Ok this is getting annoying. You cant just answer every Statement with "why not".
Why not?
Of course it's getting annoying. But it's important to understand that there is no cut-and-dried way to say
how,
when,
why or even
if such a pervasive and massively-important construct as the Roman empire finally met its demise. If someone were to say that Rome ended in 476 and the Byzantines aren't real Romans I would ask "why not?" If someone were to say that Rome ended in 1204 and that the restored Byzantine empire after 1261 doesn't count I would also ask "why not?" There were a lot of different groups of people who claimed the mantle of the Romans, if not the Empire itself, and it's important to understand them rather than adopting the usual dismissive pedantic Byzantophile answer of "ROME LIVED UNTIL 1453 WHEN THE DASTARDLY TURK DESTROYED IT" or "ROME LIVED UNTIL 1204 WHEN THE DASTARDLY LATIN DESTROYED IT". Both of those memes should be thrown in the bin with other canards like "Byzantines were cowardly and corrupt schemers devoid of honour", "the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor a real empire" or "Sparta saved the whole of civilisation from certain destruction".
Its not the basic Ursupation, which happened mamy times before.
Because the Ursupations were all from INSIDE the Empire and not from the outside. They were all part of the same Administration.
To put your logic into game perspective: Should Paradox allow every Nation to form every Nation, just because you own their territory? Oh Boy the Golden Horde could have claimed many Empires.
External usurpations also happen. The Norman conquest comes to mind, as do the Napoleonic conquests and usurpations of the thrones of Europe. Heck, just look at the average Ottoman Sultan's list of titles!
Not sure what video games have to do with it, but I will point out that actually in CKII if you own more than 50% of a title's de jure lands, even as a foreigner, you can usurp it. Foreign infidels can't usurp titles until they control all of the de jure lands though, and titles are destroyed if the title holder no longer controls any territory at all, so in CKII the Ottomans would have to create a new Byzantine Empire if they wanted to usurp it for themselves. Again, such rules have no relevance to reality.
Please stop comparing the Byzantines to the old Roman Empire. Only because the Byzantines are the continuation does this not mean that they have to mantain every single aspect of culture. It's only natural that they developed their own culture, since the West was not providing anything but germanic influeInce.
Empires change over time but that doesnt make their culture or traditions non existent. You are talking like the Romans were changing their culture every day. But keep in mind the Byzantines were mainly Greeks for about 700 years and orthodox for 400. It was a crucial part of their society and pretty much connected with the Idea of the Basileus.
As I said earlier, in the old Roman Empire it doesnt. In Byzantium it does. Since the culture and traditions changed over time. AND PLEASE. Dont say: under the Ottomans they did again. That simply doesn't count, since this was not a natural development, this was foreign Influence by conquest.
Going to have to say again: why not? Why not compare the old Roman empire with Byzantium? The very fact that the empire managed to change so dramatically and still remain the same empire in your eyes surely means that it can't just be disqualified from changing again. The fact that the empire was Orthodox, Greek and Christian for so long doesn't mean much when it (and its republican predecessor) was pagan and Latin for even longer. Rome clearly can change, and a good Ottoman subject of Mehmed II would say that the new Muslim Caesar was an example of just such a transformation.
What's the point of making a distinction between "natural development" and foreign conquest? Seems like the naturalistic fallacy to me. Conquest is just as much part of "nature"/the process of history as internal change, and the Ottoman conquest of Greece wouldn't be the first time that a group of foreigners suddenly barged into a prexisting empire and re-made it in their own image without necessarily destroying it as an entity. And more importantly, why force the distinction between the armed spiritual conquest of the Roman Empire by the Christian Church, an external force with its roots deep in defiantly non-Roman Levantine civilisation, and the armed spiritual conquest of the Roman Empire by Islam?
You can only make them inherritors of the Byzantine Empire, If you ignored litteraly every aspect of Roman laws, culture and Religion in 1 day, after the fall of Constantinople. Which make them illegitimate in my eyes.
Why not? The connections between Rome and the Ottomans come from other areas. The Ottoman empire controlled much the same territory as the older Roman Empire did, it was ruled from the same capital city, it preserved some elements of Byzantine material culture (particularly architecture) and the Sultan actually called himself the Caesar of Rome. Religion can change, as can culture (although admittedly the cultural change implemented by the Ottomans was rather "abrupt", at least where Constantinople was concerned). And if the Romans passed a law against entering Constantinople with a massive army and seizing the crown for yourself they clearly didn't enforce it very well given how often that kind of thing happened in their history.
And it's also not a Claim. Its pretty much a fact. The ERE never ceased to exist in difference to the West. Every new Roman empire besides Byzantium is a claim.
You also pretty much dodged my question why litteraly everyone says that Rome ended in 1453. Are historians wrong?
Plenty of historians say otherwise. You get historians of the late Roman empire who completely ignore the east after a certain point (usually the massive crisis of Heraclius' reign when the language was changed to Greek and most of the empire's non-Greek territory was lost forever) because for all intents and purposes it has become a different entity. You get historians who ignore everything after 1204 (or even outright say the empire ended then) because, again, post-1204 the empire changes abruptly into something very different. On the other end of the scale you have Ottomanist or Russian historians who view the spirit of Rome (if not the empire itself) as something that continued in one form or another for some lengths of time after 1453.
Oh, and you also have annoying pedants who say it ended in 1461 because that's when Trebizond fell...
Yeah, but taking somebodies Land does not make your people anything. They are still turks from east Asia who never lived inside the Roman Empires borders. They do not honor Roman traditions or Roman laws. They are outside invaders. Without them Byzantium would have not fallen and mantained orthodoxy and greek culture.
Being a foreigner means you can't be a usurper? Someone tell that to Queen Victoria, who usurped the entire Mughal Empire after the rebellion and who took the title "Empress of India". Or to Alexander the Great, usurper of the Persian Empire.
They pretty much just subjugated the Romans or greeks. You can hardly call yourself a roman If the Romans who lived right West to you are completely different.
At this point in history. Being Roman meant being of greek culture and orthodox Religion. It was not always like this, it evolved into this state. It's just not possible to see the term Roman disconnected from Greek and Orthodox culture after the 7th century. Only If you dont accept Byzantium as the continuation of the Roman Empire in the first place, but then the Ottomans would not be either.
And now we are on to something interesting. Yes, the Ottoman Sultans did claim to be the Caesars of the Romans, but they did not claim to actually be Romans themselves. Being a Roman is different to being the Emperor of the Romans. This, in my opinion, is the important distinction between the Byzantine/Roman Empire itself, and the various successors and claimants that came after or existed alongside it. It's not about culture, or religion, or originating from east asia or wherever as you put it. Ivan might have had the title of Roman Emperor, Mehmed might have actually ruled
over Romans, but none of them actually claimed to
be Romans. Not even the Holy Roman emperors claimed to be Romans.
I don't think this necessarily invalidates their claims to the empire, after all having a title doesn't necessarily require you to be part of the nationality attached to it. Foreigners have usurped or inherited titles plenty of times before as I've said. But it does let us draw a distinction between the pre-1453 Byzantine empire and the later states that claimed its legacy.
