Eh, inheritance implies the predecessor willed it to you upon death. In the case of the "Holy Roman Empire" the predecessor died 334 years earlier with no successor. This isn't a case of inheritance, it's a case of just making shit up.
The "byzantine" empire did inherit the name though. They continuously used and claimed the name "roman" from when the roman empire split (and called both halves roman) right up until 1453, even their language was called romaic. That we don't refer to them as roman to this day is really a strange success of propaganda.
> And the Byzantine Empire shrunk greatly after the first few hundred years.
Which by itself sort of contradicts the claim that empires historically fall quickly? The roman empire began in 27 and in 565 it controlled almost the entire Mediterranean. Sure a few hundred years after the split (which itself is a few hundred years after the beginning of being an empire) it shrank but that's a long time.
This is like saying that all the countries in the world that speak English are England, that's not how it works. Countries are not defined by the language they speak, and the language they speak most definitely varies over time.
Moreover you're picking a date hundreds of years into the eastern empire's existence and declaring "because they switched official languages hundreds of years later, they were always Greek". Time doesn't flow like that.
Moreover the roman empire, pre-split, spoke quite a bit of this language (well, Koine Greek, the predecessor to Romaic). Including in official communications (particularly in the east), and at least one emperor's private diaries [1].
Eh, inheritance implies the predecessor willed it to you upon death. In the case of the "Holy Roman Empire" the predecessor died 334 years earlier with no successor. This isn't a case of inheritance, it's a case of just making shit up.
The "byzantine" empire did inherit the name though. They continuously used and claimed the name "roman" from when the roman empire split (and called both halves roman) right up until 1453, even their language was called romaic. That we don't refer to them as roman to this day is really a strange success of propaganda.
> And the Byzantine Empire shrunk greatly after the first few hundred years.
Which by itself sort of contradicts the claim that empires historically fall quickly? The roman empire began in 27 and in 565 it controlled almost the entire Mediterranean. Sure a few hundred years after the split (which itself is a few hundred years after the beginning of being an empire) it shrank but that's a long time.