User:Biz/Byzantine historiography

From note 1 in "'The noun Byzantium and the adjective Byzantine are not medieval terms; they were first used in the sixteenth century to describe the continuation of the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean, with its capital in Constantinople. The Byzantines called themselves “Romans,” their empire was the “Empire of the Romans,” their emperor was “the Emperor of the Romans,” and their capital city was “New Rome.” Their neighbors, both friends and enemies, also referred to their realm as Rome. In naming the continuation of the Roman Empire Byzantium, modern Western scholars constructed an absolute chronological break between “antiquity” and “the Middle Ages”—a break which did not occur in the eastern parts of the empire. This break, in turn, reinforced western claims to be the only authentic heirs to Rome and modern, especially Enlightenment, claims that Christianity was incompatible with Roman imperial structures. In previous work, I have used Byzantium and Byzantines for the sake of clarity; that is, after all, how most readers who know about the medieval empire think of it. More recently, however, Anthony Kaldellis, Leonora Neville, and others have convinced me that the use of these terms carries an inherent distortion that has affected our understanding of everything from Late Antique and “Byzantine” religion to the transmission and inheritance of Roman law. Therefore I will refer throughout this paper to the East Romans and the East Roman Empire. For more on this terminological dispute, see Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformations of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1–8, 42–119.'"

Through suppressing Roman identity in the lands they ruled and discounting the remaining empire in the east as "Greek", the Frankish state hoped to avoid the possibility of the Roman people proclaiming a Roman emperor in the same way that the Franks proclaimed a Frankish king. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_people#Late_antiquity

Western Europeans, from as early as the 6th century onwards, often referred to it as a Greek empire, inhabited by Greeks. * One of the earliest western references to the easterners as "Greeks" comes from Bishop Avitus of Vienne who wrote, in the context of the Frankish king Clovis I's baptism; "Let Greece, to be sure, rejoice in having an orthodox ruler, but she is no longer the only one to deserve such a great gift". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_people#cite_note-154

Starting from the 6th century, the loss of most of the Empire's non-Hellenic territories in the 7th and 8th centuries, and with increasing religious and cultural differences with Western Europe, it became identified by its western and northern contemporaries with its increasingly predominant Greek element. Charlemagne's Libri Carolini in the 1790s led to an attack on the legitimacy of the Empire in the context of the iconoclasm, where it designated the Empire as "Empire of the Greeks" (Latin: Imperium Graecorum). This was the start of the Frankish effort to create equal and then elevated imperial dignity. Over time, not accepting papal primacy accused the Empire as not Roman anymore and heretical, and not having imperial control over Rome implied they could no longer claim to have the emperor of the Romans.