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In recent years there has been growing scholarly interest in Eastern Roman identity. Scholars have offered new approaches to this subject suggesting new, but conflicting, ways of understanding the way in which the inhabitants of what we call the ‘Byzantine’ or ‘Eastern Roman’ Empire viewed themselves. Despite the variety of interpretations regarding the collective identity of these people, there is a consensus that the state and its social elites identified as Roman throughout the centuries. In fact, it is believed that the term ‘Byzantine’, which many modern historians use instead of ‘Roman’, was coined by Hieronymus Wolf in the sixteenth century in order to distinguish the classical Roman Empire from its medieval Greek-speaking continuation. It is therefore not surprising that Anthony Kaldellis has questioned how far we can lean on the term ‘Byzantine’, given that ‘Roman’ was the main self-descriptive term used by the inhabitants of the empire.1
It is true that the term ‘Byzantine’ (Byzantios) in Greek sources almost always indicates a direct relation with the city of Constantinople, the ancient Greek colony of Byzantium. There are so many examples of this usage that citing them all would be an almost impossible and pointless task. Indicatively, I will cite a novel of Justinian both because of its gravity as an official imperial text and because I will later use it to help construct my argument. The novel in question, Novel 89, unmistakably employs the term ‘Byzantine’ (Byzantios) to designate the citizens of Constantinople by way of distinction from the citizens of Rome, who are described as Romans (Romaios).2 This acknowledged fact is attested in modern dictionaries according to which the term Byzantine applied only to the inhabitants of Constantinople and not to the entire population of the empire.3
My study will not attempt to change this view. I will not argue that ‘Byzantine’ had been used as an adjectival descriptor for the entire empire functioning as a synonym for ‘Roman’. Instead I will suggest that ‘Byzantine’ could be used, in the context of a distinction between Eastern and Western Romans, as a synonym for ‘Eastern Roman’. This distinction required a world-view of a united Roman ecumene divided into two halves.4 In this context,...