I feel like I’ve seen this suggested quite frequently. Can one of you (or someone else) explain to me why this is desirable?
In 395, Theodosius died and left the Empire divided between his sons. The empire had suffered divisions since Diocletian times, but 395 was the last year it was unified. See what Diocletian wanted to do.
In 476, Odoacer deposed the last* WESTERN Emperor, Romulus Augustus, but the Eastern Imperial court remained until 1204, was restored and finally fell in 1453.
Neither was less Roman than the other. I’ve heard people claim that because the Eastern Empire was based in the Balkans, it was more Greek than Roman, but these points arent exclusive. It was politically Roman and in the Balkans it was culturally Greek. Gaul, Hispania, British Island and North Africa weren’t as culturally Roman as was the Latium was, but no one says those provinces need their own civs. Also, being Roman was an idea beyond individual cultures in the Empire
Also, as I’ve said in other posts in the same thread, Eastern Emperors apointed some Western Emperors, so there weren’t as politically separated as pop culture would indicate
*Cries in Julius Nepos
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Now here’s the problem, AoE2 civs don’t seem to be based on particular empires or their political leaders. Instead they are more based on ethnic and cultural grounds from what I can see. Which means that despite Byzantines calling themselves Roman, they are not Roman by the definitions of what makes a civ a civ in AoE2.
It would be like Britons being renamed to “Franks” because the rulers post 1066 were Frankish. The general populace are still Britons and do not speak French.
In the same vain, the Byzantine populace did not speak Latin, they spoke Greek. The leaders and church spoke Latin.
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when is roman coming?
Oh that’s true, division wasn’t perfectly clear. As I said, both had the same political structure.
But I do believe the game focus more on culture rather than official administrative division when defining what is a civilization.
If it tried to represent the multicultural traits of empires, I guess they would include ethnical troops like the mercenaries in AOE3. In AOE2 case, a Roman civ could be able to deploy troops from the tribes they assimilated - and I would love it.
And when I think Byzantium, I imagine people speaking Greek, Orthodox Christianism, the Komenos dynasty, etc. The culture that flourished there for centuries until Constantinople finally fell.
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Which makes the matter even more complicated. Would the kingdom of Soissons be Roman? I’m not advocating for it, btw. It lasted too little to be deserving of it’s own civ. How about the Roman North Africa provinces? Or the Roman Middle East?
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If I recall it correctly, the narrator on the Ivaylo campaign refers to the Byzantines as “Romans”.
But I guess it is because herself was Byzantine and maybe Byzantines liked to refer themselves as Rome for legitimacy purposes.
As I said, I like it. But that’s simply me liking it.
Byzantines as a different, medieval civilization - in opposition to Rome and its Ancient essence - feels more accurate. Especially when you consider the relationship between Church and State which I believe is a defining trait of that Empire and its subjects.
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Welcome to the politics of empire-building. Put a scarier empires title as your own for clout.
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What we know as the Byzantine Empire was the Medieval stage of the Roman Empire. Until Irene became Empress, everyone from Gibraltar to Beijing and from Aachen to Axsum recognized the Imperial court in Constantinople as the Roman Empire. Even after the Pope recognized Charlemagne as Emperor, outside of the West, Persians, Arabs, Ethiopians and Chinese kept recognizing Constantinople as the Roman Empire
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Late antiquity saw the death of the romantic image many posters may hold of the Roman Empire proper. Latin was indeed an important language for the western portion of the empire, but the eastern was sternly Greek, with some forms of Aramaic (Syriac is aramaic). The Eastern Romans were in fact Romans and recognized themselves and were recognized as such. They even overthrew Zeno briefly for not being sufficiently Roman.
The changes that late antiquity would bring about on the Romans were seismic.
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By that logic the Roman Empire that fought the Huns should br a different civ from the one of Augustus or Trajan. As other have said, the Western amd Eastern Roman Empires were very similar in culture and military. It was basically an administrative division, like many other that had taken place before. It just happens that this was the last division of the unified Empire, so the two halves never rejoined.
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I’m still confused. We aren’t getting AOE1 civs in AOE2 right?
Nothing has been confirmed yet, but the more plausible hypothesis is that we get aoe1 game with all civs in the aoe2 engine.
So basically you won’t play romans against mongols, but you’ll be able to play the roman civ as it is on the original game (legionaries, centurions, cheaper buildings, faster attacking infantry…) with the aoe2 features that aren’t present in aoe1 (like gates for walls, military formation for units, being able to garrison inside buildings…).
Although those are just speculations and without any proof, so while unlikely, it’s still possible that we get a romans vs mongols scenario.
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It has been confirmed that all 16 Original Civs will be included
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Actually, it’s not even that deep the distinction.
For the romans, the empire was still one and only one, there was no division, just the consciousness that it was too big of an empire to administrate for just one person, and that it’ll required two emperors. One authority held by two people.
The eastern part of the empire (as the western part did before) tried to do everything that was in his power to support and help the western part, and in the roman mind, every land that they lost was just a momentary setback, as Rome would eventually recovered and getit back, as it did happened a lot of times before.
When odoacres overthrow the court of ravenna, he proclaimed himself king of its germanico people, but only patrizio of Italy and so local governor of the peninsula by the authority of the roman emperor that still existed in the east, something similar did theodoric after, and the east agreed to that until giustinian.
If you asked a roman who was his leader some years before the arrival of belisarius, he would have answered that he was roman, and his leader was the emperor in costantinople, which give the legitimacy to the local genrmanic king to keep up the local administration (which really didn’t changed with the fall of the western roman court). The senate in Rome kept working like clockwork along with genrmanic kings until belisarius came, and ironically only with him we have collapse of the roman local apparatus.
We can actually say the while for sure the romans lost territories in the western part (franks, visisgots and vandals too claimed to govern their local territory for the empire, but they were too far away for being really preoccupied as costantinople wasn’t always able to enforce his authority) the empire lost control of the Italian peninsula the first time only with the longobards (as they refuse to gibe them any kind of legitimacy) and then with the arabs, ad the problem in the east made so that the western territories had to left for themselves and with the mediterranean not sicure anymore, it wasn’t possible to rescue them.
We are used to study a single date as it’s easier, but in reality it was a very long process, and this prove that there were no distinction between the 2 entities that in reality shared the same political, religious, economic and military apparatus. It’s more correct to see it as just a single empire that at some point lost part of its territories, including the one including its original capital.
One could argue that the empire since then undergo a lot of cultural changes, but that’s just an organic process that without it the empire wouldn’t even had survived a single year in the Republic.
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Can you tell me why we have Bulgarians instead of Bulgars?
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And this is why I’m not opposed to a Roman civ in AOE2. Once you have civs that battled the WRE in the game, it’s logical that the WRE enters the mix as a new civ too.
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I am not knowledgeable enough on their history to be able to answer that question.
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My point is that the WRE wasn’t that different from the ERE at the time, which is already covered by the Byzantines. We are basically going to have two Roman civs, just focused on different time periods,one during late Antiquity and the other during the Middle Ages.
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When the administration, military and in a lot of ways culture is Romab I think theres an strong argument to say they are just Roman
Although admitedly the Ostrogoths were also very Roman
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