Rûm, also transliterated as Roum, is a derivative of the term Ῥωμαῖοι. The latter was an endonym of the inhabitants of Turkey, the Middle East, and the Balkans, dating to when those regions were parts of the Eastern Roman Empire. The term Rûm is now used to describe:
geographical areas such as Anatolia and the Balkans that were historically regions within the Eastern Roman Empire, or of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm, which ruled over conquered Byzantines in central Asia Minor from 1077 to 1307.
Origins
Rûm is found in the pre-Islamic Namara inscription and later in the Quran, where it refers to a contemporary ruler of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Western Roman Empire having fallen two centuries earlier. built the Gök Medrese of Sivas, while it was a capital of the Sultanate of Rûm. The Qur'an includes the Surat Ar-Rum. These people, referred to as Byzantines in modern Western scholarship, were inhabitants of the Eastern Roman Empire and called themselves Ρωμιοί or Ῥωμαῖοι RhomaioiRomans in their own language. The city ofRome was known in classical Arabic instead as Rūmiyah رومية, and Ancient Romans were called instead "Rūm" or sometimes "Latin'yun". The Arabs called Ancient Greece by the name "Yūnān" and ancient Greeks "Yūnānīm". The Byzantine state shrank from encompassing the eastern Mediterranean in 395 AD to consisting only of what is now modern Turkey and the Balkans in 700 AD; it finally fell in 1453 AD. The Arabs, therefore, called these pre-Islamic peoples of Turkey, the Balkans, and the Middle East "Rûm", and called their territory "the land of the Rûm", generally referring to what is now Turkey and the Balkans, and called the Mediterranean "the Sea of the Rûm". After the fall of the Byzantine state in the 15th century, the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II declared himself Kayser-i Rum, literally "Caesar of the Romans". In the Ottoman Millet system, the Eastern Orthodox subject peoples were placed into the "Rum Millet". In modern Turkey, Rum is still used to denote the Greek Orthodox minority population of Turkey and other pre-conquest remnants, cf. Rum Ortodoks Patrikhanesi, the Turkish designation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople in Istanbul.
''Rûm'' in geography
Because Muslim contact with the Byzantine Empire most often took place in Asia Minor, which was the heartland of the Byzantine state from the seventh century onward, the term Rûm became fixed there geographically. The term remained even after the conquest of central Asia Minor by the Seljuk Turks, so their territory was called the land of the Seljuks of Rûm or the Sultanate of Rûm.
''Rûm'' as a name
Al-Rūmī is a nisbah designating people originating in the Byzantine Roman Empire or lands that formerly belonged to Byzantine Roman Empire, especially Anatolia. Historical people so designated include the following:
The Greek surname Roumeliotis stems from the word Rûm borrowed by Ottomans.
Other uses
During the 16th century, the Portuguese used "rume" and "rumes" as a generic term to refer to the Mamluk-Ottoman forces they faced then in the Indian Ocean. The term "Urums", also derived from the same origin, is still used in contemporary ethnography to denote Turkic-speaking Greek populations. "Rumeika" is a Greek dialect identified mainly with the Ottoman Greeks. Chinese, during the Ming dynasty, referred to the Ottomans as Lumi, derived from Rum or Rumi. The Chinese also referred to Rum as Wulumu 務魯木 during the Qing dynasty. The modern Mandarin Chinese name for the city of Rome is Luoma. Among the Muslim aristocracy of South Asia, the fez is known as the Rumi Topi. In the Sassanian period the word Hrōmāy-īg meant "Roman" or "Byzantine", which was derived from the Byzantine Greek word Rhomaioi.
