>>723000220
you'd have a point if the Byzantines were some literal who Greek state that just decided to call themselves Roman one day for whatever reason, but I don't know how I can make it clearer that they were literally the Roman empire, Rome was ruled by two emperors, and the western part proceeded to fall, "Byzantine" is an ahistorical name, we just call them that to distinguish ancient Rome from medieval Rome.
>The core of Rome was the city and its people.
late into the empire the city of Rome became less important, Rome wasn't even the administrative capital of the western Emperors, it was Milan and Ravenna. Also Roman citizenship and what it meant to be Roman became less about the city itself, you even had every single free person in the empire become a Roman citizen. If we're basing it off of the city itself, then you might as well say that western Rome stopped being Roman when they changed their capital, or the HRE can't be Roman because Rome was never their capital
>That's far closer to something "Roman" than a quite foreign and eastern state
Not really, even if we're just talking about Greeks, the Romans loved the Greeks, they were very similar culturally and religiously and the Romans didn't even consider the Greeks as barbarians, Greek itself became an aristocratic language among the Romans. Romans would consider the Byzantines far closer to themselves than barbaric Germans north. And it's just dumb to say that the Roman empire is foreign to itself.
>Or a Greek state with leaders called shit like sebastos philipopolopodos and stuff
Do you think every Roman emperor was from Italy?
I think you just don't know Roman history desu, you're just trying to say the HRE was Roman based off of arbitrary rules that you're making up as we go
