Why Did the Byzantines Call Themselves Romans?

The Byzantines called themselves Romans because they believed they were the legitimate continuation of the Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople, the New Rome, by the lawful successors of Augustus and Constantine. The name “Byzantine” was a coinage of the sixteenth-century German scholar Hieronymus Wolf and was never used by the Byzantines themselves to describe their state. From the foundation of Constantinople in 330 to the Ottoman conquest in 1453, the citizens of the eastern Roman Empire called themselves Rhomaioi — Romans — and the name was not a nostalgic or rhetorical flourish: it was a serious political and cultural claim about the continuity of the Roman state in the medieval Mediterranean.

The argument below connects to the related treatments of the Code of Justinian and the language the Byzantines spoke, and to the political context of the competing imperial claims set out in the Carolingian Empire.

A Continuation, Not a Transformation

The Byzantines did not see themselves as having created a new state. They saw themselves as having preserved the only Roman state that mattered after the western collapse. The Roman Empire had been one state with two administrative halves since the time of Diocletian and Constantine; the loss of the western half did not destroy the state, any more than the loss of a province to an invading army would have done. The eastern empire, governed from Constantinople, was the Roman Empire in all its essentials: it had the same laws (the Corpus Juris Civilis of the Justinian was simply a compilation of Roman law), the same administrative institutions (the senate, the praetorian prefectures, the army, the civil service), the same religion (the Christian faith defined by the Ecumenical Councils), the same official ideology (the imperial cult of the Roman basileus), and the same imperial capital (Rome’s legal successor, Constantinople).

The institution of the empire was understood by the Byzantines to be a divinely sanctioned order, and the emperor, the basileus, was God’s chosen vicegerent on earth. The continuity of the imperial office was not a matter of national identity; it was a matter of cosmic order. The loss of the western provinces to barbarian kingdoms, the rise of new states like the Carolingian empire, the conversion of the Slavic peoples, and the long struggle with the Islamic caliphate all were, from the Byzantine point of view, perturbations of the underlying Roman order. The empire had not become something else; it had survived.

The Political Dimension

The Byzantine claim to be the Roman state was not a matter of mere sentiment. It was a political claim with very real consequences. The Byzantine emperors considered themselves the legitimate rulers of the Christian oikoumene, and they refused to recognize the imperial titles of foreign rulers. When Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne as “emperor of the Romans” in Rome on Christmas Day, 800, the Byzantine court regarded the act as an usurpation. The empress Irene, who then ruled in Constantinople, was the legitimate Roman empress, and a Carolingian imperator in the west was, from the Byzantine perspective, an illegitimate claimant. The resulting tension shaped the relations between Byzantium and the Latin west for centuries. The political context of Charlemagne’s imperial claim is examined in the Carolingian Empire.

The Byzantines insisted on their Roman identity in diplomatic and religious negotiations. The Carolingian and later Holy Roman emperors called the Byzantines “Greeks” — a deliberate denial of their Roman identity — but the Byzantines refused to accept the name. The Byzantines called the western emperors Rex Francorum (king of the Franks) or Rex Langobardorum (king of the Lombards) and refused to acknowledge the title of imperator outside the imperial line of Constantinople. The use of “Greek” rather than “Roman” for the Byzantines became a standard Latin and western European usage, but the Byzantines continued to call themselves Rhomaioi until the end of their state.

The Cultural Dimension

The Byzantine claim to be Roman was reinforced by the empire’s self-conscious preservation of the Roman cultural inheritance. The Greek language of the empire, examined in language spoken by the Byzantines, was the language of the great classical tradition, and the Byzantine scholars preserved the works of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, the Church Fathers, and the late Roman historians. The Roman law tradition, codified by Justinian and developed by the Macedonian legal scholars, was the most sophisticated in Europe. The Roman administrative tradition, the Roman military tradition, the Roman engineering tradition, and the Roman artistic tradition all continued in the eastern empire, and the Byzantines saw themselves as the inheritors and protectors of the great classical-Roman civilization.

The Byzantines also identified themselves as Roman in religious terms. The Ecumenical Councils of the fourth to eighth centuries, which defined the Christian faith, were held in the eastern Roman Empire and presided over by the Roman emperor. The Patriarch of Constantinople, who presided over the Great Church of Hagia Sophia, was understood to be the senior bishop of the eastern Roman Empire and the chief religious authority of the eastern Christian world. The Orthodox Christian tradition, with its liturgy, its theology, and its canon law, was the religious expression of the eastern Roman imperial order. The relationship between the Orthodox Church and the Roman state is examined in the Byzantine religion and the Orthodox Church.

The Word “Byzantine”

The word “Byzantine” was coined by the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf in 1577, in the preface to his Corpus Historiae Byzantinae. Wolf, working for the Huguetan publishing house in Basel, used the name “Byzantine” to refer to the eastern Roman Empire after the fall of the western empire in 476; the name was taken from the pre-colonial name of the city, Byzantion, and it was meant to distinguish the eastern Roman state from the older Roman Empire of the west. The name was picked up by later scholars, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and gradually entered general use.

The Byzantines themselves never used the term. They called their state Basileia Rhomaion (Empire of the Romans), Romania (Roman-land), or simply Polis (the City, meaning Constantinople). The modern use of “Byzantine Empire” is thus a scholarly convention, and it has the unfortunate effect of obscuring the strong and consistent Roman identity of the eastern empire.

Why It Matters

The Byzantine claim to be Roman is not a historical curiosity. It is a central fact of the early Middle Ages, and it shapes our understanding of the entire period. The Carolingian Renaissance, the formation of the Holy Roman Empire, the Crusades, the relations between east and west, and the conversion of the Slavic peoples all involved the question of who was the legitimate Roman emperor, and the Byzantines were the most consistent claimants for a thousand years.