Byzantine Studies is at a tipping point, and it has come upon us suddenly, or at least it feels that way. At many recent conferences, colleagues either refuse to refer to “Byzantium” and “the Byzantines,” or self-consciously place those terms within verbal quotation marks. There is a growing awareness not only that these terms are artificial, but that they distort the society which they purport to name and, moreover, that they originate in ideologies of western supremacy that we oppose in all other contexts. More than just a terminological problem, these words are emblematic of the deeper set of prejudices that have plagued our field since its inception. A range of negative associations have accrued in western imagination around “Byzantium,” and the field has had to wage a never-ending battle to de-weed itself from them. This is not, then, just a problem of the “identity” of our subjects—though that is serious enough—but of the larger framework in which the east Roman empire is studied. Traditionally, Byzantine Studies has been a notoriously conservative field and averse to self-critique, but now many, especially younger, scholars are calling for a paradigm-shift. Leonora Neville has pointedly captured this predicament by referring at conferences to “the B-word.”

\It may feel as if these calls have crept up on us suddenly, but in reality we have reached this point through research that has accumulated gradually over the years, nudging us toward a realization that the field-name under which we labor unduly distorts the society that we study and places our field as a whole at a disadvantage. It has been a gradual process for me too. In graduate school, we all knew that the label “Byzantium” was a modern artifice but believed that it could serve as a neutral field-label for a society that we all knew was, and called itself, the Roman empire, a direct continuation of the ancient Roman empire in the east. Actually, even that is misleading, for there is no word in medieval Greek that means “empire.” The terms actually used in the sources translate as “polity of the Romans,” “monarchy of the Romans,” or “state of the Romans.” Wholly missing from the scholarship, however, was the proper name of this society, though it is amply attested in the sources: Romanía, which translates roughly as “Romanland.”