Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise And Fall Of States And Nations (2015) - Plot & Excerpts
The ‘Byzantine Empire’, in contrast, is no more than an intellectual construct, an abstraction, some might say, that never really existed. Promoted by the philosophes of the Enlightenment – the Byzantines themselves continued to call their territories the ‘Roman Empire’ – it is a label of convenience invented long after the state in question had disappeared, a substitute for another artificial name – the ‘Greek Empire’ – which some historians (including Gibbon) preferred. Its inventors disliked theocratic states in principle, and could not stomach the idea of a Roman Empire that was not ruled by Rome. The translation of the Roman Empire from a state whose centre of gravity lay in Italy to one based further east took place very gradually. Its division into Western and Eastern sub-states, each with its own emperor, was introduced by Diocletian in AD 285; the choice of Byzantium as the new capital was made by Constantine I in 330; the Western Empire collapsed in 476; and the definitive loss of Italy occurred in stages between the initial invasion of the Lombards in 567 and their much delayed entry into Rome in 772.
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