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Late Antiquity
The East
In the East, the Empire did not fall in any sense of the word. Constantinople continued to be the capitol city, as it had been since the 320s. Its rulers called themselves Roman emperors and its subjects were Roman citizens subject to Roman law. True, the western portion of the Empire was in disarray, but all through the fifth and sixth centuries the people of the east could say without blinking that the Roman Empire had not fallen.
By the reign of Justinian, though, in the early sixth century, modern historians begin speaking of the Byzantine Empire instead of the Roman Empire. For the world had changed, and the surviving empire had new boundaries. Greece and Asia were under the rule of Constantinople, as were Egypt and Syria. Other provinces were won and lost over the course of years, as they ever had been.
The Byzantine Empire had Greek for its official language, not Latin. It was Greek Orthodox in religion, not Roman Catholic, though this break comes later, in the 700s.
The Byzantine emperors could and did fool themselves into thinking there was more to their realm. They received tribute payments from western kings and gave to those kings titles like proconsul and Master of the Horse. They could and did claim that Gaul or Spain or whereever was not an independent kingdom but was being ruled as a provincial tributary. In reality, effective Byzantine rule was restricted to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, including Turkey, the Levant, and Egypt, as well as the Balkans up to the Danube River line.
And so the fiction of the Empire, the legend, the ideal, which had had a life of its own for centuries, continued and was furthered. Indeed, the more shadowy the reality became, the stronger the myth grew. Far into the 600s and 700s, and even later, a barbarian king could reach no higher than in some manner to associate his name and his house with the Roman Empire.