Roman identity in all its variety and ambiguity is a fascinating test case for the study of social identity in general: it could be civic, political, imperial, juridical, cultural, territorial, religious and also ethnic; self-designation and outside perceptions could differ considerably. After the Western Roman Empire had dissolved and ‘central Romanness’ lost its hegemony, the variety of ‘Roman’ forms of identification increased further: for instance, Greek-speaking subjects of the Byzantine Empire; inhabitants of the city of Rome; citizens living according to Roman law; Latin speakers under ‘barbarian’ rule in the West; or, increasingly, representatives of the Church of Rome. ‘Roman’ also changed its significance in many ways. In the Western tradition, Rome was seen as an example for a non-ethnic nation, defined by the legal status of its citizens and not by their common blood; in the Latin terminology of the period, as a populus and not as a gens. Now, increasingly, Romans could be seen as one gens among many. While the powerful forms of representation and a political language that the Roman state created deeply influenced all successive European polities, the majority of ‘Romans’ (or Walchen, Vlachs, Welsh, as they were called by others) in many parts of Europe became low-status or dependent groups.

 This little-researched topic still presents a challenge; in the context of the ERC Grant project SCIRE, substantial progress was made:

• First results were published the themed issue ‘Being Roman after Rome’, in the journal Early Medieval Europe’ 22, 4 (2014), in collaboration with Rosamond McKitterick, University of Cambridge.
• The collaborative volume ‘Walchen, Romani und Latini. Variationen einer nachrömischen Gruppenbezeichnung zwischen Britannien und dem Balkan’ (published in German in 2017) deals with names given to regional or local groups of ‚Romans‘ and their medieval development. Vlachs or Welsh, Walloons or Włoski, Romanian, Romansh, Aromunians or Ladin still are familiar names in the landscape of modern-day Europe, and are mostly derived from the early medieval Germanic word *walhoz, which originally denoted Western (Celtic) and Southern (Latin) neighbours of the ancient Germans. The book is the first comprehensive publication on these names.
• The SCIRE collaborative volume Transformations of Romanness (forthcoming in 2017) investigates the many different peoples or groups which were designated as or self-identified as ‘Romans’ and offers a broad regional and thematic overview of the shifting concept of Romanness for Western Europe and the Mediterranean basin in the medieval period. A further volume will discuss the problems raised by the attribution of late antique/early medieval archaeological evidence to ‘Romans’ (or in German, Romanen).

Participants

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Universität Wien

Selected publications

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• Walter Pohl, Romanness – a multiple identity and its changes, in Early Medieval Europe  22, 4 (2014) 406–418.
• Walter Pohl, Walchen, Römer und ‚Romanen‘: Einleitung, in: Walchen, Romani und Latini. Variationen einer nachrömischen Gruppenbezeichnung zwischen Britannien und dem Balkan, ed. Walter Pohl/Wolfgang Haubrichs/Ingrid Hartl (Wien 2017).
• Walter Pohl, Introduction: Early Medieval Romanness – a Multiple Identity, in: Transformations of Romanness in the Early Middle Ages: Regions and Identities, ed. Clemens Gantner, Cinzia Grifoni, Walter Pohl and Marianne Pollheimer (Berlin/New York, forthcoming).