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The War of Names
Names carry psychological weight, bespeak identity. You can still whip up a
heated argument among Greeks about what Constantinople and the Eastern
Church should be called. The struggle over the very name of the Eastern Empire
spoke volumes about East-West tensions.
Constantinople, without the slightest hesitation, continued to refer to itself as
the capital of the Roman Empire, despite its roots in a Greek-speaking world. So
at what point can we mark the transition of Constantinople from the Eastern
Roman Empire into a de facto Greek, or Byzantine, Empire? Actually, such a
formal transition never occurred. (In fact, the term “Byzantine” first appeared
only in the sixteenth century, when a German historian described the Eastern
Empire as “Byzantine.”) Constantinople steadfastly considered itself the Roman
Empire to the end, and it never wavered from the use of that term, even in the
Greek language.
The power of this word “Roman” to describe the Eastern Empire spread far
beyond Greek speakers and into the mouths of the Muslim cultures in the region
as well. Note how in the main languages of the Middle East—Arabic, Turkish,
and Persian—the Eastern Christian Empire was known as Rûm (Rome)—and
still is, even today. The word Rûm is still associated with anything to do with the
Eastern Roman Empire, or with Anatolia (Asia Minor). The Qur’an itself has a
chapter called al-Rûm that talks about the Byzantine Christians. The first Seljuk
Turkish state based in Anatolia, which fought long wars with Constantinople
over Anatolian territory in the ninth and tenth centuries, arrogated to itself the
title of “Sultanate of Rûm.” The very Mediterranean Sea was then called “the
Sea of Rûm” in Arabic. (For fans of the renowned Sufi poet Rumi, we need only
note that the name was the adjectival form for one who lives in Rûm, on what
was once Eastern Empire soil, in Anatolia.)
But the West would not yield up the term. Despite the widespread use of
“Rome” across the Middle East to refer to the Eastern Empire, the West still
remained bitterly unwilling to surrender the mantle of the Roman Empire to
Constantinople, even though it was undeniable that the Eastern Empire was still
flourishing in the East, long after the fall of the Western Empire to barbarian
control. The West insisted on referring to the Eastern Empire only as Imperium
Graecorum, or “Empire of the Greeks,” clearly rejecting any title suggestive of
the Roman Empire, a term they wanted reserved solely for Western rulers. We
see how this struggle over “who is Rome” reemerges vividly on Christmas Day
in 800 CE when, at High Mass in Saint Peter’s in Rome, Pope Leo III crowned

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the powerful new Germanic barbarian ruler Charlemagne as Imperator
Romanorum, the Emperor of the Romans. By invoking this designation, he
sought to restore the title to the West, wresting it away from the Greeks in
Constantinople who had “usurped” it in this war of names.
In any event, Charlemagne, as the most powerful ruler of the time in the
West, ultimately decided against trying to wrest back the title of Emperor of
Rome for himself, but he did attempt to arrange a dynastic marriage with the
Empress Irene in Constantinople as one means of recovering the title and uniting
the two empires under his authority. In this he did not succeed. It would not be
long, however, before a federation of German tribes decided to adopt the
grandiloquent title of “Holy Roman Empire” and to deny it to Constantinople
and the Eastern Empire. The arrogation of the additional designation of “Holy”
added real fuel to the fire; it marked the German federation’s claim to the
spiritual power of the empire as well, even though the federation did not even
control the city of Rome. (Hence the legendary essay question for English
schoolboys on European history: “The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy,
Roman, nor an empire. Discuss.”)
Thus this war of names carries the freight of a deep, ongoing geopolitical
struggle over authority, legitimacy, even spirituality. The pope, isolated in Rome,
clung to the title and belief that he was the head of Christendom, even though he
had originally been only one of five equal bishops of the church in the fourth
century. With each passing century, the political gulf between East and West
grew. In Constantinople, a sense of Greekness would come to form part of a
“national” identity based on language and culture, especially at the popular level.
Passions hardened into prejudices; over time the barbarian-dominated West
came to think of Constantinople as little more than the locus of an overgrown,
effete, and corrupted Eastern tradition that ultimately was increasingly hard put
to defend itself against the encroaching Muslim infidels in the Holy Lands. This
dismissive attitude was maintained even in the face of the extraordinary political,
military, and cultural accomplishments of Constantinople over a thousand years,
as it spread its power across North Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, the
Balkans, and the Fertile Crescent. But Constantinople’s power could not last
forever, and by 1453 the last segments of the “Greek Empire” had fallen
irrevocably to the Muslim Turks.
Still, unlike the short-lived Roman Empire, which had barely made it into the
fifth century, the Eastern Roman Empire had enjoyed a magnificent run of
another thousand years, into the fifteenth. And even though the empire did fall,
the Eastern Church itself was far from dead, even then. The Eastern Orthodox

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Christian Church today remains the second-largest single Christian communion
in Christianity after Catholicism.

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