From Romanian român (“Romanian”) (in turn from Latin romanus (“Roman”)) + -ia.
A country in South-Eastern Europe, bordered by Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine.
(academic, historical, linguistics) The Latin or Romance speaking areas of Europe, collectively.
(historical) The Byzantine Empire or its former territories.
The Doge of Venice was honored with his full title of dominator of one-quarter and one-eighth of the whole Empire of Romania; and he was promised repossession of all the rights and properties that his people had held in Constantinople in the years of the Latin occupation.
In this letter the basileus informed the Pope that Béla III had attacked Serbia, since he was not content with his own country, “which he acquired with difficulties and with the help of the armies and the money of Rhomania [i.e. Byzantium]”.
The Fourth Crusade ended in 1204 with the Western or Latin conquest of Constantinople and signalled the beginning of a new era in the history of the Byzantine lands or Romania.
If the Constantinopolitan Byzantines regarded the Anatolian Turkic territories as lands temporarily lost from their indivisible universal Rhomania, the Turkoman rulers of the twelfth century considered Rhomania as being factually divided between several rulers.
The dramatic fall of Constantinople in 1204 and the Latin conquest of the Empire’s provinces in the following decade resulted in the dismemberment of Romania.
Next to them, the maritime region extending south to the Hellespont is Romania—a Greek nation, though it was once barbarian, and it is returning to barbarism in our own time, now that the empire of the Greeks has been destroyed and the Turks hold sway. The capital city of this country [Thrace] is Byzantium, formerly called Agios.
From Ancient Greek Ῥωμανία (Rhōmanía).