Byzantine Culture

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Why "Byzantine"? The Name Nobody in Byzantium Used

The Byzantines called themselves Romans. The term Byzantine was invented in 1557 and popularised for political reasons. Where the word came from, what it did, and what to call them instead.

No inhabitant of the Byzantine Empire ever called themselves Byzantine, and none of them would have understood the term as we use it. They were Rhomaioi — Romans — and their state was the Basileia ton Rhomaion, the empire of the Romans. They used these words without qualification or embarrassment from Constantine to Constantine XI, a span of eleven hundred and twenty-three years.

This is not a technicality. What we call a civilisation determines what we think it was, and the name “Byzantine” was applied by outsiders, after the fact, for reasons of their own.

Where the Word Comes From

Byzantion was the Greek colony founded on the site around 657 BC by settlers from Megara, traditionally under a leader named Byzas. Constantine’s refoundation in 330 renamed it, and by the medieval period the old name survived mainly as a literary archaism — a Byzantine writer in a classicising mood might call the capital Byzantion, in the same way an English poet might write “Albion.”

The modern usage begins with Hieronymus Wolf, a German humanist who in 1557 published a collection of medieval Greek historians under the title Corpus Historiae Byzantinae. The label was adopted by French scholarship in the seventeenth century — the great Paris editions of the Byzantine du Louvre series from 1645 — and became universal in the eighteenth.

What the Word Did

The renaming was not innocent, and its purpose is reasonably clear.

If the empire ruled from Constantinople was the Roman Empire, then the medieval west had a problem: the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy both claimed the Roman inheritance, and both had spent centuries arguing that the Greeks had forfeited it. Western documents from the ninth century onward habitually call the eastern emperor “emperor of the Greeks” and reserve imperator Romanorum for the western claimant — a usage the Byzantine chancery rejected every time it appeared.

The scholarly adoption of “Byzantine” completed that operation. It detached the medieval Greek state from Rome, made it a separate entity with a separate name, and left the Roman inheritance unencumbered for western Europe.

The eighteenth-century writers then supplied the content. Gibbon, Voltaire and Montesquieu turned “Byzantine” into a synonym for decadence, superstition, palace intrigue and decline — the reputation described in Byzantine studies — and the adjective entered English with the meaning it still carries: needlessly complicated, opaque, devious.

That is a remarkable achievement for a term of art. No other civilisation’s name doubles as an insult.

What They Called Themselves

Four terms were in use, and their distribution is informative.

Rhomaioi, Romans. The standard self-description, in every register, throughout.

Graikoi, Greeks. Used occasionally and increasingly in the later period, sometimes in dealing with westerners who insisted on it, sometimes with a defensive edge.

Hellenes. In the early and middle period this meant pagans — the word for a Greek in the ethnic sense had been captured by the religion it once denoted. Its rehabilitation came late: from the twelfth century, and decisively in the fourteenth and fifteenth, intellectuals began using Hellene as a proud ethnic label. Gemistos Plethon at Mystras told the emperor plainly that the inhabitants of the Peloponnese were Hellenes. This shift is one of the roots of modern Greek national identity.

Christianoi. For most ordinary people, most of the time, the operative identity was Orthodox Christian, and this was the term that survived Ottoman rule.

What Everyone Else Called Them

The Islamic world: Rum — Romans. The Seljuk state in Anatolia was the Sultanate of Rum, meaning the sultanate in Roman territory. Mehmed II took the title Kayser-i Rûm, Caesar of Rome, and the Ottomans called their Orthodox subjects the Rum millet for four centuries, as Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire describes. The term survives in modern Turkish for Greeks of Turkish citizenship.

The Slavs: Grki and cognates — Greeks — though the imperial claim was understood and imitated, as the Third Rome shows.

The Latin west: Greeks, deliberately.

So the Muslims called them Romans and the Latin Christians called them Greeks, which tells you what each needed from the answer.

Does It Matter?

Several scholars have argued that the field should abandon “Byzantine” and use “eastern Roman” or simply “Roman.” The arguments in favour:

  • It is what the people said, and historians generally prefer self-descriptions
  • It restores the continuity that the term was invented to obscure — there is no year in which the Roman Empire stopped and the Byzantine Empire started
  • It removes a label that arrived attached to a set of prejudices

The arguments against:

  • “Byzantine” is universally understood and “eastern Roman” is not
  • Some term is needed for the medieval Greek-speaking Christian empire as distinct from the classical Latin one, since the two are genuinely different things
  • Renaming a field does not by itself correct the judgements attached to the old name

Current practice has largely settled on using “Byzantine” while saying, at the outset, what has just been said here. Recent general histories have made the point their opening move, and one recent survey of the period is titled simply with the Roman name.

The Practical Answer

Call them Byzantines, because everyone will know what you mean. Remember that they were Romans, because it changes how the whole thing reads.

An empire that thought of itself as the continuous Roman state, governing under Roman law, from a city called New Rome, whose citizens were Romans and whose emperor was the Roman emperor, is not a curious oriental afterthought to classical antiquity. It is classical antiquity, still running, until Tuesday 29 May 1453.

The Insult

The adjective’s career in English is worth tracing, because it is the most consequential thing the word does.

The Oxford English Dictionary records “Byzantine” in the sense of intricate, complicated and inflexible from the nineteenth century, and the usage became standard in the twentieth. It is now applied routinely to bureaucracies, tax codes, corporate structures, procurement rules and committee processes.

The semantic route is reasonably clear. Eighteenth-century writers characterised the empire as a place of court intrigue, elaborate ceremonial, theological hairsplitting and administrative complexity. Nineteenth-century usage applied the adjective to things with those qualities. Twentieth-century usage lost the historical referent and kept the judgement.

The result is a word that carries a verdict on a civilisation, delivered by people who had not studied it, into the mouths of people who are not thinking about it at all.

Comparable cases are few. “Vandal” and “philistine” are the closest, and both are similarly unjust to the peoples concerned. What distinguishes “byzantine” is that it is still the standard scholarly name for the subject, so the field is stuck with a term of art that doubles as a slur.

Calling Them Romans: The Practical Test

The revisionist proposal to drop “Byzantine” in favour of “Roman” sounds tidy and creates immediate problems, which are worth working through.

What do you call the period? “Late Roman” is taken, and means the third to seventh centuries. “Medieval Roman” is accurate and unfamiliar. “Eastern Roman” implies a western counterpart that ceased to exist in 476.

What do you call the people in 1400? They called themselves Romans. So did the inhabitants of the city of Rome, who were a different people in a different state with a different religion of the same name.

What do you call the language? Greek. Which makes “Roman Empire” for a Greek-speaking state confusing to every reader who has not been told the story first.

What do you call the field? “Byzantine studies” has journals, chairs, congresses and a century of bibliography under that name.

The revisionists’ answer is that confusion is preferable to a systematic falsehood, and that readers can be told the story — the first chapter of any book can explain it, as most now do.

The pragmatists’ answer is that the label is a convention, that all period labels are anachronistic (nobody in the Middle Ages knew they were in the middle of anything), and that renaming will not by itself change the judgements attached.

Current practice, visible in the general histories of the last decade, is a compromise: keep “Byzantine” in the title so readers find the book, and use “Roman” throughout the text.

What the Romans Called Their State

For completeness, the formal terms the empire used of itself:

  • Basileia ton Rhomaion — the empire, or kingship, of the Romans. The standard formal designation.
  • Politeia ton Rhomaion — the polity or commonwealth of the Romans.
  • Romania — a colloquial term for the Roman world, in use from late antiquity. It is the word the partition treaty of 1204 uses, and it survives in the name of a modern European state for unrelated reasons.
  • He Polis — “the City,” meaning Constantinople, which needed no further specification. The phrase eis tin polin, “to the city,” is the probable origin of “Istanbul,” as Constantinople to Istanbul explains.

The emperor’s own title, on documents and coins, was basileus kai autokrator Rhomaion — emperor and autocrat of the Romans — from the seventh century onward, having previously been rendered in Latin forms.

Nowhere in eleven centuries of official usage does the word “Byzantine” appear.

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