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Well if Elizabeth's virginity is being questioned, we could always just call it Cornucopia.
I put that in bold, because that IMHO is an important addition. The Latin West also was a cultural heir of the ancient Romans. Limiting that to the successor state in Constantinople and their subsequent heirs wouldn't be quite right either.
Sure the East and West developed differently, but you can't deny them their heritage.
I also are inclined to say that both the 'Byzantine' Roman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire both can be described as being Roman, though that in part comes down on how one defines the term.
Still that debate isn't completely the same as the one, whether the Latin West also wasn't amongst the cultural heirs of Rome. In fact one Roman heritage (from the Western half) still exists, the Roman Catholic Church (as do her Eastern (half) Orthodox counterparts).
According to your logic there is no Byzantine Empire. I fully agree with that.
However using the same logic there is no Roman Empire. It´s all TROJA. I mean when trojan refugees found a city called Rome far away why whould they stop being trojans? ;-)
Well, I like where you're going with this but first is factual, second is based on legend
And since the Trojans allegedly found a land in a distant place that was unrelated to their land (unlike Rome-> Byzantium which was part of the empire, within the borders), it'd be a seperate entity that has a relation with the former
No. The only true Virginia is the eastern Virginia and not the western empire ahm virginia ;-)
I think it is safe to say that the Byzantine Empire was the direct political continuation of the Roman Empire. This can't be said for the HRE. There was a clear break between the demise of the Western Empire and the coronation of Charlemagne in Rome more than 300 years later. That the Byzantine Empire of 700 AD was very different from the Roman Empire of 100 AD is only logical. Political systems change and evolve.
Because the time doesn't matter. It would if I used a word like "Revolution", though.
One thing I haven't brought up this time: The Byzantines self-identified as Romans, sure. But, what would the Romans of Augustus' time have identified them as? A Greek-speaking empire in Hellas and Asia Minor worshiping an oriental prophet? It's pretty clear not.
(To be fair, it's not obvious that they would have considered the Illyrian Emperors or post-Diocletian era as true heirs either, and I certainly call them Romans. But it's why I rely on current conventions in English.)
(To be fair, it's not obvious that they would have considered the Illyrian Emperors or post-Diocletian era as true heirs either, and I certainly call them Romans. But it's why I rely on current conventions in English.)
Nobody identified themselves as "Romans" except Romans, i.e. Latin-speaking residents of central Italy.
Everyone identified themselves and each other by their ethnicity - Greeks, Gauls, Spaniards, Britons, etc. They maybe subjects of the Roman empire, or even citizens, but the term "Romans" refers to central Italians.
This continued into the Byzantine period. When Byzantine documents refer to the "language of the Romans", they mean Latin, not Greek. When they refer to their church, they call it the "Greek Church", not the "Roman Church" (they use latter to refer to the western church).
Outsiders, e.g. Arabs, may not bother to differentiate ethnicity and call everyone Roman. But inside the empire, it wasn't. There is no official document before 1080 that refers to the people of the Eastern Roman Empire as "Romans". It was a late propaganda thing, in a revivalist mood, that hadn't really occurred to anyone before.
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I think this tect will be of interest to many here
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/liudprand1.asp
An excerpt:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/liudprand1.asp
An excerpt:
Bold parts:
a) True to some extent, but the people accepted that they were Roman citizens and identified as Romans after a few centuries. Add to the persection of everyone who identified himself as Greek (which = polytheistic heathen at the time) and the collapse of the west, everyone in the Empire identified themselves as Roman citizens. The term Roman would either mean Roman citizen or person from the city of Rome, not central Italy. It later on meant citizen of the city of 'Nova Roma' aka Constantinople. The interchangeable term was also Byzantine for the people from Constantinople as they stuck with the original name of the city. It's the only situation where the name Byzantine appears.
b) That is untrue and I've never came across the ERE calling themselves anything else other than Romans, be it before 1080 or after. Care to show some evidence for that?
As for the church, since Christianity was a "universal" religion and not an ethnic one, like the ones everyone was used to at that point, the label was given according to language. And it was given by the westerners. The people of the ERE just called it the church, no linguistic or ethnic characterisation. For the ERE citizens, labelling something as Greek would instantly mean non-Christian. To call the Christian Church Greek would make no sense. It was a name given by the west which was adopted by the people around Constantinople way after the fall of the city to the Ottomans.
Except that they didn't.
Citizen has no meaning outside a republican basis. The term "citizen" stopped being used in the late empire. You are a "subject" of the emperor. The term "citizen" is not used in the Justinian Corpus (save to refer to local urban residents in the context of purely municipal affairs; urban residents of Rome are, of course, referred to as "Romans", residents of Constantinople as "Byzantines".)
Throughout the Corpus, it is always just the Emperor and his "subjects". The subjects are not identified as "Romans", but rather merely as "subjects of the Emperor", or "inhabitants of Roman provinces" or "people under Roman rule", but never "Romans".
The term "Romans" is used in the Justinian corpus in only three ways:
(1) In the ethnic sense, to refer to the Latin-speaking residents of Rome & central Italy, the "the language of the Romans", etc.
(2) In the past tense, to refer to the ancestral peoples, kept at an arm's distance, i.e. "the Romans did this", the "Romans did that", the "Romans lost Africa, we conquered it", "the Romans had x, we should have that too", "the Romans founded the empire which we inherited"
(3) In the possessive form to refer to inherited institutions built by Romans but that remain contemporaneously ("Roman law", "Roman church", etc.)
The closest thing found in the Corpus referring to Roman citizenship is a small ambiguous passage on manumission in the Novellae; but other than that, usage is pretty consistent: "Romans" refers only to the inhabitants of Rome or to historical Romans, "citizens" are urban residents, otherwise everyone is simply "subjects".
I am not talking about the ERE. I am talking about the people of the ERE. The subjects.
1080 is the first official document we have referring the eastern people as "Romans", and the region as "Romania" (the "land of Romans"). That nomenclature only begins pushed with Alexius Comnenus. They did refer to themselves as "Roman Emperors" since the 7th C., but that says nothing about what the subjects were called.
"Graecia" is a well-defined region since antiquity. It is has been known as "Graecia" forever, and its people as "Greeks". There is nothing derogatory about the term. It is a geographical reality.
The region covered by the Byzantine empire through most of its history since the 7th C. covers the Hellenic world rather neatly, and nothing really beyond it. It is a natural appellation.
For the west, "Romans" and "Romania" was in central Italy. For obvious reasons, "Romans" meant that, and not the people of the east (except for a couple of isolated documents, e.g. one Anglo-Saxon doc from the 7th C.).
This whole "We are Romans" nomenclature was a late revivalist push. It was not how it was commonly known and, of course, resisted in the West because it caused confusion.
Interestingly, none of the Italian maritime states, who had extensive trade relationships with Constantinople and loads of treaties, used the term in their docs. It first shows up in the late 12th C. in Venice, and is only begins to be used with some regularity after 1204 to refer to the Latin Empire (although, curiously, Pisans & Genoese begin using it at the same time to refer to the exiled Greek despotates - I suppose to counter the Venetian-dominated C-polis). Otherwise, before this, references are almost always to "Imperator Constantinopolum", "Constantinopolitanum imperium" and "Terra Graecorum", "Graecorum imperator", or at best "Romanum Imperator Constantinopolum". In a couple of instances, even weird-ass "Imperator romeum" (a direct sound transliteration of the Greek word, rather than translating it to Latin).
Outside of the maritime states, in almost all the correspondence & accounts with the east with the Pope, the Frankish Emperors, the Anglo-Saxons, etc. it is never referred to as "Roman" until c. 1200. Pope Nicholas I uses it once only to admonish the Byz Emperor to stop calling himself that, Pope Leo IX used it once in "New Rome" form ("imperatori novae Romae") during an attempt to heal the Photian schism. All other western popes, kings, dukes & co., in all their massive correspondence, never used it at all. Nor in any other literature but a couple of direct translations of Greek texts.
The Norman & southern Lombard chronicles documents make use of the term occasionally after the 1080s (after it had become common use among Byzzies themselves), and then for Byz Italy alone (east is still Terra Graeca). But even so a rarity until the 1200s.
In the Crusader chronicles, "Romania" is used liberally - but most frequently to refer to Asia Minor alone i.e. explicitly excluding Constantinople & Greece! Crusaders were taking their terminology from how the Arabs/Turks used it ("Rum" for the Anatolian territory they roamed over - which is what the term was narrowed down to in Arab usage during the 9th C., BTW), rather than how the Byzzies wanted to use it (for the empire as a whole) Only in a couple of instances does it refer to the Byz empire (The weirdest case is a Crusader-era chronicle relating a 1190s address by Barbarossa, from "Imperatorum romanum Fridericum" to "Imperatorum romaniae Ysaac".)
The chansons de geste of the era, when it uses Roman in Byz refs, it is restricting it to those two narrow geographic senses: the Byz lands in Italy alone or Asia Minor alone, but never Constantinople, Greece or the Byz Empire per se. That is always "Greek".
So apparently the only people who called the Byzzies "Romans" were the Byzzies themselves late in the day and, for a short while, the Arabs. Whoop-dee-doo.
Everyone everywhere referred to, and continues to refer to, their church simply as "the church". It is only when you wish to clarify that you use distinctive adjectives.
Byzantine ecclesiastical documents are pretty consistent using "Greek Church" to refer to the east, and "Roman Church" to refer to the west, whenever they need to refer to them. There's no confusion there.
There's no secret plot. It is convenience.
There's no brainwashing going on, other than some self-deprecatory illusion you have that "Greek" is some sort of insult.
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Obviously you're talking about the documents after Charlemagne's reign. Which would make sense. Otherwise there'd be no 'schism' or anything. But all this doesn't really show anything. Just because the city of Rome was controlled by people who share a belief with the one the inheritants of Rome had adopted and later on developed it differently, making it a sect (aka Roman Catholicism) it doesn't mean that they became the embassadors of whatever is Roman while the people in the ERE became a seperate entity that no longer identifies with Rome.
And it's a bit odd you keep saying 'Greek' vs 'Roman' church because the distinction was Greek and Latin... you can find that in the primary sources. And it developed after 1054 of course.
In fact, since you love using the term 'Roman' church, here is where the Byzantine question finally becomes legit. Byzantine Church is a correct term, assuming the Latin church is called Roman. Geographical reasons of course. One is based in the city of Byzantium and the other in the city of Rome. If you want to call the empire a religious patriarchy after 1054, here is where you'd be historically allowed to call this a Byzantine-centered empire.
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It is a reference to the liturgical language. We may call it "Greek Church" and "Latin Church" today. But those documents liked to call it "Greek Church" and "Roman Church". Latin was commonly referred to as the "language of the Romans".
e.g. the preface of Justinian's Digest"declares it is to be published "both in the Greek tongue and that of the Romans". ("tam Graeca lingua quam Romanorum")
The point is to show there was no brouhaha. Evidently Byzantine churchmen had no problems using the term "Greek" for themselves, or in applying the term "Roman" to someone else. They were not admitting to be secret pagans or declaring their emperor was not emperor.
Terms of convenience were convenient. There were no plots.
"Greek" is not pejorative. Indeed, if Liutprand of Cremona is to be believed, it is the term "Roman" that is an insult.
("when angry, we can call our enemies nothing more scornful than Roman - comprehending in this one thing, that is in the name of the Romans, whatever there is of contemptibility, of timidity, of avarice, of luxury, of lying: in a word, of viciousness."
)