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If you're going to hold the position that Byzantium wasn't Rome, and that Rome ended with Romulus Augustulus, then when did Byzantium start? Would you put it at the partition, at Rome's fall, or somewhere in between?
You could argue the visible trends were taking shape with the partitioning by Diocletian in 285. You could put the start date at either 330 with the founding of Constantinople, when Constantine declared it “Nova Roma,” (literally, “New Rome”) as the successor to historical Rome (“successor,” which incidentally makes the case I make, not the case of those who detract); which is a complete misnomer if you’re someone who thinks the Roman Empire never ended until 1453. Or you could place it in 395 when the division between the eastern and western halves became permanent after the death of Theodosius I.
“State” and “Empire” are two different things. Those two are not identical. And when you distinguish the two notions, you fully understand why “Byzantium” still carries historical weight in academia but somehow not in the public eye. Because by separating those notions, you fully understand the geopolitical reality of the early Middle Ages. An “empire” is a geographic and cultural hegemony. Certainly even historians argue and disagree with each other on the early dating of when the empire’s dissolution happened; but precisely zero of them that I’ve ever read dispute that by the end of the 7th century after losing the west to Germanic tribes and the rest to Arab invasions, the Mediterranean hegemony was gone forever, and hence the Roman “Empire” ceased to exist. What remained as far as an intact but damaged bureaucracy, you had in Constantinople, which was the same in 500 AD as it was in 600 AD. That was what was “left” in some sense that splintered off into it’s own center of power as a distinct, homogenous, highly militarized, Greek speaking kingdom that could hardly be called “Roman” in the original sense of the term. This is why historians continue to defend the use of the term “Byzantine.” Because calling a medium sized, Greek speaking, Hellenic kingdom “the Roman Empire,” feels geopolitically and historically inaccurate, because it is.
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