r/byzantium

With less territory and resources, the administration was more simplified, the court more mobile, and the administration of the provinces being retained, but was all this still impressive?

I know from the history of my country that Dušan the Mighty claimed the title of „Emperor of Serbs and Greeks“. It‘s not quite claiming to be Rome but if you directly say that roman subjects are actually yours and you try to force it through war I‘d say it *SOMEWHAT* counts. Now what other countries claimed something similar around the Byzantines? I‘d simply love to know more about other nations that tried to claim to be Rome or Emperors of the romans/greeks

The standard list of why the East made it through the 5th–7th centuries while the West collapsed usually includes: defensible Anatolian geography, sea-defensible capital with the Theodosian walls, denser urban network in the productive provinces, stronger fiscal base, weaker senatorial entrenchment.

All true. I'm interested in what's under that list — the specific institutional adaptations the eastern administration made that the West didn't.

Some I'm tracking:

• The theme system (later development but draws on earlier eastern military-administrative habits)
• The Christian charitable-medical complex (Basil's Basileias, the Sampson Xenon, eventually Pantokrator) as a new institutional form
• Tax collection through dioceses and bishops rather than only curiales
• The agentes in rebus and other inspectorate corps
• More frequent recoinage and fiscal reassessment

What else? Especially interested in cases where eastern administrators did something the West also could have done in principle but didn't try, or tried and abandoned.

This will be the second part of our three-video series on the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the wider Roman world surrounding its final years. In this video, we move beyond the siege itself to examine what remained of the Eastern Roman Empire before the final collapse. By 1453, the Eastern Roman Empire is often portrayed as a dying state reduced to Constantinople alone an isolated island in an Ottoman sea. But was that really the full picture? In this video, we explore the territories, cities, islands, monasteries, and influence that Rome still possessed in its final years. From the Morea, with Mystras, Monemvasia, Patras, and Corinth, to the remaining Roman towns of Thrace, such as Selymbria, Mesembria, Sozopolis, and Vize, the empire was not as territorially insignificant as it is often imagined. We also look at the islands of Lemnos, Imbros, and the Sporades, the role of Mount Athos, Meteora, and other monasteries, and the wider Greek populations that still responded to imperial prestige and legitimacy. These surviving lands and communities could still offer resources, fortifications, cultural strength, diplomatic value, and even manpower. Yet internal divisions, weak naval power, Ottoman pressure, and political fragmentation made any real recovery extremely difficult. Along the way, this video also echoes themes from two of our earlier videos: our episode on the ancient Greek world and the power of smaller states, and our video on the Gallipoli Crusade, which directly relates to the restoration of Roman influence in Thrace and the Black Sea coast. Was the Roman Empire truly finished by 1453 or, with better luck and unity, could the Roman phoenix have risen once more?

Abstract.
What was the role of trade, and how did economic activity evolve at the End of Antiquity, when
political power shifts away from the Mediterranean towards northern Europe and the Middle East?

To answer those questions, we assemble a database of hundreds of thousands of ancient coins from
the fourth to the tenth century, estimate a dynamic model of trade and money where coins gradually
diffuse along trade routes, and recover granular regional trade and real consumption time series.
Our estimates suggest that: Mediterranean trade was disrupted by the newly formed border between
Islam and Christianity; economic activity shifts away from the Mediterranean starting in the fifth
century; real consumption peaks in the Middle East in the eighth century; and by the end of the
ninth century, Atlantic regions from Islamic Spain to Frankish northwestern Europe have become
the wealthiest regions of the ancient western world.
——-

Interesting paper. Still going through it but it seems a bit too definitive.

Ever since Constantine the Great and his father, Constantius Chlorus, the Roman titulatute for the Emperors were typically Imperator Caesar Flavius [Insert Name] Augustus.

But by the fall of the Heraclian dynasty, such style for Roman Emperors seemingly fell out of use, with later Byzantine Emperors using simple regnal names and eventually using their family names to emphasize their nobles house such as Nikephoros II Phokas and Constantine XI Dragases Palaiologos.

From the age of Constantine the great and the founding of Constantinople to the wars of Justinian and later Arab-Byzantine wars to the last decades of eastern Roman dominance in the Mediterranean would you say is your favorite period in eastern Roman history and why?

It seems clear to me Vlachs, Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, Romanians etc. almost always referred themselves as Romans, but were called Vlachs most of the time even by the Byzantines.

But are there examples of Byzantines recognizing the Latinity and/or Roman identity of these pastoralists?

Also do we know exactly how the exonym "Vlach" even survived as a term for these people? It derives likely from East Germanic/Gothic, but why is it so sticky if it was never used by Romanians themselves?