The
Byzantine Empire[3] and
Eastern Roman Empire are conventional names used to describe the
Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, centered on its capital of
Constantinople.
It was referred to by its inhabitants and neighboring nations simply as the Roman Empire (in Greek ?as??e?a ??µa???, Basileia Romaion), Empire of the Romans or Romania (??µa??a, Romania). Its emperors continued the unbroken succession of Roman Emperors, preserving Greco-Roman legal and cultural traditions.
To the Islamic world it was known primarily as ???? (Rûm "Rome"). Due to the linguistic, cultural, and demographic dominance of medieval Greek,[4] it was known to many of its western European contemporaries as Imperium Graecorum, the Empire of the Greeks (see also the etymology section).
The definition of this empire as a distinct entity in itself constitutes an implicit or explicit rejection of its emperors and people's claim to be Romans and succesors of the Roman Empire - a rejection based on the assumption that only an empire using Latin as its official language and based in Italy can be considered truly "Roman", and that geographical move into hellenistic territory and linguistic-cultural adoption of Greek constituted a transformation into an inherently different identity.[citation needed]
