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I was traveling in Greece and heard a story about the modern Greek independence fighters in the ~1850's. At the time the soldiers were traveling around the various Greek islands to gain support.
According to the story on one small island, the local children asked who the soldiers were. They said "we're Greek, like you!" The children were confused and answered "no, we're Romans!".
The intricate matter of the name of the Greeks :)
To be pedantic, the soldiers might have probably said Hellenes, not Greek (γραικοί). But Roman was also a common ethnonym back then, used by the Ottoman society. In Greek (Helleneke) it was spelled Ρωμιός https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%A1%CF%89%CE%BC%CE%B9%CF%8... . The point of confusion was probably that, I suppose?
I grew up in Greece, no one uses any name other than Hellene anymore. To the point that "Greek" sounds more English than Greek to a native Greek speaker.
Also Rumelia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumelia
I don't think what you say translates the way you think it does :)
"Romios" or "Romiosyni" (the act of being a Romios) is considered in many instances parallel to being Greek.
Remember that the Roman Empire dumped Latin and went with the Greek language.
Fun facts, there is a chapter in the Quran (Chapter 30) that is named Ar-Rum or The Roman, correctly refering to the Byzantine Empire at the time. It also correctly predicted the eventual loss of Persian Empire in one of the longest conflict world has ever witnessed that lasted for more than 600 years [1]. The prediction was against the run of events due to the fact that at the time of the revealation, Persian was on a winning streaks. The pagans of Mecca were rejoicing and mocking the Muslim on the defeats of the Roman, since they considered the Persian as idolators similar to them.
The Roman eventually won the war as predicted and victorious over the Persian in 627 AD under Emperor Heraclius in Nineveh, and at the same time the people of Madinah (at the time called Yathrib) were defeating their enemies of Arab alliances by digging the trench (khandaq) in Madinah using a military tactic made popular by the Persian. During the the khandaq war according to tradition, it was prophezied that the capital of Rome (Byzantine) at the time namely Constantinople will falls to Muslim. Eventually after more than 700 years of conflicts surpassing the duration of Roman–Persian Wars, and after many campaigns that started as early as 674 AD, Constatinople fell to Ottoman Empire in 1453 AD under Sultan Muhammad Al-Fatih [3],[4].
[1] Roman–Persian Wars:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman%E2%80%93Persian_Wars
[2] 627 AD:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/627
[3] Siege of Constantinople (674–678):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Constantinople_(674...
[4] Fall of Constantinople:
You're saying the pagans were mocking muslims and zoroastrians as idolaters? Forgive me but this seems like a strange claim especially with no evidence?
The pagans were siding and rooting for the Persian to win the Byzantine/Roman - Persian war since they considered the Persian similar to them in practising idolatory by the latter fire worship. When the Byzantine was in the losing streaks and at the brink of defeat, the pagans were mocking the Muslim at the time since they considered Byzantine similar to Muslim due the Abrahamic root with their practise of Cristianity (Nasrani). According to tradition Ishmael and his mother Hajar, the second wife of Abraham were migrated to a barren land (Mecca/Bakka) under God commandment. The event are recorded in both Quran and the Bible (Old Testament), and the Muslim yearly pilgrimage to Mecca is commemorating and reflecting this event. After the verses predicting the Byzantine/Roman victory were revealed, however the Byzantine finally overcome the Persian in a very short time within a few years [1]. Eventually, both Persian and Byzantine/Roman (two of the major superpowers at the time) were conquered by the rapidly expanding Muslim Empire, and the rest is history.
[1] Surah Ar-Rum:
I would disagree with the point that they're no less Roman than Caesar or Hadrian - you could say they were still Roman but you've got to consider that by the middle and end stage they had very little in common with their earlier predecessors.
For the biggest differences: by the time of Basil II they were speaking Greek instead of Latin, they were Christians instead of pagans, they didn't have control over the city of Rome or any more than a foothold in Italy, they had totally different styles of art and their government and military were run entirely differently. If you asked Caesar or Hadrian they would've considered it a totally foreign country.
Sure they might have considered themselves Romans still, but it's like the Ship of Theseus, all those changes add up over time. A lot of civilisations went through smaller changes yet they're still considered entirely different to their predecessors - no one would say that the modern Russians are still Norse.
It seems that your definition of being Roman is being Western Roman. Of course, tautologically by that definition, Eastern Romans would not be (Western) Roman. The article, and the scholarly consensus, is that Eastern Romans are Romans, and they should be part of what defines Romans; and definitions like yours are motivated by historical prejudice (a term used in the article).
Given that Roman elites, including the very emperors you mentioned, spoke Greek, worshiped (Latin-translated) Greek Gods, and versed in Greek philosophy and literature, one could argue that Western Rome is actually less Roman than the Eastern. Hadrian in particular was very Greek in his intellectual bents.
As for the city itself, Rome was not even the capital by the time of Sack of Rome (AD 410). Contrary to your argument, the Eastern Roman empire recaptures the entirety of modern day Italy by 555 AD during the reign of Justinian.
There's a sense in which the roman empire in the eastern mediterranean was only ever a thin layer of administration over the broader hellenistic culture that remained from Alexander's conquests.
This gives me strong "the people of Rome wouldn't consider them to be Romans, but why should we care what they think?" vibes.
> It seems that your definition of being Roman is being Western Roman.
Which, considering that was the source of the empire, seems entirely reasonable. If the British Empire had gone down a different route and was today centered around Australia, with completely different language and customs, everybody would agree it's not really British any more. The insistence from (some, not even all) scholars that Byzantium was really Roman doesn't change the fact that there was very little that was recognizably Roman left there. Of course people treat it as something different.
> ... and the scholarly consensus ...
Just because historians agree on something doesn't make it true. It is pretty reasonable to demand that an empire, if it is going to be designated as the true Roman Empire, control Rome at a minimum. And not as some outcrop that they had shaky control over.
Calling themselves Roman doesn't really mean much, they wouldn't be the last group to call themselves a Roman Empire and be wrong about that. If anything, historians should be renaming the Holy Roman Empire to something a bit more correct.
It so happens I’m reading The New Roman Empire by the first historian in the article, so I can talk about this a bit:
If we compare with the Roman Republic, not being centered on Rome is a big change. However, many emperors spent little time in Rome, and when there was a civil war it was apparently common to declare some other city a “New Rome,” so that idea was going around. Roman citizenship was considerably more flexible than other ancient empires, including people of many ethnicities, and was eventually extended to every free inhabitant in the empire. They didn’t just call themselves Roman, they legally were citizens, despite not living in and never going to Rome.
We could instead focus on the similarities, like not having a monarchy. Anyone could be chosen emperor if they were in the right place at the right time. (Originally by being a popular and effective general, but later acclaimed by the crowds in Constantinople after political maneuvering.)
So I agree that there’s a “Ship of Theseus” aspect to it, but it seems like a consequence of Roman flexibility, allowing the empire to evolve into something rather different over the centuries.
(Apparently Christianity resulted in far more religious strife, though, compared to polytheism. As a state religion, it seems like it was a turn for the worse, and the history of the many schisms over nonsense is rather tedious.)
> the history of the many schisms over nonsense is rather tedious
You might be missing something from the early Christian Church (after Nicea). The Church design is hierarchical, with one presiding Bishop with legal jurisdiction over all the activity in their bishopric; hence, fighting over authority.
The tedious philosophical differences are the vestige now because the books and writing remain while the people are long gone. At the time, there was much more at stake. Secondly, Church creed was carefully and thoroughly unified at Nicea in a formal process. Heresy was well-identified and definitely resolved, but sometimes through in-fights or at worst excommunications.
> Roman citizenship was considerably more flexible than other ancient empires, including people of many ethnicities, and was eventually extended to every free inhabitant in the empire
This practice predated the Empire by decades. In the Roman Republic following the Social War various peoples on the Italian peninsula, many of whom might never step foot in Rome, were granted citizenship [1]. Caesar himself gave Roman citizenship--all the way up to Senate membership--to Gallic aristocrats.
>Roman citizenship was considerably more flexible than other ancient empires, including people of many ethnicities, and was eventually extended to every free inhabitant in the empire. They didn’t just call themselves Roman, they legally were citizens.
Rather important example: Paul of Tarsus.
Any entity changes over that sort of timescale. Modern England is very different from what Æthelstan unified in the 10th century but we call both by the same name.
> For the biggest differences: by the time of Basil II they were speaking Greek instead of Latin
That isn't a difference. There was never a time when they were speaking Latin.
The Romans, over in Italy, spoke Latin, but the Anatolians, in Turkey, never did. They spoke Greek before any contact with the Romans and they continued to speak Greek long after the Romans were gone.
> it's like the Ship of Theseus, all those changes add up over time.
The Ship of Theseus is more about changes that don't add up over time. If I repair a hole in the ship, it's still the same in pretty much all useful senses of "being the same", and the question is whether a set of changes like that which end up covering the entire ship still leave the whole ship "the same".
If I repair a hole in the ship by replacing it with part of an 18th-century ironclad, and as damage to the wood accrues I just build an ironclad over where the ship used to be, no one is going to think I'm posing some kind of deep question when I ask whether, at the end of the process, I still have the same ship.
hopefully we can agree that tarquin was roman?
caesar had control over a very different territory than tarquin, very different styles of art, and a very different government and military than tarquin, and although he spoke tarquin's language, his subjects mostly didn't speak sabine and etruscan like tarquin's subjects did. i think you can make a case that basileios's government was a lot more similar to caesar's than caesar's was to gaius marcius rutilus's; certainly the justification caesar's assassins gave for killing him was that his government was uniquely un-roman
so sure, ship of theseus, but that didn't start with caesar. caesar was already five centuries of radical changes past tarquin (who also barely had a foothold in italy) and seven centuries after the mythological romulus
>by the time of Basil II they were speaking Greek instead of Latin
They were speaking Greek the entirety of their time in the Roman Empire though?
> For the biggest differences: by the time of Basil II they were speaking Greek instead of Latin
As far as I understand it, the lingua franca of the Eastern Roman Empire never “changed” to Greek, it was always Greek in the first place.
“During the earlier Pax Romana period, the western parts of the empire became increasingly Latinised, while the eastern parts largely retained their preexisting Hellenistic culture, creating a dichotomy between the Greek East and Latin West.”
The above are exactly right. Insisisting on the Byzantine Empire being Roman is however Kaldellis whole shtick.
To say nothing of the fact the Iconoclasm (which started in the 700s) was heavily influenced by nearby Islam and the contact the Byzantines had with Islam. Granted, many of today's Byzantine-focused historians here in Eastern Europe treat that period as an "aberration", but you cannot call a historical aberration something that lasted for about a century, give or take, it's clear that there was some very heavy internal support inside of the Byzantine society for Iconoclasm.
There's also not enough mentions made of the fact that after the reign of Manuel I Komnenos the "elites" of the empire (including its intellectuals) had started to become more and more "latinised"/Westernised, in fact I would say that 1204 happened because said elites had already succumbed to the pull of the "West" (the fact that Byzantium didn't have a proper fleet by that point is a very good indication of that, of the empire just succumbing to the West via the Genoese and the Venetians).
From that point on the real "Greekness"/the real Byzantium spirit escaped to and managed to survive at monastic institutions like Mount Athos, with Gregory Palamas and the associated hesychasm being the best example for that. But because today's history is written mostly from an Western perspective, the focus is more on people like Bessarion and Demetrios Chalkokondyles, humanists that "demonstrate" that Byzantium wasn't just a backwater barbarian place, but a real precursor to the Western Renaissance. It does not matter that Bessarion was basically a traitor to the Christian Orthodox faith and to Greekness as a whole at Florence in 1439, what it does matter is to gain "institutional" points today by making said period of history relevant to Western audiences.
And that's why the history of hesychasm is almost totally ignored in much of the Western world, and that's why Ukrainian monks like Paisius Velichkovsky [1] "bringing" hesychasm to Russian lands in the late 1700s might as well be science-fiction for said Western audiences, they don't know anything about any of that. That's why it's easier for today's Western-influenced historians to write down stuff like:
> or that Putin lays claim to Byzantium and its history.
as that would be a thing that Putin had done after a millennium of no cultural and religious active contacts between Moscow and the Greek lands.
Without hesychasm you don't have Paisius Velichkovsky, you don't have staretsdom, you don't have Dostoevsky, you don't have much of the Russian culture of the late 19th century going to today, so saying that there's nothing connecting Byzantium to modern Russia would be a big lie.
I would disagree with the point that they're no less Roman than Caesar or Hadrian
"Unlike the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church was not bothered by liturgy being celebrated in different languages."
Well that's just plain wrong. Sure, Rome (not the "Catholic", the East calls itself Catholic too) preferred Latin, but it was never universal. Anyway, the rite wasn't standardized to the rite of St Francis (but not imposed) until the Council of Trent, 100 years after the fall of Constantinople (hardly an empire by then).
When exactly did Rome object to other languages? The first 1000 years when East and West were in communion and Greek was the primary language of the Western Church?
I believe, before the time of Cyril and Methodius there were the idea that western churches shared the logic that it is possible to perform religious services only in three languages: Aramaic (Biblical Hebrew), Latin, and Greek. Cyril actually had to convince the Roman Pope that his translation of Bible to slavonic language is legit, only after that the tri-lingual restriction was considered as wrong.
Some sources could be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilingual_heresy
Two counterpoints:
- They were no longer properly Roman after they stopped speaking Latin, which they did almost immediately because majority of territories remaining under their control after initial Arab conquest were Greek-speaking.
- Written cultural heritage of Byzantine, unlike Roman, is negligible, mainly because they intentionally tried to be as un-original as possible, which is a paradox: they valued not writers or poets who could write new stuff that sounded fresh, but those who could imitate particular ancient authors's style as precisely as possible.
You could say that the Latin-speaking Romans tried to be as unoriginal as possible. Most "Golden Age" Latin literature is a deliberate copy of something that exists in Greek.
Many educated Romans spoke both Greek and Latin. Greek had always remained the spoken language in the Greek islands, though it looked quite a bit different than the Greek used today. Egypt spoke Coptic. Punic was the other language.
"Properly Roman" according to what formal certifying authority of "proper Romans?"
They considered themselves Roman up until Constantinople fell to Mehmed II. And even then, the Ottoman Turks took the title Kayser-e-Rum, literally "Caesar of Rome." And even before them, as the Muslims first expanded out of Mecca and Medina, they referred to the Byzantines as "Rum" or "Rome."
stopped speaking?
The Eastern Empire never spoke Latin. There was always a cultural divide.
It's kind of awe-inspiring to think that Constantinople was more or less the capital of the Western world for like one thousand years.
If anyone is interested in further reading on this topic, 'Byzantium' by Judith Herrin is apropros.
I have also heard that the barbarian kings of the fifth century onwards considered themselves, technically, vassals of the Emperor in Constantinople. And that this continued until Charlemagne. Unfortunately I don't remember the source for this.
from wikipedia on 674-678 siege:
> the mounting Bulgar menace
hah. At that time, everyone there has been "friend" for a while then "enemy" for a while, then again. +-10 years, repeat. That has been like schoolyard's everyday play. But Arabs.. No, thanks. That "Bulgar menace" Khan Tervel went and helped Byzantians get-arabs-off-the-lawn completely.. no matter was-it-friend-or-foe. Then went back to schoolyard's games/wars as usual.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Constantinople_(717...
One thing the article doesn't mention is a misconception about the efficiency of the Byzantine military. Their generals actually had a TON of issues coming to a consensus on whether to mount an attack or not.
Hah!
Bitcoin solves that ;)
Calling it Byzantine instead of Roman would be #1
The first paragraph is
>The first thing we get wrong is that we use made-up terms. ‘Byzantium’ and ‘the Byzantines’ were invented by western European scholars to deny the identity of this state and its people, who were Roman, no less so than Caesar and Hadrian. But this is now widely recognised, so I will move on.
As the "bysantium bureaucracy" is becoming more and more commonplace in the united states and the european union, it has become a priority to convince the population that it's actually a good thing. It's for the common good guys.