(Part 1)
"What personal and social “content” made someone a Roman in Byzantium, beyond the formal labels of state (being a subject of the “emperor of the Romans”) and law (being a Roman citizen)?...
The historian Agathias, writing around 580, presented an idealized image of contemporary Frankish society...
Agathias offers a global, comprehensive definition of who the Franks are as a people by deploying the categories of classical ethnography and applying them to a base-Roman template, which is then adjusted to reflect the distinctive aspects of Frankish culture and society. According to him, a people—today we might say an ethnic group or nation—is defined by its polity, laws, religion, customs, morality, language, and dress... It is interesting that dress and language, rather than more abstract qualities such as politics and civilization, are singled out as the chief markers of difference between the two...
An early twelfth-century addition to the history of Ioannes Skylitzes notes that Basileios I (867–886) founded the city of Kallipolis (Gallipoli) on the coast of southern Italy by resettling people there from the city of Herakleia on the Black Sea coast. “This explains why that city still uses Roman customs and dress and a thoroughly Roman social order, down to this day.” “Roman” is again defined through the same ethnographic terms: one can tell who is a Roman and who is not by the presence or absence of mundane ethnic traits such as dress. Not everyone in Byzantine southern Italy was a Roman, and these, then, were the criteria by which one could tell the difference. The passage has two additional corollaries. First, it implies that a provincial population from the Black Sea coast, and not only the populace of Constantinople, could serve as a benchmark for Byzantine Romanness, especially when transplanted to Italy, where the population was ethnically diverse. Second, the author expects that, barring major disruption, the town’s ethnic profile would abide during the three centuries between its foundation and his own time. In the local Italian context, this implies a continuity in settlement. “The persistence of ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ traits, habits, styles, and so on constitutes a kind of descent,” and therefore a kind of ethnicity. The bishops of Gallipoli remained “Greek” until the later fourteenth century...
The snapshots presented above and in Chapter 1 strongly suggest that the Romans of Byzantium were an ethnic (or national) community. The remainder of this chapter and Chapter 3 will confirm this preliminary conclusion by mapping out, both geographically and socially, whom the Roman sources included and whom they excluded from the Roman community. We will pay attention also to the criteria that justified inclusion and exclusion. The factors that we will find, taken together, suggest that the Romans were an ethnic group that demarcated itself against other ethnic groups by roughly the same criteria that are used by modern scholars to discuss ethnicity...
Seneca wrote that “every day there are names of new nations, and old ones go extinct or are absorbed into more powerful ones . . . all peoples have become confused and mixed up.” He attained this realization in part because many Romans viewed their own nation as a mixture and melting together of prior ethnic groups.
For example, before the Roman conquest, Italy was populated by many ethnic groups such as the Etruscans who had their own ethnonyms, traditions, polities, languages, and a sense of difference from the Romans and each other. Centuries after the Roman conquest, by contrast, their polities and languages were mostly extinct, and they had become Latin-speaking members of a more expansive Roman state, and no less Roman than anyone else...
In 212, the Constitutio Antoniniana made almost all free people in the empire Roman citizens. The principle was subsequently enshrined in Roman law, for instance in the Corpus of Justinian, that “all who are in the Roman world are Roman citizens.”...
Byzantine chronicles trace the history of the Roman polity from antiquity to the Byzantine present without break or ethnic rupture. The symbolic “bridge” between the two was the career of Constantine the Great, who built New Rome and, according to the Byzantine imagination, populated it with nobles whom he brought from Elder Rome. This may have been enough to establish a sufficient or symbolic link of biological continuity between the two Romes. Also, as we will see in Chapter 3, Byzantine writers called Latin their “ancestral language,” which implies that they viewed the ancient Romans as their own ancestors. By contrast, when they talked about the ancient Greeks, whether in works of elite literature or just in church, they referred to them in a distant way, as a people of the ancient world who were no longer around in the present, the way we might talk about ancient Egyptians or Phrygians.
In some contexts, biological continuity from ancient Rome was asserted more explicitly, for example in the army. In a speech to his army, the emperor Julian in 363 referred to the conquerors of Carthage and Spain—over five hundred years before—as “our forefathers.” In 589, the bishop of Antioch, Gregorios, restored order to an army that had mutinied by addressing the soldiers as “Roman men” and challenging them to prove that they were true Romans and not the “illegitimate children” of their ancestors, who included Romans of the Republic such as Manlius Torquatus. A church liturgy for fallen soldiers, dating probably from the tenth century and produced in the provinces, refers to the sanctified heroes as the “offspring of Rome,” calling them also the foundation of the patris and the entire genos. During the passage of the Second Crusade in 1147, the emperor Manuel I Komnenos warned the German king Conrad not to pick a fight with the Romans, that is, his own people...
More than any other ancient polity, Rome incorporated foreign peoples and admitted them to its citizenship and name, even though some Romans did talk about blood purity. That claim is not extensively documented, but it was made. The dominant logic, however, was of assimilation. A community formed through social consensus, and that moreover knew itself to be so formed, could nevertheless still cast itself as a community of descent. As has been written about ancient Rome:
All Romans, no matter their origins, were in a sense descended from Romulus. . . . Commitment to the community allowed one to become part of that community. . . . Loyalty to the group was more important than biological ties in the construction of Roman society. . . . The myth of shared descent was by nature permeable...
Our sources were produced by such a wide variety of people across time, space, class, and language that no conspiracy to produce a “homogenizing discourse” can be suspected. We have evidence from outside Byzantium too, specifically from the Arab and even Latin worlds, that most Byzantines were ethnically Roman...
In his Life of Saint Ioannes the Hesychast, Kyrillos of Skythopolis (sixth century), a monk at St. Saba near Jerusalem, says that a Saracen raid against the provinces of Arabia and Palestine seized “as captives many tens of thousands of Romans.” Kyrillos had no investment in the discourses of Roman power propagated by the court...
Provincial Syriac texts from the sixth century tell the same story. The Church of Zeugma, in Mesopotamia, wrote a letter to the Church of Edessa about an omen that concerned “you, us, and all Romans” (a goose had laid an egg with the inscription “the Romans will conquer”). This letter was then copied into the so-called chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, a Syriac text written by an official in Edessa that is as straightforwardly pro-Roman as any Greek or Latin history written in Constantinople. It proves that members of a local church on the fringes of empire saw their fates as entwined with the victories of the Roman armies and considered themselves and their fellow provincials to be Romans.
Examples can be multiplied, and more evidence pours in if we tap the riches of Arabic literature, which consistently called the Byzantines Romans (Rum), distinguishing them from other ethnic groups who lived near or among them, such as Slavs, Armenians, or Bulgarians. Already in the eighth century, Arab writers listed the Romans among the “ethnic categories,” so alongside the Persians and Copts. In their detailed testimony about Byzantium, Arab ethnographers and other writers treat the inhabitants of the empire, whether high or low, Constantinopolitan or provincial, as al-Rum, unless they belonged to one of the aforementioned ethnic groups. The ninth century Arab essayist al-Jahiz quotes a Turkish general who made the point that Rum and Slav differ in the same way that Arab and non-Arab differ, not in the way that different kinds of Arabs differ...
Moreover, Arab writers saw the Romans as a kinship group. The ninth-century Baghdadi poet Ibn al-Rumi claimed that he had Roman ancestors, and that his maternal uncles were Persian, but his paternal uncles were Romans...
The same conclusion emerges even from some Frankish or Latin sources. Despite their general tendency to call the Byzantines “Greeks,” sometimes the real name sneaks through. This happened, for instance, when a western power wanted to keep the Byzantines loyal to an alliance and so softened the exclusion of the name Roman. In his diplomatic letters, the German emperor Friedrich II usually called his Byzantine counterpart Ioannes III Batatzes, his ally against the pope, “the emperor of the Greeks.” But in one letter of 1250 he indignantly recounts how the pope had excommunicated Batatzes and all his subjects—“all the Romans subject to you, shamelessly la belling as heretics the most orthodox Romans, from whom the Christian faith had spread originally to the four corners of the earth!” It was an occasional piece of flattery, to call his correspondent by his own ethnic name.
This slip occurred in contexts that had nothing to do with Constantinople or the court. The Chronicle of the Morea is an early fourteenth-century poem that recounts the conquest of the Peloponnese in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade and the history of the Frankish principality of Achaea during the thirteenth century. In the Greek version of the poem, the Byzantines are called Romans throughout...
In Hebrew texts it is likewise called Romaniyah, which is just a direct transcription of what Jews heard it called in common parlance. And the French version of the Chronicle of the Morea begins by declaring its theme as “la conquest de Costantinople et de l’empire de Romanie”...
Why would “the language of the Romans” be different from the language currently spoken by the Romans? This was, after all, what western critics (such as popes and German emperors) brought forward in order to deny that the Byzantines were really Romans. In a famous letter of 865, Pope Nicolaus I scolded the emperor Michael III for calling himself the emperor of the Romans when he did not speak the language of the Romans (i.e., Latin); it seems that Michael had even denigrated the Latin language in his now lost letter. Some modern Greek scholars make the same error: the Byzantines were really Greeks, they assert, because they spoke Greek.
The Byzantines had ways of addressing this mismatch of language and ethnicity, but it should be noted that at no point did this discrepancy cause them to doubt whether they were Romans. Until the end of the empire and beyond, they were unpersuaded by western polemics on this point. Moreover, our understanding of ethnicity should give to the Byzantines themselves the right to decide which of their cultural attributes constituted their ethnicity and how. Here the evidence is clear: they did not see their ethnicity as defined by their language, but the reverse.
One device was to qualify Latin as “the ancestral (patrios) language” of the Romans, implying that it was no longer the language that they used, but was the language of their ancestors...
This is not without parallel in other times or parts of the world, mutatis mutandis. The ancestral language of Greek-speaking Jews in antiquity was Hebrew. The ancestral language of Ireland is Gaelic. Latin in Byzantium can be seen as such a “talismanic” ancestral language, analogous to Hebrew among postbiblical Jews: “a national language that is not spoken by most of the nation.”...
For most of their history the Byzantines did not think that their language made them Greek; to the contrary, their ethnicity as Romans made their language “Roman,” or Romaic.
The Byzantines’ self-understanding in this matter did not deviate from ancient Roman precedents. In ancient Rome, Latin was at times invested with the aura of traditionalism but—and the following point cannot be repeated too much—there was never any requirement that one know Latin to be a Roman. Greek had always been a part of Roman culture and the Romans often referred to their “two languages,” Greek and Latin. Interestingly, even Byzantines of the middle period could refer to their “two languages, Greek and Roman,” in some contexts, for example law. The terms Roman and Latin were thus asymmetrical, and they remain so today. A study of ancient Roman literature might include Greek texts. A recent survey of Roman historiography, for example, begins with a senator writing in Greek (Fabius Pictor) and ends with both Greek and Latin historians of the later empire. What was new about the Byzantines was not that they were Romans who spoke Greek but that they were Romans who had lost touch with the Latin tradition. That was an interesting development, though it emerged over the course of centuries.
Instead of arguing that the Byzantines were not really Romans because they did not speak Latin, we should be saying instead that the Byzantines had two Roman languages, one the language of their ancestors (Latin) and another their language in the present (Romaic).
It was well understood in Byzantium—I believe by the entirety of the population—that the two labels Roman and (Orthodox) Chris tian did not signify the same thing, even though they overlapped when one was looking only at the Romans...
The Romans had formerly been quite hostile to the Christians. The average Byzantine would have been regularly reminded of this by the stories of the martyrs that were told in church, as they heard about cruel Roman officials grue somely torturing Christian saints...
The most interesting account of ancient Romanization is contained in a set of letters by the patriarch Photios (ninth century). In two letters (nos. 246–247), Photios explained to his correspondent Euschemon, the bishop of Kaisareia, how St. Paul could have been a Roman, which Euschemon was inclined to doubt on the grounds that Paul was a Jew from Tarsos in Cilicia...
How could Paul simultaneously be a Jew, a citizen of Tarsos, and a Roman? (ll. 41–44). Photios maintains that there is no problem here. Paul was a Jew by genos (family or race) and by being raised in the Mosaic Law; his fatherland (patris) was Tarsos, because he was born there; and, finally, he both was and was called a Roman because his father had obtained citizenship formally either through a Roman grant or by paying money (ll. 45–49). Thus Paul was not born “at” Rome but was born into the Roman name (i.e., citizenship) and the Roman polity (ll. 51–54)... Moreover, it was not only individual men but entire cities and even cities of a foreign genos (allogeneis) that could acquire the Roman name. Photios cites the example of the city of Philippi, whose citizens called themselves Romans (ll. 63–75). Although he does not say so, we know that the city was made a Roman colony in the aftermath of the famous battle there in 42 BC...
The Roman polity in all of its phases—Republic, early empire, Byzantium—was capable of absorbing foreigners, including the inhabitants of conquered lands, barbarian armies defeated on the frontier, and refugees, settling them according to its own modes, and, over time, making them into mainstream Romans. It was a literary cliché that Rome was formed from a mixture of nations. Absorption and assimilation were among the driving mechanisms by which Rome expanded from a town on the Tiber to the world of Romanía...
Some empires, for example the Achaemenid Persian and the Ottoman, were premised on the management and enforcement of difference among conquered populations: different groups were expected to abide, and be defined, by their own religious, local, or national traditions, as permitted by the ruling class of the empire. They lived according to a differentiated legal system, and the culture and identity of the conquering ethnic group was never extended to a large portion of the population. The same groups that went into the empire at its creation by and large came out of it upon its dissolution. Romanía was not such an empire. Compared to other pre modern states, the Roman state had the most success at extending the culture and identity of its metropolis to its provincial populations, and not only to their elites. As we will see, through a combination of policy on the one hand and the largely passive but pervasive and enduring operation of institutions on the other, it turned “barbarians,” who had initially entered the empire as members of different ethnicities, into Romans"
--- Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium / Anthony Kaldellis