As I said a couple pages back, it seems like you are ignoring the facts. You are obviously dead-set in your beliefs on this subject. If some-thing as clear as they considering them-selves Romans doesn't cut it for you, then nothing will.
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As I said a couple pages back, it seems like you are ignoring the facts. You are obviously dead-set in your beliefs on this subject. If some-thing as clear as they considering them-selves Romans doesn't cut it for you, then nothing will.
And yet by the Treaty of Verdun in 843 the Frankish Empire was already divided into de facto independent states, who warred amongst one another and constituted their own entities. These states cannot be considered part of the Frankish Empire, they constituted no meaningful whole. Just as after Louis' death the Frankish Empire broke up into several successor states, after the death of Theodosius, the ERE and WRE constituted no meaningful whole, and never would again. At that point I believe we must begin to consider them their own entities.
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So if the people of Spain considered themselves Chinese, would Spain be China?
If they considered them-selves part of China...that is how it works....The concept of a nation.
Oh so you are one of those old pro-Roman Romans who didnt even acknowledged the Latins as Roman Citizens when these rights were granted.
A bit crazy but hey whatever floats your boat.
Also here let me fix your example: "So if the people of Spain were conquered by China, were given citizenship of China, were considered Chinese by the Chinese and considered themselves Chinese, would Spain be China?"
Does everything else not matter at all to you?
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I'm not sure what you meant with the first part, but no, given what he said, nothing more is needed.
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I'm not sure what you meant with the first part, but no, given what he said, nothing more is needed.
OTOH, if we lost most of our territory, managed to save the Pacific states, New Mexico and Arizona, moved the capital to San Francisco, made Spanish our official language and abolished the tradiitional state structure in favor of administrative districts, I hope you'd at least agree that there would be a reason why, if a consensus name like "The Pacific Hispanic Republic" evolved it made quite as much sense as "The United States of America" for historical discussion (and gaming purposes).
Not in every case (check your intuition on whether you think Taiwan "is" China or that that was just diplomatic claptrap), yet only this the only controversy where we get a thread or two per year about it.
Personally I don't care too much if people think of it as Roman in some way or other, as long as we avoid lectures on why "Byzantine Empire" is wrong.
I hope that isn't an example being used to parallel to the state of the Roman Empire. But aside from that, I am not talking about what it should be called now-a-days or in the awesome games PI makes, I understand that the term 'Byzantine Empire' is there to help understand history better. I am not saying they should change it in the games, I am just helping to clarify that it is, in fact, not its official title or name. You see?
Nothing more is needed? By the time the WRE fell the roman citizens of the ERE were considered romans by the romans in the WRE.
It kinda matters as the Roman Empire never was some nationalistic empire were only people from the Italian peninsula were considered Romans. Some of the best rulers of said Empire werent even from the Italian peninsula.
Ghana refers to it-self as Ghana. 'Byzantine' refers to it-self as the Roman Empire.
Yes, it is meant to parallel. Different language, government structure, predominant culture, territory. I take it you disagree, but seems like an apt analogy to me.
Not really, but I always get a bit confused by these threads (and by the fact that I jump in myself
). It's of course well known that the name wasn't "official" (to the contemporary Byzantine bureaucracy, for example), so it's clarified well & good but then we apparently still get ongoing debates about something like whether that's relevant.In my simple, pragmatic world view "Byzantine" is the best and most correct word in 21st century English. "Roman" is not technically wrong but it seems more like saying "Felix domesticus" when you mean cat. Curious if you agree with that assessment or not?
IMO the debate tends to get really semantic and hinge on what you define "the Roman Empire" as. I like to quote one of the few anecdotes I remember from my college Philosophy classes: From William James-
If we think "Roman Empire" is defined as a kind of legalistic and pre- modern conception of continuity of ruling families, presence of imperial crowns and imperial regalia or general legal successor and so on then Byzantium has a good claim.
If we think "Roman Empire" is defined as a kind of modern nation where questions of ethnicity, language territory and government structure are important than Rome was not Byzantium the same way. At a certain point, for example, we stop calling it the Kingdom of the Gauls or West Francia and start calling it France. Legalistically, AFAIK, this is wrong but its a helpful tool.
I personally cleave enough to the (admittedly anachronistic) view of the nation method-I just don't find the presence of the imperial regalia or the legalistic continuity all that compelling. Its easy to say I am projecting my modern sensibility back in time but I often hear arguments for why Odoacer, Alaric or Mehmed the II must be considered foreigners and pretenders that seem to accept some of the nationalist ideas (they didn't speak the right language at birth ect.) YMMV.
If we think "Roman Empire" is defined as a kind of legalistic and pre- modern conception of continuity of ruling families, presence of imperial crowns and imperial regalia or general legal successor and so on then Byzantium has a good claim.
If we think "Roman Empire" is defined as a kind of modern nation where questions of ethnicity, language territory and government structure are important than Rome was not Byzantium the same way. At a certain point, for example, we stop calling it the Kingdom of the Gauls or West Francia and start calling it France. Legalistically, AFAIK, this is wrong but its a helpful tool.
I personally cleave enough to the (admittedly anachronistic) view of the nation method-I just don't find the presence of the imperial regalia or the legalistic continuity all that compelling. Its easy to say I am projecting my modern sensibility back in time but I often hear arguments for why Odoacer, Alaric or Mehmed the II must be considered foreigners and pretenders that seem to accept some of the nationalist ideas (they didn't speak the right language at birth ect.) YMMV.
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5 pages of discussion over the proper name for the Byzantine Empire? I guess that only could happen on the Paradox forum.
1. Nobody ever called the Byzantine Empire for Byzantine as long as it existed.
2. The Byzantines themself refered to the Empire as the Roman Empire.
3. Western powers used the names the Roman Empire, Romania (land of the Romans) and occasionaly the Greek Empire.
4. Western powers refered to the Byzantine emperor as Imperator Romaniae and the Holy Roman emperor as Imperator Romanorum.
5. Calling the Byzantine empire Romania might be a better name than the Byzantine empire, but it would confuse things as there is a country out there called Romania today.
1. Nobody ever called the Byzantine Empire for Byzantine as long as it existed.
2. The Byzantines themself refered to the Empire as the Roman Empire.
3. Western powers used the names the Roman Empire, Romania (land of the Romans) and occasionaly the Greek Empire.
4. Western powers refered to the Byzantine emperor as Imperator Romaniae and the Holy Roman emperor as Imperator Romanorum.
5. Calling the Byzantine empire Romania might be a better name than the Byzantine empire, but it would confuse things as there is a country out there called Romania today.
This would all be compelling, if you can convince people that we should only use 700 year old terminology (or literal translations of terms) in our discussions. Otherwise I don't think it's going to convince anyone who's happy with current practices.
I said Romania might be a better name if it was not for the fact that Romania is still out there. Byzantine does the job as long as one is aware of the fact that it was seen as "Roman" by everybody contemporary. It's just like we use the term "the Peloponnesian league" for convinience, but every scholar knows that it was never called that and that it was not a league in the proper meaning of the word. The proper name would have been "the Lacedaemons and their allies", which also gives a better description of it.
While I will readily agree on the Romans at times looking up to the Greeks and adopting some things from them it's an exaggaration to say they got all of their knowledge from the Greeks. They got quite a lot of things from others than, not to mention that not everything they got from the Greeks came from the Greeks in the first place. The Greeks were not the beacon of enlightenment in the darkness that was non-Greek barbarians like some make it out to be. One example being the Phoenician alphabet when it comes to writing for instance.
with "Byzantine Empire" we have an unambiguous term, if we replaced it with "Roman Empire", we would not
since the last emperor in Constantinople is long dead and we don't need his approval, why shouldn't we use whatever name is most convenient for us?
since the last emperor in Constantinople is long dead and we don't need his approval, why shouldn't we use whatever name is most convenient for us?
A strange claim, given that:
a) the 'latin' alphabet is known to be Euboean (i regard this as common knowledge, given you can google it easily or find it in basic online encyclopedias like wiki etc). The Euboean settlers from Chalkis and other cities were using the latin letters, and only stopped using them when they adopted the greek letters of the other cities of Greece.
b) it is a bit curious that Phoenicians had anything to do with the Greek alphabet, for a number of reasons, one of the main ones being that there is no artifact or monument with Greek letters in Tyre or other such places, apart from the ones which are obviously in the Greek language (from at least classical to late medieval time). So no link is evident, unlike with the documented pass of Euboean letters to the latins.