The Roman Empire Deserves Better Than a Family Tree Full of Shortcuts
Matt Baker's UsefulCharts history of the Roman emperors promises a complete account of nearly 1,500 years of imperial succession. But its confident storytelling conceals factual mistakes, questionable genealogical claims, and historical explanations that collapse under closer examination.
A Roman emperor's nephew becomes his son. Eastern Goths become Western Goths. A crusade already underway is presented as though a Byzantine prince started it. A complicated religious separation becomes a single event in 1054.
These are not all equally serious errors. Some are straightforward factual mistakes. Others turn complicated historical developments into misleadingly simple stories.
That distinction matters.
Baker is attempting something difficult: explaining the succession of 158 emperors and three reigning empresses, from Augustus in 27 BCE to Constantine XI in 1453. His family-tree format helps organize an extraordinary quantity of information.
But a family tree carries an implicit promise. Its relationships should be correct. Its chronology should make sense. And when it connects one event to another, the connection should survive historical scrutiny.
Several important parts of this account fail those tests.
1. A Family Tree That Gets an Emperor's Family Wrong
Consider Michael IV, the Byzantine emperor who ruled from 1034 to 1041.
Baker describes his succession by explaining that Empress Zoe adopted Michael V, whom he identifies as Michael IV's son from an earlier marriage.
That is incorrect.
Michael V was Michael IV's nephew, not his biological son.
The distinction is explicitly established in John Skylitzes' medieval history, preserved in John Wortley's translation published by Cambridge University Press. Skylitzes identifies Michael V as the late emperor's nephew and records that Zoe adopted him before proclaiming him emperor.
The relationship matters because Michael V's accession depended on more than ordinary hereditary succession.
Zoe was the daughter of Constantine VIII and a member of the Macedonian imperial dynasty. Her status supplied legitimacy that Michael V could not claim through direct descent from her family.
Adoption was therefore a political instrument.
Michael V's subsequent decision to remove Zoe from power provoked a revolt that destroyed his reign in 1042.
The real story is more revealing than the mistaken version: an emperor whose legitimacy depended on adoption by a powerful woman attempted to eliminate that woman from government and lost his throne.
Baker's error does not merely misplace a relative on a chart. It obscures the mechanism by which Michael V obtained imperial authority.
That is precisely the kind of relationship a genealogy-focused history should explain correctly.
2. The Goths Have Been Sent in Opposite Directions
The episode also reverses the identities of two major Gothic groups.
When discussing the sack of Rome in 410, Baker identifies Alaric's Visigoths as Eastern Goths.
Later, when explaining Theodoric's conquest of Italy, he identifies the Ostrogoths as Western Goths.
The conventional historical distinction is the opposite.
The Visigoths were the western Gothic group, while the Ostrogoths were associated with the eastern group.
Oxford Reference confirms the historical geographic distinction. Although the origins and meanings of the names involve additional linguistic complications, their conventional historical identification is not in serious doubt.
Why does this matter?
Alaric's Visigoths sacked Rome in 410. Theodoric's Ostrogoths subsequently established a kingdom in Italy after defeating Odoacer.
Those were different political movements, with different leaders and histories.
Confusing their identities muddles the explanation of how Roman authority in the West disintegrated and what replaced it.
A viewer unfamiliar with the subject could reasonably carry the reversed distinction into everything else they read about the period.
This is a basic error, not a disputed scholarly interpretation.
3. Constantine's Christian Revolution Has a Chronology Problem
Baker's explanation of Constantine's rise combines several important developments: the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the defeat of rival emperors, the division of imperial authority, and the legalization of Christianity.
The problem is the order in which he places them.
His account says that Licinius defeated Maximinus Daia and that Constantine and Licinius consequently divided imperial control in 312.
The decisive defeat of Maximinus Daia occurred on April 30, 313.
Constantine had defeated Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge on October 28, 312. Constantine and Licinius subsequently reached their agreement at Milan in 313, before Licinius defeated Maximinus.
The agreement conventionally called the Edict of Milan belongs to 313, with Licinius issuing its surviving eastern implementation in June.
These details expose a more complicated political sequence than the one presented.
Constantine and Licinius agreed on religious toleration while they still faced rival political and military interests. Their agreement was not simply the administrative consequence of having already eliminated those rivals.
There is another qualification worth understanding.
Christian toleration did not begin from nothing in 313.
Galerius had already issued an edict of toleration in 311. The Milan agreement extended legal protections and addressed the restoration of Christian property.
The importance of 313 is undeniable. But that importance is better understood when the measure is placed within an evolving political struggle rather than presented as one emperor's sudden transformation of Roman religious policy.
Chronology is not decorative information.
Change the sequence, and the explanation of why rulers acted can change with it.
4. A Love Affair Is Not the Same as a Political Alliance
Baker repeatedly introduces romantic relationships into his account of imperial succession.
Some of these relationships are firmly documented. Others remain uncertain.
His treatment of Maria of Alania and Alexios Komnenos illustrates the difficulty.
Maria was a Georgian princess who married the Byzantine emperors Michael VII and Nikephoros III.
Baker describes her as secretly having another lover, Alexios, before the two arranged for Nikephoros's removal.
There was indeed contemporary gossip about a possible romantic relationship between Maria and Alexios.
But an affair is not an established historical fact.
The better-documented relationship is political.
Maria adopted Alexios as her son, an arrangement that helped connect him to the imperial household and strengthen his position. The adoption appears in Anna Komnene's Alexiad, a primary account of Alexios's reign.
Modern scholarship also records rumors that Alexios might abandon his wife to marry Maria. Those rumors had political consequences because they threatened existing alliances, but their circulation does not establish that the alleged affair occurred.
This distinction changes the story.
Maria was concerned with preserving the position of her son Constantine Doukas. Alexios needed relationships capable of legitimizing his challenge to the reigning emperor.
Adoption, court influence, and dynastic bargaining provided those connections.
A secret romance makes an entertaining explanation. The documented political arrangements make a more useful one.
The problem is not mentioning the possibility of an affair.
It is allowing a disputed personal relationship to replace the institutional explanation of how power changed hands.
5. Christianity Did Not Split Into Two Churches on One Day in 1054
One of the episode's most consequential oversimplifications concerns the Great Schism.
Baker describes the events of 1054 as the moment when the Western and Eastern Churches formally separated into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
This remains a familiar way of teaching Christian history.
It is also misleading.
In March 2026, the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame published a discussion by historian Nick Kamas examining precisely this problem.
Kamas argues that no definitive separation between the Greek and Latin Churches occurred, or was generally understood to have occurred, in 1054.
The diplomatic conflict of that year was important. Representatives of Rome and Constantinople exchanged condemnations, including the famous episode involving a document of excommunication placed in Hagia Sophia.
But the division developed across a much longer period.
Religious disagreements, political competition, differences in worship, and disputes over authority had already strained relationships before 1054. Their consequences also continued evolving afterward.
A date can be a useful historical reference without being the precise moment something happened.
Baker's explanation turns a prolonged institutional breakdown into an instantaneous event.
That loses one of the most important lessons of the schism: institutions can remain formally connected while their relationships deteriorate for generations.
By the time separation becomes unmistakable, its causes may be centuries old.
6. The Fourth Crusade Was Already Underway Before Alexios IV Intervened
The episode's account of the Fourth Crusade contains a particularly consequential causal error.
Baker explains that the exiled Byzantine prince Alexios IV appealed to Latin Crusaders for assistance in recovering his father's throne.
He then presents that appeal as the event that launched the Fourth Crusade.
The Fourth Crusade had already been launched before Alexios's intervention redirected it toward Constantinople.
The chronology is well established.
Pope Innocent III issued his appeal for the crusade in August 1198.
The expedition assembled over the following years, negotiated transport with Venice in 1201, and departed in 1202.
Before reaching Constantinople, the Crusaders attacked and captured Zara, a Christian city on the Adriatic coast.
Alexios's proposed restoration became central to the expedition's subsequent change of destination.
A chronology published by Routledge documents the earlier papal initiative and the expedition's progress. The Metropolitan Museum of Art similarly explains that the Fourth Crusade originally intended to attack Egypt before becoming involved in Byzantine dynastic politics.
The difference is substantial.
Alexios IV did not create the crusading expedition. He offered its leaders a new objective and substantial promised rewards.
His proposal included financial assistance and religious concessions that made intervention attractive to important Crusader leaders.
The Crusaders helped restore Alexios and his father Isaac II in 1203.
But the restored Byzantine government could not fulfill its financial commitments.
Political disorder followed, and the Crusaders ultimately attacked Constantinople in 1204, establishing the Latin Empire.
The original objective, Byzantine succession politics, financial obligations, Venetian interests, and decisions by individual Crusader commanders all belong in the explanation.
Reducing this sequence to a prince's appeal launching a crusade removes the independent ambitions and choices of the western expedition.
It also weakens the explanation of why an army assembled for a religious campaign against Muslim-held territories ultimately conquered one of Christianity's greatest cities.
7. The Varangian Guard Appears Too Early
Baker connects the emergence of the Varangian Guard with the period surrounding Leo VI and the Rus' attack on Constantinople in 907.
There is an important distinction between Scandinavians serving Byzantium and the creation of the formal imperial guard.
Varangian soldiers entered Byzantine military service before the late tenth century.
But the establishment of the distinct Varangian Guard is normally associated with Basil II around 988–989, when Vladimir of Kyiv supplied approximately 6,000 soldiers to support the emperor.
Research on Viking service in Byzantium makes this distinction explicit: earlier Scandinavian military participation preceded the formation of the specialized imperial guard.
That places the institution's conventional founding roughly eight decades after the events associated with Leo VI.
More importantly, it connects the guard to a different political circumstance.
Basil II needed reliable military support against rebellion. Vladimir possessed soldiers who could provide that support.
The resulting relationship was connected to the same diplomatic and dynastic developments that brought Vladimir into a marriage alliance with the Byzantine imperial family.
That is a remarkably revealing story about military assistance, dynastic marriage, and political survival.
Placing the guard vaguely around an earlier Rus' attack leaves much of that story untold.
8. Justinian's Legal Achievement Has Been Enlarged Beyond the Evidence
Baker credits Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis with becoming the foundation of all Western legal traditions.
Justinian's compilation was enormously influential.
But all Western legal traditions is too sweeping a claim.
The Roman legal compilation became foundational to continental European civil-law systems. Its influence extended through medieval legal scholarship, church law, and later legal developments.
English common law followed a different institutional path.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison's legal history materials distinguish the strong influence of Justinian's compilation on continental civil law from its less direct influence on English common law.
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy similarly explains that the Corpus Juris Civilis did not become binding authority within the common-law tradition.
That difference matters because it concerns how legal systems actually developed.
Roman law influenced the Western world profoundly without becoming the universal foundation of every Western legal institution.
A more precise description would make Justinian's genuine achievement clearer.
He preserved, reorganized, and transmitted legal material that profoundly shaped later civil-law systems and influenced other traditions.
That accomplishment requires no exaggeration.
9. Constantinople Did Not Fall and Suddenly Force Europe Onto the Oceans
Baker concludes by connecting Constantinople's fall in 1453 to the European Age of Discovery.
He qualifies the relationship, suggesting that the loss of Byzantine trade routes helped spur European maritime exploration.
The argument deserves scrutiny because the chronology and commercial evidence complicate it.
European maritime expansion was already underway before 1453.
Portugal conquered Ceuta in 1415. Portuguese expeditions crossed Cape Bojador in 1434. Madeira had already been colonized, and Atlantic exploration was expanding.
These developments preceded Mehmed II's conquest of Constantinople.
Nor did Ottoman conquest simply terminate commercial exchange between Europe and Asia.
Research on Venetian–Ottoman relations documents continuing and changing commercial relationships between the two powers.
Giancarlo Casale's The Ottoman Age of Exploration, published by Oxford University Press, goes further. It documents Ottoman participation in Indian Ocean commerce and the empire's subsequent competition with Portugal for influence over Asian trade routes.
European explorers did seek profitable alternatives to established trading networks. Political competition, commercial ambition, religion, and technological developments all influenced that search.
Ottoman expansion mattered.
But the available evidence does not support treating Constantinople's conquest as the straightforward trigger that forced Europeans to discover ocean routes.
A better question is how Ottoman power changed the costs, opportunities, and strategic incentives of competing commercial systems.
That question leads to a more interesting history than the familiar picture of blocked roads and desperate European sailors.
The Ottomans were not merely obstacles standing between Europe and Asian commerce. They became major participants in the commercial and naval competition that followed.
The Larger Failure: Certainty Where History Requires Judgment
The most serious weakness in Baker's presentation is not that every simplified explanation is wrong.
It is the recurring tendency to move from a complicated historical event to a decisive conclusion without making the necessary distinctions.
An alleged affair becomes an established personal relationship.
A negotiated political adoption becomes ordinary biological succession.
A major religious conflict becomes a clean institutional separation.
A crusade's change of direction becomes its origin.
A developing military institution appears decades before its conventional establishment.
These errors matter differently, but they share a consequence: they make the historical record appear more definite than it is.
The distinction between a verified fact, a conventional historical interpretation, and an unresolved scholarly question is essential to reliable history.
A family-tree presentation is particularly vulnerable to this problem.
Draw a solid line between two names, and the viewer understandably assumes that the relationship has been established. Connect two events with an explanation, and the viewer assumes that the causal relationship has been demonstrated.
But Roman and Byzantine history repeatedly defeats those assumptions.
Emperors adopted successors for political reasons. Marriages legitimized usurpers. Biological paternity could be disputed. Religious authority developed across generations. Military alliances created dynastic relationships that would otherwise never have existed.
Some of the most revealing historical information lies precisely where those categories become difficult to separate.
A complete history should preserve that complexity when it changes the meaning of events.
Baker's presentation occasionally does so. His treatment of the Western Empire's end in 476, for example, acknowledges that political continuity did not disappear overnight.
That makes the careless certainty elsewhere more difficult to excuse.
The account demonstrates that nuance can be communicated to a general audience. It simply does not apply that discipline consistently.
Elle's Verdict
A historical family tree can be a valuable educational tool. It allows readers to follow relationships across centuries without becoming lost in names and dates.
But its usefulness depends on accuracy.
Matt Baker's account contains demonstrable mistakes about genealogy, political chronology, and the identities of historical groups. It also presents disputed interpretations and complex developments with more certainty than the evidence permits.
The independently verified errors do not establish that the entire project is unreliable. Nor do they establish deliberate deception.
They establish something narrower and more defensible: this supposedly complete account cannot safely be treated as a definitive history without checking its claims.
And the deeper problem is not simply that some names have been connected incorrectly.
It is that the story repeatedly becomes less accurate when it becomes more convenient.
The Roman Empire lasted nearly fifteen centuries. Its survival depended on institutions, political bargains, military force, religious transformation, and people who frequently manipulated the very rules of succession that genealogical charts try to explain.
Reducing those developments to neat lines and confident narration may make the history easier to consume.
It does not necessarily make it easier to understand.
A family tree should clarify history. It should not make certainty out of evidence that remains contested—or turn a mistake into something that looks authoritative merely because it has been drawn neatly.
References
1. Original work — Roman Emperors Family Tree, UsefulCharts, Matt Baker.
Watch the original video
Primary work examined. Its claims about imperial relationships, chronology, religion, and the Crusades provide the basis for this critique.
2. Michael V Kalaphates [1041–1042] — John Skylitzes, translated by John Wortley, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Read the Cambridge University Press chapter
The translated medieval account explicitly identifies Michael V as Michael IV's nephew and records his adoption by Empress Zoe.
3. Goths — Oxford Reference.
Consult the Oxford reference entry
Establishes the conventional distinction between the eastern Ostrogoths and western Visigoths.
4. Milan, Edict (Agreement) of — Encyclopedia.com, New Catholic Encyclopedia.
Read the historical entry
Places the agreement in 313, distinguishes it from the earlier toleration measure of 311, and identifies the surviving eastern implementation.
5. The Emperor Alexios, My Father — Anna Komnene, The Alexiad, Cambridge University Press.
Read the Cambridge edition
Provides primary-source evidence for Maria of Alania's political adoption of Alexios Komnenos, independently of allegations about their personal relationship.
6. Pinpointing the Great Schism — Nick Kamas, University of Notre Dame Medieval Institute, March 23, 2026.
Read the Notre Dame analysis
Challenges the conventional portrayal of 1054 as a definitive moment of separation between Eastern and Western Christianity.
7. The Crusades, 1095–1204, Second Edition: Chronology — Routledge.
Consult the published chronology
Documents the Fourth Crusade's launch in 1198 and its development before Byzantine succession politics redirected the expedition.
8. The Crusades (1095–1291) — Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001; revised 2014.
Read the Metropolitan Museum's history
Confirms that the Fourth Crusade originally targeted Egypt before intervening in Byzantine affairs and conquering Constantinople.
9. The Varangian Guard — Viking Archaeology, drawing on H. R. Ellis Davidson's historical research.
Read the historical overview
Distinguishes earlier Scandinavian military service in Byzantium from the formation of the organized Varangian Guard under Basil II.
10. Sources of Law: Roman Law — University of Wisconsin–Madison, Legal Studies Program.
Read the university's legal history materials
Explains the foundations of continental civil law and the more limited, indirect influence of Justinian's compilation on English common law.
11. Treaty of Tordesillas — World History Encyclopedia, August 11, 2021.
Read the historical account
Documents Portuguese maritime expansion before 1453, including the navigation of Cape Bojador in 1434.
12. Venetians and Ottomans in the Early Modern Age — Edizioni Ca' Foscari, Venice.
Read the scholarly collection
Documents continuing and changing commercial relations between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, challenging a simple narrative of trade ending after Constantinople's conquest.
13. The Ottoman Age of Exploration — Giancarlo Casale, Oxford University Press, 2010.
Read the Oxford University Press study
Uses Ottoman and Portuguese archival evidence to establish Ottoman participation in Indian Ocean trade and maritime competition during the Age of Exploration.