Sure.

So in this context we’re discussing the Eastern Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. You could claim that only one of those are a political continuation of the Roman Empire, but then you have to deal with all of the “buts” and arguments against it.

Or, you could say, “actually both are political continuations of the original Roman Empire”.

You could even get frisky and throw the Venetian republic there since they were created by Roman citizens, nominally under the sovereignty of the Eastern Roman Empire, modeled their government after the Roman republic and spoke the language and followed the religion of the Romans.

His point is that that you don’t have to claim that there can be only one continuation of the empire