church and the state pursued through Orthodoxy and the Greek language was not sufficient to erase distinct identities, nor did it aim to. Regional identity Often one's local (geographic) identity could outweigh one's identity as a Rhōmaios. The terms xénos (Greek: ) and exōtikós (Greek: ) denoted "people foreign to the local population," regardless of whether they were from abroad or from elsewhere within the Byzantine Empire. "When a person was away from home he was a stranger and was often treated with suspicion. A monk from western Asia Minor who joined a monastery in Pontus was 'disparaged and mistreated by everyone as a stranger'. The corollary to regional solidarity was regional hostility." Revival of Hellenism From an evolutionary standpoint, Byzantium was a multi-ethnic empire that emerged as a Christian empire, soon comprised the Hellenised empire of the East, and ended its thousand-year history, in 1453, as a Greek Orthodox state: an empire that became a nation, almost by the modern meaning of the word. The presence of a distinctive and historically rich literary culture was also very important in the division between "Greek" East and "Latin" West and thus the formation of both. It was a multi-ethnic empire where the Hellenic element was predominant, especially in the later period. Spoken language and state, the markers of identity that were to become a fundamental tenet of nineteenth-century nationalism throughout Europe became, by accident, a reality during a formative period of medieval Greek history. After the Empire lost non-Greek speaking territories in the 7th and 8th centuries, "Greek" (Ἕλλην), when not used to signify "pagan", became synonymous with "Roman" () and "Christian" (Χριστιανός) to mean a Christian Greek citizen of the Eastern Roman Empire. In the context of increasing Venetian and Genoese power in the eastern Mediterranean, association with Hellenism took deeper root among the Byzantine elite, on account of a desire to distinguish themselves from the Latin West and to lay legitimate claims to Greek-speaking lands. From the 12th century onwards, Byzantine Roman writers started to disassociate themselves from the Empire's pre-Constantinian Latin past, regarding henceforth the transfer of the Roman capital to Constantinople by Constantine as their founding moment and reappraised the normative value of the pagan Hellenes, even though the latter were still viewed as a group distinct from the Byzantines. The first time the term "Hellene" was used to mean "Byzantine" in official correspondence was in a