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Coming to Terms With
Coming to terms with: Byzantium/Byzantine
Nicholas de Lange†
, John Haldon*‡
jhaldon@princeton.edu
Abstract
This is the first in a series of articles that look at the uses (and limitations) of pieces of academic terminology. This article considers the origins of the terms ‘Byzantium’ and ‘Byzantine’, and considers both their current use in academic discourse, and whether there are more appropriate alternatives.
Keywords
ByzantiumByzantineConstantinopleRomanEastern Roman Empire In recent years English-language historians of the Byzantine world have increasingly tended to abandon the term ‘Byzantium’ in favour of talking about the medieval East Roman empire (or even just the Roman empire), and to describe its denizens as Romans, rather than as Byzantines.
Properly, ‘Byzantium’ refers to the city founded on the Bosporus in the 7th century BCE by settlers from Megara in Greece. It was refounded by the Roman emperor Constantine I in the 4th century CE and renamed Constantinople. That would remain the official name of the city until its conquest by the Ottoman Turks in 1453 (and is still its name in Greek today). From that time on there was no place called ‘Byzantium’ on any map.
In 1557 the Bavarian scholar Hieronymus Wolf revived the term in the title of his Corpus Historiae Byzantinae, a collection of sources for the history of the eastern or Greek Roman empire in the Middle Ages. Similar titles have been given to several subsequent collections. By the middle of the 19th century the term ‘Byzantine’ came into general use among historians as a convenient name for the empire centred on Constantinople, when it was under Christian rule from the 4th to the 15th century. This was useful to distinguish it from the pre-Christian Roman empire, as well as from the western part of that empire (until its collapse in the 5th century), and also from the medieval empire inaugurated with the coronation of Charlemagne in the year 800 (the ‘Holy Roman empire’).The term was gradually applied to the art, religion and Greek language of this eastern empire and its offshoots, and served to distinguish them from the art and culture of classical antiquity.
Why, then, has the term ‘Byzantine’ come under suspicion? Firstly, it is inauthentic. The ‘Byzantines’ never called themselves ‘Byzantines’. They thought of themselves, and referred to themselves, as Romans. There was no formal break between the old, pagan Roman empire and the new, Christian one. Constantine originally named his eastern capital ‘New Rome’, and this name continued in use: the Ecumenical Patriarch of the Orthodox Church still has the title ‘Archbishop of Constantinople New Rome’. Until at least the mid-20th century a Greek (although officially a ‘Hellene’) could refer to himself as ‘Romiós’, ‘a Roman’, and to his spoken language as ‘Roméika’, ‘Roman’.
Secondly, the term, although it may seem useful, obscures distinctions that deserve to be made (it is argued), for example between different ethnic identities. It also generates or perpetuates false distinctions.
Thirdly, it is often treated as pejorative. In popular usage ‘Byzantine’ is regularly applied to a system or an institution that is regarded as complicated, bureaucratic and secretive. It conveys a deeply negative judgement on everything that the state and its culture represented. This view is often traced back to Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1788). Nearly a hundred years later the Irish historian W.E.H. Lecky echoed Gibbon in his often-quoted bon mot that the Byzantine Empire constituted, ‘without a single exception, the most thoroughly base and despicable form that civilization has yet assumed’ (1869). There is no doubt that a persistent prejudice has operated among the general public and even among scholars, and one consequence has been a well-attested and widespread marginalisation of everything Byzantine, from European history to the history of Christianity to art history.1
However, the argument that the Byzantines themselves did not use the term in its modern sense is perhaps not as strong as may at first sight appear. After all we apply to premodern cultures many terms that they themselves did not or could not have done, and any name is simply a convention (including ‘classical antiquity’). Unlike when dealing with contemporary cultures and identities, sensitivity to perceived identities is not an issue when discussing the past.
The alternatives are just as problematic. The most obvious substitute is ‘Roman’. This is not only how the ‘Byzantines’ saw and referred to themselves, it is also how their contemporaries referred to them, particularly outside Europe (where the term ‘Roman’ had been appropriated by the western ‘Holy Roman Empire’). Arabic uses Rūmī (‘Roman’), hence the soubriquet of the great mystical poet; there is even a sura of the Qur’an called ‘al-Rūm’ (‘the Romans’). For the city itself, Arab authors favoured the transliterated form al-Qusṭanṭīniyya, which passed into Persian and Turkish (and Kostantiniye continued to be the official name of the city in Turkey until 1929/30).2 However, ‘Roman empire’ may seem confusing. For a modern writer it obscures the fact that the empire was Hellenic as well as Roman and that in the later period these ‘Romans’ also called themselves Hellenes or even Greeks. Finally, referring to it as the ‘New Roman empire’ seems cumbersome, even if Constantinople was referred to in its own day as ‘New Rome’.
More recently some writers have used the term ‘Eastern Roman Empire’, to mark the distinction from both the earlier Roman empire and the medieval ‘Holy Roman Empire’. Yet this is unlikely to appeal to those living in those successor states in which ‘Byzantium’ has played a formative role, in terms of political ideology and/or cultural identity and heritage. Nor is such a change likely to solve the problem of marginalisation. Greeks see Byzantium as part of a broader Greek culture (‘Hellenism’), while most Byzantine historians see Hellenism as part of Byzantium.
Others have taken the view that, despite its negative connotations, the term Byzantine is probably less misleading, especially for non-specialists, than the alternatives. It may be that finding a generally acceptable term that meets the demands of both historical usage and identities as well as modern sensibilities can never succeed. Carving the past up into ‘periods’ is in any case problematic. Scholars continue to debate when exactly ‘Byzantine’ begins—with Constantine I in the 4th century, or at some point in the 7th century after the contraction of the empire to its medieval borders? Perhaps, after all, ambiguity cannot be avoided. In the final analysis, what is important is that historians who write about this civilisation clarify their own usage if and where appropriate.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank contributions from Roderick Beaton, Averil Cameron, Sergey Ivanov and David Thomas, all Fellows of the British Academy.
References
CameronA. (1996), ‘The use and abuse of Byzantium. An essay on reception’, in Changing Cultures in Early Byzantium (Aldershot, Ashgate).
CameronA. (2014), Byzantine Matters (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press).
CameronA. (2016), ‘Late antiquity and Byzantium: an identity problem’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 40: 27–37. https://doi.org/10.1017/byz.2015.4
GibbonE.(1788), Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell. This was a multi-volume work published between 1776 and 1788.).
KaldellisA. (2019), Romanland: Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press). https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674239685
KaldellisA. (2024), The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (New York, Oxford University Press). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197549322.001.0001
LeckyW.E.H. (1869), History of European Morals (London, Longmans Green).
StouraitisY. (2014), ‘Roman identity in Byzantium: a critical approach’, Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 107: 175–220. https://doi.org/10.1515/bz-2014-0009
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a22
Published on: 22 May 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 1 & 2
Article view count: 212
Article download count: 5
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
de Lange, N. & Haldon, J. (2024), ‘Coming to terms with: Byzantium/Byzantine’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(1/2): a22 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a22Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
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July 2023
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