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Proof to your modern eyes. Not to the eyes of those who also called Constantinople "New Rome", and who called themselves Romans even 1000 years later.
by derdi 3mo ago
Proof to your modern eyes. Not to the eyes of those who also called Constantinople "New Rome", and who called themselves Romans even 1000 years later.
- momoschili 3mo agoMany Western polities have sought the title of the Roman Empire and the legitimacy it endows. Constantine split the empire, and Constantius II did not rule over Rome (or many other parts of the empire). Is it even reasonable to assert it was still the Roman Empire after the fracture? Is it legitimate for the Eastern Roman Empire to claim the legacy? I think so, and I think they have among the best arguments for it. Conversely it is also legitimate to note the major differences between the two and the fact that discontinuities do exist.
- derdi 3mo ago"Constantine split the empire" is just incorrect. There were co-emperors with regional responsibilities both before and after him. They were co-emperors of one empire. If you want a firm split, 395 (death of Theodosius) is the more common date AFAIK. I'm not denying that gradually, over well more than a thousand years, the empire (only surviving in the East) changed character in many ways. I am denying that a unique Eastern character sprang up (and immediately applied to Egypt) the moment that Constantinople was founded.
- brudgers 3mo agoAlso worth noting that Roman tradition was for two Consuls at a time.
- momoschili 3mo agoYou're correct, I'm mistaken that Constantine split the empire. That being said I think there are some semantics as far as "co-emperors with regional responsibilities" being in a single polity or separate polities. I do agree with you that there was no instantaneous Eastern character that sprang up out of nowhere.
- cwnyth 3mo agoThey actually called themselves Ῥωμαῖοι, not Romani, and not every description needs to be emic. There's nothing wrong with the label "Byzantine" except to Byzaboos.
- derdi 3mo agoSo I shouldn't call them Romans, since that is an English translation of what they called themselves, and thus foreign to them. But you can call them Byzantines, an English term invented in the 19th century, because... you say so? Thank you, I have been enlightened.
- cwnyth 3mo agoTell me, do you call people from China Chinese? Japan Japanese? Germany German? If so, you're a hypocrite. You're also arguing against a strawman. I never said they weren't Roman. I only said there's nothing wrong with Byzantine. Maybe if you weren't so smugly self-righteous, you'd have better reading comprehension.
- cwnyth 3mo agoSeparately, your facts are wrong, because it was centuries before that the word Byzantine was first used to describe this era of the latter eastern Roman empire. Oops, might want to read a book instead of looking at memes.
- vonunov 3mo ago> Byzaboos Hey that's fresh. Do they have Hittitomori too?
- cwnyth 3mo agoI'd love to see that! I can't take credit for the term. There are some people who are extreme fans of the Byzantine empire and defend it at every turn. I can kind of get recent history, but being a fanatic about an ancient polity strikes this trained historian as utterly bizarre.
- 3mo ago
- euroderf 3mo ago"Capital of the Western World for a Cool Thousand Years" (TM)
- victorbjorklund 3mo agoRussia calls itself a continuation of Rome.