For some of us, our Roman Empire actually is the Roman Empire. As far as pre-modern states go, the Roman Empire was incredibly powerful, culturally influential, and well documented. Rome’s expansion shaped Europe, and Europe’s shaped the world.
So when did the Romans stop being a thing? Definitions are as always tough, but they kind of never did. Even though the Roman state stopped functioning over 1500 years ago (or 500 years for all you Constantinople fans), the Roman identity never entirely disappeared; it just evolved. In fact, there are still pockets of people who call themselves “Roman” or some variant thereof, even today. Let’s take a look at who they are.
Romanians
Romanians in traditional dress
Credit Mihai Maxim, CC BY
Romania is a country in Eastern Europe with a name that sounds suspiciously Roman. This is no coincidence. The Romanian language, spoken in Romania and neighboring Moldova, is the Easternmost branch of the Romance Languages – the modern descendants of Latin. Romanians have been calling themselves some variation of “Roman” all the way back to the time of the actual Roman Empire, mostly to distinguish themselves from their non-Roman neighbors. The Romanians’ Roman ancestors may have lived in the same area as modern Romania (the Roman province of Dacia) or in neighboring parts of the empire south of the Danube; the specifics are a topic of contentious (and often politicized) debate.
Orange: Romania; Green: Moldova
During the Medieval era, outsiders often called Romanians “Walachs” or some variation, as can be seen with the Principality of Wallachia, a Romanian-speaking state from the 14th century. “Walach” came from *Walhaz, the Germanic and Slavic word for the Romans and Romanized people (originally just meaning “foreigner”). This root word also survives in the names of other Roman border regions across Europe, like Wales, Cornwall, and Wallonia.
Romansh
Romansh school children celebrating Chalandamarz
The Romansh people live primarily in the Swiss canton of Grisons, in the country’s Southeast. Their language, also called Romansh, is the least widely spoken of Switzerland’s four official languages, spoken natively by only 0.5% of the Swiss population – compared to 62% for German, 22.7% for French, and 8.2% for Italian.
Linguistic map of Switzerland
(Red:Romansh, Blue:German, Green:French, Orange:Italian)
Switzerland as a whole was part of the Roman province of Rhaetia from around the 1st century CE, and was Romanized and Latin-speaking by the end of the Western Roman Empire. Thanks to political and geographic barriers, Romansh remained a separate language from French and Italian through the Middle Ages. While Alemannic German became the main language in most of Switzerland, Grisons was politically independent as the “Three Leagues”, traditional allies of the Swiss that only joined the Swiss Confederacy in 1803. As such, this one pocket of the Alps maintained its distinctive language and culture. And much like the Romanians, the Romansh needed to distinguish themselves from their non-Romance speaking neighbors, and so kept the “Roman” name alive into the present day.
Romeika & Urums
Urums in Crimea
(by Luchiya Puzikova via UNESCO, CC BY)
The Romeika language isn’t a Romance language, but it still has a very solid connection to the Roman Empire. “Ρωμαίικα” (Romaiika) is the native name for several varieties of Greek originally spoken in Asia Minor and around the Black Sea. Romeika speakers are the cultural and linguistic descendants of both Greek colonies predating the Romans, and of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, which maintained the institutions of the Roman Empire in Constantinople (now Istanbul) up through the 1400s. Their ethnically Greek brethren who haven’t preserved the language are collectively called “Urums”, from the Arabic word for Rome, Rum. As such, these two groups have as much of a claim to being Roman as anybody else.
Eastern Roman Empire in 1025 CE
That said, the Romeika and Urum people don’t have a unified ethnic identity across the whole region. They’ve been split up many times through history, and the different pockets of Greek descendants have different national identities. In the north there are the Azov Greek people. They were primarily centered around the city of Mariupol before the 2022 Russian invasion (hence the city’s Greek-sounding name). In the east, there are the Caucasus Greeks, mostly living in Russia’s Stavropol Krai.
Those living on the southern coast of the Black Sea were split up again by the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent “population exchanges” between Greece and Turkey in the aftermath of World War One. The Christian Romeika speakers who were forcibly moved to Greece tend to consider themselves as Anatolian Greeks or “Mikrasiates”, with specific subgroups including Smyrnan Greeks, Pontic Greeks, and Cappadocian Greeks. The small number of Muslim Romeika speakers who remained in Turkey generally consider themselves Turks who just so happen to speak the Romeika language.
Honorable Mentions:
Romani
Flag of the Romani people
The Romani or Roma people originated not in the Roman Empire, but in the northern parts of what is now India and Pakistan. Europeans have long called them “Gypsies”, but that term is often considered pejorative. The group’s name probably comes from Sanskrit and doesn’t refer to Rome, though they would have passed through the Eastern Roman Empire on their way to Europe.
Vatican City
Flag of Vatican City
Vatican City, the sovereign state that serves as the administrative center of the Catholic Church, is the last Latin-speaking state in the world. The Church positioned itself as the successor of the Roman Empire during the Medieval era, and did a lot to preserve the cultural legacy of Rome. But Vatican City isn’t exactly a nation of Romans so much as a sovereign ecclesiastical headquarters.
People from modern Rome
Colosseum in modern Rome
And finally, while there may not be a Roman Empire anymore, there is still a city of Rome. Through centuries of Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Lombards, Franks, Popes, and Italians, the Eternal City still stands – its monuments and its millions of residents remaining among the Roman Empire’s greatest legacies.