What Was It? What Was It Called?
What modern historians call the “Byzantine Empire” was in reality only the continuation of the ancient Roman Empire in the east, whose capital was New Rome (Constantinople), built on the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantion on the Bosporos.
Byzantium was a predominantly Greek-speaking and Christian Orthodox society, but there were no radical ruptures in its political and cultural continuity from Rome, and no awareness among its rulers or subjects that they had ever ceased to be Roman. Christianization had not been sudden and did not represent a rupture: it had taken five centuries for the Orthodox-Catholic Roman empire to emerge. As for languages and territories, the empire had lost its western half in the fifth century, though the administration in the east remained dominated by Latin until the sixth century, after which Latin mostly disappeared there. In the seventh century, the empire lost Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa to the Arabs, and with them its Syriac- and Coptic-speaking populations and the churches that did not accept the Council of Chalcedon. Thus, after the seventh century, the empire was predominantly Greek-speaking, Orthodox (in its own eyes), and ethnically Roman, and it was geographically limited to Asia Minor, parts of the Balkans, and (at times) southern Italy and Sicily. The question of when Byzantium “began” is therefore artificial as are all answers to it, including: the foundation of Constantinople (330); the fall of the western Roman Empire (476); the reign of Justinian (527-565); or the Arab conquests and loss of Latin (the date used in this chapter).Byzantium was recognized as the imperium Romanum or res publica Romana by the barbarian kingdoms in the west roughly until the coronation of Charlemagne (in 800). Eventually, the creation of a rival “Roman” empire in the west (the Carolingian, Ottonian, and their successor empire), along with the exclusive claims to the Roman legacy developed by the papacy, especially after the eleventh century, fostered a hostile view of the eastern empire, which in western eyes gradually became schismatic (even heretical) and was pejoratively renamed “the empire of the Greeks” or neutrally “the empire of Constantinople.” These terms aimed to deny its Roman identity. They remained in use in the west down to the nineteenth century, when the term “Byzantine Empire,” originally coined in the fifteenth or sixteenth, became established as the name of a scholarly discipline.
Thus, perpetuatingAnthony Kaldellis, The Byzantine Empire (641-1453 ce) In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0016. medieval biases (both religious and ethnic), many historians strangely say still that “the Byzantines called themselves Romans,” rather than that they were Romans.
In eastern eyes, however, for example among the Arabs and Turks, it was always the kingdom or empire of the Romans (Rum). In Byzantine terminology, it was the state “of the Romans” or just Romania (Ρωμανία), i.e., “Romanland,” a term which was in widespread informal use already by the fourth century and which gradually became a formal state name in official documents by the tenth or eleventh. So its Roman identity is not in doubt. A more interesting question is what sort of state entity it was. There was no precise translation of imperium in Greek,[1253] and even that term had not been used consistently or exclusively in the ancient Latin tradition. For the Byzantines, Romania was the “state,” “sphere of command,” “zone of authority,” “hegemony,” or “power” of the Romans (depending on how we translate kratos, arche, exousia, hegemonia, and similar terms); or their polity (politeia), a Greek term that had come to embody the meaning of Latin res publica; or their monarchy or kingdom (basileia). Terms precisely expressing the modern concept of empire are hard to find (see the following).
More on the topic What Was It? What Was It Called?:
- HIV is a virus that infects white blood cells, primarily those called CD4 cells (also called T4 cells or T-helper cells).
- The So-Called ‘Discovery' of Child Sexual Assault
- A group of blind men heard that a strange animal called an elephant had been brought to the town.
- The Period of Ruin in Ukrainian history, which ended in 1686 after the establishment of the so-called eternal peace between Muscovy and Poland,
- The modern approach to growth, often called “new growth theory,"really consists of two quite distinct theories.
- The disease resulting from infection by a lyssavirus is called rabies in any animal species (Rage in French, Tollwut in German, Rabia in Italian and Spanish).
- In 1970 a senior civil servant in the British Home Office could publish a book called The Conquest of Violence which chronicled what he considered to be a social triumph within the United Kingdom.1
- On men's gender and kinship roles in poor, predominantly Afro-Brazilian families in the city of Salvador, Northeast Brazil, anthropologist Klaas Woortmann observed what he called a “subjective marginality.
- In 1983, the virus that came to be called the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was discovered in human blood samples.
- AMONG UKRAINIAN LITERARY HISTORIANS AND SPECIALISTS, there is absolutely no doubt that the 1845 poem “The Caucasus” (Kavkaz) holds a central place in the so-called political, philosophical, or ideological writings of the country's national poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) (Plate 11), and in the history of Ukraine.
- UNICEF has called child sexual assault ‘a fundamental violation of children's rights',1 while the World Health Organization (WHO) has named it a ‘serious infringement on a child's right to health and protection'.[234] [235]
- Europe has always had an interest in and fascination with the part of the world today called “the Middle East,” the lands to its south and east, which have since the seventh century been the heartlands of the Realm or House of Islam (Dar al-Islam).
- In the early 1890s, a chartered company called the Compagnie du Katanga was exploring Katanga to add territories to Leopold II’s Congo Free State (CFS) by surveying unknown lands and persuading Africans to submit to the CFS’s authority.1
- Single arguments referred to in legal reasoning are those that make the conclusion valid as a legal standpoint - that is, that connect the arguments as well as the conclusion to the legal order. From this point of view, the arguments are called the sources of law.