Anthony Kaldellis has vigorously revived the debate about Byzantine identity and reproached historians for overusing the term ‘Byzantines’ instead of ‘Romans’. There is no doubt that the Byzantines considered themselves Romans and the heirs to Rome, since, despite all the changes endured by the empire during its thousand-year existence, the devolution of imperial power was never interrupted in the New Rome, with 1204 constituting a particular case. The population of the empire could have formed a community united by a feeling of affiliation to Rhōmania. The author insists on the traits of a premodern nation state, having at its disposal an administration that was effective and covered the whole empire, using the same money, weights and measures and so forth. It is a surprisingly Jacobin conception of the empire, and a very cosmopolitan point of view. Without question, imperial administration made available to the basileis certain means of doing things that we do not find in other Christian states before the last centuries of the Middle Ages. Yet, if we consider the measures, they sometimes differed, often under the same name, in the different provinces of the empire, and if we consider the law, the importance of local customs is well attested. But one cannot deny the existence of unifying factors, since, from the perspective of their neighbours, in particular the Islamic powers, the group of Rums is well distinguished from the Ifranj (the Latins), who, nevertheless, are also Christians.

In this short chapter, I will not seek to participate in the debate about what Byzantine identity might be – a very fashionable but quite ambitious subject – because the answer to the question of what it was to be Roman was surely not unanimous among the emperor's subjects. This would have depended on whether one was Greek or not, or from Constantinople or the provinces and, in the latter case, on whether one lived in a city or in the countryside. It is certain that the power of the ‘Romans’ extended over a specific territory, Asia Minor and Europe, since the Turks, who occupied Anatolia and settled there, founded the so-called Sultanate of Rum. This quickly turned into ‘Turchia’. Three centuries later, the Ottomans, who had established themselves in the west, named the entirety of the conquered lands ‘Rumelia’.