Having lasted 1000 years, the Eastern Roman Empire was the most successful European empire in history. Founded in the 4th century before the fall of its more famous parent the Roman Empire. Its capital, Constantinople (modern day Istanbul), was created upon the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium by Roman Emperor Constantine I in 330 CE as his new capital for the Roman Empire. The Empire divided into the Eastern and Western Roman Empires in 395 CE.
With the death of the Western Roman Empire in the late 5th century, the Eastern Roman Empire maintained the laws, knowledge and culture of the Empire as Western Europe dissolved into scores of petty kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities and lesser states fell into what some historians refer to as the "Dark Ages."
At the height of its power, in the 6th century, under the Emperor Justinian I, the Eastern Roman Empire controlled most of the Mediterranean Sea coastal lands and the Middle East. Overtime Latin was replaced with Greek as the official language, and Orthodox Christianity became the main religion of the Empire.
Yet, until their lasts days, the people of the Eastern Roman Empire referred to themselves as "Romaioi" (Romans) and their last Emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, considered himself a continuation of the lineage of the Roman Emperors that began with Augustus in 27 BCE.
The name "Byzantine Empire" did not come into popular usage until after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453. One reason for the name change appears to be the need of the intelligentsia of the Renaissance to claim direct linkage to the glories of the Roman Empire and reduce the importance of the continuation of that empire and its glories by "Eastern Peoples" who did not hold Western European cultural, social and religious ideals.
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