Editing Roman Empire (section)

===The Byzantine Empire===

Things were a bit better in the wealthier Eastern Roman Empire after the split. The Byzantine Empire, as it's now called though they still called themselves the Roman Empire, drifted from Rome in culture and aesthetic to the Greek trend, and more or less carried on much as it had before (including the palace intrigue, which if anything became even worse than ever before). On a couple occasions, they came close to recapturing the glory of the old Roman Empire, but this was foiled by the first known outbreak of the Black Death (the Plague of Justinian) the first time and the coming of the Seljuk Turk raiders (and the rise of the Sultanate of Rum) the second time.  The Byzantines' call for aid in the aftermath of the latter decades of conflict ended up leading to the First Crusade.

Fast-forward to the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The Crusaders lacked the money to sail to the Ayyubid Sultanate as they had initially planned and were deeply in debt to the Republic of Venice, whose doge (we swear, that was the title of their chief elected official) refused to let them disband or leave without paying their debts. The exiled Byzantine prince Alexios IV promised to pay the debt for the Crusaders in exchange for deposing the current emperor and placing him on the throne. While successful at gaining the throne, the new emperor quickly realized that he didn't actually have the funds to fulfill his promises. Anti-Crusader sentiment eventually led to his deposition and execution, which the Crusaders used as an excuse to sack the city for its wealth. 

Following the sack, the Crusaders named one of their own as emperor of the new "Latin Empire" (torpedoing any hope of reconciliation between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy in the process), with the old Byzantine state being dispersed between three smaller rump states- the Empire of Trebizond, the Nicene Empire, and the Despotate of Epirus. You probably never heard of them, and for good reason- they didn't accomplish much of interest while they were around. The next few decades were dominated by fighting between the Latins, the rump states, the Sultanate of Rum, and the newly independent Bulgarian Empire.

1n 1261, the Nicene Empire was able to reclaim Constantinople and restore the Byzantine Empire, but the resources from the old Byzantine provinces had been bled dry from decades of war. The new emperors proved to be incompetent and alienated their people through heavy taxation and continued strife with the Latins, and after yet another civil war the Byzantines were forced to become vassals to the Osman/Ottoman sultan. However, their relationship with the Ottoman Turks was strained at best and when hostilities resumed the Byzantines were reduced to Constantinople alone. The city (the modern-day Istanbul) fell to Ottoman invasion by Sultan Mehmet II (seeking to prove he was a strong ruler so his relative wouldn't overthrow/execute him) in 1453, and the Byzantine Empire collapsed with it. Trebizond and Epirus limped on for slightly longer, but both had fallen by 1479, ending the last direct political rule of the Roman world.