The Byzantines

Hrōm is the Middle Persian name of the Roman empire, and from the fourth century onward that meant, in practice, the empire ruled from Constantinople. The word is a borrowing from Greek Ῥώμη, its initial Hr- preserving the Greek rough breathing that Latin Roma never had, and it is attested from the beginning of Sasanian epigraphy through the whole of the Pahlavi literature, where Hrōm names the western realm and Hrōmāy its people. For the four centuries in which the Sasanian and eastern Roman empires shared a frontier, fought, and made peace, Hrōm was Persia’s standing word for the power across the border; the entry for Rome records the same form at its origin, and the page for Greece records its counterpart Yunān, the Greeks of antiquity and philosophy, from whom the contemporary empire was kept terminologically distinct.

The form documents a fact about the Byzantines that their neighbors’ names keep proving: nobody who dealt with them called them Byzantine. The Sasanians, who fought this state longer and harder than any other power, never coined a name for a new Greek empire; to Persia the enemy at Constantinople was simply Hrōm, Rome carried on, which is what the Byzantines themselves maintained in calling their land Rhōmanía. The word also proved contagious westward of the border it named: Armenian took its Hoṙom, recorded on this page, from this Persian form rather than from Greek. Two empires that could agree on almost nothing agreed on this, that the state at Constantinople was Rome; the hostile witness of the Persian chancellery is among the strongest confirmations the Byzantine self-understanding ever received.

Rhōmanía (Ῥωμανία), “the land of the Romans,” is the name the eastern empire’s own people used for their country, formed from the ethnonym Rhōmaîoi with the -ía suffix that Greek uses to build country names. It surfaces in the fourth century, within a generation of Constantinople’s founding; Athanasius of Alexandria uses it in the Historia Arianorum, written around 358, remarking that Rome is “the metropolis of Rhōmanía.” The word belongs first to the everyday and Christian Greek of late antiquity, the register Lampe’s lexicon catalogues, and its long medieval life belongs to the Byzantine Greek entry that continues it.

The name was coined while the empire still ran from ocean to desert, and that is its point on this page: Rhōmanía made the Roman state a country, a homeland with a Greek country-name, at a time when Rome itself still stood at its notional center. When the west fell away, nothing needed renaming; the Greek east had already been calling the whole Roman world by a word of its own making, and simply kept it. The empire that historians would later call Byzantine never had to invent a name for itself, because Athanasius’s generation had done it a century before it was needed.

Latin Romania is the twin of the Greek Rhōmanía above, and its peer in age: the word appears in Latin writers of the later fourth and fifth centuries and in Jordanes’s sixth-century Getica, meaning the Roman world as a country, the ordered territory of the empire as against the barbaricum beyond the frontier. Its most famous early appearance is a renunciation: Orosius reports the Gothic king Athaulf’s boast that he had once meant to erase the Roman name and make Gothia of what had been Romania, before deciding to restore the Roman order instead. It is a late formation from Romanus, built exactly like the Greek word, and the two arose together in the fourth-century empire, one name in its two languages; which language coined it first cannot be settled from the attestation, and the entry makes no claim.

This is the only Latin form on the Byzantines’ page, and it marks the moment the empire’s name came loose from the city of Rome: Romania is a country that exists wherever Roman order runs, and after 476 that was, increasingly, the east. Its afterlife runs in two directions. In Italy the name contracted around the territory that held to Constantinople while the Lombards took the rest, and survives today as Romagna, the region around Ravenna, a Byzantine province fossilized in an Italian place-name. In the east the Greek twin carried the meaning forward to 1453. A word coined to mean “everywhere Roman” ended as the name of the places that stayed Roman longest.

Bēth Rhōmāyē (ܒܝܬ ܪܗܘܡܝܐ), “the land of the Romans,” is the Syriac name for the eastern empire’s territory, formed with the toponymic prefix bēth-, “house, land of,” on the gentilic Rhōmāyē, Romans. It is the standard geographical term of the Syriac chronicles and church documents: the chronicle attributed to Joshua the Stylite, written at Edessa around 507 in the middle of a Roman-Persian war, uses it throughout for the Roman side of the frontier, and the acts and correspondence of the Church of the East distinguish their own Persian territory from the bishops and fathers of Bēth Rhōmāyē to the west. The prefix builds the same construction as Bēth Nahrīn for Mesopotamia and Bēth Sīnāyē for China, the Syriac map assembled out of “houses.”

What distinguishes this form is where its speakers stood. Syriac Christians lived on both sides of the world’s most durable border, and for the Church of the East, seated inside the Sasanian and then the Islamic realm, Bēth Rhōmāyē was the near abroad: the empire next door that shared their scriptures, harbored their theological rivals, and fought their kings. After the fifth-century schisms the phrase carried a confessional edge as well, since the church of the Roman land was the church of the emperor’s councils. Most of this page names Byzantium from a single vantage; Bēth Rhōmāyē names it from a community that could see it from outside while praying, in the same language, on both sides of the line.

Hoṙom (Հոռոմ) is the Classical Armenian word for a Roman of the eastern empire, used in the plural, Hoṙomkʿ, for the Byzantines and their state, and in phrases like ašxarh Hoṙomocʿ, “the land of the Romans,” for the empire itself. The word runs through the classical historians from the early medieval centuries onward and stays in use to the end of the Byzantine period. Its shape gives away its route: Armenian did not take the name from Greek Ῥωμαῖοι, whose rough breathing it could have rendered directly, but from Middle Persian Hrōm, breaking the un-Armenian initial cluster hr- with an inserted vowel to yield Hoṙom, with the trilled ṙ regular in Iranian loans.

That borrowed h- is the entry’s philological cargo. Armenia was Byzantium’s neighbor, co-religionist, and frequent province, yet its everyday word for the Romans came through the rival empire, learned from Persian speech during the long Sasanian centuries when Armenia looked both ways across the border; the Yoynkʿ entry on the page for Greece took the same road in the opposite direction, an Iranian-mediated name for the Greeks. And inside Armenia the imperial name did work no other form on this page does: because the empire was Chalcedonian, Hoṙom came to label Armenians of the Greek rite, so that a family could be Hoṙom in confession without any Roman thing about it. Elsewhere on this page Rome’s name marks a border on the map; in Armenian it could mark a border inside a village, running between neighbors who disagreed about a council.

The medieval life of Rhōmanía, the empire’s everyday name for itself, continued from the late-antique coinage in the Ancient Greek entry above. It was never quite the official style, which stayed with the formal basileía tōn Rhōmaíōn, “empire of the Romans”; Rhōmanía was the ordinary word beneath it, the name of the country rather than the constitution, and it is the word that appears when Byzantine writers speak plainly. Constantine VII uses it throughout the De Administrando Imperio, his confidential handbook of statecraft, and it runs to the very end, into the laments composed for the fall of 1453.

Every other form on this page records how a neighbor named the empire; this one records the claim the neighbors were responding to. A Rhōmaîos of the tenth century spoke Greek and worshipped in Greek, but he did not call himself a Héllēn, a word the church had spent centuries using for pagans; his nation was Roman, whatever his language. The name also draws the page’s finest boundary, against the entry for Greece: the same population that the Arabic geographers filed under al-Yūnān when quoting Aristotle became al-Rūm when it manned the Anatolian frontier, and Rhōmanía is the inside of that second name. The people of Rhōmanía prayed in Greek, argued in Greek, and insisted in Greek that they were Romans; the only Latin thing left in the empire was its name, and that was the possession it surrendered last.

al-Rūm is the Classical Arabic name for the Romans and the Roman state, which by the rise of Islam meant the surviving eastern empire ruled from Constantinople. It is the title of the thirtieth sura of the Qur’an, Sūrat al-Rūm, whose opening verses refer to a defeat of al-Rūm by the Persians and foretell their coming victory, set against the Byzantine-Sasanian wars of the early seventh century. The collective al-Rūm denotes the people and the realm; the city of Rome itself is named Rūmiya (رومية). The form descends from Greek Ῥωμαῖοι, “Romans,” carried into Arabic through Aramaic and Syriac usage, with the Greek ō raised to ū and the aspirate of the source lost along the way.

From the Arabic side, the same political sense of Rome’s name governs the word as in the Iranian world. al-Rūm is not primarily a city but a people and a power, the Christian empire to the north and west, and Arabic carries the cultural-versus-political distinction in parallel with Middle Persian: al-Yūnān are the ancient Greeks of philosophy and learning, while al-Rūm are the Greek-speaking Romans of the contemporary Byzantine state. The same population is sorted into two names by epoch and posture, the Greeks one inherits wisdom from and the Romans one shares a border and a frontier war with. That a single sura should be named for them, and should stake a prophecy on the outcome of their next campaign, measures how large al-Rūm loomed on the seventh-century horizon: not a far-off antiquity but the great power next door.

The Chinese name for the Eastern Roman Empire from the Sui and Tang periods onward, replacing the older Dàqín in the dynastic annals: both Tang histories carry accounts of Fúlǐn, its capital, its walls, and its embassies, and the name persists in Song usage. The characters are a transcription, not a description; the scholarly consensus derives them from the Iranian name for Rome carried by the traders of Central Asia, the word written frwm in Parthian, with Sogdian and Bactrian cognates, whose shape the Middle Chinese pronunciation of the characters closely renders.

China’s two names for the Roman world thus differ in kind, not just in date. The Dàqín of the Rome entry was a Chinese idea, the “Great Qin,” a mirror-empire imagined at the far end of the world; Fúlǐn is a foreign sound faithfully copied, the Silk Road’s own word for Rome delivered to the annalists by the people who actually went there. Between the Han and the Tang, China’s knowledge of Rome improved from a legend to a name, and the name it settled on was Persian. Rome reached China the same way Chang’an reached the west on this atlas’s maps: not as its own word, but as the road’s word for it.

The medieval Latin continuation of Romania, the late-antique name for the Roman world that the Latin entry above traces to Orosius and Jordanes. Through the Middle Ages the name stayed attached to the territory of the surviving eastern empire, in papal correspondence and above all in Italian usage, and it reached its strangest official moment in 1204: the treaty by which the Fourth Crusade’s victors carved up the Byzantine state is the Partitio terrarum imperii Romanie, “the division of the lands of the empire of Romania,” and the crusader state planted at Constantinople called itself the empire of Romania, the entity historians now call the Latin Empire.

The usage preserves a precise medieval contradiction. The Latin West would not concede that the Byzantines were Romans, and called them Graeci, their ruler at best rex Graecorum; yet the West never stopped calling their country Romania, because the land’s name had been fixed before the quarrel began. People and country thus carried names from two different arguments, Greeks living in Roman-land, and in 1204 the men who extinguished the empire adopted its name for their own creation the moment it was theirs. The name outlived both empires on the map, and in Italy it still marks the coast the Byzantines held longest: the Romagna, Roman-land seen from Lombard Italy. Rome’s name proved most durable exactly where Rome’s power had become a memory, kept alive by neighbors, conquerors, and heirs who agreed on nothing else.

The Classical Persian name for the Roman world, continuing the Hrōm and al-Rūm of its Middle Persian and Arabic predecessors into the language of the medieval eastern courts. In the Shāhnāma, Alexander himself is a prince of Rūm, and the word covers Byzantium and its lands throughout classical Persian literature; when the Seljuks took Anatolia they became, in their own Persian chancery, the Sultanate of Rūm, Rome ruled by Turks.

The Persian career of the name produced its most famous bearer. A Persian-speaking scholar from Balkh who settled at the Seljuk capital of Konya became known, from his adopted country, as Mawlānā Rūmī: the best-read Persian poet is surnamed “the Roman” because he lived in what Persian still called Rome, in a city the Caesars never particularly cherished, under Turkish rule, two centuries before Byzantium fell. No other form on this page shows so plainly that the name had come loose from the city: by the end of the era covered here, Rūm meant wherever Rome’s ghost was currently residing.

Rūm (روم) is the Ottoman Turkish name for the Byzantines, their lands, and their people, inherited through the Persian literary language that the Anatolian Turkish courts read and imitated. It is everywhere in the earliest Ottoman literature: Ahmedî’s verse chronicle of the House of Osman, appended to his İskendernâme around 1412, narrates the dynasty’s wars as campaigns against the lords of Rūm, and the Ottoman province spanning the conquered Balkans was named Rūm-ili, “the land of the Romans,” the later Rumelia. After 1453 the word settled onto the empire’s Greek Orthodox subjects, the Rūm millet, and Rūmī remained the adjective for the Greek of Anatolia.

The entry closes the roma family’s longest arc with its sharpest turn: the people who ended the Roman state adopted, and kept, the Roman name for everything they took from it. The Ottomans called their European half the land of Romans, their Greek subjects Romans, and in their claims after 1453 the sultan himself Qayṣar-i Rūm, Caesar of Rome; the name survived the conquest on the conquerors’ own tongues, demoted from an empire to a community but never discarded. Eleven languages deep, the family ends where it began, with rulers of Constantinople calling their world Roman; only the rulers had changed, and the name, as ever on this page, had not.