Byzantine Greeks
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Byzantine Greeks or Byzantines, is a conventional term used by modern historians to refer to the medieval Greek or Hellenized citizens of the Byzantine Empire, centered mainly in Constantinople, southern Balkans, the Greek islands, the coasts of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the large urban centres of Near East and Northern Egypt. In historiography such as Arnold Toynbee's, where Byzantium is defined as a civilisation rather than a state, the term "Byzantine Greek" is reserved to the inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire, while "Byzantine" can refer to any medieval state of the Orthodox faith (such as Moscovite Russia).
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[edit] Byzantine Greek language
- See also: Medieval Greek
Since as early as Hellenistic times, Greek had been the lingua franca of the Eastern Mediterranean, spoken natively in southern Balkans, the Greek islands, the ancient and Hellenistic Greek colonies of Western Asia and Northern Africa. This continued after Roman expansion in the region. Latin was also introduced by Roman administration but all significant literary work was performed in Greek. After the reforms of Constantine the Great the ancient Greek city of Byzantium became Constantinople and the "Greek East" gradually evolved as a separate political and cultural entity, having Greek as it main language, along with Latin in official use in the administration. However Latin had never been a spoken language in the East, and it was gradually being displaced by Greek in all sectors. The evolution from Eastern Roman to Byzantine Empire, properly speaking, starts with the reign of Heraclius, where Greek displaces Latin completely from law and administration. At the same time the Empire lost most of its non-Greek speaking territories in the near East and Africa, along with its second largest city, Alexandria. The main vulgar language of the Eastern or Byzantine Empire had been Medieval Greek (typically c. 330 AD), spoken natively in Constantinople and the largest part of the empire. Medieval (or Byzantine) Greek was an evolution of Koine Greek, the popular language of the Hellenistic world, and a transitional stage between ancient and Modern Greek. Moreover neither Koine nor Byzantine Greek ever gained popularity in literature (with the New Testament and Acritic poems as an exception). The language of Church, state, administration, law, education and literature, had been none other than an artificial Atticist dialect, which imitated the Attic authors of Classical Greece. This diglossia of the Greek-speaking world (which had already started in ancient Greece) continued under Ottoman occupation and survived in the modern Greek state until 1976 - though Atticist Greek remains the official language of the Greek Orthodox Church. As shown in the poems of Ptochoprodromos, Modern Greek had already been shaped by the 11th century AD and possibly earlier. Vulgar Greek continued to be known as "Romaic" up until the 20th century.
[edit] A Greco-Roman heritage
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| Aristocracy & Bureaucacy |
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- See also: Names of the Greeks
Byzantium may be defined as a multi-ethnic empire that emerged as a Christian empire, soon comprised the Hellenized empire of the East and ended its thousand-year history, in 1453, as a Greek Orthodox state: An empire that became a nation, almost by the modern meaning of the word.<ref>Helene Ahrweiler, Les Europeens, pp.150, Herman (Paris), 2000.</ref>
Byzantines ruled a multi-ethnic empire where the Hellenic element was predominant, especially in the later period.<ref name="Ahrweiler">H. Ahrweiler and A.E. Laiou, eds., Studies on the internal diaspora of the Byzantine Empire (Washington, 1998), vii.</ref> Like many other Imperial rulers of the time, Byzantines claimed heritage to the mighty Roman Empire and indirectly laid their land claims to all Christian lands. The Latin west, for the most part, ignored such Byzantine claims and viewed the "Empire of the Greeks" decidedly as a schismatic Christian state. Some Byzantine Greek intellectuals responded by claiming for themselves the glories of ancient Hellas. Nonetheless ethnicity as such is, of course, a modern concept, which medieval peoples would not have recognized, and the inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire were not a 'people' in any ethnic sense.<ref>A. Cameron, The Byzantines (Oxford, 2006), 8.</ref> The real issue for which the cultures were split, was that of religion: obedience to the Pope, procession of the Holy Ghost, purgatory, clerical celibacy, etc. Such questions separated Greeks from Latins, and if they could be resolved, they would be reunited in a new "Romanity" under the Pope.
Yet the pretence of Romanity began to wear thin in age of the Crusades. The inheritance of the battle of Manzikert was to create a largely Greek monarchy of what had been an ecumenical Empire. After that battle the non-Greek speaking regions of central Anatolia were permanently lost to the Seljuk Turks, and the map of the Byzantine Empire coincided to a very large extent with the areas of Greek colonisation in the ancient world, and also with those areas where speakers of the modern language were to be found up until the population exchanges of the early 20th century. In other words, the identity of spoken language and state that was to become a fundamental tenet of nineteenth-century nationalism throughout Europe became - by accident - a reality during a formative period of medieval Greek history.<ref name=Beaton>Roderick Beaton - The Medieval Greek Romance p. 9</ref>
In other words the Byzantines of the 12th century had something very like a national identity, in the modern sense, foisted on them; an identity, moreover, which Greek-speakers in later centuries never quite lost sight of, and which in the long run proved more enduring than the older Byzantine model of universal empire that was maintained at an official level until 1453.<ref name=Beaton/>
[edit] Common Byzantine self-perception
Within Byzantium, a Greek or Hellenized citizen of the Byzantine empire was generally called a Ῥωμαῖος (Rhōmaios), which was first of all defined in opposition to a foreigner, ἐθνικός (ethnikos). "Romanity" was perceived by Byzantine Greeks in a different way than their contemporaries. "Romaic" had been the name of the vulgar Greek language, as opposed to "Hellenic", its literary form. "Greek" (Γραικός) had been merged with "Romaic" (Ρωμηός), to mean a Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian. There was always a question of indifference or neglect of everything not Greek, therefore "barbarian". At the same time, the popular definition of "Hellene" (Έλλην - which is today a synonym to 'Greek'), was that of a pagan. Yet most Byzantine Emperors would not list neither Augustus nor Pericles among their ancestors, but Constantine the Great and Justinian, and the Christian emperors of Constantinople.<ref name="Ciggaar">Krijnie Ciggaar - Western Travellers to Constantinople, p. 14</ref>
In official discourse, "all inhabitants of the empire were subjects of the emperor, and therefore Romans." Thus the primary definition of Rhōmaios was "political or statist."<ref name="Ahrweiler"/> In order to succeed in being a full-blown and unquestioned "Roman" - it was best to be a Greek Orthodox Christian and a Greek-speaker, at least in one's public persona. Yet the cultural uniformity which the Byzantine church and the state pursued through Orthodoxy and the Greek language was not sufficient to erase distinct identities - nor did it aim to.<ref name="Ahrweiler"/> Byzantines had no tradition of actively propagating their own culture or of actively combatting foreign people or foreign elements in their society. The highest complement that could be paid to a foreigner was to call him ἀνδρεῖος Ῥωμαιόφρων (andreios Rhōmaiophrōn: roughly, "a Roman-minded fellow").<ref name="Ahrweiler"/>
Often one's local (geographic) identity could often outweigh one's identity as a Rhōmaios. The terms ξένος (xenos) and ἐξωτικός (exōtikos) denoted "people foreign to the local population," regardless of whether they were from abroad or from elsewhere within the empire.<ref name="Ahrweiler"/> "When a person was away from home he was a stranger and was often treated with suspicion. A monk from western Asia Minor who joined a monastery in Pontus was 'disparaged and mistreated by everyone as a stranger'. The corollary to regional solidarity was regional hostility."<ref>C. Mango, Byzantium: the empire of new Rome (New York, 1980), Ch. 1.</ref>
[edit] Revival of ethnicity
Beginning in the twelfth century certain Byzantine Greek intellectuals began to use the ancient Greek ethnonym Ἕλλην (Hellēn-Hellenic: in popular use a "pagan") in order to describe the Byzantine civilisation. The use of the term was accelerated following the Greco-Latin clashes of the 12th century, such as the massacre of all foreigners in Constantinople in 1182, and especially the occupation of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204.<ref>C. Mango, "Byzantinism and romantic hellenism," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965), 33.</ref><ref name="Nicol">Donald Nicol - The last centuries of Byzantium</ref>
During that period Theodore Lascaris tried to revive Hellenic tradition by fostering the study of philosophy, for in his opinion there was a danger that 'Philosophy' might abandon the Greeks and seek refuge among the Latins. Philosophy and Classical Greek studies had always been popular in Byzantium but never in such a patriotic context. In a letter to Pope Gregory IX, the Byzantine Emperor John Vatatzes claimed to have received the gift of royatly from Constantine the Great, and put emphasis on his 'Hellenic' descent, exalting the wisdom of the Greek people. He was presenting 'Hellenic' culture as an integral part of the Byzantine polity in defiance of Latin claims. Byzantine Greeks had always felt superior for being the inheritors of a more ancient civilisation, but such ethnic identifications had not been popular up until then.<ref name="Angold">Michael Angold - "Church and society in Byzantium under the Comeni", p. 528</ref> Hence in the context of increasing Venetian and Genoese power in the eastern Mediterranean, Hellēnic patriotism was rooted deeper in Byzantine elite, as a desire to distinguish themselves from the Latin West, and to lay legitimate claims on Greek-speaking lands.<ref>P. Speck, "Badly-ordered thoughts on Philhellenism," in S. Takács, ed., Understanding Byzantium: studies in Byzantine historical sources (Aldershot, 2003), 280-81.</ref>
However Hellenic patriotism went even further, attempting to set boundaries between Greek royalties who contested over the throne of Constantinople (then under Latin rule). The theory that Constantine the Great had moved the Imperial capital to a Greek city because of "racial" reasons (allegedly wishing to pass Roman rule to the Greeks), gave birth to a new question at hand: which of the Byzantine states was the "most Greek", and therefore worthy of ruling the "Roman Empire". With that in mind, George Acropolites, Byzantine historian of the Nicaean Empire, fixed the Pindos mountain chain as the boundary between Epirus and what Nicaean Greeks called 'our Hellenic land', excluding thus the Greeks of the Despotate of Epirus as potential Roman rulers.<ref name="Angold"/>
The claims of a 'Hellenic' ethnicity continued throughout the Palaiologan dynasty. For instance, the scholar, teacher and translator, John Argyropoulos addressed John VII as ‘Sun King of Hellas’ and urged the last Emperor, Constantine XI, to proclaim himself ‘King of the Hellenes’. <ref>Woodhouse 1986, 109; Sp. Lambros, "Argyropouleia", Athens 1910, 7,29</ref>
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[edit] References
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