"As an ideological construct in the western imagination, “Byzantium” was shorn of its Roman identity already in medieval times. The dominant conceit in the medieval West was that the majority population of the eastern empire were not Romans as they claimed but rather “Greeks.” This at least recognized that they had an ethnic identity, even if it was mislabeled for political purposes. This tradition of Roman denialism then passed directly from medieval prejudice into modern scholarship, where it continues to fester. In the nineteenth century, moreover, these medieval “Greeks” were stripped of ethnicity and became deracinated “Byzantines.” Roman denialism is today one of the pillars of Byzantine Studies. Whereas visitors from outside the field can easily see that the primary sources speak clearly of a Roman ethnicity, most experts within the field continue to deny the obvious, sometimes zealously, asserting various pretexts, denials, and risible arguments by which to assert that the Byzantines were not “really” the Romans that they claimed to be... The modern reading of “Byzantine identity” as religious, and even metaphysical, makes sense only after it had been stripped of its Romanness by self-interested western medieval powers and then stripped of its distorted alter ego, Greek ethnicity, by scholars in the nineteenth century.
As they say in Greece, we have to pull the snake out of this hole. We have to come to terms with the fact that the Byzantines were what they claimed to be, Romans, in ways that were simultaneously (and comprehensively) legal, ethnic, and political. That Romanness is the great taboo, the inconvenient truth, that has held us back in a state of perpetual cognitive dissonance. There is now simply no theoretical justification left for outright denying the ethnicity of a society and imposing upon it an incoherent medley of invented alternatives to accompany the invented label (“Byzantium”) that we have also foisted upon it. Another way of saying this is that we have to align our field with the practice adopted almost universally by the social sciences and humanities during the twentieth century, namely to study identity through the claims and narratives made by the culture in question. Otherwise, we are not understanding who they thought they were and the choices that they made but devising narratives that suit our politics and preconceptions...
The Byzantine Romans were also an ethnic group...
The Romans of Byzantium saw themselves as an ethnic group or nation, defined in the same way that ethnic groups and nations are understood by modern scholars and sociologists: they had their own ethnonym, language, customs, laws and institutions, homeland, and sense (even if imagined) that they were related by kinship and taxonomically different from other ethnic groups. These testimonies come from many centuries that span the long history of the empire’s existence; they reflect the voices of provincials and Constantinopolitans alike and are taken from different genres of evidence...
Before the mid-eighth century, the Latin west casually accepted what we call Byzantium as the empire of the Romans, or the res publica Romana. There were lingering traces of Latin bias against the eastern “Greeks,” but at this time they were marginal. This changed during the second half of the eighth century, when the popes pivoted and sought to replace the patronage of Constantinople with that of the Franks. At this point, the term Graeci began to displace Romani in western references to the eastern empire. This intensified when some Frankish kings began, if at first only sporadically and uncertainly, to claim for themselves the title of emperor of the Romans. By the ninth century, both popes and western emperors were, in their official correspondence, actively questioning the right of the eastern emperor to call himself emperor of the Romans. As papal and imperial German ambitions began to draw more heavily on Rome’s prestige, hegemonic apparatus, and language of power, they saw eastern claims to them as an obstacle. Above and beyond their mutual rivalry, the popes and German emperors had a common interest to exclude Constantinople’s claims to the Roman tradition. Thus, the easterners were increasingly reclassified as Graeci, a term that in ancient Latin literature conveyed negative connotations that were now reactivated, connotations of treachery, effeminacy, excessive sophistication, love of luxury, verbal trickery, and cowardice. To avoid calling the emperor of the Romans by his true title, western authors invented a number of alternatives, such as emperor of the Greeks and emperor of Constantinople. Those would remain the dominant terms in the west until the nineteenth century, at which point they were replaced by Byzantium (see below). Naturally, the eastern Romans disliked being called Greeks. One emperor even threw papal emissaries into prison for bearing letters that addressed him as such...
There were always Latins who recognized the eastern empire as Roman and its people as Romans. But over time their numbers thinned, and the crusades intensified the anti-Greek bias. Cut off by language, the Byzantines were unable to participate or keep up with Latin intellectual developments, including the cultivation of Roman law, while their Church was increasingly perceived as deviating from the standards of the Church of Rome. An element of charged sexual polemic further cast the Graeci as unworthy candidates for the legacy of Rome, and the conquest of Constantinople in 1204 and subsequent dismemberment of their empire made the previously rhetorical humiliations real. The sack of Constantinople was regarded by some in the west as payback for the sack of Troy: the Franks, related to the ancient Romans via a Trojan genealogy, were getting back at those perfidious Greeks.
To make a long story short, western medieval observers and polemicists constructed an image of Byzantium that functioned as a discourse of orientalism parallel to that directed against the Muslim east. It was a package of distortions and strategic misunderstandings that stripped Byzantium of its claim to Rome and eventually also justified its conquest, exploitation, and (failed) attempts at conversion by western powers. This image continued without interruption down to the nineteenth century, when the field of Byzantine Studies came into being, even though it had evolved in the meantime...
In Enlightenment thought Byzantium became a symbol for all that could potentially still go wrong in Europe’s triple inheritance from antiquity: Byzantium was populated by degenerate Greeks, whose language had declined; it was a corrupt New Rome, run by scheming eunuchs and women; and it was retarded by a superstitious form of Christianity that was addicted to icons and hair-splitting theology. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hegel, and many others indulged in cringeworthy comments about this extinct medieval civilization, which they deployed strategically as an archetypal antithesis of the enlightened state and society that they hoped to see emerge in the west. Perhaps this imaginary Byzantium of the philosophers was not supposed to be historical at all: it functioned as a screen on which they could safely project all that they feared and disliked about their own world and its pitfalls, a dystopian mirror for the early modern nation-state...
The Arabs, who did not share in Latin biases, also regarded the Byzantines as Rum (Romans)...
The criterion of “Italy” is interesting because it exposes both the origins of modern denialism and the hypocrisy at its heart. Rome and Italy had ceased to be the deciding or even a relevant criterion of Romanness already in the second century ad, as Romans at the time had already realized: a Roman general of Antiochene origin even said that “Rome was wherever the emperor was.” In the third century, Romans filled the entire empire, emperors stopped living in Rome or even visiting it, and they began to call their provincial capitals “Rome.” Rome was now a world, not a city. No contemporary source for the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth century suggests that to be Roman you had to live in Rome, be from Rome, or control Rome, and no modern scholar of those centuries thinks so either. In a period when the emperors came from the provinces and spent their entire reigns there, St. Jerome declared that, when it came to (Roman) authority, “the world outweighs the city.” But when popes and German emperors in the ninth century begin to assert the centrality of Rome to Romanness, suddenly and conveniently modern scholars also discover that lost criterion and use it to discredit Byzantine claims to Romanness. Needless to say, the eastern Romans, who were the product of the globalization of Romanness between the second and the fourth centuries, were unaware of this criterion...
Denialism has, then, developed its own terms of art, such as “Byzantium,” along with specialized methods of evasion. The most common method in introducing the Byzantines is to say that they “called themselves” or “referred to themselves” as Romans, but for the modern historian to not then call them that herself. This is done, for example on the first page of the recent Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies. A corollary of this practice is to put the name “Romans” in quotation marks. This is a truly weird habit, if we think for a moment what it would look like if applied to any other historical people who had a strongly held, widely attested, and quite serviceable name. It is also out of sync with modern efforts to restore indigenous names to groups that have been marginalized in western perceptions of history (e.g., Inuit for Eskimo). In the case of Byzantium, this odd practice of circumlocution and quotation marks plants invidious doubts about whether the Byzantines “really were” who they thought and said they were...
William Harris, a historian of ancient Rome, writes that, “Almost everything changes [in Roman history], not only the sources and the material culture, but the principal language and the dominant religion. But that is a challenge, not an excuse.” Byzantium is part of that challenge, as Harris recognizes.
A recent book-length study [by Emma Dench] finds that what it meant to be Roman in antiquity varied by period, region, and context, and calls for the plural study of Roman identities...
Some affirm that Byzantium was “too small” to be authentically Roman. Again, there appears to be no methodology in the whole of Ancient Roman Studies that justifies this conclusion: How small can Rome get without ceasing to be Rome? No ancient historian has addressed this question. It is only an arbitrary criterion of what it means to be “authentically” Roman that is designed to exclude Byzantium. Here is another, even more bizarre, criterion: “The Greek East, despite its self-identification as ‘Roman,’ does not appear to have been concerned with oral sex at all.” I admit that I cannot reconstruct the logic here...
The chief tool that modern Byzantinists have invented in order to remove Romanness from the picture, while still remaining within the Byzantines’ conceptual horizons, is to highlight Orthodox Christianity as their chief and, in some cases, their only identity... the Byzantines perfectly well understood the categorical difference between their ethnicity and their religion. For example, they knew that the Romans had once been pagans and they knew, especially after the conversion of Bulgaria in the ninth century, that there were Orthodox people in the world, even within their empire, who were not Romans. This was not a difficult distinction to make and it caused no confusion. The most that can be said about this interpretation is that these two identities—ethnic and religious—overlapped in Byzantium, so that in many contexts there was no reason to distinguish between them"
--- Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium / Anthony Kaldellis
(To be continued)
