> The term “Byzantium” was reintroduced by a 16th-century German historian named Hieronymus Wolf, essentially just as a shorthand way of referring to the empire, which otherwise didn’t really have a name. Well, that’s not quite true, it did have a name - its own inhabitants still called it the Roman Empire, or just Rome. But western Europe had been denying the Byzantine Empire’s relationship to Rome for many centuries already, going all the way back to Charlemagne in the 9th century. Medieval western Europeans called it the “empire of the Greeks” or the “empire of Constantinople”, specifically to deny that that weird empire over the in the east had anything to do with Rome. Surely the heirs of Rome were in the west! That’s where Rome was, that’s where people spoke Latin (or its daughter languages), and that’s where the Latin-speaking Roman church was, etc…not like the decadent east where they spoke Greek and had a different kind of church. Those strange Greeks over there were so weak that they couldn’t even protect their empire, which had fallen in 1453, a century before Wolf was writing. Why would they deserve to be associated with the strong and honourable Romans? > > According to the Byzantine historian Anthony Kaldellis, Wolf’s use of the term was actually pretty obscure until the 19th century. Before that, historians like Gibbon in the 18th century still considered the Byzantine Empire “Rome” - Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” goes up to 1453 - but a Rome inhabited by Greeks, not Romans. Kaldellis has recently argued that “Byzantium” was really only popularized in the 19th century because of the political situation in Europe > ><cite>[Why is it called the Byzantine Empire when the city was known as Constantinople for centuries longer than it was called Byzantium? answered by u/WelfOnTheShelf (flaired) at AskHistorians](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ev9k25/why_is_it_called_the_byzantine_empire_when_the/ffvh4tm/)</cite>