Why do we call them Byzantines when they called themselves Romans?
The people of Constantinople never heard the word "Byzantine" applied to their empire: they were Romans, and the label was pinned on them by scholars after it was gone.
▶ Start the storyBecause the name was invented after the empire was gone. The people we call Byzantines never used it. They called their state the Roman Empire and themselves Romans, in Greek , and the word "Byzantine" was attached to the whole empire only by later scholars, in the 1500s and after.
The word itself has a small, local origin. Constantinople was built on the site of Byzantion, a Greek settlement founded by colonists from Megara in the 7th century BC. "Byzantine" described the people of that city, not the empire around it, which its own citizens called , or "Romanland". Even neighbours who knew the empire well agreed with its self-image: their Islamic contemporaries called it the "land of the Romans".
What its own people said
- They were Romans ()
- Their state was the Roman Empire
- Their homeland was , "Romanland"
What later outsiders said
- Western Europe after 800: "Greeks"
- Scholars later: "Eastern Empire", "Empire of the Greeks"
- From the 1500s on: "Byzantine"
So who started calling them something else? After 800 AD, Western Europe stopped calling them Romans and spoke of "Greeks" instead, because the and the medieval German emperors regarded themselves as the true inheritors of Roman identity. There was something to the label, since Greek had gradually replaced Latin for official use. But to the people of Constantinople, being Roman was the whole point.
The word "Byzantine" itself owes a lot to one man. Hieronymus Wolf, a German historian of modest means, is said to have taught himself Greek with a dictionary bought from his meagre savings. In 1557 he published a collection of medieval Greek sources as the Corpus Historiae Byzantinae, and he is credited as the first to use "Byzantine" for the Eastern Roman Empire. In the 17th century a 34-volume edition, prompted by Louis XIV of France, spread the term through history books for good.
Today "Byzantine" is the usual word, though some historians argue it should be dropped because it began as a prejudicial and inaccurate label. Either way, the next time you see it, remember that its subjects would have called themselves Romans.
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Recap
They were Romans who lived in Rome's eastern half; "Byzantine" is a name scholars gave them after the fact.
💡 A trick to remember it · Think of a wedding photo labelled with the wrong surname by a guest who arrived a century late: the family called itself Roman, and "Byzantine" is the guest's caption.
Surprising fact · The empire lasted until 1453 and was never once called Byzantine by its own citizens; the term was popularized by a 34-volume edition in the 17th century.
Connects to
- 🌉 Why did an emperor build a new Rome on the Bosporus?
- 🗣️ How did the Latin of the streets turn into French, Spanish and Italian?
- 🏛️ Why can't historians agree on why Rome fell?
- 🏛️ Why did the two halves of the Roman Empire fall a thousand years apart?
- ⚔️ How can computers agree when some of them might be lying?
Sources (3)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (14 claims) cites at least one of these.