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by nonethewiser 22 days ago
But he never said Byzantium wasnt Roman?

I get that there is controversy about if Byzantium was Roman. But the person you’re replying to doesn’t seem to be making any claims about that.

2 comments

Again, I'm not criticizing that person specifically. They repeated a word that appears in all the articles.

There are two points I was trying to make:

1. At the relevant time, there were no separate Eastern and Western empires, so this city was just Roman, without qualification.

2. Even later, it could just be called Eastern Roman. Calling it Byzantine instead may be a conscious choice to make the Roman-ness disappear. More likely it's just deeply implanted, based on an education that was based on making the Roman-ness disappear. Again, I'm speaking about the general use of the term in all the articles, not by the OP.

Anyway. Even the person in this thread arguing most vehemently for the use of the term Byzantine says it applies to the "latter eastern Roman empire". So it shouldn't be used for this city, since it's neither form the Eastern empire (which, again, did not exist yet) and especially not from its latter period.

There are a lot of people who only learned about history through memes or online talking points, but this is one of those things that is passed around that way.