Who are the Romans? The Definition of Bilād al-Rūm (Land of the Romans) in Medieval Islamic Geographies

Abstract

The present work is a contribution to the Islamic geographical conceptualisation of the medieval world through the examination of the term Rūm (Roman). Rūm, in medieval Arabic, represented a territory that lay to the north and west of the Islamic Near East and North Africa. However, it is far from clear whether the term represented Europe, the Byzantine Empire or both. Study of Arabic geographical works from the ninth to the eleventh centuries shows that the term Rūm corresponded to the Byzantine Empire in the earlier geographical works, while the writers of later geographies began to use the term to define the Christian north in general, including Byzantium. The rest of the paper is devoted to an explanation for this transition in the meaning of the term.