[2] Although defined primarily as a citizenship, "Roman-ness" has also and variously been described as a cultural identity, a nationality, or a multi-ethnicity that eventually encompassed a vast regional diversity.

The increase achieved its peak with Emperor Caracalla's AD 212 Antonine Constitution, which extended citizenship rights to all free inhabitants of the empire.

In Italy, "Romans" (Romani in Latin and Italian) has continuously and uninterruptedly been the demonym of the citizens of Rome from the foundation of the city to the present-day.

Several names derive from the Latin Romani (such as the Romanians, Aromanians and Istro-Romanians), or from the Germanic walhaz (a term originally referring to the Romans; adopted in the form Vlach as the self-designation of the Megleno-Romanians).

Many modern historians tend to have a preferred idea of what being Roman meant, so-called Romanitas, but this was a term rarely used in Ancient Rome itself.

[34] The exclusivist religious practices of the Jews, and their opposition to abandoning their own customs in favour of those of Rome,[30] even after being conquered and repeatedly suppressed,[34] evoked the suspicion of the Romans.

[44] From the middle of the 4th century onwards, Rome won a series of victories which saw them rise to rule all of Italy south of the Po river by 270 BC.

Following the conquest of Italy, the Romans waged war against the great powers of their time; Carthage to the south and west and the various Hellenistic kingdoms to the east, and by the middle of the second century BC, all rivals had been defeated and Rome became recognised by other countries as the definite masters of the Mediterranean.

This tradition of straightforward integration eventually culminated in the Antonine Constitution, issued by Emperor Caracalla in 212, in which all free inhabitants of Empire were granted the citizenship.

In the writings of the 4th-century Greek-speaking Roman soldier and author Ammianus Marcellinus, Rome is described almost like a foreign city, with disparaging comments on its corruption and impurity.

[68] The Roman army underwent considerable changes in the 4th century, experiencing what some have called 'barbarisation',[68] traditionally understood as the result of recruitments of large amounts of barbarian soldiers.

[87] The early kings of Italy, first Odoacer and then Theoderic the Great, were legally and ostensibly viceroys of the eastern emperor and thus integrated into the Roman government.

[89] In the early 6th century, Clovis I of the Franks and Theoderic the Great of the Ostrogoths nearly went to war with each other, a conflict that could have resulted in the re-establishment of the western empire under either king.

[90] Concerned about such a prospect, the eastern court never again extended similar honours to western rulers,[89] instead beginning to emphasise its own exclusive Roman legitimacy, which it would continue to do for the rest of its history.

Though the senate achieved a certain legacy in the west,[l] the end of the institution removed a group that had always set the standard of what Romanness was supposed to mean.

[97] In Sub-Roman Britain, the people of the large urban centers clinged to Roman identity, but rural populations integrated and assimilated with Germanic colonisers (the Jutes, Angles and Saxons).

A century later in the Lex Ripuaria, the Romans are just one of many smaller semi-free populations, restricted in their legal capacity, with many of their former advantages now associated with Frankish identity.

Although Rome's history was not forgotten, the city's importance in the Middle Ages primarily stemmed from it being the seat of the pope,[n] a view shared by both westerners and the eastern empire.

[108] When clashing with the emperors, the popes sometimes employed the fact that they had the backing of the populus Romanus ("people of Rome") as a legitimising factor, meaning that the city still endured some ideological importance in terms of Romanness.

[108] When the temporal power of the papacy was established through the foundation of the Papal States in the 8th century, the popes used the fact that they were accompanied and supported by the populus Romanus as something that legitimised their sovereignty.

Some symbols of the ancient state were revived and the city of Carthage, capital of the kingdom, was heavily emphasised in poetry, on coinage and in the creation of a new "Carthaginian calendar".

Such references ceased as Byzantine control of Italy and Rome itself crumbled and the Papacy began to use the term for their own, much more regional, domain and sphere of influence.

At this point, "Roman" also began being used for Greek populations outside of the imperial borders, such as to the Greek-speaking Christians under Seljuk rule in Anatolia, who were referred to as Rhōmaîoi despite actively resisting attempts at re-integration by the Byzantine emperors.

Under the Nicene emperors John III (r. 1222–1254) and Theodore II (r. 1254–1258), these ideas were taken further than ever before as they explicitly stated that the present Rhōmaîoi were Hellenes, descendants of the Ancient Greeks.

[140] In the early modern period, many Ottoman Turks, especially those who lived in the cities and were not part of the military or administration, also self-identified as Romans (Rūmī, رومى), as inhabitants of former Byzantine territory.

[144] As applied to Ottoman Turks, Rūmī began to fall out of use at the end of the 17th century, and instead the word increasingly became associated only with the Greek population of the empire, a meaning that it still bears in Turkey today.

Among these factors were that names such as "Hellene", "Hellas" and "Greece" were already in use for the country and its people by the other nations in Europe, the absence of the old Byzantine government to reinforce Roman identity, and the term Romioi becoming associated with those Greeks still under Ottoman rule rather than those actively fighting for independence.

In Western Europe, the Greek War of Independence saw large-scale support owing to philhellenism, a sense of "civilisational debt" to the world of classical antiquity, rather than any actual interest in the modern country.

As late as the 1930s, more than a century of the war of independence, Greek artists and authors still debated the contribution of Greece to European culture, and whether it should derive from a romantic fascination with classical antiquity, a nationalist dream of a restored Byzantine Empire, the strong oriental influence from the centuries of Ottoman rule or if it should be something entirely new, or "Neohellenic", reminding Europe that there was not only an ancient Greece, but also a modern one.

[165] The Aromanians, also of unclear origin, refer to themselves by various names, including arumani, armani, aromani and rumani, all of which are etymologically derived from the Latin Rōmānī.