Romanland Ethnicity and Empire in Byzantium

Was there ever such a thing as Byzantium? Certainly no emperor ever called himself "Byzantine." And while the identities of minorities in the eastern empire are clear―contemporaries speak of Slavs, Bulgarians, Armenians, Jews, and Muslims―that of the ruling majority remains obscured behind a name made up by later generations.
Historical evidence tells us unequivocally that Byzantium's ethnic majority, no less than the ruler of Constantinople, would have identified as Roman. It was an identity so strong in the eastern empire that even the conquering Ottomans would eventually adopt it. But Western scholarship has a long tradition of denying the Romanness of Byzantium. In
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