IMHO any definition of nationalism that somehow only applies to post French-Revolution Europe is awfully narrow and arbitrary.
He is talking about the 19th century shift from "Roman" to "Greek" identity, not that this "Greek nationalist" has to be a bourgeois-lead or mass popular identity.
Why is only "popular nationalism" a proper ideology? You literally mention above the fact that Greek cultural chauvinism alienates people and focuses on something that Greeks think they share, how is that not a proper ideology?
Not my kindest moment, but he posted 30 no-effort threads the day his kick expired and has since been banned for it.
It would indeed be odd, especially since there was no real Greek aristocracy or Greek peasantry to speak of.
Yeah, I know. Feudalism was mainly a thing in the West. And "Greekness" was a fuzzy concept at this point, insofar as it existed. But you know, simplifying.
Not so much 'fuzzy' as 'nonexistent'. Likewise, taking the existence of 'Armenian aristocrats' for granted is dangerous, not least because we have a lot of historical figures in Rome that have anachronistically been named Armenians on a thin evidentiary basis. Most of those people, if they had Armenian descent (and it's almost certainly not true for all of them - it was popular for Roman elites to claim descent from Armenian royalty because it was both prestigious and could not be reliably fact-checked, among other reasons) were thoroughly Romanized, and considered themselves as Romans, much like the people around them.
So I guess no one was Armenian, not even recent migrants, even Armenian speakers and followers of the Armenian church, the second someone is conquered by the Byzantine state they become and were always Roman even if they repeatedly rebel and seek political religious autonomy.
This is a massive exaggeration, most of those people actually survived as distinct entities and either rebelled, broke off or gained prominence when the empire weakened.
I guess Anatolia magically became 80% Muslim Turkish speaking within centuries after the establishment of the Sultanate of Rum by itself.
The Ottomans did not have the privilege of inheriting about a millennium of partial or complete Greeco-Roman rule over Anatolia and Greece by 800 CE.
But then the argument is not "there was no such thing as Greek as distinct from Slavs and Armenians" but rather "there were very few Armenians west of Cilicia/Caesarea"
Please read my post before arguing against strawmen of your own creation.
There were groups that survived, and there were several groups that were assimilated. The longer a group was under imperial control, the more it tended to be assimilated into the greater Roman identity. The Slavs of the Peloponnese were mostly Romanized. The Khurramites in Roman territory effectively disappear as a distinct ethnic group within a couple of generations after their entry as do the Banu Habib. Accounts of Arab captives of war or defectors being Romanized abound in the sources. And the Armenians which I brought up (in those cases were they were actual ethnic Armenians rather than Romans claiming Armenian royal descent for reasons of prestige) were swiftly Romanized in the court of Constantinople, their origins mostly becoming relevant in cases of polemic by their political rivals.
Again, not what I said. Please, make an effort to read my posts.
The Ottomans lasted for several centuries in their own right, more than enough time to do that had they had the will to do so. That a shared pan-Ottoman identity only became a priority later on is because the priorities of the Ottomans changed as well, and that it failed to take hold is its own story, which involves both native nationalistic movements as well as the foreign interventions that plagued them for their last decades. But it's more than fair to say that the Ottomans were far more legitimately a true multi-ethnic empire than the Romans that preceded them for most of their existence.
