I am a staunch 1453 partisan. And it's weirdly tragic that when the Ottomans finally showed up to kick down the doors of the last bastion of Rome they were met by a paltry few soldiers and Constantine himself. Allegedly he lead the small force he had remaining directly in to the mouth of the advancing Janissaries and died there.
that's a great fucking story. The last emperor of Rome, his empire that was one of the greatest civilizations to ever exist shrunk to little more than the city of Constantinople, and he himself the namesake of the man that made that city great, the namesake of one the greatest emperors of that great empire, dies in a pointless fight over its ruined remains and the legacy of ghosts.
Even with the "fall" of the Western half of the empire, I'd argue that, in a way, it still survived even after 395. The kingdoms of the Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Alans, and Franks all, largely, followed Roman Christianity, wrote Roman-style legal documents, and the ruling class of those "barbarian" kingdoms adopted Latin as a court language. Ethnically, the Western Roman armies had already Germanized heavily before 395, so replacing overall rule with the new "barbarians" probably wouldn't have been noticed much by the common people, if at all. Honestly, if we define "Roman civilization" as its laws, customs, and religions, then I'd argue that Justinian did more damage to Roman civilization than he "saved" by invading them from 533 to 554.
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I am a staunch 1453 partisan. And it's weirdly tragic that when the Ottomans finally showed up to kick down the doors of the last bastion of Rome they were met by a paltry few soldiers and Constantine himself. Allegedly he lead the small force he had remaining directly in to the mouth of the advancing Janissaries and died there.
that's a great fucking story. The last emperor of Rome, his empire that was one of the greatest civilizations to ever exist shrunk to little more than the city of Constantinople, and he himself the namesake of the man that made that city great, the namesake of one the greatest emperors of that great empire, dies in a pointless fight over its ruined remains and the legacy of ghosts.
Even with the "fall" of the Western half of the empire, I'd argue that, in a way, it still survived even after 395. The kingdoms of the Vandals, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Alans, and Franks all, largely, followed Roman Christianity, wrote Roman-style legal documents, and the ruling class of those "barbarian" kingdoms adopted Latin as a court language. Ethnically, the Western Roman armies had already Germanized heavily before 395, so replacing overall rule with the new "barbarians" probably wouldn't have been noticed much by the common people, if at all. Honestly, if we define "Roman civilization" as its laws, customs, and religions, then I'd argue that Justinian did more damage to Roman civilization than he "saved" by invading them from 533 to 554.