BYZANTIUM

BYZANTIUM. Founded in 660 B.C., this ancient Greek city on the Bosphorus was chosen by Constantine the Great as the site of his new imperial capital, Constantinople (qq.v.). The ancient name of the city was extended by Western European scholars in the 16th c. to include the empire that the city headed, hence the “Byzantine Empire.” It should be remembered that the citizens of the Empire never referred to themselves as “Byzantines,” unless they were inhabitants of the capital itself, or to their state as “Byzantine.” They were, in their own eyes and down to practically the present day in the old territories of the Empire, instead “Romans” (Rhomaioi in Greek, Rum in Arabic), and their king was the “Roman Emperor” (Basileus ton rhomaion). As such, the emperor was the continuation of the sovereign rule begun in Augustus Caesar and, for Christianity, the visible head of the universal Christian commonwealth. The fundamental perspective of the “Byzantines” was that their empire was, in theory if certainly not in fact, “ecumenical,” i.e., worldwide, and so the civil expression of the one, holy, catholic (q.v.), and apostolic Church. This universalist vision would live on in the office of the Ecumenical Patriarch in the years of the Ottoman Empire (qq.v.). It found a rival beginnning in the 16th c. in the constellation of popular Russian beliefs around the tsar and his capital, Moscow, as the “Third Rome,” and thus as rightful head of the Orthodox oikoumene (q.v.). The rise of the nation states in the Balkans (q.v.) during the last century has further diluted the sense of a single center of the Orthodox Church, although the Ecumenical Patriarch retains his primacy of honor.