Romanness and Islam: collective Roman identity in Byzantium from the seventh to the tenth century

Meynell, CJ

Thesis

Romanness and Islam: collective Roman identity in Byzantium from the seventh to the tenth century

Abstract:: The thesis seeks to engage with ongoing historiographical debates over the nature of Roman identity in the Byzantine Empire. It aims to circumvent debates over the ethnic or national character of Romanness in Byzantium by focusing on the fluid nature of the boundaries of collective identities to isolate the core qualities that defined the group at its most expansive — which generally occurs in relation to an external ‘other’.

To that end, the thesis is divided into two broad sections. The first examines the underpinnings of Romanness in Byzantium in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, immediately prior to the emergence of Islam and the Arab conquests. It concludes that the defining features of Roman group identity, sine qua non, were adherence to Christianity and an acceptance of the legitimacy of Roman imperial power, vested in the person of the reigning emperor in Constantinople. In this regard, whilst there existed a normative discourse of Romanness in the form of the Chalcedonian Hellenophones that made up the majority of the empire’s elite group, this did not preclude non-Chalcedonians or non-Greek-speakers from considering themselves Roman or being considered as such by others.

The second section takes a diachronic view of how Romanness interacted with the rise of Islam from the middle of the seventh century to the middle of the tenth. Knowledge of Islamic theology spread to the empire gradually over the span of two centuries, resulting in the formation of a particular image of Islam and its practitioners within the empire’s discourse that served a particular socio-cultural function. In short, Islam in Byzantium was constructed in such a way to act as a mirror to Romanness to express the collective identity of the people in the empire and define those who were perceived as ‘non-Roman’.

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APA Style

Meynell, C. J. (2023). Romanness and Islam: collective Roman identity in Byzantium from the seventh to the tenth century [PhD thesis]. University of Oxford.

MLA Style

Meynell, C. J. Romanness and Islam: Collective Roman Identity in Byzantium from the Seventh to the Tenth Century. University of Oxford, 2023.

Chicago Style

Meynell, CJ. 2023. “Romanness and Islam: Collective Roman Identity in Byzantium from the Seventh to the Tenth Century.” PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
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