Byzantine, Ottoman, Templar — every modern word for chaos comes from somewhere

The vocabulary of modern drama is a fossil record. Byzantine, machiavellian, crusade — our words for impenetrable systems and morally questionable plans are not abstract. They are place names, surnames, and the names of failed enterprises, ossified into adjectives.

Trace the history of a few and the present stops looking so novel. It starts to look like the same story, over and over, with new letterheads.

Take ‘byzantine’. We use it to mean a system that is wilfully complex, illogical, and impossible to navigate. A standing-in-line-for-a-permit-to-get-a-stamp kind of problem. The word is a pejorative, and it was invented by people who defined themselves against its source: the Eastern Roman Empire, headquartered in Constantinople.

To Western Europeans of a certain period, the Byzantine Empire was everything they were not: opulent, ancient, Orthodox, and administratively dense. It was a continuity of the Roman state they were trying to imitate or reclaim. The ‘byzantine’ label was born of envy and incomprehension. For the people inside the system, it was not ‘byzantine’. It was just the empire. It was Tuesday. The word describes the outsider’s feeling of confusion, not the insider’s reality. It is a confession of ignorance.

Then there is ‘machiavellian’. This we get from Niccolò Machiavelli, the Florentine diplomat who wrote a very frank book called The Prince. It was, in essence, a field guide to acquiring and keeping power, noting that mercy, honesty, and piety are often liabilities. He described the mechanics of power as he had observed them.

For his candour, his surname became a synonym for cunning, duplicity, and cynical amorality. It was a classic case of shooting the messenger. Machiavelli didn’t invent this behaviour; he just had the audacity to write it down. When we call a corporate restructuring ‘machiavellian’, we are tacitly admitting that the ruthless logic of the Borgias and the Medicis is still with us. The Prince is alive and well, he just traded his doublet for a Patagonia vest and talks about ‘right-sizing’.

Perhaps the best example is ‘crusade’. Originally, it referred to a series of specific, armed, and theoretically holy pilgrimages to reclaim Jerusalem. The reality was a chaotic mess of political ambition, greed, violence, and logistical failure that spanned centuries and achieved almost none of its stated goals, often while brutalising other Christians along the way.

A crusade was a FUBAR with a holy banner. It promised spiritual clarity and delivered earthly chaos. And now? The word is neutered, used to describe any vaguely noble, passionate undertaking. A ‘crusade’ for better recycling. A CEO’s ‘crusade’ to reduce paperwork. We have laundered the word, but the ghost of the original meaning remains — a grand mission that will almost certainly fly off the rails and create unintended consequences.

Each of these words is a scar, a memorial to a specific historical train wreck. They are a reminder that our modern anxieties — impenetrable bureaucracies, amoral leaders, ideological missions gone wrong — are not new. We are not the first people to stand baffled before a complex system or a leader who seems to play by a different set of rules.

The vocabulary we use to frame our present chaos proves we have been here before, many times.