Allow any culture to form the roman empire as long as they have 'eastern roman legacy'
- Thread starter rayan2033
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I'm pretty sure the main requirement is to hold the title of the Byzantine Empire. And that has no cultural limitations afaik, only religious (be either christian or hellenic). And you can switch to christianity rather easily, if needed.
It's three requirements; which is you should hold Byzantium and either be christain or Hellenic or roman. II think with the new culture mechanics it should include all cultures to have eastern legecy. To allow hybrid Romans that are neither Hellens or Christians to form roman empire as well.
I disagree. The Roman culture requirement is only really applicable for custom characters, which I think is perfectly fine. I don't think it needs to be expanded.
And the current way it works is that some Turk with no relation to Romans can form the roman empire as long he grabs the Byzantium title first and converts to Christianity. Meanwhile, if you play as a roman who hybridized or diverged but as another religion, you're not even allowed to form the roman empire.
Seems rather silly as a mechanic. Why should people who identify with the Romans not be allowed to form the roman empire but some rando can just because they have the right religion?
That's not even to mention the historical inaccuracy in giving Catholics the ability to form the roman empire. Considering the papacy was adamant that the holy roman empire is the only legal successor to Rome.
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The current decision is ripped from ck2 because cultures didn't hold much individuality and it was much easier to limit it to Christians. Ideally, with the new system, the religion requirement should be scrapped altogether and the only requirement should be 1-Not catholic 2-Culture has eastern roman legacy 3-Control all the right titles + prestige and all that nonsense. The right amount of difficulty without arbitrary limits.
This makes some sense. The Roman Empire changed its state religion once officially, and it had changed a lot over time before then. It’s pretty common to hear historians argue that the Ottoman Empire is arguably the successor state to the Eastern Roman Empire, and at one time it did actually call itself Rum.
I’d argue that this would be at least as different from the original as a German or Italian restoration, though, which have their own decisions.
I’d argue that this would be at least as different from the original as a German or Italian restoration, though, which have their own decisions.
I mean, the Ottoman Empire had very litttle to do with the Roman Empire, other than that it shared its territory. It was governed by completely different people who had a completely different culture and customs. They didn't even speak the same language as the citizens of the Roman Empire. The Romans and Greeks that converted from hellenic beliefs to christianity were still the same people as before. The Turks were complete outsiders. This is the exact same reason why we got the famous quote about the HRE by Voltaire, mentioned so often by the EU4 community: The Germans weren't Romans. Although, at least in the case of HRE Latin was still used as a state language until the age of reformation.
Neither did the Greeks. The Byzantines had neither the same language as the original Romans, nor the same religion, nor the same customs, nor any of their original territory. You can overstate the point, yes, but it is hard to explain in a consistent way why Greek-speaking Christians count as the only authentic “Romans.” (And this is an explicit statement in the game files: the Byzantine restoration decision is called “the legit Roman Empire” and all the others a “poser Roman Empire”.)
If this is the standard, only speakers of a Romance language should be able to form the Roman empire. Or if Greek counts because it was a widely-spoken regional language of the Roman Empire, Aramaic should too, but any other culture with Eastern Roman Traditions should not.
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Yea, no. The Roman Empire was de facto a country of two nations - Romans and Greeks. The lingua franca in the eastern parts of the empire had pretty much always been Greek. The New Testament was originally written in Hebrew, Aramic and... Greek. Not Latin.
First, that’s not quite correct. The New Testament is written entirely in Greek, but states explicitly that the language of Jesus and his followers, and most other people in that region, was Aramaic. (See Matt 27:46, John 20:16 and Acts 21:40, among many other places. They convert their first Greek-speakers in Acts 11.) Germanic languages were spoken in parts of the Roman Empire too. And of course, Greece had not been part of the Roman Republic, nor was it within the Roman Empire when it was first established.
If a language counts as Roman because people in the former territory of Rome, although far from the majority, spoke it, in some time period, that would logically apply to languages other than Greek. I don’t want to overstate the point here. The Turks really were foreign conquerors who did not see themselves as Roman. Roman elites had been speaking Greek for a long time. But a lot of what we hear about who do or do not count as the real Romans is just special pleading.
So, to get back on topic, it’s a bit hard to see why the line would be drawn where it is. All the Romance languages have a reasonable claim to be Latin, for example, If any has a better one, it’s the dialect spoken in the City of Rome itself—which is where Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of Rome, in Latin, by the Pontifex Maximus. And, if the “Roman Empire” were reduced to Armenia and the Armenian-speaking Romans decided to change the official language of the Empire to Armenian, it’s hard to see a clear reason why that’s so different from what happened with Greek.
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