Talk:Italians/@comment-106.105.136.18-20160702133451/@comment-147.47.105.31-20161127104517

I am the one who wrote the first reply. Roman empire did not fall in the 5th century: it just lost its western territory(by the way throughout the history of the empire, having more than one emperor was a common thing) and later recovered a large portion of it-including Italian peninsula- thanks to Bellisarius. However, soon after, plague and attacks from the Slavs, the Persians, and the Avars dealt a tremendous damage to the empire. The final blow was the rise of Islam, which devoured key territories such as Egypt, Syria, Africa, remains of Hispania and so on. So, gradually, starting from the north, Roman empire had to give up its Italian territory-it was when Venitian Republic started to become independent. And finally, in 11th century, it lost its last territory in southern Italy.

As I have mentioned, Naionalist and western-Europe centered perspectives distorted views on history of Roman empire quite a lot. In the medieval era, "Holy Roman Empire" was considered as a pseudo Roman empire. It was created only because the original Roman Empire, due to national chaos at that time, could not protect the Pope from barbarian attacks, which made the Pope have to prepare his own defensive militia and become enraged at the empire.

Everyone at that time just considered "ancient Roman empire" and "Byzantine empire" the same, calling it Roman empire. For example, in Quran there is a phrase hoping the Romans win the war against Persia(ironically, Islam and the empire become extremely hostile to each other soon after), and before the 19th century Ottoman empire called its Christian, east European subjects "Rum", meaning "Romans". The term Byzantine was coined much after the empire collapsed altogether by Ottoman empire just to categorize the Roman history more efficiently.

Of course, west Europeans often sneered at the weakened empire by calling it Greek empire. It was because they also wanted to be descendants of ancient Romans but at the same time remain completely independent from Roman empire. In fact, calling the empire "Greek" was accepted as a strong provocation at that time.