14 Facts About Byzantine Greeks

Byzantine Greeks were the Greek-speaking Eastern Romans of Orthodox Christianity throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Social structure of the Byzantine Greeks was primarily supported by a rural, agrarian base that consisted of the peasantry, and a small fraction of the poor.

Many civil disturbances that occurred during the time of the Byzantine Greeks Empire were attributed to political factions within the Empire rather than to this large popular base.

Soldiers among the Byzantine Greeks were at first conscripted amongst the rural peasants and trained on an annual basis.

At first, the Byzantine Empire had a multi-ethnic character, but following the loss of the non-Greek speaking provinces with the 7th century Muslim conquests it came to be dominated by the Byzantine Greeks, who inhabited the heartland of the later empire: modern Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, and Sicily, and portions of southern Bulgaria, Crimea, and Albania.

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The self-identity as Roman among the Byzantine Greeks only began to lose ground by the time of the Greek Revolution, when multiple factors saw the name 'Hellene' rise to replace it, given the prior revival as self-identification from the 13th century onward by the Nicaenean elite and in the intellectual circles by Georgios Gemistos Plethon and John Argyropoulos, that sowed the seed for it.

The term "Byzantine Greeks" is an exonym applied by later historians like Hieronymus Wolf; "Byzantine" citizens continued to call themselves Romaioi in their language.

In medieval Bulgarian sources the Byzantine Emperors were the "Tsars of the Greeks" and the Byzantine Empire was known as "Tsardom of the Greeks".

Byzantine Greeks education was the product of an ancient Greek educational tradition that stretched back to the 5th century BC.

Unlike the Latin church, the Byzantine Greeks church allowed married priests and deacons, as long as they were married before ordination.

The issue of caesaropapism, while usually associated with the Byzantine Greeks Empire, is understood to be an oversimplification of actual conditions in the Empire.

The Byzantine Greeks state inherited from pagan times the administrative and financial routine of organising religious affairs, and this routine was applied to the Christian Church.

The Byzantine Greeks were, and perceived themselves as, heirs to the culture of ancient Greece, the political heirs of imperial Rome, and followers of the Apostles.

The majority of Byzantine Greeks lived in the Ionian islands, the southern Balkans, and Aegean islands, Crete and Asia Minor.