Damon said: > And yet the people living it it continued to refer to themselves as > Romans (or, specifically, Romaioi), people outside the empire > referred to them as Romans (the term Romanians comes up often when > referring to the Byzantine Empire). Whether or not the fragment of > Empire that existed at the end resembled the empire is academic; > there was a clear line of succession from the original Roman > Emperors, and the last Byzantine Emperor was an inheritor of that.
And Mehmed II considered himself the successor of the Byzantine emperors without any disruption of continuity. (As, for that matter, did the Latin emperors of Byzantium centuries earlier) He proclaimed himself the protector of the Orthodox church and appointed a patriarch in the manner of a Byzantine emperor. The Ottomans took over much of the administrative machinery of the Byzantine state. I can't cite a reference, but the Ottomans may even have considered themselves Romans; the earlier Seljuk turks of the Sultanate of Rum (i.e. Rome) certainly considered themselves succesors of Rome, a new elite controlling a large part of an ancient empire. But regardless of all of this, the events of 1453 were not a collapse, but rather the fall of a single city. > Again, you can make plenty of arguments for or against. But in > academic circles 476 is the recognized or agreed upon date for the > final end of the Empire in the West. It was never clear whether the > empire in the West was in its final decline or whether it could be > revived. Certainly there were elements that hoped so, and we are > fairly certain that despite the movement of the Germans into the > remnants of the Empire, the Imperial government and beauracracy > continued to function, even AFTER the deposition of Romulus > Augustulus. Yes, indeed. All of which is why I objected here too to your use of the word "collapse". All that happened in 476 was that Odoacer gave Romulus Augustulus a pension and sent him off to live out his days in comfortable obscurity. There wasn't a collapse of any kind, there was just a Gothic chieftain ruling directly rather that through a puppet emperor (as others had before). > But this date is most accepted for the fact that the Imperial Regalia > for the Western empire was returned to the Emperor Zeno in > Constantinople, making a reality what had already happened. On the other hand, Odoacer requested the title "Patricius" from Zeno, and received it in 480 after the death of Nepos, whom Zeno had continued to regard as legitimate western Emperor. In this sense, there was a continuity of empire after 476. Zeno was sole emperor, and formally ruled parts of the west through Odoacer. If this was an empty formality, it was no more so than the earlier situation of Alaric, who was both Gothic chieftain and magister militum of the Eastern empire (and terror of the West, no doubt). While we're talking about history, I have a question for you: if I am only going to read five books about the Middle Ages, which five should they be to gain the greatest understanding? Rich Rich
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