s ultimate triumph was not in crushing the millennial enemy, Persia, near Nineveh. Rather it was in recovering the True Cross looted by the Persians and returning it in person to Jerusalem in 630.

What about that nasty reputation for duplicity and cowardice? The Byzantines weren’t cowards. They neither romanticized war nor gloried in it as a sport. They studied it as a science and used it as a last resort if gold, flattery, and intrigue failed.

Fire beacons and flag towers gave distant early warning. Ten centuries before Florence Nightingale set up field hospitals in the Crimean War, Byzantine medics got a bonus for each man they brought alive off the field of battle.

The fortified Crimea was the empire’s listening post for the steppes, that invasion corridor for Huns, Slavs, Khazars, Magyar hordes “howling like wolves,” and Bulgars born of that wild marriage of “wandering Scythian witches to the demons of the sands of Turkestan.” Information also came from distant ports, naval patrols, envoys, merchants, spies, defectors. (“Never turn away freeman or slave, by day or night,” counseled a tenth-century officer.) Collating this intelligence, the Bureau of Barbarians—Constantinople’s CIA—analyzed strengths and weaknesses of each nation, calculated the price of each prince, determined when to unleash a pretender to spark rebellion.

If fight they must, Byzantines bet on brains over brawn. Military manuals stressed mobility, scouting, surprise. Immobilize an invader by capturing his baggage, food, and mounts while grazing. Scorch the earth, block the springs. Don’t join an action unless strategy, numbers, and odds are in your favor. “God ever loves to help men in dangers which are necessary, not in those they choose for themselves,” explained Justinian’s famed general, Belisarius.

If things got desperate, the Byzantines unmasked their ultimate weapon: Greek fire. Volatile petroleum, preheated under pressure, was projected through a flamethrower, incinerating ships and crews. It even spread fire on the water, turning a foe’s fleet into a raging inferno. This Byzantine A-bomb broke five years of naval assaults on Constantinople in the late seventh century and a yearlong siege in the early eighth, changing history by stopping the Arabs at Europe’s doorstep. And when, two centuries later, Rus flotillas swept into the Bosporus, Byzantines sent them reeling with “lightning from heaven,” in the words of Prince Igor’s defeated force.

I came to a place named Ohrid in today’s Yugoslavia—a peaceful town, its red-tiled roofs shouldering down a peninsula to a Macedonian lake backed by the stern mountains of forbidden Albania. A fishermen’s church stands on the promontory, high-cheekboned saints staring out of their halos with large black Byzantine eyes. Ohrid a thousand years ago was the capital of a Bulgarian empire whose Tsar Samuel had triumphed from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. But in Byzantine emperor Basil II, Samuel found his nemesis.

For decades their campaigns seesawed through the Balkans with ghastly carnage. Samuel, slippery as a Lake Ohrid eel, finally set a trap for Basil in a gorge along the upper Struma. Eluding it, Basil pinned Samuel’s entire army there. Now he would teach the tsar a lesson in Byzantine revenge.

Descending at dusk from Samuel’s citadel, which still crowns the peninsula at Ohrid, I joined the stream of parents, children, and lovers promenading in the main street.