Sort each item by whether it is a genuine feature of the eastern empire or a WESTERN misconception about it.
Groups: Genuine feature · Western misconception
- It was a wholly different state from the Roman empire
- Roman law was preserved and transmitted westward from it
- The state rebuilt its army and tax base more than once
- It spent a thousand years in uninterrupted decline
- Its provincial system fused military and civil authority
Hints
- The misconceptions all follow from the name given to it in the sixteenth century.
- Ask which of these a tenth-century inhabitant of Constantinople would have recognised.
Show the answer
Genuine feature: The state rebuilt its army and tax base more than once, Roman law was preserved and transmitted westward from it, Its provincial system fused military and civil authority
Western misconception: It spent a thousand years in uninterrupted decline, It was a wholly different state from the Roman empire
The three misconceptions are versions of one move: treating a change of capital and language as a change of state. Once the empire is renamed, its survival looks like an anomaly needing explanation, and the reforms that produced that survival get read as symptoms of decline instead.
Practise Byzantium: the Empire That Kept the Name
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