The Byzantines always called themselves the Romans but what did the rest of Europe in there time call them? Greeks?
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No, the term Byzantine doesn't appear in writing until the mid 16th Century. Muslims referred to them as the Rumi, Romans, while Latins called them the Greeks or some derogatory term.
The vikings referred to Byzantium as Greece, usually written as Krikum or similar on runestones (there was no letter g in the norse futhark, k was used for both g and k).
It's funny I was just thinking about that, wondering what the people who lived in Rome called their rulers in 650 AD. Of course, the Byzantines called themselves Romans, but it's hard to imagine them being called that by a resident of Latium.
magritte2 said:
The Latin west had tendency to call them greeks. A derogatory term. And I think the average person in Latium at that time wouldn't know much about anything which didn't happen in his direct surroundings.
Yep, after italian peninsula had been a warground for some centuries, the locals had forgotten their lost glory...
And Rome was a small town...
so the greeks called themselves romans, the western barbarians as latins...
and the inhabitants didn't care...
And Rome was a small town...
so the greeks called themselves romans, the western barbarians as latins...
and the inhabitants didn't care...
Gil galad said:The Latin west had tendency to call them greeks. A derogatory term. And I think the average person in Latium at that time wouldn't know much about anything which didn't happen in his direct surroundings.
Well, maybe the average person, but Rome was ruled by Byzantium at the time, so the upper classes would certainly have had contact with them. It makes sense that they would call them Greeks, though.
Gil galad said:The Latin west had tendency to call them greeks. A derogatory term. And I think the average person in Latium at that time wouldn't know much about anything which didn't happen in his direct surroundings.
Given they were formally subjects of Byzantium and frequently rioted about it, it mattered.
The term was "Greeks". And it was NOT derogatory, but clarifying. "Romans" meant (and still means) inhabitants of the region of Rome. Since Westerners dealt with real Romans a lot, that's what the the term was reserved for.
"Graecia" is the ancient and well-known name of the area of the Mediterranean where the Byz empire was located. To call someone a "Greek" was hardly an insult, but an appellation of geographic reality.
Here is a long post on the matter (scroll down to the bottom).
Legally speaking, the Eastern Empire would always be known among its inhabitants as the Basileia Rhomaion; the Roman Empire. Its subjects were known as Romioi or Romans and never Greeks. Why? In the late Empire, the distinction of being a Roman meant having Roman citizenship. Since the Eastern Empire was the de jure successor to the Dominate there was no reason to adopt a 'Greek' identity when the Hellenes were just one of the many subject peoples of the Empire.
This is wrong, and especially in the 650 AD period. By the time Constantine founded Nova Roma 'Roman' went from meaning a citizen of an insular, pagan Italic city-state to member of a Christian Empire spanning the Mediterranean Basin, specifically when Caracalla made all inhabitants of the provinces citizens. The Imperium Romanum (Extent of Roman Power) was used until Heraclius made Greek the administrative language, at which point it became Basileos Romanoi (or something like that, I can't remember the exact spelling), translated meaning something approaching Empire of the Romans (since Basilieus is a translation of the Persian term Shahanshah, but later came to carry the same rough meaning universal rulership as Emperor has today)
It was only after the effects of Yarmuk had fully settled in and, at the dawn of the 8th century, it was incredibly clear that the Byzantines weren't getting the territory they lost to the Arabs back that this changed. It's hard to tell exactly when the West started thinking of the Eastern Empire as more of a Greek Empire than as the descendant of the Roman Empire, but it definitely was clinched with Charlemagne's coronation. But even then Charlemagne sought legitimacy for his Imperial title (and I find it hilarious that in your other post you posit that the HRE has a stronger claim -- a faked document does not a claim make) by trying to marry Irene.
Calling a Greek-speaking subject of the Byzantine emperor 'Hellenes' or the Westernized equivalent WAS meant to be offensive, especially that particular named carried connotations of paganism. While the HRE in the West struggled to maintain a legitimate claim to the throne of the Romans they did so by occasionally undermining the legitimacy of that of the people who actually still called themselves Romans -- inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire. In fact, Greeks still self-identified as Romans up until the national revival in the early 19th century. The Orthodox millet in the Ottoman Empire was the 'Roman Millet'.
I don't know what else can be used to convince you here, but the Byzantines very much called themselves Romans. So did the West until the beginning of the middle Middle Ages.
EDIT: Oh, and in the middle ages 'Hellenes' referred SPECIFICALLY to Greek speaking subjects of the Byzantine Emperor. I think it started being used again in the 11th or 12th century, I don't remember exactly.
Plushie said:
Yes, the "orbis romanum", "Roman world", in a civilizational meaning viz. foreign powers. But within that world, by common usage, Romans were Romans, Greeks were Greeks, Gauls were Gauls, Spaniards were Spaniards, as they had always been called for eons. In common usage, it is an ethnic folk label for central Italians. It would not have possessed anyone but a tiny clique of obsequious courtiers to suddenly start calling those whom they had always called Greeks something else.
Nor did they. The ecclesiastics, both in the west and east (and these were the cliques that really mattered in this time anyway) were thoroughly consistent and persistent in their use of the terms "Roman Church" and "Greek Church". There was no switcheroo there.
Nothing unusual. Heraclius was still emperor of the Romans in Rome. And given he was fighting a rearguard action against Lombard attack in Italy, a most necessary reminder.
The projected marriage connections btw Charlie & Irene was not for the titles of emperor, but a marriage of convenience for both - his to secure his hold in Italy against continued intrigues and interventions by Byzantine admirals, hers for a hold on her own government. It was Irene who proposed, not Charlie who pursued it.
The title of emperor bought nothing. The lands of the empire were already apportioned. It mattered only because the emperor is the master of ROME. And whomever is master of Rome is master of the Bishop of Rome. And the master of the Bishop of Rome is master of the universal church. And being master of the universal church was a heck of a big deal at the time. Far, far more important than who gets to claim the mantle of whatever pagan ancestors everyone was striving to forget.
Given that Eastern bishops & priests consistently referred to themselves as "Greeks", theirs was the "Greek church", and so on, they must have an awfully low self-esteem to be insulting themselves so.
There was no "plot" to deprive Greeks of their "Roman" appellation. It occurred to nobody to call them that. (except the Arabs, whom wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.)
Not even themselves. As noted in the referenced article, there are no official documents in Constantinople prior to 1080 that refer to the people of the east as "Romans".
All evidence points that this whole "We are the Romans" is a fantasy concocted in a fit of revivalism in the 11th C. There is no sinister Western plot to deprive anyone of anything - only the understandable Western reluctance to accept the Eastern Emperor's request to start calling Greeks "Romans" all of a sudden for no good reason, when a perfectly suitable term - "Greek" - had been used for centuries and was understood by all, and the usage of the "Roman" term was bound to cause nothing but confusion. Is the Patriarch of Constantinople to be now called head of the "Roman Church"?
It is not too different to the manner in which the Burmese junta all of a sudden wants everyone to adopt "Myanmarese". One need not assent to such a request. But it doesn't mean "Burmese" is an insult.
The Russians call them Greeks, alright, in most primary sources. Marching on the "Greeks", Learning "Greek" language; "Greeks", "Latins" and "Hebrews" having their liturgies etc.
They use "Latins" for the Western Europeans. "Romei" is reserved for the Eastern Empire and its armed forces sometimes, but mostly they just use "Greek".
They use "Latins" for the Western Europeans. "Romei" is reserved for the Eastern Empire and its armed forces sometimes, but mostly they just use "Greek".
I think you're misunderstanding me, Abdul.
In the West, they occasionally went out of their way to call him 'The Greek Emperor' who ruled over 'The Greek Empire', but in reality he ruled over many people who weren't Greek and who did not speak Greek, and his official title involved being the Roman Emperor.
I'm not disputing that the ethnic-linguistic group of Greeks were still known as Greeks, but rather that the state was Roman and the Latins would occasionally deny this out of vested interest in seeing the HRE as the legitimate successor or continuer of the Roman Empire as opposed to the Byzantine Empire.
In the West, they occasionally went out of their way to call him 'The Greek Emperor' who ruled over 'The Greek Empire', but in reality he ruled over many people who weren't Greek and who did not speak Greek, and his official title involved being the Roman Emperor.
I'm not disputing that the ethnic-linguistic group of Greeks were still known as Greeks, but rather that the state was Roman and the Latins would occasionally deny this out of vested interest in seeing the HRE as the legitimate successor or continuer of the Roman Empire as opposed to the Byzantine Empire.
I have to throw my hat in with Plushie on this one. Looking at the Crusades, for example, there was already a strong tendency to label the Empire as a 'Greek' one, and it was most definitely intended to carry negative connotations -- perfidious, feminine, backstabbing, untrustworthy, oriental. The only thing I haven't been able to figure out is when this kind of descriptive language began -- it would make sense that it would be around the time of the HRE's founding, coincidentally around the time that the Bishop of Rome was asserting more and more independence from the Exarch at Ravenna.
Plushie said:
Non-Greeks? Really? Like whom, for instance? A few distant Armenians here and there, perhaps. Whom else?
The area of Byzantine rule, certainly from the time it became an issue (post-750s, when it lost Rome itself) coincided relatively neatly with the Hellenic world, or what was regarded as the Hellenic world in the Mediterranean for many centuries.
The Roman Emperor is the ruler of Rome. His title stems from SQPR. Rome is located in central Italy. Rome is the eternal capital of the Roman world. When the empire split apart (dyarchy, tetrarchy & beyond), Rome wasn't "the Western capital". Milan was. Then Ravenna. Rome throughout this time was recognized as and remained the common capital of all the parts of the empire, even if no augustus or caesar was based there.
The Byzantine Emperor could rightly continue to call himself Roman Emperor so long as he was sovereign of Rome. Once he lost Rome, continuing to call him "Roman Emperor" was not only illegitimate, it was confusing. The switch to "Greek" was natural and clarifying. It wasn't a plot. The eastern church used it as much as the western.
motiv-8 said:
You've got it the other way around. They didn't call them "Greeks" because "Greek" was an insult. Rather, the Crusaders initiated the characterization of the Greeks as "perfidious, feminine, backstabbing, untrustworthy and oriental" because, well, that was what they thought of them when they encountered them. It had no such connotations before.
Among the Lombards, the term "Roman" was derogatory, characterized as "perfidious, feminine, backstabbing and oriental" because that's what the Lombards thought of central Italians.
Well Abdul, the Ottomans never conquered the CITY of Rome, but with the fall of Constantinople they claimed to be Caesar of all Roman Lands. Greeks are still called Roman (Rum) in Turkish and Arabic. Byzantines are undisputably the heirs to the Roman Empire as Roman Emperor Constantine moved his capital to Byzantion and named in NOVA ROMA. They changed the name Nova Roma to Constantinopolis later on.
And yes the Byzantine Empire (as we call it today) ruled many other non-Greeks aside from Armenians. Bulgars, Slavs, Arabs, Kurds, Georgians, Albanians, and even Turks. None of these people considered themselves Helenes.
And yes the Byzantine Empire (as we call it today) ruled many other non-Greeks aside from Armenians. Bulgars, Slavs, Arabs, Kurds, Georgians, Albanians, and even Turks. None of these people considered themselves Helenes.