The Byzantines, however, did not call themselves Byzantines and did not call their state an empire. Instead, they consistently called themselves Romans, and they called their state variously the monarchy, polity, power, or public affairs “of the Romans.” They also had a proper name for their state, Romanía (i.e., Romanland).

The emergence of the name Romanía (Ῥωμανία), which may be translated as “Romeland” or, better, “Romanland.” This name first appears a century after Caracalla’s grant of universal citizenship, so precisely when the inhabitants of the eastern empire—and especially the inhabitants of the regions that would form the core of the future Byzantine empire (i.e., the Balkans and Asia Minor)—were adjusting to their new identity as Romans and coming to terms with the global Roman community. Ontologically, this new name (“Land of the Romans”) recognized that the world was now full of Romans and extended their collective name to their territory as a whole, and not just to the inert territory but also to the state and society that they collectively formed. It is a striking instance of a national territory being conceived and defined into existence in lands where the name had never before existed or applied. This development was based on the (new) civic identity and, ultimately, the new ethnicity of its majority population. Moreover, the name originated from below, from the habits of vernacular speech, and not among the late Roman literary elite. This is what average Romans called their homeland, territory, and polity, in which they were shareholders. What we call Byzantium, the Byzantines called Romanland.

The name first appears in the fourth century and was likely in circulation even before that. It is important to stress this, because frequently cited and even standard studies assert that it first appears in the sixth or seventh century. Yet in our earliest sources, the name Romanía does not burst on the scene. It is used casually, almost quietly, by mid-fourth-century authors who assumed that it did not require explanation for their readers, which means that it must have been in circulation for some time before its first appearances. Moreover, the texts in which it first appears are not highbrow. Classicizing texts would avoid the name for some time still, suggesting that it was first used widely on the street and not in fancy declamations.

The first texts are Athanasios of Alexandria’s History of the Arians; the Passion of the Gothic saint Saba; and Epiphanios of Salamis’ Panarion. Athanasios is, as always, railing against the Arian heretics of his time, and in this passage he accuses them of spreading their “madness” as far as Rome itself, “without any reverence for the fact that Rome is the metropolis of Romanía.” **Romanía here can mean only the empire as a whole**. This is imagined as an extended colony of Rome the “mother city,” which is technically correct, as metropolitan citizenship had been extended to every free citizen in the empire in 212 AD. The jurist Modestinus had opined, in the aftermath of that seismic shift, that “Rome is our common patria,” a view enshrined in Justinian’s Digest and later again in its official Greek translation, the Basilika (ca. 900). This meant that a Roman was to feel at home everywhere in the empire, in Romanía. It is fascinating that, two centuries before Justinian, the view that the empire was basically an extension of the city of Rome had already been naturalized within Christian Egyptian priests’ view of the Roman world. Athanasios addressed his work primarily to monks and clerics and expected them to understand the concept of Rome being the metropolis of something called “Romanía,” which was where they lived. The name could therefore be used in a purely internal frame of reference, not as a perception of the Roman world from the outside. Egyptian Christians, who were now Roman citizens whose religion was favored by the imperial court, knew that they lived in and were part of “Romanland.”

-Anthony Kaldellis