East vs West

When did the Byzantines consider themselves Greek rather than Roman?

The fall of Constantinople is considered a dark day for Greeks, yet if this had happened in 400AD it would have been a loss for Rome.

The Romans continued to consider themselves as Roman.

Some elite thinkers did start to ponder a hellenic identity after the start of the Crusades, but for most, they were still very much citizens of the Roman Empire.

Modern day greece was founded by liberal revolutionaries and the backing of western liberal powers.

So instead of looking to the Roman past, and the orthodox church, they reached further back into classical greece for an identity

They called themselves Romans because the older term for Greeks, Hellenes, had become a synonym for "pagans". Modern Greeks /still/ sometimes refer to their nation as "Romans", albeit informally. However, this is not to ay they saw themselves as Latins, they continued to use Greek and ultimately Latin died out in the Eastern Empire around the time of the Moselm conquests.

Think of it like this: the state, the government of the """"Byzantine""""" Empire was the exact same state as that founded by Augustus. It was the same country. The USA is significantly different today, in ethnic demographics, form of governing, and lands, and a different capital city, than in 1776, but it's still the USA, and the people are still Americans. The Byzantine Empire was the Roman Empire that after a couple of hundred years had changed in culture, changed in land and ethnic makeup, but the people there were still Romans.

The thing with this is, that after several hundred years of people calling themselves Romans, the peasantry and other less educated peoples came to believe that "Roman" was an ethnic thing, and not a citizenship of the state thing, and Roman came to mean people of Greece, but that they called Romania. That's why you have these people saying they're Roman when they have nothing to do with the city of Rome.

Typical Veeky Forums logic

>Greeks were totally Romans because muh feels

>Romanians are not Romans lol they are Slavs lmao real Romans speak Greek anyway

EU4

I am both a Veeky Forumsturd and a /pol/cunt and yet I think Romanians are more Roman than modern Greeks. Well, Vlachs are, the other nations within Romania are more Slav.

Saying Vlachs are more Roman than byzantine Greeks is like saying people from Finland are Swedish.

I said MODERN Greeks. Reading is hard, huh?

Finland has a large ethnic Swedish population.

This makes no sense.
Greek and Roman are mutually exclusive concepts.

I feel like Byzantinists want to deny there ever was an actual Rome. Strange.

You are autistic

No they aren't and no they don't.

>Greek and Roman are mutually exclusive concepts.
This is the state of Veeky Forums in a nutshell.

Sometime in the 19th century, the rebels wanted to call themselves the Roman Empire again, but their western European backers had hellenistic hard-ons so the Greek Kingdom was founded instead, when there was no historic "Greek Kingdom."

(OP)
>When did the Byzantines consider themselves Greek rather than Roman?

During the Palaeologan renaissance which began in c. 1270 and which was also the genesis of the European renaissance. This despite the fact that the first Roman emperor who sanctioned the use of Greek in administration was Heraclius 650 yrs prior, an Armenian from Africa province, who did so only because the decline of Latin in the imperial compound was irreversible and not because of ethnic sympathies. This of course changed nothing about the Byzantines' self-perception.

Cicero and his contemporaries would have given you a hiding if you were to call them Greek.

It's not about calling someone Greek. It's about the fact that Greek culture became an essential part of Roman culture. The Greek language was the language of culture for a large part of the Empire.
This should be basic history knowledge.

Meant for

>Greek and Roman are mutually exclusive concepts.

Pic-related.

>Cicero and his contemporaries would have given you a hiding if you were to call them Greek.

Cierco wasn't even born in the actual city of Rome.

>the other nations within Romania are more Slav
not really
it's more like wallachia and moldova are slavic
transilvania is slightly more germanic because there's a goddamn mountain chain separating it

Transylvania, if anything, is more Hungarian than Roman. Moldovans may be "Slavicised" rather than Slavic incomers, but they're still less Roman than the Vlachs, despite the large Slavic racial admixture, simply because the Vlachs are the ones who maintained the Latin language and aspects of Roman culture.

>the Vlachs are the ones who maintained the Latin language
all three maintained a latin based language, at least the peasantry did

The Byzantines did not consider themselves Greek, they considered themselves byzantines. Below that, you had the various cultures that made up the empire (Latin, Greek, Illyrians etc).

The real question here, is when did the Byzantines consider themselves the Byzantines, the decendants of Rome, rather then Romans that just happpend to misplace a part of their empire? That was a very gradual change, but the turning point IIRC was the reign of emperor Constantine. While he dealt with his own internal sstruggles well and introduced a lot of reforms to improve his empire the eventual failure of his campaigns to reconquer the empire rubbed it in that those parts, especially Italy, were lost now, and this was the new normal they had to live with.

*Romans,

The Byzantines never actually used the word Byzantine to refer to themselves. The term was invented in the 17th century by French antiquarians iirc. Even the Gypsies who are thought to have had a prolonged stay in Anatolia before migrating to the Balkans acquired the self-designation of Romans (Rromani).

Who the fuck has a bigger Hellenistic hard on than Roman hard on?

WHen they abandonned Latin for Greek

Not at all. The Byzantines viewed themselves as Romans until the end. They hated being called the "kingdom of the greeks." And most of the empire, including Rome, hadn't fallen for a while after Constantine died.

I feel as though the original question is unanswered

The Byzantines always viewed themselves as Romans but eventually Greek language and Culture was much more prevalent in the Empire

>>"The Roman pope-if indeed he is to be called pope who has held communion and worked together with the son of Alberic the apostate, with an adulterer and unhallowed person-has sent letters to our most holy emperor, worthy of himself, unworthy of Nicephorus, calling him the emperor "of the Greeks," and not "of the Romans." Which thing beyond a doubt has been done by the advice of your master."

>>"What do I hear?" I said to myself. I am lost; there is no doubt but what I shall go by the shortest way to the judgment-seat."

>>"Now listen," they continued, "we know you will say that the pope is the simplest of men; you will say it, and we acknowledge it." "But," I answered, "I do not say it."

>>"Hear then! The stupid silly pope does not know that the holy Constantine transferred hither the imperial scepter, the senate, and all the Roman knighthood, and left in Rome nothing but vile minions- fishers, namely, peddlers, bird catchers, bastards, plebeians, slaves. He would never have written this unless at the suggestion of your king; how dangerous this will be to both-the immediate future, unless they come to their senses, will show."

>>"But the pope," I said, "whose simplicity is his title to renown, thought he was writing this to the honor of the emperor, not to his shame. We know, of course, that Constantine, the Roman emperor, came hither with the Roman knighthood, and founded this city in his name; but because you changed your language, your customs, and your dress, the most holy pope thought that the name of the Romans as well as their dress would displease you."

Liutprand's account of his mission is def one of the greatest examples of trolling from the middle ages on both sides involved. But I wonder what language they communicated in. Latin? Greek? Both, via translator?

>When did the Byzantines consider themselves Greek rather than Roman?

...never. To this day, the Turkish word for Greek is 'Rum'; an Arabic loanword meaning 'Roman'.

The very concept of Greek nationalism only emerged centuries after the Byzantine Empire had fallen to the Turks.

Greeks in the 15th century would have simply identified as Romans. This might seem odd to us, but that's because we have neat ideas about Greek civilisation and Roman civilisation being disctinctly separate things. The Byzantines did not really think that way.

>Greek and Roman are mutually exclusive concepts
The absolute fucking STATE of Veeky Forums

I thought Roma/Romani just meant 'people' in the Gypsy language, with the similarity to the word 'Roman' being a coincidence.

You are correct, "Rom" just means "[gypsy] man" in their disgusting guttural """language""", the coincidence of being like Roman and especially Romanian is an unfortunate accident.

Are you literally retarded?

Isn't Gypsy from egyptain? E.g. people thought they were egyptains?

*raises paw*

They never did, as most other posters in this thread have pointed out, they considered themselves Roman.

That said, a lot of people do tend to get pretty romantic about this subject - it's a fairly romanticised concept, afterall, the whole idea of the Roman empire lasting into the 15th century. These are generally the people who actually actively oppose calling them Byzantine and insist on referring to it as the ERE until the fall of Constantinople.

For my part, I do think the Byzantines were distinct enough that they should be considered as a unique and separate entity to the Roman Empire, or even the earlier Eastern Roman Empire (which was initially envisaged as a division of labour, rather than a creation of two separate nations).

They're more of a successor state to the Roman Empire, rather than the continuation. It's like if the British Raj had continued after mainland Britain had been conquered by some European power, kept calling themselves British, but extensively intermarried with the locals and began speaking Hindi rather than English - you'd probably see the need to distinguish that particular nation from the earlier British Empire.

Perhaps the Greeks deemed themselves Roman because they were proud the the institutional heritage and to bask in the reflected glory of Rome.

It was a status affectation more than an ethnic badge.

The bulk of the population of Byzantium and then Constantinople was surely Greek-speaking.

The west

Roman wasn't an ethnic thing by then.
It's more a 'we are literally citizens of the Roman empire'.

Same way you can be 'American' but be a non-white anglo-saxon ethnicity

Of course you fucking retard because that would mean they no longer would have claim on the entire old empire.

>When did the Byzantines consider themselves Greek rather than Roman?
Yeah, well there are instances of 19th century people referring to themselves as Roman so the answer is never.
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