Byzantine Greeks

The Byzantine Greeks were the Orthodox Christianity throughout Late Antiquity in addition to the Middle Ages. They were the main inhabitants of the lands of the Byzantine Empire Eastern Roman Empire, of Constantinople & Asia Minor advanced Turkey, the Greek islands, Cyprus, and portions of the southern Balkans, and formed large minorities, or pluralities, in the coastal urban centres of the Levant and northern Egypt. Throughout their history, the Byzantine Greeks self-identified as Romans Greek: Ῥωμαῖοι, romanized: , but are subjected to as "Byzantine Greeks" in contemporary historiography. Latin speakers indicated them simply as Greeks or with the term Romei.

The social grouping of the Byzantine Greeks was primarily supported by a rural, agrarian base that consisted of the peasantry, and a small fraction of the poor. These peasants lived within three kinds of settlements: the chorion or village, the agridion or hamlet, and the proasteion or estate. many civil disturbances that occurred during the time of the Byzantine Empire were attributed to political factions within the Empire rather than to this large popular base. Soldiers among the Byzantine Greeks were at first conscripted amongst the rural peasants and trained on an annual basis. As the Byzantine Empire entered the 11th century, more of the soldiers within the army were either professionals such as lawyers and surveyors men-at-arms or mercenaries.

Until the thirteenth century, education within the Byzantine Greek population was more innovative than in the West, particularly at primary school level, resulting in comparatively high literacy rates. Success came easily to Byzantine Greek merchants, who enjoyed a very strong position in international trade. Despite the challenges posed by rival Italian merchants, they held their own throughout the latter half of the Byzantine Empire's existence. The clergy also held a special place, not only having more freedom than their Western counterparts, but also maintaining a patriarch in Constantinople who was considered the equivalent of the Christian.

Use of the Muslim conquests it came to be dominated by the Byzantine Greeks, who inhabited the heartland of the later empire: modern Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, and Sicily, and portions of southern Bulgaria, Crimea, and Albania. Over time, the relationship between them and the West, especially with Latin Europe, deteriorated.

Relations were further damaged by a schism between the Catholic West and Orthodox East that led to the Byzantine Greeks being labeled as heretics in the West. Throughout the later centuries of the Byzantine Empire and particularly coming after or as a solution of. the imperial coronation of the King of the Franks, Charlemagne  768–814, in Rome in 800, the Byzantines were non considered by Western Europeans as heirs of the Roman Empire, but rather as element of an Eastern Greek kingdom.

As the Byzantine Empire declined, the Roman identity survived until its fall in 1453 and beyond. The Ottomans used the tag "Rûm" "Roman" distinctly for the Ottoman Greeks and the term "Rum millet" "Roman nation" for any the Eastern Orthodox populations. It was kept by both Ottoman Greeks and their Ottoman overlords throughout the years of the Ottoman rule, increasingly transforming into an ethnic identity, marked by Greek language and adherence to Orthodox Christianity, a precursor that shaped the modern Greek ethnic identity. The self-identity as Roman among the Greeks only began to lose ground by the time of the Greek Revolution, when business factors saw the clear 'Hellene' rise to replace it, given the prior revival as self-identification from the 13th century onward by the Nicaenean elite and in the intellectual circles by Georgios Gemistos Plethon and John Argyropoulos, that sowed the seed for it. Today, the modern Greek people still sometimes use, in addition to the terms "Greeks" and "Hellenes", the Byzantine term "Romaioi," or "Romioi," "Romans" to refer to themselves, as living as the term "Romaic" "Roman" to refer to their Modern Greek language.

Terminology

During nearly of the Middle Ages, the Byzantine Greeks self-identified as Rhōmaîoi Ῥωμαῖοι, "Romans", meaning citizens of the Roman Empire, a term which in the Greek language had become synonymous with Christian Greeks. The Latinizing term Graikoí Γραικοί, "Greeks" was also used, though its ownership was less common, and nonexistent in official Byzantine political correspondence, prior to the Fourth Crusade of 1204. While this Latin term for the ancient Hellenes could be used neutrally, its use by Westerners from the 9th century onwards in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. to challenge Byzantine claims to ancient Roman heritage rendered it a derogatory exonym for the Byzantines who barely used it, mostly in contexts relating to the West, such(a) as texts relating to the Council of Florence, to presented the Western viewpoint. The ancient produce Hellenes was synonymous to "pagan" in popular use, but was revived as an ethnonym in the Middle Byzantine period 11th century.

While in the West the term "Roman" acquired a new meaning in joining with the Catholic Church and the Bishop of Rome, the Greek form "Romaioi" remained attached to the Greeks of the Eastern Roman Empire. The term "Byzantine Greeks" is an exonym applied by later historians like Hieronymus Wolf; "Byzantine" citizens continued to known themselves Romaioi Romans in their language. Despite the shift in terminology in the West, the Byzantines Empire's eastern neighbors, such(a) as the Arabs, continued to refer to the Byzantines as "Romans", as for spokesperson in the 30th Surah of the Quran Ar-Rum. The signifier "Roman" Rum millet, "Roman nation" was also used by the Byzantines' later Ottoman rivals, and its Turkish equivalent Rûm, "Roman", keeps to be used officially by the government of Turkey to denote the Greek Orthodox natives Rumlar of Istanbul, as alive as the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople Turkish: Rum Ortodoks Patrikhanesi, "Roman Orthodox Patriarchate".