What Language Did the Byzantines Speak?

The Byzantines spoke Medieval Greek, the form of the Greek language that developed from the Hellenistic koine of late antiquity and continued to evolve throughout the Byzantine period and beyond. In modern scholarship this language is usually called Medieval Greek, Byzantine Greek, or simply the language of Byzantium. It was the everyday speech of Constantinople, the liturgical language of the Orthodox Church, the language of literature, history, theology, and law, and the language of the imperial administration from the seventh century onward. Latin, however, played an important secondary role for several centuries after the foundation of the empire, and other languages — Armenian, Syriac, Slavic, and Coptic — were widely spoken in the provinces.

The argument below links forward to the related treatments of the Code of Justinian and the related question of why the Byzantines called themselves Romans.

Latin: The First Language of Empire

When Constantine dedicated Constantinople in 330, the official language of the Roman Empire was still Latin. The eastern provinces had been Hellenized for centuries, and the language of commerce, literature, and everyday life in the great cities of the east was Greek, but the imperial court, the army, and the law courts used Latin. Constantine’s laws were written in Latin. The administrative apparatus of the late Roman state, from the army to the civil service, was a Latin-speaking institution. The Notitia Dignitatum, the late Roman official register of offices, was in Latin; the Theodosian Code of 438, the great imperial legal compilation of the fifth century, was in Latin; the laws of the early Byzantine emperors were in Latin.

The eastern empire thus preserved the late Roman Latin tradition for several centuries after the fall of the western empire. Justinian, who reigned from 527 to 565, was himself a Latin speaker, born in the Latin-speaking Balkans and educated in the Latin legal tradition. The Corpus Juris Civilis, the great legal code whose details are treated in the Code of Justinian, was compiled in Latin, although the Novellae (Justinian’s later laws) were issued in Greek as well as Latin. The army, in particular, retained Latin as its working language: military commands, the regimental rolls, and the technical vocabulary of warfare were all in Latin, and the Byzantine army of the sixth century was the direct descendant of the Latin-speaking Roman army.

The Rise of Greek

The position of Greek in the empire was always strong, and after the seventh century it became dominant. The Greek of the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods, the koine, had been the language of the eastern Mediterranean for centuries; the New Testament had been written in koine; and the great theologians of the eastern Church — Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, John Chrysostom, and the later Byzantine theologians — wrote in Greek. As the Roman state’s Greek-speaking eastern provinces gained in importance, and as the Greek-speaking populations of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt came under greater pressure, the empire’s center of gravity shifted toward Greek.

The emperor Heraclius (r. 610–641) is often credited with the formal recognition of Greek as the principal language of imperial administration. Heraclius came from a Greek-speaking family in Cappadocia, and his administrative reforms, including the replacement of the old Latin titles with Greek ones, made Greek the working language of the state. After Heraclius, the imperial chancery issued laws and correspondence in Greek; the Ecloga of Leo III, the Basilika of Leo VI, and the various legal and administrative compilations of the Macedonian dynasty were all in Greek. The army, too, gradually adopted Greek, and the technical military vocabulary of Latin origin was preserved as a Greek-sounding layer in the Greek of the Byzantine period.

The transition was not instantaneous, and the two languages coexisted in administrative and literary use for several centuries. The earliest Byzantine historians, including Procopius and Agathias, wrote in a deliberately archaizing Greek that imitated the style of the classical Athenian historians, but they also used Latin legal and administrative terms. The process by which Greek became the sole official language of the empire is one of the defining linguistic developments of the early Middle Ages.

The Character of Medieval Greek

Medieval Greek is not a single, uniform language; it evolved continuously from the koine of late antiquity through the development of the medieval literary language of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries and into the late medieval and early modern forms that became modern Greek. The vocabulary of the early medieval Greek was strongly influenced by Latin, especially in legal, military, and administrative terminology, and by the Christian theological tradition, which introduced a large number of biblical and patristic words. The grammar of the language simplified in important ways: the dative case was gradually lost, the optative mood disappeared, and many of the more complex classical grammatical forms were simplified or replaced by periphrases.

The pronunciation of Greek also changed. The so-called Itacism, the merger of several originally distinct Greek vowels into the single vowel i, had begun in late antiquity and was complete by the Byzantine period; the modern Greek pronunciation of i for what classical Greek would have pronounced as ei, oi, y, and e is a direct continuation of the Byzantine pronunciation. Other pronunciation changes — the loss of distinction between long and short vowels, the development of new consonantal sounds, the simplification of the consonant clusters — gave Medieval Greek a sound distinctly different from Classical Greek.

Greek in Literature, Science, and Theology

Medieval Greek was the language of a rich and varied literary tradition. The historians of the Byzantine period — Procopius, Agathias, Menander Protector, Theophylact Simocatta, Theophanes Confessor, George the Monk, and later John Skylitzes, Michael Attaleiates, and Anna Comnena — wrote in a Greek that consciously imitated the classical models but included many of the new linguistic features. Byzantine Greek theology, the work of the great Fathers of the Church and the later theologians such as John of Damascus, Theodore the Studite, and Symeon the New Theologian, was a particularly sophisticated development of the Greek theological tradition; it is treated in more detail in the Byzantine religion and the Orthodox Church. The legal tradition of the empire, examined in the Code of Justinian, preserved many Latin legal terms in Greek transliteration.

The literature of the Macedonian period (867–1056) was particularly rich. Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, the encyclopedist-emperor, compiled a series of works in which he gathered information about the protocols of the imperial court, the foreign peoples with whom the empire dealt, and the administrative practices of the empire. The treatise De Administrando Imperio was, in particular, an invaluable source for early medieval history. Byzantine poetry, the great hymns of Romanos the Melodist, the saints’ lives of Symeon Metaphrastes, and the secular poetry of the Comnenian period all developed the medieval Greek literary tradition.

Other Languages of the Empire

The Byzantine Empire was a multilingual state. In the great cities of the empire, alongside the Greek-speaking majority, lived communities of Armenians (especially in Constantinople, where they formed a substantial quarter), Syrians (in the cities of Asia Minor and the south-east), Jews (in Constantinople, Thessalonica, and the Peloponnese), and various other populations. Latin-speaking communities persisted in southern Italy and in some parts of the Balkans long after the seventh century, and the presence of Lombards, Franks, and Normans in southern Italy made Italian, Lombard, and Frankish important languages of the western frontier. Slavic languages became increasingly important in the Balkans from the seventh century onward, and the empire’s dealings with Bulgaria, Serbia, and Rus’ involved the use of translators.

Arabic, Armenian, Turkish, and Slavic all played roles in the empire’s later history. The translation of the Bible, the Church Fathers, and the liturgical texts into Old Church Slavonic by the mission of the Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century was one of the great events of medieval linguistic history; the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets they devised were used in the literary traditions of Bulgaria, Serbia, Kyivan Rus’, and beyond, and they continue to be used, in modified form, in the Slavic Orthodox world. The Greek of the Orthodox liturgy, combined with the Cyrillic alphabet and the Slavic literary tradition, became the linguistic heritage of the Slavic Christian world.

Legacy

The Greek of the Byzantine Empire is the direct ancestor of modern Greek. The literary tradition of the Byzantine period influenced the development of the Slavic literary traditions of the Balkans and Kyivan Rus’, and the Greek theological and philosophical tradition was preserved through the Byzantine centuries and transmitted to the Renaissance west. The continuing use of Greek in the Orthodox liturgy, in Orthodox theology, and in the secular literary and intellectual life of the modern Greek world is a direct continuation of the Byzantine linguistic tradition. The relationship between Greek and the other languages of the empire, and the broader question of Byzantine identity, is treated in why the Byzantines called themselves Romans.