Byzantine Empire or Eastern Roman Empire?

[RINO Tom]

I like the term "Byzantine Empire" specifically because it sounds cool.   However, I maintain there is not some point in time where you can logically "de-Romify" the Eastern Romans based on some event/trend/factor.  As I have posted before on this topic, being "Roman" by the Fifth Century AD was no longer AT ALL descriptive of Italic ethnicity, speaking Latin or being from the city of Rome (or Italy).  It just wasn't.  People had begun to view Rome as the "one true empire of God on Earth," and being Roman was entirely dependent on fulfilling that vision and carrying on that legacy.  If the US split into the Western US and the Eastern US, and the Eastern US (i.e., where the original English Americans started out "civilization") fell, NOBODY would consider the Western Americans as not just "Americans," even if they ended up speaking Spanish in this future scenario.

I like the term "Byzantine Empire" simply to help people unfamiliar with history distinguish Antiquity from the Middle Ages, and again because I think it sounds cool.   However, if you are trying to pinpoint some time in which the Byzantines are no longer "Romans," I think you are COMPLETELY missing the mark.  I highly encourage all to watch this video and many of the other ones from this channel:

Were the Byzantines Roman?

[RINO Tom]

^ This brings up another question I have often had that is loosely related to all of this ... when did areas like Egypt and the Levant lose their relative wealth compared to the various parts of Europe?

[RINO Tom]

Why would it be the Eastern Roman Empire when it didn't even include Rome?

Rome wasn’t even A capital of the late Western Roman Empire.

[RINO Tom]

If I was writing something formal, I would just call them the Roman Empire, or Eastern Roman Empire if I really need to be specific. Although to be fair, I usually just call them the Byzantine Empire because it's what everyone else calls them.

Why would it be the Eastern Roman Empire when it didn't even include Rome?

Rome (the city) stopped being the most important city in the Roman Empire long before it split up.

I would say Eastern Roman Empire until 635. Didn't Latin stop being a linga fraca then? Byzantine was a name made up after the fact by a 100 years. So I guess I would just have considered them the Greek Empire after Heraclius.

They spoke Greek, but they did not identify themselves as "Greek" so calling them that is just as ahistorical as Byzantine.

Weren't they internationally recognized as "Greek" at least after Empress Irene?

From what I have read, the term "Greek" the way WE use it today was not in widespread use.  What I mean by this, is that those in Greece thought of their population as two groups: Romans (i.e., good Christian citizens of the Empire) and Hellenes (i.e., suspicious pagans).  Of course their ethnic background was Greek and they spoke Greek, but they very consciously shed that identity in favor of this sort of "new Christian order" to the world, and anyone who pushed that vision was a "Roman."

States like the Holy Roman Empire mocked the Byzantines as "the Kingdom of the Greeks," but I'd put as much weight in that as I would in a Republican's description of the Democratic Party.  The Holy Roman Empire saw itself as the successor of Western Rome, and they didn't see much room for Eastern Rome in that picture.  So, while this is admittedly a bad analogy, I think someone from a various other country would see the Byzantines as "Greek" in no more of a way than you would see a French-speaking Swiss person as "French."

[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.

[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.