When did the Roman Empire "end?"

When did the Roman Empire end?

  • 395, with the division of the empire by Emperor Theodosius

    Votes: 12 5.2%
  • 476, with the dethronement of Emperor Romulus Augustulus

    Votes: 25 10.8%
  • 480, with the death of Emperor Julius Nepos

    Votes: 9 3.9%
  • 565, with the death of Emperor Justinian I

    Votes: 10 4.3%
  • 636, with the Arab victory at Yarmouk

    Votes: 9 3.9%
  • 1204, with the Crusader sack of Constantinople

    Votes: 21 9.1%
  • 1453, with the Ottoman sack of Constantinople

    Votes: 105 45.5%
  • 1461, with the Ottoman capture of Salmeniko Castle

    Votes: 3 1.3%
  • 1461, with the Ottoman conquest of Trebizond

    Votes: 10 4.3%
  • 1806, with the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire

    Votes: 5 2.2%
  • 1917, with the abdication of the Tsar

    Votes: 3 1.3%
  • 1922, with the abolition of the Ottoman sultanate

    Votes: 19 8.2%

  • Total voters
    231
Mostly a devil's advocate vote, but I might as well defend it.

If we accept the Byzantine Empire as a continuation of the Roman Empire, we are inherently acknowledging that the empire can change significantly over time, and that "Rome" is not central to its identity. As others have noted, this becomes especially true if we include the Palaiologoi, whose sole claim to the throne was being Greeks who had captured Constantinople from the Franks. They claimed to be a continuation of the Roman Empire, and made some efforts to restore Roman governance, however. Nevertheless, they are implicitly recognized as Romans by the majority of voters on the poll, who are currently picking 1453 as the date by a landslide.

But of course, Mehmed the Conqueror not only conquered Rome and took it for his own, but also rebuilt Constantinople and implemented numerous changes in Ottoman governance modeled on Byzantine practice. He furthermore considered himself the heir of Rome after his conquest. As such, I see no reason not to take him at his word.

It's true that the Ottoman Empire in 1922 looked very different from that in 1450, but the same could be said of 1450 and 950, much less 1450 and 27 BC. Empires change.

The Roman Empire still exists, and It's called Republic of Turkey.

The first quote sums up most of why I voted for the last option- the Ottomans were radically different from the medieval Greeks they took Constantinople from, but then again those Greeks were very different from any Latin culture. The fall of the Ottomans marked the end of a vast, powerful Mediterranean Empire Based around a grand Roman capital- something that the Republic of Turkey has not lived up to. The Ottomans claimed the mantle of "Rome" in a sense from the Greeks, but nobody did after 1922.
 
1204. 476 and 1453 are the lazy answers imo.

476 wasnt the end of the empire. It didn't even see the end of the western Roman state. It just saw the last western emperor abdicate. The Senate in Rome continued on, and the empire in the east was alive and well.

What the Ottomans conquered in 1453 was a Greek successor state founded decades after the old empire was destroyed.
 
I just thought of another point; If you want to refute the end of the WRE and accept the ERE as the true Rome, then I think that you have to go with the end of the Ottomans as the only good choice, since by the logic of accepting the Byzies, you have to accept the Turks.

How so? The 'WRE' never ended, there never was a 'WRE'. There was an Emperor with authority over the Western provinces of the Roman Empire, the last of whose regalia was sent to the Emperor in Constantinople by the Western Senate. Even the barbarian warlord who had initially deposed this last of the Emperors in the West was given official recognition as a representative of the Emperor in Constantinople and ruled Italy on his behalf.

You can call these technicalities all you want, but all that really does is explain why you get 'hate' about these kinds of posts: You're factually wrong about something and are being obscuritinant in order to avoid admitting it.

The Ottoman 'succession' is completely different. A foreign polity that existed contemporaneously with a series of Emperors that claimed to be Roman Emperors ruling over Romans in Romania and which never itself claimed to be Roman conquered Constantinople and adopted the titles of the conquered. That the Ottoman polity originated among a people who did not claim to be Roman nor acknowledge the authority of the Roman Emperor and spent generations existing as such before any Ottoman ruler deigned to call himself Roman Emperor stands in stark contrast to the situation in the 5th century in Constantinople.

The heartlands of Roman identity is probably a better way of saying it. Plus, neither of those were held by the Byzies for a majority of their history.

After the Edict of Caracalla, the heartland of Roman identity was the whole damned Empire. There's a reason 'Greeks' were calling themselves Romans up to the damned 20th century.

-Accept they didn't, seeing as the thing called the Holy ROMAN Empire was around. Yeah it wasn't Holy or Roman or a true Empire, it carried the title the same way the greeks did, therefore it falls under the same category as the turks and should apply to your logic.

The difference is that the HRE traces its descent to a forgery (The Donation of Constantine), while there had been Roman Emperors ruling the Roman Empire from the Roman capitol of Constantinople since Constantine had founded the city (and there had been Roman Emperors across the Bosporus in Nicomedia even before that! Is Diocletian not a Roman Emperor?), in direct succession (according to the murky succession rules that applied in the Roman Empire, anyway), Emperor to Emperor, continuously, down til 1204.

-The title was passed down in a feudal way, they officially spoke greek for a majority of their existence, the Theme system was thing...

Not even close. And this is why people get angry at you: You are apparently that infuriating combination of ignorant and self-assured about your ignorance. The title was passed down in exactly the same way it had always been: Through acclamation by the Senate and People of Rome. Did you know the Romans thought they still lived in their 'Republic' well into the Middle Ages?

The Romans had no concept of the state as private property like the feudal succession laws of Medieval Europe. Saying the Byzantines followed feudal succession is hilariously wrong. Hilarious because it's so obvious to anyone who has any idea what they're talking.

-Again, so did the turks and HRE germans. Identification doesn't make you something. I live in the South, which was sometimes called "New Rome". I could call myself Roman if I wanted. Does that count?

No they didn't, actually! They would have considered themselves Christian, first and foremost, because religious identity was THE thing in the Middle Ages, but they would have considered themselves...Germans or Turks if you could figure out a way to ask them questions about their ethnicity that they wouldn't have entirely understood.

Medieval Greeks, on the other hand, considered themselves so Roman that you could ask Greek-speakers living in Anatolia in the early 20th century what nationality they were and they would have answered 'Romaioi'!

-The Byzantines very rarely held any sizable portion of Italy, and what they did control usually was the Naples-Sicily area, which had always been more greek anyway. (Magna Graecia?)

Rarely? Rome itself was a Byzantine possession until the 8th century. Remember, the Exarchate only collapsed in the middle of that century.

More broadly, there's no specific reason why this should matter.

-The 'actual heartland' wasn't Greece or Anatolia, the two areas the Byzantines ever had good control over. Sure, roman culture borrowed greatly from the greeks, and I know that, but you didn't see that many legions being drawn from there, or that many politicians who worked on a national scale, they would be from the Italian peninsula or north Africa usually.

What does 'politicians who worked on a national scale' mean, specifically?

And do you have any kind of citation for these claims? Because it's my understanding that legionary recruitment outside of Italy started very early on in the Empire and continued for the entire period it existed, with the Balkans and especially Dalmatia being the recruitment heartland.

Greece, Anatolia, and the rest of the East were certainly the population and economic heartland of the Empire by the 5th century, though, so your argument seems to depend on a very unclear definition of 'heartland'.

-Yes, Rome was no functioning capital, but it was still the beating heart of the Empire. It's kind of hard to be Rome without Rome. Plus, the other WRE of Ravenna was a skip and a hop over from Rome.

You're really just playing word games and spouting rhetoric at this point. By the time of the fall of Rome the city, it had ceased to be the single most important city in the Empire along any metric you care to name, sometimes centuries before. Constantinople replicated most of the institutions that had once made Rome unique, Rome was beaten by several cities in the East in terms of population, its questionable whether it produced any economic surplus at all by the end, it didn't even have sole claim to Roman ethnicity: Latins had been colonizing the Mediterranean (including Greece and Asia Minor!) for centuries at this point. There's a reason Romanian is a Romance language.

This is the kind of response I was expecting. I always get one where people are maybe a little too snarky.

Maybe people get snarky because you clearly don't have much of an idea what you're talking about but you're utterly sure of your opinion, which can be very frustrating for people who know more about the subject than you do.
 

Abhakhazia

Banned
Using this logic, Rome ended in the 3rd or second century BC, when they ceased to have the same identity and culture as the Romans that preceeded them.

You see how odd this sounds? The Romans of the third century BC were as different from the Romans of the 5th century BC as the Romans of the 5th century AD were from the Romans of Augustus. And anyway, this view is thoroughly debunked here.

I'm not talking about Rome, I'm talking about the classical Roman Empire. That's what I assumed the question was talking about.

Of course Rome underwent gradual cultural shifts and the Byzantine Empire was Roman in its own way, I was really talking about how in a significant part of core Roman territory the Roman Empire was no longer effectively a thing.
 
Top