I am a Roman Citizen: The Shrinking of Roman Identity during the Macedonian Dynasty of the Byzantine Empire, c. 867 - 1025
Open Access
- Author:
- Brandt, Trevor Carl
- Area of Honors:
- History
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Anthony Gregg Roeber, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Michael James Milligan, Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Byzantine
Empire
Language
History
Religion
Orthodoxy
Christianity
Greek
Greece
Identity
Medieval
Middle Ages - Abstract:
- This thesis is an examination of change and continuity in imperial conceptions of the Roman-Byzantine identity between the years 867 – 1025 CE. This period of the Byzantine Empire, a Roman relict state far outlasting the collapse of the Western Empire in 476, encompasses most of the Macedonian dynasty (867 – 1056) and its associated renaissance. Under this dynasty, the Empire regained territories lost to the Muslim powers and successfully navigated religious and cultural recovery from Iconoclasm, a crippling theological dispute of the previous century. Despite the considerable geopolitical and cultural successes of the long-lasting Macedonian dynasty, extremely subtle but profoundly unsettling changes were occurring within the European heartlands of the Empire in Thrace, Macedonia, the Balkans, and Hellas. This thesis will address these changes. I argue that the conventional wisdom about the successes of the Macedonian dynasty has overlooked a gradual shift in the idea of what it meant to be a ‘true’ Roman in this period. Before the Macedonian dynasty, identification as ‘Roman’ had been restricted to those who were loyal to the imperial government in Constantinople, expressed adherence to imperial Chalcedonian Christianity, and fluently spoke koine, or common, Greek. Changes emerging in the 9th century, though, weakened the distinctiveness of the latter two of these markers, which became less effective at ascribing what imperial elites in Constantinople would consider the ‘true Roman’ identity, instead limiting this progressively more ethnic identification to the inhabitants of the capital. As a result, the question of “what is a Roman?” had begun to raise unsettling issues that the Macedonians could not satisfactorily address. This thesis concludes by providing an interpretation of the consequences that this ethnic sharpening had on later imperial history, thus relocating a generally recognized ethnic crisis associated with Comnenian and Palaeologan-era events to the earlier Macedonian renaissance.