Byzantine Empire or Eastern Roman Empire?

[John Henry Eden]

Store Brand Latins

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Store Brand Latins

If anything, the Romans were Latin knockoff Greeks.

[buritobr]

This video shows very good arguments to say that the correct is "Eastern Roman Empire" and not "Byzantine Empire" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN9sg2XKuuo

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

This video shows very good arguments to say that the correct is "Eastern Roman Empire" and not "Byzantine Empire" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN9sg2XKuuo

I like Maiorianus as a channel. I discovered it while I was on vacation and binged most of the videos released to this point. This last video is pretty good obviously.

There is also a video emphasizing that the real "collapse of Rome" for the city of Rome anyway, was during the period between 530-600, not 476.

[RINO Tom]

I agree with Fire of Learning from YouTube … both are totally fine and separately useful, as long as “Byzantine” isn’t meant to “de-Romify” the empire and is seen as synonymous with “Eastern Roman Empire.”  If that’s understood, getting hung up about this is semantics.

[buritobr]

This video shows very good arguments to say that the correct is "Eastern Roman Empire" and not "Byzantine Empire" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN9sg2XKuuo

I like Maiorianus as a channel. I discovered it while I was on vacation and binged most of the videos released to this point. This last video is pretty good obviously.

There is also a video emphasizing that the real "collapse of Rome" for the city of Rome anyway, was during the period between 530-600, not 476.

I like this channel too. It covers a very interesting topic: the transition from the late antiquity to the early middle ages.
In the videos, we saw that people living in the italian peninsula in 476 didn't see that date as the end of the Western Roman Empire. Odoacer was just seen as the new western roman emperor. He was germanic, but the germanic people were very integrated. The narrative that the Western Roman Empire fell in 476 was built in the Byzan... ops Eastern Roman Empire in ~500, in order to justify the reconquer mission of Justinian.
The city of Rome started to loose population and wealth in 320, when Constantine created Constantinople, and when there were the 3 sacks in the 5th century. The richest families left the city. In 476, the city of Rome was already impoverished, there were between 100K and 200K inhabitants, much smaller than the peak of 1M but still one of the world's biggest cities in that time. The most splendorous building lost the statues in the sacks, but the buildings themselves were not destroyed. The aqueducts were still in use, people were still drinking water from them, the bath houses were still in use. The Colosseum was empty since 400, but there were still chariot races in the Circus Maximus. The city was like that until 530. Only after the Gothic Wars, the ancient city was almost all destroyed, and Rome became a small medieval village, with no more than 30K inhabitants.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

The self ID of the people of Byzantium was "Roman" and they called their country Romania. I think a lot of the efforts to stress the differences between classical and medieval Rome kind of odd, like we are saying the people of Constantinople were mistaken to refer to themselves as Romans. The nature of classical Rome was that everyone in their borders came to call themselves Romans, even those who spoke Greek or Coptic or Syriac rather than Latin. The idea of the Roman Empire was a system of universally applied laws that would eventually encompass every free resident, and that ideology / self mythology extended to the Byzantine empire.

The idea of a self-determined Greek/Hellenic society of the tine is an anachronism. There were many Greek speakers, yes, with a literary canon and little colonies across the Mediterranean, but their was no kind of Enosis going on. Think about this: many people speak English today, but they do not necessarily share some political unity because they are all anglophones.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Dumb to ask, but is an exonym of "Greek Roman Empire" totally out of the question? "Eastern" is clunky to me (maybe just because I suck at pronouncing "s").

[RINO Tom]

Dumb to ask, but is an exonym of "Greek Roman Empire" totally out of the question? "Eastern" is clunky to me (maybe just because I suck at pronouncing "s").

I mean, if we take this entity to begin with the splitting of the Empire, I think it included enough non-Greeks to make “Eastern” better.  By the time it was in its twilight years it was pretty clearly Greek, but its identity and classification was always more political than ethnic, too.

[Person Man]

This video shows very good arguments to say that the correct is "Eastern Roman Empire" and not "Byzantine Empire" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rN9sg2XKuuo

I like Maiorianus as a channel. I discovered it while I was on vacation and binged most of the videos released to this point. This last video is pretty good obviously.

There is also a video emphasizing that the real "collapse of Rome" for the city of Rome anyway, was during the period between 530-600, not 476.

According to Maiorianus, Rome could have gone the way of Medieval China had the Eastern Roman Empire tried to mend fences with the Goths over some high profile executions in the 520s. There could have been a situation where Justianian still took control back over Carthage and Tingus, but let Visigoths and Ostrogoths unite, as Theoderic intended, and form a German dynasty of Rome in the same way that the Chinese kept their nation united by accepting the Qing dynasty until a native dynasty could retake the throne.

Maybe there would have been a German Roman Empire and a Greek Roman Empire. Which, actually, is kind of what happened in real life but maybe in a closer relationship and without the infighting and wholesale destruction of society, the two empires wouldn't have been reduced to a 50-50 combination of unclaimed territory and portion of the  Northern frontier in the West and Greece and Western Asia minor in the East.

The Italic wars were a mistake. 

[Agonized-Statism]

There has to be a better way to distinguish it from the intact Roman Empire while still conveying their Roman identity. Rump Rome?