9 thoughts on “Byzantines Smite Romans”

  1. I thought Byzantine referred to the eastern roman empire.
    Did they ever fight the western half?

  2. I imagine they did, as the empire was briefly reunited, and generally that happens with violence.

  3. The name “Byzantines” is actually a modern word coined by the historian Hieronymus Wolf to distinguish the Romans living in the eastern half of the Roman Empire from the western half. The actual people referred to themselves as Romans, just like the people of the western half of the Roman Empire did. The eastern Roman Empire was founded by Constantine in 395 and the western Roman Empire fell shortly afterwards when the Germanic king Odoacer captured Rome in 476. There was never a major war between the two halves of the Roman Empire.

  4. There were “severajl E-W wars” after the Eastern & Western halves of the Roman Empire finally split in 395? You might want to inform Edward Gibbon of this so he can add that chapter to “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.

  5. The eastern/western split was an administrative division and in place before Constantine. In fact, fighting first the Western and then Eastern Emperors was an enormous part of Constantine’s rise to power, and far from “founding the eastern Empire” he in fact temporarily reunited all of Rome under his sole rule. He did, however, create/expand the massive fortress-city of Constantinople, which would go on to become the capital of eastern Rome when the empire split again.

    And yes, Eastern and Western Rome did in fact fight, on several occasions. The Romans never could pass up a good civil war, and having more than one ruler at a time didn’t exactly improve their disposition in that regard. Fairly sure their conflict never extended to the Levant in particular, but hey – it’s just a cartoon.

    Also, while Gibbons did write an exhaustive and fascinating work, he’s over 200 years behind the curve at this point, and definitely not the last word in Roman history.

  6. The actual war was between the Sassanid Persians (missing in your animation), and the Romans. There was a huge power struggle between Persia and Rome over Jerusalem, check its wiki page.

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