Romans or Rhomaioi (Ῥωμαῖοι; sg. Ῥωμαῖος Rhomaios) and Romioi (Ρωμιοί; sg. Ρωμιός Romios), is the name by which the Greeks were known in the Middle Ages and during Ottoman rule. The name in antiquity originally signified the inhabitants of the city of Rome in Italy, but with the increasing grants of Roman citizenship to the Greeks and other nations of the Roman Empire, it soon lost its connection with the Latins. This process culminated in 212 AD, when Emperor Caracalla's Constitutio Antoniniana granted the citizenship to all free-born men of the Empire. Later Byzantine authors such as Nikephoros Basilakes, Michael Attaleiates, Theodore Prodromos, Patriarch Germanus II, Niketas Choniates and Nicaean Emperor Theodore II Laskaris also used the classicizing term Ausones to refer to the people of the Eastern Roman Empire, although, as John Tzetzes 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.
