Additionally, are there any other instances of states calling themselves one thing when they existed (like the Byzantines calling themselves Roman), and being relabeled after their fall?
Dear dude,
These are two interesting questions that I’d love to answer. I’m well versed in Byzantine histor(iograph)y, but less in that of the Holy Roman Empire. Luckily, they and the origin of their names are closely connected. I’ll mostly be answering this question from the Byzantine perspective. If you have any follow up questions, I’ll be happy to answer them if I can.
So as you’ve already noted, the Byzantines never used the name ‘Byzantine’ refer to themselves – this name only started to be applied to them by scholars long after the final fall of the Queen of Cities in 1453. They usually referred to themselves as Romans, though from the recapture of Constantinople in 1261, the terms Greeks and Hellenes are used more frequently as well. Medieval Europeans usually referred to the emperor in Constantinople as the ‘Emperor of the Greeks’.
But you probably already knew most of that, so let me get to the gist of it. The name ‘Byzantium’ is a Latinization of ‘Byzantion’, which was the name of a pre-Roman city state on the site of what would later be called Constantinople. To find out why we name the continuation of the Roman Empire by the name of a Greek city-state and the empire of some smelly Frankish barbarian as ‘Holy Roman’, we need to go all the way back to the 8th century AD.
Like so many things in Medieval Europe, this story starts in Rome, with a pope. From Justinian’s conquest in the 6th century until 752, the Byzantines were in control of the ‘Duchy of Rome’, which contained the city of Rome and some surrounding territories. There were popes, but they were only appointed on the whims of the Byzantine emperor and were nothing like the all-powerful leaders of Catholic Europe we see in the later Middle Ages.
But all was not well in the Byzantine Empire. The 8th century was a century of great devastation and disruption for the emperors of Constantinople. There was a divisive and often violent religious conflict within the empire over Iconoclasm. The Arabs had overrun the richest and most populated provinces in a matter of years and threatened Constantinople multiple times. Slavs and Bulgars were descending on the Balkan, Lombards were challenging the Byzantines in Italy. The Byzantine Empire was a mess in the 8th century, and looked like it could collapse any moment.
Back to Italy. In 751, the Lombards took Ravenna, an Italian city which was the centre of Byzantine rule on the Peninsula. Afterwards, they started pressuring the city of Rome, which was looking like it would be the next to fall. With the Byzantine Empire in no condition to intervene, the then ruling Pope Stephen decided to take a chance. He travelled north of the Alps, to visit the Frankish king Pepin in Paris. He requested his aid in fending off the Lombards. Stephen re-consecrated Pepin as king and in return, Pepin took on the role of protector of the church. Pepin kept his promise, took a swath of once-Byzantine land in the middle of the peninsula, and gave it to the pope, founding the Papal State(s). This is usually referred to as the Donation of Pepin. (Iconoclasm is also a big issue in the split between Rome and the Byzantine Empire, but I’d truly digress if i tried to explain that here as well)
Quick jump to the year 800. The Franks had grown in power under Charlemagne and subjugated the Lombards completely. With the Byzantines still recovering from the mess of Iconoclasm and foreign invasions, the Frankish king was now rivalling the Byzantine emperor in power. The then ruling pope, Leo III, was a friend and ally of Charlemagne. Charlemagne had banished a group of Romans (inhabitants of the city) who had tried to blind Leo and cut out his tongue on suspicion of adultery. (A very Byzantine way of punishing people)
So, I guess you kinda feel where this is going now. Charlemagne had secured Italy and controlled a lot of territory that used to belong to the Western Empire, including the imperial city itself. He was the protector and friend of the pope. And importantly, from a early medieval/late antiquity perspective, the original Roman Empire had never fallen, it was just continued with a different capital, Constantinople. On top of that, from Charlemagnes and Leo’s point of view, there was no legitimate emperor in Constantinople at the moment. That’s because Irene of Athens, Empress of Byzantium did not have a penis – only people with penises could become emperor or king under Frankish customs. The Byzantines had a tradition of powerful empresses, most ruling with their husband, some on their own accord. But from a Frankish perspective, the throne was vacant, not withstanding the person sitting on it.
And so, on Christmas day 800, Charlemagne was crowned by Leo. The pope titled Charlemagne thusly: most serene Augustus, crowned by God, great and pacific emperor, governing the Roman Empire. This already contains all the elements of ‘Holy Roman Emperor’. For at least until the 12th century, the Holy Roman Empire was simply referred to as ‘the Roman Empire’. Later on, in the beginning of the 16th century, the name was officially changed into ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’.
So now we know where the name ‘Holy Roman’ comes from. Interestingly, the origin of the Holy Roman Empire is closely connected to the reason why the Byzantines are called Byzantines and not Romans today. Charlemagne got crowned Roman Emperor, quite simply flipping the finger to that other supposedly Roman ruler, Irene of Athene, who sat in Constantinople. There was a new ‘Rome’ in the west, which seemed the more prominent power at the moment. It is from this time on, that medieval Europeans started referring to the Byzantine Empire as ‘the Empire of the Greeks’ or ‘the Empire of Constantinople.’, because ‘the Roman Empire’ now referred to that of the Carolingians and their successors.
The term ‘Byzantine Empire’ is much much younger than this. After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, this fallen empire lacked a name in historiography. The Roman Empire had come to mean the Roman Empire of antiquity or it’s modern ‘Holy’ successor. The rediscovery of antiquity in the Renaissance (under strong influence from the many Byzantine scholars who fled the teetering Empire to Italy) had reserved the title ‘Greek’ and ‘Greek Empire’ for the Greeks and Macedonians of antiquity. To cut a long story short, the names the Byzantines used to refer to themselves were already taken in European historiography.
The first use of the term ‘Byzantine’ in the context of the Empire is in the 16th century, by (oh irony!) a German historian. Before that, the term ‘Byzantion’ had been sparingly used by the Byzantines as a kind of poetic way of referring to Constantinople, something that gained traction because of the rediscovery of antiquity in Europe. Use of the term slowly spread, for a time competing with the moniker ‘Empire of Constantinople’, but by the 19th century, it had become the agreed name for the Empire, quite simply because a better alternative was lacking
So to wrap this all together, the name ‘Byzantine Empire’ is a very (Western) European affair, mostly constructed in the Renaissance. The Greeks were called ‘Rum’ under Ottoman rule. They continued to refer to themselves as Romaioi in their native language until at least the 19th century. The Arabs referred to the Byzantine Empire as the Empire of Rum – they didn’t consider them the be a different state from the Roman Empire of Augustus. We have become very accustomed to the somewhat artificial historiographical split between Western and Eastern Rome, with the Western Roman Empire being the ‘real’ Roman Empire in our Western eyes. Thus we tell kids in High School that the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, even though that’s kind of a silly statement to make, seeing as the economic and cultural heart of the Empire had never been in Gaul, Spain or Britain. I guess that in the end, the victors do write history, and the Byzantines have little to say on what we should call them since their empire has been lost in the sands of time.
I consider Cyril Mango’s The Oxford History of Byzantium to be a great book on Byzantium in general. It discusses the ‘naming issue’ of the Byzantine Empire in its introduction and also explains the complicated relationship between popes and emperors. If ya wanna find out more about Charlemagne and his coronation, I recommend The Significance of the Coronation of Charlemagne by Monica Fleener.