Rhomaioi (endonym)
Rhomaioi are the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Southern Europe and Western Asia that identified as Romans starting from Late Antiquity. Although modern scholarship commonly refers to these populations as Byzantines, Eastern Romans, or Byzantine Greeks, they consistently understood their identity as Roman, rooted in imperial continuity, the Christian faith, and the Greek language and culture. Over time, Rhōmaios became closely associated with the Eastern Orthodox Church as well as Greek speech, and the identity continued in use among Greek Orthodox communities after the fall of Constantinople in 1453.
Terminology
During most of the Middle Ages, the Rhōmaîoi. It is now a term in the Greek language that is synonymous with Christian Greeks.The Latin term Graikoí was also used, which was rare in official Byzantine political correspondence prior to the Fourth Crusade of 1204. The name Hellenes was synonymous to "pagan" in popular use, but was revived as an ethnonym in the Middle Byzantine period.
While in the West the term "Roman" acquired a new meaning in connection with the Catholic Church and the Bishop of Rome, the Greek form "Romaioi" remained attached to the Greeks of the Eastern Roman Empire. Despite the shift in terminology in the West, the Byzantines Empire's eastern neighbors, such as the Arabs, continued to refer to the Rhomaioi as "Romans", as for instance in the 30th Surah of the Quran. The signifier "Roman" was also used by the Byzantines' later Ottoman rivals, and its Turkish equivalent Rûm, "Roman", continues to be used officially by the government of Turkey to denote the Greek Orthodox natives of Istanbul, as well as the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
Among Slavic populations of southeast Europe, such as Bulgarians and Serbs the name "Rhomaioi" in their languages was most commonly translated as "Greki". Some Slavonic texts during the early medieval era also used the terms Rimljani or Romei. At least one 11th-century Bulgarian source is attested which refers to "Ellini rimski". In most medieval Bulgarian sources the Byzantine Emperors were the "Tsars of the Greeks" and the Byzantine Empire was known as "Tsardom of the Greeks". Both rulers of the Despotate of Epirus and the Empire of Nicaea were also "Greek tsars ruling over Greek people".
Equally, among Nordic people such as Icelanders, Varangians and other Scandinavian people, "Rhomaioi" were called "Grikkr". There are various runic inscriptions left in Norway, Sweden and even in Athens by travellers and members of the Varangian Guard like Greece runestones and the Piraeus Lion which we meet the terms Grikkland and Grikkr referring to their ventures in Byzantine Empire and their interaction with the Byzantines.
History
The Rhomaioi are a Greek-speaking and Orthodox Christian people that historically inhabited the lands of the Byzantine Empire during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages; They represented the dominant culture of the empire, which they called Rhomania, primarily in the southern Balkans, Asia Minor, and other parts of the eastern Mediterranean. Throughout their history, they self-identified as Romans ; medieval Europeans called them Greeks in their languages, while in the Islamic world they were known as Rum.Use of Greek was already widespread in the eastern Roman Empire when Constantine I moved its capital to Constantinople, while Thrace and Anatolia had also been hellenized by early Byzantine times. The empire lost its predominantly non-Greek speaking provinces by the 7th century Muslim conquests and its population was overwhelmingly Greek-speaking by the 8th century. Unlike the early medieval West, the Greek education of the East was more advanced, resulting in widespread basic literacy. Success came easily to Greek-speaking merchants, who enjoyed a strong position in international trade.
After the fall of the empire, the Ottomans used the term "Rum millet" for their Greek and Eastern Orthodox populations. It increasingly transformed into an ethnic identity, marked by Greek language and Orthodoxy, shaping modern Greek identity. Although the term 'Hellen' was briefly revived by the Nicaenean elite and in intellectual circles by Gemistos Plethon and John Argyropoulos, the Roman self-identification persisted until the Greek Revolution, when 'Hellen' came to replace it. Greeks still sometimes use "Romioi" in addition to "Hellenes", and "Romaic" for the Modern Greek language.
Culture
Language
The Eastern Roman Empire was in language and civilization a Greek society. Linguistically, Byzantine or medieval Greek is situated between the Hellenistic and modern phases of the language. Since as early as the Hellenistic era, Greek had been the lingua franca of the educated elites of the Eastern Mediterranean, spoken natively in the southern Balkans, the Greek islands, Asia Minor, and the ancient and Hellenistic Greek colonies of Southern Italy, the Black Sea, Western Asia and North Africa. At the beginning of the Byzantine millennium, the koine remained the basis for spoken Greek and Christian writings, while Attic Greek was the language of the philosophers and orators.As Christianity became the dominant religion, Attic began to be used in Christian writings in addition to and often interspersed with koine Greek. Nonetheless, from the 6th at least until the 12th century, Attic remained entrenched in the educational system; while further changes to the spoken language can be postulated for the early and middle Byzantine periods.
The population of the Byzantine Empire, at least in its early stages, had a variety of mother tongues including Greek. These included Latin, Aramaic, Coptic, and Caucasian languages, while Cyril Mango also cites evidence for bilingualism in the south and southeast. These influences, as well as an influx of people of Arabic, Celtic, Germanic, Turkic, and Slavic backgrounds, supplied medieval Greek with many loanwords that have survived in the modern Greek language. From the 11th century onward, there was also a steady rise in the literary use of the vernacular.
Following the Fourth Crusade, there was increased contact with the West; and the lingua franca of commerce became Italian. In the areas of the Crusader kingdoms a classical education ceased to be a sine qua non of social status, leading to the rise of the vernacular. From this era many beautiful works in the vernacular, often written by people deeply steeped in classical education, are attested. A famous example is the four Ptochoprodromic poems attributed to Theodoros Prodromos. From the 13th to the 15th centuries, the last centuries of the Empire, there arose several works, including laments, fables, romances, and chronicles, written outside Constantinople, which until then had been the seat of most literature, in an idiom termed by scholars as "Byzantine Koine".
However, the diglossia of the Greek-speaking world, which had already started in ancient Greece, continued under Ottoman rule and persisted in the modern Greek state until 1976, although Koine Greek remains the official language of the Greek Orthodox Church. As shown in the poems of Ptochoprodromos, an early stage of modern Greek had already been shaped by the 12th century and possibly earlier. Vernacular Greek continued to be known as "Romaic" until the 20th century.
Religion
At the time of Constantine the Great, barely 10% of the Roman Empire's population were Christians, with most of them being urban population and generally found in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. The majority of people still honoured the old gods in the public Roman way of religio. As Christianity became a complete philosophical system, whose theory and apologetics were heavily indebted to the Classic word, this changed. In addition, Constantine, as Pontifex Maximus, was responsible for the correct cultus or veneratio of the deity which was in accordance with former Roman practice. The move from the old religion to the new entailed some elements of continuity as well as break with the past, though the artistic heritage of paganism was literally broken by Christian zeal.Christianity led to the development of a few phenomena characteristic of Byzantium. Namely, the intimate connection between Church and State, a legacy of Roman cultus. Also, the creation of a Christian philosophy that guided Byzantine Greeks in their everyday lives. And finally, the dichotomy between the Christian ideals of the Bible and classical Greek paideia which could not be left out, however, since so much of Christian scholarship and philosophy depended on it. These shaped Byzantine Greek character and the perceptions of themselves and others.
Christians at the time of Constantine's conversion made up only 10% of the population. This would rise to 50% by the end of the fourth century and 90% by the end of the fifth century. Emperor Justinian I then brutally mopped up the rest of the pagans, highly literate academics on one end of the scale and illiterate peasants on the other. A conversion so rapid seems to have been rather the result of expediency than of conviction.
The survival of the Empire in the East assured an active role of the emperor in the affairs of the Church. The Byzantine state inherited from pagan times the administrative and financial routine of organising religious affairs, and this routine was applied to the Christian Church. Following the pattern set by Eusebius of Caesarea, the Byzantines viewed the emperor as a representative or messenger of Christ, responsible particularly for the propagation of Christianity among pagans, and for the "externals" of the religion, such as administration and finances. The imperial role in the affairs of the Church never developed into a fixed, legally defined system, however.
With the decline of Rome, and internal dissension in the other Eastern patriarchates, the church of Constantinople became, between the 6th and 11th centuries, the richest and most influential centre of Christendom. Even when the Byzantine Empire was reduced to only a shadow of its former self, the Church, as an institution, exercised so much influence both inside and outside the imperial frontiers as never before. As George Ostrogorsky points out:
"The Patriarchate of Constantinople remained the center of the Orthodox world, with subordinate metropolitan sees and archbishoprics in the territory of Asia Minor and the Balkans, now lost to Byzantium, as well as in Caucasus, Russia and Lithuania. The Church remained the most stable element in the Byzantine Empire."
In terms of religion, Byzantine Greek Macedonia is also significant as being the home of Saints Cyril and Methodius, two Greek brothers from Thessaloniki who were sent on state-sponsored missions to proselytize among the Slavs of the Balkans and east-central Europe. This involved Cyril and Methodius having to translate the Christian Bible into the Slavs' own language, for which they invented an alphabet that became known as Old Church Slavonic. In the process, this cemented the Greek brothers' status as the pioneers of Slavic literature and those who first introduced Byzantine civilization and Orthodox Christianity to the hitherto illiterate and pagan Slavs.