The Byzantines were the Greek-speaking Orthodox population of the eastern Roman Empire, who called themselves Rhomaioi — Romans — for the whole of the Middle Ages and never once called themselves Byzantine.
The people this archive files as Byzantines were the population of the eastern Roman Empire: Greek in speech, Orthodox in religion, Roman in law and in their own understanding of who they were. Their state ran from Constantinople and outlasted the western empire by nearly a thousand years.
They were not a nation in the modern sense and never became one. Being a Rhomaios was a matter of religion, language and allegiance rather than descent, and an Armenian general, a Cappadocian farmer and a Slav settled in Thrace could all be Romans on the same terms.
This article is about the people. The empire they ran, its emperors, dynasties, wars and its end in 1453 are the subject of the Byzantine Empire article, and the city is the subject of Constantinople.
They called themselves Rhomaioi — Romans. Not the heirs of the Romans, not a successor people, but Romans, in an unbroken line from Augustus, ruling the Roman state from the city Constantine had founded as New Rome. Their empire was the Basileia ton Rhomaion, the empire of the Romans, and it is the single most important fact about how they saw themselves.
Nobody in Constantinople ever called themselves a Byzantine. The word is a modern coinage: the German scholar Hieronymus Wolf introduced it in 1557 in his Corpus Historiae Byzantinae, borrowing the name of the small Greek colony of Byzantion that had stood on the site before 330, and later historians found it a convenient way to file the eastern empire separately from Rome. Every person in this article would have rejected the label, and most would not have understood it.
In their own time the disputed word was Greek. Westerners called them Graeci and their ruler the emperor of the Greeks, which was a deliberate denial of the Roman claim, since Latin Christendom had its own emperor of the Romans from 800. The insult ran both ways: when Liutprand of Cremona came as Otto I's ambassador in 968, Nikephoros II Phokas told him that the westerners were not Romans but Lombards. Graikos was a word the Byzantines occasionally used of their language and rarely of themselves; the Arabs and then the Ottomans called them Rum, a name that outlived them in Rumelia and in the Sultanate of Rum.
So why does this archive keep Romans and Byzantines as two articles, when the Byzantines were Romans and said so? Because by the seventh century the Latin west and the Greek east had become genuinely different cultural worlds — different languages of worship and government, different legal practice, different relations between emperor and church — and a single article would have to pretend otherwise. Separating them is a filing decision about culture, not a verdict on the claim. The Byzantines were Romans, and the page called Romans, which covers the Latin-speaking populations of the former western empire, is the other half of the same story.
The eastern empire began as a Latin state governing a Greek-speaking population, and the gap closed from the top down. Justinian's Digest and Code were issued in Latin in the 530s, but the Novels, the new laws he made afterwards, were mostly published in Greek because that was what his subjects actually spoke.
The change became formal in the seventh century. Heraclius took the Greek title basileus in 629 in place of the Latin imperial style, and Latin faded from the chancery, the coinage and the army over the following decades. What survived was vocabulary: Greek documents kept Latin words for offices, taxes and military ranks long after anyone could decline them.
The Greek that resulted was two languages at once. Educated writers used a deliberately archaising literary Greek modelled on Attic authors a thousand years dead, while everyone including the educated spoke a living vernacular. A Byzantine historian writing about Turks might call them Persians because that is what a classical model required, which is a recurring problem for anyone reading these sources for facts.
Law was the strongest of the Byzantines' claims to be Roman, and they maintained it as a working system rather than a memory. Justinian's commission produced the Code, the Digest, the Institutes and the Novels between 529 and 534, gathering a millennium of Roman jurisprudence into a usable body.
It was then repeatedly rebuilt for a Greek-speaking society. The Ecloga of 741, issued under Leo III, was a short practical handbook in Greek, with a revised law of marriage and inheritance and a penal system that substituted mutilation for many capital sentences. The Basilika, completed under Leo VI around the end of the ninth century, translated and reorganised the whole Justinianic inheritance into sixty books of Greek.
Alongside the imperial codes ran more local material, such as the Farmer's Law, a collection dealing with village disputes over animals, boundaries and theft that shows a world of free peasant communities rather than great estates. Taken together these texts are why a Byzantine judge in the eleventh century was administering recognisably Roman law, and why western lawyers rediscovering the Digest at Bologna were recovering something the east had never put down.
Byzantine religion was Chalcedonian Orthodoxy, organised around the five ancient patriarchates and the seven ecumenical councils, with the patriarch of Constantinople as the senior bishop of the east. After the Arab conquests took Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem out of imperial control in the seventh century, Constantinople was in practice the only patriarchate the emperor could reach, which concentrated religious authority in his capital.
Emperor and church were understood to work as symphonia, a harmony of two powers with distinct spheres. In practice emperors summoned councils, appointed and deposed patriarchs and legislated on doctrine, and the church acquired its independence chiefly through the monasteries, which were wealthy, popular and difficult to coerce.
The rupture with Rome was slow and mutual. The Photian schism of the 860s, the excommunications exchanged in 1054, and the sack of Constantinople in 1204 each widened it, and the attempted reunions at Lyon in 1274 and Florence in 1439 were rejected by most of the Byzantine clergy and population. The last serious internal argument, over the hesychast monks' claim to experience the uncreated light of God directly, was settled in favour of Gregory Palamas at a council in 1351.
The Byzantine Empire article covers how this church operated as an arm of the state; what belongs here is that Orthodoxy was the Byzantines' primary badge of belonging, more reliably than language and far more than descent.
Between 726 and 787, and again from 815 to 843, the Byzantines fought over whether images of Christ and the saints could be venerated at all. The argument was theological — whether an image of Christ claimed to depict the undepictable divine nature — and it was fought with depositions, exiles, beatings and the destruction of art.
It was also a fight about who decided. Emperors led the iconoclast policy and monks led the resistance, and the two women who ended each phase, Irene at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 and Theodora in 843, did so partly by rebuilding alliances with the monasteries. The restoration of 843 is still commemorated in the Orthodox calendar as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.
The result was a settled theory of the image that shaped everything the Byzantines made afterwards: an icon is not a portrait but a channel of honour passing to the person represented, which is why Byzantine religious art is deliberately conventional rather than naturalistic. The losses are permanent — very little religious figural art from before 726 survives inside the empire — and the survivors, such as the icons at Saint Catherine's on Sinai, are mostly those that were outside imperial reach.