The so-called Byzantine Empire was, in every legal and cultural sense, the Roman Empire continuing unbroken in the East — its people called themselves Romans and it called itself the Roman Empire all the way to 1453.

1:59historians writing long after the empire has collapsed, that the people of that time considered themselves Romans, and that the so-called Byzantine Empire never actually existed, that it was, in every legal and cultural sense, the Roman Empire continuing unbroken. So let's get our terms right in the grand historical context. What is the Byzantine Empire, and why should we just call it the Roman Empire? - So Lex, the burden of proof is on those who would assert that what we've been

2:32calling the Byzantine Empire is something other- ... than the Roman Empire, because all of our sources are very clear about this. And we've known about this. We've always known about it. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance, right? It's like when you know something is the case, but you carry on as if it's not. So the Eastern Roman Empire, this is the direct continuation of the ancient Roman Empire in the East, right? Everybody knows the Western Empire

2:54fell in the fifth century. And for many conceptions of Western history, that was sufficient. Like, that's when we just called it. The Roman Empire fell in the fifth century. And we kinda, yeah, we kinda know that the eastern half survived, but we don't wanna include that in our cultural genealogy. And so we kinda pretend that it became something else. But in fact, it called itself the Roman Empire. Its subjects were

3:16Roman citizens. They called themselves Romans all the way down through to the end and beyond. So there are a number of reasons why Western Europeans wanted to think that the Eastern Empire is something different, and those reasons have created these models where They were, they called it Empire of the Greeks for 1,000 years, then they switched to Byzantine Empire for very political reasons. Now that's collapsing. So we're now moving into a phase where we have the long Roman Empire. We,

3:44we recognize that the history of the Roman state, the Roman polity, is something that lasts an extraordinarily long time. Very unique almost in history, from antiquity, like the archaic period, down to the 15th century. - I think it would be really nice to actually look just for a brief moment at the grand scale of the, the full Roman state as it lasted for over 2,200 years. - Yeah.