This always kind of annoys me when people talk about this subject:
> In all of these, we will mostly be focused on the western empire (with some gestures at the East), but I’ll note here (and no doubt repeatedly subsequently) that this is because the empire didn’t fall in the East, at least not any time remotely around the fifth century. The continued existence of the Eastern Roman Empire is a free, massive point that the change-and-continuity argument gets to score at the beginning of these debates for free, every time.
Is it even possible to talk about the fall of the Western Roman Empire without someone interjecting that the Eastern Roman Empire didn't fall? Is it to be a permanent feature of the discussion, this shift in focus away from the actual topic of discussion? The next time someone talks about the continuity of the Eastern Roman Empire, I'm going to talk about the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Or maybe the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, just for variety.
> Is it even possible to talk about the fall of the Western Roman Empire without someone interjecting that the Eastern Roman Empire didn't fall?
No. It would be like discussing quantum mechanics without mentioning wave-particle duality--you're missing a key part of the story.
If you're legitimately interested in understanding why Late Antiquity played out the way it did, your hypotheses have to come up with a plausible explanation for why the trajectories of the Western and Eastern Roman Empire diverged as much as they did.
> No. It would be like discussing quantum mechanics without mentioning wave-particle duality--you're missing a key part of the story.
imo I've never been satisfied that the Eastern Roman Empire was sufficiently Roman to actually qualify. Everything I've read and consumed makes me think the Byzantines were as Romans as Romans were Greek, that is to say, they liked to think they were (and possibly claim they were for political reasons).
Byzantines spoke Greek, their architecture was not Roman, their military did not behave like Romans, they were Christian, they didn't eat Roman food; if you line up the Roman Republic, or even early Roman Empire, next to the Byzantines and asked an alien whether or not they were the same, they'd say no.
They definitely called themselves Romans, they loved to "re-conquer" their old empire in the West etc, but from my perspective there is little to tie the two together as "Roman".
Well by that standard the 4th or 5th century Roman empire (both east and west) wasn't Roman either. Rome in the 2nd century AD would had probably seemed as alien to a Roman from 3rd century BC as the Roman empire in the 5/6th centuries was to someone from the time of Trajan. Does that make any of the 3 less Roman? By the time the western empire fell being Christianity and Roman identity were inexorably linked and Latin continued to be the official language until the early 6th century. The Byzantine empire itself changed tremendously as well, while by the time of the crusades it was clearly Greek, before the plague of Justinian and the Arab invasions it would be clearly recognized as Roman (aside from religious changes) by anyone from the 3/4 th centuries.
Uh, do you have something against the eastern empire? We shouldn't even mention it when talking about the fall of the western empire? Your point would make sense if the two empires were truly unrelated, but makes no sense when the two were both Roman empires.
Well technically the Western Roman Empire did not "fall" it just got merged back into the "eastern" Empire. The collapse of the Roman Empire is just a convenient concept invented by modern historians to serve as an arbitrary line between the ancient times and the middle ages. There were never two Roman Empires, just a single one universal empire ruled by multiple rulers. In 476 it just temporary lost direct control of it's Italian provinces (which it later regained). At the time it was not considered to be some monumental event (e.g. like the Sack of Rome (410) was).
It's kind of hard to ignore; if your claim is that the Western Empire fell due to A, B and C, then the continued existence of the Eastern Empire, and whether it had A, B or C, surely has to be considered.
(In particular, a lot of the simplistic popular views of why the Western Empire fell run into this wall.)
> In all of these, we will mostly be focused on the western empire (with some gestures at the East), but I’ll note here (and no doubt repeatedly subsequently) that this is because the empire didn’t fall in the East, at least not any time remotely around the fifth century. The continued existence of the Eastern Roman Empire is a free, massive point that the change-and-continuity argument gets to score at the beginning of these debates for free, every time.
Is it even possible to talk about the fall of the Western Roman Empire without someone interjecting that the Eastern Roman Empire didn't fall? Is it to be a permanent feature of the discussion, this shift in focus away from the actual topic of discussion? The next time someone talks about the continuity of the Eastern Roman Empire, I'm going to talk about the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Or maybe the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, just for variety.