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>Both Taiwan and the Byzantines are rump portions of their larger entities The "Byzantine Empire" wasn't a rump portion at the time of the fall of the Western

>Both Taiwan and the Byzantines are rump portions of their larger entities The "Byzantine Empire" wasn't a rump portion at the time of the fall of the Western Empire. It was the other way around: the Eastern Empire was the wealthy and powerful section while the Western Empire had been slowly weakening and collapsing for centuries. It was a rump portion of the East, if anything, when it fell, reduced to just the Italian peninsula and a few other minor holdings while being propped up by Germanic forces. It's not really comparable to Taiwan because, when the Western Empire fell, the Empire had two legal capitals and two legal co-Emperors. The Eastern Empire simply persisted when the Western Empire finally gave its last gasp and was snuffed out by Odoacer, so it makes no sense to call it a different polity. Odoacer and his successors also made no claim to being the new Emperors of Rome to contest the rule of the Eastern Empire; in fact, it was exactly this rejection of the Imperial title that marked the end of the Western Empire, whereas in earlier days Odoacer or someone else would have claimed the mantle. That's how worthless it had become by then. The Eastern Empire would certainly go on to evolve and change over the next 1000 years, but that doesn't make it a different entity. >I wouldn't call the Frankish kingdoms under the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties France Neither would they, since that concept didn't exist at the time. But do you know what the "Byzantines" called themselves?

jcranmer 8y ago
The way I figure the Roman Empire (and I realize this is not the usual historiography, definitely not what is presented in school textbooks), the Roman Empire ceased to exist as a de facto polity with the Crisis of Third Century. While Diocletian's partition of the empire was meant to be administrative and not political, the notion of an Eastern/Western divide did persist. The taxation spiral of the Western Roman Empire caused it to collapse, where it recoalesced into the Carolingian Kingdom, while the Eastern Roman Empire lived on as the Byzantine Empire. I don't draw a meaningful distinction between the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire, but I do draw a distinction between the Eastern Roman Empire and the pre-Crisis Roman Empire. And yes, I'm well aware that the Byzantines only ever referred to themselves as Romans. But so did the Sultanate of Rum, and no one argues that the Sultanate of Rum should be considered the Roman Empire.

jcranmer 8y ago

The way I figure the Roman Empire (and I realize this is not the usual historiography, definitely not what is presented in school textbooks), the Roman Empire ceased to exist as a de facto polity with the Crisis of Third Century. While Diocletian's partition of the empire was meant to be administrative and not political, the notion of an Eastern/Western divide did persist. The taxation spiral of the Western Roman Empire caused it to collapse, where it recoalesced into the Carolingian Kingdom, while the Eastern Roman Empire lived on as the Byzantine Empire. I don't draw a meaningful distinction between the Byzantine Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire, but I do draw a distinction between the Eastern Roman Empire and the pre-Crisis Roman Empire. And yes, I'm well aware that the Byzantines only ever referred to themselves as Romans. But so did the Sultanate of Rum, and no one argues that the Sultanate of Rum should be considered the Roman Empire.