Herald of Rome@HeraldOfRome
The east Romans believed they were one true unified nation!
Romania to them was not a multicultural empire of many peoples but a single people.
So they looked down on the barbarians and mocked them as nothing more than scattered tribes with no real nationhood of their own.
Minorities were expected to assimilate into the nation and serve its interests, and emphasizing multiculturalism the way modern states do would have been taboo back then.
Only when a minority assimilated fully and became indistinguishable from the locals did they count as native Romans, so people who refused to assimilate could still be seen as barbarians, which means that even in taking outsiders in there was a meritocratic idea behind it.
And they would not just accept the mass settlement of barbarians for the sake of increasing manpower and GDP like modern states do
Anthony Kaldellis, in his book Hellenism in Byzantium, wrote that:
‘‘No Roman would consent to a settlement [of barbarians] whose purpose was merely to increase the manpower available to the emperor at the expense of Roman unity.’’
And that:
‘‘Byzantium was not multi-ethnic in the way that some modern states aspire to be, namely multi-cultural, where ethnic diversity is recognized and even highlighted; rather, ethnic origins were irrelevant and usually forgotten after the requirements of assimilation were met.
‘Empire,’ then, is a misleading term because it tends to group Romania along with ‘multiethnic states’ such as the Persian, Holy Roman, or Ottoman empires, which were explicitly understood as encompassing different ethnic groups or nations ruled by a single authority. The early Roman empire also falls within this category. Byzantium, then, was not an empire, if current terminology presupposes ‘the inner incompatibility of empire and nation.’
The res publica was not a federation of ethnic groups or a dominion by one of the rest.
In his lament for the fall of Constantinople in 1204, Niketas Choniates complained that the Latin aggressors were ‘not true nations (ethne) but indistinct and scattered tribes (gene)’ (577); presumably, he believed that Romania constituted a distinct and unified ethnos.’’
‘‘Consider also the inclusive definition of ‘indigenous inhabitants’ (autochthones) offered by the twelfth-century Aristotelian commentator Stephanos:
‘those who are not migrants or colonists from another land, or who, if they come from another land, have lived in this land long enough to be old-timers and in this respect resemble the indigenous inhabitants, like those who resemble the indigenous inhabitants of Constantinople.’ ’’
For context, ‘‘Romania’’ meant Romanland, meaning the land of the Romans. It was the equivalent of Italia or Germania. It meant the whole Roman nation and it's land.
Source:
Anthony Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium, 2007.
