No after that too. The point where they really became moribund was after the Catholics came and smashed them to pieces for awhile.
Again you're defining Rome as "positive stereotypes of Rome". Talking about Rome as a romantic concept rather than an actual state(s).During the great migration period it was West Rome that basically disintegrated into jack, so that's true. But in the middle ages, the population of Byzantine fluctuated greatly. Constantinople dropped from half a million to just over 50.000 inhabitants during the arabic wars and a lot of the nation would grow to be more ruralized and more reminiscent of the average east european nation than some antique, civilization built on marble.
If the point you're trying to make is about peoples romantic memories of Rome that still doesn't work.
Western Europeans still talk about the "fall of rome" and mean the dessicated corpse empire that got offed by Odaecer.
And Eastern (and yeah some Western even) Europeans talk about the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans as a big end, even to the extent as considering it one of the major points that ends the middle ages. Not any earlier point.
So either factual or romantical, it doesn't work.
Half of that is change that occurred by just time passing, and that same half is entirely applicable to Ancient Rome. Especially the matter of government style.I think a more sound analogy would be ''if the US split into two countries and one of these states would as time progressed change their style of government, change their customs, change their language, with the borders shrinking and growing left and right, could you still consider it to be the United States a thousand years later?
Explain to me for instance why considering the Roman Republic and Roman Empire the same Coke Classic brand is sensible, but considering the basically the same government style of the Roman Empire pre-split and the two empires after that and yet they're different?
That's...everything ever.'' '' I mean, there are way too many things that are different about the Byzantine Empire than it was from the start,
It is technically, Eastern Rome. And also Western Rome. But not on the basis of anything you're saying. But on the legal basis of a split of the empire into two entities.I think calling Byzantium a successor state makes for a fairer description, since that is what we tend to call other kingdoms that have broken off greater empires.
This is also a silly argument because you're arguing against contemporary views on the matter. People actually saw the East as the true inheritor of the spirit, especially after the West died. The schism in the church accounts for much of the West's failure to recognize this.
The only way you're going to hold up this view by the way would be also admitting Western Rome was a successor state, not on "cultural" basis but as soon as the split became reality.