According to most history books the Roman Empire fell in 476 A.D, giving room for the birth of the new Christian Europe and thus the transformation from the ancient world to the medieval world. The Empire of the east that remained after the fall of Rome has often been considered as a small remainder of the eastern provinces that was mainly Greek and Oriental in its characteristics. The Empire has been labled " The Byzantian Empire " thus creating a distiction between an ancient Roman Empire and a Greek medival Empire of the East. In this essay I will try to bring these to empires closer to each other and try to give a picture of a Roman Empire that did not fall in 476 but rather in 1453 when the turks invaded Constantinopel. The time period I will talk mostly about is the early period lasting from about the founding of Constantinopel in 325 by Constantine and ending with the conquest of the South Eastern provinces, such as Egypt and Palestine, made by the Arabs in the 7th and 8th century.
The reason I have choosen to concentrate on this period of time, is because you can see a very clear and close connection with the earlier unified empire. Of course I will also try to show important aspects of the later empire since these are relevent as well.
We must remember that the Eastern Roman Empire was an extremly heterogenous empire and had no great unifing force except for perhaps in some ways religion, that is to say the Christianity accepted at the council of Chalcedon in 451. But there were not a complete religous unity either, and the Eastern Roman Empire was faced with several religous conflicts ever since the 4th century. Therefor it would be extremely hard to point out any single culture as the main identity of empire. The administrative language of the east was Greek, but had been so ever since the early Roman Empire. The admininistrative body was made up by a traditional Roman bureaucracy and the Imperial law was also of a traditional Roman nature, which during the regin of Justinian was developed further through the Corpus Juris Civilis , also known as the Justinian law.
The main fault that is often made when discussing the nature of the Eastern Roman Empire is that people traditionally often have discarded the west as becoming a complete germanic society. This I belive is a problematic simplification, which creates a view were the Romans of the West became extinct and where the people of the East would create a completely new empire with a vague roman origin. In fact, the populus of the Old Western provinces was still mainly Roman and the only real main thing that changed was that the rulers were of germanic origin. This created a sense of connection between the west and the east during the 5th and early 6th century and made it easy for Justinian to reconquer the "lost provinces". During this period the empire was almost unified and it was only the Gaullic provinces ( Gaul , a large part of Spain and Britain ) that kept the empire from returning to its past size. But I will begin to look at how the inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire saw themselfs and how people of other nations saw them.
National Identity
As I mentioned before there was never any strong national identity that was particularly dominant for the Empire. The word commonly used when refering to the populous of the empire was Romaioi (Greek = Roman) and the Empire was refered to as Romania.
This shows that the feeling of the Roman ruleship was not gone and that the people defined themselfs as subjects to a Roman Empire and not a Byzantian. A Byzantios (Byzantian) was usually a resident of Constantinopel.
The main identity people had was that they were Christians. This seems to have been the most important factor in the national indentity of a Romaioi. There is a documentation that tells about an occasion when St Gregory the Decapolite, a native of the southern parts of Asia minor, came to the port of Ainos in Thrace were he was arrested under unclear circumstances. When he was asked " who are you and what is your religion " he did not answer that he was a Roman but he stated that " I am a Christian, my parents are such and such, and I am of the Orthodox persuation." (see Byzantium, The Empire of the New Rome, by Prof. Cyril Mango).
The only patriotism was to the own community and not to the Empire as a whole. If there was any cultural patriotism it has not shown strongly in written records. There had probably been a wide intergration with the Greco - Roman culture for quite a while and it is hard to tell how strong the national cultures were during the time of Justinian.But the many languages of the empire had not faded away during this long time of Roman occupation. As mentioned before the adminstrative languages of the Empire were mainly Greek, but also latin concerning some occasions. But these languages were only spoken by a few (mostly patricians, and educated men such as members of the clergy) excluding those who actually lived in these lingual areas.
Languages such as Aramaic and Coptic were still major languages within the Empire as they had been during the unified period. But even though there was never a sense of Roman patriotism one must still stress the fact that people saw themselfs as being ruled by the Roman Government of Constantinopel.
As we have talked about how the Romaioi saw themselfs it is equally important to talk about how other nations regarded this Empire. In the west the "Byzantines" were defined as the "graeci" - simply meaning Greeks. This is split because of many different reasons. The word Roman had become something in reference to the church as this had become the last strong remain of the Western Empire in Europe during the middle ages. The capital of the West was still Rome, although it had moderately transformed from a fixed political platform to a spiritual one, and because of the severe schism between the Eastern and the Western churches, the East could not be defined as something Roman. Instead a member of the Eastern church, which held Greek as the ceremonial language would be defined as a greek, a Graeci. This would therefor not just encompasse a person who was a native of Greece or a Greek speaking area, but anyone who belonged to the Eastern orthodox persuation.
But to the Arabs and later the Turks who came to conquer a large part of the South Eastern territory and finally Constantinopel itself, the inhabitants of the Empire were Romans and the
Empire itself was a Roman one ( Rum ). When the Eastern parts of Asia Minor was conquered in the 12th century by the Turks, the Sultenate established there was consequently named the Sultenate of Rum, The Sultenate of Rome.
The Roman Government of Constantinopel
Another aspect which is important for our understanding of the Eastern Roman empire during the middle ages is the governmental and buerocratic systems of this time. Any claims made by the early Imperial governments of Rome as being a republican and popular government had since long been forgotten and the government of the Eastern Roman Empire recognised a despotic ruler in the form of the emperor or Basileus (Basileus, greek = king). The emperor had complete control over the governmental institutions such as the senate, which was dissolved during the 9th century, and also the judical body of the empire. The emperor would also have a deep control over the church which was headed by the patriarch of Constantinopel over whom the Emperor had a great influence. The army would also be able to perform a certain amount of power, as in Rome, disatisfied legionaries could over throw the Emperor in order to install a new one who often would be a military leader. In fact, the military was a good way to come in contact with the Imperial power and generals who were both carismatic and ambitious enough could that way reach the imperial throne. A good example is Justin I, father of Justinian, who became emperor this way. This was not something that was new within the Empire, also during the earlier empire military emperors were common. The most famous one is perhaps Vespasian who was the last to take control during the year of the Four Emperors (69 A.D).
The autocratic government of Constantinopel which was developed during the 3rd century A.D due to the many reforms made by the emperor Diocletcian who introduced a more harsh and strict imperial rule according to the oriental persian model. This was "needed" in order to keep the empire together as the Roman Empire, as it saw enemies both from the west in the form of the germanic tribes and from the east the Persians. It is during this period that we see the first use of the notion of Basileus. It is also during this time that the introduction of the diadem and the coronation is introduced from the Persians, something that would become an important part of the recognizing of an Emperor in the late Roman Empire. In the erlier Empire it was the patrician families that would be struggling for the power, with the exceptions of military emperors. These familys would often claim to be of "old Roman lineage" which again gives a better picture of the national identity.
The judicial systems of the Empire is also an interesting aspect when looking at this period of the Roman history. The judicial system, as mentioned in the introduction would develope greatly during the late Roman Empire. The first book that tried to collect and systematize the old laws, which had its origin in the Roman republic of the 4th century B.C, was the Codex Theodosianus which was published by the emperor Theodosius II in 438 A.D. However, the books that would come to encompass all of the Roman laws would be Justinians Corpus Juris Civilis which was made up by the following books: Institutiones, Digesta or Pandecta, the Codex Constitutionum and also Novallae. These laws would try to establish a systemized use for the old laws. The reason why these laws are interesting when talking about the identity of the eastern Roman Empire is that these laws are largely based in the old Roman system and would therfor give little credit to the "Byzantine reasoning" since you can see such a clear
connection in this with the earlier Empire. The laws would have a clear importance in the Imperial rule of Constantinopel and would be crucial for all Roman emperors constitution.
Conclusion
With the two topics discussed above, I hope that I have been able to give a picture of the Roman empire after the fall of Rome. The discussion on the nature of the "Byzantine" empire is certainly a very interesting one but also a very complex one. That is why I have choosen to bring up the topics presented in the essay which are based more on a broad overwiew of the political life of the Empire.
I think it would be quite wrong to separate the Byzantine Empire from the Roman Empire. What we can state is that there were some very large developments during this period of time as well as with many other parts of the Euro - Asian world, but these are not strong enough to state that there would have been a completely new civilization arising out of the old Eastern Empire.
The "greekness" of the Empire that have often been used to separate Rome from Byzantium is only a clear simplification, since the Greek culture was a major influence in the eastern mediteeranian world before the Roman occupation. Hellenism had spread to most of the future eastern Roman provinces due to the conquests of Alexander the Great during the middle of the 4th century B.C, about 200 years before the Roman conquest of Greece itself.
