Double Standards

The empire under Justinian was the Roman Empire. After the fall of the Western Empire in 476 AD, Odoacer sent the imperial regalia of the West to Emperor Zeno in the East and ruled Italy nominally as Zeno’s representative. This effectively left Zeno as the sole Roman emperor. At that point empire was legally united. From that point onward, there was direct institutional continuity in the East. The so called “Eastern Roman Empire” was not a successor state but the continuation of the Roman Empire itself. Later emperors, including Justinian and those who ruled until the end, were Roman emperors. Under Justinian, the empire even reconquered the city of Rome, although by that time Rome was largely symbolic, as the Western imperial capital had been moved to Mediolanum and later to Ravenna in the late fourth and early fifth centuries.

the double standards are way worse for empires named after the dynasty. if we applied the chinese, egyptian, HRE or byzantine standard to iran, it would be a continous state.

While I have nothing against using Byzantine as a historiographic term for the medieval Roman Empire, I have seen a lot of people genuinely arguing that the later Roman Empire is a politically distinct successor state, or that it isnt even Rome at all. People usually cite changes in its language, religion, government, borders, and capital as justification for this, but it is odd that we rarely see these arguments applied to other similarly long lived polities. Using the HRE as an example, Josef II officially changed the language of administration from Latin to German to match what the populace had been speaking for centuries, not dissimilar to how the later Roman Empire eventually converted its language of administration to Greek to match what had been the lingua franca of the empires eastern provinces since the days of Alexander. Though not as drastic as the shift from Paganism to Christianity Rome experienced, the HRE also experienced religious changes as the birthplace of the Reformation. What once had been the secular arm of the Catholic Church was now ironically filled with people the Pope would consider heretical Protestants. As expected of any long lived polity, the Imperial Roman government and the administration of the HRE both experienced reforms over the centuries. I dont think its a stretch to say that the late HRE had more in common politically with its successor state—the post Napoleonic German Confederation—than it did with the HRE of 963 it shared political continuity with. Like the actual Roman Empire, one might argue that the HRE was really founded in Rome, as the Papal Coronations of Charlemagne/Otto I are what transformed Francia/East Francia respectively into the Imperium Romanum. However, with the signing of the Treaty of Venice, it had all but lost control of its namesake, de jure capital, and place of founding to the Papacy. The city, along with the territories of central Italy were officially ceded to the Papal States in the Golden Bull of 1213, and the territories of Northern Italy would also eventually establish their independence from the Germans. Again, not that dissimilar from the Romans eventually losing the Italian peninsula. Despite all this, Ive never really seen anyone genuinely suggest that it should stop being called the HRE at some point, and that it should be assigned some anachronistic exonym based on its capital like the Half-Protestant Viennan Confederation. So, why is it different for the actual Roman Empire?

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