HISTORY OF BYZANTIUM EMPIRE

The Byzantine Empire (or Byzantium) was the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, centered around its capital of Constantinople, and ruled by emperors in direct succession to the ancient Roman emperors. It was called the Roman Empire and also Romania (Greek: Ῥωμανία, Rhōmanía) by its inhabitants and neighbours. As the distinction between "Roman Empire" and "Byzantine Empire" is purely a modern convention, it is not possible to assign a date of separation, but an important point is Emperor Constantine I's transfer in 324 of the capital from Nicomedia (in Anatolia) to Byzantium on the Bosphorus, which became Constantinople (alternatively "New Rome").^{[n 1]}
The designation of the Empire as "Byzantine" began in Western Europe in 1557, when German historian Hieronymus Wolf published his work Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ, a collection of Byzantine sources. "Byzantine" itself comes from "Byzantium" (a Greek city, founded by colonists from Megara in 667 BC), the name of the city of Constantinople before it became the capital of Constantine. This older name of the city would rarely be used from this point onward except in historical or poetic contexts. The publication in 1648 of the Byzantine du Louvre (Corpus Scriptorum Historiæ Byzantinæ), and in 1680 of Du Cange's Historia Byzantina further popularized the use of Byzantine among French authors, such as Montesquieu.^[3] It was not until the nineteenth century, however, with the birth of modern Greece, that the term "Byzantine" came into general use in the Western world.^{[citation needed]}Before this time Greek had been used for the Empire and its descendants within the Ottoman Empire.
The Empire was known to its inhabitants as the Roman Empire, the Empire of the Romans (Latin: Imperium Romanum, Imperium Romanorum, Greek: Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn, Αρχη τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Arche tôn Rhōmaíōn), Romania^{[n 2]} (Latin: Romania, Greek: Ῥωμανία, Rhōmanía), the Roman Republic (Latin: Res Publica Romana, Greek: Πολιτεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Politeίa tôn Rhōmaíōn),^[5] and also as Rhōmaís (Ῥωμαΐς).^[6]
Although the empire had a multi-ethnic character during most of its history^[7] and preserved Romano-Hellenistic traditions,^[8] it was usually known to most of its western and northern contemporaries as the Empire of the Greeks^{[n 3]} due to the increasing predominance of the Greek element.^[9] The use of the term Empire of the Greeks (Latin: Imperium Graecorum) in the West to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire also implied a rejection of the empire's claim to be the Roman Empire.^[10] The claims of the Eastern Roman Empire to Roman inheritance had been actively contested in the West at the time of the Roman Empress Irene of Athens, due to the coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor year 800, by Pope Leo III, who, needing help against enemies in Rome, saw the throne of the Roman Empire as vacant (lacking a male occupant). Whenever the Popes or the rulers of the West made use of the name Roman to refer to the eastern Roman Emperors, they preferred the term Imperator Romaniæ instead of Imperator Romanorum, a title that Westerners maintained applied only to Charlemagne and his successors.^[11]
By contrast, in the Persian, Islamic, and Slavic worlds, the Empire's Roman identity was generally accepted. In the Islamic world it was known primarily as روم (Rûm "Rome").^[12][13]
In modern historical atlases, the Empire is usually called the Eastern Roman Empire in maps depicting the empire during the period AD 395 to AD 610, after the new emperor Heraclius changed the official language from Latin to Greek (already the language known by the great majority of the population); in maps depicting the Empire after AD 610, the term Byzantine Empire usually appears.

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