The problem is, ancient history was already rewritten.
Only Gibbon’s attempt to deny the Christian with its capital at New Rome (a.k.a. Constantinople) as the organic continuation of the Roman Empire, so as to claim the ‘glories’ of pagan Rome for an anti-Christian ‘Enlightenment’, made 476 into a significant event.
The retirement of the last Western Augustus to a villa near Naples, with the decision of the Eastern Augustus, Zeno, to assume the sole Emperorship, and allow administration of the West to be given over to Odovacer as Patrician of the Romans, was not understood by any contemporary as ending Roman rule over Italy: the pattern of sometimes one, sometimes two, Emperors or Augusti (one for the East and one for the West) had been set by Diocletian’s reforms, and the capital moved to Constantinople by Constantine.
Direct Imperial rule was reestablished in the West under Justinian, and even after effective control passed back to the local Germanic ‘nobility’, there is ample documentary evidence that people still regarded the Emperor in Constantinople as, at least theoretically, the highest political authority.
Even the Imperial coronation of Charlemagne by Pope Leo in 800 was understood by Charlemagne as reestablishing the office of Western Augustus, at least until his position was not recognized by the actual Roman Emperor at Constantinople, at which point he began styling himself ‘Holy Roman Emperor’, and referring to the Roman Emperor, Irene (yes, she was styled Imperator and Basileus, not Empress), as ‘Emperor of the Hellenes’—and insult, since until about 1800 Hellene was understood as ‘pagan’.
The Alexiad, a biography of the Emperor Alexius I by his daughter, consistantly refers to the Empire at the time of the Crusades as the Roman Empire.
The book sounds like an inadequate attempt at fixing the rewrite that already took place.
If you have a FReeper ping list, I’d be happy to be on it.
Very informative and very interesting.
I appreciate the time you took, and I appreciate the education.
:-)
If you read Gibbons I don’t know how you missed the more than lengthy hsitory of Constatinople from its founding to its fall, or of Justinian’s temporary recapture of Italy, or of the development of the East West Church schism and the subsequent efforts to mend it. Or for that matter the extensive history of Christianity, which Gibbons never tried to deny.
Indeed: the Empire didn’t end, it morphed. Good posts.