Byzantine (Roman) crown passes elsewhere?

We tend to distinguish it from the "true" Byzantine Empire, but there's no inherent reason that some random Catholic prince using foreign troops to seize the capital and declare himself emperor is any less legitimate than the emperors in Nicaea or Trebizond or Epirus.

Except that said prince would be a foreign conqueror.

The Latin Empire was never anything else, and would never be something else whatever those pretending to its throne were.
 
So I guess the basic question then is what defines the Roman Empire, and who is Roman?


The state that existed from (earlier if you count the republic) Augustus to Alexius V (to name emperors) is unambiguously the Roman state, and its up for question what happened after 1204 with the splinters remaining.

Who is Roman? Any citizen of that state. Some of those citizens were Greeks, some were Armenians, some fell in other categories - but that's getting into, to paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, hyphenated Romanism.


I'm not sure why western historiography has to make something that never was complicated in the period itself complicated by trying to ignore that the thing enduring in the East was the eastern half of the Roman Empire that had been around since (whenever we want to start it). Or forget that the term "Roman" had long, long since stopped applying only to the city of Rome by 476.

It's not as if it took the so-called HRE seriously enough for that to wear the mantle of Rome.
 
Maybe if there were another dynastic marriage between the Byzantine Empire and, IDK, Sicily or somewhere (not hugely important right now which country in particular), and then the royal line of this nation goes extinct, leaving the Byzantine Emperor the rightful heir? Assuming the Emperor manages to secure his new title, we'd probably see the Emperors abandoning the impoverished and hard-to-defend Constantinople in favour of his new provinces, at least for day-to-day affairs. (Tho' we might well see Emperors head back to Constantinople for ceremonial occasions like coronations and so forth.)
 
So I guess the basic question then is what defines the Roman Empire, and who is Roman?
Anyone who was integrated into the empire and has not broken away from it is Roman IMO. For instance, Byzantium wasn't the Roman homeland, but it was conquered, integrated, and ultimately never made the decision to leave, though the decision was eventually forced upon them.

Similarly, if, say, through ASBs, Russia were conquered by the Byzantines in 1350, was reasonably integrated into the empire, and then Constantinople and Greece fall on schedule, leaving the imperial court to migrate to its territories in Russia, territories which it has already controled for some time and are culturally more or less similar to the ones the court is leaving, then we could call Russia a direct continuation of the empire. It is no exaggeration to call that scenario impossible, which is why Moscow can't be a third Rome with a 1350 PoD, but that is what it would take.
 
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