points out (in his Scholia to Lycophron's "Alexandra", attributed to himself and his brother Isaac), that should be understood in its proper context as a literary device. Overall, the word Rhomaios came to represent the Hellenized inhabitants of the East Roman Empire. Overall, the foreign borrowed name (Romans) initially had a more political than national meaning, which went hand in hand with the universalizing ideology of Rome that aspired to encompass all nations of the world under one true God. Up until the early 7th century, when the Empire still extended over large areas and many peoples, the use of the name "Roman" always indicated citizenship and never descent. Various ethnicities could apply their own ethnonyms or toponyms to disambiguate citizenship from genealogy, which is why the historian Procopius prefers to call the Byzantines as Hellenized Romans, while other authors use Romhellenes and Graecoromans, aiming to indicate descent and citizenship simultaneously. The Lombard and Arab invasions in the same century resulted in the loss of most of the provinces including Italy and all of the Middle East, save for Anatolia. The areas that did remain were mostly Greek-speaking, thereby turning the empire into a much more cohesive unit that eventually developed a fairly self-conscious Greek identity. The Byzantines' failure to protect the Pope from the Lombards forced the Pope to search for help elsewhere. The man who answered his call was Pepin II of Aquitaine, whom he had named "Patrician", a title that caused a serious conflict. In 772, Rome ceased commemorating the emperor that first ruled from Constantinople, and in 800 Charlemagne was crowned Roman Emperor by the Pope himself, officially rejecting the Eastern Roman Empire as true Romans. According to the Frankish interpretation of events, the papacy appropriately "transferred Roman imperial authority from the Greeks to the Germans, in the name of His Greatness, Charles". From then on, a war of names about the New Rome revolved around Roman imperial rights. Unable to deny that an emperor did exist in Constantinople, they sufficed in renouncing him as a successor of Roman heritage on the grounds that Greeks have nothing to do with the Roman legacy. In 865, Pope Nicholas I wrote to the Emperor Michael III: "You ceased to be called 'Emperor of the Romans' since the Romans, of whom you claim to be Emperor, are in fact according to you barbarians." Henceforth, the emperor in the East